There are two explanations. First, right at the beginning of my career, a more experienced female colleague had led me to understand that conferences, seminars and other meetings held in seclusion with people who were temporarily cut from their usual ties were God-given opportunities for furtive creepings up and down hotel corridors. I was used to sexual rendezvous of a more advanced nature; nevertheless, this shocked me to the same extent as the shapeless clothes people wear to show that they are on vacation, when they are usually very particular about their appearance. With the intransigence of the newly converted, I believed that fucking—and by that I mean fucking frequently and willingly whoever was (or were) the partner (or partners)—was a way of life. If not, if this thing was permitted only when certain conditions were met, at predetermined times, well then it was just a vacation from values that remained completely traditional. (A little aside to put this severe verdict into context. We no longer need so much to prove that our sexual tendencies can turn inside out like an old umbrella, and the device that protects us when the wind blows with reality can flip the other way and leave us to get soaked in the squalls of our fantasies. Once again, I am bringing together fact and fantasy, in this case to expose an amusing antinomy: despite the moral stance I have just expressed, I have often been aroused by imagining myself as a “scumbag” for a group of stressed executives at a conference; each would shoot his load into me secretly, hiding at the back of a hotel bar, even in a phone booth, with the receiver in one hand while carrying on a ritual conversation with the wife: “Yes, darling, it’s going well, but the food’s not so great,” etc. That’s a sure-fire scenario to get me off on my own complete degradation.)
In the realms of reality, though, the exotic adventures of this spelunker of Parisian parking lots can be dealt with in just two paragraphs. The assistant who had so emphatically drawn me to him right in the middle of the hotel foyer did indeed come and wake me up the following morning. Judiciously, he had let me rest after our long travels—we were crossing Canada—over the last few days. He pushed his hips calmly. I let him get on with it without much conviction, but I encouraged him almost as a professional would, nonetheless choosing a vocabulary that was rather more amorous than obscene. Afterward he said, quite sincerely, that he had been thinking about it for several days, but that he had waited until the end of the trip so as not to disturb our work. We worked together a number of other times. He never made the slightest gesture of sexual invitation again, and neither did I. It was the first time a sexual exchange that had started with someone whom I was to see again did not continue, did not naturally fertilize the soil of our relationship as friends and colleagues. It has to be said that I was at a stage in my life where I was trying with limited success if not to be faithful, at least to limit myself. I thought that these might be the venal transgressions permitted to people who were not libertines. It was the only time in my life that I vaguely regretted a sexual act.
A Brazilian adventure left me with more complex feelings. I had just arrived in Rio de Janeiro for the first time, and of all the telephone numbers I had been given, the only person to reply was a certain artist. As luck would have it, he was familiar with an area of French cultural history that was my field, and we stayed up very late, chatting on a gloomy terrace in Ipanema. Several years went by, he came to Paris, I went back to Brazil a couple of times. In São Paulo, as we came away from a party for the Biennial, we took the same taxi. He gave the address of my hotel. Without taking my eyes off the back of the taxi driver’s neck, I drummed my fingers lightly on his thigh. He gave the address of his hotel. The bed stood by a bay window, and street signs outside threw blocks of yellow light across it as in an Edward Hopper painting. He did not lie over me and cover me, he sowed parts of his body like gentle seeds over mine, reassuring himself that I was there with his hands, his lips, his penis, as well as his forehead, his chin, his shoulders and legs. I felt good as I sank into the depths of a migraine, which terrified him. I could hear him whispering about the time, all that time. There was no second time with him, either. Later, in another taxi, in Paris this time, as I watched rather than listened to him speaking to me attentively, I was overcome by an intense feeling of joy: I was thinking about the geographical distance between us, the long intervals of time between our meetings, which were nevertheless regular—sometimes, when in Rio, I might give him a quick phone call; and I thought of that single occasion when time and space had come together and their union had formed a perfect architecture.
The other explanation for the limitations in my adventures while traveling is connected with a subject I raised in the first chapter. I liked to discover—on the condition that I had a guide. I liked it if a man was introduced to me by another man. I would take my cue from the relationship the one had with the other, rather than having to think about my own desires and how to satisfy them. In fact, feeling desire and having sex were almost two separate activities; I could want a man very much and feel no frustration if nothing ever actually happened. I was a dreamer, a gifted fabulist; a major part of my erotic life was lived like that, heightened by the friction on my vulva, held between my thumb and index finger. Sex really answered a wider necessity: to carve a smooth path for myself in the world. As I have illustrated, I was living in the comfort of a familial complicity; something you do not get when you arrive for the first time (and without any specific tips) in some distant city.
With many men, it is their houses that I remember before anything else. That is not an excuse to underestimate other memories that I have of them; it is rather that they cannot be dissociated from their background, and it is a spontaneous reconstruction of this background that brings back a moment of affectionate friendship or the geometry of bodies. The reader may well have realized: I quickly take in the setting. When my most intimate opening has given access, I have opened my eyes wide, too. I learned to use this method, among others, to find my way around Paris when I was very young. An architect friend whom I used to visit in his Parisian pied-à-terre on the top floor of a new building—so high up that the view from the bed dived straight into the sky—once commented that from my place in the rue Saint-Martin on the Rive Droite to his at the top of the rue Saint-Jacques on the Rive Gauche, you just had to follow a straight line. I came to love the area around Invalides when I accompanied my dentist friend on his trips to one of his girlfriends. She had been a successful variety singer in the 1950s, and she still had the bland and uptight appeal of record covers of the period. She submitted with lukewarm enthusiasm, and I amused myself by playing the aesthete, scorning the low tables cluttered with a collection of tortoises of all sizes, in stone and in porcelain, and going to gaze through the windows at the sublime proportions of the buildings along the esplanade.
Each home elicited a specific way of looking at it. In Éric’s apartment, the bed was the nerve center in a kaleidoscopic arrangement of camera lenses, screens and mirrors; in Bruno’s, based on the model of Mondrian’s studio, a vase of flowers was the only focal point in a space where the doorjambs, the beams, the frames of the cupboards and the furniture all seemed to be one continuous unit, all with homogenous proportions, as if the same volume repeated several times served a variety of functions, as if the big dining table, for example, was merely an elevated replica of the bed.
I carry in me a sweet nostalgia for large apartments in Italian cities. When my collaboration with Enzo began, he was living in Rome, in what I think was an outlying part of the city, in one of those ocher-colored buildings separated from others by open spaces. When I compared this place to the suburb of my childhood, I was amazed that there was so much space lying fallow. There must have been a sort of feudal urbanism dictating that each building should be able to project its entire shadow on the ground in the evening. Inside, the rooms were much larger than those in French apartments of a comparable standard. One’s voice echoed in the bathroom, and the tile that covered the floor of the entire apartment was so clean that it made it all the easier t
o appreciate the full extent of the space, as if someone had just finished buffing it, in honor of our visit. After a couple of years, Enzo moved to Milan. The buildings were older, the apartments even more spacious, the ceilings higher. There was no more furniture. It was such a pleasure wandering around it with nothing on, as pristine as the fresh paint on the walls, as close to my essence as the bedroom was to its, furnished as it was with only a bed and an open suitcase! Pulling off my sweater and letting my skirt slip to the floor caused an inrush of air that aroused my entire body.
On the Threshold
The reader will understand more readily why I have made such an intimate connection between physical love and a mastering of space when I explain that I was born into a family of five living in a three-room apartment. And the first time I escaped the place was the first time that I fucked. That was not why I left, but that was what happened. Those who have been brought up in more well-off families where each member has his or her own room where privacy is at least respected, or also those who have walked to school in the country, may not have had the same experience. Discovering one’s body would not have been so much of a tributary to the need to expand the space within which the body moved. Whereas I had to cover geographical distances to reach parts of myself. I had to go from Paris to Dieppe in a Renault 4 and to sleep facing the sea to learn that somewhere in a part of me I could not see and had not imagined, I had an opening, a cavity that was so supple and so deep that the extension of flesh that made a boy a boy, and me not one, could be accommodated there.
The expression has fallen into disuse, but it used to be said of a young boy or girl who was not supposed to know how the human race is perpetuated—and by extension how love and the satisfaction of the senses are connected—was “innocent.” I remained almost completely innocent until I had direct experience of the first act of that process. I was twelve when my periods started. My mother and grandmother got into a state and called the doctor, my father popped his head around the door and asked with a laugh whether I had a nosebleed. So much for teaching me the facts of life. I had no clear idea of where this blood was coming from, and I couldn’t distinguish between the passages through which my urine and my periods passed. One day the doctor tactfully explained to me that I should clean myself rather more thoroughly than I had been with my washcloth; otherwise, he said, sniffing the latex-covered finger that had examined me, “it doesn’t smell very nice.” I eventually suspected something because of a scandal at a rock concert. My mother and her friends were talking about it in front of me. The concert had caused an outbreak of violence, and the police had had to intervene. “Apparently some of the girls were so far gone that they even took the billy clubs and stuck them up themselves!” Put them up where? And why exactly would they want billy clubs? Questions that unsettled me for a long time.
I was an adolescent but had retained the ignorance of my infantile onanism. As a very young girl, I had realized that some games afforded me exquisite and incomparable sensations. I played with dolls in a specific and unusual way. I would gather the crotch of my panties into a thick strip and wedge it into the cleft between my legs right up to my buttocks, and I would sit down so that the fabric dug into me slightly. In that position, I would take the tiny concave hand of a plastic Ken doll and let it roam over a naked Barbie. In later years I replaced the action of the bunched panties with a rubbing of the two swollen lips at the front of the cleft. I had stopped playing with dolls, but I would picture myself in a situation similar to that of the Barbie, and I was entitled to the same diet of caresses. Perhaps because this activity gave me so much satisfaction, I didn’t try to find out more about the ways in which a man and a woman can be together. But here is the point I wanted to make: while, in my mind, several different boys ran their hands over my body, in reality that body remained hunched, almost paralyzed, apart from the tiny to-ing and fro-ing of my hand clamped in my groin. My mother had not slept with my father for several years. He stayed in what had been their bedroom, and she moved into the second bedroom to share the double bed with me, while my brother slept in a single bed to one side. Even when you haven’t been told anything, you instinctively know which activities should be kept hidden. What a paradox that I should have been forced to acquire such dexterity to give myself pleasure while barely moving or breathing, so that my mother, who brushed against me when she turned over, wouldn’t feel me quivering! The fact that I had to rely more on mental pictures than on blatant physical caresses may well have developed my imagination. Despite my best efforts, it did happen: there were times when my mother shook me and called me a dirty little girl. When I went to Dieppe with Claude, I was no longer sleeping in the same bed as my mother, but even then—and for many years—I still masturbated in a tightly hunched ball. Finally, I could say that when I finally opened my body, I learned to uncurl it.
Space rarely opens up to us all at once. Even in the theater, when one more curtain needs to be raised, the process can be laborious, the heavy fabric rises slowly or, when the scene is still half hidden, the mechanism gets stuck and some occult resistance defers by a few seconds the spectator’s mental involvement in the action. It is well known that we attach special importance to the transitions in our lives and the places they occurred. The sensual pleasure I feel in airport lounges is perhaps a distant echo of the act of emancipation I achieved when I accepted Claude’s invitation to go with him, and stepped through the door with no knowledge of what the end of the journey would bring. But space is only ever an immeasurably large balloon with a hole. If you blow it up too fast, it will readily turn on you and deflate just as quickly.
I must have been thirteen or fourteen when I belatedly witnessed a “primal scene.” As I walked along the hall, I saw my mother on the threshold of our front door with the friend who used to come and see her when my father was away. They were exchanging a slight kiss, but her eyes were closed and her back was arched. I took it badly. She took the fact that I took it badly badly.
Three or four years later I first saw Claude framed in the same doorway. It was June. It was late when we arrived in Dieppe, and found a place to camp. We couldn’t see very well to put up the tent. At the time a lot of students took amphetamines to keep them awake so that they could study through the night before an exam. Claude must have taken some so as not to get tired on the journey, and he offered me one. Inside the tent, we didn’t sleep. When he asked me quietly whether he could penetrate me, I was trembling. I couldn’t really say if it was because of what was happening or because of the drug. In any event, I felt thoroughly unsure about my state. A few months earlier I had indulged in some heavy petting with a boy. He had put his erection onto my naked stomach and had come there. The next day I got my period. My knowledge of physiology was so hazy that I thought this blood meant I had been deflowered. Particularly as, after that, I waited a very long time for my next period (young girls’ cycles are often irregular and can be disrupted by emotional upheavals), and I thought that I was pregnant! I told Claude that I would say yes if he asked me the question again and used my name. He couldn’t have been expecting that sort of demand, and he willingly said “Catherine” several times. When he withdrew, I was scarcely aware of a fine thread of brown along the top of my thigh.
The next day we hardly left the tent, where there was just room for our two bodies. We lay on top of each other and rolled over, separated from the people next to us by the canvas, through which a golden, sandy light filtered. There was a family in a nearby tent. I heard the wife asking irritably: “But what the hell are they up to in there? Aren’t they ever going to come out?” and the man calmly replying: “Leave it! They’re tired. They’re resting.” We did manage to extract ourselves from our lair to eat something on a little terrace. I was in quite a daze. As we headed back to the tent, I noticed that the beach and the campsite, which was set slightly back, were cut right across by a cliff that ran perpendicular to the sea.
I don’t remember exactly how my parents got
me back, but it was not without drama and not for long. A few weeks later there was the episode in the garden near Lyon. A few weeks after that, I went to live with Claude. The trip to Dieppe had allowed me to “become a woman,” and I had established the right to come and go as I pleased. All the same, as I look back on it, our frolicking in the tent seems like child’s play and reminds me of the way I used to hide from adults by pulling my sheet up over my head, creating the confined but vital space of a little house of my own. Succumbing to a forbidden activity in a place regulated by communal laws, poorly protected by a thin or flawed screen, by a bit of foliage, even by a wall of human accomplices, derives—at least in part—from the same ludic spirit. It represents an elementary mechanism of transgression that, paradoxically, belongs less to extroversion than to introversion; you don’t make an exhibition of yourself, you turn in on your intimate pleasure, pretending to ignore the fact that it might accidentally erupt in front of spectators who are not expecting it and might even try to stop it.
3.Confined Space
A Variety of Havens
My explorations of exclusive locations on the outskirts of Paris not only filled me with the euphoria of wide-open spaces but, on the flip side, with that of a game of hide-and-seek. On a fairly broad street a stone’s throw from the Soviet embassy, I once found my refuge in the back of a Ville de Paris van, because one of our group was a city employee. The men came in one by one. I knelt to suck them or lay down and curled to one side, the better to present my ass to facilitate their access. Nothing had been provided in the back of the van to soften the ridged surface of the metal floor, and each jolt was quite painful. But I could have hid there all night, not so much stiffened because of my uncomfortable position but rather dulled and lulled by the atmosphere of my unlikely haven where I curled up and sunk and like in those opaque dreams, watched myself sink deeper. I didn’t have to move: the rear door was raised at regular intervals, the man jumped out and a new silhouette slipped in. In that creaky vehicle I was like a motionless idol unblinkingly accepting the homage of faithful followers. I was as I had imagined myself in some of my fantasies (like, for example, the one when I’m in a caretaker’s quarters with only my ass protruding from the curtain, which serves to hide the bed), offered to a long succession of men who stood outside stamping their feet and yelling abuse at each other. A 2CV van is worth a caretaker’s lodge any day. But I left my metal palanquin before they were all done. Éric, who had been keeping watch, explained the following day: on the one hand, the men were in such a state of excitement that they were beginning to get aggressive, and on the other hand, the van was threatening to tip over.
Sexual Life Catherine M. Page 11