Sexual Life Catherine M.

by Catherine Millet

  Sick and Dirty

  Every confined place in which the body has felt a fulfillment inversely proportional to the available space, where it has felt all the more pleasure for being constrained, awakens in us a nostalgia for the fetal state. And we never benefit from it so much as when, safe in that secret haven, organic life reassumes its rights (whatever they may be) and we can abandon ourselves to something not unlike the beginning of a regression. If you think about it, it was not for reasons of hygiene that bathrooms became places in which we isolate ourselves, closets in fact. Modesty is the pretext given, but the occult explanation for this modesty is neither a fear for our dignity nor a wish not to embarrass others but the freedom to experience the pleasures of defecation without any restraint, to inhale our own permeating stench or even examine our stools meticulously, taking a cue from Salvador Dalí, who left descriptions rich with comparisons and images. I am not about to tell a series of scatological stories, I just want to remember here some banal situations in which my different bodily needs found themselves in conflict. And as I have never come across any declared enthusiasts for my farts or feces, and I myself have had no inclination to savor those of others, these confrontations turned out to be dubious struggles between pleasure and displeasure, ecstasy and pain.

  I suffer from migraines. Having landed in Casablanca, I suffocate in the heat at the airport as I wait for ages for my luggage to come through. The journey is not over yet: Basile, the architect friend who invited me, drives me to the resort town he built, where he has a small house. We stop off on a track away from the road. It is the most beautiful day, the sparse leaves flitter in the bright light around us. Squatting on all fours on the backseat of the car, I am, as usual, sticking my ass out so far that I can almost imagine it as a balloon popping out of the car, ready to detach itself from the rest of my body and fly away. While this balloon is being pierced by one of the sharpest pricks I have ever known, I can feel the first symptoms. My vision is blurred by a sort of flashing that accentuates the fluttering effect of the light. By the final charge, my body—with the exception of my ass—has ceased to exist, emptied of its substance like a piece of fruit left to shrivel, crumbling in the glimmering light. Or, to be more precise, there is nothing left between my head, which has been turned to stone by the viselike grip of pain, and the skin on my buttocks, where the last few caresses linger. I could no longer utter a single word. When we arrived at our destination, I went and lay flat out on the deep, tall bed. Added to these two terminals to which my body was reduced (the one overwhelmed by pain, the other abandoned to lethargy by pleasure) was now the weight of nausea, which comes with very bad headaches. Now I had just the outward appearance of a body, anchored in three places by the only three organs left to me, and fussed over silently by an anxious man. When a migraine pins me in the depths of a darkened room like this, when I don’t even have the strength to peel off the sheet impregnated with up to thirty-six hours’ worth of old sweat, and when breathing the dissipated stench of my own vomit is the only perception left to me that does not cause intolerable pain, my last mental resources can end up imagining strangers watching me in that state (with the cavities around my eyes enlarged by rings of gray and the angle between the inner edge of my eyelids and the bridge of the nose pinched tightly together). Jacques is too accustomed to it, and doctors have too much clinical distance. I would like Jacques to take photographs of me at times like that, and for them to be published and seen by people who read my books and articles, for example. There would be some sense of compensation in closing the circle on my physical degeneration by inscribing it on the gaze of others.

  My relationship with Basile has always been light and playful, and the pleasure unadulterated. If I had to be ill in front of him, then I would have to do it with the same simplicity with which I surrendered myself when he took me from behind after a good meal and I let my bulging tummy express a few farts. He was a sharp, astute man, and conversation with him was always stimulating, and one day he was kind enough to compliment me on the big nose that I had always had a complex about, but which he told me gave my face character. He was also someone who usually came in my ass, but not before having used a firm index finger to stimulate the most highly reactive point on my body. While I was no longer capable of exchanging a single word with him, or to respond to the touch of his hand, I could still offer him the spectacle of myself indulging in the complete negation of my being.

  It is often extremely difficult to identify the cause of a headache; anyone who is prone to them will know this, and in some ways this spares them of any feelings of guilt when the cause is obvious and it is their fault: abuse of alcohol or too much sun. I haven’t been drunk more than two or three times in my life. On one of these occasions I was with Lucien, who had slumped on top of me on the sitting room carpet, in front of his friends and unbeknownst to his wife. He had taken me for dinner with a young couple who lived outside Paris. I drank too much champagne without realizing it. The couple lived in a big bungalow where you walked straight into the kitchen, which also served as a dining room. At the back of the room there were two doors next to each other, each leading to a bedroom. The evening must initially have started in their bedroom. I am trying to piece it together: Lucien takes me over onto the bed with help from the other man; they start touching me up, I concentrate on investigating their flies. The young woman hangs back a bit; her boyfriend takes her by the shoulders, kisses her, encourages her to come and lie down with us. She goes into the bathroom, he follows her and comes back explaining that “this isn’t Christine’s thing, but we can do what we like, it doesn’t bother her.” I partake in the goings on in the same way that I involuntarily follow a radio play echoing through the courtyard of my apartment building on a summer’s day when my neighbor’s windows are open. Probably out of respect for Christine, even though she doesn’t reappear—is she busying herself in front of the bathroom mirror or sitting indecisively on the side of the bath?—we move to the other bedroom.

  I really can’t remember whether our host penetrated me. On the other hand, I do know that I apathetically let Lucien have me. The eiderdown was a deep chasm, and I sank deeper into it. My vagina, worked over smoothly by Lucien (who must have realized I wasn’t feeling well), softened and sank, drawn into that great depth, while a paralyzing force kept my head, neck, shoulders and even my partially spread arms flat on the bed. I did somehow find the strength to get up. How many times in the night? Four, five times? I crossed the kitchen naked and went into the garden. It was pouring with rain. I stood and vomited straight onto the ground in the middle of the alley, not even looking for somewhere to hide. It has to be said that each spasm converted the blacksmiths hammering inside my skull into something that felt like a final disintegration of the beaten piece of metal. The whole body flows into the mass of the head and forms a fist tightly grasping a lacerating blade. The cold rain momentarily appeased the pain. On my way back to the bedroom, I rinsed my mouth out in the kitchen sink. The following morning, when the lifesaving medicine had been brought from the drugstore and when it was all over, Lucien assured me that he had fucked me several times during the night and that I had seemed to enjoy it. It is one of the rare times when I was not conscious of what I was doing. A few months later the young woman came to see me. She and her boyfriend had had a terrible car crash. He had died, and his family had turned her out of the house they had lived in together. I felt genuine compassion for her while at the same time having a strange feeling that this was just the continuation of a nightmare.

  Putting all these episodes together reminds me of another. Not after a very good meal, as with Basile; it was on a day when, to the contrary, I might have eaten something that wasn’t very fresh, and I had an upset stomach. Lucien absolutely insisted on taking me from behind. However hard I tried to avoid this and to distract him with fervent fellatio, I couldn’t stop him from delving his fingers right up close to the part of me that was sick, and I realized to my shame that
they brought out a small amount of liquid matter. He buried his dick in there. The pleasure that this particular use of the rectum gives is obviously in the same family as that experienced in the seconds before the expulsion of fecal matter, but in this case the conjunction of the two was so narrow that it bordered on torture. I have never taken part in scatological games, either of my own free will or encouraged by a man with that sort of experience. I have noticed that when this sort of incident occurred at all, it was with men much older than I, both of whom could be deemed—although both for different reasons—father figures. When he withdrew, Lucien went to wash himself with no commentary other than to say I had been silly to make such a fuss because it had been so good. I felt I could trust him.

  There is such a perfect feeling of well-being when you have, so to speak, left your body behind in excesses of pleasure with someone else, but you can recognize some aspects of that well-being when you leave your body behind in the opposite circumstances, in abjection or even the most intense pain. I have dealt with the theme of the open space we appropriate for ourselves, and of our temptation to let strangers look on our nudity like at a shopwindow. In these instances, we actually wear our nudity like a garment, and displaying it relates to the excitement we feel when, conversely, we prepare our bodies, dress them and put on our makeup, to seduce. I emphasize the word “excitement,” the rising tide of desire waiting for a response from the outside world. It surely cannot be excitement that we feel when we recoil into the closed world of pain or in the immediate satisfaction of elementary functions: when the body doesn’t have the strength to occupy any other space than the sunken outline carved into a mattress, when the spew of vomit splatters the feet, when a dribble of shit trickles between our thighs. If there is any pleasure in this, it is not that the body feels struck by something greater than itself, it is that it feels bottomless, as if by exteriorizing the activities of our entrails, we could accede to our entire surroundings.

  If one of the meanings of the word “space” is emptiness—if when it is used without any qualification, it principally evokes a clear sky or a desert—a confined space is seen almost as automatically as a filled space. When I feel the need to return my aspirations to vast horizons, I happily transport myself on my imagination to a garbage area, usually the one at the foot of the building in which I grew up. Back to the wall between the corrugated surfaces of the cans, with a man who sets down his bucket of trash for the occasion. I have never enacted this fantasy, but I assiduously maintained a relationship with a man who lived in such a shambles and so much filth that this archetypal garbage area must have had a place somewhere in his unconscious. This same man was an aesthete, a clear and self-possessed theoretician with a rather precious way of speaking. His apartment consisted of two minute rooms whose walls were completely covered in shelves laden with books and records, distributed at random, and some of the shelves had given way under their weight. Three quarters of one of the rooms was taken up with the bed, where the top sheet and the blanket were always scuffed up in a heap, and which you could get into only after pushing aside books, papers and newspapers. In the second room it was not just the desk that looked as if it had suffered the vengeance of a burglar furious not to have found what he was looking for, but also the floor; it was covered with a maze of crumbling piles of books and catalogs, heaps of opened envelopes and crumpled paper, fanned-out sheaves of paper that one might think were still of some use. This, along with the dust, would have been nothing if it hadn’t been for the glasses with the dried brown ellipses of long forgotten drinks in their depths, used as paperweights if they hadn’t left their slimy circular imprint on other pieces of paper, if a grayish T-shirt or a stiffened face towel hadn’t been jumbled into the bed sheets, if—when you wanted to locate a bar of soap in the sink—you didn’t have to search through archaeological layers of cups and saucers encrusted with crumbs, like the mud still attached to recently exhumed relics…all of that made you heave.

  I spent many nights in this hovel. The occupant seemed not to notice. The fact that he never accomplished that elementary act of comfort—brushing his teeth—was perpetually unfathomable. When he laughed, his upper lip raised the curtain on a yellow plaster dotted with black patches. As I was sure that all mothers taught their children this hygienic routine, I wondered exactly what level of amnesia he had achieved on the subject of his childhood. He liked to be finger-fucked up his ass. From the outset he would put himself on all fours, presenting his large rather white bottom, and his face serious while he waited. Then I would kneel squarely beside him with my left hand resting gently on his back or his hip, and my moistened right hand would start by rubbing round the outside of his anus, then I would put in two fingers, three, four. With my back bent and my frenetic arm movements, I must have looked very like a housewife desperately trying to stop a sauce from curdling, or someone proudly finishing up a home improvement. His moans had the same nasal resonance as his laugh. Measuring the fruits of my sustained efforts by listening to them afforded me such an extreme state of excitement that it was only with great regret that I abandoned the movement, which had become painful. Then we undertook a series of positions with the logic of acrobats who end up exchanging places as they flow from one movement to the next. I would substitute my tongue for my fingers, then I would slide underneath him to form the sixty-nine position, then it would be my turn to go on all fours. The acute level of pleasure that I then reached was also a recurring subject for interrogation.

  Not many people knew his lair, and wallowing in it undoubtedly revived the childish predilection for sewers. Sewers are hidden places, not so much because it would be humiliating to be seen there but because, following the example of animals that release a powerful stench to put off a predator, we hide ourselves in them like a protective envelope, we take refuge in them like a nest that is all the more secure for being partly strewn with our own excretions. Even so, my friends were in a position to confirm that the man in question was dirtier than is usually acceptable for intellectuals who often neglect their physical appearance. I didn’t discourage their questions or their comments. There was a controlled defiance in my response: “Well, yes, I go just as I am now—freshly showered and in clean panties—and rub myself up against that filth.” Or, if need be: “I rub myself against him just like I’m cuddling up to you.”

  You don’t have to be a great psychologist to deduce from this behavior an inclination for self-abasement, mixed with the perverse intention of dragging others into that same abasement. But this tendency doesn’t stop there; I was carried by the conviction that I rejoiced in extraordinary freedom. To fuck above and beyond any sense of disgust was not just a way of lowering yourself, it was, in a diametrically opposite move, to raise yourself above all prejudice. There are those who break taboos as powerful as incest. I settled for not having to choose my partners, however many of them there may have been (given the conditions under which I gave myself, if my father had happened to be one of the number, I would not have recognized him), and I can also say whatever sex there may have been and whatever their physical and moral qualities may have been (in the same way that I have never tried to avoid a man who didn’t wash, I have with full knowledge had sexual contact with three or four who were completely spineless and stupid). And I was still waiting to find myself under a trained dog, as Éric kept promising, but which never happened, either because the opportunity just didn’t arise or because he thought it ought to stay in the realms of fantasy.

  Earlier on in this book, I applied my thoughts to the theme of space. I have now just spoken of animals and of immersing oneself into human bestiality. What path should I take to convey most clearly the contrasting intermingling of experiences of pleasure, which projects us outside ourselves, and filth, which belittles us? Perhaps this one: on some plane journeys I like looking out over desert landscapes. Being shut up in the cabin on a long-haul flight promotes a general sloppiness among the passengers, and in that promiscuity, you end up
exchanging the smells of musty armpits and overheated feet with those sitting next to you. The feeling of wonderment I have if I have an opportunity to look over a stretch of Siberia or the Gobi Desert is all the greater if I am shackled not so much by my seat belt as by the soupy bath in which I am submerged.

  In the Office

  I feel a need to suture the cut between the interior and the exterior of my body. Without going so far as a frank anality, I have a facility for finding appeasement in filth: some of the traits of my sexual personality support slight regressive tendencies. I would add to that my habit of completing the sexual act in a maximum number of spots in my familiar space. Some of these places allow a couple to express the urgency of their desire and, at the same time, to experiment with unusual positions, between the elevator and the door to the apartment, in the bath or on the kitchen table. Some of the most exciting locations are in the workplace. Here intimate space and public space meet. One friend whom I used to meet in his office, overlooking the rue de Rennes, would happily let himself be sucked off in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, and the euphoric activity in that part of Paris, which bubbled up to me from the street as I knelt silhouetted against this window, must have contributed to my pleasure. In cities, deprived of distant horizons, I like being able to look out from a window or balcony while I keep a languorous dick captive in a secret place. At home my gaze roams over the narrow courtyard and the neighboring windows; from an office I once worked in on the boulevard Saint-Germain, I contemplated the vast facade of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I have also mentioned some of these places when I spoke of the exquisite fear of exposing oneself to involuntary witnesses. To this exhibitionist temptation, I could add the impulse to mark one’s territory as an animal would. Like a lemur, which marks out its chosen space with a few jets of urine, you leave a few drops of come on a staircase or the office carpet, you impregnate the storeroom where everyone hangs up their coats. By inscribing this terrain with the act in which a body exceeds its limits, you appropriate it for yourself by osmosis. And you take it from others. There is, without doubt, a degree of provocation or even of indirect aggression toward others in this operation. Our freedom seems all the greater when we claim it in a place where professional cohabitation usually imposes rules and limitations, even if you share that place with the most discreet and tolerant people. Not to mention the fact that we can to some extent embroil them without their knowledge by annexing their belongings into our most private spheres: a sweater they forgot which you park your buttocks on, or the hand towel in the office bathroom which you use to wipe between your legs. There are some places that I have occupied in this way, and I have felt more at home in them than those who spent the best part of their active time there, because I had left the damp outline of my buttocks in the place where they laid out their work and their files. This didn’t stop me from entertaining the idea that they, too, might have subverted the role of their workspace, and that we were fucking in one another’s wake.