Sexual Life Catherine M.
Page 16
The Body in Pieces
If each of us drew our own body as if by dictation from our own internal perspective, we would produce a real gallery of monsters! I myself would be hydrocephalic and callipygian, and these two protuberances would be joined by an insubstantial mollusklike arm (I have trouble making my breasts count for anything), and the whole thing would be planted on two posts that impede movement more than they facilitate it (I have had a complex about my legs for a long time). Perhaps it’s my cerebral nature that has led me to accord priority to the organs of the head, the eyes and the mouth. There could even be a compensatory relationship between them. When I was very young, people used to compliment me on my big eyes; people noticed them because they were dark brown. As I grew up, my eyes became proportionately less important within my face, and when I was an adolescent, my wounded narcissism had to accept that no one made much fuss about them any more. So I made my mouth, which I thought was rather nice, a possible means of attraction. And I learned to open it wide, and to close my eyes at the same time, at least in certain circumstances, while my backside came to represent the image I had of myself, its rotundity all the more accentuated by my pronounced waist. This backside that I extend ever farther into the unknown regions of the outback (the name Australians give to the desert that lies behind them), which I will never see. Jacques once gave me a postcard of a sketch Picasso made for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: a woman seen from behind, her torso the shape of an isosceles triangle, her buttocks curving dramatically above what look like knuckles of ham. My portrait, he said.
My ass is another side of who I am. Claude used to say, “so-so face, but what an ass!” I like it when Jacques is on the job and he uses the word “ass” unspecifically to designate the whole lower part of my body, which he is penetrating, and when he accompanies his declarations of love addressed to it with sharp slaps on my buttocks. I make a point of asking for this sort of attention. “Rub my ass” is one of my most frequent requests. In response, he grabs my buttocks and shakes their malleable mass as if he were trying to whip up two mountains of cream. If he finishes the job by inserting two fingers in a duck’s-head formation and then opens the bill—i.e., parts the two fingers—in the narrow corridor that leads from the parting of the buttocks to the opening of the cunt, then I just can’t wait for his cock a minute longer.
Once he is inside me, I, too, can get going. Whether I am lying down or on all fours, I play energetically on the suppleness of my waist, and the repercussions of my regular, vigorous thrusts provoke the fantastical melding of my mouth and my genitals. I want to know whether I am “sucking” him well with my cunt. “Am I going to suck up all your come?” The answer I hope for subsumes my identity into that part of me in which all of me is concentrated: “Oh, Catherine! Your ass, your ass…” Knowing that what I cannot see is being attentively examined is just as stimulating. A focused ray of light (from an adjustable bedside lamp, for example) is preferable to more diffuse lighting. I have been known to suggest using a flashlight. By glancing back, I can see the expression on a man’s face as he scrutinizes the cleft between my buttocks which facilitates the disappearance of his precious appendage. I rely heavily on the description he gives me, however literal and crude it may be. “You have a good view of my ass?” “Oh, yes, it’s gorgeous, you know, it’s really swallowing my dick. Oh, the bitch wants more…” If there happens to be a mirror nearby, if I put myself in profile, I can oversee the immersion and emergence of what looks like a piece of flotsam tossed by the swell. Because of this predilection for sensations in my rump, the doggie position has been my favorite for a long time, until I ended up admitting to myself—we always end up being sexually honest with ourselves, but this can, of course, take a long time—that, even though it allowed the rod to strike deep and hard, it still wasn’t the form of penetration that satisfied me the most. In other words, having gone in pursuit of the dick with the energetic buckings of my hips, and having been alternately pinned down and buffed like a polisher’s duster, I like to be turned over and nailed in the classic position.
The pleasure I take in exposing my ass goes back a long time. When I was six or seven, I would expose it to my brother in a game that included some of the moves I used to masturbate. That is, with my skirt hitched up, I would crease my panties up into the front of my crack, and I would push my buttocks out as far as I could beyond the back of the small bench I was sitting on. Then I would wait for the little guy to go behind me. What amused us about it was that I would pretend to have revealed myself quite absentmindedly, and he pretended to brush my buttocks inadvertently.
It must be that we give caresses in the way that we receive them because I have always responded eagerly to men with sensitive asses. I have mentioned the friend who offered himself on all fours for me to finger-fuck until my arm and shoulder were paralyzed with pain. Another one planted his buttocks on my nose without any warning. At the beginning of our relationship, he was being coy and I had to overcome his resistance before I could undertake fellatio. But I had hardly taken him into my mouth when his body stiffened and he pivoted around and presented me with two resolute buttocks. It was easier for me to get to his asshole than his glans. Even so, when I got back up, I thought he still wore the same severe, almost reproving, expression that he had assumed when I first took him in my mouth. After that, I got into the habit of exploring this man’s body in minute detail; I have never licked, kissed and nibbled anyone so thoroughly, from his earlobes to the shifting skin attaching his testicles, via the delicate depressions under his arms, in the crooks of his elbows and in the folds of his groin. It was the systematic occupation of a territory where I left my mark in the form of tiny gobs of spit released from a few centimeters to give the limpid saliva time to stretch out, soiling where I had passed.
Is it because people were less interested in my bosom that it is more lymphatic by nature, and is it because I never thought to offer it spontaneously to be seen and fondled by others that I find it tedious having to stimulate my partner’s nipples? A lot of men ask you to “do their tits” and they even expect this coaxing to take the form of pinching and biting these delicate areas. I have regularly been reproached for not pinching hard enough when my hand hurt from rolling nipples between my fingers, at the same time trying to squeeze them. Not only is the sadistic the least developed of my impulses, I can’t find any resonance in myself for pleasure provoked in this way. Personally, I prefer my breasts to be enveloped in a wider, more subtle gesture, which is even nicer at the time in my cycle when my breasts are heavier because then I can feel them quivering gently. I don’t like them to be pressed or pinched. Any fussing over my nipples I keep for myself, and then only to feel how hard and rough they are under my smooth palms. But in my own intimacy, I can experience an even more striking contrast: kneeling or on all fours, I rub my breasts on my thighs, and this is a confusing feeling; it feels as if my own thighs are strangers to me, as if they don’t belong to me, that their touch comes from outside me, and I melt, always surprised by their velvety skin.
On the subject of seeking out a contrast between rough surfaces and soft ones, I have just remembered one of the first times I experienced an erotic emotion as such. My brother and I would be sent to spend a holiday with some friends of our father’s whose numerous grandchildren played with us. One day, the grandfather, who was ill, had to go to bed and I went to see him in his room. As I sat on the edge of the bed, he started to examine my face. Feeling his way with his fingers, he commented that I had a very fine jawbone; when he reached my neck, he diagnosed that later in life I might be susceptible to goiter. These contradictory observations worried me. Then, slipping his hand under my blouse, he brushed past my breasts, which were barely beginning to bud. And as I stayed there, silent and motionless, he said that when I became a woman, I would really like it when people stroked my “titties” like this. I still didn’t move, or perhaps just my head, which I turned toward the wall as if I couldn’t hear what I was bei
ng told. The callused surface of his big hand snagged on my skin. I was aware for the first time of the stiffening of my nipple. I listened to his predictions. I was suddenly brought to the threshold of womanhood, and I felt a sense of pride. A child forges its power in the enigma of its future life. So, though disconcerted by this gesture, for which I had no prepared response, I turned back to look at this man, whom I was fond of, on his bed. I felt sorry for him because his wife was crippled, obese, her legs covered in suppurating sores that he dressed meticulously morning and evening. At the same time, his grayish face and his lumpy nose made me want to laugh. I extricated myself gently.
That evening, lying in the bed that I shared with one of his granddaughters, I told her about the episode. He had touched her, too. We looked each other right in the eye as we spoke, trying to measure the magnitude of our discovery in the other’s gaze. We were pretty sure the grandfather was doing something forbidden, but the secret that he gave us to share was far more valuable than some moral whose meaning was, anyway, no clearer. When I once decided—again, with a sense of pride, almost bravado—to talk about my masturbating in confession, the priest’s reaction was so disappointing (he made absolutely no comment and just gave me a few Aves and the odd Pater to recite as usual) that I felt nothing but contempt for him afterward. So, trying to tell him that I had been stirred because an old man had put his hand on my breast…!
If I see a man’s eyes alighting—even for half a second—on the place where I then deduce that my bra is straining the buttons of my blouse, or, more usually, if I am talking to someone whose staring eyes are apparently following a train of thought unrelated to what I am saying, I always take refuge in exactly the same modest behavior as in that first examination by the grandfather. For the same reason, you won’t find any low-cut or tight-fitting dresses in my wardrobe. This modesty extends to even those around me. If I am sitting on the sofa in someone’s living room, next to a woman in very revealing clothes, I will instinctively pull down the hem of my own skirt and hunch over to hide my breasts. In this sort of situation, my discomfiture derives as much from the impression that, by association, it is my own anatomy that she is revealing, as from my tendency—described earlier—to break down the barriers of sexual contact from the word go; by adjusting my clothes, I am stopping myself from burying my hands between the two half-exposed breasts and revealing them entirely. And yet I myself wore no underwear at all for many years. I can’t remember why I gave it up. It was definitely not to follow the feminists who wanted us all to burn our bras, because I never adhered to that philosophy, but it was perhaps in the same spirit of rejecting accessories of seduction. Obviously, the results could have the opposite of the desired effect; breasts that can be seen moving freely under clothes are just as tantalizing—although more “naturally”—as those displayed to best effect by a bra. I could at least feel free from any suspicion of having a battle plan for my conquests. I passed up panties in the same way. For how many years was I compelled, for reasons of hygiene, to clean the crotch of my trousers every evening, when it would have been much quicker to put a pair of panties in the washing machine? I just thought it was much simpler to slip all my other clothes on directly. This tendency was dictated to me by a minimalist, almost functionalist principle, according to which a free body need not weigh itself down with ornamentation, as long as it is ready without the need for preliminaries, no shedding of lace or manipulating of bra hooks. In sum, I don’t like it when a man undresses me with his eyes, but once you get down to undressing for real, then it might as well be in one swift move.
If a subjective eye were on a journey, what a world of contrasts it would see! Like a mountain road interrupted by tunnels, you pass abruptly from darkness into light, and from light into darkness. Here I am trying to explain that I prefer to keep covered something that it is perfectly acceptable to reveal, when within these same pages I have displayed an intimacy that most people keep secret. It is obvious that, in the same way psychoanalysis helps you to shed unwanted parts of yourself, when you write a book in the first person the latter becomes the third person. The more detailed my descriptions of my body and my actions, the more I leave myself behind. Who recognizes themselves in those magnifying mirrors that show cheeks and noses as vast fissured landscapes? Because sexual pleasure brings you outside your own limits, it can impose the same sort of distance. Perhaps there is even a structural relationship, and the distance governs the pleasure as much as it is governed by it, at least for the category of creature to which I belong. Because, and this is the point I wanted to make, the same woman whom I described as uncomfortable under someone’s insistent gaze, and who hesitates to wear suggestive clothes, the same woman in fact who partook blindly in sexual adventures with faceless partners, this same woman, then, takes indisputable pleasure in exposing herself on the condition that the exposure is distanced at once, by a narrative.
Image and language conspire. It is so stimulating to look in a mirror and measure—to the nearest centimeter—the amount of flesh that your own flesh can swallow, and this is because the show gives rise to words. “Oh my! It’s going in so smoothly, so deep! Hang on, I’m going to leave it there so that you can really see it, I’ll fuck you right, afterward…” One kind of dialogue that Jacques and I adopted willingly can be characterized by being purely factual. If the vocabulary is crude and limited this has less to do with a desire to provoke each other by upping the obscenity stakes than a need to be accurate in our descriptions. “Can you feel how wet I am? Even my thighs are soaked, and my little clit’s all swollen.” “God, you move your ass well! Does it want my prick? Does it?” “Yes, but I want to feel your cock on my clit again first, can I rub you against it?” “Yes, and afterward we’re going to fuck the ass really good!” “That’s good. How about you, does your dick like it?” “Yes, he likes it.” “Is it pulling on your balls, too?” “Yes, it’s pumping them really well. But hey, we’re going to give this cunt another really good thrust, aren’t we?” And so the exchange goes on in a tone of voice that remains, even as we approach the conclusion, fairly measured. Insofar as we don’t see or feel the same thing at the same time, each speaks to the other with the intention of adding to his knowledge. You could also say that we’re like two dubbing actors, their eyes riveted on the screen where they watch the actions of the characters to whom they give their voices: with our words, we relay the actions of the protagonists in the porn film we are watching, and whose names are Ass, Cunt, Balls and Prick.
Description cuts bodies into pieces, satisfies the need to fetishize them, to instrumentalize them. That famous scene in Godard’s Le Mépris, when, word by word, Piccoli runs over Bardot’s body, is a beautiful transposition of the two-way traffic between sight and speech, each word bringing into focus a part of the body. How many times people say “Look!” when they’re fucking. Of course, you are at your leisure to see things close at hand, but in order to see well, we sometimes also need to stand back, the way we move back from an exhibit in a museum. Undressing, I love to gaze at a promising-looking cock. Abiding by the law of the Gestalt theory, it looks enormous in relation to the body, which becomes almost fragile in its—sometimes laughable—seminudity and its unexpected isolation in the middle of the room; in any event, the cock certainly looks bigger than it would if I was looking at it on its own. In the same way, I can, without any warning, break out of the game and go and stand a couple of meters away, with my back turned, my hands forced onto my buttocks to spread them as far apart as possible, bringing into the same sight line both the brownish crater of the asshole and the crimson valley of the vulva. An invitation become imperative, like a greengrocer saying: “You must taste this fruit,” I’m saying “You must look at my ass.” And because things are more picturesque if they are animated, I make it quiver.
To show my ass and to see my face. There are few pleasures to equal this double polarity. The layout of the bathroom is perfect: while the basin offers a perfect gripping point to brace
the shocks to my rear end, I intermittently catch sight of my harshly lit face in the mirror above it, a face that—quite unlike my lower half, which is totally mobilized—is almost lifeless. The cheeks are hollow and the mouth half open like a windup doll whose mechanism has wound down. It could be the face of a dead woman except for the eyes, which are intolerably listless. I try both to avoid them by lowering my eyelids and to seek out their gaze. That gaze is the anchoring point; it is by seeing its reflection that I establish this certainty: there I am, that is me coming. It is the siphon through which all of me is evacuated: I cannot recognize myself in such a state of release; with a feeling of shame, I reject it. That is how pleasure stays on a knife edge: just as the multiplication of two negative numbers gives a positive number, this pleasure is the product not, as is sometimes said, of an absence from oneself but of the bringing together of this perceived absence and the feeling of horror that it provokes in a flash of conscience. Sometimes I bring myself to this peak of pleasure all by myself, as an interval in my bathroom routine. With one hand on the edge of the basin and the other one masturbating, I watch myself in the mirror out of the corner of my eye.
A particular porn film made quite an impression on me. The man was taking the woman from behind. The camera was facing her so that her face was in the foreground. Thanks to the pressure exerted on her whole body, her face was projected forward and distorted, as things are when they come too close to the lens. You could hear the man’s orders: “Look! Look at the camera!” and the girl’s eyes looked directly into yours, the viewer’s. I thought he might well be pulling her hair to force her to raise her head. This scene has given me a lot of inspiration for the little scenarios that nourish my masturbating. In real life, a man I met only once gave me such intense pleasure that I have very precise memories of the encounter, and this was because with every thrust, he would order me to “Look me in the eye.” I did as I was told, knowing that he was witness to the disintegration of my face.