‘No!’ He too holds up his copy of the manuscript, bringing it down on the table, the crack of the impact ringing out around the room. ‘Smut! This,’ he thunders, ‘is nothing but a little bit of porn!’
There are cries of agreement and disagreement all around the table, but Gaston Gallimard, who founded the house, is determined it will not publish this thing.
‘It is nothing but filth, Albert. And not only filth but demeaning to all women! Do you really want your wife to read this? Or your daughters, gentlemen? Or your mother? Heaven forbid! We are Gallimard, for god’s sake! This book will never go into the world with my name on it.’ He fixes Camus in his sights. ‘Albert, how can you, a man of such culture, intelligence and artistry, not recognise smut when you see it?’
‘Not smut,’ Camus fires back. ‘Art!’
Gaston Gallimard is incredulous. ‘Art?’
Again there is a divided chorus of ‘yes’ and ‘no’, of ‘smut’ and ‘art’, Camus and Gallimard eyeballing each other and, all the time, the conservatively dressed, petite figure of Dominique Aury (who, before the meeting started, passed around a tray of visitantes, her favourite biscuits, which she bakes for every committee meeting) sits silently watching the whole spectacle. Impassive, giving nothing away, except for the slightest hint of amusement.
Camus’s face rises up like a full moon in front of her and she could almost laugh. Her eyes twinkle. There is now a clear hint of a playful smile on her lips. High seriousness, like politics, amuses her. To all outward appearances she is a quiet woman in her mid-forties: one of those who hide in plain sight; a woman who brings freshly baked biscuits to every meeting like a mother or a dutiful wife.
But everybody knows that she is the first woman to ever sit at this table, and for all the small theatrics of baking biscuits for the meeting, for all the appearance of being quietly unremarkable, everybody steps lightly around Dominique Aury, knowing full well there is a formidable intelligence behind those twinkling eyes. Opposite her sits Jean. The two of them, silent collaborators, giving nothing away.
Camus sinks back into his chair, smoke streaming from his nostrils. A glance passes between Dominique and Jean, the slightest raising of his eyebrows, and, Dominique notes, what eyebrows they are! Together, they observe the scene, their secret safe. And while the words smut, filth and porn are being thrown about, and while Camus and another committee member defend the book, Dominique watches. Utterly unmoved. Untouchable. As if the words dirt, filth and porn, and phrases such as degrading to all women, defiling, demeaning, were being spoken about another book altogether.
And so while Gaston Gallimard is telling the room that this is Gallimard and we do not publish sordid little tales for the trench-coat brigade to smuggle into their sordid little rooms to light their sordid little lives, while he is telling the committee that to publish this book would be to soil the company’s name, that nobody ought to publish it, that if ever a book deserved to be burnt, this is it, Dominique watches, with something close to fascination, the passionate reaction the book has provoked.
But above all – like the impassive Jean in front of her – she is amused. And she knows already that when the meeting is finished and everybody has had their say, when she and Jean go for drinks afterwards, they will laugh about it all. Loud and long. For it is inconsequential to Dominique if the book is published or not. But the reaction of the committee, she knows, will only make Jean more determined. For, he will surely tell her later, if a book like this can create such a storm in the reading room of a publishing house, imagine what it might do out there in the world. For her, though, the book has done its job.
If only they could see themselves. Supporters and naysayers alike. Shouting and jabbing their fingers in the air, and all over what is apparently meaningless dirt that leaves them feeling defiled, yet somehow revelling in it. Like inquisitors who have found the very thing they sought – the work of the devil itself – exalted into a frenzy by their discovery. And as she watches the spectacle, amusement is giving way to curiosity. For something intriguing is happening here. A seemingly insignificant piece of porn has set off a storm.
And it is while amusement gives way to curiosity, and she is asking herself just what is happening and why, that all of them, having exhausted themselves, fall back into their respective chairs, and for the first time all afternoon there is silence in the room.
She allows the soothing silence to wash over her, until Camus turns once more to her and speaks.
‘Who is Pauline Réage?’
And as the question is directed at her, she feels compelled to answer, and replies as if it were perfectly obvious. ‘The author of Story of O.’
Part Five
Publication and Scandal
Paris, 1955–56
18.
There is something about a classroom that never changes. Especially a rainy-day classroom. She hasn’t been inside one for years, but the cloying smell of bodies close up against each other and that mixture of expectation and boredom hits Dominique the moment she enters the room.
Today she is giving a talk on the art of translation, at an American college – mostly to young women, but young men too. A mixture of French and Americans; some of them, she was told, ex-soldiers on government schemes. Writers, possibly. Who knows?
Nobody notices her enter. Nobody looks up. There are thirty-five, possibly forty, students. She doesn’t count. She is too struck by their youth. Indeed, some of them look like they should still be at high school. But that, she tells herself, is what aging does: the young look so terribly young. Just as she would once have looked so terribly young to the lecturers she had in that distant age before the war.
She stands by the door, which was already open, registering the smell and the sounds while observing the steady rain drenching the courtyard. It is good to be inside. A cat, which seems perfectly at home, huddles under the protective foliage of a shrub, fur puffed up. She loves cats, they are their own beings. You think you own them, but you don’t. Nor do you control them; you are in their service without realising. You think you know them, but they are a wonderful mystery. If a cat could speak, no one would understand it.
Her gaze shifts from the courtyard back to the classroom. The students sit in groups. The hum of talk and occasional laughter fills the room. A few of the students have now noticed Dominique and fall silent, eyes on her. Curious. But her attention is drawn to a group of three young women at the back of the room. They are sitting close together, as if for a group portrait, the young woman in the centre holding a book and reading it to her friends, the three of them so focused on the book that they are oblivious to everything else.
They are in their own world, having slipped through the high security fence of everyday reality and into the wonderland of story. And as she approaches them, Dominique is wondering what the book is and why it has such power over them. The student in the centre is reading softly, the other two hang on every word. Suddenly one of them gasps; another bursts into laughter, placing her hand over her mouth. But it is not amused laughter, it is laughter that comes of disbelief. Or the shocked embarrassment of watching someone commit some utterly unpardonable social transgression.
Dominique moves towards them, now in their thrall, while the rest of the class turns to Dominique, following her progress and, like Dominique, also intrigued by this group reading taking place at the back of the room (though the face of one young man, not so much intrigued as disapproving, wears a scowl). Everybody is staring at the three women, but they are too absorbed to notice. As Dominique nears the group, the young student reading suddenly looks up and sees her, sees the eyes of the class upon them, and slams the book shut. The three young women are frozen, like animals in a spotlight. The room is silent. Dominique, an intrigued, quizzical look on her face, quietly inquires, ‘What are you reading?’
The student slides the book off the desk and into her satchel – the action is furtive and swift; a guilty reader – but there is enough ti
me for Dominique to catch the title and suddenly she is the one frozen and mortified.
‘Oh,’ the young woman says, as casually as she can, ‘it’s nothing. You wouldn’t be interested.’
Her love letter has been out there in the world for a year, more or less. It went into the world quietly. Small publisher. Nobody seemed to notice. And this was good. If it had to be published, then let it be, she thought, the kind of book that enters the world soundlessly. No splash. As though it were never published at all. And life went on. A letter written for an audience of one stayed, more or less, as private as it was always meant to be.
But this is the first intimation that it has slipped from her. Not hers any more, nor Jean’s. Something to be read, giggled over and quickly hidden like a piece of incriminating evidence: not a book to be seen reading in public. What have we done? Until now, thoughts of strangers poring over the book, reading the words that flowed effortlessly from her through long nights of writing, nights that had a touch of heaven about them, have been abstract and infrequent. But this is the first real indication that her letter has gone out into the world, grown up while she wasn’t watching, become independent and started to mix with strangers. Like these three young women in front of her, making of it what they will.
And what do they see now standing in front of them? What do they make of her? A quaint middle-aged woman, to be sheltered, even protected, from the shock of their reading, like a mother or a favourite aunt.
‘Why not?’ Dominique eventually asks.
‘Why not?’ the young woman says, puzzled.
‘Why wouldn’t I be interested?’
‘Oh,’ she says, stifling a laugh and sharing a knowing look with her companions, ‘believe me, you wouldn’t. It’s not your kind of book.’
‘Isn’t it?’ Dominique says, while asking herself how on earth this young woman would know what is and what is not her kind of book. ‘Is it your kind of book?’
‘I’m not sure.’
There is a kind of guilty smile in the young woman’s eyes, in the eyes of all of them, as though, Dominique can’t help but think, something in them has been set free and they are not quite sure just what to make of this sudden freedom: as though some part of them that until now they weren’t even aware of has surfaced or been set loose, like a runaway animal both elated by its freedom and troubled by it – caught between running back and going on. And there is something endearing, even touching, in observing it.
‘You might be surprised,’ Dominique suggests, and the young woman in the middle who was reading pauses in reflection, as though weighing up the possibility that she just might be.
The whole class by now is following the conversation. Dominique nods to the three young women, a nod she thinks of as conspiratorial, that says we understand each other more than you can imagine. But probably these young women see none of this. How could they: all they see is a middle-aged woman who could be someone’s favourite aunt.
Dominique walks to the front of the room, places various translations on the desk, and begins talking about the process, the translatable and the occasionally untranslatable, like T.S. Eliot’s troublesome phrase zero summer, for Dominique recently translated Four Quartets and, she tells her class, found the phrase untranslatable.
The hour passes quickly, and when she is finished she watches the students file out into the drizzle of the day, dripping umbrellas in their hands, that damp smell of a damp classroom once again in the air. She looks onto the courtyard outside; the cat has gone to wherever cats go. When she turns back to the classroom she looks for the three young women, but they too have gone, to wherever young women go. A café, perhaps. To continue their reading. And she is surprised at the sense of connection she feels to these young women, whom she will more than likely never see again. But they have, nonetheless, brushed up against each other, strangers united by the love letter that is now a public possession. Readers and author, even if Dominique is the only one who knows.
* * *
The next day she is sitting in a café reading a manuscript. The waiter produces a silver tray bearing two cups of coffee for a nearby table with a flourish like a magician, as if he has conjured the tray, saucers and cups from his sleeve. The couple at the table, an older man and a younger woman, look up at the waiter and observe the spectacle with a casual manner that suggests they expected nothing less. For either party to remark upon the dexterity of the waiter’s movements would undercut the theatre.
The waiter leaves and Dominique, at the window, is gazing upon the couple while also taking in the afternoon sun. Who are they? It’s a game she plays whenever she is alone in a café, a game she likes. Just as she enjoys being by herself, for it leaves her free to observe. And how often has she observed this? The older man and the younger woman. Perhaps a father and daughter. But unlikely. The man is trying to impress the young woman. He is telling a story, or so it seems. His hand gestures are large. He too is performing. He is trying to make her laugh. Open the door to laughter, and you open all the others. How often has she seen it? His hair is greying, too long, but only just, with a careless, unbrushed look. A look that says the trifles of appearance don’t matter. He is above such things. He could be Jean. His companion has the confident look of the new young: short hair, black sweater, a curious mixture of innocence and experience. Two generations linked by the bridge of . . . what? Mutual exchange? Each with something to give the other, an equal trade: he the experience of the years, and she vibrancy of youth and the illusion of being young again? It’s all about death, Dominique tells herself. It all comes down to death in the end. Everything: the middle-aged husband heady with young love; the man who checks the lock in his door three times before leaving; the pyramids. It’s all about death. And are she and Jean any different? She watches them. His gestures large. Her eyes both knowing and amused. Will she laugh? And in that moment will their compact be sealed?
Near them a woman sits reading a book. She is neither young nor middle-aged, but in between. Married, comfortably dressed in a way that suggests a comfortable marriage. She occasionally glances up, taking in the scene, a cigarette beside her, smouldering like a slow fuse while she turns the pages. Not far from her, and watching her, is a man in a suit, sipping an afternoon brandy. He taps his foot on the floor, a rapid beat, but irregular, like a faulty metronome. The woman looks up from her book, locates the source of the sound, then turns briefly to the man near her before returning to the book. It is a glance, but long enough for the man to notice.
‘Does it bother you?’ he asks. ‘My foot?’
The woman looks at him, a touch of censure at the intrusion. ‘No.’ She returns to her book.
The man’s foot is still. The silence more intrusive than the tapping, for Dominique can sense the will power required to restrain the errant foot, the man still staring at the woman and her book.
‘But it does,’ he says, the eyes of the café – the waiter, the couple and Dominique – turning upon the man, hearing the urgency in his voice.
‘I can assure you,’ the woman says, voice calm but troubled, ‘that it doesn’t.’ And with that she returns to her book, as if to say that surely puts an end to that.
But the man does not give up. He is committed. ‘But you looked up.’
The woman looks at him, collecting herself. ‘Will you do something for me?’
‘Me?’ the man says, astounded. ‘Do something for you? I went to war, isn’t that enough? I did my bit.’
The woman remains calm. ‘Just let the matter rest.’
‘Before the war my nerves were good. My foot was mine.’
As if on cue his foot starts up again, tapping out a fierce tattoo. The woman suddenly snaps her book shut and thumps it down on the table. The snap and the thump echoing like a judge’s gavel. The waiter moves towards them. The slow, smouldering fuse of her cigarette burns out; the man erupts.
‘And you can do something for me . . . for everybody . . . you can have the decency to no
t read that filth in public!’
‘Monsieur!’ the waiter calls out.
‘In the camp,’ the man continues, indignation rising, ‘they spat on us. As we worked. And we weren’t allowed to wipe it off.’ He stops, gulping back his emotions. ‘They laughed. And we could do nothing.’ He adds, glaring at the woman, ‘I didn’t live through that just to watch you read filth!’
He swiftly rises, grabs the woman’s book and flings it across the café floor, where it lands at Dominique’s feet.
‘That utter filth,’ the man shouts, ‘does not belong in a public place or any place. And you, madame, you are a disgrace!’
‘Monsieur!’ The waiter is now standing directly in front of the man. ‘Leave my café. Now!’
‘Gladly.’
As he passes Dominique, the book still at her feet, he glares at her, a glare that says don’t you dare pick that thing up. But she’s not frightened of him, she knows him, his anger, she is sure, coming from the impotence and humiliation of wearing German spittle on his face, day in, day out.
The waiter, watched by Dominique and the couple, not so much escorts the man to the door as marches him, the man slamming the door behind him. The waiter watches him go, his actions and manner leaving nobody in any doubt that this is his café and what takes place in it is his responsibility. When he turns back to the woman she is packing her things up, and he rushes to her.
‘Madame, my apologies. My sincere apologies.’
‘It is no matter, I assure you,’ she says, clearly shaken.
‘Please, sit. Let me get you something. A cognac.’
‘Really, there’s no need. I was leaving anyway.’
The waiter stands, hands hopelessly outspread as if to say what, what can I do?
The woman reads the unspoken question. ‘You have done enough. Thank you.’
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