I dropped to my hands and knees with the next blow.
I sensed the blade of the knife slide down my back, and on its way back up, cut my shirt and the bottom strap of my bra.
Only my wrists were holding me up. Somebody kicked me in the side.
After that, I have only a linear vision of events. Somebody lifts my head, and a cock is stuffed into my mouth.
The blade of the knife weighs on my throat, the tip jammed under my chin.
I take another violent blow to the kidneys—a sharp blow— a belt buckle, probably. Then another.
A guy behind me tries to force open my buttocks, and I contract them, resisting as best I can. Other kicks in the belly follow.
The best and worst that could have happened did; I collapse and almost lose consciousness. The icy chill of the wet stones keeps me from completely passing out.
Other kicks, other blows with the belt.
The guy who wields the knife leans over and stabs it into my right breast rather deeply from below.
He plasters me to the ground, my arms crossed, and again I feel hands trying to pull apart my buttocks. Fingernails dig into my flesh. Burning.
A violent blow on the nape of my neck, and for an instant there is no one, nothing.
When I come to, one guy is humping against my labia, and another is thrusting in my ass.
I convulse, throwing them off. I hear a voice: "Whore, you're going to get it now!" An avalanche of kicks. Someone hits me very hard in my cunt with the point of a military pistol, and I faint for good.
I hear a barely audible voice from very far away: "Miss? Miss? Wake up! Come on! Come on! Help is here!"
I feel myself floating. I don't even hurt anymore. I am in a soft, snowy place. I need only close my eyes again to slide into sleep.
I get a dose of water on the face; I choke a little, snort, then wake up altogether.
The pain sets in. The impression of being no more than a wound. A broken doll.
I open my eyes. Leaning over me is a guy in his fifties who smells good.
To the side, no less curious but more reserved: a dog with strangely clear eyes. I learn afterwards it is a Weimaraner, whom his master calls Wagner, "although he was born in the year when you were supposed to choose only names beginning with a G."
The man has a nervous but reassuring smile. "Do you want me to go with you to the police station?"
He gets me on my feet, helps me pull up my pants, retrieves my jacket. As for my shirt, there's nothing to be done. We never find the raincoat. Thrown into the Seine.
"No," I say in one breath.
No, no cops! Definitely no cops! I wasn't going to let a gang of men look at me, get a real eyeful, only to have them note "rape attempt" in a ledger and put me in a clinic where a sleepy intern would measure the extent of my bruises and perform the appropriate blood tests.
He helps me recross the tunnel. I am as weak as a baby learning to walk—and much less well-disposed. The beating of the water against the arches, amplified by the stones, seems enormously noisy. My head hurts, and I have a stomachache. A terrible need to vomit. The odor of cold urine doesn't help.
As we emerge on the other side, a wave laps at my ankles. Only the dog has the reflex to avoid the water's flow. Dogs dislike getting their paws wet as much as cats do. It's funny what thoughts will fill your head, once it's been beaten in.
He repeats his offer to take me to the police station, file a complaint; he says they shouldn't get away with it. Again, I refuse.
I am at the end of my strength. The last fifty feet have finished me. It takes me a considerable period of time to climb the gentle ramp that gives cars access to the quay.
The thought of what I am ravages me, and I begin to cry silently.
He puts his arm around me. "I live nearby," he says. "Come."
***
A small building on the Rue Bonaparte.
Louis (that was how he introduced himself) was an antique collector. A boutique below, a beautiful apartment on the second floor. His place was a perfection and a profusion.
Only little, delicate, and gracious things. A frozen avalanche of Sevres biscuits placed on rosewood pedestal tables; a debauchery of Pompadour parquetry.
I looked at him through the haze of my exhaustion. He was nicely turned out for six o'clock in the morning.
He took me into a room decorated like a chambermaid's boudoir. A door covered with a cheap imitation of a Watteau throw led to a completely white-and-gray bathroom of polished •marble and granite, bright white tiles, the gray reflections of chrome and mirrors.
"Would you like—" he began. "I'm fine," I said. I wasn't at all fine. I closed the bathroom door and vomited. It hurt a lot to get undressed—though I didn't have much to take off. I couldn't manage to get my heels free from my pants legs.
I was a thousand years old and devoid of memories.
I looked at myself in the mirrors, from the front and back at the same time.
I was covered with enormous bruises, especially on my stomach and loins. The skin had been opened in eight or ten places where the belt buckle had struck. I palpated my sides. Enormous pain, but nothing broken. My sex was as shattered as if it had been struck by an invisible stone. Under my right breast was a gash of an inch or so, as deep as a lance blow. Though I had been bleeding badly earlier, it had stopped. I gritted my teeth and disinfected the wound.
I felt flushed with the alcohol's sting and thought I might faint again.
I leaned over and examined my ass in the vertical mirror. I felt nothing, saw nothing. Perhaps those bastards hadn't had me after all. Retrospectively, in one blow, I felt sick and I vomited again—bile, and nothing else, except for a little bit of blood. What -had they done to me?
I took a very long and very hot shower.
I found a gray peignoir that was a little bit big for me, in which I let myself be lost.2
Louis waited for me. I seemed so dazed, no doubt, that he instinctively took me in his arms, and I started to sob, without holding back this time.
He told me he had come by while they were covering me with kicks. Nothing in their attitude suggested they had "subjected me to the final outrages." I appreciated his choice of words as much as his delicacy. Both distanced me from the facts.
"Rest," he said.
I collapsed onto the bed, and fell asleep as one dies: in pain and in an endless void.
***
I woke up once because in a nightmare the same gray-haired hooded man had sewn up my vagina. The pain of my labia— crushed by kicking, no doubt.
I felt black and blue all over. Beaten to a pulp—that was definitely the appropriate expression.
It even hurt to smile. I got up and drank a little bit of water. And fell asleep again.
***
Louis was in his fifties. You never would have guessed it; he took care of himself.
Discretely, but exclusively, homosexual. "Why did they finally leave me alone?" I asked. It was six p.m. Nearly one whole revolution of the clock.
Teatime. Buttered bread, scones, and Earl Grey. I felt reborn.
"I know them," he said briefly. "How?" "I've run into them, mornings—" "Sorry."
That made him smile. This guy was marvelously indulgent.
***
I stayed with Louis for five days. I had never gotten along so well with a man.
I told him everything. (What was there so important to say, in the end?)
He encouraged me to keep at it. "Search farther," he said. "The physical pain is nothing. It's that other, older pain—a man in a hood, you say? Daddy?"
He snorted. He had said the word with an accent of terrible irony—as if summing up his whole life in two syllables.
I shook my head—to chase away the idea because I didn't believe it.
"And that Nathalie! Ascesis through suffering! Nirvana through the whip! Idiocies! She has a score to settle and that's all, and that's enough, by God. But what score?"
I tol
d him everything I had gleaned from talking with her mother and sister. The mausoleum. The death of her father.
"Maybe she feels guilty," he said. "If it's that, it's irrecuperable. One can be very strong in the face of one's own death—well, one may try—but one can do nothing before the death of others. You cannot accept it. So, when you also feel responsible—"
He questioned me finally about J. P. What he had done to me. What he had made me do.
"The human spirit is funny," he said. He seemed to be talking to himself. "Look He's treating you like a boy. You accept the role, but only through inverting it; then you become the man to Nathalie's woman. She herself is never more than the feminized reflection of the boy you are forced to be—and on that subject, who for- bade you to be a girl? And you two women act like men with each other! Simultaneously, you want her to be a woman—yet the boy you are does not like women. You torture her; she no longer knows who she is. She loves you, but you are only a means, for her, of finding the solution. She is the only one who really likes to suffer. Not you. I don't believe it."
I told him everything I had felt under the bridge: extreme suffering, feeling as if I were dying, and quasi-beatitude. As if I had pierced the wall of suffering; as if I had found the origin. The separation of my parents. My mother's voice, a night of fighting and insults at home, before their separation—and me, trembling to hear them, hiding in my room:
"What have you done to the child?" But was that really the sentence I heard?3 My fault? Children always have a tendency to accuse themselves when their parents make mistakes. To reproach themselves for being born.
"That's a little too easy," I concluded.
"Of course it is, picky girl. Does that mean it's necessarily wrong?"
***
My bruises disappeared harmoniously. A rainbow revealed in stages.
Two or three times I called my answering machine. There were several affectionate and nervous calls from Nathalie. Because each time I listened, the tape rewound and began at the beginning, I could better discern how her anxiety mounted as she left messages without getting any answer. The fifth time, I kissed Louis tenderly, shook Wagner's paw, and went home.
One day, after I had used up a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and was looking for another, I happened to find pill bottles of AZT, blessed with a terrible eloquence, in his medicine cabinet.
An antique collector, a homosexual, and HIV positive: the stereotypical nature of the situation hardly diminished its tragic aspects. Indeed, on the contrary. Tragedy is ultimately full of stereotypes. Only the drama itself makes it original.
The second day he came back with a little red dress. Cuddly enough to make me feel pampered again, it skimmed my neck and was long at the wrists—enough camouflage to keep me from feeling frightened. He also brought several small indispensable baubles. "I am not very familiar with all this feminine artillery," he said apologetically as I unwrapped the gift boxes wrapped in tissue paper. But he didn't get it wrong—not even the size of the cups of the brassiere.
The dress was somewhat light for the season, so I waited until a warmer day to return to my place. Good-bye, Louis, I love you.
Nothing in the mail. In the stairwell, for no reason, my heart beat faster.
Notes
1.It appears that the brain was not conceived to memorize pain. A perfume, yes, or a pleasant sensation, but not pain. That would explain why some women claim not to remember the pain of childbirth. In spite of this, Florence wants us to believe she can convoke on her skin the physical memory of all the cries of her beaten, mistreated, plundered flesh.
2.The nightgown, and all of Louis's clothes, were impregnated with an odor I didn't identify right away. When I asked, he told me it was Habit rouge. Decidedly, Guerlain never left me (Florence's note).
3.At the beginning of his career, Freud believed hysterics were talking about actual paternal fondlings. Then his Viennese puritanism took over and he finally concluded that these scenes were fantasies. The funniest, or most tragic, consequence of this is that thousands of psychoanalysts have taken for fantasies what were? actually real events. As far as Florence is concerned, I learned that the latent, though inadmissible, homosexuality of her father had become
for her an aspiration to masculine homosexuality, impossible to experience in a woman's body. From this perhaps came her diffuse feelings of guilt, later exteriorized in epiphanies of pain.
Chapter XIII
February,
End
I entered, and right away there was the odor, dull and ferrous, of blood. I called out, "Nathalie?" My voice reverberated against the walls; then there was silence. All the lights were on in my room. I took two steps.
How much blood does the human body contain? Ten pints? Well, it was all there. An enormous pool of blood surrounded Nathalie, slumped nude in the middle of the room, her hair filled with blood, her body a vivid blue—completely bloodless.
I leaned over her, all the while holding on to the partition, keeping myself above the red lake. Her eyes were closed, her lips curled into the half-smile that I loved so much and yet also irritated me. It looked as if she had been waiting for me, and wanted to welcome me, but was also making fun of me. It was her face as it looked before our first kiss, because she grew serious again when in love. I lowered my head and saw my reflection in the pool of blood.
She had died in my place. Something in me had died with her—that something that was bound to the horrors of my child- hood and early adolescence. She had killed herself because she wanted me to live—and I was just asking yesterday, again, if she loved me! Oh! Of course, there is always egotism in the purest altruism: she had also abolished, in dying, the monsters that wallowed in her, the unthinkable pain she tried to conjure in masochism, without deluding herself that a love of suffering could not be, and never was, an end in itself.
She had gone farther than I had in the ascesis in which J. P had initiated me. Farther than I would ever go, since she went there for me. Her suicide left me with only one exit—to be born and to be. At last, to be born without a mother's intervention, to be the womb from which I had emerged, to be the cock that had filled that womb, subject to neither father nor law, mother nor faith.
What had she tried to destroy? The little girl who believed herself responsible for her father's death? The adolescent who had tried to control her mother's alcoholism—and who reproached herself for not loving her enough? The one-hundred-franc tricks to pay for her sister's schooling? Happy, happy are those who are orphaned from birth, happy to have their accounts already settled, their culpability extinguished in the cradle, their pain limited to a single primal cry.
She had carved deeply into her flesh, cut the muscles and tendons. Human arteries he deeper than you'd think. She had slashed her left arm, but had not been able to grasp the razor sufficiently with her left hand to slash her right wrist. Dead hand, nearly severed, and the white, hard flash of bone, now that all the blood had run out of it.
Fallen from her bluish fingers, the razor shone in the middle of the pool like a sardonic mirror.1
I noticed the stereo was on. I would discover later she had died while listening to Mozart's Requiem.
A theatrical production. Confusedly, I wanted for her to have indulged in this absurdity.
Christianity bases itself primarily on transgression and redemption. What I had before me, this statue slumped in the middle of a red mantle, was a lay crucifixion, the redemption of graver faults. Those we had not committed.
Suddenly dizzy, I dropped to my knees, my hands falling forward into the blood congealed on the surface of the lake. I was on my knees, my eyes looking into the eyes that mirrored my own.
My arms buckled, and I slid into the pool, flat on my chest. Nathalie's blood, colder than the coldness of the white floor, soaked my red dress. The room I had wanted to be a laboratory had become a slaughterhouse. The slimy cold covered my breasts like an immense hand with diffuse fingers.
Sobbing or shout
ing, I didn't know which anymore, I slithered across that lake of blood to her, a marble island with closed eyes. Her lips. Her neck. Her breasts. My lips on her parted lips, pulp without life, without vigor. My eyes on her dead eyelids. I crushed her to me.
Much later, I found the strength to get up again. I went to the bathroom; I wanted to avoid my reflection in the mirror. It couldn't be done; my face was streaked with blood as if I had pulled strips of skin from it. I undressed; my dress was terribly heavy. I stepped into the shower without even thinking of regulating the water temperature.
I don't know how long the cold water ran over me. I watched the reddish strands slide down the drain and the water change from red to pinkish, just as when first one rinses a newborn, crumpled up and covered with bloody membranes.
I stayed there a good while, exhausted. And then the cold water little by little brought me back to life.
I returned to the room, and suddenly everything became easier. Telephone a doctor I knew—he would know what to do. Put on a pair of underpants, jeans, a sweater. I found nothing to put on my feet but blue pumps. My everyday shoes were soaked with blood and I had left red footprints everywhere.
While waiting, I looked at Nathalie. Who would have thought a corpse could be so pale? She appeared nearly luminous. By contrast, the s,cars on her buttocks, shaved sex, hips, and breasts appeared more marked than they had a week
I had seen her. We had joked about the fact that the marks seemed to heal more quickly each time, and that I would have to hit her progressively harder. Harder!
The scars from the razor cuts were even more white.
A word came to me: palimpsest. The traces of all our furies rose to the surface. -
The gold rings piercing her face, breasts, and sex, made visible as she lay in the pose of a broken doll, caught the violent glare of the track lights.
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