The Sextine Chapel

by Hervé Le Tellier

  Hervé Le Tellier

  The Sextine Chapel

  Sexual practices are banal, impoverished, doomed to

  repetition, and this impoverishment is disproportionate to the wonder of pleasure they afford.

  Roland Barthes, preface to Tricks by Renaud Camus

  I fail to understand why women, especially beautiful ones,

  agree to sleep with men other than me.

  Jacques Bens, La cinquantaine à Saint-Quentin

  for Harry Mathews, these plural pleasures

  ~ ~ ~

  Anna and Ben. Afterward, Ben opens the curtains. It’s January and already night. The red and blue neon lights of the Holiday Inn on Place de République make Anna’s willowy body turn yellow as she lies on her back, naked on the sheet. He kneels by the edge of the bed, kisses her feet, spreads her thighs, grabs her hips and draws her towards him. Anna closes her eyes. She can’t understand a word of what Ben is saying as he penetrates her and starts his slow to and fro. She feels sorry she took German and Spanish at school.

  Suddenly, she catches the word darling. It sounds so terribly off.

  Ben and Chloe. In a leafy suburb of Houston, Texas, on the double bed belonging to Ben’s parents — whose holiday in Nassau is going just swell, we’ll be back home Monday — he feels his penis stiffen between Chloe’s fingers while she kisses him shyly, then more and more boldly. On television, CNN is showing again and again a terrorist attack that has just occurred in New York. Chloe goes so far as to lick the tip of his penis. Right there, she feels, the skin is as dry and soft as a kitten’s paw. But Ben doesn’t even purr.

  Chloe thinks that if she were a man, she’d be gay. Then, a second later, what an absurd thought that just was.

  Chloe and Dennis. In an ivory Kimberley Clark bathtub, Chloe has crouched down over Dennis, turning her tanned back and short-cropped brown hair towards him, while taking in his phallus (after a deal of wriggling). Once the bathroom floor has been drenched, she decides to pull the plug. So it’s now in an empty tub that she’s rising and descending and groaning with all the requisite energy. Their genitals shunt with a slight sucking sound and, from time to time, air escapes as though from a puncture.

  Dennis has a backache, finds the lighting too bright, and his arms aren’t long enough to reach her breasts and so convince him that he really is with a girl.

  Dennis and Elvire. The ART elevator (for two people, load 180 kilos) is taking Dennis and Elvire up to the seventh floor of their Parisian apartment block (“Go up with our friend,” Elvire’s husband just told her, “Chloe and I’ll take the next one”). On the first floor, Dennis kisses Elvire’s nape and strokes her buttocks through her dress. On the third, his hand slips round her hips, raises the cloth, and his fingers slip between the material to touch her belly. On the fifth, his middle finger is inching its way ever deeper between her moist flesh. On the seventh, his finger recedes (regretfully) after a final caress. The door opens, Dennis delicately removes his hand, and they get out. The elevator goes down again at once.

  Nothing is more reassuring than a woman’s wet, salty desire, Dennis thinks, as he sniffs at his scented hand.

  Elvire and Farid. Elvire is amazed at the power of the jaws of the crocodile of the pit of the aquarium of the Museum of African and of Oceanic Art of the Porte Dorée of Paris, but not of the number of genitives in this sentence. While whispering sweet nothings into Farid’s ear, she rapidly slips her hand between the young man’s belt and belly. His beige parka conceals what she’s doing. Her index finger moves back and forth, stroking the centre of his testicles. His rising erection slowly wrinkles their skin. Her fingers squeeze them gently, before letting go and re-emerging from his trousers. Farid feels petrified.

  Unbeknown to Farid, several years later, he will masturbate while thinking back over the scene of the crocodile of the pit of the aquarium, etc.

  Farid and Galata. The orange tent has been pitched on the edge of the Aiguille du Midi. Galata and Farid are pretending to sleep so as not to wake up their two companions. Farid, staring into the darkness, has managed to open Galata’s duvet and slip his right arm through the gap. Galata is trembling as much from excitement as from the cold, because an icy blast of air is giving her gooseflesh. Farid’s hand reaches her tawny fleece and his middle finger tries to enter her twat, her snatch, her pussy, whatever.

  Farid thinks: there are fifty words in French for a woman’s sex, and even more for a man’s, but how few that it is given that there are 366 for curdled milk.

  Galata and Harry. The old Audi 80 turns off the A46 for the La Voulte rest area. Harry pulls up beneath a tree, then turns off the headlights and engine. The yellow streetlight makes Galata’s naked legs look even slenderer. She’s sobbing, in staccato bursts. Harry leans over to kiss her mascara-stained cheek. She kisses him back, opening his mouth with her tongue, almost by force, while stroking the grey hairs of his chest. She straddles Harry, as best she can, still sobbing, undoes his belt, unzips him, and squeezes his rapidly hardening penis between her fingers. Swiftly, she lowers her panties and slips his already hard member inside her: she has never been so wet, he has never seemed so big.

  I love you, you bastard, I love you, you bastard, I love you. . are the words that Galata’s lips keep just unspoken each time Harry shoves deeply inside her.

  Harry and Irma. Harry, on his knees, is holding Irma by her hips and penetrating her from behind (though not via the vas illegitimum). This position is bending his penis downward, giving him a feeling of exceptional stiffness. From time to time, he leans on his hand and Irma nibbles his thumb and groans. Her lovely face is being crushed against the sheet, where she leaves several blonde strands of hair with brown roots. As for the slats of the bed, each of Harry’s thrusts is making one fall, then two, leading to the risk of total collapse.

  Harry admires Irma’s delighted behind, then his stare wanders through the dormer window, over Paris’s zinc roofs, where a grey pigeon with tiny round eyes is cooing indifferently.

  Irma and Johann. In the kitchenette of a show condominium (with two bedrooms on the outskirts of Lyon), Johann is negotiating — blueprints spread out on the Brazilwood bar — with the real estate agent, who has stayed on the “living-room” side. Irma studies the blueprints then slips behind Johann and runs her hand through her fiancé’s brown hair, while discreetly placing an index finger on his fly. She smiles at the young salesman, and as her caresses grow increasingly precise, listens with delight while her future husband stammers on about mortgages and interest rates.

  I’m crazy, extremely well-behaved Irma says to herself, quite thrilled at the idea that, yes, she might just be slightly nuts.

  Johann and Katia. The steam train bursts out of the chimney, in a frame of (fake) elm burr. This Magritte poster is partly hidden from Johann’s eyes by the muscular roundness of Katia’s buttocks. Just like every Thursday, from three to five p.m., in this one-bedroom Belleville flat, his nose is hidden in her dark rigid pussy, while he licks the crimson petals of her vulva, at the same time as she is sitting on his solid hairy body and greedily gobbling his thick penis. They alternate speed and slowness, gentleness and vigor, without really knowing who is dictating the tempo to whom.

  Why, Katia wonders in amazement, do I so enjoy sucking off this charmless guy whom I do not love and who loves me even less?

  Katia and Laurent. Night has fallen on the “Fresh Fruit” parking lot at the Rungis market, where a Volvo pick-up truck, 349,548 kilometers on its counter, is parked. Behind the velvet curtain in the driver’s cabin, Laurent makes no effort to calculate how many trips around the world that makes. Kneeling on the worn and dirty mattress, he is struggling to penetrate Katia, who is grimacing in pain. He then spits a l
arge drop of saliva on his penis (“yuck,” Katia thinks), even though a little patience would have done far better.

  In one of those coincidences that sometimes go unnoticed, on the radio Mick Jagger is wailing: I can’t get no satisfaction.

  Laurent and Mina. “Sure, no problem, by the end of the afternoon,” Laurent calls down from the window of his two-bedroom apartment in a leafy Paris suburb to Widow Chabert, who is speaking to him from two floors below on the sidewalk. The noon sun, as much as the pleasure, is making him blink, while mischievous Mina, crouched and invisible, has slipped down his trousers and boxer shorts, then runs her incisors over his penis before taking him in more fully. So it is that, a few minutes later and without interrupting garrulous Widow Chabert, who is now talking weather forecasts, Laurent ejaculates inside Mina’s welcoming mouth.

  While tasting his admittedly bitter, but protein-rich sperm, Mina doesn’t really give a damn about being at one extreme of the food chain.

  Mina and Niels. As soon as Mina, a temp secretary in the Paris office of Searson & Wilman & Partners, answers the telephone (with her left hand), she recognizes the vice-chairman’s voice. But she still does not release (from her right hand) the testicles of young Niels, who has recently been promoted to senior associate and whom she is gratifying through his flannel trousers. Quite naturally, she changes hands to note down an important telephone number with her blue ballpoint. She is neither gauche nor left-handed.

  In a few hours’ time, Niels will learn that “the Lotus” is not just a sports car and that his marriage plans with Gertrud Wilman have fallen through for good.

  Niels and Oriane. Because “Junkie” was too nervy this morning, Niels has mounted “Jade,” a three-year-old bay mare. At the end of his ride, Oriane is awaiting him, leaning against a tree. Her hand has slipped down across her belly, pushing into her mane and stroking the silvery pearl concealed within. As her blood pounds in her diaphanous temples, she emits a raucous gasp, and a spasm of pleasure quivers through her. Then, she throws herself onto Niels, unexpectedly grabs his index finger, and closes her crimson lips upon it, sucking avidly, while panting with desire.

  Stunned by this festival of literary clichés, Niels thinks that Oriane is a dead-ringer for an oil painting by some artist or other whose name currently escapes him.

  Oriane and Philippe. The Limoges-Paris midnight express is rattling through the night. In carriage 12 (first class), which is almost empty, the charming Philippe — with a golf handicap of five — is intrusively kissing his neighbor Oriane, after making her laugh with a dumb joke: “I’ve just won the Condom Open. . it’s a golf tournament, of course.” He starts stroking her naked thigh, before working up little by little toward her panties.

  Philippe thinks how much kisses are like pickles in a jar. Once you manage to extract the first one, the others come out of their own accord.

  Philippe and Qiu. The din of Shanghai fails to reach the twenty-third floor of the Hilton where Philippe, in room 2412, is kneeling on the thick carpet while licking with skill the delighted vulvae of Qiu, her legs spread across the bed. He then reaches out to stroke her breasts, in no way regretful about having provided them with a few extra centimeters. This position is also quite good for soothing tennis elbow.

  Given that you need at least seven different clubs and nine holes to play golf, Philippe wonders: does this prove the superiority of golf over sex, or vice versa?

  Qiu and Rémy. The bedroom window of Villa Luciana looks out over the blue sky, wheat fields, and cypresses of a Tuscan landscape. Wearing just shirts, Qiu and Rémy are lying on a white cotton sheet. On her Finnish-brand cell phone, Qiu composes a haiku text message for her husband, who has been away on a business trip to Dublin for the past two weeks. She punctuates each word, abbreviations included, with a kiss on Rémy’s still-damp penis. He’s humming a Haydn air and fingering the delicate hairs of her jade-colored, oriental pubis.

  If, at that moment, Rémy could see inside Qiu’s belly, the first thing he’d say would be: “It’s a boy!”

  Rémy and Sofia. The metro leaves the “Plaisance” station in Paris (line 13) with a roar, but without blonde Sofia managing to convince Rémy about the enormous absurdity of the Freudian notion of “penis envy” in little girls. Given such obvious lack of good faith, she drops the subject, sticks out her sharp pink tongue and abruptly slips her little finger into Rémy’s mouth. He instinctively parts his lips.

  Sofia decides not to tell Rémy that women may not have penises, but this means that they do not — unlike you — spend their lives wondering if they’re well-endowed enough.

  Sofia and Terence. The rumbling of the New York City — Philadelphia Greyhound is deafening at the back of the bus, which is almost empty. The diesel engine covers Terence’s groans of pleasure: he’s sitting, with his jeans round his knees, a Columbia University T-shirt hiked up over his chest, while penetrating Sofia, who’s in his lecture course and wriggling crazily as she straddles him. Any desire to urinate has utterly disappeared.

  “Oh yeah, oh yeah!” he groans. If people have two ears and just one mouth, it’s because the latter tends to spout twice too much.

  Terence and Ursula. On the patio of a penthouse apartment overlooking the Hudson, dessert is being served. Terence is going on about how awful it is that young psychiatrists have stopped using hypnosis. Opposite him, Ursula, a slender and beautiful black woman, with cropped and dyed-blonde hair, stretches out her leg and wriggles her naked foot up between his thighs. Slowly, her deft toes open his fly buttons one by one, before rummaging inside in search of his suddenly swelling penis. Terence had no idea that such virtuosity was possible.

  Losing his concentration, he tells the dinner guests that “the penis is an island” while “sexuality is a continent.” In other words, garbage.

  Ursula and Vincent. In the bedroom of a two-star hotel in the tenth arrondissement of Paris, Vincent and Ursula are lying naked on their sides, head to toe. The bedspread is decorated with red fleurs-de-lis, and the window looks out over the tracks of the Gare du Nord, where the 1:29 train (it’s late) to Compiègne is passing alongside the Thalys from Brussels. Vincent slips his head between the young marketing director’s ebony thighs and starts to separate her pink labia gently. As for her mouth, it is just beside his erect penis. Though Ursula knows what is expected from her, she is still dithering about what to do next.

  Ursula does not realize that, confronted by his swollen member, she now has the reptilian gaze of a crocodile in a tanner’s workshop.

  Vincent and Wendy. Unafraid of the prowling, man-eating sharks (if the warning signs along the beach of Acapulco are to be believed) Wendy and Vincent have strayed far out into the Pacific, while still remaining in their depth. Vincent is kissing her young, hardening nipples; she is squeezing her charming “Frenchie” against her, while kneading his muscular buttocks and sticking her left index finger into his anus almost brutally. His eyes light up at once in astonishment.

  This astonishment is followed by delight and then a certain regret, because he guesses that he’ll never dare demand such a thing from his future partners.

  Wendy and Xavier. The brass bed stands majestically in the middle of the bedroom, on the second floor of a town house in Saint-Cloud, where Wendy, a young “au pair,” still tanned from the tropical sun, is surrendering herself to Xavier, the household’s eldest son. As naked as her, on the flowery sheet, he is stroking her breasts, then her belly, before gliding across her clitoris and introducing the full length of his middle finger into her moist sex. Wendy arches her back, cries out with pleasure, while Xavier feels her ischiocavernosus and bulbospongiosus muscles contract, thus imprisoning his finger.

  Unless, the young medical student suddenly wonders, the correct terms are ischiospongiosus and bulbocavernosus?

  Xavier and Yolande. Trapped for the past twenty minutes in the bleakly motionless cargo elevator between the second and first floors of the teaching hospital in Tours, Xavier and Yolande a
re keeping themselves busy. Clumsily, the houseman is kneading the nurse’s generous breasts while she (with a more expert touch) is removing his penis from his fly, which rapidly loses the consistency of a sausage in her fingers. Meanwhile she continues to hold a lively and cogent conversation with the outside world, here represented by the repairman.

  As for me, Yolande thinks rather proudly, I can talk the hind leg back onto a donkey.

  Yolande and Zach. It little matters how Zach, Professor of Latin at the University of Aix-Marseille, ended up at the wheel of this damned Massey Ferguson tractor in the middle of the fields of Beauce. What does matter is that he is licking the erect left nipple of Yolande, who is sitting beside him. It is sometimes said that the moment when the nipple appears is the moment sexual relations have begun, and so it is, because Yolande straddles him, in the so-called Andromache position.

  Zach is about to penetrate Yolande when she cries out: “Oh, look! The spires of Chartres Cathedral!” and its competing erections immediately make his go limp.

  Zach and Anna. Under a porch in rue des Francs-Bourgeois in Paris, Zach leans against the wall and draws Anna toward him. He slips the coolness of his old professorial palms through a gap in her dress and onto the warmth of her young student buttocks. Then he murmurs a Georges Bataille quotation into her ear: “The sexual act is to time what the tiger is to space,” though its meaning has always rather eluded him. “See you tomorrow,” Anna replies, before disappearing up the staircase.

  How exasperating: in Zach’s pants, Sildenafil, an active ingredient discreetly swallowed in the form of a blue pill, is slowly and pointlessly coming into effect.