I turn the pages of the magazine.
On the left page, she appears sitting awkwardly askew on a cloth backdrop holding a riding crop. She is nude, her heavy breasts leaning towards me, the reader, the voyeur, around her neck a collar to which a thin metal chain is attached. The make-up on her face is too harsh (as it is in all the photos to follow),giving her features a hardness which is alien to her nature. She no longer smiles. Her stockings climb up to midway up her thighs.Around both her wrists are thick leather straps connected by a metal chain. For a brunette, her nipples, her areola are surprisingly pale.
The right-hand page is all photograph. A defiant look in her eyes, Vanessa sits legs wide open on a low black table. A dog collar around her neck, her breasts encircled by a complicated leather harness connected in a subtle arrangement of straps to the lower part of her body where her sex is open to our gaze. Her clitoris is clearly visible, jutting out under the conjugated pressure of the leather bands that surround her slit, inner lips swollen but held together by a metal ring attached to the lower point of entry of her outer cunt lips. She is wearing stockings, a different pair from previously, high heels, still the same straps around her wrists and, in her left hand, holds another whip, seemingly the same as on the opening spread shot. Her pubes are shaven clean, so that the delightful obscenity of her open sex is inescapable, enhanced by the shining ring dangling there. She has thin arms, the veins of her left arm visible as she leans back, thrusting her shoulders forward. Around her waist there is a heavy leather band, adorned with a myriad baroque metal studs.
The waistband is the only adornment left on the next photograph which shows us Vanessa lying downwards on the cloth, her left hand holding her breast, her legs upwards, a knee bent, feet cropped out of the shot. Still she doesn’t smile. Her shaven sex unbearably bare, with a hint of darkness surrounding it, closed. I perversely approach my myopic eyes closer to the photograph and notice a few blemishes, pimples maybe, irritations of the skin from the passage of the razor blade over her shorn pubic area. On the next page, a right hand side one, another full-page photograph, the most indecent of all, Vanessa on a high-back chair in all her pornographic splendor. Stockings, high heels, and her thighs crucified apart. Another leather harness surrounds her open sex. She holds her arms upwards and pulls a metal chain through her open mouth, between her teeth, the hint of provocation in her eyes. Her full breasts, nipples paler than ever, adorned by a curtain of six metal chains connected to a leather collar that circles her neck and extends into three branches, two on each side of her breasts, holding their weight up by the sides, biting no doubt into her skin, the final branch separating the round globes of her femininity and anchoring the metal chains draped across her offered chest.
She wears the same outfit in the last photograph, double-page spread which ends the feature, with the final text of the interview that accompanies the photos superimposed in the top right-hand corner. She is leaning on one arm. Her legs are partly open, her sex lips slightly creased by the position, her nipples visibly erect. There is a slight stain on the underside of her left breast; I am unsure whether it is an actual birthmark or a fault in the printing of the photograph. Her full lips are closed, the colors of the dark lipstick surrounding the shape of a perfect kiss. The make-up circling her eyes is too dark, ages her beyond her twenty-one years. There will be no photographs of Vanessa at twenty-two. This immodest pose, as they all were, this brazen exhibition of her body is the last picture we have of Vanessa Duriès, author of The Ties that Bind.
Seven months later, on the 13th of December 1993, returning from a festival in Montpellier, in the south of France, which she was covering for a magazine, she died in a car crash, traveling towards Paris, together with three other passengers in the car, two other writers and their child.
She was bringing her French publisher the first thirty pages or so of what she hoped would be her second book, The Rival, about the rivalry between two submissive women. Another erotic work which, I am confident, would have assured her of a place in the modern pantheon of erotica. Sadly, we will not read that book.
The Ties that Bind is more than a novel, it is a true story. Vanessa’s story is touching. It might shock or disgust some; the truth about human nature is never palatable when you have the courage to explore the dark side. Vanessa Duriès had the guts and returned to tell us the story.
Goodbye Vanessa. The images of your sex, your pale nipples and quiet smile, the story of your experiences, will always remain within me, and I will miss you badly.
Translator’s Note
This is an unauthorized translation of the surviving manuscript of L’etudiante by Vanessa Duriès, published by Èditions Blanche in 2007. As far as I know, this is the first time the book has been translated. The translation is produced for no commercial gain.
The Maxim Jakubowski article comes from the afterword to the American edition of The Ties that Bind.
The photographs are scans from a copy of the Èditions Blanche edition.
The French edition contains a letter from Vanessa Duriès to Franck Spengler. This has not been translated. Similarly, Florence Dugas appended a proposed ending to the fifth chapter. This has not been translated either.
More information about Vanessa Duriès can be found on Wikipedia. Clues to the identity of the Parisian “famous dominatrix” mentioned by Vanessa in Chapter 4 may be found in a profile of Catherine Robbe-Grillet by Toni Bentley (author of The Surrender) published in Vanity Fair on February 1, 2014.
The Ties that Bind remains in print in both the original French and English almost twenty years after Vanessa’s death.
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