Monsieur

by Emma Becker

  Explain yourself, Ellie. Try to explain to the man who changed your nappies and gave your first boyfriends dirty looks the subtle difference between discussing Story of O and shameless flirting. Philippe would see beyond the words. In the dry tone that always gave me the willies he would say, ‘Do you think I’m a complete fool? Do you think a guy knows the difference between talking about erotic literature and the chance to have it off?’

  Maybe the subtle difference is that there is no difference: I was never stupid enough to believe that an appreciation for writing alone would provoke Monsieur into a response. I just wanted to see how he’d react. Compare my scruples with his. Assess the power of my youth, determine how much weight it held against a marriage and children. Already, in my absence of principles, I was toying with a seductive postscript, providing him with the assurance of my total discretion as long as he would show me what a man was like, a real man, a man who could fill my body and my mind.

  MONSIEUR

  Ellie,

  I am moved to discover that a twenty-year-old is interested in such writers. Actually, I don’t remember mentioning this particular cultural interest to Philippe. I have an enormous interest in erotic literature, and own a significant collection centred around Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues. Apart from my work, it’s the true passion in my life.

  We can meet up and chat whenever you wish.

  What magazine have you written in?

  (And, by the way, there is no need to be formal with me.)

  See you soon.

  At first I didn’t mention my secret to anyone. It was like keeping a surprise in my pocket, or stifling a scream. On the evening that Monsieur answered me, Babette came to mine for a sleepover. She knitted her eyebrows, concentrating, as she read the first two messages, carefully weighing up every word, while I stood behind her and spilled out my fears.

  ‘No, really, Babette. Really. Do you think that’s what he has in mind?’

  ‘I do.’

  I was far from reassured by that. ‘I just suggested we chat by Internet. He’s the one suggesting we meet.’

  ‘He’s “moved”,’ Babette added, like an amateur detective.

  ‘It’s not uncommon to be moved. If all he wanted to do was talk, he could have written, “I’m surprised” or “It’s unusual to come across people who read Mandiargues.”’

  ‘I reckon he’s thinking about it.’

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘I don’t know. What do you want to do?’

  We were in my room in Nogent. I lit a fag. ‘Generally speaking? I’d like to meet him, talk to him.’

  Babette stood up and raised her eyebrows. She was dubious. ‘Even though I know how you feel about erotic literature, it’ll be difficult to have some sort of innocuous relationship with him, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘You asked me what I wanted to do, generally speaking.’

  ‘Basically, you want to find out what he’s all about.’

  ‘He’s married, he has five kids, he’s forty-six and used to work with my uncle. Should the situation ever become ambiguous, it would only mean the guy has balls.’

  ‘Or that he’s a pervert.’ She had picked up one of my old copies of Bataille and was leafing through it.

  I sat down at my desk and stared at my computer keyboard. ‘So what is perversion at the end of the day? For me, it’s just the opportunity to track pleasure down wherever it’s hiding out. I don’t know of any men who search for it in books. Especially this kind of book. Maybe it’s worth taking a few risks. Well, I think so at least.’

  ELLIE

  Good evening,

  I recently wrote for a literary erotic magazine called Stupre that a friend of mine had set up and which has so far published three issues. Its distribution is fairly limited so it’s unlikely you’ve come across it.

  I would be delighted to meet up with you this week, if your work schedule allows; as far as I’m concerned, I have all the time in the world, as my university faculty has been on strike for an eternity and is likely to remain so for some time to come.

  I assume you’re not on Facebook that often so let me give you my phone number. It’ll be easier to communicate that way: 06 68 . . .

  I hope we’ll see each other very soon,

  Ellie

  (I will try not to be too formal in our dialogue)

  (but then again . . .)

  MONSIEUR

  There is nothing wrong with being formal, although it makes some forms of dialogue somewhat awkward, which, however, I appreciate. Informality is a reflex, while formality is a choice.

  I shall attempt to get hold of Stupre and read you before we meet so I’ll have some idea of the way you . . . think.

  My own number is 06 34 . . . and my email address is ******

  I’ll call you soon.

  Until then.

  ‘Surely, you’re not going to fall into bed with this guy!’

  Having read the mails, Alice was rolling her eyes. I hadn’t expected that. Or maybe I had, just a little. Once upon a time I might have reacted similarly, although I haven’t a clue when.

  ‘Come on!’ I said, looking her straight in the eye, with an assurance I knew I couldn’t sustain.

  ‘Well, that’s the way it looks.’

  ‘But he’s thinking about it, no?’

  Maybe Alice could see hope in my evasive gaze. She let out a deep sigh. ‘It’s you who’s thinking about it.’

  ‘But he is too! And I’m not going to sleep with him just because he feels like it.’

  ‘So if you have no intention of doing so, why are you furnishing him with such heavy hints?’

  ‘I’m not providing him with any hints whatsoever. All I’m doing is talking about erotic literature, which I agree is a bit much, but this guy reads the same books as I do. To discuss our taste in reading is not an invitation to fuck.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you have simpler tastes, like sport or animals?’

  For a moment, sitting cross-legged on my bed, we fell silent. That’s how our conversations go when I shock my sister. We were watching our feet, fags in hand, music in the background connecting us. I’m never worried about losing Alice: she’s as corruptible as I am and has the same sense of humour, and I knew that if I could find something funny in this story about the surgeon, she’d soon jump aboard. The only problem was that I couldn’t see any humour in the situation, not yet at any rate. That it would be easy to corrupt the man amused me, but perhaps I would be the only one to laugh.

  ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘I can feel it in my bones you’re going to do it. No point in trying to deny it.’

  ‘So don’t ask the question.’

  New awkward silence. Alice probably hated me then, and was clinging to every scrap of sisterly love to defend my course of action. As for me, a perfect egotist, all I needed to find was the perfect lie, or the perfect excuse. I could have sworn to her that I wouldn’t touch the man, but the story was already taking shape, whether I wanted it to or not, and I knew I could never keep from her a single detail. My next words rushed out of me: ‘He interests me. OK? It’s bad, it’s immoral, nobody must know, but he interests me. I don’t know if I’ll sleep with him, but I probably will if I get the opportunity. So, come on, have a go at me.’

  Alice, wearing her I’m-beginning-to-give-in-but-that-doesn’t-mean-I-like-it face, mumbled: ‘If Philippe knew . . .’

  ‘I don’t see why he should. And at this stage the guy’s suggesting we meet, not me. He’s taken the first step.’

  ELLIE

  Good evening,

  Herewith my masterpiece. You won’t have to search for a copy of Stupre. My story’s in the first issue, which has possibly now become a collector’s item, although I will bring it along if you wish. It’s my first time in print so you might find it a bit ingenuous, but I’ll say no more, except that I won’t forget how I felt when I first held the magazine in my hand. Bloody proud. My family pretended they’d never heard of Stupre, althoug
h I noticed that the magazine moved from room to room, almost as if by magic. My uncle didn’t realize the narrator was a man, and I had a hard job convincing him I wasn’t a lesbian . . .

  As far as formality in our dialogue is concerned, I had no intention of making you feel awkward. Do as you wish. Feel free to switch to informality along the way. I’ve actually devised a theory about the erotic nature of speech, which, no doubt, only makes sense to me, and I’d love to explain it to you whenever you’re willing to listen.

  I remain at your total disposal . . .

  MONSIEUR

  Thank you for letting me see the story – although I will still want to acquire a copy . . . and get it signed . . .

  You’re only twenty? What have you read? How have you lived? I’d love to know how all this made its way into your mind. It’s not that ingenuous – not always at any rate, with the way you move so effortlessly from ‘pussy’ to ‘cunt’ . . .

  You intrigue me. And your uncle failed to understand you were Lucie? . . . Maybe that’s a good thing . . .

  Do tell me your theories on the erotic nature of speech. George Steiner, in a recent piece of writing titled, I think, My Unwritten Books, devotes a whole chapter to the subject, although it’s more about the way the colour of eroticism varies according to the language it’s written in.

  ‘Total disposal’ covers a lot of ground, but I like it. And ‘along the way’.

  See you soon.

  PS I can’t resist sending you this poem by Baudelaire, ‘The Jewels’.

  The lovely one was naked and, knowing well my prayer,

  She wore her loud bright armoury of jewels.

  They evoked in her the savage and victorious air

  Of Moorish concubines upon a holiday.

  When it gives forth, being shaken, its gay mocking noise,

  This world of metal and of stone, aflare in the night,

  Excites me monstrously, for chiefest of my joys

  Is the luxurious commingling of sound and light.

  Relaxed among the pillows, she looked down at me

  And let herself be gazed upon at leisure – as if

  Lulled by my wordless adoration, like the sea

  Washing perpetually about the foot of a cliff.

  Slowly, regarding me like a trained leopardess,

  She slouched into successive poses. A certain ease,

  A certain candour coupled with lasciviousness,

  Lent a new charm to the old metamorphoses.

  The whole lithe harmony of loins, hips, buttocks, thighs,

  Tawny and sleek, and undulant as the neck of a swan,

  Began to move hypnotically before my eyes:

  And her large breasts, those fruits I have grown lean upon,

  I saw float towards me, tempting as the angels of hell,

  To win my soul in thraldom to their dark caprice

  Once more, and lure it down from the high citadel

  Where, calm and solitary, it thought to have found peace.

  She stretched and reared, and made herself all belly. In truth,

  It was as if some playful artist had joined the stout

  Hips of Antiope to the torso of a youth! . . .

  The room grew dark, the lamp having flickered and gone out,

  And now the whispering fire that had begun to die,

  Falling in lucent embers, was all the light therein –

  And when it heaved at moments a flamboyant sigh

  It inundated as with blood her amber skin.

  ELLIE

  Les Fleurs du mal, Monsieur! Your aim is true! This is why I read: for such epiphanies.

  My theory of formality: well, the word ‘theory’ is possibly a bit far-fetched. Rather some sort of aesthetic of formality that I’ve fine-tuned as I’ve grown up. At the age when I began to take an interest in men I noted there was a somewhat heady charm in formal speech, a tension that had, as you pointed out, an ambiguous effect on the relationships. If you stick for some time to that unnecessary formality there’s a remarkable change in the atmosphere when you switch to informality. And doesn’t it make for an ironic paradox? To be formal in a certain context can almost become a form of indecency. I hope I’m making myself clear, I’m quite tired this evening . . .

  The questions you raise are thorny. What I have seen, what I have known . . . both a lot and not much. Enough, I believe, to have written what you have read, not enough to be willing to use ‘cunt’ from the very beginning of the story. I am now twenty, not eighteen, as I was when that story was published, and I think I’m more articulate now. I hope so. It would be a pain to harbour such love for words and not be able to use them properly . . .

  What I have known: I don’t believe it’s necessary to have known many men to be able to write about them. Calaferte was almost sixty when he wrote La Mécanique des femmes, and even though I guess he must have spent many hours in his own bed, I detected several awkward mistakes in his descriptions, which betrayed a still imperfect knowledge of women. For instance, there is a line where he has a woman saying something like ‘Anyway, if you hadn’t come round, I would have grabbed the first man I saw. Just a cock.’ At my age, and with the experience I have (for what it’s worth), I am sure that a woman cannot crave only a cock and nothing else. I believe that female desire, however complex and fleeting it might be, has some sort of life instinct that draws us towards tenderness with men, even though at the same time we are motivated by an animal need to be filled. I’m trying to say that I’ve never desired just a piece of a man’s body. And many women I know cannot conceive of a cock with no torso, back, hands, smell and breath, and the words of the man that go with them.

  So, writing about men when I’m only twenty . . . There are likely to be mistakes in what I write, but I don’t believe that knowledge is the foundation stone of the whole malarkey. It’s not only about the desire to know men – a task that will never be completed anyway – it’s the intention that counts: the willingness to dive head first into their world of large hands and dark voices in an attempt to understand them. For now, it seems to me to be a beautiful vocation.

  What have I read? A lot. The story you’ve seen was, I think, fairly influenced by Calaferte, who was something of a revelation to me. I’d found his book a few months earlier in our cellar, and liked the way he described male flesh. At the time, you see, I was with a boy, had been for a year, and wanted to write all sorts of things for him, but he was incapable of writing a single line in response. So when Stupre suggested publishing me, I took great pleasure in reversing the roles . . . As you correctly guessed, there is something of Lucie in me, and that scene actually took place. I must say I’m curious to learn how you came to that conclusion.

  I’ve also read two or three titles by de Sade, but I’m no great fan, and I feel I know all there is to know about him having just read Philosophy In the Bedroom and 120 Days. Which a friend of mine, who is heavily into de Sade, finds particularly annoying . . . But, then, this is a guy who hates Queen and the Beatles.

  Bataille, of course. I loved The Dead Man, although the Régine Deforges adaptation was stupendously poor. My Mother affected me a lot, but I’m still not totally into it: Bataille’s literary style is awkward.

  On the other hand, it bugs me that I’m telling you a lot and still feel I have so much more to say. But I know so little about you. What a pity. Worth a coffee? Or a glass of wine? I have so many questions for you. I have an indecent fascination with men who read. Particularly these books. An interest in erotica is very telling. But let’s have this conversation another time – what if you had nothing to say? Am I boring you?

  As I mentioned, I remain at your disposal whenever you’d like.

  You have my number.

  Ellie

  (I don’t think I’m boring. I can even be very funny, given the chance. I hope.)

  MONSIEUR

  I have to admit I was waiting for your mail with a guilty sort of impatience.

  I firmly believe
that, in spite of your delicious, impressive and precocious sensibility, time and experience do allow us to expand our erotic universe. I discovered the erotic in literature when I was ten and came across Pierre Louys. At the time, he seemed to me to be the nec plus ultra of subversion. I then began reading a lot and some of my reading revealed sensations, excitement, emotions I couldn’t understand and would only come to understand much later. I do believe, in fact I know, that a woman under the right circumstances, when things are intense enough, can desire any old cock . . . I’ve witnessed it, lived through it, have been told so, even if, as you correctly point out, she is also thinking of a back, a smell and all those things you write so well about. But there is a moment when everything teeters, and in a flash the object of desire can, in a marvellous way, swing in another direction, change: anyone, any cock, and that’s what Calaferte is writing about.

  De Sade established the early principles others built upon and his writing is not very sensual, which is a bit shocking for us today. But what he writes about is fundamental. It’s about the disconnect that eroticism generates, the proximity of violence.

  And then there is Bataille, whom you are aware of. To understand the theory better you must read Eroticism. And Story of the Eye is sublime, Madame Edwarda too . . .

  I knew you were Lucie after I spent time looking at your photos on Facebook with awe – your smile, your eyes, your skin.

  Write to me soon.

  PS Don’t show my mails to your uncle . . .

  My shaft against your cheek

  Helmet grazing your ear

  Slowly lick my scrotum

  Your tongue soft as water

  Your tongue raw like a butcher-woman

  Red like meat

  Tip like a smiling bird,

  My shaft leaking spittle

  Your rear is my goddess

  Opening like your mouth

  I adore it like the sky

  I worship it like fire