Dolorosa Soror

Hhh

Dolorosa Soror By

Florence Dugas translated byMarti Hohmann

“…I will make you cry; there is too much grace between us.” Saint-John Perse, Amers

Prologue

And if I loved her? No act of mourning, not even these pages where I bring her back to life, would make me forget her hands or mouth, would make me admit she is gone. Did she love me? Do you love those who love you? Where did she come from? J. P. brought her over one night, at my request, to photograph her. Where is she? Her death separated us; my death will not reunite us. And where am I? In hell, they say... Damned women—very damned.

All too often, when I am out walking, I think I see her slender silhouette before me, that particular way she had of dancing while walking, with one of her very round shoulders incessantly baring itself, the fabric of her dress sliding over her skin. Patiently, harmoniously, she pushes it back toward her neck; you can see the undulation of her hair on her shoulders. When just about to catch up, I glimpse a nearly white kiss-curl, a touch of blondness trembling against her rounded cheek, the promise of ample buttocks. I speed up and pass, but of course it is not her. Only in books may you journey among the dead. Eurydice, I am thinking of you. This illusion, this deception, is my only way of being with her. My way of being hers, always. Of being her.

Chapter I

September

At first I did my best, for the sake of conformity, to love men as women are supposed to love men. I say "men," but there were only two of them—I don't have a taste for collections. I loved them one right after the other—I don't have a taste for repetition, either. Love, you say? At nineteen years old, what does anyone know about love? Then he came along, but I will talk about that soon enough. I was taking courses at the university, in addition to pursuing my interest in the theater. His voice had passionate and distant intonations. The distance in it particularly pleased me. Did he love me? He played a part with me, he taught me to act—became the director of my real life.1 I was trying until then to take my fleeting loves seriously. A laughable Madame Bovary, for four years I had been holding forth on the merits of romantic love. Apparently, I did not believe my own rhetoric, at least not enough to have orgasms when my mere scraps of men clasped me in their arms. This happens to many women, to too many women: they experience much more pleasure all alone than at the hands of the fumbling men in their lives. Some women even manage to feel

guilty about being so unresponsive to their lovers' clumsiness, so much have they persuaded themselves that a beard is proof of omnipotence.2 They take the problem upon themselves, make it their own. The result is that the men ejaculate even more prematurely—and the women are left in the lurch even more often. I was like the others: I chalked up my frigidity as a reflection of my disgust—or boredom.

From the first with J. P., I was never bored. Deep down, I was already gay with him. Not yet lesbian, but completely a faggot. You always think you have something of the other sex inside of you. There was a bit of that in it. With J. P., I was like a young boy who loves boys—as later with Nathalie I was like a boy who loves girls. Why did my parents make me a woman? A minuscule error of genetic programming, a whole life not to take up and make my own. J. P. had vast resources of femininity—a stone-butch femininity. Nice couple... Nathalie was a girl with girls and with boys. A complete whore with both of them. Submissive to every caprice, with a nearly animal ingenuity in perversion. There was nothing against her nature, or even calculated in her tastes: she was like a tree that supports the caresses and brutalities of the wind with the same nonchalance. At least that is what I thought at first. Later, I understood there was a monstrous despair in her, a startling guilt no excess could absolve or shake free. She became an object only when her very soul was exhausted. ***

As soon as J. P. and I met, in that corridor of the third floor on registration day, we recognized each other. At the time I had a lover presumptive, a boy my age, with whom I had had sex three times: the first to see what it would be like; the second to convince me; the third to get rid of him. He would spend hours caressing me with his fingertips, kissing my neck, telling me he loved me. It was unspeakably boring. I would have liked for him to take me rapidly, brutally, without trying to make me come—the insupportable pretension of the majority of men who think a woman's orgasm will absolve them of their egotism. He would call me often, telling me about his inauthentic feelings, suggesting we go to dubious concerts in out-of-the-way suburbs, and no longer occupying my fantasies.3 , J. P. was very different. He was older—nearly twice my age. By then, he had arrived at a seasoned irony that made his expression both sarcastic and self-deprecating. He reassured and troubled you at the same time. You knew he would know what to do. You feared what he would be capable of doing. In class, we got along well enough for him to approach me. As I was able to discern later, it was the strategy he used most often. I stupidly gave in with good humor. We ran into each other one day at the beginning of the afternoon. He bought me a coffee and asked me to pose for him; three days later we were in bed together. He came to my place at around six o'clock on a pretty day in September, with champagne purchased prechilled and a large collection of photographic supplies and materials he would not use that day, but which he set up carefully between gulps of champagne and left there. I was sitting on the big metal bed that dwarfed the central room of my small studio apartment. We drank a toast. A little later he looked at me as if seeing me for the first time and very politely asked me to get undressed. He himself retained both his jeans and his reserve.

A nearly too-warm late autumn presided over Paris. I stood immobile, nude in the middle of the room, my palms moist, and the soles of my feet, too, not even cooled off by the cold tile. Not knowing what to do with my hands—I who had taught so many others what to do with theirs onstage—I put them on my hips, throwing back my shoulders at the same time. It was grotesque. He got up and closed the window. The noise of the street ceased with one blow, and his voice seemed abnormally loud in the sudden silence. "Lie down on the bed. On your stomach. With your face towards the window." Nearly relieved to be able to bury my face in the pillows... I heard him open his bag, felt him leaning over me. He gently took my hands and bound them, one after the other, to the bars on the headboard with fine leather straps he had brought expressly for that purpose. He tied them very tightly to make me understand it wasn't just a game, and my fingers briefly opened and closed like a chicken's claws. I knew then what I had already sensed: from that moment forward, my life would be different. Not for an instant did I think of protesting. Because I felt astonishingly free to refuse everything, I was thus completely free to accept.

He caresses the nape of my neck and my shoulders, kissing me for a long time/ His hps trace journeys down my back; his tongue makes its way down the long depression of my spine, then flickers between my buttocks. He comes back up to bite my shoulders and the nape of my neck as if I were a litde kitten. Then he goes back down to the small of my back. Using both hands, he spreads my buttocks, and I tense up at first; then the feeling that I am being ridiculous, combined with desire, claws its way through my belly and encourages me to open myself up.

His tongue gently follows the furrow of my buttocks, lingers upon my anus, and explores inside, then comes back and goes lower, between my parted thighs. I am as wet as I have ever been with a man. He investigates my sex, opening my labia, rolling the hps gently between his fingers. His tongue journeys over my clitoris, while much lower his hair sweeps against my thighs. I feel a spasm, then offer myself even more. He licked me until I came. He licked, sucked, bit, scratched, grazed, and manhandled me. He drove his fingers into my sex, getting them very wet; then he caressed my ass again, his fingers soaked, and buried them deeply there: first one finger, then two, three. I would never have believed myself so easily opened. With his right hand he stroked my breasts, crushed against the comforter. I came and he got back up, his thumb still buried in my vagina, his fingers continuing to play with my labia and clitoris. I convulsed against the straps around my wrists like a frog whose head had just been cut off. I begged him to stop. He remained strangely distant, as if his caresses hardly concerned him—as if he were manipulating the buttons of a mechanism whose operation he could figure out without resorting to the instruction booklet. I should have detested him for treating me that way. On the contrary, I was grateful to him for having spared me both the garlands of sentiment and the masculine manifestations of self-satisfaction. I felt myself at once object and enigma—like a text written in a language difficult to decipher. Still dressed, he is seated on the side of the bed; he caresses me still, almost distractedly, touching my back and the nape of my neck. His fingers slide toward my face, buried in the pillows, find my mouth, roll between my lips. So that's what I smell like? I think.

He puts his two hands on my neck and unhooks the long golden chain holding my grandmother's wedding ring—it is all I have left of her. I understand at once what he is going to do, and it upsets me. He redirects one hand towards my sex and plays with me, thrusting in one finger, lightly pinching my labia, tracing circles around my clitoris. He dips his thumb in my vagina and wets it; then he plunges it into my ass. Time stands still just long enough for me to get used to his touch and open up more. Then there is a rapid whistling sound, and I feel the little chain stinging my buttocks. I experience a new, violent pain, something that reminds me of nothing I know, and yet evokes something. A burning more than a foot wide, whose warmth is rapidly diffused from the epicenter. And immediately a second blow. Then a third. I stopped holding my breath and cried out. I did not protest; I simply cried, the cry of mistreated flesh—although I tried to hold it in through pride, tried to count the blows, to detach myself from the scene. Very quickly afterwards, I cried out again, and little, completely parallel lashes followed one after the other, from the small of my back to my thighs. Soon I was no more than the pain, a pain that completely took hold of me. I begged him to stop without being able to think of the word.5 Of course I asked myself why I let him do it, why I twisted my loins towards the oncoming blow, why I felt ridiculously proud of being so ripped apart. I did not know the answer. I cried because I was in pain, but also because beneath the pain I felt arise in me, with each blow, a cesspool of swallowed anguish I knew it would do me well one day or another to explain to myself. I sobbed this first time as if I were a little girl, as if I were no longer able to stop, the tears calling forth tears, calling forth blows. I suddenly realized that he had stopped and that I was no more than a vast burning flooding the middle of my body. The

only isolatable sensation was that of the strips of leather about my wrists. Then there was a great weight on the bed between my spread legs. He leaned over me and, without imposing his weight, spread my buttocks with one hand. He placed the tip of his dick on my anus and forced it open—slowly—so that at each instant I could feel the weight of the gift he was obliging me to accept. I had never been sodomized before. Even his fingers in my anus earlier had horrified me, without my being able to give up my liking for it. There was this terrible moment when the fat part of the glans had to drill itself a passage—then an instant of respite before he weighed heavier upon me and I let myself be conquered, both humiliated and proud of being thus vanquished. Then I felt the iron bar of flesh thrust itself in vertically, ever more deeply. A vagina has a bottom. When a man fucks you, unless he's the size of Tom Thumb, he arrives soon enough at the end. Even the position you choose may speed up events. Your legs around his neck, his cock deep inside you: he cannot get in any farther, even if he may think he is doing so with each ravaging thrust, even if you open up yourself more to him than to any other. A vagina is an impasse. A dead end. An asshole does not have a bottom. No matter how generously endowed is the frisky member moving around in there, free and greedy spaces remain, untold depths, mystery. J. P. was larger than my two previous lovers—and than many other men, too. He thrust himself into me as if he wanted to reach my heart. I arched my back, my loins raised, so he could go deeper.

Impaled. Since then, I have been offered to cocks as vigorous, to anonymous masked males who buried themselves interminably between my buttocks until their pubic hair scratched my skin. I've had dicks planted deep inside my ass, in that space where shameful substances stagnate; they were lost in me as if they would become a part of me. But none of these frenzied

cocks made me feel that first, novel sensation: the exploration of the virgin territory of the map of my body. Buttfucked: what other word is there for it? I had the very clear vision of that apricot of hard flesh lost in the obscurity of my organs; I anticipated the moment when his pleasure, white and creamy and warm, would gush forth in my narrow cavern.6 The sensation of burning against my torn skin fused with the ice in my womb, and I came violently. My anus contracted like a hand around his cock, and I pulled him into the deepest part of me, delighted to suck at his cock with my buttocks, to lose nothing of the stake that stabbed me. Next frame: he was leaning over and untying me. I heard him walk toward the bathroom. The sounds of a shower. I was annihilated. Liquefied. After his departure, I saw I had pissed myself a little when coming; the bed was soaked. He came back, already dressed—had he ever undressed, anyway, except to take his shower? He took my head in his hands and kissed me delicately on the forehead, eyes, and lips. We exchanged several inconsequential, complicitous remarks: He would photograph me another time, he said. He went towards the door; I followed him. I kissed him, my breasts trembling against his cold leather jacket. He slipped his hand between my thighs; I was happy to show him how very wet I was. I knelt, very quickly undid his pants, and took his whole cock, already half-hard, into my mouth. The pleasure of feeling him grow tense. The buckle of his undone belt rubs against my cheek. His hands clench in my hair's short curls. For the first time of my life, I enjoy swallowing sperm. He leaves shortly afterwards.

I went into the bathroom.

Except for my eyes, ravaged with mascara, and my moistened hps, nothing could be read from my face. Could I have been so totally transformed, yet have nothing show? I did have evil-looking red marks around my wrists. I turned around, did my best to arrange the mirrors so I could see myself, the one on the door of the small bureau and the movable round mirror above the sink. From my waist to my knees I was completely striped with purple lines that overlapped, extended over each other, ran together. They were more visible on my buttocks than on my thighs or back because in that month (it was September) I still had traces of tan and bathing-suit lines. I counted forty-something parallel marks. Each one looked like a double impression, a handwritten note in the margin of a book. The skin was slightly raised and swollen, with a more pronounced cleft where the clasp of the little chain had struck. Did I mention that he put the chain back around my neck before leaving? I looked at it again from the front. The wedding ring of antique yellow gold bobbed between my breasts, as usual. At that instant, and for the first time, I felt a strange pride in having been beaten and marked. Since then I have felt this way each time the mirror has thrown back to me the image of my broken flesh. By the next day the pain had passed, leaving only the geometric testimonials on my decorated skin. In the days that followed, I observed with eager curiosity—and also detachment—the lines slowly effacing themselves. Soon only several bluish marks remained; then the skin was again immaculate. This seemed to make it call out for another homage. He phoned me eight days later.

Notes 1. Let's be clear: I do theater as much to find myself as to express myself. As with carnival masks, it's never "just for laughs." J. P. constantly puts himself onstage. In other words, he is always trying to find himself, without any luck, and his

self-assurance (which is limited to detachment, or reserve, as we shall see) is only, when all is said and done, a request. If we still love each other, it's only when one of us looks at the other from the wings. With the exception of these lines, all the notes in the following pages are the work of J. P., whom I asked to respond as if he were hearing this story read aloud. I did not censor anything he wrote. But I still ask myself what prompted him to slip in a note here rather than there... 2.Florence's story is peppered with theatrical citations, a reflection, no doubt, of her training, of roles learned for the stage, that come back in full force in real life. 3.Florence suffers early on from what I call the "quotation effect." Behind each sentence, each pose, she thinks she can discern text, arrogant borrowings from other sources, without quotation marks. Words of love strung end to end. Gestures, like memories of scenes written by others, for others. 4.Florence sometimes still hesitates to speak in the past tense. Writing also helps in this respect, to perpetuate what have proved to be fallible and fleeting moments. 5.When I compare these first days to what I have made her suffer since, or what she herself inflicted on Nathalie, to speak of pain with regard to this first experience seems exaggerated. Florence writes, curiously enough, as if this were the first time, as if she were recopying, without knowing what comes next, a sort of journal kept day by day. As if she were unaware, at the moment of drafting these lines, that she would later be whipped until her blood ran. As if she did not remember that sometimes, although we saw each other only for very reputable reasons—work, for example—as soon as we would begin to grapple with the Sophocles scenario she was supposed to be finishing, she would want to sleep with me. Before leaving, I would ask her to lift her skirt so I could mark her with the crop or flogger; I wanted the marks to keep her company until our next meeting. I wanted her to rediscover, the next day, when she was in an elevator or on a staircase or on the street, the very welts she had the impression everyone could see through the light fabric of her clothes. Wanted her to have those feelings of embarrassment and pride—and let life pass by, indifferent. 6.Internal autopsy, as they used to say. Florence very often visualized the interior of her body, the creamy jets striking the purple membranes, brought to life by the cock laboring against them. One day, when seven or eight men had come in her mouth, one after the other, as she would tell it later on, she had positively seen her digestive system assimilate the new juices, gorging itself on male proteins.

Chapter II

October

“Flo? Are you free tonight?" "I don't like it when people call me Flo" I say. But of course I was free—liberated, even. For a week I had been feeling loosed from my cage; gone was my straitjacket of infancy and anguish, and I was free from the sugar of sentimentality, and ready to love him. Free and yet a slave.1 "So, are you free?" "Yes," I say. "Good. Meet me at ten o'clock tonight in front of the entrance to the Jardin des Plantes, at the traffic circle at the Austerlitz exit—where the bus stop is, you know? Oh! There's one thing: I want you to wear a pair of pants and a sweatshirt. The most boyish possible. Nothing else. No panties, no bra. And slick back your hair with gel." With my hair parted on the side, I could have been mistaken for Julie Andrews's twin brother in Victor, Victoria. (Once in drag, everyone belongs to the same family.) I gazed at myself in the mirror. Should I anticipate his desire, play to what he seemed to want? Among my theater accessories, I found a small, fine mustache I had used before to play Feydeau. Easy to glue on. Glance

in the mirror: I would be by for the prettiest street rogue out that night.

He takes me by the hand, kisses my fingertips tenderly. "You are perfect," he says. "Perfect." He leads me along. We cross the traffic circle diagonally. Cars are rare at that hour. We descend to the banks of the Seine by way of a metal footbridge at the Quai d'Austerlitz. It is gloomy in the semi-subterranean parking lot by the edge of the water, deserted at this hour. The only lights—from the Right Bank and the large office buildings of Bercy—are cut off by the shadows cast by the large concrete pillars. As you progress toward the back, the shadows multiply and grow and darkness triumphs. But you get used to it. Suddenly he seems to know where he is going, though he keeps the slow strolling pace habitual to him. The darkness is peopled with sighs. "There's a lot of action tonight," he says softly. Sometimes the brief, white radiance of a body pressed against a pillar, with a darker shadow gripping the body's back. A brief light, the flame of a cigarette lighter: a guy is smoking, alone, leaning against a wall. J. P. takes my hand and we stop without making a sound. "Look," he murmurs. Useless injunction. I am no more than a gaze. Two young people—they appear to me really very young— pass in front of us, hesitate an instant, then finally head towards the big solitary guy dragging placidly on his cigarette. They approach him, exchange several muffled words. The guy offers them a cigarette; one of them accepts. At the flare of the cigarette lighter, I see my first impression was right: this kid is just barely an adult. His cheeks, more polished than mine, are covered with that slight down which, though not yet a beard,

makes the skin velvety. The guy extinguishes his lighter, leaves his hand suspended in the air for an instant, and then caresses the young man's beardless cheek. We watch them talk without hearing them. Suddenly the man pulls one of the younger guys to him and kisses him, crushing his mouth. At the same time he puts his hand on the guy's’ inner thigh.

The other kid leans over and opens the pants of the guy still glued to the pillar. The two young men slide to their knees and each in his turn begins to peck, lick, nibble, and suck the object of their delights. The guy calmly lights another cigarette. He might be about thirty-five or forty years old. A hardened Mediterranean type. Very short hair. A mustache. In gay terms, a clone. This lasts the time it takes for him to finish his cigarette without hurrying, Then he throws away the butt, which falls in a long parabola in the dark parking garage. He grasps one of the two guys by the neck, raising him up to him. The other takes advantage of this by sucking the whole of the cock abandoned to him. The guy again kisses his prey, sucking hard on his hips, then his cheeks. He starts to undo his tight jeans, pushing them down to midthigh level, then caresses his cock with an authoritative hand. Finally, he unglues himself from the pillar and pins himself against the other guy. The stooge, still on his knees, spreads his friend's buttocks and introduces into his friend's anus the cock he has never let go of, rewetting it with saliva at the last moment. Arching his back to the fullest, the kid against the column breathes an ecstatic sigh. The other guy gets up, undoes his jeans, and plants himself against the pillar next to his friend, his ass offered, tense. He stays like that for a minute or two, masturbating quietly, while his friend groans more loudly under the rutting thrusts.

The big guy foregoes penetrating the little guy, shifts slightly to the right, and pokes his cock into the second ass offered to him. He thrusts twenty times, just enough to dilate the other's ass fully. Then he goes back to the first one.

I am horribly excited by the scene. J.P. passes a hand under my sweatshirt and caresses my breasts, scratches them lightly, twisting the nipples, pulling on them and letting them go, and then making the whole of the breast fill the hollow of his palm, along the length of his luck line, as in the song. "What would that do for you, to feel up a younn hoodlum like that?" I ask. He snorts, laughing. "Take me," I say in one breath. A few feet away, the guy switches from one ass to the other. J. P. unbuttons his pants. His hand plunges down toward my soaking sex. He plays for several instants with the desire running under his fingers; then he wets my ass and spreads my buttocks. It is my turn to be pinned against a urine-drenched cement pillar, my face screwed to the concrete; my turn to be deeply butt-fucked. This time I just shiver when the bulge of the glans crosses the threshold. Does the flesh grow so quickly accustomed? I close my eyes. I need to feel him come right away, hut also need to be fucked for a long time. Suddenly there is a voice, very near: "Hey, man!" Then: "Can we do him together?" And the voice of J. P., who at the same instant pulls out of me: "This little faggot? Why not? Here, the place is still warm!" His hand weighs on the nape of my neck and keeps me pinned to the wall. "Easy, guy, easy! Take your time...and put on a condom." There is a hesitation. Powerful hands grip my hips. Again, this vision of myself from outside of myself. As if from three meters away, I see my very white buttocks, the sole

illumination in the gloomy light of the garage, and the back of a guy I do not know, toward whom I cannot even turn. I feel the little rubbery membrane of the condom's reservoir tip being pushed between my buttocks. And then he plunges in. Good gracious! I feel like a virgin again. Not only apprehension, but also surprise tightens me up: so there are cocks like this in the world? He plunges interminably inside of me. I hug the pillar as if to flee the monstrous object that forces me open and plows me. Derision: where was I thinking of going? The guy punches me hard in the small of the back to make me throw back my shoulders, to give of myself more. The blow makes me shudder, and he plunges all the way in, his pubic hair scratching my skin. I cry out; I even shout. The base of his cock is so fat I think my anus will burst. I cry and sob. He starts to thrust in and out, slowly at first, then faster and harder, pulling my hips towards him each time he plunges in. I cry out each time. And then, whether because the condom is lubricated or not, he slides in and out of me more and more quickly, without difficulty. I feel a strange pleasure, as if I am shitting in the opposite direction. When he is deepest inside me, I arch my back to offer myself even more. I have stopped crying. Is this me, this groaning little faggot? My thoughts run together. I understand why J. P. asked him to put on a condom, but am sorry to know I will not feel his jism burning my entrails. Then a commentary, not addressed to me: "God, he's tight! It's good." Then everything happens very quickly. He passes a hand in front of me, no doubt in order to jerk me off, gropes around in the emptiness... Suddenly he stops his cock in midthrust. He pulls out of my asshole and I cry out again, but this time from pain and despair. "Goddamn! >It's a goddamn girl!" He turns toward J. P. "Take off, then!"J. P. says. I halfturn. The guy is twenty-five

or twenty-six years old, of mixed race. He is fuming with rage. In the shadows, I see him go limp in a glance. Even so his cock reaches to midthigh. J. P. leans toward me and pulls up my jeans. “Come on, let's go." I button myself up. He takes me by the hand. My would-be lover, convulsed with rage, throws his fist. The instant afterwards, he is on the ground, bleeding nastily from the mouth. J. P. leans over him, seizes him by hi hair, and smashes his face three or four limes against the concrete pillar. The sound of bone or teeth shattering. The guy is completely soft now. The odor of blood rises amidst the cement dust and stench of oil and cold piss in the garage.1 "Come on, let's go," J.P. repeats, taking my hand. *** That night he whipped me until I bled with a dog Ieash he held tightly by its loop of braided leather. He worked over my belly and loins for a long time, making me explode with a mixture of pleasure and fear. At my request he came in my mouth, and I suffocated under the torrent of sperm and bits of shit stuck to his cock. Tears gushed from my eyes. I heard him cry out. I swallowed all he gave me, and sucked him again and again, nibbling at his dick, rubbing my lips against his pubic hair, stopping only to lick him again and again, taking him as deeply as possible inside my mouth, molding it around his stiff member. For the first time I deep-throated a man, took his dick beyond the glottis, like a swordswallower, and become as open and available above as I was below. He finally tore himself from my lips and laid down next to me. I rested my heels on his lower back, tilted myself as far back as possible, grubbed his cock, and introduced it myself into my ass. Wllh several movements of my fingers, I made myself come yet again, and much more violently this time.

*** I stayed awake in the dark for a long time afterwards, unable to think of anything but the anonymous dick that had ripped me up so well on the quay. Was I really one of "those" women— those who live only for the sensation of being fucked and give no thought to the guy at the end of the dick? My whole body burned—and not only where the whip had torn into me. Next to me, J. P. slept deeply. His breathing was light, childlike, insouciant. I took his hand in the darkness to reassure myself, prove to myself that there was something between us other than sex and blood—and the fear that put my heart in my throat. Again I heard the lapping of the Seine against the walls of the parking garage, the noise of the river as it was slashed by a barge's prow. Again I saw the dancing lights on the water. Be good, my pain. And in my turn I fell asleep. *** "Do you treat them all like that?" He bites into his croissant, gulps a mouthful of coffee. "Like what?" "Like you did me." Because he has asked me to remain completely nude, and because I am covered with purple marks from the strap, as much in front as in back, he hardly has a problem understanding what I mean. "Oh, like that? No, of course not. Only on demand." "But I didn't ask for anything!" "But yes, Florence, but yes! Everything in you asked for it. It's written on your skin, in your gestures. In your gray eyes, always on the edge of tears. In your kisses. It's the same with the sodomy and all the rest. I knew it the instant I saw you. Afterwards, our first caresses only confirmed my initial impression." "What is written in my eyes?" The other end of the croissant. Another gulp of coffee.

"You know." He stops for an instant, seems to be searching for words—the old trick of those who are searching for nothing at all , but only want to stall long enough to emphasize one word, one sentence. "You remember that old Freudian expression that we have in us a trace of the other sex? It's true, but not in the way people think. You can be completely straight and have in you a good dose of the opposite sex—but that doesn’t mean you’re a latent homosexual. More precisely, you're the homosexual counterpart of the other sex. It's my dyke side that loves your breasts, your sex, and your lips. And it's my guy side that loves your faggot side. Besides—" "That's why you brought mc over there last night?" "Among other reasons. I wanted you to know once and for all that it’s your little faggot ass I'm fucking." "Do you have to be vulgar? You Imagine I had an orgasm in the parking garage?" "Yes, and a pretty good one at that," he says simply, turning back to his decapitated croissant. I blush. "In fact," he continues, "you wanted that cock to be longer, and even thicker, and you arched your back in order not to lose a single inch." "Stop! You're disgusting." "What's disgusting?" A beat. "Does my guy side like guys or girls?" I ask, "Both, my darling!" Then, suddenly serious, he says: "Do you want one?" "One what?" "A girl." I shrug my shoulders but don't say no. Shortly thereafter Nathalie enters into the dance.

Notes 1.I must say I sportingly foresaw that everything she felt for me was only a delusion, a trap set by her own guilty conscience, a way for her to keep from having to love herself. Yet I wanted her a slave, all the while repeating to herself that at any moment she could break such a feudal tie that only, after all, depended upon her. I wanted it to be her will to give herself to me, and not weakness, or what she called "love." 2. Did I really need to be so violent? I don't know exactly what I wanted to punish. My own alter ego, perhaps. Or perhaps I was counteracting my own taste for violence—what I civilize when I am with women, regardless of the treatment I require them to accept.

Chapter III

October, Continuation

How had he met her? At the university, as with everyone. She was taking a course in eighteenth-century libertine literature in which each student had to make an oral presentation related to the topic. She had chosen to talk about homosexuality in the literature of the Enlightenment. " “Good idea, Miss." I can see him from here, trembling. She had been imprudent enough to speak only of men, guys affected with a "little defect." So, there were only male homosexuals in Sodom? She was flunked without compunction and told she had to retake the exam the fall quarter. Apparently she had not wanted to. He had subsequently hired her to pose for him—it was a hobby for which he was not short of talent, not as a photographer (the camera produces ninety percent of the shot, and the rest is the fruit of chance), but as a director. To obtain the pose, the appropriate expressions, he used to tell stories. He would have you participate as if you were making a film, and then he would suddenly freeze a moment of the story. His goal, he had explained to me three times in different ways, was to rediscover the sensations he had felt as a child when he saw the posted photo stills taken from the movies then showing at the neighborhood cinema. He went to the movies very infrequently, but he would

Imagine, after looking at the stills, often taken at random, a , whole frenzied, baroque scenario in which the photos would occur in a precise order, all for the sake of a telling a story, and a very troubling one at that. I say "baroque” and “frenzied” because he made me pose for him, too and later showed me shots he took of Nathalie—apart from those we took together… *** I live in a large studio that probably was once a small two-room apartment. The entrance opens directly onto a miniscule kitchen, as is often seen in Paris. Then you pass a doorless foyer that becomes a big rectangle that a large bay window in the back, on the smallest side, lightens sufficiently. Of the two original rooms there exist only, in the ceiling, a beam covered over with plaster, and the moldings of leaves and fruit typical of 1920's design. In the center of the ceiling of the first half are other moldings of leaves and a metal ring, the last trace of a former light fixture. The room is lit by several floodlights and and halogen lamps. The bed is a 1920's period copy, an example of the modern style at its most geometrical. Its head and foot mo of equal height, and made of brass bars that used to be gold but are weathered (falsely, no doubt) by the years. On the bed is a comforter, black on one side and red on the other. I repainted all the walls white, diluting the color by ten percent with an orange-red tint that lent a vague peach light to the whole. On one side is a vast mirror rising lo the ceiling; near the window, on the other side of the bed, a dresser, and a small bookcase. There isn't much closet space. My single storage piece is a huge, authentic kneading machine, my sole luxury furnishing, transformed into a wardrobe. On the floor, hexagonal tiles, the color of burned bread, which I don't take advantage of as much as I should. i

***

Does he love me? No doubt he does: if not, he would not beat me, would not offer me to others. Something in him takes pleasure in seeing a woman he loves fucked by someone else. On the other hand, he will not stand for her going to bed with someone of her own free will, with a stranger she has chosen. This is how he neither provokes nor dominates anything. Head games: perhaps he does not love me? One day he made a frightful scene because he had not been able to reach me for three days in a row—although he himself had once left me without news for three weeks. In fact, my absence was the result of the unhappy coincidence of a sick grandmother in a faraway suburb and a broken answering machine. Where had I been, and with whom? I was so pleased at feeling myself so loved—even if only through his egotism and jealousy—that instead of mentioning Grandma, I sealed myself in a silence full of insinuations and complicated idiocies. He punished me with the savagery and exactitude he devoted to staging his passions. Together we had bought a dressage whip, a long weapon of finely braided leather. He marked me from calf to shoulder like a zebu. The scars took nearly ten days to fade. Each day during this period, he showed up early in the morning, on a breath of wind, just to come in my mouth—the thing in the world I like the least when it's an end in itself.1 In fact he noticed very quickly that I cherished the idea of punishment. Typically, he got off on it at the same time as he tried to cure me of it.2 "What crime are you guilty of?" The question, posed time and time again, had no answer. At the highest point of the pain, I sometimes had the strange impression of something already seen, already felt, that I could not put my finger on. "Perhaps," he said to me one day when I mentioned this curious sensation, "perhaps I should beat you until it comes back to you. But I think it is up to you to make the effort, and

you are not ready. Pain breaks through certain resistances—as do fatigue, or dreams, or the harassment of a mercenary shrink. But your resistances are still too strong: I would have to beat you for too long, and I want neither to kill nor to mutilate you.” "Thanks, thanks very much!" "Don't mention it. But I know you running after a memory, an extinguished, burned-out memory, Something you feel guilty about—without being so, of course, Real culpability is anchored in innocence."

“It's strange. I beat you, all the while knowing I am helping you to figure out, one day, that you no longer need nor want to be beaten. As for me, then, how will I be able to love you?” *** Pain and humiliation: a strange therapy… He arrives when I am getting out of the shower, jovial and charming. Completely nude, I press myself against him—my skin moist against the drops of rain on his leather jacket, Chills. He tells me not to get dressed. Puts me on all fours, on my elbows, my thighs slightly spread, in the middle of the room. The hardness of the tiles, I glance sideways in order to see myself in the big mirror. Grotesque and pitiful. My hanging breasts make me look like the she-wolf that suckled Rome. With ropes brought expressly for the purpose, he puts me in tight bondage: my arms tied to my knees, ankles tied to a radiator six feet farther off, and my head bound by another rope, which handcuffs my wrists to the foot of the bed and prevents me from standing. A purely decorative rope, pulled very tight, makes a double loop over my chest and back and pushes my breasts forward, making them look like hands extended through hemp bars. He allows me a brief glance in the mirror so I may appreciate myself as a trussed-up offering, the gift I have become. Then he blindfolds me.

He gets behind me and smears my sex and anus with Vaseline, inside and outside. His gestures are medically precise and I feel nothing, no excitation. Nothing but absolute terror. After a series of little metallic clicks, the light of a flash goes off under the blindfold, and I hear the battle sounds of the camera being reloaded. I still have these photos of myself, and today I cannot look without inexpressible emotion at these images of an anonymous girl, a black blindfold over her eyes, her flesh creased with complicated knots, submissive to all expectations, her heart in her throat. The very picture of anguish. There I am, on all fours, my buttocks lifted up by the crouching position he makes me adopt. The ropes saw into my skin. I hear the door close. I call out. No answer. My voice seems strange to me, curiously broken. I wait for quite some time; my knees hurt a lot. The ropes are stretched tight and have no play in them. I can hardly breathe. I try to slide the blindfold from my eyes by rubbing my temple against my shoulder, but without success.

The door again. The sound of a footfall clacking against the tile, but it's not his. The certainty that there are at least two people there. An enormous lump in my belly. Palms moist against the tile. Hands grip my hips; a cock plunges into me, rapid and rectilinear, and bumps roughly against the back wall of my vagina. I cannot help crying out. The light of a flash shding under the blindfold. The man moves about in my cunt. Nearly as quickly, someone raises my head—the rope saws into the nape of my neck—and another cock forces my lips open. Nausea. Photo. I will not go into detail. He left me tied up like that all day. He only freed me once; without taking the blindfold from my eyes, he took me to pee, and tied me up just as tightly afterwards.

He never stopped taking photographs, shooting in frames so tight I could not identify anybody later: could see just my buttocks, mouth, cunt, and hips, and the cocks of the guys who fucked me. He must have established a certain protocol for them: once installed, they were to ejaculate where they had first thrust. That day I drank more sperm than I have ever swallowed, I was sodomized often, too. Perhaps that was part of the rite. Some, more rarely, preferred my cunt—they were numerous enough, however, that I very quickly felt streams of jism running down my thighs, Who were they? J. P. showed me the photos two days later: beautiful, brilliant 5" x 7" prints, with the clear, frank colors of finely grained film. In all, twenty-three guys had fucked me that day. Some of them had big stomachs, with curly hair' on comfortable pot bellies, or bulging muscles, There were few blonds. One of them had gray hair all over. Their cocks were of every shape and size. Four were attached to very flat, hairless stomachs, adolescents no doubt, all of whom had chosen my mouth. Others were curved like bananas or twisted like the stems of stock. Thin and grainy like sausage from Auvorgne, Short and thick—fat crimson fruit with bursting shafts. In porno videos or magazines, you never see more than one model of dick, its size and thickness nearly unchanging, as if a standard were imposed upon scriptwriters and casting directors—somewhat like the hypertrophied, hyperreallstlc breasts of the female stars of hard-core, those miraculous, plastic-surgery Barbies. Cocks of all colors, too. A man with very matte skin whose mauve-colored glans had just been intimate with my lips. An Asian with barely curly pubic hair. Three very dark blacks, all of whom fucked me up the ass. Several photos were taken just after they had pulled out, or between visits. A close-up of my face, quickly soaked with tears—all those bastards had bored deep into my mouth. A close-up of my ass, my anus open, gaping like the mouth of a carp, incredibly dilated. My sex yawning like an oyster renounc-

ing the protection of its pearls. Teardrops of jism frozen by the camera, oozing from all my holes.

There is an ecstasy in degradation—a forgetfulness of self in the gift of self. Those machinelike cocks fucking me without stopping; those hands pulling on my buttocks like retractors or raising my face; those fingers tensed on my loins and shoulders like hooks: all contributed to my hypnosis. I was no longer myself—just a sack for sperm, a lay saint thrilled to have been made a martyr. With a man you often end up asking what you are doing there—and why him rather than somebody else, and what is this ridiculous swaying of a hairy backside and a pale backside, and this fury to have an orgasm—to be done with him even more quickly. But at that moment, stuffed with cocks, swollen with jism, I achieved a complete detachment, an indifference to myself that was happiness itself. It was that afternoon (in thinking it through afterwards, for at the time I was only pure sensation) that I began to understand why I loved the whip, the crop, chains. In the immense pain of tortured flesh are united all of life's little hurts: those you live with all the time, the hidden pains, burning memories, acknowledged defeats, choked-back tears, rejections. Disgust for life itself. "Where did you find them all?" "Oh, here and there. Passersby. A neighbor—I won't tell you which one. Several kids hanging out in a bar, near the school, behind it. Two students—the Chinese guy. Manual laborers from a shipyard who came and called their friends afterwards. No, it was no trouble to find them. Much less difficult to persuade strangers than to propose the same thing to friends who know me." "No refusals?" "Very few. One guy came up this far and then backed off at the last moment at the idea of mixing his sperm with the others'. At that moment, I must say, you were dripping with come. And

another, who thought the whole story was only n pretext so I could fuck him at the same time." Nearly all of them had come too fast for me to net Into the groove: not a single real orgasm in a whole day'fi Ol'gy. Hilt what I had was almost better than an orgasm: I quickly climbed to a sort of plateau of pleasure, and each new sensation kept me there. It was intense enough to make me forget my rilled vaginal walls, irritated by so many successive coining "i»d goings, my throbbing elbows, my nearly bleeding kneeN, A stroke of luck, no doubt—none of thctic anonymous strangers off the street gave me any diseases. That was the only time that J. P. made me run so many risks—and look them on himself, too, for after having bathed, washed, and perfumed me, and done everything a master owes to his ,'iwcclCNt slave, he made love to me with extreme gentleness for a good part of the night. I lost my head enough to tell him 1 loved him, 1 loved him, I loved him, and to believe it when he said he loved me, too. Notes 1. I think she is lying (to herself). It sometimes happens that she will limit her contact with a man to this single fantasy, as in these scenes. In a car, just in front of her building, she is with a near-stranger, who can hardly believe his good fortune. She kisses him distractedly, but reaches for his cock immediately—quickly pulls it out of his pants, quickly sucks it—only because she wants to feel his sperm run into her mouth, and not lose a drop of it, and then kiss him again lightly, and go up to her place, alone, to go to bed with the taste of jism on her tongue. And another time, in a movie theater, with a guy she does not know sitting next to her—movements of knees, groping fingers, and very quickly the sound of his fly being unzipped and his cock in her mouth. The usher surprises them and shines her flashlight, but does not say anything, just watches her suck him; then extinguishes the light when, without a word, Florence gets up again, her lip shining, her mouth full. She leaves before the end of the movie—no doubt because she had nothing to say to the guy. In the hall the usher smiles at her. She is very pretty, so Florence smiles back at her, as if to dedicate the impromptu fellation to her. 2. She means no doubt to say: in the typical manner of a typical guy...

Chapter I V

November

There were days when he would whip me for himself: several blows, just to mark me until the next time (and perhaps in a way to say to other lovers that he made me who I was, and that I was his).' But on certain days he would beat me for me. I nearly always began by counting the blows; then I would lose track, lose everything at the terrible thought that today there would be no. end, that I would die under the whip. Each crack of the lash trebled my fright until I would accept the idea that I was going to die, and that it would be very nice to die. My body would twist, my mouth cry out, imploring him, but my mind was already elsewhere, with a nearly religious resignation. Those feelings mixed with a fascination for my long-suffering body, for the immense pain that somehow grew and gained strength, that found a way to bloom. Eventually I understood that the pain I accepted was only a metaphor written on my skin for an older, lingering pain I had never agreed to bear. As I will explain later, I had to love Nathalie enough to confuse her with myself in order to watch her be tortured in turn. Thus I was the one being hurt, if only to understand what silent presences lay at the heart of the deluges of pain. One day the cry she emitted was so torn I had the fleeting impression she was

reliving her birth, the pain of our entry Into life, it puln she had always fled, until she was able to make pence wllh hei'ticlf only by refusing to live. *** He comes in and immediately introduces us. “Florence, this is Nathalie, who has agreed to give us two hours of her time; Nathalie, Florence, whom I've told you about.” We look at each other, judging each other, gauging each other. Is she prettier than I am? Yes, probably. Her gray-green eyes gleam in her face, nude of makeup. Her skin is very pale; her medium-length hair is curly and very blond. A pouting mouth; when she smiles, superb teeth. Very high cheekbones frame a small, straight nose that is quivering, gluttonous. She has a better body than I do, that's for sure; at our request she takes off her clothes, and her bosom bursts forth from her demicup bra. She has sumptuous breasts—thirty-six or thirty-eight inches—that are extended like offerings, with a small, very round areola and a hard, clearly drawn nipple a rare combination in a chest that large, where everything too often has the tendency to spread, to slide.2 (Even now, on command, I can relive the feeling of her breasts brushing against my back as she kisses the nape of my neck or my ear. They slide like two light little lingers over my loins as she skims over my back with her lips, and finally mash against the crook of my knees as she buries her face and tongue between my open thighs...) She has a marvelously flat and muscular belly, with a very small waist—her breasts seem suspended like gardens over a void; her buttocks are very rounded, set high. She is maybe 5'6", but she looks striking, now nude in the room filled with lights and cameras. So striking that very quickly I stop looking at her directly and only contemplate, with a curious emotion, her reflection in the mirror. "A little champagne, Nathalie?"

He hands her a glass full of bubbles. Nathalie liked to drink. That was a constant until the end, and when I met her mother, it made sense. One glass, two glasses, we chat, he and I dressed, she naked to the tips of her toes—a Dejeuner sur l'herbe shot inside, with the same intentions to follow, no doubt. Then I notice that J. P. is completely dressed in black. "How do you see the scene, Florence?" he asks. "I want to photograph you together," I say. "You dressed like that, her naked. On the black side of the comforter, first. Then you'll take it off the bed and we'll keep just the white sheet as a background." "In short, black-and-white in color, if I've understood you?" "What else?"

I photograph their faces, looking eye-to-eye, approaching each other slowly, a quarter of the frame each time, then intertwined, as in Rodin's Le Baiser. I do a first series in full lighting, then move all the lights nearly to the ground. Stretched out on the bed, they look as if they belong in an Expressionist film, replete with immense looming shadows and violent contrasts. "Kiss her again," I say. The zoom lens allows me to take a close-up of their joined mouths, their tongues shamelessly seeking each other out, his hands playing with her breasts, her very pale hands on the dark fabric of his shirt. "Keep going," I say between clicks of the shutter. He buries his face between her breasts, licks them, sucks them, clutches them. She throws her head back in a moment of cinematic ecstasy. "Take off your clothes " I say to J. P. His skin is much darker than hers, making for a very satisfying contrast of tones. He has a hard-on. What do I feel? I don't know. The camera feels it for me.3

Because I am watching everything through the lens, I can distance myself—all the while confusedly knowing I can stay fifteen feet away only for so long...

And then, at the precise moment at which I ask myself what I want next, she leans over on her stomach and takes his stiff cock into her mouth. And sucks it much better, much more greedily, than I ever could. Her hair falls in two cascades over her cheeks, hollowed out by the back-and-forth movement. Her hips are shaped by the luminous object of her desire: shrinking to a little doll's mouth when she flutters about the glans, her brows knit as she gathers its nectar; then open and refined by the effort when she entirely swallows it; and eventually lost in the brown pubic hair rubbing against her face, as if she wants to make a furrow in his belly with her nose. As always, watching, I feel a violent emotion. As if I were getting a hard-on. But anyway, doesn't a woman get hard? From that moment on, I shoot only close-ups.

He crawls under her and gently bites her labia, drowns his mouth between her thighs, sticks his tongue into the wetness and drinks. She sucks him, as I often see her do later, as if she were desperate to drink jism, as if she were a whore who has another client waiting. Each time she swallows his tense dick, ready to explode, she inhales the flesh, then comes back up nearly to the tip of the glans before going all the way back down the pillar. He kneels behind her and penetrates her without ceremony. I place the tripod in the diagonal formed by their haunches. He plunges into her sex as he has ravaged her mouth earlier; with each thrust driving into her very depths, then almost pulling out as if he might abandon her altogether.

She reopens her eyes and stares at me, silently panting, her lips half-open. He pulls out of her cunt, repositions himself slightly above her, and sodomizes her, with the same irrepressible dan, without preparation. Very briefly she shuts her eyes and contracts her forehead a little, and then she looks at me again and smiles. It's the smile that does it. I undress and join them. Just before, I put the camera on automatic. I have thirty seconds. A brief, very brief hesitation. She kisses me, and from the first kiss in which her hps clasp mine, I know she has decided to be as much a woman for me as for J. P. A sudden burst of six photos triggered by the motor. Like firing a Winchester. Then the silence cut by the groans of the mattress, the rustling of fabric. I drink her kisses. Her tongue is like an animal's—incisive, disturbing. Little by little I slip beneath her. I lap at her breasts as I have drunk from her hps. She skims over my chest in the same way, but her hands are already descending towards my cunt. The texture of her skin is extraordinarily taut, which gives it the feel and savor of barely ripened fruit. She engulfs her face in my sex before I dare confront hers. I have never been sucked like that: practically eaten alive. I try to use my hands to slow down her mouth, but without success, so I bite her. I spread her sex with my fingers and look at her as I never have a woman. She has well-formed, very regular labia, and the entrance to her vagina, even as dilated as it is, is not the abyss mine seems to be when somebody wants to fuck me. Two inches from my forehead, J. P.'s cock thrusts furiously between her upraised buttocks... I explore her sex with my tongue, coming back up to play with her clitoris. So that's what female pleasure looks like, viewed

from below? I don't have time to dare to do more, because I am coming—one of the most rapid orgasms of my life. I close my eyes. I feel displacements on the bed, then suddenly a cock pierces me... I love being penetrated right after I have come, and he knows it, the creep. Again I investigate that marvelous pussy, still offered to me, manhandling it with the tips of my teeth, my moudi full. So that's what a woman tastes like? Well, it tastes a lot better tiian a man does... Her cunt, a mouth of dilated shadow, calls to me. I stick in my tongue. J. P. raises my backside, spreading my buttocks, then takes my ass from behind. Nathalie pulls away from my vulva and moves to kiss me at the same time as my other lover, lower down, fucks me to the depths. I drown my face between her breasts, held above me, and push back with all my strength the orgasm I feel mounting in me. He must have guessed my difficulty because, whether from compassion or a desire for suspense, he pulls out of my ass and ejaculates in long jets on my belly and breasts. Nathalie leans forward and carefully laps up the traces of burning sperm. Then she kisses me again, infusing me with a nearly sweet mixture of sperm and saliva, all the while masturbating me very quickly—and very quickly I come again.

We rapidly empty a second bottle of champagne. J. P. puts his pants back on and photographs us a second time as we kiss and rub against one another, like two hands soaping each other.4 Is it me, or is it us? Our loins are nothing but sweat and vaginal juices. I bury my fingers in her, she plants hers in me, and we sit stuck together, rooting about in each other's sex with one hand, stroking our breasts with the other. Never has a man taken such good care of my breasts. It's simple: before her, I didn't think about having any.

By the time we detach ourselves from each other, as two halves of a nut might come unstuck, J. P. has already stopped photographing us for a pretty long period of time and finished another glass of champagne. He fills our glasses, holds them out to us, and smiles.

That smile... Our first contact, our first toast to our union. Several flashes survive in my memory, like the following scenes: He is standing between us; kneeling, we are playing at nibbling on his cock. Regularly our mouths join about this phallic pretext, held like a lure before us. We are lying down next to each other on the bed, both of us on our stomachs, and he runs his hands over us, one after the other, stopping wherever he finds his next, provisory haven. Nathalie's mouth is always fresh on mine. He comes in my mouth, but she leans over and immediately drinks, in the kiss that follows, all the sperm he ejaculated in me. How can he still be hard—or was it much later? We are lying down head-to-tail, our faces buried between each other's thighs. I am above, she is below, and J. P. pirouettes around us, passing from my raised ass to Nathalie's vagina, tucked away beneath my lips, before rinsing himself off in my mouth and beginning all over again...

Pleasure... In the beginning there was only pleasure. It was on our second date that J. P. tied her up and, in front of me, beat her three or four times on the back with a whip, then handed it to me and asked me to continue. At first I did it awkwardly, then with a debauch of energy and an absence of restraint that stupefied me.

As I was doing it, it occurred to me that it was not Nathalie I was beating. She was only the reflection of my own body—a reflection magnified, embellished, and tortured.

That it was not Nathalie became clearer as soon as we two got together without the alibi or transaction of a cock between us, susceptible at any instant to install another hierarchy—one in which she treated me as I treated her. Here's the strange part: although I crushed myself against her, came under her tongue or fingers, and in spite of my clumsiness, made her come, too, not for an instant did I imagine myself a lesbian. I was an altered, bastard form, a hermaphrodite. I even sometimes experienced a sort of repulsion, a horror of the female sex; then the instant afterwards I would cover her with kisses. She would get enormously wet and I would get drunk on her. Very quickly one of our favorite games became tying her up, her legs hanging halfway over the headboard, her ankles tied to the frame, her legs spread wide apart. For a long time I would whip her on her open thighs, sex, and belly. She would never cry out during this period. When the pain was too fresh, she would let out a sort of whimper, a sound more animal than human. She would contract her legs, as if to close them, but would immediately reopen them very widely. Soon I no longer needed to tie her up when I whipped her. I only had to order her: "Push out your breasts! Open your asscheeks! v Spread yourself wider! Use your fingers! There—" Invariably I end up leaning over and kissing her, and her tongue is always gracile and sweet. I fall into the habit of telling her I love her. She says it to me, too, in many ways, and yet I do not manage to believe her.5

Notes 1.The only person who inadvertently profited from the spectacle of Florence's marked skin was a friend of mine staying the night with her. Without it being an accident—that is to say, very intentionally—Florence paraded about nearly naked the following morning when she emerged from the shower. My friend was so horrified she was at first unable to say a word; then she was so fascinated that she bombarded her with questions on who, why, how, and if it hurt. She touched each one of the welts, and neither one of them dared to say how excited she was. When Florence told me about the scene, it pleased me a great deal. 2.Nathalie usually wore very sophisticated Italian lingerie, mixing the pieces, like a very fitted brassiere, or a bodysuit sheathing her bust in complicated lacework, with a negligible pair of panties—a mere formality of satin. When we appeared astonished at these expensive fripperies, she laughed and offered to give them to Florence to make her shut up. Now that she is no longer with us, I often ask Florence to wear these silk souvenirs for me, and for her—as if we could resuscitate her in an imperfect mirror. 3.Everyone knows, obviously, that there is something phallic in the lens of a camera—especially when, if you're using a zoom, it suddenly lengthens toward the object of its desire. There is no doubt that photography was a substitute for Florence. As for me, my fascination with photography was more complicated. Why had I always associated it with the taste I had for a woman's ass—as if I only dared to be homosexual with women? 4.Nathalie was left-handed, and as soon as they were intertwined, it was like seeing a doubled image, as if one were approaching the other from the other side of a mirror. 5.As long as Florence thinks of Nathalie in the present tense, she is still with us. Nathalie is in her, in her head, her heart, her belly, like an immortal fetus one is never rid of. She is there, at night, between her empty hands. She skims over her skin, always, the phantom vessel of her memory. She is in the least of her silences. And sometimes, in mine.

Chapter V

November, Continuation

J. P. would see me sometimes, either in order to fuck me or to work with me on the Sophocles text, as I have already said. “Why Sophocles?” he asked, and never, “Why Oedipus?” "Because Cocteau is too simple and Seneca too dark. Sophocles is a pure tragedy, one of misunderstanding and recognition—but Aristotle said that well before I did." He would see her, too, but I heard only bits and pieces of what happened.1 I had given her a set of keys, telling her she could come and go as she liked. She would drop by, sometimes between classes, whether I were there or not. I would find a rose in a metal vase, an open book on the bed, or simply the unreadable imprint of her body on the comforter. Or else I would be there, and she would come by fresh from the rain and kiss me, or ask me sometimes, in very crude terms, to make her come. Standing before me, she would lift her skirt. I would drop to my knees, take off her underwear (when she was wearing any), and eat out her ass. Very quickly her cunt would weep with pleasure, and I would make her come, my thumb bored deep in her vagina, my fingers on her clitoris, my tongue

buried in her asshole. She would have strong anal contractions that would push me out and suck me in by turns. Then she would leave as quickly as she had arrived. She would sometimes disappear for a whole week, and no one would run into her. Then she would show up one morning, her hands full of croissants. "Your hair smells of the sea," I said to her one day. "Really? It's possible." And I never knew more than that.

Twice she arrived very late. The first time, she forced herself not to wake me—the discreet princess who did not want to disturb her sleeping beauty. I had fallen asleep while reading, and by the light of the reading lamp, through the hypocritical filter of my eyelashes, I watched her undress in silence and slide in next to me. Taking off her skirt and sweater, she had the grace of a cat. There was a movement in her arms I always found captivating because each time her breasts seemed to burst forth like snow. This time, in the uncertain light, I thought I had not seen correctly. But when she leaned forward to undo the straps of her shoes, I realized I had not been wrong: she had been beaten on the breasts with a brutality I had never dared. Deep horizontal stripes, the proof that someone had slept with her before beating her. One nipple, darkened with blood, was nearly torn off. The creases of scars, the rectitude of gashes, evoked the imprint of a hard lash: a riding whip, perhaps. She laid down next to me and kissed me lighdy on the temple. The instant afterwards, she was asleep. For a long time I remained awake with my nightmares. She did not try to hide the marks the next morning. "What? Oh, that. Who did it? It's not important." But ten minutes later, I surprised her in the bathroom looking in the mirror with an evident satisfaction at the gouges on her skin, touching the swellings of her laminated flesh with her fingertips.

I knew who did it when, three days later, J. P. treated me in the same manner. But with me, he took care to tie me up head-to-toe first. I cried out; I begged like a madwoman for him to stop. He struck me twelve times, very hard. Then he came in my mouth. He loved that—after he had made me cry, he loved giving me his cock to suck, knowing I was halfstrangled, between his dick gagging me and my nose stopped up with tears. One afternoon... I needed her so much, had so much hoped she would come by that I leapt upon her as soon as she entered and, laughing, she let herself fall to the bed. I lifted her skirt, took off her underwear with an authoritative movement... The black lace was sticky with fresh sperm, as were her sex and asshole. I lifted my head. "Who was it?" I asked. "J. P.," she said. "At school. On a table, between classes. Without even locking the door." He had once taken me the same way, stretched me out upon a desk, my ankles around his shoulders, my skirt hiked up to my waist, my panties hanging at half-mast from the heel of my sandal—and him passing, with an insouciant air, from my cunt to my asshole. He did it often, and each time I would try to guess where he would come, even tried to provoke him, through the contractions of my sphincter, the suction of my cunt, to forbid him from moving from one to the other, from making me pine even longer. Come where you want to, but come! When Nathalie opened her thighs before me, I had the impression he had found the strength to ejaculate in both her cunt and her ass. I slapped her on principle, then was immediately ashamed, asked her to forgive me, took her in my arms... That was one of the only times she took power, briefly. She sat astride me, squeezing my face between her thighs, and made me lick her sex and ass for a long time, telling me to miss

nothing, to forget nothing, to bury my tongue in her as far as it would go. Her cunt tasted like seaweed. *** During this period, I whip her nearly every day. Why, then, do I think I didn't want to kill her? I would like to kill her; I could die from wanting to kill her so badly. *** Moments like these were a constant with Nathalie, and became more and more marked as we neared the end: moments when I would confusedly sense the end coming without having decided anything. It was like hearing a blues fragment that echoes on the last note and refuses to let itself be reduced to silence. The blows, the humilations, even the tortures I made her suffer, were for her, each time, new opportunities to be more tender, more sweet. She was my negative reflection, or rather, the positive reflection of the negative image I had of myself. The whip revolted me. My whole body rebelled against the blows, yet seemed to ask for more, as if to punish me for an ancient rebellion of uncertain origin. Nathalie, however, seemed to grow more perfect under the whip, as a river stone will be slowly polished until it arrives at its definitive form—a pure oval, a grain of sand, nothingness. Her torn flesh would bleed, and she would keep that half-smile, completely interior, that fourteenth-century Italian painters tacked on the faces of their martyred saints. I only struck her harder; I only loved her more; and I hated myself for loving her so, yet tearing her apart. *** "You know," she begins, "for a while now I have been studying the Way of the Body as a Japanese scholar might the Way of

Wisdom or the Way of Tea: in order to isolate myself. At the end of all perfection, there is solitude and night. Others live in order to be filled: with love, money, alcohol, memories, and so forth. I live to be emptied. When I feel men come in me, when I feel them both proud and ashamed of having filled me with a tea-spoonful of sperm, I feel myself grow emptier each time, until I become almost a perfect hollow, a champagne glass, an exquisite piece of porcelain, nearly immaterial. What you call my masochism, because there is no other word for it, ends up engulfing me, relieves me of the condition of being." We have drunk a great deal. Her voice, marked by that drowsy drunkenness that precedes sleep, is of a frightening whiteness. "J. P. whips you—he tells me so," she continues. "And you also beat me. But they aren't the same. You look for yourself in the pain, but I like it for what it takes away from me: my skin, desires, dreams. To no longer be only flesh, because flesh is nothing. Pain puts me somewhere else. Everything becomes blurred. Sometimes there is even a moment—maybe you have noticed this—when the pain itself fades away. I become pleasure, pure pleasure—in other words, nothing." "What about us?" I ask after a short silence. "You mean because I say I love you? With you, I give you all of myself, my body, my cries, my tears, because I don't care about them. I give you everything I don't want. That's the paradox, you see: at the end of the Way of the Body, the body is no longer there. Only the egotistical sensation of emptiness remains. It's not for you that I let your fingers bury themselves in me, not for you that I touch you. I could just as well touch a statue. That would be less involving, that's all. Less varied. Marble can be learned—slowly, but nonetheless learned. A body is a composite of metamorphoses, and with each gesture, at every instant, you have to be attentive to the modifications of the body of the other, to its undulations, its flights..." "So, not with me more than J. P.?" "You a little less than he. J. P. is profoundly egotistical; he

lives in a state of self-absorption you're still far from. He is already nearly completely empty. Maybe he has always been: it's a gift." "Okay. And what will you do when you are finally a master in your Way?" "I will kill myself," she says. "Death will be just a completion. The perfection of my annihilation. Nothing new: an organ note." She brings the bottle of champagne to the foot of the bed and, her mouth open, empties the last drops onto her tongue. I lean over and manage to steal several of these last tears from her mouth. She lets herself be kissed with compliance, but without passion. Am I really nothing more than one of the many tongues that have come to gather honey from hers? "There's no more champagne," she murmurs. She throws the bottle against the wall with a violence I never would have suspected. The glass explodes, then falls to the floor. I look at her. She is completely drunk, lying down, her eyes closed. Lose her? No. I don't want to lose her. I don't want to. She turns on her other side. The mass of her long curly hair consumes her face. I look at her for a long time, in the void. I shiver. I take a bedspread and cover her up again. I get up, telephone J. P. "Yes," he says. I take a shower, dress, and go out.2

Horizontal delirium. Drunk with blows. "Keep it," he says, giving me the whip. It is a long bullwhip1, very fine, made of black lambskin. At the end, a short nylon tip that ends in a knot. "Go home," he says. "I have work to do."

Notes 1.Their relations were so completely dual that as soon as we three got together, which happened rarely, the silent protocol stipulated that Florence alone had the right to beat Nathalie, and that I would never whip Florence in front of her. However, as soon as I was alone with one or the other of them, I was exclusively the master of the game. I treated them like twin sisters in masochism, without seeing very well what was specific to either one of them. 2.I know that in writing these lines Florence re-experiences her former sensations, as when she takes the same streets, or rides the elevator up to my place, knowing that in the moments to come she will be a pure wellspring of cries, and that she will leave with her buttocks on fire. Up to my door and beyond it, she could have always returned untouched, but she rang, entering as if for a doctor's appointment. She would come by on a whim, silently imploring her ration of pain.

Chapter VI

December

“The

two sexes are perpetually at odds," as the saying goes.

There is such a difference between how men and women make love. A woman is opened, and she opens you. Each time I am under Nathalie's mouth and fingers, I have the impression of unfolding, as a Chinese paper flower unfolds when thrown in water. I give of myself. Pleasure dilates me. With a man, it's not the same. Pleasure contracts me. It gags me, plugs me up, shuts me up, closes me. When a cock plunges in, a door closes. Not that the sensation is unpleasant, since there is also pleasure there. But the meaning is different. There is no competition with Nathalie: just an understanding, a marvelous understanding. With J. P., I know I am going to end up broken, torn to pieces. I resist as much as I can, but pain and fear end up carrying the day, always. Whereas I leave Nathalie's arms more broken, perhaps, but more whole each time. I never really knew the degree to which she could be opened. I am neither petite nor small-boned, and my wrists are, shall we say, a tad lacking in finesse. But that evening, I fuck her like a

man, with my hands, and she opens up for me better than she would have for a man. My whole hand is engulfed by her sex; I make a fist inside her, then pull it out. "It's like a baby's head," she says, and she bites my lip very hard as she kisses me. I also bury my hand in her ass (with more ease, besides), go up to the middle of my forearm, my fingers digging into the depths of her belly, feel the terrible contractions of her anus around my arm as I masturbate her at the same time. Fist-fucking, as gay men say... Apparently, the most painful part is when I pull out my hand after she comes. She grabs my wrist and lengthily, lovingly, sucks each one of my grimy fingers.'

"Who taught you to open up like that, Nathalie?" She drags dreamily on her cigarette, leans toward me, and exhales the smoke on my breasts. "You did," she says, laughing. "Stop—" "It's true," she says. "No man has ever penetrated me like you." "Have there been many?" "Men? A fair number, yes." "How many?" "I don't know." "How many?" "I don't know for sure. One day, when I was seventeen, I was recruited as a 'hostess' for a party organized by the Jaguar-France Club. "All those obsessed aficionados of beautiful engines, at Bagatelle. There was a pavilion with champagne and petits fours, and behind it thirty or forty models of Jaguars glistened under the moonlight. We were having a marvelous spring. "The evening dragged on, extended by alcohol. Jaguar was paying, and the company was full of Brits being snobby about

the older single malts and the relative merits of the Highlands versus Islay. I may appear pretty knowledgeable to you, but I learned a lot that night. In short, who knows how it happened? You know how I am when I drink! I only remember that at a given moment, I was lying on the cold and immense hood of a black Jaguar E-type. I was completely naked—and several—the majority, no doubt—of the guys who were there had fucked me in one way or another." "All of them?" "I don't know. A lot of them. One, whether because he couldn't get it up or because he thought it was a better idea, grabbed a Jaguar statuette—the totem of the evening. It was on a table. It was much bigger than the ones you see on the hoods of cars. He fucked me with it—the front paws and the metal head, round and icy, maybe three times the size of a man's cock, were buried in my cunt. I screamed. He let go, and the statue, which was very heavy, fell out, though it still hung from me by the claws. Somebody else came along and tried to fuck my ass, but the head of the Jaguar took up all the room." "Lucky for you it wasn't the Rolls Royce Club!" I grimaced. But the image of the statue bumping between her thighs was beginning to hypnotize me. "Very funny," she said. "Afterwards, some of them caught all the sperm dribbling out of my cunt with a tablespoon and gave it to me to drink. Then I had another glass of Scotch." I took a deep breath. "And how was it?" "Salty," she said, laughing. "Don't you find it salty?" I evaded the question. "Nathalie?" "Yes?" "What do you like best, when you make love?" "What do I like best? What all my lovers like, with me. You know me by heart, right?" "Truer words were never spoken." "Then tejl me: what do my lovers see, above everything else, in me? What are the alpha and the omega of my body?"

I didn't need to answer her. A thousand times I had told her that I loved her buttocks, which were like a marvelous drop of water suspended miraculously under a stem. "From the beginning," she continued, since I hadn't said anything. "From the beginning. I was young, there was a prof I adored—well, finally, I think, it comes down to the same thing, but in the end, I resolved to seduce him. And it really wasn't too difficult! Anyway, one Wednesday afternoon, when school was out, I found myself at his place, my heart beating. He kissed me, took my clothes off, caressed me a lot, fucked me up the ass a lot. And nothing else happened. For the whole of our affair (two years, maybe), he never took me otherwise. "Oh! I almost forgot: he also spanked me, from the beginning. The first time he penetrated my ass, it hurt just a little bit—just long enough for me to ask what I had gotten myself into. Then he touched me, tamed me—and spanked me, hard. He penetrated me again, and fucked me for a long time, all the while caressing me. I came, and I had that marvelous feeling you have when it's somebody else who makes you come; plus, it's a bonus when you come with a cock planted in you, to the depths, and not as your mother said you should." Her eyes took on a singular cast whenever she mentioned her mother. "Afterwards, it became like a game, a rite. He would spank me—with his hand, or belt, sometimes—then he would fuck me up the ass, and I would come. It became automatic: I was trained to come like that. My ass would be bare, and I would be lying on my stomach, or across his knees, already wet. And when I felt the tip of his cock push against my 'rosebud,' as the poets say, I would already be on the brink of orgasm. He would fuck me while he jerked me off, I would come, and only afterwards would he ejaculate. The majority of the time, I was already so hot, so beside myself, that I did not feel the sperm flow into me. I only knew he had come because he was buried all the way inside me but not moving, and because my anus was palpitating around a cock that was slowly getting soft."

(I had never known anyone who used with so much, nearly naive ease the words most inflammatory to the imagination.) "So who took your virginity?" "A girl. Strange, no? A year and a half later, during the summer. She was the first woman who ever seduced me. She did it with her fingers. God, how I bled!" "And since then?" "Since then, I don't know how many there have been. More men than women, in any case. It's easier. However...I like men, but I love only women. Anyway, you know what I mean." "No," I say, kissing her. When we kissed, she was always the girl, and her hips enfolded mine with a moist warmth that made me feel faint. Notes 1. Here was inserted a long scatological scene in which the narrator pulled out from her lover's ass enough shit to smear herself all over with, then rubbed against her until they formed a single odiferous body. I thought it wise to suggest to Florence to cut these excesses lest she try her reader's patience. In fact, I wanted to keep these particularly delicious moments to myself.

Chapter VII

December: Continuation

There was a short period when Nathalie and I nearly tried to live together. We would sleep together—her breathing was so slight that twenty times over I thought she was dead. We used to share sumptuous breakfasts—she had converted me to tea and a very lighdy sugared orange marmalade we found in an English shop. We would leave together for the university, meet again between classes. Once in the elevator, we met by accident—I had run to catch it just when the doors were about to close, and there she was, jammed between five or six students. She winked, smiling, and between the mezzanine and the fourth floor, taking advantage of the multiple stops, entrances, and exits, she slipped next to me, her back against my belly, and with a mischievous hand gliding outside of my skirt, caressed my thighs and sex without anyone noticing. In maybe one minute, she brought me to the brink of orgasm. Then we separated, each of us going to her own classroom, and the sensation of my empty cunt and wet underpants kept me from hearing what was said that hour, so full was I with the need, barely checked, to finish with a rapid stroke of my index finger what she had so nicely begun. During this period, another girl was flirting with her—a frustrated-virgin type. She was irritating, brushing up against

her, her insinuations as subtle as a whore's makeup. One day Nathalie took me by the hand and introduced us: "Do you know Florence?" she asked. Then immediately afterward, she added: "She's the one I love." Good God, I almost believed her. *** One Saturday, a beautiful and cold day, she told me she needed to get out of the city, that Paris was weighing upon her. She had a paper to write on seventeenth-century theater. She would go to Versailles, take a closer look at the magnificent theater the king had built to his scale. She was especially enthusiastic to see the performance hall designed by Gabriel. "The theater in the theater," she said, with the delighted air of having been the first one to come up with this banality. We stopped to talk at the rear of the Grand Trianon, leaning our elbows against the balustrade that overlooks the French gardens and, farther off, the great canal. In the semicircle that connects the gardens to the esplanade, a group of about fifteen Japanese tourists were listening attentively to the commentary of their charming guide. She was one of those Japanese women—I'd known one or two of them at school—who adroitly mixes a traditional way of life with excursions into French culture, and who lives, and rather comfortably at that, off of little jobs like this one, connecting her hurried compatriots on the Grand Tour to the fleeting countryside. Nathalie was holding my hand, so we must have been the spitting image of the lovers of Pont Mirabeau. I was having a good day so feeling a bit ridiculous, instead of killing my love for her, only strengthened it. I released her hand, letting mine fall between us, then distractedly touched her thigh. I glided my hand down the front of her coat's low neckline, then rolled the fabric of her skirt between my fingers. Still on our elbows above the balustrade, just above the

Japanese group, we appeared not to have budged an iota. My hand moved along the length of her stockings—I had forbidden her to wear pantyhose from the very first day—and slipped under that pretext for panties called a Brazilian thong. She started when my icy fingers came into contact with her thighs and buttocks. There was a short pause, during which I warmed myself with the heat of her body. The vision of my hand plucking the little bit of fabric (which I had chosen myself that morning) excited me, and I abandoned myself entirely to it. As usual, she was wet. My hand slid along the furrow of her gorgeous thighs, then across her supple labia. My wrist softly rubbed against her sex, then dove deep to her clitoris, as if nothing particularly important were happening. She spread her legs slightly. There was nearly no one else on the terrace of the chateau; in any case, the vague folds of her coat hid my handiwork. Below us, the Japanese guide cheeped on, her compatriots nodding their heads like mechanical dolls, marking less their acceptance than the fact that they were following the commentary. One of them, evidently audacious enough to stop listening to the guide's no-doubt iUuminating remarks, began to stare at the beautiful blond just above him, leaning on her elbows with her girlfriend. He quickly focused his camera and photographed us. At the very moment when he depressed the button, I shifted my hand backwards and thrust my index and middle fingers into Nathalie's vagina. Surprised, she widened her eyes and parted her hps, just for an instant. This was precisely what the click of the shutter captured on that cold day in mid-December. As if slightly disconcerted, the Japanese1 man lowered the camera for an instant; perhaps he wanted to verify with the naked eye what his lens had revealed to him. Again he raised his camera and aimed.

Nathalie stared at him, hiding nothing of her ascent into pleasure, though I knew her capable of coming intensely without batting an eyelash. As my fingers groped about inside her, I buried my thumb in her asshole and rubbed it against the slender partition of flesh separating it from my index finger. She presented the Japanese man with a singular recital of flaring nostrils and open mouth. One spasm, then another. Her chin moved with each ecstatic sigh; her tongue passed slowly over her lips, dry with desire. At each pause, the Japanese man took a photograph. Merely by watching Nathalie's oh-so-changeable face, one could guess the moment at which the click would resound.1 Her game did not remain private for long. One after the other, the guys in the group turned their heads and whispered to each other, full of excitement. Finally the guide stopped talking and stared at us. Nathalie played her orgasm as if she were a piano beneath my fingers. The cameras went off in a noisy chorus. I felt her ass contract around my thumb; she leaned her face towards me, hungry for my mouth. I kissed her. Her lips were as cold as the air, her tongue a ball of wet fire. A new burst of clicks. Then everything returned to normal. We were again leaning against the balustrade, standing next to each other like good little girls. On the lichen-stained stone, Nathalie's hands, which had been clenched so tightly they were almost white, relaxed. She softly squeezed my hand, still soaked with her wetness. The Japanese group returned to their guide.

Only the man who had noticed us first still stared, and only for a brief instant. Stone-faced, he nodded his head slightly, with an infinite deference, as if to thank us.

Nathalie turned towards me. "Shall we go back?" she suggested. Her face reflected the same enigmatic, indecipherable light as the waxy face of the Japanese man.

On the way back—I was driving, she was playing with my hair—she asked: "What's on your mind, Florence?" "Nothing," I said. I was thinking of the strange pleasure I had taken in exhibiting her to the group and the complacency with which she had participated. She could very well have assured our total privacy. I told myself I did not have a woman's libido, but a man's, or at least, what I imagined a man's to be. I had been as hard and tense as a stone. As if I had had a hard-on.

Notes 1. I remember a similar performance. One day Florence was playing Hamlet with the same spirit, if not the same pertinence, as Sarah Bernhardt did long ago. Somewhere in the first rows, an audience member was taking photos. In the silence of the room his camera made a horrible racket, and I could foresee the particular times when, with this hand movement, that facial expression, the fatal click would go off. It was very funny and also very annoying.

i

Chapter VIII

December: Conclusion

I have a present for you," he says. Pretty paper, a small box made from expensive wood. "For a would-be mistress," he says. Not to be joked about. And inside, a straight razor made from ivory and nickel. The implement of our ancestors.

He shows me how to hold it so as not to cut my fingers. Slides it into the cups of my bra and slices them open with a simple flick of his wrist. Turns me around, glides the blade against my back (my God, how can something be so cold?) and cuts the band of elastic fabric. My bra falls to my feet like a fruit paring. So much for Christian Dior. With two clean and precise razor blows at my hips, he rids me of my underpants, their pale chiffon opening like a Saint Andrew's cross on the light-colored floor. He is still behind me, his arms tightening around my back. He passes the razor slowly across my cheek, throat, breasts. Pause. Just enough time to put on the handcuffs: pretty nickel-plated ones bought from a porno shop on the Rue Saint-Denis.

Sleight of hand. The blade plays with my skin, stops when just about to wound me. It slides across my chest, skims over my belly, coils in the slit of my sex. Pure terror. He must have pushed a little too hard, because he nicks me, a half-inch chunk: a beautiful cut that bleeds a lot right away. "Stop!" Nasty game. He holds me by the hair, my head raised like a stubborn horse's. Takes his time opening his fly. I simultaneously feel his cock, hard with desire, against my buttocks, and the razor, with which he grazes me. A burning sensation. He drives the blade into my left buttock. "No!" I cry out. He leans me over, spreads my tensed buttocks, caresses my sex with the razor handle, raises me up, penetrates me slightly, and then, with a thrust, completely. The polished ivory opens me like a small, cold penis, while the blade, charting an obtuse angle, pushes against the slit of my sex. He need only push down a litde more to mutilate me forever. A catastrophe seems imminent. His right hand passes in front of me and masturbates me gently, while the razor's handle skims over my pussy. *** Ten o'clock in the morning. I am working on the Sophocles scenario, which is coming along very slowly, by which I mean not at all. Somebody rings, but Nathalie enters with her key before I can get to the door. She is wearing the smile she wears on the days I love her. She kisses me, then says suddenly: "Flo?" "Yes?"

"Would you get undressed, please?" I feel myself blush. She does not seem to notice. She goes to the window and closes the thick doubled green velvet curtains. Then she turns on all the lights. "Please," she repeats, turning towards me. I had seen J. P. the night before and he had, if I may say so, lavished me with innumerable marks of love. "Very well," I say. A striptease at that hour seems somehow indecent, especially since Nathalie keeps on her big sweater with the large, loose collar, as well as her snug pair of pants, which make her ass look as if it belongs on the CaUipygian Venus. I take off my underpants last and stand in front of her. She scrutinizes me with curiosity. "Turn around," she says. My buttocks are creased like taffeta. First he had hit me with a crop, tidily; then he had whipped me every which way, until he had erased the clean, straight stripes of the crop. The work of a slaughterer. The skin had been broken in many places, and little superficial scabs had formed. By that morning, the marks had turned to bruises, as usual. Nathalie draws near. "It's very pretty," she says. With her fingers she traces the embossed meanderings. "It might as well be me," she adds. She kneels behind me. Her hands fall on my hips; her mouth skims over my buttocks, from track to track, with the lightness of a bird. Titmouse, I think, because the sound of the word pleases me. Her tongue traces the blurry scars one by one. Turtle dove. Robin redbreast when her hands gently spread my buttocks. Skylark when she licks me, smoothes her lips over my asshole. Sweet skylark.

Her tongue hollows out my anus; she twists her torso and puts her whole face between my thighs, held open with both hands, the very caress I specialize in. Skylark, I will pluck you. Her hair streams against my skin; her hps bite mine. Her tongue buries itself in my sex; she searches and drinks, then goes back around front. I am nearly astride her now; her breasts are between my thighs. She plays with my clitoris, and her hands move toward my belly, sculpt my cunt, hips, buttocks, and back, scratch me, restore my form, give me new life. I come standing up, shaking with spasms, my knees wobbling, my sex glued to her mouth. She gets up again and pulls me to her—my breasts lie against her black sweater. She kisses me, licks my ear, my neck, and the bridge of my nose, then buries her face in my shoulder. Her hand descends towards my groin, brushes against my sex... "No!" I nearly cry aloud. The idea of even the slightest arousal repulses me. She couldn't care less. With her hand, she forces open my thighs and masturbates me violently, as violently as I have sometimes seen her flail away at herself, gritting her teeth, her crotch jumping under her fingers. She folds and unfolds the surface of my groin, thrusts her fingers inside me, jabs me again and again as a clumsy boy would. I cry out and come again. Never, I think, have I had two orgasms so close together. She undresses quickly and lays me down on the bed. She embraces me, her groin against mine, mound against mound. She leans all of her body between my spread legs and I come again. She does not let me caress her—not really, in any case. She makes me come eight or ten times—but I can no longer even speak of having individual orgasms, for all of me has become erogenous, from my hair to my fingernails. She sucks my toes,

and I come; she licks the insides of my knees, her fingers plunging in me more deeply than any man ever has, and I come. I come. I come. Men thrust inside you as if they were going to tear your vagina from your body, or else they curl up the tips of their fingers. Her fingers give. At one moment, I nearly have the impression that my hand is in her vagina at the same time as her hand is just as deeply lodged in mine. I am annihilated. I reach out as if to caress her but she stops me, and I am too exhausted to insist. She puts my head in the crook of her shoulder and I curl up against her warmth, one hand on her breast. She pulls the red-and-black quilt over us. I fall asleep briefly in the heat of her skin. When I wake up, she again sucks and licks and forces me open until I cry out. *** Slowly I return to consciousness. "How did you know?" "Know what?' "Why did you ask me to undress like that?" "Oh! That! I telephoned J. P. on another matter this morning, and he told me about last night." "Why?" "So I would know, I imagine."1 She kisses me on the cheek. "You know, I think we love being whipped for different reasons." She kisses me again. "Nathalie?" "Yes?" "Do: you really like being beaten?' She looks at me. Against the light her eyes appear darker than normal'.

"I like to be hurt,".she says. "I like it when someone hurts me. Often, standing in front of a mirror, I torture myself with needles, burying them into my breasts, until I transform them into pin cushions, martyred Saint Sebastians. You've never tried it?" What to say? "I don't know," I answer. "Honestly, I don't. Each time I tell myself I will refuse, that the last time was truly the last, and the instant afterwards, I hold out my wrists for him to bind and I have a lump in my stomach that slowly disappears with each blow. Though I cry and beg him to stop, I am aware that another 'me'—and truly it is as if I were another person—offers her buttocks and arches her back and waits for the blow to come. "When he hits me, I think of nothing—nothing more than the sensation of my torn skin. I want it to stop and I want it to last forever. But afterwards, when I am no more than a mass of burning, a thousand things come to mind. Amidst the pain, at a certain moment, a memory floats to the surface, and each time it seems I am going to grasp it. Not a memory of physical pain: the brain does not remember physical pain. No. It's as if my torn skin were a metaphor of mute suffering, buried." "Your parents," Nathalie said. What, my parents? The explosion of fights, and me trembling alone in my room. Once, the noise of blows, cries. And in the end, the obligation to choose between them. Who can choose between one love and another? I suddenly realize that in J. P. and Nathalie I am trying to reconstruct that fatal couple, my parents, though I treat Nathalie like a little girl most of the time—if only to punish her. I have the fantasy of being beaten by my father as he beat my mother— as he made her suffer, in any case. "I don't think so," continues Nathalie. "Look farther. Fantasies are screens that keep real memories from rising to the surface." The fantasy of punishing the womb from which I came— punishing it for all my suffering, and all of hers, as well. Is it an accident that these last few times I have concentrated my whipping on her sex?

"You're stupid," I say. "That's got nothing to do with it." *** Later in the afternoon, we are in the bathroom. With the shaving cream J. P. sometimes uses, we smear our mounds with soap, then shave each other with the razor he gave me. Not without doing some damage. The razor slides with a screech to the edge of our delicate labia. Several tiny nicks. The blood wells up in the foam. It stings a little. Afterwards, we go back to bed and with tweezers, depilate each other very patiently, completely. Even I do it, who can barely tolerate the depilation of my "bikini line," as they say, because each plucked hair is a trauma in miniature that irritates the area until, little by little, I can't be touched at all. We get in the sixty-nine position, our eyes buried in each other's pussies, making each other smooth and hairless up to our buttocks. It's unforgettable. Aflame, we roll atop each other. Her crotch is smooth against mine—two pubescent little girls' groins, girl-children with women's breasts. Her mound is as cool as a cheek, her mons quite round, like little buttocks. Her tongue runs over my sex, plays with its most sensitive parts, buries itself in my vagina, explores it lazily, to the depths. She rolls against me, takes my face in her hands, and kisses me. Her tongue rolls against mine like a wet finger. "It's true that women taste salty." Of the two of us, I am again the only one who comes, and when I do, I come hard. ! *** Next shot: I am sitting on the edge of the bed. Nathalie is on

her knees between my open thighs. I lean over and grab her by the hair, my hands full, so I can raise her face to mine. I kiss her passionately and tell her I love her. And then, my eyes on hers, I piss on her breasts. The jet rebounds against my knees and calves, spills to the floor, surrounds my feet. The strong odor of urine rises toward us. She frees her face from my hands, bends over, and begins to drink the last drops at the source.

Two days later we are dressed, ready to go out. I call to her; she already has her hand on the doorlatch. "Nathalie?" "Yes?" "Come here. Get on your knees, please." I take off my underpants, hitch up my skirt, and jam my already gaping sex against her mouth. Then, deliberately, I piss. She swallows. She doesn't miss a drop.

It became a game between us. Often—and in the most compromising or unexpected places—a door, a public garden, or between two parked cars—I humiliated her in this manner—or honored her, as you like. I especially remember one night on the Quai de Bethune, at the tip of the He Saint-Louis. A hot spot of gay cruising. There is a streetlight there; it's also where the riverboats taking tourists up and down the Seine turn. She leaned me against the streetlight while a boat full of spotlights and onlookers turned fifteen feet away, and she drank from me, lengthily, lovingly. *** "Tiresias," J. P. says, "was originally an ordinary young man.

But one day, while walking through a clearing, he met two coupling serpents. Did he disturb them? Did he kill them? Little matter, but there he was, suddenly changed into a woman. "Seven years later, again walking through a clearing...two serpents coupling...he disturbs them and kills them...In an instant, he's a boy again. "Some time after that, a fight among the gods. 'In matters of love, men really have it good,' say the goddesses. 'But you women have it best,' protest the gods. The idea (a bad one!) to ask Tiresias, who after all has been both sexes. Called before them, he reveals that if pleasure were composed of ten portions—like Camembert—women would get nine, and men one. "Hera, outraged that one of Zeus's ex-wives had already eaten her piece—and that Tiresias had betrayed the great secret passed from mother to daughter—blinded him. Zeus, moved to pity by such treatment, but not being able to reverse it—a little like the story of Sleeping Beauty, in which the evil spell cast by the spiteful old fairy cannot be nullified—gave Tiresias as compensation the gift of second sight. And seven lives." "Nice story," I said. "That's why he knows everything, from the very beginning, about the secret of Oedipus. And if you connect that to the passage from the Banquet on the myth of the androgyne..." "Well, am I looking for my masculine complement or my feminine double?" "We aren't coming back to that again, are we? You're looking for your own and the other sex. One cock in front, one behind." "God, you can be vulgar!" "But why? Does it bother you so much to say you like to be buttfucked?" "It's the word I don't like. It's off the mark, metaphorically. Somebody who gets buttfucked is a bastard, a jerk. Or an idiot." "Okayj sodomized, if you like. You like to be sodomized. Very deeply. Your asshole is as open as a cow's. Gaping." "J.P.!" We burst out laughing.

Notes 1.Thus I allowed myself from time to time the illusion of continuing to manipulate them, whereas I was only, and more and more rarely, a tool, a strategy of love.

Chapter IX

Christmas

I needed to cover her with resounding jewels, as the poem says, so we went into a rather dimly lit boutique full of barbaric baubles on the Rue Saint-Andre" des Arts. Very heavy necklaces and bracelets, combinations of worked metal and polished gem-stones, iron, copper, and feathers. We tried on every piece of this flashy paraphernalia, one after the other. The dull color of iron sliced into the pale pink of her sweater and the more luminous pink of her neck and hands. I sampled all sorts of earrings, looking for something that lengthened my neck, which I find a bit short. "It's too bad," I said, "that you don't have pierced ears. They don't have clip earrings here." The salesman approached us. His skin was a mix of black and yellow little seen outside of the Antilles. His eyes were very clear, his nose small, just barely flattened, and his lips thin. "If you want to get your ears pierced, I have everything we need, and it doesn't hurt at all, you know." I knew. Nathalie hesitated. "My mother never wanted me to," she said. Was that an objection? I took it as an acceptance. Besides, she wasn't protesting. "Wait here," said the so-exotic salesman.

>

He came back with a little pistol. He disinfected her earlobe with alcohol—the odor instantly invaded the tiny boutique— then pinched the lobe into the mechanism and pierced it, at the same time installing a gold-balled stud. One ear, then the other. Nathalie bore the procedure with great dignity. Hardly batted an eyelash when the needle pierced her lobe. "Good girl," I said, touching her cheek. Then I turned toward the man. "Make a second hole in her left ear, above the other, please." She moved as if to get up, then sat down again. "That's going to hurt a little more," he said. "Miss has tiny earlobes. I will have to pierce the cartilage." "Go ahead," I said. Just a little more painful. She grimaced, then quickly recovered. "There." She got up. "And don't forget," added the salesman, "that you must rotate the studs regularly, for several days, so the holes don't close." We paid for our purchases, including the little operation, and left. I was in a hurry to see her naked, laden with these dark and excessive jewels. The idea struck me several hours later, after having made love to her. We were lying spoon-fashion; she had her back to me, and her buttocks were against my belly. I had my left arm around her and was playing with her nipples. I raised myself up, leaned on my right elbow, kissed her neck, the roots of her hair, behind the ear. She purred. I looked at her ear. A little blood had crystallized behind the lobe. I took the heads of the studs, one after the other, and turned them gently. She jerked her shoulders slightly, then let me doit. Two rings of different sizes, long hoops usually reserved for

necklaces, which would show off the pale blond of her hair and the mother-of-pearl of her neck... Why just the ears? I suddenly thought.

I returned to the boutique. The salesman recognized me, of course. Hurried over. "Tell me, with your ear-piercing gun, what else can you pierce?" "The nostril," he proposed. "Or anything, provided I can pinch the flesh. However, on certain areas, it's better to have recourse to ancient methods, or else the wound heals over too readily. And then there are places where it's not easy to rotate the studs, no?" I did not want him to get lewd. "The nipples, too?" I asked. "Of course. That's done very often, you know." Did not want him to entertain me with other people's fantasies. "Very well. Until tomorrow, then." "I'm closed tomorrow." "Monday, then."

I had told her to wear a black sweater and a skirt. She arrived at around three o'clock. "No, don't take off your raincoat, we're going back out." There were two tourists in the boutique, and we waited like good girls for them to leave. Nathalie seemed both surprised to find herself there again and intrigued by the situation.T wore the blank, absent expression I reserved for the times I mistreated her. "Come back here," said the salesman. He had us go into the boutique's back room, and went to close the shop's front door.

"We won't be disturbed here," he said. The space was cramped and badly lit. He flicked a switch; a lateral spotlight came on, illuminating the center of the bunker's tight perimeter. "First the nose," I said. "The left nostril." He again used the little pistol. Nathalie looked at me intently. The odor of alcohol was even more stifling in the airless corridor. The man was deft but, whether due to apprehension or greater sensitivity, she was in much more pain this time. A drop of blood pearled, rolled down the curve of her nose, and stopped at the edge of her hp. God, she was beautiful like that! After this was done, I said, "Take off your sweater, please." My voice was dry, tinged with a moved coldness. She obeyed without commentary. Underneath, she was wearing a push-up bra made of black and silver lace, and I asked myself briefly, for the thousandth time perhaps, where in the world she found the money to buy herself such trinkets. "The bra, too." Her breasts seemed to burst forth under the track light's glare. The salesman trembled in his immobility. He turned around, got something from behind him, and returned to us. He was holding in his hand a sort of small bulb at the tip of which shone a needle. He pushed on a button. In three seconds, the needle was red hot. I leaned towards the executioner: "Pierce both breasts, please. Just behind the nipple." Nathalie started; the man hesitated. I slapped her gently. She quieted herself. The salesman passed a soaked cotton over her breasts, and her nipples hardened in front of us. "That will make it easier," he said. "Keep very still, miss." There was a slight scorching smell. An odor vaguely like grilled pork mixed with the smell of alcohol. "If you want, you can install the rings immediately," he said. I had foreseen this. I took out of my purse two gold rings, about three quarters of an inch in diameter. I hoped to make the

nipple stretch, but didn't want to have the metal take up too much space. "Put these in," I said. His dark fingers touching her white breasts looked obscene. With my fingertips I played with these new ornaments. Nathalie had not stopped looking at me. "Get up," I ordered. "Lift your skirt. What do you have on underneath? Take off those tights; the cold is no excuse for parading about like that. Your underwear, too. Good. Sit back down. Lean back more. Put your thighs against the armrests. That's good, my beauty. My beautiful girl." The man waited, frozen with excitement, his eyes riveted on Nathalie's shaved sex. I leaned forward, spread her labia and exposed her clitoris, then pressed my finger there. "Pierce her here," I said. He got on his knees between her spread thighs, his cotton in one hand, the red needle in the other. Nathalie did not stop staring at me. Suddenly a tear appeared at the corner of her eye. She made no move to dry it. "I don't want to use alcohol there," said the man. "She's going to scream." "But no," I said, "of course she isn't going to scream. You won't scream, isn't that right?" She had a sort of spasm, then breathed openmouthed, like a fish, when the guy passed his cotton over the delicate mucous membranes. She shuddered when he spread the delicate lips and pinched a little wedge of flesh between his fingers. "Wait," I said. I leaned over Nathalie and kissed her softly. She kept her. eyes open and held my lower lip between her teeth. "Go ahead," I murmured. She shuddered. Nathalie bit me until my blood flowed—and yet I suddenly had the impression I was tasting her blood, not mine. She closed her eyes, finally, and big tears rolled down her cheeks. She let go of my lip. Our blood, still mixed, welled up again, a bit congested this time.

C% Q

"We can put a ring in," he said with effort. I gave him one, a little larger than the ones for her breasts. "Do it," I said. He leaned over again, groping about for a long time. "Spread your legs more," I told her. She obeyed. How could she have done otherwise? The gold ring gleamed incongruously in her shaved sex. I picked up her tights, underwear, and brassiere, rolled them into a ball, and put them in my purse. "Put your sweater back on," I said. She got up, the skirt falling to her knees. "I'm going to look odd with my legs naked in this weather," she said. "For all of five minutes," I said. "We need only cross the Seine, and I'll buy you stockings and a garter belt. That'll be pretty, you'll see." I turned to the man. "How much do I owe you?" He looked as if he had just woken up. "Nothing," he said, with effort. "You owe me nothing. I have already been paid in full." I did not smile. "Fine," I said. "Good-bye." It had stopped raining. Nathalie headed straight as an arrow for the Rue Dauphine. Then suddenly she turned towards me. "You go too far," she said. I smiled at her. My lip was hurting horribly. I licked it; it seemed to have tripled in size. I felt full of a ferocious joy. "You're right," I said, "I go too far. And you will be punished for being so ready for it." We went to the Samaritaine and after a while I chose a white corset and very sheer black stockings. I made her try on the corset, which pushed up her breasts

without hiding either her nipples or the rings, and called to the saleswoman to come give us her opinion. The sight of Nathalie's pierced breasts, emphasized by the lace armature, left her speechless. It was very amusing. "Let me pay," said Nathalie. At the register she held out two brand-new five-hundred-franc bills. "God, where do you find all that cash?" "Odd jobs," she said, averting her eyes. We descended to the basement of the department store. Household goods. I bought chains. "...heavy chains, for you, my love," I recited in a low voice. "What are you saying?" asked Nathalie. "Nothing, my beauty, nothing. Come on, let's go home. I need you very much."

The strange and delicate sensation of sucking a breast and, with the tip of your tongue, playing with a ring piercing the nipple. The even more delicate sensation of playing with a pierced clitoris, of feeling your lover groaning and coming right under your tongue... For her, she told me, the torturous feeling of my mouth teasing her perforated, burned flesh....

"I belong to you," she told me. *** Ten days later, it was Christmas. I telephoned her early in the morning, to catch her just as she was getting out of bed, to make sure she would be there. "Yes?" she said, her voice still heavy with sleep.

"What are you doing tonight?" "Tonight? What's tonight?" "Christmas. You know, presents in the stockings, turkey with chestnuts, mass at midnight—" "I don't celebrate Christmas," she said. "Not with my family, anyway." I made a promise to myself to go visit these people who so deliberately ignored Christmas. "Well, are you free?" "I had sort of planned something." "Cancel it. Can you be ready at eight o'clock? I'll come get you in the car." "What should I wear?" "Something warm," I said. "A big sweater. A coat, a short skirt, and stockings." "Where are you taking me?" "To mass, my dear, to mass. It's the night for it. But we're going rather far, so if we want to be there by midnight—" "I don't want to go," she said. "Oh, yes, you do," I answered. "Eight o'clock, your place. Be outside."

A sordid ghetto just south of Paris. She darted out suddenly—beautiful from head to foot in a symphony of white—an off-white wool coat, a pure white angora sweater, the crushed white of the skirt's thick fabric, white lace stockings—and red pumps that made her feet look tiny. She hesitated an instant at the building's door. I heard a hysterical voice fall from the heavens. She shrugged her shoulders as if worn out as she lifted her eyes to the black sky. Nearly all the streetlights were broken. I parked under the only one still working, and all the while that Nathalie approached, enjoyed watching the vertical shadows transform her into moving sculpture.

She gets in, kisses me lightly. She smells marvelously good— a bouquet of flowers in light blond. "What is that? It's new, no?" "Guerlain," she said. "Jardins de Bagatelle." At her ears and nose, she had put in three diamond studs. "And elsewhere?" I asked. "I left in the rings," she said calmly. I skirt Paris; the highway around the city empties almost instantly, and on the road to Bretagne there isn't a mouse stirring. "I love highways," I say. "Why? It's deadly dull, if you're driving." "Yes, but I can leave the car in fifth gear and with my right hand caress your thighs until you can't take it anymore." Up to where the stockings and skin meet... "I didn't put on any underwear," Nathalie says. It's true. For two hundred miles, my hand agitates against the raspy nylon covering her knee, the softness of her thigh, the moistness of her cunt. We had to refill the gas tank a little outside of Le Mans. We stopped at one of the rare gas stations on the highway that was not yet self-service. The guy working there came towards us with the enthusiasm of someone spending his Christmas smelling carburetor emissions. With that sense of tranquil provocation I so much envied and for which I reproached her, Nathalie kept her skirt hiked and her thighs spread. I thought the service-station attendant was going to have a stroke at the sight of her milky thighs above her stockings, her shaved sex, and the gold ring gleaming there with an incongruous shine.

"Why did you do that?" I ask. "It's Christmas," she says.

We stop at Le Mans. "We've got time to get something to eat," I said. "Why spend Christmas in Le Mans?" "We're going a bit farther. But I need the calories, and you do, too."

It really scandalized them at Le Mans, those two dykes who couldn't keep their hands off each other during the meal. For dessert Nathalie wanted strawberries and champagne. She put them delicately between her teeth, one after the other, giving me a taste, each time, of strawberry and lips. A great to-do in the restaurant...

We headed towards Nantes before forking off towards Sable\ It had to have been about eleven-thirty.

Solesmes is a Roman jewel of a church revamped by Gothic goldsmiths, as they say in the guidebooks. The Benedictines taking care of it dedicate themselves to the practice of the Gregorian chant, and the masses at Solesmes are so sought after that reservations must be secured well in advance. The near traffic jam in the middle of the countryside at that hour seemed rather strange. Plainsong... As the hours passed, Nathalie's face was transformed. Her resemblance to the statues of the female saints enshrouding the body of Christ became more clear. Her face, white striated with white, emerged from the large neck of her sweater like a pale flower, and the diamonds appeared nearly carnal against her flesh. The colorless locks of hair that grazed her cheeks were the sole points of light.

Of course, there were breaks in the singing between midnight and five o'clock in the morning. Each time Nathalie seemed to emerge from a macabre dream. She would come back from the world of the dead with a visible effort, as if everything were pulling her ceaselessly down below. My God, why did I bring her there? In a single blow, an evil moment of clairvoyance, I saw I was going to lose her soon. I also realized that the libertinism with which I had camouflaged my love for her was a clumsy mask for the fever now mounting in me—the anguish of feeling myself completely chained to her. I leaned towards her, taking her in my arms. "I love you," I told her. "I love you so much." Contrary to what is usually the case, my feeble words did not ring false. The statue turned her head towards me without smiling. In her expression there was such sadness that I was disconcerted. "Never say that again, Florence. Never!" "What can I do? I love you as I love the sun or moon, as I love the stones, or the music that makes the stones vibrate. I say I love you because I don't know any other word for it, because I've never felt this way, and because it must be what people call love, this thing that tears at my belly when I touch you, when I look at you, imagine you." "Are you done?" In her voice was a deadly irony and in her eyes, unexpectedly, tears.

We left at around five o'clock, the choir still reverberating with the echoes of the monks chanting. From the grassy moat of the Chateau d'Angers, a great deer, bizarre at that hour of the night, stared at our headlights with the sovereign suspicion of a slave. We found without too much difficulty the little hotel in the

oldest part of the village, behind the chateau, where I had reserved a room. We had some trouble getting them to open up for us, but the room was a comfortable jewel; an overheated, delicate alcove. "If you like," hesitated the night attendant, "there is one remaining room with two twin beds." "That's not necessary; this will be fine." I bestowed upon him a generous tip, returning him without comment to his masturbatory slumbers. I turned to Nathalie. "I love you, you know." I went to her and pulled off her white angora sweater. It was like skinning a rabbit. I buried my face in her breasts; the flowers of Guerlain still lingered, if feebly.

It was a short and exquisite night, full of caresses, touches, little valleys conquered and reconquered. At a certain moment, as she hollowed her loins under my fingers, a line from Racine came to me and would not leave. I covered her with kisses for two hours, all the while repeating, like an idiot, "her haunches curve in tortuous folds..." Monstrous love. Later, as she slept, a statue from head to foot, I stared at her for a long time, and insidiously my gaze would stray beyond her body, beyond her curves, and fix obstinately on the double curtains that kept out the gray day. In that Christmas dawn, I experienced as never before the feeling of loneliness that grabs at your heart when you are in love in order to remind you, in black and white, that there are more ferocious pains than those imposed by physical torture.1 I stretched out beside her, her buttocks against my belly, my hand cupped around one breast. A thick silence rose from outside. I no longer heard her breathe, but the heat of her skin inundated my belly—as if she might have died, yet remained burning long after death.

Notes 1. It's as Pascal says—Love cannot be written, whereas one can infinitely describe an erotic situation, to the point of trying the reader's patience. That morning, with her fingers or mouth buried in Nathalie, her fingers skimming over her flesh, Florence did not want to describe anything in detail. The evidence of a total love, body and soul.

Chapter X

Early January

" J. P.? Can you be free tomorrow night?" "Tomorrow, no. The day after, if you want." "Okay. Can you come over at around seven o'clock? Nathalie will be here. With a surprise. We're going to take a lot of photos, but I'll bring the camera and all the materials. Okay?" I hung up. I never spend a lot of time on the telephone. I don't like not seeing people's faces. I spent the next day searching for a hood in boutiques specializing in clothing of that sort; I had an idea of what it should look like but wasn't sure, exactly. It wasn't easy: too much mock leather, too many spangles. I finally found what I was looking for in a sex shop off of Place Blanche. A leather hood—made of calfskin, the salesman specified—that completely covered the head, and attached in back with three straps. Not an executioner's mask, but his victim's. The placement of the eyes and nose were marked, as if for a mask, by an appropriate indenture, but there was only a hole for the mouth—a hole as round as a scream. Once inside, she would be only a blind cry. Then I gave in to an old fantasy, and bought a twelve-inch dildo made of an indeterminate substance that looked like the skin of a peach. It attached at the waist with a belt; there were

two strings that passed between the thighs and retied just above the small of the back. That leaves free access to my body, I thought. The salesman gave me a discount for the two items because I didn't have enough cash on me, and I didn't want to pay by check, only to receive God knows what sort of "promotional" material in the mail. *** I put everything on the bed: the hood; the chains, both big and small; the pair of handcuffs; the whip, crop, and dildo. I carefully set up all the photographic material we would use: the lights and projectors, two umbrellas, and two tripods with the cameras already in place. They were loaded with a very sensitive, high-speed black-and-white film that would keep the exposure time relatively short and thus allow for a certain spontaneity. I preferred at the last minute to change the lenses already in place to a very practical 28-135 that would allow us to vary the perspective without seeming to. We would gain in manageability what we would lose in lighting. I put the heat up as high as it would go and pulled the double curtains. I took a shower, made myself up very carefully, and perfumed myself with Guerlain's L'Heure Bleu. My stomach was in knots—as if I were a virgin and this were my big night. J. P. arrived first, as planned. With one look, he understood. "It's for real tonight, Flo?" "I hate it when you call me Flo," I said. My voice was completely unrecognizable. He shrugged his shoulders and checked the cameras. "It's pointless to leave a UV filter on the lenses," he complained. Pointless, indeed.

Nathalie arrived at around eight o'clock in the evening. She was wearing, as I had asked, a long blue dress—nearly a sheath—made of cashmere, buttoned in front from top to bottom, which I had given her a little while before then. "I'm not wearing anything underneath," she said after she took off her coat. I kissed her. She looked at the bed encumbered with instruments. She laughed, crazy girl. "Are you going to hurt me very badly tonight, Flo?" "I hate it when you call me Flo," I repeated. J. P. popped the cork of a bottle of champagne, and we toasted each other agreeably, all the while talking of this and that, and of the good luck we wished each other for the new year. I saw Nathalie occasionally glance at the bed and the threatening objects placed there. She got up and seized the dildo. "How does this go on?" she asked. "Undress," I said. "You do it," she replied. One by one, I undid the buttons of her dress.1 She really didn't have on anything underneath. In passing, I noted she had carefully shaved and plucked her mound; she was as hairless as a baby's cheek. I leaned over and kissed her lightly. In my turn, I made myself naked. "It goes on like this," I said, attaching the artificial penis to my hips. Now that it bobbed in its harness, it seemed ridiculously large. More like a satyr's phallus than a real cock. I am not very tall, and I had the bizarre, incongruous impression that I was attached to the end of this oddity, and not the reverse. I patiently joined all the rings of her body with the little chains I had bought: her ears to her nose, her nose to her breasts, her breasts to her cunt. Then we draped her with jewelry: earrings and necklaces, oversized, chunky bracelets, and ankle chains. I put a finger in the furrow of her sex and kissed her. I played

for several instants with the ring that pierced her clitoris. She was soaked. She murmured: "Is it going to hurt a lot?" "Of course it's going to hurt a lot, idiot." "So much the better. I love you." She returned my kiss with renewed passion, with fire. J. P. handcuffed her from behind. I got a chair and attached a goodsized, rather short chain to a ring in the ceiling. "Lift your arms," I told her. She had to raise herself a bit on tiptoe. I attached the handcuffs to the chain hanging from the ceiling.

She looks strange like that: nude, elongated by the chain. Her hands are like imprisoned birds in the handcuffs. I walk around her, the oversized sex attached to my waist. I caress her slowly, delicately—lengthily. I have to get on tiptoe to kiss or lick her ear or neck. Our reflection in the mirror is not without dubious interest. J. P., who from the beginning has been as discreet as possible ("You've organized this, I am only a tool," he tells me in a flash of clarity) finishes the first roll of film, reloads the camera, and has Nathalie drink another glass of champagne. He remains completely dressed, but his feet are bare. The wine runs from her hps to her neck and breasts, sparkles against her cunt. I rub the synthetic penis against her buttocks as if it were real. I place it between her thighs. She groans. "Take me," she murmurs. I shake my head. I look at J. P. He has returned to his camera. I know he already sees nothing except for the shots he imagines as he experiments with the zoom, without pushing on the button. I insert the dildo into Nathalie's cunt, but just a little—a third of its length, maybe. She groans again and tries to bend

over, in spite of her uncomfortable position, so I can penetrate her completely. I pull out of her, go to the bed, and pick up the whip. In the mirror, J. P., his finger poised on the camera. The instant is frozen. I caress Nathalie with the hard strap. She looks me in the eye. "Tell me you love me," she says. "I love you," I echo. "I love you."

Everything that follows belongs to the history of cataclysms. I don't try to whip her methodically. I beat her in front and back, sparing her nothing, then suddenly hitting her very hard. She twists around, and the tip of the lash that has just torn into her shoulders bites into her breasts with its next blow. The little chains and jewels clatter. I hear the ceaseless clicks of the cameras. Little by little the marks of the blows are superimposed over the network of metal holding her. It is as if she is covered with an irregular pattern of brown and purple traces. The whip strikes the nipple of her right breast and half tears the ring from its hole in the flesh. It bleeds abundantly. Sometimes I enchain the blows very quickly, without giving her body time to immobilize itself, and the whip strikes haphazardly. Sometimes I spy in the mirror the moment when her blond body stops twisting at the end of its chain, and I return to purposeful blows on her breasts, thighs, or back. An alternating-ly baroque and classical syntax. I did not count, but I must have hit her at least fifty times with all my strength. Nathalie held on until the thirtieth blow, then cried out or groaned with each one that followed. I had already heard her scream, of course, but she would do so very rarely, as if ,taken by surprise, when her mistreated flesh

protested briefly. But that night I wanted her to be nothing but nerves on fire, lacerated flesh. Passion itself. Crucified. I throw the whip to the floor. She twists about for several instants at the end of the chain. I go to her, kiss her, pull on the small chains and rings to wrest from her new cries. I stand on tiptoe and undo the handcuffs. She slides to her knees as if in slow motion. I pull her to me and kiss her all over. Her skin is burning. At the tip of her breast, her blood tastes of earth and iron. I take her by the hair and put her on all fours, then get behind her and push into her cunt, doggy-style. I hear only the successive clicks of the cameras. I don't manage to get the enormous dildo all the way in. I fuck her more violently than a brute animal—like the hermaphrodite rapist I am. She screams with each thrust, as she had earlier at the whip's blows. I pull out from her cunt. I adjust the synthetic organ between her buttocks and sodomize her as she has never been— as if I were impaling her, as if I wanted to pierce her to the heart and come out through her mouth. As deeply as I can go. She screams again, so monstrous is the tearing of her anus; no matter that she is used to it. I want to chase from her ass the memory of the cocks buried there. With each thrust of my loins, the base of the dildo pushes against my sex, nearly painfully. I want to ejaculate. Knowing I cannot makes me even more savage. I want to be taken as I am taking Nathalie—harder, even. I turn toward J. P. "Come here, please." He shakes his head. "Beat me." Again he refuses and continues to take photographs, imperturbable. Nathalie rests her forehead against her bound hands, her

loins raised high, offering herself totally to the dildo's thrusts. I pull the cock out of her ass and put it in her vagina again, this time for several strokes back and forth. Then I sodomize her again, as if to kill her.

Time stood still. Fucked like that, did she come? She did not stop crying. I don't know how to describe the pleasure I felt. Nor how to qualify the pleasure she felt.

I pull out of her, her ass so round, so delicate; striped with love, gaping like an open door. A bloody foam is coming out of it. "Get on your feet," I say, helping her to stand. I reattach her to the chain from the ceiling as before. I go to the bed and pick up the long crop. From the first blow, she screams. She yells with each impact, as if each blow plunges her into a horror without end. I beat her maybe twenty times. The swellings made by the crop, nearly all straight, are superimposed upon by the more irregular, confused lines of the whip. The skin has broken in a dozen places. On the final blows, she bends her knees, suspended by all her weight from the chain attached to the handcuffs. Her imprisoned hands are open and begging, as if she were trying to fly away. I am lost. The mirror throws back to me the image of a disheveled reveler, outside of herself, the horrible dildo dangling. J. P. does not stop taking photographs. I almost believe he is hiding himself discreetly behind the cameras in order not to take part in my delirium.

I throw down the crop. I glue myself to Nathalie's body, bring her back to consciousness, cover her with kisses. She turns her hps to mine. Under her tears, her makeup is slowly disintegrating. God, she is beautiful like that! Passion. Suffering. Death and resurrection. When there is no longer any reason, there is no reason to stop. I am on my knees, between her legs. I spread her thighs, slide my tongue over her sex, and drink for a long time. With my mouth, I pull on the little chain connecting her clitoris to her breasts. She emits a sort of hiccup of suffering. My fingers push inside her more. Her vagina sucks them up and she comes, bleeding. The big artificial cock beats between my thighs as if a part of me. I turn towards J. P. "Take her," I say. "No," he says, his eye still riveted to the camera. "Please." "No," he repeats. His mind seems made up. On tiptoe, I undo the hook and unlock the handcuffs. If I had not supported her, she would have fallen to the floor like a rag doll. Gently I help her to her knees. She tumbles forward on her shackled hands. Her cunt, breasts, back, buttocks, and thighs are no more than a mass of purple streaks, meandering swellings, illegible. I get rid of my artificial cock, throwing it to the ground as I have everything else. I take the hood from the bed. I go to Nathalie, pulling her up and placing her back on her knees. Steadily I undo the chains from her ears, nose, and breasts, letting them fall with all their weight to her cunt. I put on the hood, which is difficult because her mass of

blond hair, its curls wet with sweat, keeps slipping free of the slick leather. She is nothing more than an indistinct form, without a face, without eyes, just a mouth. She pants loudly because she is suffocating, and because she thought it was all over with and is afraid again. I stand her up, reattach her to the ceiling. Again I caress her. I have the singular sensation, as I draw my hand over the swellings, that they are a countryside of vales and dells and shadows on her skin, so beautiful and clear. I take the razor J. P. gave me and open it.2 Steadily, with maniacal precision, without pushing down, I slice open the welts on her body, one by one. The violet blood boiling under the raised skin flows in little rivers down her chest, back, buttocks, and legs.

Sometimes I stop for a few instants and finger myself. I am on the brink of coming, so I wait for an instant until my breathing calms before beginning to torture her again. Each time the burning of the razor recalls her to life, she groans strangely, like an animal and, with a sort of convulsion, throws several drops of blood to the light-colored floor. I am standing completely pressed against her. I drink in her warmth, rub against her unstitched skin, inundate myself with blood. I kiss her on the neck and put the blade there. "Tut, tut," whispers J. P. from behind his lens. I believe he thought I was going to kill her. I believe we all thought so: Nathalie did, and I did, too. I believe I was going to cut her throat. To feel against me the blood beating crazily in her jugular vein. In the room is a bizarre odor: the very odor of fear, a nauseating perfume, fascinating, that I inhale for the first time. I stop my hand and slowly come back to myself. Nathalie hangs inert at the end of the chain.

I untie her and let her fall to the floor like an exhausted waterfall. I stay there, watching her lying at my feet, a white and red stain* a black mask, on the brown of the tiles.

I feel a displacement of air at my back. J. P. comes to me and takes me gently by the shoulders. I am frozen in place. He kisses me tenderly on the temple. "Well!" he says. There is admiration in his voice. He leans toward Nathalie and, with rapid and precise gestures undoes the hood, which he takes off by turning it inside out as if he were skinning an animal. Her eyes are closed, her nostrils pinched. Her makeup has run everywhere, collecting in gray splotches between the hood and her skin. He grabs the bottle of champagne and pours a long stream on her face. The bubbles sparkle on her skin like hydrogen peroxide on an abrasion. It takes her some time to come back to herself—as if she were coming from very far away. "Are you okay?" I ask stupidly. She has been chained like a medieval martyr, beaten and whipped nearly to death, fucked in front and from behind. She is covered with gashes where the blood is slowly coagulating, and I have just asked her if she is okay... Without saying anything, she drags herself to the wall and leans there. As paradoxical as this might seem, there is something immensely happy in her face. And also something disappointed.

J. P. returns to me, takes me by the arm, throws me on the

bed. I bury my face in the red comforter. I need something—but I don't know what. I feel his weight on me, and I open up as never before, voluntarily. He fucks my cunt as if he were carving a piece of meat. Meat. To be only meat. He pulls out of my sex, lies down on the bed, pulls me to him, and penetrates me again. His hps seek my mouth; I kiss him with the ferocity I have just put into fucking Nathalie. I press myself against him, rub against him. I wipe his chest with the blood covering me. I suddenly sense a presence behind me. I turn my head without impeding my impalement on the cock piercing my cunt. Nathalie has returned to us. In her hand she is holding the dick I had thrown to the ground. Hallucinatory. I hardly recognize her under her tragic mask, a watercolor of blood and mascara. She puts the dildo to her labia, rubs it against her sex, then buries it between my buttocks clumsily, as if she were screwing it in. It hurts so much that my whole body moves in an effort to escape the impossible double penetration. J. P. pulls me tightly against him, his mouth on mine, his arm encircling me. He glues me to him and keeps me jammed down on his cock, and Nathalie is able to get the oversized rod all the way up my ass. I want to scream, but he drinks my cries from my lips. I want to escape this monstrous rape. I want them both to be longer and bigger. I don't know what I want. I want to come, because it seems to me they will stop hurting me if they see me come. I don't want to come, because I could open myself even more, and I want them to fuck me for an eternity. The blunt rod of the dildo rams the wall of my asshole, presses against, the other rod of flesh burning in my cunt.

I feel him ejaculate inside me—or was it her? I see the jets of sperm rush into me, cover my dilated mucous membranes, look for a way out of the impasse... She lets go of the dildo, leaving it stuck inside me. Then she slides her hand to my pussy, seizes my clitoris, and twists it gently between her fingers. It is my turn to come as if possessed. It is after midnight. Nathalie dozes in a warm bath full of creamy soap. I am lying on my back, my millionth glass of champagne in my hand. I have the impression my cunt has been torn open. My soul too, besides. J. P. meticulously puts away the photographic materials. On the wall where Nathalie leaned are long streaks of blood.

Notes 1. Did Florence consciously copy a scene from Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women? Her story is full of these reminiscences, whether voluntary or not. 2. On the photos I took at that moment, Florence looks insane. I think she was.

Chapter XI

January., Later

After that crazy night, our relationship cooled. It was as if we had said what was essential. It took a long time for Nathalie's scars to fade, and I followed the phases of their efface-ment with a curious detachment. The swellings caused by the whip and crop turned purple, then yellow. The gashes scarred over, leaving only faint lines, whiter still than her skin. Through instinct she came to see me less often. One afternoon, returning home, I found her stretched out on the bed, completely dressed, shaking with sobs. I could never get her to say what was wrong. Even the fact I had to ask proved my indifference, and she sensed that. I decided to give up the Sophocles play and write an original production on Tiresias and the myth of the androgyne, with a hermaphroditic character at its center. I looked in vain for a young actor to play the role, then a young actress. By silent mutual agreement, J. P. and I no longer made love. We continued to work together, our efficiency increasing tenfold. He no longer called me "my love" and kept himself from touching me.1 My spirit was drained and my soul depleted, with no desire to be filled. I made love to Nathalie twice, and each time I was distracted.

Once at least I was sure she faked an orgasm. Her piercings began to appear vaguely ridiculous. In this way, January passed. *** I had never been to Nathalie's house—I had gone there to pick her up but had never been inside. I had extracted her address with difficulty that December by promising to write her. And I had written her, besides. To tell her I loved her. That I needed her. Put into writing, it sounded false. When you love someone, it always sounds false. The letters J. P. occasionally sent me were more credibly eloquent—since he did not love me, I thought. I returned to her mother's, to that sordid project in Cr£teil. I arrived at around six o'clock at night. All the streetlights were out this time. The slums. I rang. Several times. I was going to give up when I heard the noise of a footfall. "Who's there?" A terrible voice. Blow for blow, question for question. "Is Nathalie there?" I asked. A beat. The door opened. Behind it, Nathalie, thirty years later. Her mother, obviously. She reeked of alcohol. Was dressed in that housedress of faded flowers that becomes the second skin of the drunks you see in the movies.2 "Nathalie is not here," she said. A cavernous voice, dark and broken. "Mama?" A little girl dressed like a two-dollar whore paraded into the frame. "Hello," she said. "I'm Clara, Nathalie's sister. Come in."

The mother didn't budge, and her daughter pushed her with her elbow to let me get by. I entered as if committing a crime, as if breaking into a mausoleum. A sanctuary. The walls were covered with photos in frames of varied but particularly mediocre taste, of a man in his thirties. Slightly bearded. A fighter. An odor reigned of recently extinguished votive candles and incense. I must have looked completely stupid. "Would you like something to drink?" "No, no, thank you." I had answered mechanically. "Doesn't know what's good," said the voice from beyond the grave. She poured herself a large glass of rotgut white wine. Its smell mingled with the odors of the crypt, and I felt slightly nauseated and really wanted to get out of there. The girl (she might have been fifteen) enjoyed my surprise. "Takes your breath away, huh?" she said. She gestured about the room. "My father," she said, as if she were continuing the introductions. "I never knew him," she added. "At least, I don't remember him." The terrible voice sounded: "She wasn't two years old when he left." .• "Left?" "Mama means when he died" Clara said, shrugging her shoulders. "Not for anything in this world will she say the word. I'm not afraid to, though." Then suddenly: "Would you like to see Nathalie's room?" I acquiesced. Several steps took us from the main cavern. The mourning continued in the other rooms. There were niches surrounded by small lit candles, as one sees on Italian

street corners, illuminated pots of round red votive candles, like in churches. Her room...my God, she was as crazy as her mother! The same yellowed, enlarged, exceedingly grainy photos. A littie bed, like a bunk on a ship. "The photos," Clara explained, "are there because Mama says that way, he's always here. He watches over us." She shrugged her shoulders. "It's only lies." She took me into her room. It was a typical adolescent's room. On the walls were the usual posters of imbecilic singers. "Explain to me—" she began. She did not continue, then was evasive. "You're the girl that...well, that my sister—" She hesitated. "You know, she's not such a great catch. She's nuts. Just like my mother, but with her it's not alcohol. I have nothing against her, though. She's taken good care of me. God, she really chewed me out when I flunked out of school!" She lit a cigarette. She ought to have capitalized on her youth, and yet suddenly she looked like what she was: a teenager burdened with big tits, in a family of crazies, who did what she could to survive. By taking snapshots—isolating scenes. "My father died before I was three years old. I remember what people told me. Nathalie was with him in the car." "He died in an accident?" "Immediately, they tell me. Nathalie was in the back. Not a scratch on her." The monstrous voice rang out from the door: "My daughter was covered with blood! Do you know what happened? She used to horse around all the time in the car. He probably reached back to calm her, restrain her, I don't know. And look what happened!" Then: "Do you want to see her dress? Her little dress? Do you want to see it?" She darted into the neighboring room and came back brandishing a chiffon dress covered with little flowers and spotted all over with rust.

"Here's her dress!" She threw it in my face. "Mama!" Clara jumped in front of her, pushed her back, and closed the door. "God, I can't stand this screwy family!" I picked up the little dress at my feet. It was indeed splotched with rust-colored blood. "You didn't notice, of course, but the dress is tacked up above Nathalie's bed. Did you see her bed? It's been the same for twelve years. She's bigger than you are, but she sleeps in a child's bed. You've seen her sleep, haven't you? Doubled over." It was true she slept curled in two—worse than a fetus, folded over upon a secret I was only beginning to understand. But I had never really paid attention. I would spoon against her buttocks... "Don't trust her," Clara continued. "She's lost her marbles, and long ago, at that." "I love her very much," I said. She hesitated. "You sleep with her, right? Look, I don't give a damn if you do; I prefer guys. The young ones are good for having fun, and the old ones for the money. I dress myself up like Lolita, and there you go. That puts a little money in the bank. Do I shock you? Nathalie did it before me. But in my case, it's only for the money. I'm the best cocksucker at my school. I don't shock you, do I? I know what you two do together. She has the right to get off as she likes, doesn't she? After all, it's not the happy times that have hurt her, these past ten years." The sentences came out like bursts of gunfire, and during the pauses my imagination would get stuck, as if in a corner. The idea that Nathalie had "happy times" with me made me smile. "Tell me one thing," I said. "If I can." "How do the three of you survive?" "Oh, that. Mama has a small pension from my father's death, which she drinks up. I get by—enough to pay for school. Not

through vice, don't think that. I take care of the retired people in the neighborhood. They want to be visited. Touched. I do a little something nice for them. Two hundred francs, quickly earned. As for Nathalie—" "Yes?" "I don't know exactly. Really! She peddles her tail, a little. But not like I do. She does it with disgusting guys. Bruisers. Real assholes. She carries the bag for some very nasty guys—heroin, I think. She looks nice, she doesn't use, doesn't drink, so she gets across the border with a smile. Once she had in her purse more money than I've ever seen. I think that's what she's into now. Money laundering. She knows some dangerous guys." It was completely reassuring. That explained the luxurious clothes and perfume—and the trips, no doubt. "Don't hurt her," Clara said suddenly. "She's a good girl, deep down. Crazy, but nice." "Why do you want—" "She's not doing well right now, I think. But I wouldn't know how to say—" The door opened on Nathalie's mother. "You really don't want a drink?" She had the moist forehead and unmistakable odor of a professional drunk. She blocked the entrance to the room. Clara went to her mother, took her by the arm, and gendy opened the passage. "She didn't come back this morning. I don't know where she is," Clara said, as I was edging toward the door. The ghost on the walls watched me try to escape without commentary. Night was falling like soot. Why did girls have to die of the deaths of their fathers? And why did I have to kill him, too?

***


The car stopped beside us at the red light. Driver and passenger looked straight ahead, saying nothing. The woman's cheeks were creased with silent tears. Nathalie turned toward me, taking me by the hand. "Save her, Florence, save her!" she said. Already too late, the light changed to green, and the car pulled away. "It's too stupid," she said. "Stupid." She appeared on the brink of tears.3 *** (Here is interpolated a scene I don't remember without feeling confused and irritated—the state in myself that comes closest to guilt.) She had disappeared for several days, as she did sometimes. She arrived one afternoon, beautiful and fresh, a tormented look in her eyes. I was working; she was bothering me, and I let her know it. "I know," she said. "I know I'm disturbing you." "Then why did you come over?" "I want you to explain why you treat me this way." "What way?" "You loved me two weeks ago." "But I still love you. It's just that I don't have the time to take the time. The days go by, the deadline for my presentation is drawing near, and I still haven't decided anything. I think I'm going to forget about Oedipus and write a play with the double as its theme—the double torn apart: the original androgyne, and the myth of Tiresias: dance, mime, and theater. Didn't J. P. mention it?" "No, I don't know anything about it, and I don't give a damn. I just want to know why you treat me like this." "Like what?" "Worse jthan a dog. A dog gets touched. Sometimes it gets beaten. It's given a hand to lick. It gets loved."

"Here," I said. "Lick my hand." I held out my closed fist. She seized it, unfolded my fingers slowly, traced the interior of my palm, kissed my luck line. "Nathalie, I don't want to." "Take me," she said, as if she had heard nothing. Anyway, that's how things were. No longer hearing each other, no longer getting along. "Very well," I said. I freed my hand. "Where were you?" "In Jersey," she said. Among all her exotic destinations, that was one of the most unexpected. "Are you kidding me? You visited the land of the Anglo-Normans in January?" "Banks have no seasons." "So it's true, Nathalie? You launder dirty money?" "Temporarily dirty. It comes out clean, as clean as a new penny. I'm the only thing that stays dirty." "How much money do you have on you?" The question surprised her. "I don't know. Two, three hundred francs, perhaps." "It's not enough. I won't do it for that price. Come back when you're richer." She had tears in her eyes, and the scene had begun to please me. "How much would it take?" "That depends on what you want. For two or three hundred francs, I'll take off my clothes. But you can't touch me." "Suppose I kiss you?" "Not on the mouth. Never with clients. You can have everything else, if you have enough money. But not my mouth." "Your breasts?" "Two hundred more. What do you want to do to them?" "Love them," she said. "Well, then, four hundred more. You may kiss them, suck

them, bite them, cut them, then do it all again. But my feelings are not for sale today." "Your cunt?" "What do you want to do?" "Kiss it. Suck it. Bite it." "A thousand francs. But I don't come. And I won't take care of you." "I don't give a damn. But I'll make you come in spite of yourself." "That would surprise me. You have to be a little bit in love in order to come."4 "Very well," she said. "Your anus?" "That most charming rosette is not for sale this season, okay? No, not my ass. Only men get my ass." She looked at me. I had worked myself up into an artificial anger, and as often happens in these cases, was now truly angry. My eyes must have flashed red. "Slap me," she said. "Beat me." "That's not available, either. It takes a specialist for that. I don't think you can afford those kinds of fantasies. Even one jab of my heel in your pussy is out of your price range." "I see," she said. She went to the chair where she had put her purse, opened it, removed an envelope, and tore it open with her teeth. Bundles and bundles of five-hundred-franc bills. She picked up one of them, removed the clip, and threw the money in my face. "What does this much get me?" she asked. The bills flew about the room and fell noiselessly at my feet. There must have been at least ten thousand francs in small denominations. '"Where did you get this money, Nathalie? I thought you had only two or three hundred francs."

"None of your business. Shall we?" Play the game?

I backed up a little bit and undressed down to my last piece of lace. I stayed there, mute, arms crossed. "Come here," she said. She undressed in her turn and thrust herself against me. Her breasts were marvelously warm, still infused with the moist heat of her sweater. "Kiss me," she ordered. "Not on the mouth, remember—" She stared at me. She leaned toward me and began to minister to my breasts, nibbling them with her teeth, teasing them with her tongue. My nipples responded before I could do anything about it. "You're hard," she said. She slid a hand between my thighs and caressed me with an assertive rudeness, as an inexperienced boy might. It excited me more than I wanted it to. "You're hard," she repeated. She took me in her arms and we found ourselves on the floor, her hands all over me, her mouth buried in my sex. I began to pant, then got control again. I remembered some advice J. P. had given me when I had asked him how he could keep from coming for so long. It had stayed with me forever. "It's simple," he had said. "You must be able to control your breathing, as if you were diving at the bottom of an angry sea, and recite to yourself a text that has nothing at all to do with the situation. Something from Corneille, for example. How many times have I found myself mumbling lines from the battle of El Cid against the Moors while buried deep in an asshole or a mouth—" That had nothing to do with the current situation. The first

thing that came to me was Tartuffe—"Oh, close my heart, seat of human weakness," as Orgon says to Marianne—and I was the one playing Marianne. But there was still too much sensuality in Tartuffe. Corneille, perhaps? Well, nothing's more unerotic, if I may say so, than to say to oneself, "Rome, the sole object of my feeling," while an expert mouth explores each fold of your vulva, a tongue wriggles up your clitoral flower, and innumerable fingers dig inside of you... It's true, then. The sublime kills eroticism in a single blow. She finished by lifting her head, surprised, disappointed. "I see," she said. She got up. "You want to play the whore? Then I'm going to treat you like a whore."5

Without warning she slapped me, hard. "I'm warning you, you've got to show results." She went to the dressing table where I kept my trinkets and baubles and dug through them rapidly, returning with a long silk scarf. "Lie down on the bed. No, on your back." She took my wrists, bound them together, then tied them to the headboard—just as I had myself so often attached her. She opened my legs and put her pussy against my mouth. "Lick me," she said. Her voice was sharp, so cold it was almost unrecognizable. All the while I caressed her, she did not stop talking. "Do better than that; put in your tongue; no, deeper; go back to the clit now. No, not so hard. Don't pull on the ring as if you were going to tear it out. I don't want you to hurt me today. You, however, are going to get hurt, Flo. I know, you hate it when people call you Flo. Lick my cunt—better than that! Wait, I'll pull apart my asscheeks. Stick in your tongue—deeper than that. Harder with your tongue...way down to the bottom—"

She was extremely wet, like always, but although I strained to hear her falter, or speak with a different inflection, it was in vain—she spoke with icy mastery, her orders clearly articulated with the most precise words she could dispose of. "You're lousy, you poor girl. Hasn't anyone ever told you you're lousy? It would take a stretch of imagination for me to come right now. Poor little faggot, you've got no dick! You get yourself fucked, then pout about having to suck it afterwards, under the pretext it smells of shit! What were you saying earlier when I was eating you? Whore! You pitiful whore! Lick me better than that! I paid you, didn't I?" She freed herself and, standing near the bed, leaned over me. "You're not worth it," she said. In a corner of the room, she found the long black whip; she came back holding it in her palm. "J. P. has already hit you with this, right?" She cracked it with all her strength across my thighs. I screamed—what else could I do? I screamed with each blow, which didn't seem to move her at all.

At a certain moment—very quickly, in fact—I understood she would go farther than anyone ever had—that she was going to exceed my limits, go beyond the pain principle, the point at which pain can still become pleasure, the burning warmth, the whip a caress. I understood I would be hurt—and nothing but hurt. I would be at once the thorns and the forehead, the wrists and the nails, the lance and the side, passion and death. There was no doubt of it. Worked over. Open, covered with long lacerations in all directions, from my belly to my knees. The blows followed so closely I didn't have time to catch my breath, and my successive cries drowned out each other. She hit me with all her strength, and the skin swelled and

burst open a little bit everywhere, especially on my nipples where the whip struck sideways, and at my hips and shoulder blades. She came back up towards my breasts, and I thought I was going to faint—it would have been so nice, so comfortable to faint. But no, the pain merely changed tone, biting into the soft flesh of my breasts. She seemed enraged, for the moment. Bacchanalia. Lost in that drunkenness of inflicting pain I had known myself, when I tortured her. I thought afterwards it was her love for me she was punishing, or herself, perhaps, in the person of the object of her love. Or was it jealousy-—the idea that until now only J. P. had had the right to chastise me? Or did she want to teach me something, something I had been refusing to learn these long months? As for me—I was a little piece of panting flesh. An uninterrupted cry, as in Paul Eluard's uninterrupted poetry. I am the pen and the paper, I am the ink and the blood. Scratched, torn. The words ran together. In place of the precise pain of the beginning, which leapt from me with each blow, was substituted an undifferentiated, throbbing suffering. I felt as if I were a blind pupa caught in a terrifying cocoon. She stopped long enough for me to turn over. Because I had jumped a lot and twisted away to escape the bite of the whip, which continued to strike me with mechanical regularity, she paused long enough to attach my ankles to the bed with two other scarves. My legs were slightly spread apart. For an instant, I thought we were going to stop there. She slid her hand between my thighs and grabbed me, crablike, opening my legs without gentleness, forcing my cunt open with her thumb, scratching me on the way in, tearing me, exposing the interior of my inundated cunt. I'd never experienced anything like it before. When J. P. would whip me, he would dole out the strength and frequency of his blows, stopping just when excitation would disappear beneath the

pain—probably because in the end he beat me as much for him as for me. But Nathalie had beaten me with a rage that resembled altruism, had horsewhipped me with a savagery that immediately surpassed erotic subtexts. I was only an immense pain, and my sex ran like skin recovering from a terrible burn. She let go of me. I heard her rummaging in the bureau; then she returned.

I still had the strength to scream when she jammed the dildo between my buttocks, dry, pushing it in with all her weight. I reflexively resisted the intrusion by tightening and contracting my buttocks. That only made things worse. When she forced me more, she tore my anus—at least that's what it felt like—I was going to remain wounded for life, definitively open. In a sort of spasm my loins lifted, and she profited from the way my back involuntarily arched to push the synthetic dick all the way in to the flange. Then she tied the whip tresses together, tightly, to close me up. I sobbed convulsively. "Poor little baby," she murmured, caressing my cheek. "Poor little girl whose little fanny hurts—"

I screamed again, though more weakly, when the whip began to strike me again, just as pitilessly, from the backs of my knees to the middle of my back. Then there was a strange sort of floating, in which I passed into a state beyond pain.6

Several times, between blows, I murmured, "I love you," as if the bite of the whip had forced the words from me, but it was as if I did not know who I was talking to, as if I were reaching

beyond Nathalie, to have myself heard by the quick and the dead. The whistle of the hard lash beating down, my skin being opened, my back getting flayed, and these sobs escaping from me: "I love you, I love you, I love you—" All of this made it abundandy clear that my words were not addressed to Nathalie nor to anyone in my present life. They were addressed to a phantom, the first one whom I had—so badly—loved, whom I had betrayed when I left with my mother, the first one who had loved me, body and soul—to whom I was always a little girl or boy. My tears changed in nature and destination. There was something terribly soft in my despair, something that deconstructed me at the same time as it made me emerge from my ruins.

Did Nathalie understand where she had taken me? She stopped beating me and threw the whip to the other side of the room. I turned my head towards her. She was picking up the bills scattered about the floor. She must have felt me watching her, for she smiled without enthusiasm. "This money is not mine," she said. "And you're not worth this much, anyway." She stuffed the wad back in her purse, put on her coat, dug into her pocket. She came close to the bed. In her hand she had a one-hundred-franc bill. "Here," she said. "For the pain." She leaned over me and thrust the bill between my buttocks, jamming it beneath the tip of the dildo still planted deep inside me. "I love you very much, you know." She seemed to be thinking of something else. She left without untying me. Time passed. I slowly returned to myself. My whole body was on fire. I was terribly thirsty.

I tugged without success on the scarves binding me. There is nothing less compassionate than silk. I thought she would come back, untie me, kiss me. No. Not that day. We had done too much together. J. P. untied me the following morning. I had brooded and cried for hours—as if all those tears had accumulated in me for years, without my being able to get out, and a floodgate had suddenly opened. I was very cold. Then I fell into a comatose sleep. Waking, I pissed myself. The bill jammed between my buttocks stuck out, J. P. said, like an obscene provocation. He removed the dildo gently—it felt as if he were extracting one of my internal organs. The pain returned en masse. I was dying of thirst. He gave me a glass of water, then made coffee, and while waiting for it to be ready, put me under the shower. I was one huge abrasion. The whip had flayed me like arable ground. "Nathalie?" he asked, soaping me with infinite precautions. I nodded. He made no comment. He opened the window to air out the room, but to little avail. When I came back from the bathroom, the bitter odor of adrenaline, blood, and shit leapt to my nostrils. He made the bed, tucked me in gently, and served me a large cup of coffee. We hadn't exchanged three words. I wanted him to take me right there, immediately. Luckily, he did nothing. Expressed or not, there are some desires that others do well to resist. He kissed me tenderly, paternally. I was nothing more than a rag doll. Lazarus must have felt like this when he emerged from his winding sheet. I started to cry, then fell asleep against my clean and slightly damp pillow. When I wake up several hours later, he is sleeping next to me. As if he were dead.

The impression of being no more than an immense scar. A dull pain, with sudden, more violent flashes, sears my loins. On the nightstand lies Nathalie's one-hundred-franc bill, full of bloodstains. *** "How did it happen?" I ask. "That I came by? Luck. I found a poem for you. I wanted to read it to you." "For me? Did you write it?" "No, of course not. Here, read it." He hands me a photocopy. There is a painting by Dali on the left. On the right, a drawing in pen and ink, the disturbing mask of an emaciated man, grimacing. Just above, this title: "The Persistence of Memory." Lower, a movie still, and I recognize Serrault holding Isabelle Huppert on his knees, while Aurore Clement watches in the opening of a door. Beside the photo, surrounded by a stroke of yellow highlighter, are these lines:

Papa "My sweet Daddy, you hurt me," she said. But the papa who felt the fire in the engine a little below his belly button raped— in the tunnel of the garden, in the middle of the cave that inspired her— Violette, who then returned to her studies and, betwixt the author of her sorrow, and the mother meditating upon her vengeance, finished her next day's homework in which people proclaimed the holiness of the family.

It was signed: Benjamin Péret. I look at J. P., disbelieving: "Where did you find this?" "Hard to believe, isn't it? The Violette from the text is Violette Nozieres, whom the Surrealists made so much of. I thought it would interest you." He has good intuition sometimes. "Who's in the mask on the right?" "I checked: it's a portrait of Freud by Dali. Exactly what it needed." "Don't make too much of it, J. P. Don't make too much of it." I fall asleep later thinking that some imaginary assaults are more violent than actual rapes. *** A long winter month passed. I scarred over. A curious feeling of mourning overtook me and I grew accustomed to living with it. In my work, I kept trying to unite Plato and Tiresias. I imagined a ballet of intertwined bodies that separated little by little, then tried to find each other again—in vain. From this chaos emerged the character of Tiresias, but I had not yet decided if I would have a girl or boy play the part, because I did not imagine anyone in the role besides myself. Nathalie did not call me for a good two weeks. Then she reappeared as if nothing had happened ("Hello, how are you?")—but without waiting for the answer, as in the banal small talk of the real world. She gave herself to me again with much tenderness and much insignificance. I cannot rid myself of the impression, still, that tenderness is a means of camouflaging that one no longer has very much to say. Notes 1.Twice I brought her girls, always under the pretext of photographing them. She would make them up, and we would take shots of them from every angle.

Each of them consented to a threesome on the condition that Florence would merely be a bridge between her and myself, in order to exonerate herself of all suspicion of lesbianism. Both times, the scenario unrolled with the same implacable logic. The girl would begin by tolerating Florence's caresses as long as I took care of—how shall I say it—the main activities of the scene. Then she would end up bobbing away at Florence's belly like a buoy, trying to return a hundred times over the pleasure that had been given her. Neither one of them had ever been sodomized, or so they said. Florence's mouth on their clitorises made them accept without complaint the dick that tore open their assholes—because I took them without excessive tenderness. Both tried to see her again. She would get undressed, but first there was, in one way or another, a plenary session in which we showed them the photos, some of which were taken at the height of passion. An exquisite moment of embarrassment. Reddened cheeks. Then smiles, abandon, and an orgy that Florence and I would disassociate ourselves from rather quickly. Afterwards, I would take them to a crepes restaurant where we would hold forth on the merits, not so evident to sensibilities less refined than ours, of salted butter on sweet crepes. Upon our return, they would stay only briefly; let's just say that the perfume of the flower of the chestnut tree lingers longer than they did. Florence and I would quickly show them the door. 2.Florence always had a hard time not defining herself with respect to literature, and it didn't go any better with her in this respect than with those who define themselves by television series. The body and soul built of composite images. Freedom lies in liberating oneself from the perpetual flow of the soap opera. 3.This is the only moment, in these too-truthful memoirs, in which Nathalie demonstrates a penchant for altruism. But I note, rereading this, how much this scene appears fabricated. Perhaps that's how we recognize real charity: it rings false. Too bad. 4.The naiveté of such an affirmation! That's how life is: in the heat of the moment, one says stupid things. And wisdom comes too late. 5.Nathalie knew what she was talking about. Very shortly afterwards, she gave me a brief glimpse of her autobiography. I still remember she had written, with that extraordinary taste she had for the crudest words: "You know why men go to whores? Of course the majority do it to have done what their spouses won't do. If all of,the proper ladies in the world knew how to suck cock, three-quarters of the professionals would be out of a job. But some men ask for much more than their wives would know how to give them, even when willing. I prostituted myself to earn enough to pay for my school and my sister's; my

mother drank up the rest. You can't imagine how far I went for money. I was sixteen years old and some days, I didn't even feel like a woman anymore. Not human, either. Not even animal. I had become the collar and leash. As obedient as a stone. A piece of flesh. Real debasement is not when someone butt-fucks you—after all, that's just something that will give you pleasure—but when you must offer your cunt to the German shepherd owned by the very respectable guy in the far stairway, who has such adorable blond children, and a nice, very prim and proper young wife, who doesn't know that her husband is paying the young bimbo in the near stairway, second floor, to eat out his ass with her tongue, then lick his feet, while he whips her with his belt buckle. That he ties her up spread-eagle, her legs raised high, then buries into her cunt all the fruit and vegetables he can find, the ones his kids will eat later, the bananas for their afternoon snack, the zucchini and eggplant for the evening's ratatouille, and don't forget the Coke bottles. That he smears dog food on her pussy, and she cries from the depths of her soul because even when she feels the dog's teeth rooting about in her labia, she knows she'll come back next week anyway, because she desperately needs the one thousand francs. That he'll ask her to fuck the dog next." Without entirely believing her, I loved hearing these details, if only because I wanted to witness her frenzy of autodebasement, her complicity in the destruction of herself; then I would lustfully kiss that mouth that had nonetheless perhaps fornicated with dogs. 6.Good torturers can sense, through their victims' cries, that particular moment when the brain reverses the messages, or refuses, at the very least, to transmit suffering. They know when to stop, how to leave their prey the time to come back from this side of ecstasy, all in order to be able to make them suffer all over again.

Chapter XII

February

I masturbated rarely then. At least, not while alone. I did it sometimes, of course, while making love—as when you want to climax quickly, but your orgasm is playing hide and seek, and you don't want to wait any longer, you've had enough of being there. Alone, it was extremely rare. Between J. P. and Nathalie, I had the impression of covering the entire range of my desires, or nearly. One night, I was surprised to discover I was caressing myself distractedly, with a languid finger, as in books, as if I did not know what I wanted to happen. But the story I was beginning to tell was already written in my head, though the first sentences were only then being articulated.

I am with Nathalie, bound as I have so often bound her, my spread legs flush against the headboard, my ankles tied, thighs open wide. My arms are spread, as if I were on a cross, and tied to the foot of the bed. We are alone. She strokes me, kissing me all the while (my finger becomes her finger, then is mine again, alternately), touches my breasts and pussy, jerks me off nonchalantly, much as I would do myself. Then she disappears from my line of sight. I close my eyes. I hear the terrible whistle of the whip manipulated at top

speed and feel the bite of leather between my thighs. Just as I strike her. I begin to jerk off with frenzy, and I feel, genuinely feel, the terrible punishment that covers me with blood, from the interior of my thighs to my navel. In the middle of an imaginary, thrashing denunciation, which is much more cruel than any real punishment, I come hard, my back tense, eyes rolled back in my skull. It should have ended there. My hand still plays with my overexcited flesh, and I watch, as if outside myself, without feeling anything, the sequel to the imaginary scene, the whip that rains blows, the torn sex, the blood that splatters the wall... It is no longer Nathalie beating me, but a man wearing a leather hood and clothes. It is the hood I had bought for Nathalie, but the strands of hair on his neck are gray and dull. Each blow of the whip bites away a bit of skin, a piece of flesh. He tears my sex bit by bit. Mutilation...

Finally she sees him head-on. He stops beating her and, taking two steps towards the bed, slides to his knees between her spread, worked-over thighs. Leather hood and jerkin. He opens a sort of bulging codpiece, the kind they wore in the Middle Ages, takes out a cock of Biblical proportions, and puts it in her, in the middle of her bloody bush. With each thrust of his loins he tears her. Each time he halfway pulls out of her, she has the impression his cock is covered with scales that point backwards, like a pheasant's ruff or a samurai's armor. He tears the inside of her cunt as he has already flayed the outside. Mutilation...

The man finally comes—and doesn't she know who he is, with his gray hair peeking out from the hood and those leather eyes—and it's interminable, like hot acid running in her cunt, destroying everything, transforming her into a lake of blood. He pulls out of her, tearing her for the last time, turning her inside out, like a glove. An indistinct and reddish mass, still trembling, runs between her thighs onto the bed. Suddenly, she does not know where he has gone. She turns her head. Nathalie is there, lying on the floor, six feet from the bed. She calls to her, but she does not respond. A voice comes from offstage, as if from the other side of the door: "But what have you done to the child? What have you done to the child? The voice repeats the same sentence again and again, with violent, hysterical intonations. Then she begins to cry.

That's what woke me up. It's curious—no doubt I fell asleep after the orgasm, and the dream set the story in motion. Or was the story a ruse I clung to so the dream could manifest itself? That's the problem with dreams. The stories they tell are not necessarily true, being neither the reflection of nor the metaphor for true stories. Dreams offer you beautiful lies. Easy solutions to artificial problems. I am drenched with sweat. My cunt feels abundantly wet, as if I've hemorrhaged during my period. I put my hand to my sex, look at my fingertips. But no, there's nothing, nothing more than the usual liquids of pleasure. I am in terrible pain. Great! Now I don't even need to be whipped to be in pain.1 It is a little bit past two o'clock in the morning. I get up and drink a glass* of water. I am not at all sleepy. I take down a book, read two pages; it falls from my hands.

I think again of what I had written about Tiresias. I toss and turn. I get up and go into the bathroom. I pick up a pair of scissors and cut my hair very short. With the blue shadows under my eyes, my face without makeup, and my anxious expression, I look more and more like a young boy who is a little naive, a little licentious. I put on the gray outfit, the jacket and pants J. P. gave me, and a big fur-lined raincoat, and I go out into Paris. *** Quai Conti, Quai Malaquais. I got off on the river side on the stairway across from the Vert-Galant, where the fireboat of the river firemen is moored. It was humid and cold, very cold. The Seine had risen a lot in those last days, and there remained at best ten feet of stones safe from the waves. Several drunks were sleeping at the foot of the Pont des Arts. I kept walking. The water had invaded the banks so much that the barges at the quay were comfortably moored. I reached the arch, bathed in the night of the Pont Royal. Shadows moved in the darkness. Men, as usual. The misery of homosexuality, of those who ventured there to finish the night looking for a final cock "for the road," or to lie in wait for family men who came to give free rein to their fantasies at six o'clock in the morning on a winter day. I kept going. I went towards the tip of the quay but could not reach the little stairwell that went back up towards the Rue du Bac. The river wet the feet of the large poplars and beat against the support works. I retraced my steps, alone in my thoughts—more alone than I liked. ***


There were three of them, emerging from the shadows, and they seemed to be watching my return under the arches. "So, little one, are we taking a walk?" Leather, a mustache: a hoodlum a bit off the rails, that was pretty clear. But what did they want with me? "I think she came to beat off," another said. And then they all joined in. "You think she came to get off?" "Maybe faggots excite her?" "That's very possible." "You're not a faggot, are you?" "Because we don't like faggots." "Could be a faggot." "That wouldn't surprise me—looks like a faggot." "Is that true, are you a faggot?" "A cocksucker, at least?" The last to speak opened his fly and took out, with a flick of the wrist, a thick and respectable dick. I felt the situation was getting out of hand. "Leave me alone, guys. I'm not bothering you." "You were right," said the exhibitionist. "It's a cunt." "Well, we like everybody, don't we, fellas?" "That's right!" They barred my way. I tried to pass, but one of them pushed me back, striking me on the shoulder. "Do you really think it's a cunt?" asked another one. "It's definitely a cunt, but that doesn't mean it didn't come here to get off." "A cunt and a cocksucker, if you want my opinion!" And the circle closed around me.

I tried to resist, to force my way through. They struck me immediately, suddenly, forcibly. I was almost lifted off the earth by the fist that pierced my belly. My breath was cut off.

Somebody tore off my raincoat. Another blow, on one of my breasts, hurt me horribly. Then a slap, very hard, and I saw stars. Two fists in the belly chopped me in half. I fell to my knees. The one who had already halfbeaten me to death grabbed me by the hair and jammed his cock in my mouth. He thrust in so deeply I gagged. I pulled back, tried to spit out that repugnant flesh. Someone gave me a kick in the kidneys. In several seconds, they had torn off my jacket. In an instant of total panic, I saw a blade shine in the night. The guy slashed vertically across my stomach, cutting my belt and pants. Another guy tugged, and my pants fell off. 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, n. *** 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 told 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 irrecu-perable. 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 forbade 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 con'cluded 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 childhood 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 shouting, 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 hps 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 HDUOLHUWKHODVWWLPH

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. The doctor made no comment. He took care of me, in particular. "Would I be all right?" I said yes. And I was. Deep inside, everything was even fine. It's not every day that one is reborn at twenty. I telephoned J. P. He wasn't there. I simply left a message that he should call me back. My voice was calm, poised. Then I called Nathalie's house; her mother was not there. I told the whole story to Clara, who thought it wise to burst into sobs. That left me perfectly cold. Detached, rather. Akidia, as the Greeks said. The indifference of grief. I felt as if I were watching myself from the outside. When I think of it today, now that all the words I use to disguise my mourning cannot efface it, I tell myself that this indifference was a momentary means of survival. A refusal with all my being that looked like rationality. Her death had taken her away, and joined me to her side, definitively. Palimpsest, as I was saying. I too was a collection of scars, and one does not efface scars with new gashes. New marks just make the old ones reappear. Scars are in the head, all of them. And so? One can't efface pain with pain—nor with caresses, besides. One must live with pain, not construct a whole story around it. I thought of some militant masochists I had met once in an SM support group. Specialists in "leathersex," in whipping,

play-piercing. Who looked no further than the first drop of blood! Poor women!

I ended up having to answer questions—and the interrogation lasted interminably because Nathalie was, as they say, "known" by the police. I forced myself not to hear the comments, mezzo voce, of the cops and paramedics. They took away the body. Then everyone left, leaving me alone in a room trampled with footprints. In the middle was a lake of congealed blood, where one could still see, in the hollow, the mark of her body. Where her hand had been. Her hip. Several blond strands of hair were still stuck in the blood.

And since I had nothing better to do, I started to clean up the mess.

Notes 'It was only afterwards that we remarked upon the unusual aspect of the suicide, in which a left-handed girl became right-handed only in order to kill herself. We remembered what Nathalie had told me, what Clara had said to Florence of her strange "business" relationships, and the considerable sums of money we had seen in her hands. The police, whether asked to do so or not, had already ruled it a suicide, and quickly at that. But had Nathalie wanted to leave us with this uncertainty?




About the Author

Since the publication of Dolorosa Soror in 1996, Florence Dugas has been recognized as one of the most gifted eroticists writing in France today. She is the author of a second novel, L'Evangile d'Eros, and several short stories, all published by Editions Blanche, Paris. Dolorosa Soror has been translated into Dutch and German.