The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (17 page)

surrounding light into my mouth and, al- though I still held his member in my hand, no longer rubbing it up and down. Then I considered myself sated for now, and it was my turn to close my thighs and bury my head back between his. Our movements took up no more space than our tightly joined bodies. The light went back on two or three times. In the intervals between, it was as if the dark- ness were hiding us in a crevice in the walls of the well formed by the elevator shaft. The blaze of light whipped my forehead to make me suck more quickly. I now don’t remember whether Henri ejaculated by “day” or by “night.”

The usual little patting movements with the flat of the hand to straighten out clothes and tidy hair. When Claude and I spent an evening with friends and I unexpectedly had a fuck—as I had that night—out of his sight, I couldn’t meet up with him again without feeling slightly awkward. I think it was

probably the same for whoever was with me. That night Claude was waiting for Henri and me at the foot of the stairs; he pretended he had just come from another building. Henri thought he was behaving strangely. We gave up on the idea of finding the girl’s door.

Every confined place in which the body has felt a fulfillment inversely proportional to the available space, where it has felt all the more pleasure for being constrained, awakens in us a nostalgia for the fetal state. And we nev- er benefit from it so much as when, safe in that secret haven, organic life reassumes its rights (whatever they may be) and we can abandon ourselves to something not unlike the beginning of a regression. If you think about it, it was not for reasons of hygiene that bathrooms became places in which we isolate ourselves, closets in fact. Modesty is

the pretext given, but the occult explanation for this modesty is neither a fear for our dig- nity nor a wish not to embarrass others but the freedom to experience the pleasures of defecation without any restraint, to inhale our own permeating stench or even examine our stools meticulously, taking a cue from Salvador Dalí, who left descriptions rich with comparisons and images. I am not about to tell a series of scatological stories, I just want to remember here some banal situations in which my different bodily needs found them- selves in conflict. And as I have never come across any declared enthusiasts for my farts or feces, and I myself have had no inclination to savor those of others, these confrontations turned out to be dubious struggles between pleasure and displeasure, ecstasy and pain.

I suffer from migraines. Having landed in Casablanca, I suffocate in the heat at the air- port as I wait for ages for my luggage to come through. The journey is not over yet: Basile,

the architect friend who invited me, drives me to the resort town he built, where he has a small house. We stop off on a track away from the road. It is the most beautiful day, the sparse leaves flitter in the bright light around us. Squatting on all fours on the backseat of the car, I am, as usual, sticking my ass out so far that I can almost imagine it as a balloon popping out of the car, ready to detach itself from the rest of my body and fly away. While this balloon is being pierced by one of the sharpest pricks I have ever known, I can feel the first symptoms. My vision is blurred by a sort of flashing that accentuates the fluttering effect of the light. By the final charge, my body—with the exception of my ass—has ceased to exist, emptied of its sub- stance like a piece of fruit left to shrivel, crumbling in the glimmering light. Or, to be more precise, there is nothing left between my head, which has been turned to stone by the viselike grip of pain, and the skin on my

buttocks, where the last few caresses linger. I could no longer utter a single word. When we arrived at our destination, I went and lay flat out on the deep, tall bed. Added to these two terminals to which my body was reduced (the one overwhelmed by pain, the other abandoned to lethargy by pleasure) was now the weight of nausea, which comes with very bad headaches. Now I had just the outward appearance of a body, anchored in three places by the only three organs left to me, and fussed over silently by an anxious man. When a migraine pins me in the depths of a darkened room like this, when I don’t even have the strength to peel off the sheet im- pregnated with up to thirty-six hours’ worth of old sweat, and when breathing the dissip- ated stench of my own vomit is the only per- ception left to me that does not cause intoler- able pain, my last mental resources can end up imagining strangers watching me in that state (with the cavities around my eyes

enlarged by rings of gray and the angle between the inner edge of my eyelids and the bridge of the nose pinched tightly together). Jacques is too accustomed to it, and doctors have too much clinical distance. I would like Jacques to take photographs of me at times like that, and for them to be published and seen by people who read my books and art- icles, for example. There would be some sense of compensation in closing the circle on my physical degeneration by inscribing it on the gaze of others.

My relationship with Basile has always been light and playful, and the pleasure unadulterated. If I had to be ill in front of him, then I would have to do it with the same simplicity with which I surrendered myself when he took me from behind after a good meal and I let my bulging tummy express a few farts. He was a sharp, astute man, and conversation with him was always stimulat- ing, and one day he was kind enough to

compliment me on the big nose that I had al- ways had a complex about, but which he told me gave my face character. He was also someone who usually came in my ass, but not before having used a firm index finger to stimulate the most highly reactive point on my body. While I was no longer capable of exchanging a single word with him, or to re- spond to the touch of his hand, I could still offer him the spectacle of myself indulging in the complete negation of my being.

It is often extremely difficult to identify the cause of a headache; anyone who is prone to them will know this, and in some ways this spares them of any feelings of guilt when the cause is obvious and it is their fault: abuse of alcohol or too much sun. I haven’t been drunk more than two or three times in my life. On one of these occasions I was with Lucien, who had slumped on top of me on the sitting room carpet, in front of his friends and unbeknownst to his wife. He had

taken me for dinner with a young couple who lived outside Paris. I drank too much cham- pagne without realizing it. The couple lived in a big bungalow where you walked straight into the kitchen, which also served as a din- ing room. At the back of the room there were two doors next to each other, each leading to a bedroom. The evening must initially have started in their bedroom. I am trying to piece it together: Lucien takes me over onto the bed with help from the other man; they start touching me up, I concentrate on investigat- ing their flies. The young woman hangs back a bit; her boyfriend takes her by the shoulders, kisses her, encourages her to come and lie down with us. She goes into the bathroom, he follows her and comes back ex- plaining that “this isn’t Christine’s thing, but we can do what we like, it doesn’t bother her.” I partake in the goings on in the same way that I involuntarily follow a radio play echoing through the courtyard of my

apartment building on a summer’s day when my neighbor’s windows are open. Probably out of respect for Christine, even though she doesn’t reappear—is she busying herself in front of the bathroom mirror or sitting inde- cisively on the side of the bath?—we move to the other bedroom.

I really can’t remember whether our host penetrated me. On the other hand, I do know that I apathetically let Lucien have me. The eiderdown was a deep chasm, and I sank deeper into it. My vagina, worked over smoothly by Lucien (who must have realized I wasn’t feeling well), softened and sank, drawn into that great depth, while a paralyz- ing force kept my head, neck, shoulders and even my partially spread arms flat on the bed. I did somehow find the strength to get up. How many times in the night? Four, five times? I crossed the kitchen naked and went into the garden. It was pouring with rain. I stood and vomited straight onto the ground

in the middle of the alley, not even looking for somewhere to hide. It has to be said that each spasm converted the blacksmiths ham- mering inside my skull into something that felt like a final disintegration of the beaten piece of metal. The whole body flows into the mass of the head and forms a fist tightly grasping a lacerating blade. The cold rain momentarily appeased the pain. On my way back to the bedroom, I rinsed my mouth out in the kitchen sink. The following morning, when the lifesaving medicine had been brought from the drugstore and when it was all over, Lucien assured me that he had fucked me several times during the night and that I had seemed to enjoy it. It is one of the rare times when I was not conscious of what I was doing. A few months later the young woman came to see me. She and her boy- friend had had a terrible car crash. He had died, and his family had turned her out of the house they had lived in together. I felt

genuine compassion for her while at the same time having a strange feeling that this was just the continuation of a nightmare.

Putting all these episodes together re- minds me of another. Not after a very good meal, as with Basile; it was on a day when, to the contrary, I might have eaten something that wasn’t very fresh, and I had an upset stomach. Lucien absolutely insisted on tak- ing me from behind. However hard I tried to avoid this and to distract him with fervent fellatio, I couldn’t stop him from delving his fingers right up close to the part of me that was sick, and I realized to my shame that they brought out a small amount of liquid matter. He buried his dick in there. The pleasure that this particular use of the rectum gives is obviously in the same family as that experienced in the seconds before the expulsion of fecal matter, but in this case the conjunction of the two was so narrow that it bordered on torture. I have never taken part

in scatological games, either of my own free will or encouraged by a man with that sort of experience. I have noticed that when this sort of incident occurred at all, it was with men much older than I, both of whom could be deemed—although both for different reas- ons—father figures. When he withdrew, Lu- cien went to wash himself with no comment- ary other than to say I had been silly to make such a fuss because it had been so good. I felt I could trust him.

There is such a perfect feeling of well-be- ing when you have, so to speak, left your body behind in excesses of pleasure with someone else, but you can recognize some aspects of that well-being when you leave your body behind in the opposite circum- stances, in abjection or even the most in- tense pain. I have dealt with the theme of the open space we appropriate for ourselves, and of our temptation to let strangers look on our nudity like at a shopwindow. In these

instances, we actually wear our nudity like a garment, and displaying it relates to the ex- citement we feel when, conversely, we pre- pare our bodies, dress them and put on our makeup, to seduce. I emphasize the word “excitement,” the rising tide of desire waiting for a response from the outside world. It surely cannot be excitement that we feel when we recoil into the closed world of pain or in the immediate satisfaction of element- ary functions: when the body doesn’t have the strength to occupy any other space than the sunken outline carved into a mattress, when the spew of vomit splatters the feet, when a dribble of shit trickles between our thighs. If there is any pleasure in this, it is not that the body feels struck by something greater than itself, it is that it feels bottom- less, as if by exteriorizing the activities of our entrails, we could accede to our entire surroundings.

If one of the meanings of the word “space” is emptiness—if when it is used without any qualification, it principally evokes a clear sky or a desert—a
confined
space is seen almost as automatically as a filled space. When I feel the need to return my aspirations to vast ho- rizons, I happily transport myself on my imagination to a garbage area, usually the one at the foot of the building in which I grew up. Back to the wall between the cor- rugated surfaces of the cans, with a man who sets down his bucket of trash for the occa- sion. I have never enacted this fantasy, but I assiduously maintained a relationship with a man who lived in such a shambles and so much filth that this archetypal garbage area must have had a place somewhere in his un- conscious. This same man was an aesthete, a clear and self-possessed theoretician with a rather precious way of speaking. His apart- ment consisted of two minute rooms whose walls were completely covered in shelves

laden with books and records, distributed at random, and some of the shelves had given way under their weight. Three quarters of one of the rooms was taken up with the bed, where the top sheet and the blanket were al- ways scuffed up in a heap, and which you could get into only after pushing aside books, papers and newspapers. In the second room it was not just the desk that looked as if it had suffered the vengeance of a burglar furi- ous not to have found what he was looking for, but also the floor; it was covered with a maze of crumbling piles of books and cata- logs, heaps of opened envelopes and crumpled paper, fanned-out sheaves of pa- per that one might think were still of some use. This, along with the dust, would have been nothing if it hadn’t been for the glasses with the dried brown ellipses of long forgot- ten drinks in their depths, used as paper- weights if they hadn’t left their slimy circular imprint on other pieces of paper, if a grayish

T-shirt or a stiffened face towel hadn’t been jumbled into the bed sheets, if—when you wanted to locate a bar of soap in the sink—you didn’t have to search through ar- chaeological layers of cups and saucers en- crusted with crumbs, like the mud still at- tached to recently exhumed relics…all of that made you heave.

I spent many nights in this hovel. The oc- cupant seemed not to notice. The fact that he never accomplished that elementary act of comfort—brushing his teeth—was perpetu- ally unfathomable. When he laughed, his up- per lip raised the curtain on a yellow plaster dotted with black patches. As I was sure that all mothers taught their children this hygien- ic routine, I wondered exactly what level of amnesia he had achieved on the subject of his childhood. He liked to be finger-fucked up his ass. From the outset he would put himself on all fours, presenting his large rather white bottom, and his face serious