Lovers (9781609459192) (4 page)

H
e yawns, fully dressed, satin breeches, shirt trimmed with lace, doublet. The beautiful lad has just left him. The room is shrouded in half-light. There is no drape or net curtain at the window. Noises in profusion, voices whining or arguing, there are moans, there is laughter too, and in all this hubbub a strange silence makes its presence felt, it rises like dough between the bed and the walls, everywhere, sovereign and clammy, it paralyzes, weighs on the chest, it is unbearable.

I'm going, Sébastien tells himself.

I'm going. And I betrayed him. The shame and permanence of love, it will be like this for each adventure with one of these brutes picked up in low taverns.

He must learn to play the frivolous, unfaithful role to perfection.

No need to say “I love you” as he slips into bed beside him, he would recognize that body anywhere, he huddles up against him, sinks into sleep.

Sleep, murmurs Sébastien, sleep, my love, sleep, don't ask me any questions, don't say a word, I beg you, stay like that, naked, drowsy, sleep.

A
good deal of shame, but elation too at discovering that his love for Balthazar remains unshaken. This love will not suffer any change, it has become as necessary to him as breathing, it is his stability, his joy.

And Balthazar forgives everything, Balthazar accepts everything, Balthazar cradles him, Balthazar's presence beside him leads him to sleep and dreams. Thank you.

 

Three hours with the poorly-dressed man from the tavern, the ogler of boys, the drinker of hooch, three hours of satisfying lovemaking, just three hours and then the realization that it is enough, that boredom sets in once the seed has been spilled and the passion has subsided. Balthazar is once again in his thoughts, his one desire is to see his love again, and all will be well, order will be restored.

 

They are naked, he and Balthazar, and they feel as though they are floating, lost in each other's warmth, that is their joy.

D
iscreet is the word to describe the Créon mansion on Rue Quincampoix. No atlases, no caryatids. No gates studded like the vault of heaven, no roof surmounted with pinnacles or bristling with arrows. Austerity is the signature. The Créons have always been people who cared more for ideas than decoration. Behind those smooth gray walls, what is brewing? The King has been given evidence that Balthazar transmutes base metal into gold. False testimonies are legion.

Créon will request an interview with the King, although it kills him to do so. What is the master of France to him, when he has Sébastien?

The domestic staff has been reduced to a minimum. A valet, a cook, a chambermaid, a coachman. These four are trustworthy. From father to son and mother to daughter in the Créons' service. As silent as the tomb. Satan's flunkeys, they are nicknamed at Court. They will be beaten, their nails will be teased with iron spikes, they will be thrown into a dungeon and left to rot. They will thus have a glimpse of hell, the eternal dwelling place for queers, it is said.

The princess has dismissed those servants capable, once they are on the street, of chattering about Balthazar and Sébastien and their supposed liking for alchemy and orgies. Yes, the specialists in dusting, brushing and rinsing have been dismissed!

The mansion is like an empty crate. It gathers dust. The walls are coated with grime. It smells like a swamp.

Twenty-nine rooms, only five of them in use.

As for Anne de Créon, she is at Versailles now. She is not allowed to leave. An attic room, like a prison. Every day she confronts the courtiers, once her equals, now her enemies. Let her tongue loosen, let the marble fissure, let the varnish crack, let her betray her son, let what has been kept secret from generation to generation—the taste for alchemy, the passion for orgies, the contacts with sorcerers—be revealed, once for all, and justice be done. But Anne de Créon makes life difficult for those who spy on her, who try to trap her. She is brilliant at evasion. Everyone knows she is mad about her son, Créon the buggerer, the sodomite, doomed to hell. She is dying at Versailles, and the King will not receive her, ignores her during balls.

The Princesse has become a victim.

At last, one morning, the King summons her.

Go, Madame, go to Paris, and bring us back your son.

I
shan't go. It would be like throwing myself into the lions' den. Not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow, not ever. Here, in my house, your house, the Créons' house, we know what it means to be silent, what it means to live. I shan't go.

Quiet, my son! This is nothing but lunacy.

I shit on Versailles, Madame, and the King stinks, Madame, oh yes, he stinks worse than ten musketeers. Tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, one day soon at any rate, I shall go back to Créon. What do I care for the Court and the King, what do I care for your whining, your reproaches, your entreaties?

A
little more Latin, a little more Greek, a little more French grammar.
Sébastien is more of a dreamer than a good pupil.

He is the angel.

Angel, says Balthazar, angel.

They are together.

How long has the feeling of love existed? Was it born with man? Or did man make it all up?

And who are the barbarians? Is a man who does not believe in love a barbarian?

Angel, says Balthazar.

No more Latin, no more Greek, no more French grammar. Only painting, from now on. There are days when Sébastien shuts his door, even to Balthazar.

T
hat blackness in a corner of the miniature was painted with fervor. The blackness that, like a wisp of shadow, is preparing to invade the sky, the trees, the ground. To invade, as love invades all the space, all one's being.

For a time, he will paint no more landscapes, just smears of paint, dark and tumultuous or slow and caressing. He hears them already spreading.

He slaps the paint on.

Or so it seems.

Not only black. A gray monochrome. Sometimes green. Sometimes red.

As he paints, he thinks neither of walls, nor of foliage, nor of blood. He thinks of nothing. He paints what spreads, what colonizes. These smears are alive.

He paints shadows too. Something vague and rumpled. Something that dances slightly, that summons the dusk or the daylight, it is hard to say which.

Even when they are red, in his mind they are always shadows.

Is a shadow silent?

All his life, he may paint nothing but shadows.

And perhaps only faces ravaged by shadows.

Faces beneath which are glimpses of an animal nature, weasel faces, hare faces, fox foxes. Faces out of fables.

But he will never paint Balthazar's shadow. It is too complex, too close to him.

He is afraid that one day that shadow is all he will have left.

It will haunt him.

He does not even give his canvases titles. Can they be called works?

But what does he know of his future, their future?

How can he foresee that he will never paint the dawn, nor Balthazar's shadow, nor the end of time?

S
ébastien has had several adventures.
His whole body is against mine, Balthazar tells himself, he huddles up to me, he can only fall asleep by my side, he always comes back, but the other man's smell is there, between us, and he does not care, I know, since he is with me, a smell like that is not going to tear us apart, he has told me that, sworn it, he does not lie. But to me, the smell is unbearable. We are different, he and I, why deny it? His is the infidelity, mine the jealousy, ours the undeniable fact of our love.

A
king is a king, and there are not so many ways to die. There is no point in creating a new one for this Créon, is there? That would be doing too much honor to a sodomite.

He has refused to go to Versailles. And the King is furious.

There is much whispering in the corridors of the palace, many smiles and sneers: Don't you like flames? He does!

This Créon will be executed sooner or later, not because he is a murderer or a maker of gold, nor because of his morals, but because of his indifference to the crown and scepter. Who does he think he is?

Vermin, yes, but as rich as Croesus.

S
ébastien is possessed. He demands body after body. He wants them all.
And Balthazar says: Enough! And Balthazar says: Ah, here you are at last!

In a notebook, Sébastien writes down measurements, sexual requirements, the duration of each bout, the smells, the quantity of semen, the profusion of body hair on one man, the hairlessness of another, X's profession or Y's flaws, all in a jumble, he reduces these men, these males, to little or nothing.

In a short time, he has established a reputation, one that will last.

He is the Angel.

He is called this by Balthazar, and also by a tavern owner, one of his casual lovers.

There is this tavern, called In the Land of Priapus.

And Balthazar cries: Come back! And Balthazar starts waiting for him.

H
e has dodged all the dangers in which the capital abounds, he deserves his nickname, he is the Angel, it is undeniable.

“Blessed by the gods” would do equally well.

He offers his body to all and sundry, he desires most men, almost all, though some more than others all the same.

He sometimes witnesses brawls, murders, monumental thrashings.

He does not tell Balthazar about his escapades. In their intimacy there is little place for other stories than theirs.

Balthazar implores him to be careful.

What is that tiny boil? That small red patch on the groin?

Is a pox-ridden angel still an angel?

It is nothing, it soon fades, he always emerges unscathed from his nights.

H
e once came close to feeling love for a boy, Christian Guesnes, known as Raging Cock. But a knife in the belly, guts spilling out, and it was all over with the fellow, who was much hated.

There is hate, and that's it. What more to add?

Raging Cock, consummate whore and godlike male at one and the same time, a loyal participant in all the best-attended orgies, Christian Guesnes, the De Broglies' gardener, the man is dead, well and truly dead, mourned by some, forgotten too soon.

Sébastien confesses to Balthazar: I almost fell in love with someone else.

He could leave me, Balthazar tells himself, he could, he can do anything, he is the Angel.

V
ersailles seems to exude a smell of shit.
Créon is done for, they say in the corridors.
Because the King has been told that Balthazar is said to have declared that the Créons are a more ancient line than the Capetians.

The words have hit home. They are repeated. It is like a game of pass the slipper. They are already bleeding their victim dry.

He will be led to the stake, his corpse will be public property, it will belong to everyone, offered to the spectators and to the crows and tiercels.

Tiercel
: it was my father who taught me that word.

Be quiet, says Anne de Créon.

Then: Never again venture outside our mansion.

What proof can he give that he is innocent? he wonders all at once, beginning to panic.

He feels homesick for the wooden lodge.

What proof? What innocence?

Oh, my God, and this despair in him.

Don't leave me again, he implores his lover.

Toward what pit is Sébastien dragging him?

O
ne evening, the silence in the Créon mansion becomes deafening. It is the lull before the clamors, before sentence is pronounced.

Balthazar, who cannot die, who was not born to die, as they both know, is condemned to death.

My love.

Two little words that Sébastien can no longer bring himself to say, so overwhelmed is he with fear.

He rarely leaves Balthazar now.

What am I still to him, the matchless one? Balthazar asks himself, in torment.

Let me die, before I am abandoned.

But who can affirm anything at all?

Why must fate always have the upper hand?

S
he takes her meals downstairs, in a kind of boudoir, at a richly laid table next to a French door that looks out on a garden no bigger than a pocket handkerchief, green with box trees, a yellow rose bush in one corner. She no longer strolls along the three short paths. If she made up her mind to do so, if she forced herself, she would immediately begin to rail against the world, men and kings, to loathe them. Screaming will be for later. She can only imagine screaming deep in the woods, as she can only conceive of dying in one's own bed, unless one is a man, for any man, as is well known, might meet his fate on a battlefield. Bed or battlefield, but not at the stake.

She imagines the stake, very high and very red, making a noise like a smithy.

Hell on earth—men have been accustomed to it for centuries.

She says no to hell.

He must flee.

But Balthazar rejects such cowardice.

No, he will not flee. She despairs of him. Just as he despairs when Sébastien stays out all night, although that happens less often now.

They share a room. Like the poor. They have barred their door to Anne de Créon.

This prohibition has plunged her into a terrible state of somnolence. She is heavy with lethargy. She drags herself along. It is as if she is welded to the marble of her mansion. She shivers. Chaos is nigh.

H
e paints the birth of a shadow. Balthazar's shadow. Managing to do so is a bad omen.
He will leave me the memory of his shadow. Perhaps more. His eyes, the shape of his body, his smell, the sound of his voice. But how to paint them?

I will paint them. I will find a way. I have to find a way. I must be worthy of him. Are we not more than brothers? What can compare with lovers like us?

He has not yet tried depicting the things that fill his memory.

This morning the shadow is coral, this evening it will be golden. A changing, dazzling shadow, but no more than a shadow. There is an eternity between dawn and twilight. And people die.

There is a pounding at the gate. There are cries. The servants are thrust aside. Anne de Créon is manhandled. She screams.

Where are the forests? Where is the wooden house? Where is the night that cradled the Créons' estate?

Today is the day of disaster.