I had been promising myself for months that one day I would verify whether or not the three trees planted in the small square were charms. Charm trees: the kind one plants, vaunts, and sells . . . And I was ready to give my charms away, at a loss, for a little peace and liberty.
I felt light, as though I were about to leave a piece of myself that I didn’t want anymore in this room. Shed my dead skin. Yes, that was my plan, to pretend I was giving Louie everything he wanted. But I wouldn’t really be there. Not with him. Not for him. All he would get was an obsolete version of the woman he had been circling all this time with his little obscene notes. He thought he’d almost caught her in his net. In reality, he would be devouring a ghost. Biting into a shadow. As for me, I would leave everything that created distance between David and me between these walls. Including the things I’d learned about him and that I never should have known. Then, and only then, I would really belong to him and only him. Annabelle Barlet, David’s wife.
I don’t know whom I thought I was fooling with such naive ideas. I guess it was what I needed at the time . . .
I was already late. I rushed from the metro station Saint-Georges, where a film crew was getting ready to shoot a scene whose set, a retro booth and an automobile parked nearby, recalled the Occupation. As for me, I was wandering through a scene from the nineteenth century, over the steps where Louie and I had walked the other day.
I recognized the buildings whose history he had described in such detail. I hesitated on Rue la Bruyère in the idiotic hope I’d run into Marceline and her lover, arm in arm. At the intersection of Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and Rue de la Rochefoucauld, a figure of Dionysus stuck its tongue out at me from under a columned balcony. At least someone appreciated the irony of the situation. For a fraction of a second, Louie’s face appeared as the impish devil and winked. He was everywhere.
Why had he decided to play the role of the perverted marquis and manipulator? What had David done to him—nothing he wouldn’t have done in his brother’s place, I was sure—to make him harass me? It made me feel like an object in an endless transaction between them. If Louie ever decided to be the man he had been for a few moments during our walk—happy, funny even, delighted to share his knowledge and interest—could we one day become . . . I don’t know, friends? Instead of being yet another reason for the brothers not to get along, I could help them bond. I could be their angel of reconciliation.
“Good evening, Elle. I didn’t expect to see you again so soon . . . but I am delighted, of course.”
Monsieur Jacques, obliging as ever, waved from his counter and folded his long silhouette into one of his little bows, a fleeting bend of the torso reminiscent of Japanese culture. As I approached him, I caught a tart scent of bergamot.
“Thanks,” I said. “Tell me . . .”
I withdrew the polished metal egg.
“Oh my!” he exclaimed, his eye gleaming. “A new puzzle?”
I often wondered about Monsieur Jacques’s role in Louie’s games. After all, this was his hotel. The room keys didn’t circulate without his knowledge. Did he simply furnish the elder Barlet with keys and turn a blind eye to what he did with them? Like his bald head, the concierge was as smooth as he was impenetrable.
“It would appear so, yes . . .”
“No clues this time?”
“No. Just this.”
I placed the object in his long, arachnidan hands, which were so delicate it was almost worrisome. He closed his fingers around the scintillating metal and inspected it with his bulging eyes.
“Marie . . .” He smiled after some reflection.
“Marie?”
“Marie Bonaparte.”
“Napoleon III’s . . . daughter?” I guessed.
He corrected me politely, but I noticed his eyes cloud in what looked like worry, which did not fit with his usual erect, unwavering bearing.
“Napoleon Bonaparte’s great-grandniece.”
“Oh. I believe you. But why an egg?”
He raised his nonexistent eyebrows and fixed his dizzyingly blue eyes on me.
“Hmm . . . No one ever told you about her relationship with the Freud family?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Marie Bonaparte was a social fixture in intellectual circles of the late nineteenth century. As a result, she befriended some of the great minds of her time, including the French psychologist Gustave Le Bon.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“At the time, he was much talked about. His work on crowd psychology was even a kind of bestseller. He’s the one who recommended Marie read Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis.”
The rest seemed obvious. At last I understood where his erudition was leading.
“She also managed to meet Freud, is that it?”
“Even better: she became a patient of his, for almost fifteen years.”
“That’s incredible. But what about the egg?”
“Well, dear Marie Bonaparte had some fetishes. Sexual fetishes.”
“Really?”
“She was incapable of knowing real pleasure. And for reasons that are still unclear to this day, she convinced herself that female frigidity originated not from an unconscious trauma . . . but an anatomical problem.”
He lowered his voice when he said this last word, as though afraid something awful might happen.
“Anatomical? What do you mean?”
“She believed that the clitoris was too far from the vagina to achieve its goal: orgasm. She wrote several articles on the subject.”
“And? She thought this would solve the problem?”
I pointed at the oblong object he was rolling between his palms like a pebble, having abandoned his gold-accented, black lacquer pen.
“No, not exactly. At first, she thought she could reconstruct the parts where nature had failed. She underwent no less than three operations to bring the ill-placed clitoris closer to the orifice of copulation.”
I gasped.
“What? Was she crazy?”
“A little, yes. After that, she put her hopes in the still nascent field of psychoanalysis. But despite all the years she spent on the couch, even Freud himself proved unable to divert her from her obsession. As for this little thing”—he raised the egg, a fragile trophy in his hands, and looked at it admiringly—“it figured among the many intimate toys she used and abused to stimulate herself internally and experience pleasure like she had never known from an external touch. She was so convinced that one day it would ‘loosen her up’—excuse my expression—that she became a devoted proponent of a new device: the vibrator. She promoted it and all its forms without any thought of recompense. For her, it was a kind of erotic sacrifice.”
“Incredible.”
“But don’t be fooled. She may have been eccentric, but she was a good woman. During the war—she wasn’t so young anymore—she personally intervened to help a number of Jewish intellectuals flee Austria and Germany. Freud included.”
He stooped to return my object, his voice vaguely melancholic:
“That’s the whole story. The Marie Bonaparte is on the fourth floor, the first door on your left when you step off the elevator. Have a nice evening, Elle.”
No hidden meaning in his gravelly voice. Just his usual courteousness.
As I turned around, I was surprised by Ysiam’s immaculate smile. Ysiam, who had led me to my first cell. Who hadn’t answered my calls for help. The hand that had slipped Louie’s orders under the door. Despite his gentle looks, Ysiam was a jailer.
“Please follow me, Mademoiselle.”
But was it reasonable to blame the messenger? He waited as I entered the elevator, which jostled us upward. When we arrived on the fourth floor—we didn’t say a word to each other during the brief mechanical ride—he moved to the right to let me by and pointed at a night-blue door. The whole floor was that color, just as the sixth was all red and the second, where the Josephine was located, all gold.
Holding my keycard in front of the lock, I was about to question him about his boss when he broke the silence that had been imposed upon him ever since our first meeting:
“This time there won’t be any instructions. You’ll know what to do. On your own.”
“No instructions?” I cried. “And who decided there shouldn’t be instructions today?”
“That I cannot tell you.”
“That’s your instruction, right?”
“Yes.” He nodded.
I would have sworn his dark skin blushed.
“I bet you’re dying to tell me . . . !” I said defiantly, playing with his show of reserve like a cat and its mouse.
The poor boy lost his perpetual look of quietude. He was so touching, with his scared, wide eyes. He looked lost, as though he were desperately searching for something to hold on to.
“Not at all!”
At last his gaze settled on the keycard in my hand. It was his escape, and he seized it. He slid the card into the reader. The door opened. My prison was his liberation.
Without saying another word, he disappeared in the flash of an eye to the other end of the hall. Louie could be proud: Ysiam hadn’t failed. He must pay him well.
I knew he’d be back to lock the door behind me.
The room did not look like a place for sleeping but more like an office. It had a sober feel, and was decorated according to a turn-of-the-century style: a desk made of polished cherry, covered in green Moroccan tapestry, a metallic ball lamp, a small worn club chair, and, on the other side of the room, under the unique barred window, a velour blood-red sofa on which had been thrown a number of cushions embroidered in gold.
A coherent ambiance, especially considering the person who’d inspired it. What was expected of me seemed pretty obvious, and I lay down on the sofa without further ado.
As before, I waited a long time before anything happened. I heard the faint and rather distant sound of the elevator as it came and went, of doors that opened and closed, and something like the clanking of a room service cart that the attendant on the floor above must have been pushing through the hallway.
There was one modern feature in the room, a flat screen hanging like a painting opposite the sofa. I only noticed it when it flickered on. I checked to make sure I wasn’t sitting on a remote. No. The electronic device was responding to an outside command. There was no other possible explanation, thought I. The static quickly gave way to an image of another room.
It looked nothing like the other rooms I’d seen in the hotel. No vintage decor nor gesture toward a historical figure. Its walls were a bluish black, the furniture consisting of a simple bed with a thick mattress and a comforter, as well as two Louis XV chairs upholstered in dark canvas. The lighting was poor, and I had to wait for two persons, one man and one woman, both naked and wearing masks, to enter, before I understood what was making the atmosphere so bizarre: their bodies glowed in the dark like two fireflies torn from obscurity by a black light, the kind dancers go wild for in nightclubs. Their skin shone brightly from the shadows. It was unreal. Every imperfection erased by the diffuse light and the effect of being filmed.
Did they know they were being observed? And if they did, who were they and why were they so willing to participate? They forwent preliminaries, undoubtedly thinking them superfluous, and got down to business so quickly that I decided they must be simple mercenaries, commissioned and paid for by Louie to put on a private show for me. The girl was smaller and more petite than I. She had two tiny bulges, like little apples, for a chest. She knelt before her partner and began using her mouth to make the flaccid and inert object between the boy’s legs grow. She sucked diligently and with delicacy, using her tongue to excite his tip and only swallowing the whole shaft at privileged intervals. He grunted with increasing intensity each time her mouth jetted down his dick, which grew imperiously large, deep inside her throat.
The fact that the show was choreographed exclusively for me, that the two actors probably came from some live show in Pigalle, that it was all so artificial and fabricated, should have put me off. But indifference and disgust soon gave way to curiosity—I wanted to know how she would prolong his pleasure before the final moment. The very thing that I would have found unacceptable in an X-rated movie was now turning me on. The reality effect. I was fascinated by her lips, which were now moving slowly over the throbbing, swollen gland that shone with their desire. I hated to admit it, but yes, yes, yes . . . I found their bit madly exciting.
“More . . . Yes!”
Detecting a strange echo, I stood from the sofa and walked toward the hanging television, where I noticed that in addition to the integrated speakers, there was another source of sound, one that was more direct, more present. Indeed, the troubling fact of the matter was that the couple was making love in an adjoining room, and the wall was so thin that I could hear even the most discreet moan.
Knowing that they were so nearby, so close that I could touch them, unleashed a wild, voracious desire in me to join them. I wanted to participate. Torn between image and sound, I glued my ear to the wall, then took a step back to look at the scene on the television screen. Each peek revealed a different configuration of bodies. Each Kama Sutra move elicited a specific form of pleasure. Ysiam had been right, and the man who was orchestrating everything in the shadows, too: I knew what to do. I didn’t need orders or instructions.
All I had to do was watch the man’s hands, which were now running over the woman’s body, pressing into her flesh, dashing into her orifices, a finger pushing into the crease in her ass or brushing across her brown lips engorged with desire. From my side of the electronic mirror, I slowly undressed, piece by piece, each article of clothing igniting a specific area of skin as it brushed across my body: buttocks, belly, thighs, shoulders, nipples . . . I could not take my eyes off the man’s hands . . . Standing, my lace panties still in place, I tried to mime each one of his movements. I became my own lover, discovering hitherto unknown sweetness from my own touch.
As I felt my clitoris, which gleamed between my nymphae and pressed proudly into the lace of my panties, I saw the man bury his face between the petite brunette’s thighs. With each lick, she shook frenetically and her backside raised over the bed. Her breasts dangled toward him. They were small, but they seemed to become bigger and more extended with each wave of pleasure. Despite the woman’s small build, the man’s head suddenly disappeared between her legs. He melted into her sex, his nose getting lost in her dark earthiness. He was hungry for her. He sucked, bit, and tasted every fold of her throbbing flesh. Her sighs became more strident, more frequent, and I supposed he must have introduced his tongue—a natural and effective sex toy—into her.
The orgasm took her by surprise. She arched her back in an improbable curve, throwing her head behind her and contracting each one of her muscles. Then she collapsed as though she’d been electrocuted.
When he withdrew his face from her sweet underworld, he contemplated her for a moment, like a painter before a masterpiece. He had made her come, and he alone. His tongue was his paintbrush, his dash of genius. But this triumph must not have been enough since he then reopened the woman’s thighs and introduced his member, which seemed even bigger than when it had been in the girl’s mouth.
The man cried out strongly as he penetrated her. They were facing each other. His legs were planted into the ground. The girl was now lying across a small table in a corner of the room. She sighed in pleasure, and he turned her around and felt her backside with his penis, looking for her soaking vulva. He moved in and out of her as he stimulated her engorged button, his hand resting on the young woman’s pubis.
“Yes . . . yes, don’t stop,” she begged.
Her voice was breathy. Given the camera angle and the mask, I couldn’t see all of her face, but I was able to make out her parted mouth—it was probably as wet as her vulva—striped with a few stray hairs. She moaned, in shorter and shorter intervals, at higher and higher decibels.
The synchronous stimulation of her most sensitive areas seemed to have gotten the better of her. Each time the man entered her, she projected her palpitating flesh to meet her assailant. She groaned now, yes, she let out a primitive, husky, animalistic growl. She hiccuped pleasure that seeped through her whole body. I watched as her limbs and nape of the neck shook uncontrollably.
Her second orgasm hit her like an uppercut. Her head tipped to the side, and after a long spasm ran up her spine, she grew still.
I was equally shattered. I felt moisture in the hollow between my legs, which started shaking suddenly, bringing me back to earth. I was no longer floating. I was one year old, I was a thousand years old, I was crippled with unfulfilled desire that had been contained for too long. I rested against the wall, then got on all fours, a rather grotesque position, thanks to which I was able to crawl to the sofa. I buried my nose in the red velour and noticed the metallic egg sitting on the soft fabric. It was looking at me. It was provoking me. It was waiting for me to react.
Behind me on the screen, the action hadn’t stopped. Satisfied that he had made his partner come—he patted her backside and improvised a few words, like “nice little ass for my cock” and other rather degrading phrases—but not yet satiated, he started riding her again, furiously thrusting himself into her open lips that still shimmered from her first orgasms. What had preceded seemed more like a warm-up, what with his show of energy—some might call it roughness or even violence. He crushed his victim with pleasure. The woman was practically screaming. It was impossible to tell if they were cries of encouragement or for help. If they were expressing pleasure or pain.
I pushed aside the small stretch of embroidered cloth that contained my vulva. A translucent liquid stippled my inner thighs. I considered the fact that no man had ever put me in such a situation before: I wanted more, but I also wished it would end, in happiness, all at once. Contradictory impulses such as only occur in the unique pleasure that thrills and exhausts us.
Or maybe yes . . . Maybe right now, this egg, this capitulation of my body to the mercy of a triumphant Louie, who was witnessing every last detail somewhere backstage . . . maybe I was about to experience my first sublime undoing.
When at last I introduced the oblong object into my dripping vagina, the girl on the screen was orgasming again. I quickly pushed the thing deeply inside me, as though I were in a hurry to join her. My sex contracted around the cold object, surprised by the intruder’s unexpected visit, then adopted it. After I clenched my buttocks and perineum a few times, it even started playing with it, swallowing it whole, sucking it into an abyss from which my fingers could not retrieve it. A new king in my kingdom.
At last I found the strength to sit up on the sofa, which welcomed my abandon with that smooth softness of old upholstered furniture, worn by other bodies that had lost themselves here. I spread my legs wide, showing my sex to the screen. I felt as though I were being penetrated by the two protagonists. As though their pleasure could be communicated through the screen and touch me, giving me their surplus of delight.
The man’s face, which only occasionally emerged from the shadows during their position changes, was softer or more hollow depending on the light. At first he looked like David, smiling, reassuring, his young face between my thighs.
At that precise moment, I felt the egg’s first vibrations inside of me. They were so strong that they radiated throughout my vulva, touching my lips as well as the incandescent point of my clitoris, which had grown too sensitive to touch. Pleasure came in waves that were being controlled by an anonymous hand.
Then, when I saw him again, as he withdrew his head from between my legs, my virtual lover looked like Louie, with his tense face and sunken, burning eyes. He was a predator, a wolf who would tear me apart with his teeth. The spasms emanating from my vagina felt as though I’d been fanged. As though the most powerful jaw I’d ever encountered had my vagina in its mouth and was ripping me apart, devouring me. Deep down, I felt an explosion inside. A mute and strangely slow-moving explosion, as if I were being reconfigured from the inside out. Each quiet wave chipped away at the terror in which I had been submerged just a moment before. Now I was being undone. My head jerked back suddenly. I let out a long, silent cry, my mouth the shape of an O. I savored every second of pleasure, the delicious present tense. I never wanted it to end.
I fell back onto the sofa, my body heavy. It felt dismembered. A puzzle of exhausted flesh. I noticed the screen had gone black. The egg had also been turned off, and was now rolling around outside my gaping hole.
He had not touched me at all. He had not even come into the room. And yet, I admitted to myself with a happy sob, an ecstatic and bitter smile on my lips: Louie had made me come. Louie Barlet had possessed me.
And I hadn’t held back.