If I had an archenemy and wanted to inflict the worst torture on her, the gentlest, the slowest, the cruelest and most disfiguring, I’d push her into the arms of a writer; I’d wait for her to fall in love, the purest love, and then I’d watch her suffer as I flipped carelessly through an old issue of Vogue.
I was barely nineteen when that catastrophe happened to me. Nineteen. A child. And an orphan, on top of that. Good times. Like a bird falling from its empty nest with its big sad eyes and its bald head. With such soft flesh. Straight into a novel. A first novel. Hell of a beautiful thing, and a fucking fantastic subject too, right?
Okay, I’ll stop. He’s made a name for himself since then. I brought him luck, or maybe my circumstances did, and he doesn’t need any publicity. He’s done very well in that department all by himself. Someday, when I’m really old, someone might ask me a question or two for a footnote, but in the meantime I’d rather stay silent.
Peace.
Peace to artists.
Peace to myths.
Just one last thing, though. The passing of this guy, this man, this thief through my life had only one real effect in the end: to remind me, and comfort me in the certainty that my mother’s long illness and suffering had given me, a few years earlier, that the expression “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” is complete crap. That which doesn’t kill you, doesn’t kill you. Period.
(That was a really complicated and probably grammatically incorrect sentence, which I can easily simplify as follows: that bastard fucked me up, big time.)
My turn, Master Boileau.
* * *
He was my first love. It wasn’t the first time I’d slept with a man, but it was the first time I’d made love, and it was . . . well, I said I’d stop, and I will. I’m no writer, and I certainly don’t need to torture myself with the past, or put my emotions in test tubes and refine what I went through into crystalline form to make stones I can throw . . . so keep it brief, Mathilde, keep it brief. Don’t ruin the last tiny shred of dignity he was kind enough (or negligent enough) to leave you with, please.
Okay, okay. We’ll put an ellipse there. (Ha ha, yes, he did teach me one or two things along the way . . . ) Let’s just say, for the purposes of this story, that this lovely person had sent me tons of letters—love letters, as I proudly thought at the time, but which I have since had to admit were lyrics and writing exercises—that I eventually threw away one night when I thought I was free of him.
Yep, I ended up buried under a heap of cigarette butts, empty bottles, coffee grounds, and dirty makeup-remover pads.
Hallelujah. I’d finally gotten rid of the letters.
Except for one.
Oh, really? Why?
Why that one?
Because it was the last one. Because it belonged to me more than all the others. Because I was, and still am, weak enough to think that it was sincere, and even if it hadn’t been, that didn’t matter much anymore. I’m honest enough to distinguish between the beautiful and the true, and to choose the beautiful when it’s obvious. Because the question of figuring out whether something is art or smut has never really interested me. Because that letter reminded me that I’d been loved by a talented guy, that I’d inspired him, and that yes, despite everything, despite him, I’d been that lucky.
And because it’s beautiful.
And I was beautiful, too.
Because I grew up with it. Because it watched me grow up. Just ordinary sheets of A4 paper, but loaded with little marks in black ink and placed in a series by which I was first horribly embarrassed then flattered, skeptical, nauseated, prostrate with sorrow and huddled over a wastebasket, and finally . . . changed.
Changed. Fatalistic. Conservative. Guarded. The guardian of the little temple of what served as my life before ending up in . . .
. . . my handbag.
Out of discretion. So it wouldn’t fall into the hands of my roommates or anyone else. Ever.
It was in the little pocket hidden in the inner lining. The only one that closed with a zipper. Narrow, discreet, undetectable by anyone who wasn’t specifically looking for it.
It was still there, but it wasn’t in its envelope anymore as I was sure I’d put it in, but around the envelope instead. Clamping down around my name and my address at the time—as if telling me, I imagine, that it had been read and that it was important for me to know that.
(Oh, stupid language! Not there; not now! Not at this exact moment in my story! And I laugh. All alone, and loudly, at being subjected to such ridiculous rules of agreement.)
. . . and that it was important for me to be informed of that.
There. It’s a more awkward way of saying it, but it’ll do.
* * *
Yes, you see, I asked a stranger to address the envelope for me. A clumsy fake-out, I know, but don’t send it back to me. Not this letter. It’s more worthy than I am, I promise.
If you don’t want to read it now, then wait. Wait two months, or two years, or maybe ten years. Wait until you don’t care anymore.
Ten years. I really think highly of myself.
Wait as long as you need to, but one day, please, unfold it. Please.
Our last conversation—or our final battle, should I say—has been haunting me for weeks. You chastised me for my egotism, my vileness, my selfishness. You accused me of using you, sucking you dry, loving what you inspired in me instead of who you were.
You said I’d never loved you.
You feel betrayed. You threw it in my face that you’d never read another book as long as you live. You said you hated words as much as you hated me and even more, if that kind of repulsion was humanly possible. That words were pathetic weapons in the hands of pathetic people like me. That they were worthless, they said nothing, they lied. That they destroyed everything they touched, and that I’d made you permanently disgusted by them.
Now, tonight, in two months or in two years, you’ll read the words below and you’ll know, my love, that you weren’t always right.
Your closed eyelids when you fell asleep in my arms, Mathilde, looked like the insides of lychee husks. The same iridescent gleam, the same pink, unexpected and poignant. Your pretty earlobes were like two plump coxcombs—tiny porcelain pebbles, made tender and meltingly soft from simmering so long in a broth of saliva from your endless frothy kisses—and their spiraling cartilage teases, like Carême’s beignets, a fricassee of birds’ heads.
The scent of your hair, there where it grows at the back of your neck, just above that delta, that secret downy gap, that funnel for caresses, had the piquant bitterness of the inside of a loaf of bread, and your fingernails—to someone who spent hours sucking them—were like so many almonds blanched a bit too early before summer’s end.
The hollow between your collarbones sparkled with a tangy juice that fizzed on the tongue, and the curve of your shoulder provided the fresh, fine-grained flesh, meltingly soft as the bottom of a pear, to soothe it.
An Anjou pear suckled in the shadowy light of the saddler . . .
At the corner of your mouth, those minuscule bubbles of saliva when you laughed sparkled like drops of pink champagne, and the tip of your tongue, my beloved, had the grain, the dusky red, the pale and delicate roughness of wild strawberries.
The same adorable, innocent, hidden sweetness, secret, shy, and desperately, desperately sweet.
Your nipples? Two little Provence beans, the first ones, the ones gathered in February, which must be earned, shucked while raw, and the curves of your breasts beneath my hands had the smooth golden softness of spring butter.
The little valleys leading to your belly button, if I moistened you with pleasure, had the sweet tang of wild plums picked in forgotten hedgerows and happily awakened a mouth heavy with so much sweetness.
Your hips were like two beautiful brioche tops, and the small of your back had—always, I imagine—no, I remember—the delicate taste of acacia blossoms. A heady, imperious fragrance that continued along the curves of your buttocks until the exquisite creases where your thighs met. That tender, dimpled flesh, soft and shining, which so often imprisoned overly daring fingers . . .
The arches of your feet were musky, the hollows of your ankles bitter, the lengths of your calves fruity, the backs of your knees salty. The insides of your thighs tasted mineral, and what ran between them, and what came next, and what dripped at the end, was a reduction of everything that had led me there. A core. The core of you and of the whole universe.
That taste, the taste of your being, modern-day princess, delicious, unseemly, and tattooed, to which I helped myself then and overindulged in . . . well, now I have only words with which to savor it.
Alas, these miserable tools—and it’s you who reminded me of this—they’re worthless. They know nothing, invent nothing, and teach nothing when they remember, and relate the tale . . .
More than your skin, your hair, your fingernails or your scent, it’s your essence, your humors, the lifeblood of your insides, your pectin, your vaginal juices—that messenger, elevator operator, telltale of your hunger, your thirst, and your giddiness—that altar boy of your desires—that still, even tonight, makes my mouth water.
“What did she taste like, your beloved?” ask all 26 letters of the only alphabet I ever learned, “and what order would you put us in, if you challenged us to tell her?”
Swallow’s nest. Warm fig. Overripe apricot. Tiny raspberry swallowed beneath an icy drizzle.
Sometimes, wood shavings. Sometimes, tides, soul blood and menstrual blood. Or soft roe. Or milkiness. Aphrodite’s colostrum.
A terrifying mixture of mother’s milk and the snot of an animal in heat.
Truffle in aspic. Bouquet garni of labias and hems of flesh poached to moistness. Eviscerated stingray. Pink flesh attached to a fish bone. The water from shellfish. The juice beneath the shells. Emulsion of sea-urchin coral. Suction of ink from jigboat-fished calamari. Crazy calisthenics. Pussy against the flat of my tongue. Ambrosial candy. Citron. The iodine-tinged zest of a red grapefruit. Vi . . .
Oh, Mathilde.
I give up.
I loved you.
I loved you more than I can say.
And much less well.