During the taxi ride on the way to the hospital at Asnières what was I thinking about? I can’t remember… I kept on looking out the window of the car at the trees in the Bois de Boulogne whipping by.

I have no memories, just a huge void moment, a big hole, a chasm. As we reached the hospital I see a bed where a man I can’t even recognize has been thrown, it’s my father: a plastic tube is dangling from his nose down into a glass container laying on the floor, a second plastic tube goes from his arm to a bottle red with blood that is dripping down slowly, drop by drop. His face is grey, I can only see the whites of his eyes that are covered with a yellowish substance; his body that had appeared to be so bloated lately now seems so tiny under the ivory white sheets.

He’s still conscious and sees me and says:

“I’m sorry, Julien!”

Sorry? Sorry about what?

Five people are around his bed: my mother, who looks as though she’s thinking about what she’s going to have for dinner this evening; my grandmother, who seems to be thinking about what her daughter will have for dinner that evening; my father’s brother, who must be pondering the problems he’ll have at work tomorrow and his professional responsibilities should my father die during the night; my sister-in-law, who is looking at me and remains silent; and then me.

And I am looking for someone who should be there: where is he? Why isn’t he here? He should be present on such an occasion. His place is here.

Where is Fabien?

My brother, where is my brother? He should be here to help me, next to me but he’s not here; he died a stupid death… Smack! Whiplash… Smack!

The doctor comes by and tells us that it will happen during the night. I feel nothing when he says it, not even pity. My father falls asleep after they give him a shot of morphine. We decide to spend the night at his bedside, my sister-in-law, my mother, and myself. After about one hour my mother and sister-in-law fall asleep. I stay awake at my father’s bedside as he falls into a long delirium; it’s now early dawn. During the night the nurse came to check his blood pressure, which is excellent at 130; his heart is holding up very well.

Tuesday 8 a.m.

I go downstairs to get a cup of coffee; my mother and Claudia went home to get some sleep and I went back inside his room at 8:30 a.m. My father is basically out of his coma and is looking at me with his huge and intelligent eyes. He wants me to recite the prayer “Shema Israel.” Me? How could I recite the “Shema Israel” prayer since I don’t even know it and have never learned it. I haven’t heard it in an eternity… Well in any case I’ll pretend, I’ll just mumble something; I’m sure that at that specific instant he won’t even figure out what I’m saying, so it’s not that important…

And then he cries as he asks me to forgive him… Forgive? Forgive what? For what? And then I start looking at him deeply. I see him as the companion of my childhood, the one who played hide and seek with me, the one who wrestled with me, the one who hugged me, who was saying that I was the strongest of them all, and who was such a bad liar.

“Hey Dad, I’m the strongest.”

“It’s true. You’re really tough!”

“Dad help me, tell me that someday I’ll be able to run, to dance, to dance through the sky just like Peter Pan, tell me that, Dad, say it to me!”

I understand…that I never stopped loving him even though I wanted to lose him for five years and I tell him.

Large manly tears run down his sunken cheeks that are disappearing and he regrets that he is leaving me nothing when he’s actually leaving me his love. He falls asleep and I fall asleep with him.

Noon

I’m awakened by his dry and rough cough; he’s throwing up blood, pints of blood, and I’m holding the bowl where his life is winding itself down; large black clots of blood are running and running uninterruptedly and are mixed with my tears; then, exhausted, he stops and falls back into a semi-coma.

The doctor comes by at that time and tells me it’s best that I don’t leave the room, that it may only be a matter of hours or maybe even minutes. I panic when I hear it’s imminent and call the family, who come by two hours later; they’re all surprised to see that I’m still there. I, the disowned one, the one who left home, the bad son who loved freedom, who wants to be an actor, they’re surprised to see me so calm and so quiet. I, calm and quiet? If only they knew what was going on inside me... If they only knew. They will never know; we don’t belong to the same world; it would be useless to try and explain; they wouldn’t understand.

My father lifts his arm and lets it fall in a sign of powerlessness over and over for about one hour. Everyone else around me is crying. I am not crying. Between my father and myself there is a pact, a pact of love. I feel him with me and I feel his heart inside mine. The others look at each other and elbow each other to point out my dry eyes as a sign that I have no feelings. The doctor comes in and says there is internal hemorrhaging due to a perforation of the stomach: more and more blood transfusions, the blood keeps on dripping from the bottle into his arm. At 6 p.m. my father suddenly is again conscious and awake and repeats to me everything he said regarding his final wishes. The others all suddenly jump at the opportunity and decide, given the circumstances, that I’m the only one who can spend another night at his bedside. They leave the room as quickly as possible to go back to their homes.

And now I am alone with him.

The nurses make their continuous rounds and repeat that his blood pressure is very good and that they have never seen such a strong heart. As I sit next to him I remember all those nights when he would sit next to my bed and tell me stories where I appeared as the indestructible hero. He never reminds me of my condition even though he, too, hears what people are saying. Those words that still haunt me.

“He’ll never make it.”

“Yes, he will, you’ll see.”

“He won’t make it.”

“You’ll see, he will.”

“Won’t make it.”

“Yes, you’ll see.”

“Won’t make it.”

“You’ll see…”

“Won’t…”

“We’ll see…”

It’s an awful night. I have to hold his hand because he’s trying to pull the tubes out of his nose because it bothers him terribly; he’s suffering and there’s nothing I can do, just pathetically mop his forehead that’s streaming with tears and sweat. He’s suffering and I can only be sleepy; he’s in agony and I can only feel back pain.

“Help me Dad, help me! I still need you, even now you must help me endure your suffering, and you were always so good at doing things for others and for me. Even when you’re dying you must help me… I’m scared Dad… I’m scared…”

I’m scared… I recapture the fear of my childhood that I had forgotten…the fear that would freeze me up when they left me alone.

They all went out and I stayed behind.

They left me with my crutches near my bed. “You’ll be able to get up if you need to go to the bathroom.”

Thank you for the delicate thought.

They all went away and left me there, leaving me like a dog tied to a leash.

“In any case he can’t go very far” My legs are my leash. I’m afraid… I hate Saturday nights, when the servants have their night off, as though servants needed one… Pfft! Day off? To do what? Movies, a girlfriend, to go for a walk, go dancing see the parents; they work like dogs all week and to enjoy their day off, they dress up with incredible bad taste, the kind of bad taste only cleaning ladies can think of and they go out on Saturday nights...!

And I’m scared….

And my parents go out on Saturday nights, just like the maid, to play bridge; well I’d like to stick their bridge up somewhere!

“Dad you’ll leave the light on in the doorway, right? Don’t forget!”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

I can’t even get up to check that he didn’t forget. I don’t even have the guts because I would have to walk through the long, long hallway. It’s so hard being a cripple, to be thirteen, to be alone and scared on a Saturday night in a big, a very big “beautiful house.” The hall must be more than one hundred and fifty feet long! It’ll take me over five minutes to get through it on my crutches…

Five minutes of being scared stiff is too long! What do I do if the phone rings? Do I answer it or don’t I answer it? If I get up to answer I have to cross the entire living room because the phone is at the other end of the room, sitting on the table like a big white worm, so by the time I reach it, the ringing will have stopped.

A white telephone! How stupid can they be to think it makes them look richer!…A bunch of jerks!

If I don’t answer the thieves who are calling to see if anyone is home will conclude that the house is empty and will come around to rob us. What do I do then?

I’ll try to fall asleep very quickly, as quickly as possible, to get to tomorrow morning in five minutes. I am more and more scared. I try to go to sleep but cries come out of my throat and the sound of my crying fills the room.

I’m so fuckin’ tired of being a cripple!

And my brother could at least stay home on Saturday nights. Instead he goes to the Hot Jazz Club to listen to jazz! How absurd! He thinks he’s Louis Armstrong. I hear noises in the kitchen. I’m sure there’s someone there! So what do I do? Do I cry out or keep quiet?

If I yell he’ll come running over to kill me, but if I keep quiet he’ll also come to search every room. So?

Yes, this time I’m sure there’s someone in the kitchen. I clearly hear the steps! How late can it be? Ten, nine, eleven o’clock…? I didn’t even think of asking for an alarm clock; they could have given it some thought after all!

No I’m just imagining things, there’s nobody, it’s incredible what fear will do to you! You go on imagining silly things that can’t happen or only happen in movies.

“Mommy, what if the doorbell rings?”

“If it rings don’t you answer it!”

Easier said than done—don’t answer—was she ever alone in a house?

Did she ever hear the doorbell ring many times, nonstop, one night alone in the house! Does she know that every ring makes your blood curdle, crushes your bones, and your hair stand up?

I’m afraid.

I’m afraid of being afraid.

I’m ashamed of being afraid of being afraid.

I feel like peeing.

Let’s cool it and think of happy, funny things, but… I have nothing, I find nothing.

But why did I take a nap this afternoon? It’s obviously the reason I’m not sleepy now.

“Come on, you have to take a nap.”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“But you must. It’ll give you strength.”

Strength? What for?

In any case I’m lying down. I’m always lying down.

They don’t know what to do with me, so they tell me that I have to take a nap.

The wall facing my bed is blue. I never did notice how cruel the color blue can be.

There are spots on the wall that look like mean men. They look at me and laugh and make fun of me.

I’m afraid.

They’ll wind up coming out of the wall and surrounding my bed showing me big snakes. I must ignore them, otherwise they’ll get angry.

OK, let me close my eyes... Yes but if I close my eyes I won’t see them getting closer and once they are near my bed they’ll strangle me or they’ll want to look at my fanny or even touch it.

“If you think you’re scaring me, you’re nothing but spots on the wall.”

I’m scared… But why did they leave me alone? And soon it will be next Saturday and I’ll be all alone again.

I’m scared Daddy, I’m scared… Your breathing is almost peaceful. You’re asleep and I’m looking at the blue wall in the hospital room. You must help me overcome my fear, you must help me endure your suffering, even if you die, even if you die, help me Dad, help me. Only if you help me will I be able to get through this, you must, you must… Dad? Dad? You’re not saying anything, there’s nothing you can do for me anymore, I need you so much. You see I’m closing my eyes I’m going to doze off in my armchair while you’re in your white bed. I close my eyes, I don’t want to dream, and I slowly fade away …

I hear screams that seem to come from a crib left in the middle of a field… It’s very hot, a stifling kind of heat, that grabs me by the throat, but strangely I also feel the drops of a cold sweat dripping down my back, my hips and between my legs… My legs, and my thighs especially hurt so much. I exercised too much yesterday, the muscles ache and are swollen as they bulge through my pants… I try to get closer to the crib, the field has turned into a sort of no man’s land of sand and bushes and a tiny stream of black water which emanates an awful smell of pestilence and putrefaction, flows down the middle. It becomes harder and harder to go forward; the black stream is really a sewer and all kinds of garbage and waste are floating on its surface, orange peels, date pits, empty cans, a bone, a clump of hair, a book with block letters saying “It is forbidden to come closer.”

I attempt to open the book but I can’t, there’s a sort of hand pulling in the opposite direction to keep the book closed… I pull so hard with both my hands that it finally opens with the same noise as a huge door. Inside the book I see a woman lying down who is looking at me smiling; she is naked and very skinny, her empty breasts are dangling on her chest, she has no teeth, and she is licking her lips with a red and very pointed tongue like a viper. Suddenly she opens her legs and a huge black hole appears as if to devour me. I turn my head away so as not to look but I still see her face, her eyes roll out of their sockets and fall to the bottom of the book that closes up once again.

The cries coming from the crib have turned into sobs and muffled moans and the crib seems to be still so far away. I must go down the slope into a gully and climb up slowly; my aching thighs tell me to catch my breath but I keep going forward, forward even more. At the bottom of the black hole I see the crib, the cries have stopped and lowering my face I can distinguish lying down on a multicolored blanket what looks like a tiny body hidden by a white sheet.

There is nothing moving, not a sound is coming from the crib now, but the sounds of crickets all around and the sound of the sun. I hear the voices of both men and women mumbling at a distance, all speaking at once. I can’t make out what they are saying.

There is a little musical ditty coming from the crib now, a rhyme that repeats the same sad notes over and over again. The voices are coming closer, a mixture of French, Arabic, and German; a few Italian words are thrown in at times… A crowd of people appears suddenly at the top of the hill, they are all running in every direction as if to escape an unknown threat; they run, fall and get back up; they’re dressed in black with yellow emblems on their clothes. But who are these people? Why are they running so fast, why are they falling? What are they afraid of? They all disappear at the bottom of the hill, swallowed by the earth that opens up. Everything is quiet once again, even the crickets and the sun are now silent… The body under the white sheet seems to have grown, and it’s very odd…

I start walking again and the crib is following me. Actually it’s fastened to my feet with a rope and I’m having trouble pulling it; it’s heavier and heavier… But who is under that sheet?

Three people are following me I can’t see their faces; they’re walking with their faces turned down and are chanting an incessant litany. But who are they? They overtake me and vanish into the blue sea.

The sand makes it hard for me to go forward and the sand is getting hotter and hotter and I can feel it burning through the soles of my shoes. I stop at the little black water stream. But why is the water so black? The three shadows that have been following me are in front of me now, smiling. I can’t recognize who they are, they’re speaking words I can’t understand….they make gestures I can’t see, but who are they? What are they expecting from me?

I try to go forward again but I can’t anymore, the sand is too hot, my legs hurt too much, the sky is too blue, the sun is too high. I sit on the ground not too far from the crib.

But who is in that crib anyway, under the white sheet?

There is total silence now, not a sound, not a noise, not a whisper, nothing…nothing. The three shadows appear very close in front of me, I can almost touch them but I still don’t see their faces; they surround the crib and are holding hands tightly and peacefully… But who are they?

I get up with great difficulty and fall to my knees and slowly I get closer to the crib…

But who is it in the crib under that white sheet?

I attempt to lift the sheet but it’s so heavy, very heavy, as heavy as lead. The three shadows put their arms forward and start lifting the sheet and now I am able to recognize who they are: my brother Fabien, my father, and my mother are smiling… But why is my brother older than my parents who appear to be in their twenties? My brother’s face has wrinkles on his face like an old man. How can this be possible?

They keep on lifting the lead-heavy sheet and I see my face as a child appearing smiling. I look so happy and begin to laugh softly; everyone is smiling…the sheet is lifted some more and it uncovers me. My parents and my brother are no longer smiling; their faces are now covered with tears; my body is now that of a man.

A man with a child’s face… But how can this be possible? The sheet is now black and as I lean over closer to my crib I discover to my horror that my body stops at the knees and two stumps… I turn toward my father, but he has disappeared, they have all disappeared, I am alone in the middle of the desert with my stumps and I am screaming with horror…a high pitched scream comes out of my throat…

I’m startled out of my sleep. I open my eyes and sit on the edge of the armchair where I’ve been sleeping and I’m drenched in sweat and have even pissed all over myself. I must have been very scared during the night when I had my nightmare, this recurring nightmare that’s been haunting me. It’s always the same but it gets clearer and comes into greater focus, as if to tell me… It’s not over yet, but soon.

Wednesday

His face is like that of a skeleton, he has the hiccups, he has black and purple circles around the eyes eating away at his face, his limbs are lifeless, his jet black hair is covered with white spots, the bones in his face are incredibly visible; the hemorrhaging has stopped. At ten in the morning the nurses come in to place a catheter into his penis to avoid any danger of uremia; he emerges from his coma to ask me to get him a few Tchaikovsky records and then falls back to sleep under the effects of morphine.

A second patient is placed in his room and he moans incessantly with the noises of an airplane taking off.

My father is destroyed by the struggle and the nurses are sure that the end will take place during the night.

I remain since I want to fulfill his final requests. One of the few things I could have done for him. The waiting is horrible, I am frightened, every noise inside the room takes on an incredible dimension, I feel cold, I hurt for him. The man dying next to him is screaming from the pain.

Thursday

He’s still hanging on; his breathing is hoarse and cavernous. “Congested lungs.” He has trouble breathing, says the doctor.

The whole family arrives, accompanied by a very religious uncle, a true believer who enters the room like the messiah. His arrival prompts me into an uncontrollable nervous and happy laughter that is unstoppable; people look at each other, shocked at my hard and pitilessly dry heart; they whisper among themselves but I don’t hear what they’re saying; only my father looks and smiles at me, as if he’d finally understood me after all those years I stayed away.

He gives me his hand that I squeeze eagerly as I go on laughing.

“It’s horrible to see someone die,” says my mother.

“We must pray,” says the messiah.

“It’s the end,” says my uncle.

The others take out their handkerchiefs.

All we are missing are the professional criers to complete the spectacle. Every half hour my father regains consciousness for one or two minutes, only to whisper words such as “love” and “good health to all of you” or “I did what I could.” Not once during his agony with a terrible and admirable lucidity did he say my brother’s name and yet he revered him and his heart, that damn heart of his, kept on going.

Thursday night.

I’m alone with him once again and his eyes are now completely covered with a grey veil; his tongue, which is visible as he keeps his mouth open, is separating into bloody slices that are flaking away, his lips look like old parchment.

He’s had nothing to eat since Sunday night and the red blood from the white bottle keeps on dripping through the plastic tube going into his arm that has now become entirely blue and seems to be separated from the rest of his body.

Julien…Julien…in the silence and the darkness of the night his whispers have awakened me… The hospital room is completely dark, his bed is barely illuminated by the outer darkness.

Julien…Julien …he calls me quietly whispering… Julien…

I get up from my armchair and come closer to his bed… I lean over toward him, his eyes are wide open and he is repeating in a whisper:

“Julien… Julien …”

“What is it, Dad? What?”

“Listen, listen…”

“What, Dad? What?”

“You wanted to know how it was over there?”

“Where, Dad, where?”

“Over there, over there…a long, a very long time ago, look…you see? You see?”

“Where, Dad?”

His face no longer shows signs of pain, he looks younger…and different…yes different.

There is terror on his face, unbearable terror, a green inescapable fear.

“Over there... Come here, closer to me, closer, closer.”

He wants to whisper into my ear.

Over there it was...

I can’t understand the words he’s saying and he begins to shake, his whole body is shaking everywhere, his entire soul trembles and with his hand he draws circles in the air… He continues to whisper and I also begin trembling just like him…my whole body is shaking in the silence of the night punctuated by his incomprehensible whispering…

I can see on his face, in his lifeless eyes… I see in his fear…long barracks, electrified barbed wire fences, charnels, Germans, dogs, bodies cut to pieces, helmets, uniforms and shaved heads, bodies without bodies and he whispers and whispers without stopping… And on his face I can see clearly, distinctly… Bodies burning, contorting themselves, children saying nothing, looking sad, men who cry and piss in their pants, fall down and get up like automatons and moan and implore God and humanity… Death stinks and the odor is now unbearable, a stifling grey smell… The smell comes from him, he’s still in the process of dying with them, he’s dying for the hundredth time…and he whispers as he shakes and passes on to me the fear and the doubt and the strength and the hatred. I finally understand who he is. I understand this man at last whom I call my father, my father. He was 33 when he was put in that camp, one more martyr… How many martyrs were 33 years old?… How many were crucified for the love of the new race?

“Julien…that’s how it was, don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget…”

The shaking has stopped, his face has recaptured its pain, silence has returned, the black night has once more imposed its will, and I am here in his room, without a sigh or a word, without a flutter.

So I am here.

The son of the unknown man, the son of a poor corpse thrown on that bed, the son of the martyr… The son of the man I can now call my father.

“Don’t forget, don’t forget.”

Friday morning

His blood pressure has suddenly dropped, his pulse is beating 170; he’s nothing but an old rag in a bed that’s much too big for him. He’s breathing much faster with a whistling sound and more hoarsely than before.

He coughs and spits and I go and take the spit out of his throat with a cotton swab. He has one last instant of awareness and tells me:

“You were right, one shouldn’t be fearful of life, grab as much of it as you can. You see I’m dying a happy man because inadvertently and due to my own foolishness I managed to make you become a man way before your time.”

But what’s he talking about? What foolishness?

Me, a grown man?

He asked me to kiss him and blessed me as he asked me to say “no” to the others because they had turned him away from me. He sank back into his coma with a smile on his face. The day goes by breathing with him, suffering with him, loving him with the others who are crying and the messiah who is praying.

He has this grin on one side of his face where three front teeth have fallen out, and I had this strange and proud feeling overtake me, I was proud of the man who could fight that way, who could lay there with his sad look but who also appeared to be challenging everyone…

Don’t forget, don’t forget… Now I know how it was over there, I see you and I understand, no rather, I know. Don’t be afraid, I will not forget, I am strong now thanks to you, I am complete. I am ready, I am ready.

At that moment I love him the most, I am proud to be his son, proud of sharing that same blood that was being spilled, proud of being more than his son, a friend, a brother, a father, the same man he is: him.

Then the bleeding starts all over again, blood drips into the plastic tube that came out of his stomach; the blood reminded me of tiny snakes sliding along the side of his chin and his shoulder dropping into the bottle. At every breath white and black blood spurts out, spilling over, flooding the bed with life just as life was leaving it. The nurse comes in; his blood pressure is at 40; it is impossible to stay alive for more than one hour under those conditions.

Saturday

Everyone is present and he is as well. Every breath taken in generates excruciating pain and every breath out is a gush of blood; but where does all that blood come from?

There isn’t a single inch of his face without pain on it; he’s full of uncoordinated gestures, his bloated stomach sinks again and lifts up at the same rhythm as the blood flow and his damn heart is still there holding up. The professors from the medical college come in to observe this exceptional case.

His blood pressure becomes impossible to measure: it’s less than three and his heart is still holding up. The creases have now disappeared from his face, he looks smooth but every hiccup is a cry of pain answered by the quiet breathing of the man who is in the bed next to his. His sad look has changed into a mask of suffering, his arm is moving in search of something he can’t find, and from time to time he half opens his eyes to look at something he can’t see. It’s three in the afternoon.

And his heart is still holding, as regular as a machine. Tic tac, tic, tac, pompom, pompom, pompom, pompompompompompom, pom, pom, pompom, pompom, pom, pom, pompom, pom. It is now midnight and blood is still flowing through the plastic; his hands have become cold and he continues to cry.

At one o’clock “they” decide to go home; the messiah has declared: “It won’t happen tonight, I know it.” Amen!

That’s when I burst out laughing because I had the sudden thought of killing him while they were gone, to stab him to death or choke him with his pillow.

Let him die! At last!

Suddenly, while the others were babbling, he stops moaning, he looks better, more peaceful. And then I don’t understand anything; the messiah is praying in Hebrew very quickly without catching his breath; he just died, like that without saying anything, without warning anyone… He has just died, tears penetrate into me like knives, I bite my fingers in order not to scream, I feel physical pain, everything is turning, my eyes see nothing except for his wide open eyes that are locked on me in pain, I’m shaken by sobs and shivers, tears flow, my hands tremble, my knees give way, he is dead, my father.

In the commotion the messiah asks for a mirror and holds it close to his mouth to make sure:

“YES. He’s dead, I don’t see any breath.”

He’s dead, dead.

The messiah turns to me and with a pompous and almost professional attitude asks me to close his eyes as my father had requested. My fingers touch his eyes softly, it feels as though they will sink into his eyeballs, everything is flabby, strangely flabby, he’s flabby, I’m flabby, the others are flabby, the room is flabby, the air is flabby. Everything is flabby. That’s what death is like.

Now I’ll work at erasing the past. I have to start over and be born a third time! I’m still very young, my whole life is in front of me, the world is mine, I’m in Paris, I have an education, I can walk, I’m handsome. I’m going to work on my acting career, forget about past sorrows, forget… forget everything. Forget Tunis, forget my legs, forget Fabien, forget the sorrow, the physical suffering, the fear and humiliation, forget who I am…

When I thought at the time that such a thing as forgetting was possible…it now sounds so ridiculous, and grotesque! You must not forget, you can’t forget, ever, nothing, you must appropriate some things that happen, they must be digested and the chapter must be closed, benefit from your experiences, and go forward and in short become an adult.

But all this has remained inside me, stuck in my throat.

“He’ll never make it.”

“Yes, he will, you’ll see.”

“He’ll never make it.”

“Yes, he will, you’ll see.”

“He’ll never make it, he’ll never make it, never, never, never…”

And I will never forget. I have a black book where I write in red the names of the people who have hurt me, who have wronged me, and later I’ll remember those who humiliated me, wounded me, covered me with shit, those who sniggered behind my back, those who made me lose all the women I loved, those who doubted me, those who hated me, those who didn’t love me well enough. I don’t write the names in alphabetical order, they are inscribed as I meet them, chance encounters, chance hatreds.

Marianne’s parents have a place of honor among the others on the list; they called me a pimp because I couldn’t make any money for one month.

“He’s a pimp, he does no work!” says Marianne’s mother.

“You are prostituting yourself!” says Marianne’s father.

“At least a prostitute gets paid, while you pay him to go to bed. I’ll tell him that you used to have a drug addict for a lover and since he’s so jealous it’ll make him suffer! And he’ll get out of your life!” adds Marianne’s sweet and generous mother.

Marianne’s parents dared say such things while they forced their daughter to pay the premium on a life insurance policy in their favor—it’s hard to believe, I was the pimp of her body and they were the pimps of her life.

Well! Those dramatic and taunting memories were all very interesting, the anecdotes of hatred, the disgorging of the soul, but this afternoon I must actually do something. I strangely feel something akin to the need to suffer, to recall cruel things and bring them back from the past. To remain inactive drives me out of my mind! What shall I do this afternoon? I’ll go sell myself to the companies that dub American movies even though it’s the kind of thing that makes me sick. The mediocrity of what I’m required to do is depressing; I have to say in French in a false tough guy tone because the actor I am dubbing is supposed to be a gangster like Robert De Niro or a cowboy like Clint Eastwood. I have to go and humiliate myself for a fee of a few hundred francs.

What good will it do for me to have one or two hundred francs more? I’ll be able to buy a pair of corduroy pants for sixty francs or take a girl out to dinner. And then? So what… What will it do for me? Nothing…strictly speaking nothing… I don’t want to live just to make a living…

Nicolas has decided to produce a new play and offered me the part of a neurotic. It’s the kind of character role that obviously doesn’t suit me, as I am the perfect example of mental health. The Butterfly’s Game is a terrible play by a third-rate Polish writer with absolutely nothing new to offer any audience and I have no desire whatsoever to be in it. But my best friend Jean is part of the cast, which is a major plus, and I don’t know how he managed to pull it off, but Nicolas has somehow convinced a famous old actor to also be in the production. Lucien Raimbourg was part of the original cast of a play by Samuel Beckett.

I quickly become very friendly with Raimbourg who has so much to teach us about acting but who also works closely and is still in regular contact with one of my idols, none other than the great Samuel Beckett. I have acted in several of his plays and his work also happens to be the main topic of my doctoral dissertation.

One afternoon after rehearsal, Lucien asks me if I would like to join him the next day for a cup of coffee at the great writer’s apartment located just a few streets from the theater where both of us appear in that Polish masterpiece that no one will want to go and see for many good reasons.

I am overjoyed at the thought of meeting the genius, the inventor of the contemporary theater, a towering master of modern literature, a model for my generation, and a great man. The thought keeps me awake all night as I recall every single title of his works that I know by heart, and I repeat out loud the intelligent words I plan to say to him when we meet the next day. I’m ready. I go to sleep early to rest my mind and be fresh and worthy of the incredible moment when I shall be face to face with Samuel Beckett himself!

I meet Lucien Raimbourg at the corner of the boulevard Montparnasse and the boulevard Raspail and we walk down to the Odéon-Mabillon neighborhood in the Latin Quarter where the great man lives. We reach his place at exactly two in the afternoon as agreed and my friend Lucien searches unsuccessfully for the doorbell until he finally decides to discreetly knock three times—what else—directly on the apartment door… After several long minutes the door opens…. The great man is right there facing us, and he appears much more craggy and emaciated than I expected, which I attribute to his age. He’s wearing a filthy old greenish bathrobe covered with oily spots and dried up tobacco stains and a worn out pair of grey corduroy pants riddled with holes. He shuffles around in his brown leather slippers that are just about ready to fall apart. He walks round shouldered as he drags his feet and belches at every third step. We enter what he must consider his work space, a rather smallish room cluttered with old newspapers, dirty clothes, open and half-eaten cans of food, dirty dishes everywhere, empty bottles, some empty glasses, and other glasses filled with wine, gin and other indescribable liquids…. I thought I was on the set of one of his plays.

I carefully sit on the extreme edge of his sofa; the great man takes a seat facing us, his hair is as white as snow and his eyes are so intensely blue and shiny that they also appear white to me. He doesn’t offer us any coffee, doesn’t utter a word to me or even glance in my direction… He speaks nonstop in flawless French to my friend, punctuating his speech with loud fits of belching and guffaws as he discusses the women he fucked, those he would want to fuck, and the fact that he can still get a hard on and keep his erection for a very long time, and of the advantages of bigger tits over smaller ones… My friend Lucien is crimson and can’t stop snickering as he appears to derive the greatest pleasure at the wild sexual imaginings of the genius. The great playwright’s interesting monolog goes on for a very long time, during which I have not opened my mouth once or uttered a single word, nor have I even been blessed by a passing look… After an entire hour of chuckling and snickering, belching and telling gross anecdotes, the great man’s eyes finally shift and descend toward me at last… His white eyes shoot through me for some twenty endless seconds without him saying a single word… Then the great man’s eyes move away from me and back to_Lucien and, pointing at me with his index finger in a gesture of obvious disgust, he asks:

“Why have you brought this little turd here?”

He immediately rises without looking at either one of us, and turns his back to us to make us understand that the visit is over, and we walk back down the same hallway to the door. He doesn’t see us out and remains motionless, standing in the center of his study as if he were in a stupor, probably getting ready to write another masterpiece after that most inspiring moment. As we leave, we quietly shut the door behind us. Our visit with the literary genius is over.

The Polish play closes after a single triumphant week with a grand total of six performances and an audience of no more than two hundred, most of them being older ladies using discounted tickets. I never did see Lucien Raimbourg again after that, and I have learned to forget about Beckett and all the other geniuses, living or dead, and life goes on.

I am exhausting myself in my attempt to become the great actor I deserve to be…Well then I’ll go home to bed or just lay down for a while and then we’ll see…

I hope that Nicolas will not be there. Nicolas is really beginning to lose it. Yes, I know we’re supposed to be friends since we share an apartment in the rue Vavin near Montparnasse, across the street from La Coupole, very chic and fashionable with the Café Select practically next door where we meet all the great future failures and those rejected by success.

Nicolas comes from a good family and is a student in political science. Four times a week he drives a taxi around Paris to make ends meet and pay for his theater classes that he hopes will turn him into a great director.

He often tells me that the conversations he overhears while he’s driving the taxi are an invaluable source of important references for his future work as a great director and how those living experiences while he’s driving prove that you can have a life of great adventure without ever getting out of your car.

Actually he managed to demonstrate the true extent of the talent and knowledge he acquired while directing the Polish masterpiece that we performed. He spends the rest of his time in the apartment we share and often is nice enough to wait for me for dinner and offer me his usual concoction of rice and mushrooms that has become his daily diet… I understood that he was losing his mind the day he was waiting for me around dinner time but that evening there was neither rice nor mushrooms; he looked much more serious than usual.

He’s placed a blackboard in the very center of his bedroom and is waiting for me, sitting in his plastic armchair with his pipe stuck in his mouth, wearing a velvet bathrobe and a black beret on his head, his well-bred aristocratic good looks, tall and emaciated, just enough to convince you that life’s trifles are of no interest to him. He must think of himself as some kind of Sherlock Holmes.

“Julien, I have to talk to you. Well, this is it… As you know I come from a well-to-do family from the provinces.”

I immediately thought I was about to hear the confession of a petty bourgeois from a small town somewhere far away from Paris.

“Nicolas, to tell you the truth I’m a bit tired. You’ll have to excuse me; it’ll have to wait for another time.”

“No, no Julien, sit down. You must listen to me! Well, this is it… My parents are divorced and my father lives alone. He’s got lots of money but he’s a disgusting miser and doesn’t want to share any of it; he hates the idea that I should want to make the theater my profession; no rather, that I am in the theater. Well, this is it… I think he can still last another twenty years and I really don’t intend to wait, because knowing him, he’s very capable of leaving all his money to charity. Well, this is it… If he dies I can be rich, very rich. Well, this is it… I have an idea…”

He begins drawing something on the blackboard that turns out to be the blueprint of a house. He draws it very quickly and very clearly.

It all takes a few minutes and I remain patiently seated there looking at him without uttering a word. I can see that it’s not the first time he’s outlining his plan. He must have thought about it, drawn it over and over several times. Every conceivable detail is on the blackboard: the bedrooms, the hallways, the doors. I thought I was in gangster movie where they’re getting ready to rob a bank.

“Well, this is it…”—he’s so irritating when he constantly repeats “Well, this is it.” He must be very nervous—“If you take the 7 p.m. train you’ll reach Auxerre, where he lives, at 10:30 p.m.; his house is only a ten-minute walk from the train station on a road that is generally deserted, especially at night. You go to the house; he always goes to sleep at 9 p.m. after taking his pills. He has a dog but I have a way of preventing him from barking. In any case I hate that dog, he poisoned my childhood. You understand what I mean when I say poisoned?

“Well this is it… You’ll enter his room from the hall right there that comes from the rear doorway… You see the door right there?”

“You’re asking me to enter your father’s house while he’s asleep and steal whatever he has there?”

Nicolas stops drawing on the blackboard where he happens to be tracing the steps I should take to penetrate into his father’s bedroom, turns around and looks at me with a smile. He has a strange look on his face that seems almost without any shape as if it appeared behind a smokescreen.

He looks at me and says:

“He keeps nothing at home, only a few worthless works of art that would be impossible to sell. No it’ll take more than just that. Because of his pills he always sleeps very deeply, like a baby, with no fears and no regrets. He’s grabbed all of his family’s money and feels absolutely no obligations toward me, the bastard! I despise and hate him; he’s a worm who is totally useless to society, a turd, filth, an insult to my intelligence. He doesn’t deserve to live.”

Nicolas says all this without getting excited, without hate or emotion but almost with a smile. He looks at me; I look at him; he’s waiting for my answer. He just sat in his armchair with his hands on his knees and his pipe in his mouth.

“But Nicolas, he’s your father.”

He bursts out laughing, he laughs uncontrollably holding his stomach, and he has a hoarse kind of laughter like a series of hiccups.

“Julien, I never suspected you could be such a petty bourgeois. Really, you’ll always be a surprise to me… Yes, he’s my father, so what? I owe him my life and then? Must I wait for him to die before I can have my grandparents’ money? After all it’s my money isn’t it? Why should I wait? Let all that money rot in a bank vault? No, no. Imagine all the plays we could produce with all that money.”

His logic is iron clad; we can have all of his father’s money and produce twelve other Polish masterpieces. I look at him and he goes on:

“Well, this is it then, I could give you a percentage of the inheritance. What do you think?”

I look at him for a few seconds and then leave the room without saying a word. Since then I have been avoiding Nicolas as much as I can.

I decide against going back to the rue Vavin. Nicolas must still be there with his pipe in his mouth, drawing on his blackboard and attempting to convince another petty bourgeois to help him murder his father. He looked at me with unmitigated disgust when I said no, since I had now become another one of his enemies, co-opted by the system, the future employee of some government agency with an iron-clad pension. Therefore no rest today, but more walks through the streets of Paris.

Paris that I know so well by now, my streets, my stores, my cafés, my merchants, my own little world; some of them even wave or nod at me as I go by, but they never really say a word, not even hello.

If Monique calls me I’ll hang up on her … I hope old Richard will call so perhaps I can make fun of him, make him hope that something is possible, that I’m thinking of him and would like to see him again and then laugh at him; perhaps I can also make him suffer… An old man with white hair who could be my father and looks like my brother, kneeling in front of me with his head between my legs. That never did happen to me but it must be quite surprising; well not really. It’s actually pretty disgusting.

“Dad, let’s wrestle!”

“No, not tonight. I’m too tired! But you can lay down next to me if you want.”

And he took me in his arms and we took a nap and I believed it was someone else caressing my cheek, who was holding me in his arms; I got a bit scared; and what if it was a different man who would take advantage of me and do things; they say you must be wary, you never know the kind of person you can encounter. Perhaps it’s another man who is wearing my father’s mask and is taking advantage of me. I’m sure another man is wearing my father’s mask, and it is not my father, because I believe I was adopted when I was young. Yes, I know, every child thinks that but in my case I know it’s true.

I often looked at pictures of myself when I was younger to see whether I resembled someone in the family but I don’t, I don’t look like anyone… So? Then I dream sometimes of things I can’t repeat to anyone. I often have a wonderful dream I think about:

I’m thirty and I’m walking along a blue beach. I’m no longer limping and actually I never did limp in the past. I’m very good looking and women, all the women, look at me and smile, and I start running very fast and they’re all running after me but they can’t catch up with me because I’m running on the water, so they remain on the beach yelling and screaming out of frustration.

There are scores of women. Then they take off their clothes and are stark naked and show me their bodies by posing seductively and I ignore them and keep on walking on water without looking back. I walk, I walk, at times I fly using my arms as wings and I look at them from above, from high up in the sky, they are completely naked, and I am still flying and I reach a different land where scores of other naked women are also expecting me. They applaud when I touch the sand, they scream that I’m so beautiful, that I was the one they were waiting for and then they all jump on me as if they want to devour me. I close my eyes and feel great warmth overtaking my entire body, I shiver and I smile. If my Daddy knew what I’m thinking about when we take a nap together he’d be very angry!

Maybe I’ll tell him someday; maybe he’ll think its fine and he’ll also tell me stories about naked women… I read in a book that sex begins at birth, so it’s not because I’m unable to walk, I’m a cripple, that I’m not supposed to have any desires. Once, while they were having dinner I found in Dad’s dresser under his shirts some pictures of naked women and men touching each other and doing revolting things, so he must have quite a few stories to tell. There were dozens of pictures but I didn’t find pictures of Dad and Mom. I must admit that I felt heat and shivers all over my body…

My maid Pina’s voice interrupted my pleasure as I was looking at those pictures: “Dinner is served!”

My mother must always bother us just when…

Madam my mother with her beauty, her servants, her lovers, her children, her husband, in that order of importance…her this, her that, her other…

I hate Madam my mother.

When I think that right now she’s in the hospital in a public room, alone like a poor woman, and that they all turned away from her, her lovers, her friends, her family, her brother, all of them fearful of having to do something, perhaps even to offer her some help. They just ignore her like they ignore me; we don’t exist, we should have, we should, we must disappear, and we represent nothing. They all go on with their mediocre little lives and let my mother go on with hers. She’s no longer young, nor so beautiful; she no longer dresses fashionably: she looks like a poor Jewish woman who works as a cleaning lady. She had all of Tunis at her feet. Now she’s kneeling at the feet of the whores in the rue St. Denis as she shortens the hems on their skirts for a few francs.

She, who never was a good mother, has now become the mother of all the hookers in the rue Blondel: they confide in her. Those ladies who come from just about everywhere and wind up in the same street have a personal story, always an original and pathetic one to tell. They talk about their childhood, their family, sometimes about their children. They all say they won’t be in this business forever, that it’s only a passing moment in their lives, a stage, a pit stop so they can finally organize their lives. They tell Mom the complicated stories of their pimps: Yugoslavs, Arabs, Senegalese, or Corsicans. They describe their customers with their habits, their manias, their obsessions, and their perversions in the greatest detail. Mother, who suffers from asthma, must work all day in a smoke-filled miserable little shop with her packs of Marlboro that she’s chain smoking and mixes with the smoke of the cigarettes smoked by those half-naked ladies who stop by to purchase sexy dresses and skirts, or request that she shorten the hem but rarely to make it longer…

As they all cough together, the ladies have coffee with Mother, whom they have nicknamed Mami, and relax between customers as they confide their joys and sorrows and Mother, who had always been thoroughly incapable of managing her own life, is now the special counselor and confidante of a bunch of two-bit whores. She works from eleven in the morning to ten at night and then returns to her hovel a few doors down the street near the Porte St. Denis. She lives in two rooms on the sixth floor of a dilapidated building, drinks coffee with milk all evening, smokes nonstop, and eats only canned food. Her only remaining pleasure in life is her poodle Pamela, a big change since she used to hate animals before but now adores this ridiculous little dog and treats it better than she would a child. She feeds it filet mignon that she can’t even buy for herself, gives her a bath, brushes her hair, dresses her in winter coats and even in summer clothes and looks at it smiling with happiness.

And I, the unemployed actor, am unable to offer her any kind of help.

Now that her beauty has vanished, that her pride is defeated, that her bad temper is dissolved, she finally needs me, she hangs on to me; without me she has nothing left!

She was never able to defeat me; she was never able to conquer me.

Poor mother, now I look at you, and…. I can’t even speak, I’m overwhelmed with remorse, with pain, with emotion, it wasn’t your fault, you… you knew nothing. You had been thrown into life like some kind of beautiful piece of merchandise; you were only a young Jewish-Italian girl from Tunis, with an abusive, alcoholic father who was actually half crazy, a barbarian. He had the gall of having himself called Papi and even tried to impose his madness on Fabien and on me but Dad stopped him immediately.

“Nino this is my house! You shall respect my rules or you will no longer be welcome here.”

My father and Papi Nino never spoke again and we practically never saw him but the stories of his extravagant behavior remain in everyone’s memory.

Mother, do you remember the cakes he used to throw out the window every Sunday because his wife, your mother, complained that he had bought too many? After three Sundays of that circus all the kids in the neighborhood were waiting outside the window for the rain of cakes and that lasted for several months.

Angelina, my Mami, your mother tried to defend you but couldn’t really do anything against the Barbarian. Angelina, my grandmother whose name means little angel in Italian, with her sweet compassionate face where you could read the signs of pain left by her years spent with the Barbarian.

Her face exuded a gentle kind of wisdom and resignation, but also the silent rejection of any compromise. Every other Thursday afternoon Mami Angelina used to come and pick me up at home to take me to the La Royale tea room for cakes. I would go with the greatest pleasure because I enjoy being with my Mami. I love the cream puffs and chocolate éclairs. I even agree to have Pina disguise me in a sailor suit and comb my hair with a part on the side so I look like the little Prince.

And best of all my Mami used to come with a horse-driven cab.

I’m always hoping it will be a white horse. They get me settled into the cab and Mami sits in front of me and we’re off. Mami looks at me and smiles. I smile at her, the horse trots off slowly and I can hear the Sicilian coachman whistling between his teeth and from time to time he yells out to stop the horse or drive him on faster. I’m in a stagecoach and look down on the passersby and I’m so proud. Mami is also happy to enjoy a short moment of rest away from Nino, far from the silence she has chosen. Forty years of silence with the barbarian…

But from time to time she says to him in a firm voice that I can still hear:

“Nino, ma basta! Enough! Let your wounds heal. You’re not the only one to have suffered; let life take its course; look at the sky in a different way.”

My grandfather would listen and calm down for a few minutes; then Nino the barbarian would take over once again. He breaks his own son’s arm with a stroke of his cane only because he expressed the desire to accompany him to a soccer game. No one was allowed to say a single word in his presence; he must have thought of himself as Mussolini, that nut case, so then, Mother, no one allowed you to be or to express yourself or give the possibility of becoming a real person? The idea of love had been poisoned in you at birth.

So the beautiful young maiden you were was married off at seventeen to escape the abuser, the soul breaker, the barbarian. Your new family, Dad’s family, didn’t help you understand life and its ways any better. They were a Tunisian family while you were of Italian origin. A Tunisan family with a multitude of brothers and sisters and a hoard of children. It was a patriarchal system where the grandfather rules with an iron hand in a velvet glove over his family and its affairs… Nothing escapes him; he controls everything but with kindness, wisdom, and understanding, especially when you agree with him. He even keeps watch over the melons and watermelons that he hides under his bed that no one is allowed to approach or even look at… Everyone knows they’re there under his bed and waits with undisguised impatience for the great day to come. Finally the whole family, some forty people in all, is present in the big room where we generally celebrate Passover because the great day has arrived. I’m sitting on a big wicker armchair. Papi Isaac arrives as proud as a conquering general; he is wearing his white silk djellabah, used only on special occasions, with a satisfied smile on his face and he carries a huge watermelon draped in a white cloth as if it were a precious child. He places the watermelon on the table, touches it a little, pressing his fingers on the most sensitive parts; he leans carefully over it and finally gets his ear closer to it as if he were hoping for a heartbeat. Finally without averting his eyes he asks for the knife with the mother of pearl handle that they hurry to bring him. With the precision of a surgeon he cuts open a thin long and longitudinal slice of watermelon, puts it in his mouth, and begins eating and chewing on it slowly….

The flies stop buzzing around and land on the furniture near the watermelon; there’s not a sound in the room; we’re all holding our breath awaiting the verdict… Only my grandmother, who is tired of that circus and must have seen this and other nonsense many times, opens her snuff box and snorts loudly a few times, rolling her eyes, barely able to contain her impatience….

After chewing for one or two minutes my grandfather turns toward us; he has a big smile on his face and we are all relieved because he’s happy. He looks at us all for a long time and finally announces solemnly:

“The watermelon is ripe and we can eat it.”

Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and starts talking all at once. Papi Isaac now cuts the watermelon in long strips and I must say it is very beautiful with its three colors, green, red, and black. The children run up to ask for a slice, the parents comment on the taste of the cucur-bitaceous plant, the older ones are comparing it to the taste of the watermelon from the week or the year before; we’re happy, we’re all family, we share the same pleasures and we are all watermelon experts.

I look at my mother, who doesn’t seem to understand what is going on; my father is sitting in a corner, silent and with other things on his mind.

Poor mother, did you have your place in that strange world? Did you trade the insanity of the Barbarian for the craziness of the watermelon eaters? Poor mother…you knew nothing, you understood nothing, and now you are nothing.

I remember how much I spied on you, I remember… I used to hide under the bed to listen: she is making a phone call, she is calling her lover; I had a hard time getting under her bed; first I had to put down my crutches, then I had to lay on the floor and crawl under the bed pulling and dragging my legs but I’m sure she will call so all this effort will not be wasted; she’s going to call Carmelo.

“Hello, Carmelo, is that you, darling?”

Why is she calling him darling? What gives her the right? I should be able to get up and hit her across the face with my crutch, to teach her, to show her that you don’t call someone else darling.

And now she’s laughing, a big, hearty, and throaty laugh.

What can he be telling her to make her laugh so much? A lot of dirty things, no doubt, I’m sure of it, I know it.

“But of course sweetheart, I’ll see you this afternoon, you know that I feel like seeing you.”

She feels like seeing him? What for? To act like the pictures I discovered under my Dad’s shirts? But this is my mother! No, it can’t be possible, she can’t be my mother, a mother doesn’t do those kinds of dirty things. Does that mean women, all women are like that? They all do dirty things?

Fabien was right when he would say: “We’re unlucky, it had to happen to us; look at all the mothers around us; when I get out of school I see all the mothers that are waiting for their kids at the door, but there’s never anyone waiting for me; or if she is waiting it’s because I’ve done something wrong. And when I come home she’s not there. Charlie’s mother gets him a snack and waits for him. Is he lucky!”

My poor brother, he had tears in his eyes when he said that; had he known he was going to die so soon, the whole story would have seemed so silly to him. He’d lived a life without a single scratch and he died; his death was as pathetic as his life. Also without a single scratch, “whiplash,” “the rabbit punch”... You fall asleep, just like that, you fall asleep in your car seat on your way to a holiday resort, a friend is driving, a friend you trust implicitly, a friend called Bobby. But then Bobby suddenly goes through a red light at an intersection, a car is coming on the right and it’s whiplash, the “rabbit punch”! The smack! The lumbar vertebrae are severed and you’re dead.

When I was told the news, I was hoping, I thought, I was absolutely convinced that there had been some mistake, that it had to be his friend Bobby who had died, that there had been a mistake in the paperwork. I wanted that dog Bobby to die so badly, and come to think of it Bobby is a dog’s name anyway. Poor Fabien, when I think I was jealous of you, that I hated you and that when you died you were a child, you were my age.

“Yes, yes Carmelo! But of course I’m careful with Julien... Yes, yes I know he’s very sensitive... But yes, I know... He’ll never know... But why should he hate you...?”

Why do I hate him? As if she could know what hatred really is.

Why? Why do I hate him?

But when I see him next to my father I feel like bursting with rage, with shame, with disgust! So then my father has no balls at all! He knows, he cannot not know and he says nothing; he either doesn’t give a damn or he’s a coward! No, he just doesn’t give a damn, that’s it! My father can’t be a coward, that’s not possible!

When it’s close to dinnertime and I see the place setting ready for Carmelo—the name of a jerk if ever there was one—I feel like going under my bed, I feel like hiding, disintegrating, or...or...disappearing into thin air.

I’ll have to endure him for another full meal, with that rotten accent of his, those rough manners of a successful laborer; his face resembles Raf Vallone! He does look like Raf Vallone, the bastard! And above all, Carmelo is tall,

“Julien! Julien! Come to the table! But where are you? Julien! Julien! Ju...lien! Ju…lienju ... lien! Ah! There you are at last. You must have become deaf. I’ve been calling you for one hour; you’re doing it on purpose.”

Yes, I am doing it on purpose, I don’t want to sit with all of you, I don’t want to feel ashamed, I don’t want to feel my heart sinking. You’re not going to ask me once again to perform like a circus dog like the other night in front of your guests. Pina comes and gets me in my wheelchair and takes me to the center of the living room. She has placed a blanket over my legs extended in front of me, to avoid offending the guests with the awful sight of my two shriveled stubs.

“He looks so good!”

“He’s just adorable!”

“He looks like he’s in great shape!”

“His eyes are truly like burning embers.”

“He has his father’s forehead!”

“And he has his mother’s mouth!”

Fabien is laughing silently in a corner, my mother is pink with pleasure, my father is tapping on the table impatiently and I am all drenched in sweat, I am red in the face, I feel like peeing, or throwing up, I hate all those well-dressed guests.

“Come on, Julien, say something, tell us a story, ‘The Three Little Pigs’ or ‘Mr. Seguin’s Goat’; you’ll see he has a slight lisp but he’s so cute and so sensitive, he recites with such heartfelt emotion, he’s a real actor.”

“Come on, go ahead, just to please us!”

Soon they’ll be offering me candy.

“We’ll give you candy!”

There! Exactly as I said!

They all think I’m retarded. “Mr. Seguin’s Goat”? Why not “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”? They all forget I’m five years ahead in my class work and I read Shakespeare and Nietzsche, James Joyce, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

“Very well then, but not ‘The Three Little Pigs’ or ‘Mr. Seguin’s Goat.’ I’ll recite whatever I choose!”

My father looks at me and is smiling. Fabien stops laughing and my mother says: “But of course, sweetheart.”

I take a deep breath, I put on a deep frown, and I recite the poem by Boris Vian that begins with something like:

“Our father who art in heaven… why don’t you please stay there!”

There was total silence, they all look at me disapprovingly; clearly Boris Vian is not among their best-loved poets. So then I smile and add:

“Would you like to hear something else, you shit heads! Something that will amuse you and educate you perhaps? An excerpt from Mein Kampf? A passage from Sodom and Gomorrah? An erotic poem? A few lines from the Marquis de Sade that I have memorized?”

Huge scandal, amazement on every face, stunned looks, bobbing heads, hands that are shaking, then everyone starts talking all at once to express their troubled feelings. Fabien quickly leaves the room and mother is about to burst into tears; only my father is laughing out loud, choking up with uncontrollable laughter and hilarity.

My dear, my dear father, I spent so many hours waiting for you to return from work, you were the only joy in my desert deprived of love.

As soon as you were ten minutes late, I used to wait on the balcony of our “beautiful big house” crying and imploring the “Good” God to make your car appear at the corner of the street… Tears would flow and when I would finally see your car arriving I would cry out “There’s Daddy!” and I would laugh and dry up my tears. I was relieved until the next day at the same hour. From the balcony I see you parking your car in the street, the black Citroën Traction Avant that you loved so much.

You get out with your hat on, look at me smiling from the street and saluting me with your hand at your temple as if to say “Hello, General.” It was as if I always felt you were going to disappear forever from my life, suddenly, much too quickly, without excusing yourself, without respecting the accepted rule that a father doesn’t die without warning you.

It’s now four in the afternoon and the street is filled with people who seem to have lots of things to do and who are pushing each other without any consideration. There’s an incredibly thick crowd around the Odéon today! People must really have nothing to do! Everybody complains and nobody does any work; they’re all penniless and the stores are always full; they all have their worries; they call them money problems that bunch of bums! Four times a year they only discuss one thing: their vacation. Their vacation, where they are bored to tears, they quarrel, cheat on one another, dream of being elsewhere with other bums that are not part of the family, spend one month pissing each other off and come back to Paris full of extraordinary memories they share with their friends, with their asshole colleagues. Their vacation!

All right, well, enough with the bitter ironic statements; each one has the right to like whatever it is they want to do and to do whatever they like.

Maybe I’m the sick one, the moron, the anti-social denier of life and the world. Maybe it’s me, maybe I’m the asshole who doesn’t like anything, believes in nothing, who walks around the streets of Paris like a ghost denying everything and despising everyone.

“Julien, is that you?”

“…”

“Julien, is that you?”

“…”

“Julien, it’s me!

“…?”

“You don’t recognize me? Nicole.”

“Yes, yes, of course I do, excuse me, I was thinking of something else.”

“I see you haven’t changed much, you’re always thinking about something else.”

“Are you being critical?”

“Not at all, I was just joking, what are doing now? Do you have some time? Can we have a cup of coffee?”

“If you like, what time is it?”

“Five minutes to three.”

“I’ve got about one hour.”

I can’t really tell her that I have nothing to do.

“I have nothing to do. We can sit there. I like that little cafe. I often go there to dream and wait.”

“OK, if you like.” But what were you waiting for in that café?

“So Julien, tell me! It’s so long that we haven’t seen each other. It’s must be a whole year.”

“Yes, about one year. You look much more attractive, you know.”

“Thank you.”

“No, no, it’s true. I think you have really blossomed.”

“You know something? You’ve also changed; you’ve become more of a man.”

More of a man! More of a man! Just wait and she’ll ask me to lunch like my aunt with the laughing thighs. It’s always the same thing: you can skip generations, you can skip months and years, but you always repeat the same clichés. Why do I balk so much? I want to meet someone I know to pass the time and now I’m complaining about it.

“Are you still living on that hill of yours?”

“Oh! That’s right I haven’t told you: it’s all over with Jean-Pierre. Now I’m living in a studio around here in the rue St. Sulpice… All alone like a big girl. It’s such a cute place. If you like later on we can go there and you can see for yourself.”

“We’ll see; it depends.”

“It depends on what?”

“On you, on me, on what we’re going to say or rather not say and if we can still say something.”

“I see you’re still the same simple person you used to be. I hope you’re not still angry with me. You know we met at a time when I wasn’t available. I loved Jean-Pierre and I’m the faithful type. I liked you very much but you crowded me and with Jean-Pierre it was quieter. I’m sure you can understand.”

I can’t remember any of that; neither Jean-Pierre nor our meeting even or her lack of availability. This shitty conversation is boring me. What the hell am I doing here with this silly bitch drinking awful coffee in the middle of the afternoon on a week day that feels strangely like a Sunday after attending mass?

“Julien, you must be thinking about something else. What is it?”

“No, nothing, you can’t understand.”

“Why don’t you come out and say that I’m dumb and that I’m not at the same level as you are.”

“How can you imagine that I can be thinking such a thing?”

“Well, all right. Now I know I was wrong. But you were bothering me, you were making me feel uncomfortable in my way of life, the way you lived, your endless silences and your craziness and your reputation and …”

and…

and…

Yeah sure, my ass! The way I live? She would have been better off saying my way of dying, which would have been more original and closer to the truth…

Does she intend to bother me even more by putting my persona on trial? She’s seeking explanations for her attitude, she’s constructing a whole legend, a storybook romance, a cheap novel, a graphic novelette, a photo novel featuring men who are wearing their shiny hair slicked back just like Sicilians, just like Carmelo.

Her story slowly comes back to me but she should have figured out that I never did give a damn about her and Jean-Pierre and I still don’t give a shit about either one of them. I have and have had other problems to tackle, other issues that are infinitely more important than her sexual liaisons and her little suburban romances.

She attempts to prove from A to Z that I was in fact in love with her and that she hadn’t wanted me, while that’s not at all the case...it’s actually so far removed from reality that it makes me laugh or rather smile, she was probably a passing fancy in my life, another girl with whom I spent a few evenings listening to her lofty ideas about relationships between couples and all that stupid stuff until I would finally screw her or she got on her knees in front of me… actually

Actually I remember that she … did give me a blow job in the toilet of the Select Café, while Jean-Pierre, the love of her life, was pontificating with Nicolas on Hindu art.

But it’s true that she does look much more beautiful, her mouth is fuller, her eyes now have little creases around them, her tummy looks wider. Actually I think I will go and visit her studio.

“Julien, you know that I never stopped thinking about you. You look good with a mustache; you look like a Tatar. You even look more savage than before.”

Now I look like a Tartar; well why not a steak tartare? She’s an idiot. I look even more savage! She’s really ready for anything and doesn’t hesitate to hand out compliments, or indulge in any kind of humiliation. She has only one thought on her mind, and that’s to get screwed. She must need it bad and I’m going to be used as a corkscrew for some bottle of cheap local wine.

“You see, Julien, there you go again, you’re no longer listening to me.”

“On the contrary I’m listening to everything you’re saying. I’m drinking in your words; everything you say is so true.”

“I can never tell when you’re serious and when you’re joking.”

“But that does have a certain charm don’t you think? Well, let’s stop talking and go to your place so you can show me your studio.”

“Oh! Really? That makes me really happy, you know. So let’s go right away.”

“If you wish.”

“No let me pay for the coffee, my treat. You’re my guest to celebrate our reunion.”

“Fine, OK, but next time it’ll be my turn.” She doesn’t suspect that there will not be a next time. I can’t be wasting my time with loose chicks of her kind.

“OK, let’s go… You’ll see my home is not that big but I tried to make it look as cozy as possible, a real little love nest. You’ll love it.”

Shit, so that’s what I have to hear now! A little love nest! I feel like laughing and screaming at the same time.

“Julien, are you still in the theater?.... Ah! Now that’s a profession I’d have loved to be in as you know my job is not at all that much fun; to listen all day to people who come to complain and tell you how unhappy they are or because their....”

Won’t she shut her mouth? She asks questions and doesn’t wait for the answers. She’s into her job, good for her; at least I don’t need to talk that much, it’s going to last for one hour at the rate she’s going. I can remain silent all the way from the cafe to her place; she’s taken my arm and I can feel her breast brushing against me, and that’s beginning to get me very excited. She keeps on talking of this and of that, another useless and boring speech.

“What are you thinking?”

“But of course, certainly, that’s very good, huh, excellent really.”

“The workers are convinced that by going on strike they’ll achieve their goals. But that’s not the case at all, the issue is completely different; look at the socialist countries…they don’t have the same problems, yet they have found solutions or at least try to make changes and instead in this country we…”

Pseudointellectuals have no idea how much they bore me with their shitty ideas. What the hell am I doing in the rue Mabillon anyway with such an idiotic cow who insists on telling me her life story. What the fuck do I care about the fucking socialist countries, about Karl Marx, the workers, building skyscrapers, the fact that Paris is being disfigured, the Vietnam war and the nonintervention into the politics of other countries? What do I care about all that? I don’t even know who I am. And she talks and talks….

“The French government just gave ten thousand francs to a group, a club, an association of Canadians to set up in Black Africa a small French Canadian Club of people who speak French in front of the little Africans. Don’t you think it’s great?”

Great? Little Africans who are dying of hunger and don’t give a damn about hearing French Canadians speaking French? But they must really not care less about all that and it doesn’t interest me one bit.

I’m impatient to get to her place, and caress her maybe, screw her surely, and get the hell out.

“Here we are, this is the place. It’s on the fourth floor. I’ll go first to show and you the way.”

“Yes, please go first. It’ll be a much nicer view to watch.”

She’s really very beautiful, a round ass, two independently moving globes, thin hips, enough to give a hard on to a corpse, as they say… I want to touch her ass, all right, let’s do it.

“Julien, what are you doing?”

“I’m touching your ass, mmmmmm, it’s hard, very hard. I am caressing it.”

“You’re really crazy! You’re impossible! I don’t know anyone else like you. You’re one of a kind.”

Ah! Ah! One of a kind! If she only knew! She really hasn’t the faintest bit of imagination but I forgive her. A woman with an ass like hers must be forgiven everything and is forgiven everything.

Phew!

At last we made it upstairs but you’re not out of breath; are you still doing your exercises?”

“Yes, always. I want to stay in shape!”

“I hope so!” she answers with a hungry smile. “But sit down. Do you want something to drink?”

“Yes, thank you, what do you have?”

“Whiskey, cognac, vodka.”

“Whiskey, no water, with some ice.”

“Here you are. Excuse me for a minute.”

“Are you going to powder your nose?”

“Yes, precisely!”

Good, Nicole leaves the room and disappears into the bathroom. I finally have a few minutes of peace and quiet, far from her and her absurd babbling. I feel like I’m in a high-class brothel when the hooker goes off to wash between two customers.

I sip my whiskey slowly, barely touching the liquid in the glass with my lips and imagine myself as Humphrey Bogart sitting in the only armchair in the room, which I inspect carefully. The room looks like a million other rooms inhabited by single young women in Paris who are, as they say, trying to “get ahead” before they give up and marry a bank clerk.

It’s the house of an aging doll with paper flowers, tinsel trinkets, an orange colored bedspread and a green carpet.

The stuffed teddy bear of her childhood on the bed is looking at me with a complicit smile as if to say: I’ve seen them all.

A little figurine of a ballerina on a round box is resting on the dresser; she looks sad, dances no more; she is tired and rather ashamed of having become a music box.

A mirror that time has deformed reflects my own image, the image of a poor bastard trying to be somebody, a small time gigolo who thinks he’s a high-class pimp.

Behind me I can see in the mirror a bad imitation of a Goya painting, a man with his face contorted by a bitter smirk; my face replaces his in the mirror. There! I’m now Goya waiting for the Duchess of Alba. I get out of the armchair and imitate Goya’s heavy gait. I can easily imagine myself using a cane. I have the proper references.

I get closer to the mirror and look at myself. I can see Goya in the midst of the war in Spain against Napoleon’s armies, columns of refugees are attempting to flee, execution squads in the whiteness of the morning light, and in my head I paint three new masterpieces. I take the ballerina and open the box: a sad little Italian-sounding music filters out; the ballerina doesn’t even turn anymore, the poor thing is broken, but the sad music of the box is mixed with the sounds of water coming from the bathroom, the noise of the faucet dripping, the noise of water gushing and splashing over her face….

The music, the music that Pina, my nanny, used to listen to every day some twenty years ago. Now I hear it once more.

Let’s go, Julien, it’s time for your bath… It’s Wednesday and it’s seven. The bath once a week is almost worse than taking a nap. Pina gives me my bath, she undresses me, it takes forever, she lifts me and puts me into the water, my lifeless skinny legs float, my little peanut floats, my sac filled with hollow balls floats, I float just like a plastic duck and I’m sweating and I’m red and I feel ashamed. She turns me over on my stomach to wash my back, the soap in my hair is dripping down and burns my eyes, the water is either too hot or too cold; I feel miserable. She pinches my cheeks in a sign of affection and laughs and speaks to me in her Sicilian dialect. I understand nothing. And she talks and talks; from time to time she’ll say some French words to make a specific point that is totally unimportant.

I believe she’s talking to me about her family who are all coachmen of horse-driven buggies and who left Palermo during the war. They have recreated a little Sicily right here, living just like Arabs in their own Casbah, without running water but with electricity; they go to Mass every Sunday and the husbands are coachmen, the women cook pasta and the girls work as maids in the homes of the Jews whom they despise because they are Jews and fear as their bosses at the same time.

The bath continued until age twelve when one day my peanut got bigger while she was washing my stomach… I looked at it, at my peanut, and I was surprised and almost pleased. I would have liked to get up and show myself in my entire splendor; she turned around to grab a towel or out of modesty and I did attempt to stand up but then fell magnificently on my ass like a wet noodle. She came back toward me and smiled and said looking at it:

“Dio mio! Un vero uomo.”

I was feeling proud of being a man and full of shame of being what I was. I could get hard but my legs stayed flabby.

The baths with Pina were over… I washed myself alone as best I could. Rather poorly actually but no one was allowed into the bathroom from then on. I stayed there for hours attempting to do what was required, the most difficult being to reach my feet but I had sworn that never again would anyone see me as a half-man.

Nicole comes out of the bathroom and she must have rubbed perfume all over her body. Now she’s wearing a black bathrobe with brightly colored Japanese drawings; she must see herself as a geisha in one of Ishihara Yujiro’s old movies. They all do the same thing: it’s like a ceremony to go into the bathroom before getting skewered: when you think about it, there’s something moving about the need they have to always be so desirable. I wonder what color panties she’s wearing, and whether her bra has a flower between each cup? She must have fantastic thighs, full hips and an obedient tongue…

“Well, how do you think I look?”

“Devastating, and on top of it we can have a real conversation; you’re really intelligent and we communicate in spirit.”

“Please don’t make fun.”

“I’m not making fun. I was very much interested in your ideas about the workers and the socialist countries; it was truly fascinating, really very interesting.”

“Would you like some more whiskey?”

“No thanks. Come sit next to me.”

“Julien, I think I missed you a lot and I never realized it. I must have buried the memory I had of you in the bottom of my heart and tried to forget that you existed.”

“But I also missed you. Life is very strange. You see someone again after so long and you feel you’ve always been there.”

What am I saying? I had sworn not to use any of those asinine statements.

“You know, life is so strange. When I was with Jean-Pierre I often thought about you, and now you’re here next to me. I believe in fate...”

She believes in fate and she dares tell me that? She believes in fate and she has the audacity to throw that right into my face… What about me, did I deserve my fate?

My fucking, shitty fate, so then shut up, don’t mention fate. Say anything you want, tell the story of your life, of your sorrows, your successes, your dreams but do not talk about fate.

I hate fate, this fate thing makes me lose my hard on, capish?

I thought about all this without saying it, without a whisper, without a sound, without saying a word, with a pinch in my heart.

She goes on with what is supposed to be an erotic and desirable tone.

“Oh! I love your hands. They’re so soft and yet so masculine. Oh, caress me. I want to feel you all over me.”

She will not keep quiet; women are unbelievable; they always have the urgent need to talk in every situation, even the most intimate ones. But I made no mistake about the quality of the merchandise: she does look like Juno. Where should I begin? I don’t know or rather, I don’t know anymore. The solution is that I should have a pre-ordained plan to follow to the letter each time, a little piece of paper I’d keep in my pocket where I’d write exactly what I’m supposed to do with a woman in this kind of situation, when I fuck her, no sorry, I meant when I make love to her…

But why is it called making love? What relationship does it have to love? Is it to justify the animalistic coupling that people of a certain status have decided that it was best to call that act making love? Make…love: manufacture love? Make as in build? Love…love? I don’t get it!

Basically the goal is to satisfy them by screwing them well. … Well? ... Screwing well? What does that mean? It must mean that we have to be sure they will have an orgasm; women say you shouldn’t be selfish, that they need more time than we do, so…

Actually I’m bored to death while she’s caressing and kissing me and so I think of other things.

Well let’s see, first I’ll caress her for a very, very long time! Yes like that… She’s moaning very softly, already? She must be pretending…but I want her to be the one to beg me to take her completely… I want her to die with desire, I want her to want it more and again, so that she needs me desperately… She tries to take off her panties, but I want her to keep them on longer… She’s almost naked in front of me, she grabs my hand to force me to caress he between her legs…and I am still fully clothed, wearing my boots on the bed… I’m going to get mud everywhere; in any case a little more mud won’t bother anyone.

She is kissing my face, her tongue is all wet and she licks my eyes that I close… Her tongue is in my neck, a little pussy cat’s tongue, pointed and sticky that leaves traces of her saliva in its wake on me. I keep my eyes closed and I walk in mud, I’m in mud up to my knees and I continue to walk, the mud gets higher and higher still and I’m still walking, I will get there. I’m a prisoner up to my girth and can’t go backwards or forwards but I’ll get there, the mud is up to my shoulders, I’m going to drown in the mud, in that saliva, that swamp, that quicksand, that they call making love and I’m beginning to choke. I’m overtaken by panic and yet nothing has really begun, so! Let’s be calm and collected, I will get there.... I concentrate and make myself think of the blue sea in Carthage when I would swim like a little fish, when I was happy and laughed out loud and slowly the mud melts away, I am succeeding, I control myself, I’m the master of myself and of the game. I’m not in a swamp, I’m making love.

She desperately wants to lower her tiny panties like a little girl who feels like peeing… But not yet.

“I beg you, Julien…let me take it off…”

“No, not right away.”

I want to be sure she wants it so bad that it becomes painful… That she wants it so bad that it hurts her down there…that she ends up caressing herself…a bit…not too much, not all the way.

“He’ll never make it.”

“Yes he will, you’ll see.”

“Hello, Carmelo, my darling!”

“A mommy isn’t someone who gets fucked anymore.”

“My father, he has no balls.”

“I’m dying of shame, rage and utter disgust!” “He’ll never make it.”

I’m going to slip my hand under her bra to find her nipple and play with it.

“Yes, Julien, yes… It’s so good.”

I’m going to squeeze it gently turn around it and then squeeze it a little harder, then harder and harder.

“Yes, Julien, yes… It’s so good.”

I continue to play with her nipples mechanically and the words and images crowd each other and invade my mind.

“You know, you’re very smart.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Steak for two.”

“Open your mouth, chew, swallow.”

“Lend me your silk shirt.”

“It’s too big for you.”

“I should be able to get up and hit him across the face with my cane.”

“Again Julien, again, my darling.”

She’s unhooking her bra and her cheeks are very red and I look at her… The bell tower at the church of St. Sulpice just rang and it’s five o’clock and there are certainly a bunch of poor slobs inside kneeling in front of God; they must be praying while others are dying somewhere… Time went by very quickly today, very quickly; in the final analysis that’s what I should do every day, pick up a girl, go to her place and make love to her, it helps make the hours tick by.

Nicole has beautiful breasts. I caress them and think they’re almost as beautiful as those I would see when she would undress in the bathroom, as I was hiding under the bed…in her room in the beach house...

Every summer we spend three months in the house in Carthage, the great yearly expedition There are only fourteen kilometers from Tunis to Carthage…and that short distance requires weeks of preparation; all the furniture in Tunis is covered with white sheets; we have to be sure not to forget anything and off we go in Daddy’s Citroën. Pina and the other servants will take the train.

I love that house, especially the floors where I will necessarily spend most of my time… The floor is made up of little multicolored tiles in a mosaic that in certain spots tell the story of highlights of the Punic wars. I memorized those mosaics one by one, color upon color. I can imagine Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants and his armies on their way to conquer Rome. From my window I can see the sea that is so blue that it hurts my eyes, with the small Carthaginian ships in the distance and the slaves that are rowing and rowing.

…I have been waiting hiding for an eternity under the bed, one of my favorite spots, where I count and recount the mosaics, and finally the door opens…she just got out of the shower and takes her clothes off in front of the mirror, she’s only wearing tiny pink panties and a white see-through bra, I can’t see her face; I’ve never seen breasts before, they are big and heavy like two pink watermelons, and she caresses them with some cream.

I feel like touching my dick and I unbutton my fly. She brushes her hair in front of the mirror and I touch myself and I look at the big titties and I feel like touching them and I’m dying to see her take off her panties and I’m sweating and touching myself. I’m afraid she’ll catch me and punish me and…it’s good, I know it’s bad but it’s good…so good… A strange sticky and warm liquid fills my hand and my head is spinning and she takes her panties off and I’m hot, I shake and shiver all over, I love myself. I wrap myself in my own arms, I love her, I want it and I feel good, so good.

I can see St. Sulpice church from the window looking at me with a mocking smile. I have one hand caressing her thighs and her tummy and with the other hand with my fingernails I caress the tips of her nipples, I’m so well trained… I feel her hand coming up against my crotch but I turn around skillfully to avoid it.

Daddy must not find out. And suppose this were actually my father or my brother disguised as a girl? You can never tell. I was always told that you have to be very wary, but if I’m always suspicious of everything. I’ll wind up becoming impotent.

“Why, Julien, why?”

“Wait a little longer and it’ll get even better.”

“But I can’t stand it anymore.”

“Yes, yes you can.”

She begins twisting herself like a worm, she moves her mouth toward me but I give her a finger that she sucks on hungrily, and she sucks it and nibbles it a little and she licks it… Ah! At last she’s beginning to touch herself, it never fails, it always ends up the same way.

I’d like to know if the Odeon is still full of people, those clowns who are trying to pass for what they are not.

She is taking care of my finger very well; it looks like this could become interesting… What if I just left right now, without saying a word, just “Ciao!” “See you soon!” I wonder what her reaction would be? Rage, sadness, fury or despair, distress or relief? Who can tell? In any case it would be entertaining, but the weather is turning bad, I see clouds and I hear rain drumming against the window so I guess I’ll stay where I am and just make love, it helps time flow by … I’m bored….but at least I’m not outside in the rain.

“Please, Julien, kiss me, give me your mouth...”

Kiss her, taste the traces leftover by another man on her lips? And in her mouth the bitterness of her entire being? I should have her foul liquids in my mouth, inside me? To think we are “making love” just because two unspeakable orifices such as the mouth exchange their secretions? What the hell does she expect then? Must I tell her that I love her while our tongues are brushing up against one another? I should whisper eternal vows in her ear and murmur sweet things to her? Swear that it’s forever and that we shall not leave each other ever? No, no!

I couldn’t, there’s something revolting in all that. I hear a grating, rasping sound. When she moans she sounds like a goat grazing in the grass

My hand never did leave her thighs and her hips... My other hand is back on her breasts that are now getting harder and resemble Mount Everest… Her breasts were just like Mount Everest…that at least was what a guy I met in a café told me the other day as he bragged about his good fortune with a visiting tourist. The image stayed in my mind… I find the comparison with Mount Everest amusing.

She’s caressing herself a bit too much; will she reach the climax, the final moment without me? I will not allow her to think this can happen. Well then, let’s do it, I’ll take off her panties very softly by slipping them off.

Now I’m going to ride her and go…go…

In those American war movies there are always airplanes and guys saying “Go…go…” and then they jump with their parachutes. Now in modern wars they don’t even jump anymore; they just push a button and you see explosions and people dying, women, children, old people and all that… To tell you the truth I couldn’t care less. I’m not the type who would walk the streets with a beautiful sign to protest against wars, peace, agreements, disagreements… Masses of people love to protest and go into the streets, march in tight disciplined lines organized by those who set up the rally and scream out slogans, often laughing and having a good time; it’s pathetic… I often hear the same words in the cafés or at parties:

“To tell you the truth, I’m the kind of person who hides, but in comfort, hiding in good conscience. I don’t feel that any of this concerns me. I’m neither to the right nor the left nor the center. I am myself. I have enough of my own problems, my memories, so that now I am co-opted by society, but I still have an opinion, you know; all those far off wars don’t really concern us; they are far away, even though here we still have specific problems with foreigners, illegals, Moslems, all kinds of extremists, the Asians, the Blacks, the Jews, the Arabs—in brief, with just about everyone. And if you also add to all this the tourists who break our balls, especially the Germans, the taxes, the traffic jams, the weeks of paid vacations that the government doesn’t want to give us, the minimum wage, the superhighways in need of repair, legalized abortion, back breaking workloads, family, children, Christmas holidays and the gift giving, the garbage strikes, and Sunday soccer on television. Well? We have enough problems; so then the problems of foreign countries with their war, their revolution, their desire to be full-fledged nations, all that bullshit are not our problems at all. We should just let them gobble each other up and then we’ll see! It’s like those little African kings…we really don’t give a shit about their country’s health problems, their economic crises, their famines, their under development; they’ve got to fend for themselves, find their own solutions. We did it didn’t we? We had our revolution and we sent the king and all the others to the guillotine…OK?”

There! I have just managed to listen to an average Frenchman, the guy in the bistro comparing tits to Mount Everest and making a speech to impress his silent and admiring buddies who are dazzled by all his knowledge as they drink up their fifth glass of anisette….

I am tempted to become an average Frenchman, a Sunday morning asshole with an opinion about everything and who is convinced he has every right to reconstruct the world in his own way and after his moment of glory at the café will return home and be as silent as a corpse without exchanging a word or even a glance with his wife and children who also have had nothing to say to the asshole for years on end.

Ohhhhhhhhhh! Julien !

But I’m digressing…

Her moaning brings me back to the present situation, which is to make love to… I forgot her name actually… I do have some effect on her after all, such a moan for a pair of panties slipped off is a bit exaggerated; let’s have some modesty!

Some control, some mystery, some class, some style.

“Lift your legs so I can take off your panties.”

Panties are so clumsy; they always roll around the ankles; but now it’s done. Well now, let’s go ahead without any further hesitation. My soft and yet virile hand will replace hers.

“Ohhhhhhhh! Julien!”

She’s repeating herself, with two Ohhhs in two minutes.

“Julien, take off your clothes, I want to feel you, to touch you, to caress you also, I want you, I want your strength, I want your manhood.”

These are the lyrical fifteen minutes she can’t just say she wants to be fucked, no! She wants my strength! My strength? If she only knew, poor thing! She’s twisting more and more… You’ll see she’s going to climax with my hand…no it would be much too easy… Enough! Enough!

“More! More!”

“You don’t want me to get undressed? No?”

“Yes! Yes!”

She’s got this bad habit of repeating everything twice; that’s really unnerving. OK, off the bed. I take off my shirt I let her gaze at my powerful hairy chest, just a short second, one shouldn’t spoil pleasure by giving too much too soon. I take off my cowboy boots, my socks, the socks are a most ridiculous moment and I don’t handle too badly, my pants, my underwear… And I then appear in my splendid nudity… I am gigantic, straight, hard, all…and all…

After twenty years of exercises, it would be rather sad if I were not in good shape, or that I did not impress the young women lacking some affection.

One, two, three, four!

“Half a centimeter in four months, that’s very good my boy!”

Twenty years to get out of this.

Mr. Muscle-Pau.

My duck walk.

“Everyone can be loved, even you shall be,” as Fabien would say.

I feel like having her admire me for hours while not allowing her to touch me. Yes, yes it’s me! This good looking well-built guy, yes, yes it’s me, the former ugly little cripple who tripped every two feet.

I got all of you, haven’t I?

“He’ll never make it.”

I made it…my body made it.

My first great victory came with an event that can seem pathetic to everyone except me.

I’m playing Horace in Moliere’s The School of Wives. I am in Pau, a deathly boring town in Southern France… There’s absolutely nothing to do… My old buddy Gaston is playing the role of Arnolphe; according to what he says he’s a modern sculptor and he scours every garbage can, every abandoned building site to find old bones, old metal, old cans, old this or that. He assembles these discarded pieces by gluing them or fastening them with string, belts, ribbon, or wire and he calls the results a form of sculpture: at least it gives him something to do between rehearsals and the evening performances. One day he sees an ad for the bodybuilding competition for Mr. Muscle City of Pau. Gaston is already over fifty and is way beyond the age where you participate in that kind of contest… But he still has the heart of a child and loves practical jokes. He tells me we should enter the contest and have a few laughs as we adopt muscleman poses on a stage.

I’m going to walk half naked on a stage set up for the occasion. I’m going to exhibit myself to crowd of assholes who will laugh like my neighbors in Tunis when they saw me. I’m going to be humiliated once again. To be humiliated was part of the past, I deserve better than that: I’m an actor.

I answer no; he insists, by attempting to prove that this a good thing for me, like a catharsis, a useful experience, a way of breaking with my years of solitude…he insists and insists and in the end here we are in bathing suits posing like Apollo on the stage, with a dozen other guys who must be spending most of their time in the gym working on building up their muscles and who look like cartoon characters.

Gaston is eliminated in the first round but I make it through the second and third rounds to reach the finals with two other clowns… Gaston is screaming his pleasure and joy, he is applauding loudly, laughs to tears like a child when the winner is announced and is given a trophy and a kiss from Miss Pau. It’s me! I won! The horrible stunted child, the one who limps, the ridiculous little cripple is now Mr. Muscle Pau. Nobody understands why tears are rolling down my cheeks, why I look so unhappy. I made it you bunch of greenhorns, and you can’t stand it and I say no to you! I say no to everything, to everything because I have defeated you. Now I can refuse everything.

“Julien! How handsome you are. Come, come next to me!”

You want me? Well then, you shall have me. Mr. Muscle Pau is going to be all yours. She’s smiling; she looks like the little girl I saw the other day at the carnival in Pigalle: she was sucking on a huge caramel lollipop and she had a big smile and her cheeks were on fire.

I’m so thirsty, I feel like having pineapple juice. When I was on the island of La Réunion, I was drinking pineapple juice five times a day.

But for god’s sake, I’m amazed, she’s going to direct operations and I must do the same... My head between her legs, I’ll go into the deepest part of her, to her greatest intimacy. And then it’s the whole symphony.

“Julien, Julien, it’s good, it’s good, Oh! You’re driving me crazy, I can no longer ah … I can no longer… I can’t…take me, take, take me please!”

I pretend not to hear her words…and I continue my work, without thinking about anything, without any kind of pleasure, without displeasure either but with no feelings whatsoever…

…Goya looks at me and smiles, and on the other wall I discover the reproduction of a picture of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. But why is the same identical reproduction in every young woman’s studio? That picture is becoming some kind of mania or a trauma of sorts; it has to correspond to some obsession. If I were a psychologist or a modern art critic I’d be able to find an explanation, those people always have something to say.

“Julien, you don’t understand, I want it, I want to. I beg you, make me feel like a woman!”

She finally says the great fateful words!

Better and better, or rather worse and worse, psychology in the bedroom.

“Make me feel like a woman!”

Perhaps mother used to say those same words to Carmelo.

I shouldn’t think about that or I’ll lose my hard on. In any case I can only give in when faced with such insistence. I lay on top of her. She lets out another Ohhhhhhh! The third time in the afternoon, she’s repeating herself. Every time I screw a woman I have the feeling that I’m working in a factory, I come and go like a piston, my back follows and I watch the goings on like a bystander watching a train go by… It’s five thirty in the afternoon at St. Sulpice church… The walls in the room are covered with cracks, the paint is peeling off, the furniture is chipped, the faucet in the kitchen is running uninterruptedly, everything is fucked out, my piston keeps on doing its job; if I were to do this every day I’d go nuts.

I can’t bring myself to pretend that I love her or play the man in love with this woman who is free of any inhibitions…it’s something I can’t bring myself to do, even if I could, since I specialize in playing romantic lead roles.

Yes… I am playing the leading young lover in the romantic title roles.

The first time I tried that kind of part was to leave its mark on me forever. I’m sharing the dressing room with the other main male role and I have established a good and almost friendly relationship of mutual respect with him…. On opening night we’re extremely on edge because someone told us that Jean-Louis Barrault was present in the audience. Jean-Louis Barrault, the hero of the French theater, who played the mime in the movie Les enfants du paradis, the director of the Odéon national theater. During the intermission we hear someone knocking softly on the dressing room door. We open and it’s Barrault, a skinny little man all wrinkled like an old apple. He smiles and says, “I appreciate the play very much, you’re both very much in character. I can see that you have worked hard at it and given it a lot of thought.” We smile with pleasure; the great Barrault likes us. Perhaps he might choose us for a part in his prestigious company, and then he adds, without smiling and very seriously, “But I must say that one of you two has also a lot of talent…” He comes up to us and we shake his hand with all the respect he deserves. He closes the door quietly, probably heading back to the audience to listen to the second act and my colleague, who has a much more sophisticated sense of humor than I, laughs aloud, shrugging his shoulders.

I am more in a bad mood and don’t laugh.

My colleague will go on and have a great acting career. I keep getting parts in the former colonies, in the “Maisons de la Culture,” and a few suburban theaters.

St. Sulpice rings on the quarter hour…. Boredom becomes unbearable; I must think of something else, like…. Something that has nothing to do with her, who still moans like a top that’s turning on itself… let’s see. a man drowning—no it’s the same thing… the slaughterhouse where they’re cutting the heads of bulls with a single slash of the sword—no it’s also the same thing.

The slaughterhouse is a truly fascinating place and I think I have seen the most incredible of them all.

I’m on the island of La Reunion to play the role of Perdican in On ne badine pas avec l’amour by Musset and the part of Horace in The School of Wives by my master, Molière.

The island of La Réunion, a French island lost in the Indian Ocean, an exotic jewel isolated from the rest of the world, far from everything, a paradise given to man to take advantage of it shamelessly, and I am enjoying myself like a man possessed. I drink in all its exotic charms like a convict with two years left to live or fifteen years to catch up on.

I am living with the other actors in the plays in a huge villa on the beach of St. Denis and the first five days are dedicated to rehearsals during the day and starting at six every evening the party begins… We are screwing every one of the little ladies of the island with their ebony and mahogany bodies, and for the ladies of the French theater, the men of La Réunion with their bronze bodies. We drink white rum from the bottle, swim naked in the Indian Ocean, and basically live like colonizers who think they can do as they please because they are white, they are from the parent country, and on top of everything else they are actors.

We are or rather we act as Greek gods in a conquered land...a bunch of real assholes that fully justify the hatred and the contempt some people could have for what we represent.

Every evening on the beach I barbecue lobsters, which were simply resting peacefully on the boulders and invite me with their heavyset eyes to grab them and eat them.

After five days of that kind of life full of enrichment and surprises where I make my contribution to bringing culture to the colonies I go to sleep around two in the morning like every other night after drinking my bottle of rum and dancing like a jerk with half-naked dolls on the moonlit beach.

I’m awakened by horrible screams that seem to come from outside, the screams of children or women being disemboweled, accompanied by crashing sounds as if the trees were being smashed with power hammers… I snuggle closer to the girl with nipples as sweet as pineapples asleep next to me and I whisper a few worried words. She doesn’t wake up; she sleeps happily satisfied after having tasted the love of an important person and she is indifferent both to my fear and the screams.

I muster all the courage I can and finally get up while she turns around and snores. We meet down stairs in the hall—Jean and two or three other actors in the troupe—and even though we can recognize the jitters in each one’s eyes we all decide to go and see the reason behind those deadly screams… We go outside in the moonlight, not a breath of wind, the ocean is absolutely calm without a single ripple, the screams of women and children are now more intense and have become intolerable and some in our group don’t want to keep moving forward…

Jean and I walk on in the direction of the incessant screaming, wondering how many women and children are being killed. We walk for some twenty minutes on the sand and cross a thicket until we reach a clearing. The screams of women and children that are tearing through the night have now increased with the screams of men talking and calling each other and we think we recognize Creole singing that is hoarse because of the heavy drinking.

Under the white moon, the night is as clear as day, filled with horrible searing sounds.

Jean pulls at my arm and is repeating again and again: “Julien, what is it…what is it…” We get a bit closer….in a corral that is the size of a school yard, surrounded by barbed wire, we can see scores of giant pigs running in every direction as they are being pursued by men armed with machetes and clubs. The pigs are screaming in fear and confusion and once the machetes and clubs beat down on them, they scream and howl in their pain and death… God! They really appear to be suffering like human beings, their voices are human, their screams are human. Blood spurts everywhere and the sound of bones being crushed is deafening; the pigs fall down without a struggle one after the other on their backs or on their sides, crying just like children…. Pools of blood are formed and flow outside the corral where they have dug trenches so that the blood accumulates in large puddles.

Men are running after the animals savagely, mechanically, and when a pig falls they all converge on another one… On an adjoining wall two men are sitting with their legs dangling as they are singing and drinking rum.

From a truck parked next to the corral comes the sound of a radio playing French love songs. I think I can recognize the voice of Edith Piaf as she sings.

Non, rien de rien, non je ne regrette rien...

From time to time one of the men on the wall sings along with Edith. And meanwhile the screams of the pigs that are being massacred go on and on… Wild dogs are assembled all around the corral, barking and lapping up the blood that is constantly overflowing in the channels and growling with pleasure… The hallucinating scene goes on and on. Jean begins to throw up and I grab him by the arm and we walk back.

I wake up the girl with the sweet pineapple breasts who still sleeps and ask her if she knows anything about the massacre. She answers: “Oh, yes, don’t worry…it’s the slaughterhouse,” and goes back to sleep…the slaughterhouse… the slaughterhouse…

“Julien, Julien, I’m coming, I’m coming…it’s so good, more, more, make me come some more, I’m going to die, you bastard… You’re a bastard, you make me come too much. I never have come as much as with you….”

They all say the same things to the last stallion that mounts them, the last one to speak is always the one who is right, or rather the last one to fuck is right.

Amen!

“Bastard”? I find her language rather rough.

That’s the least one can say, she is coming... She is all dripping with tears everywhere, her mascara is running, she looks like a character in a Fellini film where actors wearing white make up cry over their sorrow and misfortune and the tears streak down their cheeks whitened with chalk. They cry just like this bitch who is in tears because I’m fucking her. Oh! But yes, I’m still fucking her, it had escaped my mind almost completely. Well now it’s time to change the program.

“Turn around.”

“…?”

“Nicole, turn around.”

“Yes Julien, anything you want.”

Even from the back she is beautiful, suntanned with white lines. I ride her with fervor.

“Yes, Julien yes! Oh! It’s so good! I’m going to come again.”

She’s going to come again…she is! And I’m back on the assembly line. I suppose orgies must be just like that, working on the assembly line. You put in the screws without really knowing what you’re doing. I’ve never been to an orgy because I don’t like the company of other assembly line workers. The assembly line…the invention of the petty bourgeois class, of communist exploiters like Lenin, you work on the assembly line, make love on the assembly line, die on the assembly line while you are in chains.

To make love to a woman you love—I wonder if that is really good or whether it’s also as boring as the assembly line. She keeps on moaning and I’m wondering what the hell I’m doing there on a bed I don’t know with a woman I don’t know who is moaning. She’s had enough, she wants me to come now, she wants my seed she says, she wants my honey, she insists. I’m still hard but I can’t…I can’t do it… Nothing wants to explode, the machine is broken, it refuses and won’t give any life on this death bed; the machine seems to be telling me very coldly: No! It’s not for you!

After almost two hours at work the machine can still go on but it can’t cross the finish line, it can’t end triumphantly… Once again…

I am a great, an extraordinary lover. I can control and last a long time as hard as a sword but what they don’t know is that the sword can’t end in triumph, it cannot…

The Buddhist monks with whom I spent three months a few years ago would be the first to be surprised. I went into their temple during one of my trips to Asia, the devil only knows why they accepted me…

I developed an interest in Buddhist philosophy for a long time and I hope to find the solution to my problems thanks to it, answers to my anxieties. But actually for three months I spend whole hours in contemplating my navel and looking within my deepest soul for the true meaning of my self without finding it. But I do learn one thing that will stay with me forever and will turn me into a desirable and popular man: that is how to control my ejaculation. I can reach an orgasm without ejaculating and therefore be in control of myself, of my partners, and I believe of the universe.

No one warned me that I was risking what I am experiencing now: that I can no longer ejaculate at all but can hold an erection for hours without being able to reach the final moment.

And now like a fat, satiated and ruminating cow, she sleeps. She sleeps and I am there wide-awake and dizzy, my eyes are open, my belly is empty and my legs are feeling flabby, my heart is blank and my feet flat.

And Nicole… sleeps, with her nipples dilated, bloated, and hairy; she sleeps quietly while I torture myself, and die quietly. I have known another one like this who after doing it would fall asleep loudly sucking her thumb; she must have been born dissatisfied; another one would smoke three cigarettes in a row just like Lauren Bacall; another would have an ice cold bath like Joan Crawford. Another one would sing West Side Story and the one that wanted me to sing West Side Story; and Mercedes, who would get hungry; and Julie, who would get thirsty; and Eliane, who wanted to go out; and Michele; who wanted to stay home and….I, the extraordinary lover, I remain knocked out by emptiness and the impossibility of emptying myself.

He’ll never make it, but you’ll see, but no, but yes, but no yes, no, no, yes, no, nothing, nothing at all...

I must get out of here and get out fast, very fast, I have to leave… But I watch her sleep and I stay for a long time. I’m fed up with my fucked-up self, my fucking skin. She’s now just a woman asleep and I can’t leave her all alone; if she wakes up suddenly calling my name and I’m not there it would be horrible. I look at her and she looks like Mother suddenly on her hospital bed.

My mother…is sick in bed and I’m strong, she needs me and if I feel like it I can laugh in her face and just walk away, turn my back on her and she’ll scream after me, she’ll call out for me and I’ll pretend I can’t hear. My mother is defeated.

Now it’s my turn.

I can recite poems, sing or shut up, pout, scream or make jokes, I can dance in the room in the hospital and even play castanets and she…she remains lying down, motionless, speechless, without moving her lips, a supplicant begging for my presence with her eyes. I am the king, the king of my sick mother… No more servants, no more husband, no more Carmelo, nothing left, but me, only me.

Me and my mother, my mother and I.

Mother, Mother why did you do it, why did you betray my father’s love, and my love with another man? Why? But I can’t tell her anything, I can’t think of anything.

Mother, poor Mother, you’re suffering, you’re going to die, and I forgive you, I don’t hate you anymore, I look at your poor face of what used to be you and I see nothing that was you. If only you knew how much I love you, I think it, I whisper it, I say it to you in a very low voice… I tell you and you smile with happiness as you cried of despair.

“Julien, how could you live with all those years of pent-up hatred? What did I do for you to hate me so much?”

She cries, long tears roll down her face and she once again becomes the mother of my childhood..

“My son, if only you knew how much I suffered when I felt your hatred, your despair and your silence.”

“Mother, you suffered and I, I died ten times, so tell me now, tell me everything.”

“Your father never really managed to recover. He suffered too much and could never forget what he’d lived through. He was a poor man, sick and unhappy, destroyed by his own life.”

“Don’t say that. He wasn’t a poor man, he did everything for me. He tried everything.”

“No, he couldn’t, he was incapable of it, the pain had made absent, he was never able to forget, his life was filled with ghosts and horrible visions, he saw destroyers of shadows everywhere and turned me into a hopeless shadow. Perhaps someday you’ll understand the truth and shall forgive me and you’ll finally be at peace with me and above all with yourself.”

“I would rather hold on to my illusions about him, that’s all I have left to avoid sinking, to avoid losing myself completely. Leave me with my illusions about him.”

“So you still have all these illusions? Fine but I believed that you had let go of illusions, that you preferred to see things clearly, that you wanted to face life. You can’t reject life.”

“Mother, I never thought you could say such things, I always saw you so absent, so clearly outside life and incapable of acts of courage and unable to think.”

“Look, I’m just a Jewish woman from Tunis, from another era; in my day we didn’t stand a chance. With an abusive father, a mother just like myself, I resigned myself, I pretended I didn’t exist, I accepted and that kind of acceptance is worse than anything. Don’t fall in that trap. I just wanted peace and a semblance of happiness. All I wanted was to be a woman who was happy with her husband who would love and respect me.

“Dad didn’t love you?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know…”

“Well, what was it then?”

“He sold me.”

“Sold you?”

“Yes sold, he knew about Carmelo.”

“What do you mean, he knew?”

“When he went into bankruptcy Carmelo was his only way out, so he sold me for money, but I didn’t want that, I didn’t want to. Carmelo bought part of the business and me with it.”

So then my father had no balls—it can’t be, it can’t be true.

“Don’t judge your father; he was a victim as well, like me, like you, like all of us. It’s life that is guilty, not us, not us.”

She is crying and I feel one hundred years old. My father was capable of doing something like that. He died like a hero and lived like an empty bag, empty of life and emotion. I’ll never have those memories of you again, I’ll never wrestle with you, ever again, I won’t ever do anything else, not take naps, or wait on the balcony, I won’t become a great actor for you, I won’t buy you pistachios, nothing anymore, nothing. I’ll dance through the sky like Peter Pan, but not for you. You are a bastard! I’m ashamed for you, I’m ashamed of you, I’m dying of shame, I’m ashamed of being your son, the son of a bastard.

You betrayed me you lied to me…

“Daddy, mother is cheating on you!”

“You must not judge your parents, later on you’ll understand.”

“I know that you must not judge your parents but mother is cheating on you! She has no right.”

“Later on…”

Now I understand, you had sold mother, you’re nothing but a garbage pale full of shit! And I hate you, I despise you, you dirtied up what remained, you destroyed my life, I despise your memory now that you have been dead for six years.

No, no it’s life that is to blame not him, not us, not us. He was destroyed like I was and even more… He lost his soul, his heart, his courage. No! No! They stole his soul his heart, his courage…. He was castrated, chopped up, emptied of all life, deprived of his humanity… He wasn’t anything anymore…life is to be blamed, not him…

She’s still asleep and I ask myself all these questions, I remember and I forgive.

I have to get out of this place, I have to flee, I must fly away, I have to disappear, like Rimbaud, become a merchant in guns and slaves… But then I am not Rimbaud; nevertheless I must leave. I’m going to go and seek shelter in a blue and white silk corner; I have to spill my guts somewhere else and drag my legs along with me as I had done twelve years before when they had died on me.

“Dad, I must leave.”

“Very well, but you’re coming back for dinner?”

“No Dad, I’m leaving, I’m leaving...”

“You’re going to the country to one of your friends?”

“No, Dad I’m going away.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know precisely. I’m leaving.”

“Have you thought this through?”

“Yes I must leave, I must. I have been walking for six months now and as I live again I feel that I’m going to die. You understand, you understand.”

“You want to go to France? To see your cousins.”

“Yes, that’s it, my cousins in France.”

“You will keep in touch and let me know where you are?”

“Yes, yes.”

“I know I can trust you.”

“Thank you, thank you.”

“Are you leaving because of your mother?”

“No, yes…maybe, now that I have my legs back I have to fly, you understand. It took my twelve years of relentless exercising to finally be able to cross the street without holding on to a helping hand…the kids don’t laugh anymore when they see me, I am finally in one single piece…”

“Yes, yes, you’ll tell me where you are, promise me?”

“Yes, yes.”

“I’ll let your mother and brother know that you’re leaving. When are you going?”

“Now Dad, now right now.”

“You’re a man and you are sixteen.”

“Yes, sixteen.”

“So go then and you’ll tell me where you are.”

I saw him again on his deathbed. Life is the guilty party, not him… not him… He became the victim of other men, of their cruelty, their madness, he spent twenty years trying to forget but never managed to do so, Dad forgive me for doubting you even for such a short instant.

You didn’t have a choice. We’d have all ended up in the street and you tried to protect us, all of us…especially me.

Nicole sighs softly, opens her eyes and looks at me as if she wanted to know something. This is the moment that fills me with fear because she’ll want us to share our impressions.

“Julien you know it was fantastic. I hope Jacques won’t find out… Oh! Yes it’s true. I haven’t told you that I’m getting married in two weeks to Jacques. He’s marvelous, I’m crazy about him and we have so many plans. We’re going to move overseas for two years, he has to go into the military in the foreign cooperation service, he just finished medical school, we decided all this four months ago. The big day is in two weeks and I’m crazy about him.”

She turns on her side, wiggles some more and falls into a deep sleep once again. Goya looks at me and is now smiling sardonically.

I’ve got to get out of here, I’ve got to go… She sleeps with her mouth open like a satiated child who has just quickly digested two chocolate bars she swallowed in great haste. I get up and she doesn’t even move… So now I am officially a whore. Nicole’s handbag is still there on the table, next to the ballerina who looks at me without any kind of expression. I see that the paint on her nose has been erased. My hand slips into her bag, opens her wallet and I take whatever bill I can find. I’m hoping it’s one hundred francs. The ballerina smiles at me. I leave closing the door behind me without looking back.

The concierge looks at me with an amused and sly expression. I stop in the hall and piss in powerful spurts against the wall to teach her a lesson; it makes me feel better.

“You should be ashamed of yourself you rotten disgusting man!”

I’m disgusting, you are disgusting, we are all disgusting; the church at St. Sulpice is ringing seven o’clock and I am back in the street.

Whatever happened to all my friends? The friends I was so close to and loved so much?

What friends? Which ones? Where are they if not in my own imagination? Is someone saying of me, “Julien is my friend?” If you exist step forward, don’t hide… All I hear is … “Julien, nobody knows how to take him, he scares me.” But what the hell are they fearful of? I’m doing nothing bad, I don’t speak that much, what are they afraid of? They are wrong to be afraid of me, they are wrong.

Only dogs are right, they take a shit on the sidewalk where we are walking, where we live; they literally cover us in shit. Winter is the worst moment, it snows over it and the snow covers all the garbage and they start over and it snows again; the layers accumulate and in the spring the snow melts and the refuse quickly reappears.

Soon, as Lautréamont writes, when we’ll all bathe in an ocean of sperm and shit. There’s a dog in front of me expelling small darkish nuggets that look as ridiculous as goat turds under the tender and admiring eyes of his master who thinks he’s giving a gift to humanity. Every morning we empty our guts of all that is sordid, the sordid accumulations of an entire day, but there’s always some of it stuck inside you and it winds up killing you.

People just croak and I don’t want to die. I’ll find some way to not die even though the sky has been shattered. I’ll put that fucking sky back together, I’ll stick it together with my sperm and then I’ll spit in the face of those who doubt me. But no, let’s stay calm and collected, otherwise I’ll do something rash or crack up. Calm down, calm down. Good, well I think I just went through a moment of refusal, of violence, so let me be calm. I almost let myself go, I almost screamed in the street and people turned to look at me, to look at that poor bum who was screaming as he walked alone.

They were wondering whether I was crazy or if I had been drunk or… I don’t know. I wonder why I’m so angry. After all, I only got what I deserved and on top of it wasn’t such a disagreeable moment to fuck a girl all afternoon; it must be everyone’s dream, the dream of many men and I’m complaining. I complain about everything and I’m never satisfied. I wander on and complain.

To wander is not such a bad thing; after all, at least I can walk and that’s something useful, don’t you think?

I’m walking,

I made it. Period…

“Dad, I have to leave.”

“Go, my son. Go.”

Had I known I wouldn’t have left. I escaped the hell of a prison for the other hell of freedom. I spent six years wandering in Paris, London, Istanbul, Madrid, Venice, Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Dakar, Tananarive, Djibouti, St. Martin de La Réunion. etc. …

Six years of conditional freedom, conditioned by my upbringing, my taboos, my hang-ups. Six years to get rid of all that; my first woman in a sordid brothel in Seville on a binge with some sailors I had just met, sixteen years old and thirty seconds of pleasure of having a naked woman in my arms who after ten seconds says: “Come on, be quick about it!” while I had dreamed of becoming a romantic poet.

Next! Next!

I wander the streets of Seville, still searching for the worse neighborhoods, the most rotten and shittiest places. I’m proud of myself because with my looks the Spaniards think I’m a gypsy and the kids in the street yell after me “Mira al Gitano.” I finally find the most disgusting café in Seville, an unbearable smell of frying, urine, crud and vomit. I am happy. I’ll be able to wallow in mud. Seventy-year-old hookers with no teeth, obese and slimy are yakking away without ever catching their breath as they chew on fried calamari while sailors drunk on rotten beer and their accumulated sorrows smile at the world, spitting their rancor with self satisfaction; at the center of the café a rusting zinc urinal crisscrossed with dirty words, without a door for protection, a urinal set up right smack in the center of the place, and I see guys who go one after the other to piss out their vinegar as they snigger. They piss with a kind of joy and everyone laughs and the sordid hookers make sordid jokes about their sordid penises as they look at me and call me Guapo. On the floor there is sawdust to absorb the piss and the vomit that the very thick smoke can’t even cover up.

And me, I’m with them and I sing and laugh with my new friends. I feel I’m part of the family and I drink beer and get up to go and piss as I laugh and dance a few steps to the tune of flamenco music.

Travel is the greatest education when you’re young. Go my son, go and discover your brothers, your peers, travel is enriching, you’ll see so many beautiful things in all the countries you shall visit.

Flamenco… A short time later a group of gypsies, real ones, not cheap imitations like me, asked me to join their life. So here I am, the little Jew from Tunis. I have become a gypsy in the Barrio Cruz in Seville; I share their life for six months, I share their joys and their sorrows and at night I give shows for dumb tourists who come to play at being gypsies for a few hours… They scrape their guitars and dance for hours in smoke-filled cafes and the American girls think they’re so lucky and privileged to be there and literally have an orgasm at the idea of being in danger in that subterranean and hidden world.

I pour two-bit cheap red wine, I’m wearing a red scarf around my neck, I adopt a sinister appearance, I keep my jaws perpetually clenched my act is perfectly rehearsed, I am a gypsy of the Barrio Cruz. And I regularly leave this place of debauchery for tourists seeking cheap thrills, in the company of a frustrated and hungry female about to spend the night of her life and who will later have something to tell her girlfriends when she returns to Idaho. I learn how to love the guitar and the long lament of the Flamenco mood, and the sensuous dances of the gypsies… And one day I get tired of that circus and I disappear without a word, without a farewell…

Travel is the greatest education when you’re young.

But what youth? My fucked-up youth?

Until what age are we young?

Fifteen years old, twenty years old, thirty, sixty?

I have been an old man since birth, so travel brought me nothing, it just turned me into a first class pain in the ass, a conceited ass who thinks he knows it all.

It’s hard at first and then you learn how to survive in every single city of the world, the same intellectuals, the same artists, the same rich; the same poor can be found everywhere but they dress differently and speak a different language. From time to time you run into unusual people or you experience unique moments.

Argun Hackman, for example, who welcomed me in his house in Floria, in the suburbs of Istanbul. Argun, the Turk whom I met in a nightclub and who took me in the early morning to a small village thirty kilometers from Istanbul for an unusual show. The show takes place once a week: a young girl, almost a child actually, copulates with a designated donkey.

She holds on to the donkey’s neck from underneath and stays suspended on him; the child says nothing, doesn’t cry, doesn’t seem to be in pain, the entire village has gathered around, women and children included. Argun looks at it jaded, he’s a man of the world… I ask him if this is part of some kind of rite. An initiation rite perhaps? He looks at me and smiles at such monumental naiveté; he shrugs his shoulders and introduces me to his mother, his sisters, his father, then invites me to spend a few days at his house.

Argun is an English professor at the university but thinks he’s a painter and an artist. He has covered the inside walls of his house with multicolored faces and impressionist landscapes that vaguely imitate Monet. He explains his painting at length and in great detail and his choice of colors; he wants my opinion but I don’t volunteer it, since I know nothing about painting. Later that night, under the influence of hashish, he smashes the walls by hitting them with a pickaxe to erase his paintings as he screams that it cannot even create emotion in a Frenchman…

The next evening he paints another wall and two nights later he’s back with his pickaxe obsession and the wall crumbles. After a few nights of this craziness the house is almost destroyed and I pack my bags.

My friend André asks me to accompany him to East Berlin, just to visit the city, he says. What he doesn’t tell me is that he’s going there to deliver some secret documents to someone—I never found out to whom or why. So here we are suddenly near the Brandenburg Gate… we’re walking in the Berlin night, a black and throbbing night, there is no one in the streets when suddenly three men jump out of nowhere and surround both of us. André draws a revolver, a fucking revolver. Where did it come from?

They all begin to run and as they take off. As if to leave some kind of souvenir one of them slashes me in the stomach and it hardly hurts but leaves me with a gash for the next ten years. I used that scar for a very long time to surprise and seduce, as I invented a long story that was much more colorful that what had really happened. The gash was well worth it.

My friend André later became a translator at the UN and had used me as decoy for his James Bond style games. A true friend.

The museums of all those cities of all those countries make me sick with their preserved beauty, their canned talent, their post-card type genius. I’ll never return to those halls filled with the vestige of other times that attempt to make all those who are willing to listen that it is man’s fate to create beauty… I eat German sausages, Turkish tajin, Italian ravioli, Spanish peppers, shark from Madagascar, Greek souvlaki, peanuts from Djibouti, frogs in the island of La Reunion, crickets in Dakar, Polish soup, Malagasy zebu meat…this…that….the other….

Walter takes me to a nightclub where I’m delighted to pick up a truly magnificent blonde with a pair of aggressive tits. I brush up against her as we dance as the other merry makers smile wondering no doubt why in the world such a beautiful creature would go with that young jerk. I’m almost in love. I take her to a hotel where I quickly find out that Blondie has a cock that’s much bigger than my own and I run away at full speed back to the night club and discover Walter with ten other guys who are bursting with laughter and I join in of course...

I cross the banks of the Volga River in a boat, I take a barge from Brindisi to Igoumenitza, I sleep in the public gardens of Athens. I think I’m Don Quixote in Spain and an ivory trafficker in Djibouti.

Pietro takes me to every transvestite nightclub in Venice, Vladimir shows me the old Cossack encampments, I go bear hunting with Wojciech, I wash dishes in restaurants, serve drinks in bars, I sleep on park benches, in the beds of all the ladies and finally six years later, tired of wandering and travel, I’m back in Paris my home base, my starting point and decide to finish my studies and begin my new calling: I shall be an actor…

And for a few years I use all this to my own sordid ends and people would say about me: He’s an exciting young man, he’s experienced so many things!

I’ve become a living encyclopedia: as soon as anyone says anything it’s as if they were playing a record entitled: “The Living Encyclopedia” that talks and tells stories with interesting details, and displays his knowledge to smug women and men who are foaming with jealousy.

“Julien, you’ll regret it later on; it’s not enough to be fun and smart in society. You’re still a failure.”

“First of all, I’m not pleasant; they say I’m too aggressive.”

Travel is enriching so I have been enriched. I have the necessary material so I can recite “Mr. Seguin’s Goat” or Hamlet’s soliloquy with the necessary emotion. I act, I’m a performer, an actor, and just like all the other actors I wander throughout Paris as I wait for the next gig, which leaves me enough free time to get into literature and more than anything else to rehash my sorrows, my pain, my failures.

Then I come back to reality; I understand that trying to forget by getting drunk on one’s experiences is useless, to live by talking about oneself is meaningless; then anguish takes over and I stop talking about my travels forever and then I remain silent, period.

It’s been a long day and it’s time to go home, maybe to go to bed and try to sleep and leave all those memories aside at least for one single night.

It starts all over again, Odéon, Mabillon, the rue Bonaparte. I walk along the Luxembourg Gardens, I reach the rue Vavin, I’m close to home.

Home...what will I do at home? It’s going to be nine o’clock. I’ll try to wait for it to be ten and then I’ll go back out to try and meet someone I know as I wait impatiently for tomorrow…so that it may all start over once again.

It must not start over again. I can’t stand it any longer, something has to happen, something has to happen to me, the wheel of fortune must turn, they always say it does; after seven years of hunger come seven years of plenty, the wheel turns but if doesn’t turn for me I’ll take off once more for Timbuktu or Tananarive or Poughkeepsie.

There’s nobody in the apartment to wait for me and thankfully Nicolas isn’t there either; he must be driving his taxi as he goes on searching for the man who’ll agree to murder his father.

When I get there the apartment is always empty, but the cat is there, the one Catherine gave me. It’s the little kitty of the old cat we had together. She gave it to me as a souvenir. In memory of what?

Of her?

Of our passionate love?

The cat is meowing and runs in every direction, then hides under the bed. He knows I hate him. I feel like strangling that cat. The whole world ignores me, pushes me aside so I’m going to take my revenge on the cat; I run after him with a towel; I try to beat him, but he’s hiding under the furniture and I can’t reach him, what a despicable animal he is. I finally corner him and get closer, slowly looking at him straight in the eyes. He looks at me with the same kind of hatred, and suddenly shows his teeth, wrinkles his eyes, arches his back, his crummy whiskers stiffen, he emits a strident kind of sound, and his paw comes at me in a flash, leaving a bloody scratch on my hand.

Shit, even cats think they can do with me as they please. I leave him with his hatred and go into the bathroom to clean the wound. I walk through the long hallway muttering insults at the cat and insults at the world.

He’ll never make it, but yes, you’ll see.

I’m either crazy or I’m a genius.

I’ll write a book and once it’s published I’ll commit suicide.

I dress like a bum because I can’t dress like a lord and it makes me sick.

I hate all those bastards

To die in a corner made of blue and white silk.

I’ll take my revenge but I’ll remain simple, very simple.

I’ll paste that fucking sky back with my own sperm if it’s necessary.

I let the warm water flow over my hand; it burns a little, but wounds must be cleaned, as the wise people I met have often said; I let the hot water flow over my hand, the blood stops, the wound seems to close up slowly. I look into the mirror just above the dirty wash basin and the mirror sends back my image…and in the mirror where I look at these twenty-seven years a corner of blue sky makes its appearance. I hear my grandmother’s voice talking to the Barbarian:

“Let your wounds heal; you’re not the only one who has suffered; let life take its course; look at the sky in a different way.”

Yes the sky was shattered but…it’s now high time to look at the sky in a different way.