Sometimes, when Gilles lifts his hand to stroke my face, I quickly shield myself with my arm. The gesture always startles him, as if he’s suddenly found himself transported to another planet. We both float for a moment, nauseous, in a state of weightlessness. Then I start to laugh, and the incident is closed.
I have no power over the arm that rises in front of my eyes. Perhaps the simple truth is, I don’t want Gilles to touch me anymore. But I can’t be sure, about either that or any of the other signs. I eat very little, and only when my body demands it. Sometimes I sleep in the afternoons, curtains drawn against the sun. I get up at night and walk the streets, straight ahead along the canal, until an impulse makes me turn and head back home. Sometimes, when I get back, I find the ginger cat lying on the bed. He looks at me with an air of wild entreaty, as if saying: I love you for the soft bed and the warm room, I love you for the things I’ve forgotten and the things that are going to happen, I love you for the way your hand touches my fur just like my mother’s tongue used to, when I was only a blind, wet ball in a transparent pouch. I chase him away. The following night, he’s back. In the end I’ll have to keep the window closed.
During the day, I have no desire to move. I stroke Douce and watch the kittens sucking hungrily. Douce is thin, and so am I. I talk to her tenderly. Outside the house, I have no desire to talk. My silence is a tribute to the memory of the blows, a constant longing to be spurned, an obsession with the belly. I can’t communicate any of these things, but my silence, my seeming indifference, makes me appear unusually receptive, like an antenna. People have started confiding in me more than they used to. At the agency, the customers take their seats in front of my desk like patients at the doctor’s, and the conversations quickly turn confidential. Now I know, as I didn’t before, why such and such a person chooses to go to Venice rather than New York. It has nothing to do with the actual cities, or the pictures in the brochures, it has to do with dreams of Venice, dreams of New York, free of all reality. In shops, on the way from the fitting rooms to the cash desk, the assistants tell me their life stories. At the market, a woman told me a recipe for mussels cooked in port, when all I was doing was waiting in line next to her at the fish shop. She was a prodigiously ugly woman, the essence of housewife, with the staleness of daily chores and simmering dishes about her, but those mussels cooked in port gave me a more intimate view of her life than if I had been her best friend, her clairvoyant, or a radio talk-show host she was calling about her personal problems. Maybe I had become her for a moment. Not that I found out anything about her personal problems. I was simply present when she showed me the best thing she had to offer, something delicious, a feast for the senses. It was marvelous, like those paper flowers that open when you dip them in water—in a fraction of a second, something closed and stiff reveals itself in all its splendor. I’d like to dip all of humanity in a bath like that, all those stalks of humans who jostle against one another like matches in a closed box.
I’ve agreed to meet the man a third time, but only because Gilles stood me up. I suspect he did it on purpose, to make me feel nostalgic for what we used to have. Unless it was a misunderstanding, one of those errors of timing that only happen when people are starting to weary of each other. We were supposed to meet outside his sports club. I’d sat down on the stone pillar at the entrance and was swinging my legs, half open, a few centimeters from the ground. I was wearing a short skirt, and above it, a very wide belt that pinched my waist and made my breasts and hips more prominent. I think I was almost beautiful.
I waited a long time. People passing ignored me, except for one old woman who said hello to me. I looked at her. She walked humbly and rather stiffly, the way people do who don’t have a succulent fruit between their legs, but a fountain in their heads and fruit in their hearts. I thought of Margot. I returned her greeting, and decided to get up and leave. I’d had enough of waiting for Gilles. My belly felt suddenly empty—the only thing I had left that could help me walk like that woman and greet people with a smile. For a long time, my head and my heart have been pumped dry by my cunt, dissolved by men’s hands, my cunt is the one place where my blood still beats, all the rest is dead.
I returned home, wandered around the kitchen for a while, then lay down on my bed with a bottle of beer. I drank the beer straight from the bottle, taking my time, drinking it to the last drop, then lifted my skirt and touched myself for a long time, until I was on the verge of coming. Then I took the empty bottle and thrust it into me, pushing it forward in jerks, as far as I could, but my arm didn’t have the strength of Gilles’s loins, or the magic, or the madness. I cried out all the same, and arched my body, and when I took the bottle out, the neck was sticky and streaked with white. I licked it. It didn’t taste as good as sperm, it was more bitter, slimier, but maybe that was because I was alone and it was my own substance, not the one that Gilles sometimes spurts into my mouth and asks me to keep for a moment before putting it back between his half-open lips, passing it gently from my tongue to his, like a slithery fish.
Gilles never arrived, and the red-headed man phoned. He asked how I was and whether I wanted to see him again. My evasive replies seemed to make him nervous and uncomfortable. His voice grew plaintive as he plied me with questions. Another one, I told myself, who doesn’t know the universal law: The more you say, the more you ruin the fantasy.
“I don’t suppose,” he concluded feverishly, “you want us to meet again?”
I thought about it for a moment or two.
“On one condition. No more blindfolds. I want to see the blows.”
“Tomorrow, the one-thirty train,” he replied, sounding almost cheerful.
The hotel is a pleasant, middle-class house, the best we’ve had since the adventure started. The manager looks as sweet and tired as the roses that are shedding their petals on her counter. The buttons you push for the elevator are made of brass, and the sliding door of wood. We go upstairs. The room is huge and clean and overlooks the garden. The eternal drawn curtains bring back childhood memories of English percale. The June sun hammers on the housefront and the windowpanes, making my temples hum. I feel as if I’m going to faint. I sit down in an armchair covered in the same material as the curtains and slowly undress. Once I’m naked, I stand up and, without a word, go to the shower. The towels, hanging on an old-fashioned rail, smell of lavender. I dry myself just a little. The man is waiting for me. I stretch my cool body on the bed, exposing my belly and my chest, my thighs and my face. And I watch.
The eye distances. It captures the promise of pain in the man kneeling beside me, tense, his arm raised, and in the very thin strap of plaited leather which is going to strike, be raised, and fall again, methodically. The eye captures the man’s effort, the two horizontal creases on his forehead, the heat that makes him stream with sweat, his growing exhaustion. The quick gestures, the cleanness of the blows, contrast with the infinite wetness of his torso, the blankness of his face. In noting these details, my eyes master the pain, anticipating it, hardening my muscles, so that my flesh, between each sting of the strap, no longer verges on total emptiness, but takes in what comes before and after each blow, all the picturesque details. The man is sweating like a horse being led to the slaughterhouse, and it seems as if his eyes want to say something, there’s a mute, desperate message behind those pupils bulging with effort. I can’t help it, can’t help hitting, and you, you can’t help it either, can’t help watching, that’s what the man’s eyes are saying. By staring at him, I manage not to groan, not to bend my legs, but to leave them extended and slightly open. At each blow, my whole belly vibrates with an invisible contraction. But I remain exposed, seeing each gesture coming, anticipating the distance between the contractions, the decrease in the burning. Giving birth must be like this, the same lucid awareness as you wait for the contraction, the same precise timing that organizes the suffering, breaks it up into almost bearable stages. There are special classes to prepare you for that, lots of big bellies and big chests panting in rhythm, trying hard to reduce the future tearing to a matter of cause and effect, to master its mystery with little narrow controlled breaths, yes, that’s what they teach you, apparently—to control it all, the anger and the helplessness, the freedom to hit and bite and cry out like an African woman in labor, to cry until you find your voice.
I close my eyes now. There’s something I still want. It’s the reason I’m here, the reason I’m lying, for the third time, on a bed in a short-stay hotel. I want to be broken, to be taken out of the cold once and for all, I want my cry to ring out, my rage to explode, and my tears to flow. But the man stops abruptly, and everything stands still. My eyes are still closed, but I know he’s looking at me.
“One of these days,” he says, “you’re going to dump me.
I don’t reply. I open my eyes. I look in front of me, staring one last time at the darkness of the day. I chew his wetness as I swallow my saliva. I turn on my side, roll off the bed, and rush to the shower. I let the ice-cold water run. My skin crackles as my circulation revives. I am the most alive thing in the universe, and the coldest. Let the whole city go up in flames, I don’t care. What was the point in being beaten, showered with insults and sperm, abandoned to a martyr’s ecstasy, if not to give me back the very thing in which I’m at my best, the thing I love and hate— my cold, chaste body, nourished by an uneventful childhood and the stealthy footsteps of maids?
By the time we get back on the train, the embankment is already in the shade. The giant hogweed have eaten the sun, cutting the world in two at the level of the buildings, the peeling back walls, the washing lines, the birdcages in the windows. Up above, there is light, while below we ride in darkness.
Tonight I have a crucifix on my belly, purplish and distinct— two lines that have drained off the blood from the blows. I’ll have to keep Gilles away. I’ll say I have the flu, or my period came early. But the truth is, I haven’t heard from him since the day he stood me up. Maybe he’s away on a trip. Venice, New York. Far away. Maybe he’s gone for good.
It’s dark now. I’ll sleep through the night, without dreams. But first I’ll throw out the ginger cat, if he dares to come into my room again. I’ll take him by the spine and shake him, crying: “Get out! Get out! Get out!” three times, like an exorcism. My violence will be painful, like a baby coming out from between my legs. But it will be alive, and it will be hot, so hot that I’ll be struck dumb, my face distorted by the cries, disfigured with tears. I’ll close the door and the window and cover my head with the sheet, so the animal won’t ever come back. I can’t feed everybody. I have a boyfriend. Habits. And the sun to worship. That’s why I’m sitting at my table tonight, writing to the red-headed man: “Don’t ever come near me again. Ever. Ever. Ever.” I sign it. On the envelope, I put the number of his post office box. No name. Just the number, the town, and the zip code. I get up, put on a jacket and sneakers, go to the corner of the avenue, and throw the letter in the box, just as I would throw out a stray cat, just as I would bring a new life into the world—sobbing with pain.