2

The blood has stopped. The kittens’ eyes are half open, though they’re still sticky at the corners. I’m reminded of the red-headed man’s sperm.

He phoned. “It’s over,” I said.

“Just knowing you exist,” he said, “just knowing I could have a drink with you from time to time, would be enough for me.”

“All right,” I said. “I don’t mind a drink.”

I miss the blood. It was bright and very pure, quite unlike menstrual blood. The kind of blood you see in old paintings— Christ on the cross, the Virgin of the Seven Sorrows.

We have our drink on a café terrace. It’s a fine day, the sky looks as if it’s been given a thorough cleaning. I tell myself I’m not going to any more hotel rooms. Summer’s coming, and I love the sun. I don’t want to sacrifice any of my afternoons while the weather’s fine. I’ll work at the travel agency in the mornings, advising people who think that going away gives you a new lease on life, and then in the afternoons I can be alone in the woods, alone with Gilles. I tell myself the sun will help me say no.

I say yes. We’re going to see each other again. Somewhere else. In another hotel. That way you’ll be sure, the man says. I’ve said yes, and now I feel even more disgusted. But that’s all to the good. My body will reject him in a way that my will never could. Once and for all.

At home, I’ve been watching Douce. Since the kittens started opening their eyes, she’s been going out into the garden for longer periods, then coming back for a nap on my bed. She used to be submissive, now she’s becoming dominant. I’ve seen her provoking the stray ginger tom who comes into the bedroom when my window’s open and lolls shamelessly on the unmade bed. He lies there and watches Douce advance. They look each other up and down. He waits for her to beat a retreat, but she growls and throws herself on him. He runs off. She’s surprised to see him go. Then she notices how rumpled the sheet is where they were fighting, and she crawls back in terror from the strange swelling in her resting place.

I put on a very short, figure-hugging dress. I’m too old for it, but that’s the way it is. Things end, but you drink them to the last drop without understanding why.

Gilles arrives. He says I look beautiful, and I ought to take off everything I’m wearing underneath and be naked under the dress.

* * *

Gilles takes me to the woods. We have two hours. As we stroll, we talk. About everything except the red-headed man. Neither of us wants to talk about him. It’s not worth the bother.

Gilles smokes as he walks. I’m fascinated by the way he smokes, the way he screws up his eyes slightly. It makes him look gentle and hard at the same time. He’s somewhere else, somewhere far from me. He walks away as he smokes, breathing in the whole world through the smoke, a world I’m temporarily excluded from. It’s his respite from me. But for me it’s another way to possess him, staring longingly at his beauty across the distance created by the cigarette. He has long hands, with well-groomed nails. When I think of his fingers, two images come to mind— a long, thin cigarette, and my swollen vulva.

He walks and smokes, and we talk. An hour goes by. I’m surprised he hasn’t yet laid me down in the bracken. With an air of mystery, he turns and starts to walk back the way we came.

“Aren’t you going to do anything to me?” I ask, but lightly, casually.

“Yes,” he says. “Everything.”

My belly becomes heavy, and I go weak at the knees. We walk on a little farther. Gilles points to a tree that’s not like the others, a chestnut tree surrounded by beeches. I lean my back against it. Gilles lifts my dress and, with infinite gentleness, begins to touch me with his fingers.

“Your cunt is swelling like a fruit,” he says. He’s always impressed with that kind of natural display.

I can feel the fruit ripening, filling with juice at a dizzying rate, getting huge, oozing—what strange power my lover’s hand has to bring such a flat, dry fruit to ripeness, to fill it in an instant with hot liquid and the desire to be picked or to explode under the exquisite pressure of his fingers. I explode. My knees give way against the trunk and my head goes back and the bark snags my hair, pulling it like a hand.

“You’re a fast finisher,” Gilles says.

My breath slows, stretches down to my feet. I straighten up, my back against the tree, my flesh melting into it, strengthened by the contact with this tree that is so different from the others, so sturdy and confident, strengthened, too, by my cry that ascended all the way up the trunk to the sky, to the thin clouds streaked by the topmost branches. I open Gilles’s fly, plunge my hand inside his underpants, and take out his cock, which is already hard. Gilles gets a hard-on as soon as he touches me. Sometimes he gets one just by thinking about me when I’m not with him. It brings tears to his eyes—I know because he told me. Now, like a child, he puts himself in my power, letting my hands move back and forth, back and forth, and very soon I can sense he’s about to come, so I undo the buttons that go up the front of my dress like a ladder and expose my naked and swollen belly and Gilles moans and comes over my skin. Looking down at the bright gel that covers my dark pubic hair, I laugh—it’s so tepid and pure and milky inside, every time I move it quivers. When Gilles wipes me with the bracken, it’s so sticky it won’t go away, it’s like the gel they put on your belly before an ultrasound, I remember going to the hospital with my sister when she was eight months pregnant, her skin stretched to breaking point, the male nurse applying the gel, then the probe gliding gently over her belly in a circular motion. I can still see the shape of the baby swimming on the screen, expanding like ectoplasm. You were supposed to marvel at the sight of an arm, a leg, a tiny cock, a heart beating regularly, but I couldn’t make out anything, all I could see was moving life forms vaguer than dreams, than all my dreams of motherhood, indecipherable oceanic forms that bring tears to your eyes.

The spores of the bracken are sticking to my belly like gold dust, and Gilles tells me I’m the most beautiful woman in the world.

When I see the red-headed man again, when we’re on the train going to the city, following the white lines on the platforms, he takes a quick look at me in my very short dress and tells me he wishes he were going out with a “real looker,” so that passersby would turn around and envy him, but there are beautiful women who are nothing much in bed and others who … I don’t resent what he’s saying. I’m only surprised that Gilles thinks I’m so beautiful. Maybe this man’s right, maybe it’s time I realized I’ll never be a “real looker.”

The weather is glorious. On the embankments on either side of the railroad tracks, the giant hogweed sways like ivory umbrellas. I wonder why I’m going to shut myself away again behind closed curtains with this man. The one consolation is that it’ll soon be over. But I feel as if I’m being unfaithful. To the sun, to the woods, to the free time that only Gilles can fill. I’m going to waste two hours of my life. A hole, a stain that will dirty the trees, the sky, and everything I’ve ever learned or ever will learn about love.

The red-headed man is talking without looking at me, staring down at the flap where I’m resting my elbow.

“I’d be happy to have what you don’t give your boyfriend.”

Without thinking, I protest that it’s not like that. Everyone is unique, Margot used to say, you must have a thought for everyone when you say your prayers at night, and I repeat that everyone is unique, what I get from him is something Gilles can’t offer—blows, unrestrained violence, violence without love, that more than anything, without love. It’s so refreshing not to love, if you only knew—you do know, don’t you?

Then I stop, taken aback, because he’s looked up and I finally see him for what he is—a faithful dog, resigned to being abandoned again. His sadness is so absolute, I’m dazzled by it—it opens me more surely than any scalpel could, making me a bundle of exposed nerves and bared entrails, with my cunt quivering in the middle, a red gaping mouth open forever with the pain of the blows. I tell myself the red-headed man could be our dog, Gilles’s and mine, he could be a dog that belongs to everyone, a dog that collects scraps from under the table.

“Are we there yet?” I ask, with a slight trembling in my voice.

We’re nearly there, the man says, there are no more stops. And a great hole opens beneath me, and the vibration of the wheels penetrates me in a gentle and regular rhythm in time with the throbbing of my cunt. My body is preparing itself. I remember waking up last night, well before dawn, with the kind of feverish excitement you feel at the anticipation of sexual pleasure. But without pleasure, without any hope of it. Thinking only of the pain to come, like a poisonous shrub, a giant hogweed growing for some reason on a railroad embankment. I looked down at my pale body, the limbs stretching involuntarily, and the cunt I could no longer bring myself to touch, as if it carried death with it.

We’re there. It’s another hotel, a smaller one this time. An ordinary two-story, redbrick suburban house. There’s a tall, well-built man perched on a ladder in the yard next door, cutting scrap metal with a blowtorch. He stops for a moment and turns to look at us, staring as we go around to the back door of the red house. I can feel his eyes on me, the eyes of a man cutting metal, a man with fire at the end of his arm, a dazzling fire you can’t look at directly. I look down at the ground, pursued by his blinding gaze. He knows exactly why I’m wearing a short dress and how long it’ll be before I come back out. I feel very weak suddenly, like molten metal being bent and shaped.

The red-headed man rings the doorbell. A little dog barks. The door is opened by a fat woman who leads us into an old-fashioned kitchen. She is in the middle of doing her ironing. Her linen is on the ironing board. The dog sniffs at my calves.

“The price includes a drink,” the fat woman says. She’s wearing an acid-green skirt and a spotted blouse.

We turn down the drink and go upstairs. The staircase is narrow and dark and echoes to our steps. The room is very small, almost an attic. There’s a mattress on the floor, covered with a dark red bedspread. The gold floral wallpaper is peeling.

“Get undressed. Lie down.”

I’m used to the orders by now—they’re what I was made for. I lie on the mattress. The bedspread smells of other people, an indefinable mixture of secretions. I get up again and tear it off. Beneath it, the sheets are clean and cool to the touch. I have a strong desire to sleep.

“Spread your legs.”

Shyly, I mention the blood and the bad night I had. The man says he’ll be gentler this time. Maybe he’s also been affected by the way the man next door looked at us, or troubled by the brightness of the blowtorch in the solar forge of the afternoon. Brightness on brightness. But inside the room, the curtains stifle the light and muffle cries, the darkness is pitiless.

The man doesn’t put clothespins on my breasts or whip me. He penetrates me with his fingers and digs about inside. He asks me if my boyfriend has ever fucked me up the ass, and if so, how many times.

“Just once,” I tell him, in a low voice, “and it hurt.”

“Get down on all fours.”

I do as he says.

“It’s obvious you’re not used to it,” he says. “You need widening. Next time, we’ll start with that.”

There won’t be a next time, you loser—that’s what I’m thinking—you’ll never see me again, me or my asshole. So go ahead, work on me all you want, one last time. That’s what you do, methodically, with something I haven’t had time to look at, something long and not too wide that forces an entry and then goes farther and deeper. I can feel it beating against the wall of the rectum, I get the impression it’s going to burst through the wall into my vagina and come out the other side in a stream of blood and shit. It doesn’t hurt. The only thing that hurts is the shame of being purged like a mare, I’m melting with shame and abandon, I’m afraid of what could come out when you remove your contraption, what could spurt in your face and spread across the bed and make the room stink, the room and the whole world, and make me a woman people either avoid or else spit at, closing their eyes and holding their noses. But my boyfriend, who’s interested in everything, my boyfriend, my lover, he’ll be next, loser, and he’ll use the opening you’re making. With his hard, gentle cock, he’ll come and go, deep inside me, as far as he can, and he won’t be afraid of causing me the pain I felt the first time.

I was the one who wanted it, one summer’s day in the woods. I asked Gilles to kneel behind me, then I got down on all fours, spread my buttocks myself with tense hands, and went in search of his erect cock. In my haste, I impaled myself with such force that I screamed in pain and slid onto my side, bending my legs. Spellbound by what was happening, Gilles followed my movement passively. I sobbed without tears and he said nothing, didn’t move inside me. Then, when the pain stopped, I asked him to move, and he did, gently at first, then more quickly, and it didn’t hurt anymore, or only a little, only as much as it had to. I was still lying on my right side when I felt a cramp in my left leg. I asked Gilles to change position. I expected him to come out, but he stayed inside, taking me by the shoulders and tipping me gently onto him. My back was against his chest and belly, my eyes turned to the sky, and his cock stood upright inside me like a pivot. He began to move slowly up and down, thrusting ever so carefully into me, cradling me in his great body, my arms hanging loose, anchored on this rock of flesh. I was drifting ecstatically, drowning, offering up to the sun a spectacle of overwhelming beauty.

There’s nothing beautiful about the red-headed man or what he’s doing to me. But I like it this way, I like the way his blows accentuate Gilles’s gentleness, I like the way his dry, shrill voice makes Gilles’s throaty voice ring in my ears, that slightly cracked voice that’s the background music to all my emotions, I like the way his brutality deprives me of an orgasm, punishes me where I sin, a depraved little girl whipped for her depravity. That’s what I tell myself as he forages inside me and I moan, my head in the pillow, humiliated to the depth of my being—Gilles has my orgasm, Gilles has it all.

The man has stopped. Now he’s kissing the back of my neck and my shoulders, with cold, precise little pecks. Dumbstruck, I wonder what these kisses mean, and the gestures that go with them. He’s like a timid adolescent confronted by a girl’s naked body, and at the same time, he’s manic in his frenzy. This is no lover’s frenzy, though.

“You always stay in control, don’t you?” I say, hating him.

“Always.”

He turns me over with one hand, spreads my legs, and puts his fingers into me. I’m streaming. He laughs.

“You get really wet,” he says. “Here, taste.”

And he sticks his fingers in my mouth. I don’t want to do it. His fingers disgust me, even with the taste of me on them. I hold my breath, and the man notices. Suddenly his teeth start to chatter as if he’s cold, his features contort alarmingly, he slaps me hard across the face several times, and his teeth knock together. It’s a weird noise, fascinating and terrifying at the same time. There’s something wrong with him, I’m sure of that now, he’s a madman, the clicking of his teeth indicates the onset of his madness, that and the blows which are getting more and more violent, following one another in a hellish rhythm, sending my head spinning from side to side.

Suddenly, it all stops. The man gives a little groan, goes back to my vulva, puts his fingers inside again, then gives them to me, demanding that I lick them one by one. Holding my breath, I lick, and through my disgust I notice how sharp the taste is, like the sweat of a dying person.

The man has put his head between my legs. He has his tongue in the streaming furrow, drinking the way an exhausted animal drinks, not pausing to take a breath and yet savoring every last drop. Apart from this wet sound, there’s a vast silence. The thrusts of his tongue are exact and merciless and unerring. I anticipate them—my cunt has become a mouth, my mucous membranes tastebuds—and my mind, washed free of all fear, walks on the water, my mind is barefoot, a young god newly awakened, and my cunt eats it, then listens to the throbbing of its tiny heartbeat, a fragile little lamp in its red receptacle. My whole existence is there, just as the calm surface of a lake exists only through the sky, the rest of my body has vanished, a neutral landscape, a sterile dune. My body has become empty and inert and useless. Only my cunt is still howling silently, not with that exquisite torture I sometimes feel, which makes me beg for it to be over, but with a peace that eternity itself could not exhaust, like the submissiveness of a kneeling animal, motionless for centuries. When the orgasm arrives—I wasn’t expecting it anymore, I was past desire, past hunger—it’s nothing like the usual explosion that startles Gilles, when my limbs go stiff and I cry out as if I’m being broken in two. This orgasm is smooth and totally silent, it arches me in a single, slow, unbroken wave, and billions of tiny drops of seawater unite in my veins and on my skin, at the center of my muscles and my nerves. I come like a saint in her ecstasy, radiantly, lips parted in a smile.

“Well, well,” the man says. “I thought you were asleep.”

I open my eyes. He’s lost that twisted look he had, the protruding muscles, the disappearing eyes. His eyes are weary now, and very blue, and his flesh is tender and glistening with sweat. He lies down next to me and relaxes into stillness. His body is like a child’s, and his sweat is light as water and has no taste. I drink at the surface of his skin, like a child at its mother’s breast.

When we emerge from the red house, the man with the blowtorch looks at us again, and this time I don’t lower my eyes. When we emerge from the red house, I’m carrying my orgasm like a pregnant woman her belly, and I want to be shown respect.