Best S&M, Volume 3 (16 page)

And the longer Anne and Kathy stayed still, silent, released, and relaxed, the longer they could avoid the question of
should
they continue.

Anne reached to her side then, stretching across Kathy. Kathy rose up to see what her friend could possibly be reaching for, but in her wildest dreams she never would have dreamed she’d see what Anne suddenly plucked from behind an 8x11 framed photo of Bill and the kids.

Worse than any implement she could have produced (and Anne wasn’t sure she wanted to use anything on Kathy except her open hand) Anne extended her baby monitor as far as its chord would allow.

“Now, we continue,” the mistress of the house said, flicked the monitor to hissing life, placed it down once again, and lifted her hand to continue swatting Kathy for whomever cared to listen.

The Corpse Washer

By

Jan Vander Laenen

“Classic is healthy, Romantic is sick.”

- Goethe

Well, if one were to take this saying by the greatest German genius of all time
to the letter,
then I am a rather sickly being, because the more I advance in age, the more I catch myself to be a real, incurable romantic.

And yet, I have really tried to keep this romantic side of me hidden, perhaps because, in our cynical age, “romantic” is considered nearly synonymous with “ridiculous,” and there is nothing that people nowadays worry about and indeed fear more than coming across as weak or, even worse, ludicrous. Furthermore, the term romantic is often still construed to refer to Death and ideas of death – ideas that are not exactly appreciated in contemporary society where we want to give the impression we are eternal and sickness and dying can be stopped and swept under the carpet... Oh, yes…

And so, I have had my frivolous rococo period, a period during which I plunged into the most diverse eighteenth century writers, and especially the writings of the Marquis de Sade and
Dangerous Liaisons
by Choderlos de Laclos, and well, sometimes, I perversely and falsely tried to pose as the character of Madame de Merteuil, or imagined myself to be even more sexually deviant than the aforementioned
Marquis
. Regrettably enough, with the help of my psychiatrist, I have had to come to the conclusion that manipulating, deriding, and lying are not really part of my character – no – on the contrary, I have been the one that has been swindled by others and driven in a tight spot – and that my sexual tastes could be called rather normal, or even sunny, never based on little power games, in other words, or with the danger of suffering permanent injuries, but just with the intention of giving and receiving healthy pleasure – with as many men as possible that, naturally, Don Giovanni was a precursor of the Romantic movement…

What I have retained from my “Enlightenment” period, is a life-long, total reverence for its music, and in particular that of Mozart, then, more naturally, a little flat which, in all its simplicity, seems to be done up like a miniature version of Versailles or Caserta or Amaliënborg.

And yes, I have also had a period during which I posed as an all but militant gay, a little in the American vein, perhaps. And naturally, I have been and shall, on the one hand, remain an ardent proponent of the gay movement and of human rights in general, but I am too well aware that there is still a lot of work to be done, and continue thus to do my little bit for our so-called “community.” And on the other hand? Well, on the other hand, I continue to find that the saying “the world is beautiful because it is diverse” rings true, and would not feel really at home in a gay ghetto. And I naturally did enjoy my stay in the Castro district in San Francisco a number of years ago, but after a week or so, I was glad to be flying back to Europe. Because, well, the men there were naturally drop-dead gorgeous, with their facial hair and piercings and tattoos and their gym bodies; although it was a nice feeling to be able to knock about in a neighbourhood where men were the majority for once, I had missed the surreptitious, mucky, the secretive side, the sort of surreptitiousness, muckiness, and secretiveness that one can still find, in other words, in the stinking public toilets and stations and sex cinemas of European cities such as Brussels, Paris, or Madrid, for instance. Well, perhaps the American way of life is not really something for me…

...as was the case for that romantic Edgar Allan Poe for that matter, who may have emerged as the most illustrious representative of American literature, but who did not exactly have a high opinion of his predominantly profit-pursuing countrymen, and who managed to make a name for himself via Baudelaire’s translations into French. Poor, poor Edgar Allan Poe, who saw his mother cough her last breath out when he was only two years old, and who then saw one young woman after another pine away for the rest of his life, so that love and death started to mean nearly the same thing, as can be gauged from the following verses:

I could not love except where Death

Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath—

Death. Death! Have I been confronted with it myself? Oh yes, for I was born in Flanders, a region which, in spite of its Brueghelian reputation, seems to have been losing its
joie de vivre
more and more, where suicide statistics are not exactly pretty, and where the government takes pains not to publicise this fact. I was not yet eighteen when a good friend of mine, Rudy, threw himself under a train, for instance. I was not yet eighteen when another good friend, Jan, hanged himself. And I was not eighteen just yet when my then twenty-year-old brother–rich, athletic, intelligent, beautiful, and hairy and virile—ran into a post with his car at a hundred miles an hour. Poor, poor Guy, had you aimed a bit better, then you would have been dead on the spot, and have spared yourself some three weeks in semi-coma. Poor, poor Guy, who was the most beautiful of us and the darling of our parents, who taught me to masturbate, and about whom I may well have cherished incestuous feelings of being in love – how strange I felt when I greeted you for the last time in your brief life: because there I stood, the so-called weakling, towering over you who lay in your sickbed, attached to machines, with the hair on your head seared, your teeth smashed, your left eye torn out, and above all, an amputated lower leg. It did not do me any good to have seen you so felled, and the result of this early confrontation with death is that, as I grew older, I suffered more and more of a syndrome that I have christened “thanatitis,” a rather morbid urge towards death. In other words, a feeling that I am constantly living under Death’s wings, and that every action here on earth – and naturally, making love – could well be my last. “I could not love except where Death / Was mingling his with Beauty’s breat—,” Poe wrote, and given the loss of my brother, perhaps that applies a little to me too.

So far, so good. The title of this short story is “The Corpse Washer,” and it is in his memory that I have now picked up my pen. In his memory? Yes, in his memory, because a week or so ago, Halal – corpse washer by profession, and an all but drop-dead gorgeous man, of such beauty in fact as to be well nigh fatal for me – dropped dead all of a sudden.

And yes, I can still remember where and when the likeness of this man graced my retinas… It must have been three months or so ago, on a beautiful September evening, in the Dada Café, a Flemish bar obliquely across my door, where I still go to down a few beers in the evening, usually alone at a table in the back room to apprise the other patrons that I have no wish to engage in conversation with them, and want to spend a nice little hour alone with my musings in my half-drunken stupor.

And what do I muse about? Well, don’t laugh, but it is about serious subjects such as love, eroticism, art and death… Yes, and sometimes my ideas crystallise into a genuine aphorism, as the following, for instance, which on the evening before my encounter with my corpse washer, whilst reasonably drunk already, I scribbled on a beer coaster, and then put in my pocket: and life essentially boils down to creating one’s own, personalised hereafter.

 And what did I think of this aphorism the next morning, when, whilst nursing a hangover, I found the beer coaster on my writing desk next to my computer? Well, that I am probably an incredibly pious – and rather unlucky – man, perhaps because my little life has not exactly run smoothly up to now, and I am beginning to consider our earthly existence chiefly as a prelude to Paradise, although I will naturally spare no effort in the world to experience as many heavenly – read heavily erotic – moments, right here on this earth.

“...and life essentially boils down to creating one’s own, personalised hereafter.” Ah! Heaven! In my view, Heaven is naturally a real Heaven, a place where one never runs the risk of bumping into a member of one’s family, in other words, and with streams of wine and other spirits, so that you can live in a constant state of stupor, without ever feeling the negative effects thereof, with such conversation partners as Mozart and Tchaikovsky and Boccaccio and Blixen, who know how to pull the most wonderful melodies and stories out of their sleeve, as if by magic, and with a
pineta
for their landscape, with a shore and a sea that is just a pinch sunnier and cleaner than the
macchia lucchese
in Viareggio, inhabited chiefly by dark-eyed specimens of the male species, ever ready for a romp, who naturally only speak romance languages – French, Italian, Rumanian, Spanish, or Portuguese, in other words. And who reigns in this Heaven? Why, God, of course, the most beautiful, most perfect, sweetest Man you have been searching for in vain your entire life, who will take you in his arms after you breathed your last too, for a never-ending story with the power of a continuous orgasm. Yes, indeed, and I, as a real melancholic type, can answer the prissy Catholic souls who reproach me for perhaps attaching a bit too much importance to eroticism, with a saying by Aristotle: “Melancholic types are, for the most part, obsessed by sex.”

Ah! Heaven! God! The corpse washer, the man who must get us clean for our first appointment with God! Halal! There you were, on that sunny September evening, when I made my entrance in the Dada Café, sitting at the little table by the window, a mint tea in front you – there you sat in your drop-dead gorgeous glory, with your dark-bearded head, your limpid, black eyes that turned to look at me, and in which I thought I could read a certain holiness, the holiness of someone who is all too aware that we are here only temporarily, and can thus look Death straight in the eye; with an aura of blinding light around you; yes, yes, nearly a slap in the face of the ugliness that surrounded you, the musty floor and counter and tables of the bar, the unacceptably bad hard-rock music, the unfriendly barman, and the handful of half-drunk, unkempt Flemmings spluttering at each other – and my first question was, what in God’s name is he doing here?

And this was exactly the first question asked by Evert, my neighbour and night nurse at Saint John’s Hospital in the Rue du Marais, who happened to step into the bar, saw me through the open door, raised his arm to waive to me, saw my beautiful stranger through the window, and smiled at him with a somewhat surprised yet very polite nod. And my beautiful stranger smiled back, downed his last gulp of mint team, and with a supple gait and his well-built 1-metre-80 frame, dressed in bleached jeans and a white shirt with short sleeves, walked out of the Flemish watering hole, leaving me in the lurch!

And what did Evert have to say about my beautiful stranger when we bumped into each other on the patio of our building? Oh, that he too was amazed to see Halal, for that was his name, in the Dada Café, because this Halal was someone very discrete and very reserved; he worked as a corpse washer in the same hospital, but had no real contact with Evert or his colleagues; no one knew in fact whether he had a family or where he came from, and he always took his lunch alone in the canteen.

Needless to say, since that afternoon, my fantasies about Halal all but broke loose and that his likeness – I had seen him only once – has remained constantly before my mind’s eye. And what kind of fantasies could these be? Well, they range from the most traditional to the most excessive. Supposing that I still wanted to make something of the life I still have left, I dreamed, for instance, that Halal was gay too, that I would meet him in a gay spot, that he would say “
je t’aime
” to me – the Flemish version “
ik hou van je
” has the contrary effect on me—and that we would live long and be happy together, and perhaps adopt children too. A more delirious dream was that I would see one of the erotic fantasies still on my wish list come true with him, to bonk so furiously together in public that we would end up in a police station for indecent exposure. For instance, we would first cuddle and strip and paw each other in relatively safe places, such as porno cinemas, peepshows, public toilets, and sex shops. But then things would get heavier and more frenzied each time, we would go and frolic about in our bare bottoms in the fitting cubicles of large warehouses, in passport photo booths at metro stations, and underground car parks, until finally, some prissy soul, preferably accompanied by innocent children, such as an infant teacher, for instance, would, completely out of herself, call in the Men in Blue.

My more morbid fantasies took even darker turns; he could, for instance, initiate me into the joys of coprophagy, very gradually, because taking part in a banquet such as the one in
Salò
has been no priority of mine, but I could have a look how a – his! – arsehole would open to press out a couple of brown turds – this was perhaps still a feasible sort of fantasy. Or, when I was feeling down, he could perhaps, for a quarter of an hour or so, the duration of Ravel’s
Boléro
, anally penetrate and dilate me hard, so that in the end, with my permission, and with one thrust on the last dissonant note of the aforementioned composition, he would rip up my bowels to shreds.