Sphinx (8 page)

This resistance, despite being hard to define, did not disarm me: I persevered and kept at it for weeks, trying to prove to A*** through every means imaginable that to succumb to my pleas and do the deed, far from destroying our affection, would only deepen and reinforce it. I insisted, tactically, on this shocking fact: A***'s not-so prudish attitude could coexist with my moral rigidity, and a carefree practice of bodily exhibition could rub shoulders with an equally strong contempt and suspicion of the flesh. In other words, that A***'s excesses could go hand
in hand with my moderation and decorum. Far from being enraged by my obstinacy or taking offense at my incessant urging, A*** found it all quite amusing. This was a good sign. Certainly the variety of my pleas was astonishing; one often finds oneself suddenly capable of deploying the treasures of rhetoric, imagination, and persuasion in order to convince someone to have sex—a very common ambition, and not so interesting when one thinks about it in the cold light of day. But voilà, the price that I seemed to attach to my conquest, measured in terms of the energy and ingenuity I was expending, was high enough to be flattering. What must have seemed at first to be a passing blaze of concupiscence was, over time, taking on real form.

Our daily telephone conversations were no longer anything but a game: a hypothetical reconstruction of our relationship if A*** were to succumb to my desires. We were presenting each other with illusions, visions, and tableaux. The object of this display was to figure out how to get along without drama, how to deal with the overcrowding engendered by a relationship that we hoped would not be temporary, but rather truly invested with stable affections, tastes, habits, and lifestyles—all of which differed radically, even more each day. We discussed everything down to the most trivial details. Would we live together? And if so, how would we divide up the household chores? Would we sleep in separate beds, thus shielding ourselves from the boredom of a complacent conjugality? And if not, what type of bedding would we choose? A*** was pushing for the classic pairing of sheets and covers, I for the more rational duvet.

The slow workings of this fiction, which didn't shy away from any ridiculous or insignificant detail, were taking on the meticulous traits of familiarity. It was winning A*** over to the possibility of such a relationship. Its incongruity, its danger was dissipating in the soothing quietude of our constructed fable. Repetition and habit tend to diffuse excess. A***
was no longer systematically imagining the worst, no longer predicting disasters at every turn; the scenarios were becoming less catastrophic. Our union, by dint of simulation, was no longer completely inconceivable. The game of “and if” wore down A***'s reluctance; every day, we already belonged to each other in our imaginations. My desire was gaining power through a trick, was gaining life through a fiction.

Finally it no longer seemed to be a perilous trap to plan a vacation together, an idea I had secretly been entertaining for a long time now. I convinced A*** to go away with me to Munich for a few days just before Christmas, with no ulterior motive, in keeping with our “and if…” We left, pretending for a laugh that it was our honeymoon, where of course nothing scandalous would actually happen. One morning, after a night of work, we boarded the first plane for Munich and settled into a comfortable hotel room around noon.

The weather was astonishingly beautiful for the entire duration of our trip. A***, who had lived for some time in Munich, knew a lot of people there. I went along on some visits, but I saved three afternoons for myself to go from church to church and to make a rapid tour of some of the museums. It was important for me to prove to A*** that a relationship didn't amount to servitude and suffocation. Nevertheless, I was trying to secure the promise that we would visit the church Saint*** together, a little Baroque gem that I thought A*** would like because of its excessive decorative style and outrageous ornamental magnificence. Indeed, this extreme manifestation of Baroque taste, magnified in the confined proportions of that church, swallowed up and overwhelmed the view, from the spiral trompe-l'oeil to the horrible allusion to the confessional placed under the sign of the skull and crossbones.

Catholic and as far as possible from the censorious tastes of the Puritans, A*** was the perfect antithesis to white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant
America. The spirit of the Counter-Reformation suited A*** perfectly, and, in guessing that, I had brought A*** a pleasure that might never have been discovered otherwise.

Munich also had some nightclubs to offer. Each night we visited three or four, where A***'s extensive notoriety was again made clear to me. Two years spent in Munich had sufficed to make A*** known in more or less all of the city's social circles. In each of these clubs, we were always invited to a table where I was introduced to a mob of people I would have been incapable of recognizing if I were to meet them again.

The clubs in Munich closed earlier than in Paris and some of them legally had to shut down at two o'clock. This particular policy forced us into a transhumance around four in the morning, inevitably leading us to a rather snooty club—the Sans-Nom, the Bavarian equivalent to the Apocryphe, frequented moreover by the same fashionable idlers that can be found in all the major cities of the world.

We would return by taxi to our hotel, which was not too far from the city center but still removed from the old town. The room had only one bed and we slept side by side in a platonic concubinage, as if this sort of asceticism were natural for us, or agreed upon in advance. There was a hint of perversity in this game; before I went to sleep I kept calculating all the possible consequences of transgressing. That A*** had conceded to come away with me and to share a bed with me, that sleeping next to each other had seemed to go without saying, could have been a sign that I had permission to succumb to the temptation currently putting my perseverance to the test. I was excited by the proximity of A***'s body; I didn't know whether to suppress this excitement or to give it free rein. What was it that A*** really desired? Each night, a ray of light, passing through the slightly opened curtains, illuminated A***'s sleeping face, and I couldn't help but stare. I was hoping that our unconscious
nighttime bodily movements would culminate in a compromising position in the morning. But A***, always waking before me, eluded all fortuitous languor.

In the evenings, we would take a walk through the English garden nearby. At night, we would have dinner with some of A***'s friends before beginning our nocturnal wandering. We would walk from one club to another in the sharp cold of those December nights. The night before our departure, we completed a farewell tour. I still remember the amazing ambiance of the trashy dive we found ourselves in, a meeting point for homosexuals of all stripes, where A*** knew the owner, who was a former dancer. In the penumbra, further obscured by cigarette smoke and the movements of perspiring bodies packed one against the other, a barely visible transvestite burlesque show was unfolding. By contrast, the awkward stiffness of the Sans-Nom bored me and so we returned a bit earlier than usual to pack our bags. Worn out from visiting a number of museums that afternoon, I collapsed onto the bed, asleep, without taking the time to undress. From the depths of an intractable slumber, for a very brief moment, I vaguely perceived someone leaning over me, a vision of A***'s face near mine, the sensation of being tucked in. Then I plunged back, muttering, into an interrupted dream. Once again, I was stirred awake by the feeling of being touched and, in the uncertainty of shadows and the fog of sleep, I discerned A*** looking at me. Turning over, I groped in the darkness for A***'s body and threw myself against it before falling back to sleep.

I never alluded to what I had so indistinctly perceived in my sleep, and neither did A***. There were always inexplicable silences between us, a sort of prudishness or reserve that kept us from broaching certain intimate subjects. We kept the evidence hidden away, even avoiding the use of expressions that seemed improper, excessive, or bizarre. A*** would never show any immoderate affection, and I was constantly forcing myself not to criticize the escapades I witnessed. Once, only once, I was weak enough to reveal my jealousy, which had been gnawing away at me. In the same vein, A*** only once slipped in showing tenderness toward me, using words and gestures that we had never before allowed ourselves to use.

This single jealous episode took place in the dressing room of the Eden where, one night, I came upon A*** in the company of a man I had seen fairly often in the wings the previous week, whom I suspected to be A***'s latest lover. Normally I pretended not to give a damn about the goings-on of A***'s libido; the number and nature of A***'s escapades were none of my business. What right did I have to be jealous, since there was nothing between us other than platonic affection? But that night I could not bear to see this lugubrious cretin, in the seat that I habitually occupied, engaged with A*** in the sort of conversation I had thought was reserved for me alone. This substitution outraged me: the idea that in my absence someone could take my place, could be the object of identical attentions. I was willing to admit that I was not
everything for A***, but I refused to accept that what I was, achieved through a hard-fought struggle, could be taken over by someone else, and apparently by
anyone at all.
The sole merit of the lover in question was his idiocy: his inane conversation was doubtless a nice break from the thornier discussions A*** and I typically had. A*** thought he had a beautiful face, entrancing eyes, and good fashion sense. I was shocked by A***'s poor taste, by the appreciation of such an individual: an Adonis from a centerfold with a stupidly handsome face.

I had judged him, a priori, as moronic, and I realized, triumph and despair mixing indissolubly, that it was true, indeed in every way. I was revolted by this pretty boy's attitude, by his dumbfounded acceptance and regurgitation of all conventional hogwash. With the aplomb bestowed on him by age and rank, Monsieur would uphold unconscionable vulgarities, which, moreover, he revered—a proselyte! When I arrived, the conversation was revolving around the countries of North Africa, which he had glimpsed during a recent trip to a resort. He passed briskly from the picturesque story of his trip to general commentary on the countries and the samples of the population that one could encounter in France, “in
our
country,” as he articulated so well. I reveled in ridiculing a rival in front of A*** and put on a show of systematic perversity. The discussion quickly turned sour: when one realizes that one is being unreasonable, it is precisely then that one employs even more uncouth and violent arguments. The offspring of the 16
^th
arrondissement do not like to be refuted, much less mocked; they never think it beneath them to resort to insults, no matter how low. I left, slamming the door behind me, not without having hurled out an extremely spiteful compliment on the quality and distinction of A***'s lover, whom I referred to with a far more offensive noun.

I was in a very bad mood when I arrived at the Apocryphe, and the
music I selected was proof. I exuded my resentment through the loudspeakers, which calmed me down a bit. On the floor that night were some showbiz caryatids, those people that one sees on the covers of popular magazines. They did me the honor of a hello, expecting that I would carry out some of their desiderata: “Could you maybe play X's latest record…? He's here tonight, it would be an immmmense pleasure for him,” or else: “When are you going to play some reggae?” It made me snicker that these dignitaries, flush with their new, modern-day power, solicited favors from the feeble authority conferred on me by my position behind the turntables. What an
enormous
privilege it was in their eyes that they should notice me! In granting me the favor of acknowledging my presence, of pouring onto me a miniscule portion of the celebrity they oozed and tried to pawn off as glory, they tried cheaply to coax my kindness. I made them feel the vanity of their approach, and unless they were willing to own up to the humiliation of failure, they had no choice but to laugh at my sneering. And that night in particular they were made to feel the grace of my cynicism, the bursts of my impertinent irony.

Common mortals have other ways of expressing their desires. A club does not get filled every night with only the chic clientele. Because there are a paltry number of remarkable characters—and they are remarkable only because their number is paltry—a mass of individuals of lower distinction are allowed into this sanctuary, a privilege through which they are made to feel honored. They would come to the Apocryphe, attracted by the club's reputation (they don't accept just
anybody
—you, me, any old person), hoping to rub shoulders with some celebrities.

That night I realized something: they pronounce their desiderata, demanding (without really caring) some record, in order to prove that they have a right to be in this milieu where the arbitrary reigns. It's their sole ontological proof, their sole cogito, their foundation and justification.
I want, therefore I am; I need, I breathe. I spend money, they must grant my desire, considering my demands in light of the value that I offer. I pay to exist; the tribute, delivered in kind or in cash, buys the recognition of my right.

My strategy was to inspire incertitude; I derived pleasure in imbuing these souls with doubt by not playing into their pathetic ruses.
Che vuoi?
I was leading them to the brink of an essential anxiety. My reply was always “maybe.” It was a dangerous game that exposed me to the disapproval, disrespect, or insidious resentment of the people to whom I denied the assurance of being a subject. Each night I would have to confront this great panic of individual desires that were in reality desires for individuation, for furious revindication. Sometimes I would try—utterly in vain but with a perverse pleasure—to make them understand that the sum of individual desires does not add up to the happiness of all. That when it comes to the music in a club the law of the majority is ineffectual; that neither democracy nor aristocracy, nor even oligarchy, is a possible regime for a coherent musical set. I would argue that a good DJ is one who, rather than simply responding to repetitive wishes that are consciously formulaic and elementary (such and such a record, such and such a song), subconsciously manages to fulfill an unknown desire by creating a unity out of something superior to adding up so many records, so many requests. To appease is not the same as to fulfill.