The Necrophiliac (3 page)

In the morning, I went down to the concierge, begging her not to disturb me for any reason. I pretended I had some urgent and difficult work to do, the restoration of a very precious painting, a task that I had never before executed. She seemed to half believe me despite the strange glance she shot me.

I locked myself in with Suzanne. Honeymoon without music and without bouquets in my glacial room where the lamps burned. I didn't respond to the telephone. One or two times, despite my forbidding, someone rang the doorbell. My heart beating, holding my breath, immobile in the dark vestibule, I was all ready to do anything to defend my treasure.

I surrounded Suzanne with bags of ice. I often applied cologne to her face, which was marvellously intact, except for that greyish gleam that attaches itself to the cheekbones and that delicate pinching that refines the nose of the dead. Three days after her arrival, Suzanne opened her mouth suddenly, as if to say something. She had beautifully formed teeth. Didn't I say that the dead always have surprises to share? They are so good, the dead. . . .

For fourteen days, I was unspeakably happy. Unspeakably but not absolutely because, for me, joy never comes without the grief of knowing it is only ephemeral. All happiness carries with it the seed of its own end. Only death, mine, will deliver me from defeat, from the wound that time inflicts on us. With Suzanne, I experienced all the pleasures without exhausting them. I covered her with caresses. I tenderly licked her sex; I grabbed her greedily; I plunged myself into her again and again without stop, for at the time I didn't have a preference for the delights of Sodom. Then Suzanne let out a light whistling that could have been described as admiring or politely ironic, a breath that seemed to not want to finish, a sweet, prolonged complaint: Sssss . . . S as in Sèvres . . .

Suzanne, my beautiful Lily, the joy of my soul and of my flesh, had started to marbleise with violet patches. I multiplied the bags of ice. I had wanted to keep Suzanne forever. I kept her for almost two weeks, barely sleeping, feeding myself with what I found in the fridge, drinking too much at times. The tick-tock of the pendulums, the creaking of the woodwork had adopted a particular quality, just like each time Death is present. She is the great mathematician who gives the exact value to the data in a problem.

As time passed and the dust deposited an ashy veil over everything, my despair over having to leave Suzanne grew. The craziest ideas entered my mind. The primary one, though, never left me. I told myself I should have taken Suzanne abroad — but where? — right on that first night, before having even made her my mistress. I should have had her embalmed and I would never have had to separate myself from her. That would have been happiness. Instead, I had gone crazy, crazy and bad; I never had the wisdom to overcome and defer my desire; I had lost, out of the coarseness of my sex, a body that could have always delighted my senses and my heart. Now it was too late, I could no longer have Suzanne embalmed. Regret and pain gripped me in a terrible stranglehold. But hardly had I said it was too late and that I had wasted everything, when I rushed out again to the foot of my mistress, covering her legs with kisses where already the shaven down was starting to grow again. Desire seized me again with more force than grief, and soon I found myself interlaced with Suzanne, my mouth on her mouth, my belly on hers.

Passion and grief had invaded me to such a point that I didn't bathe or shave anymore, and mirrors reflected back the image of a shaggy, livid man with sunken eyes bordered in red. Seated at Suzanne's bedside, a bottle near me, enveloped in woolen blankets to ward off the cold, I imagined finding myself in my own tomb. Sounds from the outside barely reached me, almost never crossing the drawn curtains anymore: the clear sound of garbage cans pulled at dawn along the sidewalk.

The last night, I washed Suzanne; I put back on her fine underwear, her bourgeois suit that two weeks earlier I had removed euphorically. Wrapped in a rug, I carried her to the car. Green Suzanne, blue Suzanne, already inhabited, I think. The moment I let her slip into the Seine, I let out a cry that I heard resonate as if it had come from another planet. It seemed someone had ripped out my heart, ripped off my sex.

The Seine had welcomed her body, which had been saturated by my sweat and engorged by my semen for two weeks. My life, my death, mixed in Suzanne. In her, I entered into Hades; with her, I travelled all the way into the oceanic silt, tangled myself in the seaweed, petrified myself into the limestone, circulated into the veins of coral. . . .

Back at home, I threw myself on a bed that smelled of decay. I fell asleep instantly, brutally seized by a mortal slumber, rocked to sleep by the same black waves —
mare tenebrarum
— that rocked Suzanne, Suzanne my love.

I don't hate my occupation: its cadaverous ivories, its pallid crockery, all the goods of the dead, the furniture that they made, the tables that they painted, the glasses from which they drank when life was still sweet to them. Truly, the occupation of an antiquarian is a situation almost ideal for a necrophiliac.

At my neighbour's house, in the library, an elegant stamp from the eighteenth century — a nun toiling for a monk — that reminded me of a burlesque episode that occurred a dozen years ago.

I had gone to Melun on business that I managed to complete in much less time than I'd expected. Having arrived by train, I still had more than two full hours to kill. Now, I knew that a
Circumcision
, by Gentile Bellini, was located in the chapel des Filles in Saint-Thomas-de-Villeneuve, right in the north gallery. As these nuns aren't cloistered, their chapel is open to the public. The owner of the restaurant where I had lunched told me some pretty horrible things about the notorious hysteria and meanness of these nuns towards the orphans they took in. The convent was situated at the edge of the city.

It was suffocatingly hot and stormy, and everyone seemed to be sleeping. The garden gate was wide open, as was the chapel door where I entered without being seen. The stairs to the galleries were immediately to the right, and I followed them right away. I found the
Circumcision
, which disappointed me as it had been redone around 1890 by some rustic dauber. He had redressed the characters in the scene like new, retouched the architecture, introduced textured draperies into the opening of the windows through which the Venetian Maremma could once have been glimpsed. It was enough to make one cry.

Before descending, I leaned on the railing of the gallery from where I could, in one glance, take in the entire ground floor. The central alley was occupied by a catafalque bearing a stretcher on which reposed a nun, left alone provisionally, it seemed, by the sisters who had to watch her. Though dead, this nun, with a belly swollen like a wine skin and a face that seemed to come straight from Daumier's pencil, inspired a deep repulsion in me. She wore the habit of her order, and her sisters had styled her hair with a crown of fat paper roses to signify she was a virgin. Of all the dead I saw, this nun was the only one that inspired neither sympathy nor tenderness: meanness oozed from her entire person. I noted the image with displeasure, but it surprised me into thinking of the frequency with which the necrophiliac meets with the dead, the drunk with the bottle, the gambler with the cards. At the instant I had this reflection, a little man with a long nose and a very devoted air entered the chapel and prostrated himself in front of the altar, making his sign of the cross with the blessed water. Then in the same second that a tremendous clap of thunder resounded and a torrential rain tried suddenly to penetrate the chapel, he noticed the stretcher and seemed electrified. After a brief hesitation, the little man hurried to the door, which he closed, as he did the one to the sacristy. Then, protected from the deluge of all unexpected intrusions, he looked to the right and to the left to ensure he was alone, forgetting, nevertheless, to lift his eyes to the galleries. Reassured, he threw himself on the Christian, septuagenarian virgin; then, having taking out a thin, red, bulbous member resembling that of a Pompeian satyr, he introduced himself, gasping. Once in, he worked the nun furiously, who at each of his thrusts, let out the sharp squeak of a mouse in heat, all while the crown of paper roses, fallen into her nose, was jolted about in cadence with the castanet noise of her rosary. The little fellow was certainly not an inveterate necrophiliac, at most he was maybe among those who figure it's never too late to start. In truth, I think it was more a case of opportunity making the thief, and he would have just as well appeased his brusque needs on a goat. Stamping, jumping, and crying out as if someone had cut off his ears, the little fellow achieved his goal in time to the nun's squeaks and the rolling drum of all the celestial thunder, after which, he readjusted himself with a sheepish look, rearranged the crown of artificial roses, and readjusted the habit of the Lord's spouse before leaving furtively.

I waited a bit longer, and once the storm had moved off, I left in my own turn. The scene had entertained me with its rustic fable flavour, which I saw as a pleasant allegory of the Christian world besieged by paganism. As far as sacrilege, I haven't believed in that for a long time.

Sex is spoken of in all its forms except one. Necrophilia isn't tolerated by governments nor approved by questioning youth. Necrophiliac love: the only sort that is pure. Because even
amor intellectualis
— that great white rose — waits to be paid in return. No counterpart for the necrophiliac in love, the gift that he gives of himself awakens no enthusiasm.

From time to time — most often after my nocturnal outings — the local press mobilizes an opinion. They go so far as to come up with ridiculous hypotheses, evoking former medical students searching in the Clamart Cemetery for specimens to dissect or Victorian-era
resurrectionists
. A particularly spirited hack didn't hesitate to suppurate cannibalistic orgies, something like the amusements of
l'ogre Minski
.

Whatever. It's not sufficient to be as timid as I am; I must also be prudent. I often have the impression that I'm being observed, watched. Especially by service people: cleaning ladies, concierges, neighbourhood merchants. And cops, of course. Especially the cops.

Herodotus teaches us that women of quality “after their death are not delivered directly to the embalmers, no more than very beautiful or well-renowned women. They aren't given up until after three or four days. This is done in order to avoid the embalmers taking advantage of these women.”

Scattered in the human chronicle, the most ancient of commentaries on this inoffensive passion that no one calls perversity. But “three or four days” is so naive . . . !

Yesterday, one of my clients, a young and charming pianist, tried to seduce me. We were having tea, seated on the little Empire sofa in the library, a piece of furniture that's not very big. I gathered together in mine the two beautiful wandering hands and I gave them back to their owner smiling, as if refusing a pair of birds.

“Oh . . . Lucien. So you're not into boys? I thought that . . .”

“But of course I like boys. And even girls too.”

Not able really to say to him, “I would love your eyes sunken in, your lips silenced, your sex frozen, if only you were dead; unfortunately, you have the bad taste to be alive,” I hypocritically added, “But I am not single, and I wouldn't want to give occasion for any complications.” Too bad.

He believed with much kindness.

Hardly a day goes by that I am not reminded of Suzanne, her breasts with their large, beige aureoles, her sunken-in belly suspended like a tent between the two points of her hips, her sex of which the mere memory is sufficient to stir my own. Today, the ivory of her bones, with what marine life has it integrated?

The visit from the unmarried woman from Ivry wore me out completely and I only want to sleep alone.

I discovered her tomb by chance as I was going for a stroll in the cemetery to unwind: a completely fresh grave, not even given a name yet. Curious, I asked myself what it might contain and promised to return at night. Now, the grave contained a pine coffin of inferior quality — exactly the type that is the most convenient — in which reclined a woman whom I brought home without trouble. In all my loves there is an ineffable moment, the one in which, for the first time, I discover the face of a companion whose destiny I am granted, when I lean avidly over the traits that soon will become familiar to me.

She must have been between forty and forty-five, but it's true that death restores youthfulness. It was a common woman, probably a seamstress, for her left index finger was hardened and picked all over with a thousand needle pricks. I noticed also that the skin on her hands was too big for the bones: thick as if waterlogged, it was encircled by a host of heavy folds. This woman was brown as a Gitane: her eyelids, the points of her breasts, her sex had this deep, somewhat violet swarthiness that is found in the velvet of certain mushrooms or in hydrangeas touched by frost. Opulent tufts of hair with the lustre of astrakhan fur dressed her armpits, her pubis. And above all, she had an extraordinary moustache: two black commas, thin and supple, framed her mouth, descending to the bottom of her cheeks, cruel as those of Genghis Khan. An original person, no doubt. I couldn't help but notice, for that matter, that this wasn't the least of her originalities. She was a virgin, or so I discovered, in the very second that she ceased to be. Was she afraid of men or did she hate them? Had she preferred women? With this mustache like the lash of a whip . . . With that extraordinarily virile part of her femininity: a hard, strong almond overhanging her nymph's fold . . .