The Necrophiliac (6 page)

I am tempted to believe that Hecate has cast a benevolent regard over me. Death is kind to me, the tireless purveyor of my pleasures — and if they are sometimes incomplete, it's only due to my own debility.

A long time ago, I might have thought of the happiness that the simultaneous presence of two bodies would bring me, and I might have imagined in my mind's eye a sort of tableau vivant (or more like a still life). Something, in any case, that I never really counted on, a forgotten dream, returned to the night where dreams dissolve.

I was very stupid to not believe in miracles.

Tonight, I want to record every detail of the adventure so that I can remember them all, for everything is happening so quickly and in such an unexpected way that I feel like my memory is threatened. It's true that I always feel, in some way, as if a part of myself, if not my whole being, is under some obscure threat. Or under the threat of a threat.

I went to Sorrento and, on the way back, I stopped for a glass of wine at Vico Equense, in a hotel where they know me. Built into the edge of a cliff, the hotel dominates a little cove closed off by rocks, which is accessed by an elevator, the interior of which is always dripping. As it was the middle of the week, with the season already over even if the sea was still warm, the hotel and its beach were empty. A deserted feeling weighed on the terraces, the bar, the dining room. It was like a veil, a detention, a constraint. In the hall, I bumped into the patron and remarked that he really looked out of it. The staff whispered to each other. When Giovanni, the one who serves me the most often, brought my wine, I asked him why everyone seemed so troubled. He looked around carefully to the left and right before confiding in me in a half-whisper:

“It's because of the two Swedes, the brother and sister, two young clients who were fished out of the water this morning. Those two who swam like fish! One of them must have had some trouble and the other wanted to help. Yep . . . drowned, it really gets you . . . as if they did it on purpose to not die alone. . . . But what a blow for the hotel!”

He also taught me that the two swimmers had been fished out right after the accident, though there had been no success in reviving them, and that the first steps had been taken in Naples to have the Swedish Consulate warn the parents — they were surely going to arrive by plane, concluded Giovanni — and that the two drowned bodies might even be transported to their own country to be buried. Until then, the bodies had been left in the little grotto on the beach since no one came there in the off-season and the beach huts had already been taken down. It seemed that all my blood went straight to my heart. I put a mask of indifference over my face and pretended to interest myself with other things. Is it possible? I repeated to myself. How? I had to come up with a seamless plan. In less than an hour, it was developed. I left the hotel and took the drivable road that leads to the Faito summit to wait for night. I couldn't truly hide from myself that the mission was full of danger. My entire project could degenerate into a horrible catastrophe at an unexpected interruption: the sudden barking of a dog, an encounter with octopus fishers who sought their booty almost every night with enormous lamps. . . . But I was determined. It was simply a question of acting calmly and quickly. Nervous, edgy, extremely emotive in daily life, I have a tremendous reserve of calmness and aptness as soon as it's a question of carrying off a dead body. I become another person. I'm suddenly a stranger to myself, all the while being more myself than ever. I stop being vulnerable. I stop being unhappy. I reach a sort of quintessence of myself; I fill the task that fate has destined for me.

Around six o'clock, the rain started falling with enough force to send away the threat of the fishers with their
lampare
. I experienced a happy urgency. Two hours later, I took the road to Seiano, where the landing is more convenient than the one at Vico. I left the car in the bus garage, a murky, rusted hanger with an oil-spotted floor, which is never closed because its door no longer closes.

Today there are only a few rickety houses, just two or three hundred years old, there where once stood the villa of Seianus. All the lights were out except the lamppost at the edge of the pier that blinks each night with a false glow. There was the sound of crackling rain and the sea's undertow between the rocks. I headed toward a boat I had spotted that afternoon, a nasty old plank-board shell that I detached without noise. I rowed to the hotel beach. There, too, the lights were out. Unable to land on the pebbly shore, I took off my pants, attached the boat to a rocky protrusion, and, entering the water up to my thighs, I advanced toward the grotto. The night, the whispering rain, the voice of the sea, and above all the thought of what I was going to discover intoxicated me. I lifted up the cover that concealed the two bodies and carried them one at a time into the boat. Then I went back to Seiano, rowing as quickly as I could. I didn't yet have the time to appreciate the sight of my dead ones, but they seemed as light as children. Once again, everything went without a hitch, even though I had to execute each manoeuvre twice. I carried the Swedes into the car, where I had some difficulty getting them in. They were already stiff, but I managed to arrange them diagonally on the backseat, the one against the other, hidden with a cover.

I don't deny that going up in the elevator to my apartment was one of the most critical moments of the whole undertaking. I had the same problem, for that matter, in Paris, and I'd often thought of renting or buying a ground level apartment more favourable to my love affairs.

When I had laid out the Swedish adolescents on my bed, I didn't regret my trouble. They must have been sixteen or seventeen years old and I have never seen anything as beautiful as those two. They resembled each other in an indescribable way and had no doubt been twins. Death had changed the quality of their tans, which the salt had frosted into a gold of a strange, subtle pallor comparable to that given off by a candle flame. Each of them had a long asexual body — the virility of the boy hardly stood out; the breasts of the girl were practically nonexistent, though infinitely desirable, and evoked I don't know which angelic nature to my eyes. The languor of their silvery-blond hair, the absence of eyebrows above their severely bulging eyelids, their protruding cheekbones — like those of fleshless skulls — and the evanescent colour of their thin, mauve lips, expressed in them a most mortal predestination. Strangers to the world of the living, they had been made to die and, right from the start, Death had passionately marked them.

Now that they are in my presence, I hardly dare approach their beauty.

Outside, the tempest has let up and shakes the trees of Posillipo. Enormous clouds roll across the sky. Hecate's dogs roar past.

I'm acting as I did for Suzanne, sending away the staff, forbidding any disturbance, turning off the heat, establishing cold drafts. Certainly, I am far from feeling for my beautiful angels the tender fraternity, the love that united me to Suzanne, but their splendour moves me and I want to keep them a long time.

I put them to bed in the arms of one another, interlacing them tenderly, placing the lips of the brother against those of the sister, putting the sleeping sex of the one between the delicate nymphs of the other, at the entrance to that crack with a pallor and tightness that reminded me of the one belonging to the little octopus girl, the one who vomited black juice. I wanted their bodies, which so often in life had to call to each other in secret, to be united finally in death. For I know that these two loved each other as the sky loves the earth. And the one wanted to save the other and the other took the one along. Brought along by love, into the depths, into the salt and the seaweed, into the foam and the sands, into the icy sea currents that are stirred up by the stare of the moon and become as agitated as semen. It wasn't with me that they celebrated their sublime honeymoon, but at the precise instant when the one clung on to the other, the two had exhaled their life at the same time in a shared rapture, united in the water as they were once united in the maternal liquid, in the mother sea as in their own mother, discovering themselves again in their end as they had been confused at their beginning. They had reached their cosmic truth, foreign to the lying world of the living. I contemplated them a long time, recognizing in the spectacle a sort of grace. Not for a moment did I dream of interfering with them, troubling their union with the impure contact of my living flesh.

My chaste resolutions abandoned me yesterday evening for a moment, I confess. I was seated near them on the bed, and just for fun, I nibbled the neck of the boy — or was it the girl? — at the precise spot where it comes from the base of the skull, the round container of which I could feel on my upper lip. My mouth started a delicious journey on its own, lightly mounting and descending along the vertebrae as if exploring a varied landscape in which the slightest protrusions integrate themselves into the vastest undulations of plains and mountains. I went from dorsal desert to that lumbar valley, full of feeling and tenderness — a place that always infinitely moves me — before progressing into the little arid plateau that lies in front of the ravine of delights. My hands followed the journey of my tongue, forming a nonchalant rearguard. During this whole tour, my sex was inert; this was nothing for me but a chaste caress. But when my fingers reached that valley dug out behind the waist and my nails brushed against that precise vertebra that was secretly robust for having, through osmosis, absorbed the aggression of belts, the desire washed over me with such violence that I was completely lost. Beside myself, I passed my head quickly under a thigh — was it the girl's or the boy's? — and stuck my mouth to the angelic point where their sexes touched. Their sexes: two infant mollusks, quite soft, flaccid, and covered with that pinkish hue that appears on the skin of the dead when the flesh is going to start changing. My excitation had put me into a sort of delirium, and I'd hardly started passionately licking the point of encounter where these beautiful dead creatures united my desire, when I thought I would die myself and inundated myself, moaning. And unexpectedly, for that matter, for it had been months since I'd managed any sort of ecstasy.

My angels radiate a rainbow. How beautiful they are. Their union:
Trionfo délia Morte . . .

From time to time, I correct their position, for my beautiful dead ones with the white nails are deteriorating. They opened their sad shadowy mouths; their necks are folded like stems touched by frost. Their violet and green skin . . . Their members are getting lopsided.

It has been a long time since I forgot the dry odour of the bombyx, and now it's that smell of decay that invades the air. A flask of that black juice that the octopus child vomited spreads over the bellies of the angels, a putrid ink that goes through the mattress, drips on the floor, a pestilential sap that intoxicates me like that of the mandrake. This liquor came slowly from them, though it's water from a very ancient source; it chortles with an embarrassed voice from the edges of their intestines, leaps up, and pours out. Their eyes fall back into the inside of their skulls, as those of the delicious old Marie-Jeanne once did. In them, I think I have found all my dead ones again, even if none of them that I loved ever got to such an advanced state. Not even little Henri.

That's already the third time that someone has rung my bell and knocked furiously at my door. Bad sign. The concierge calls me: “Don Luciano! Don Luciano!” I hear whispers, discussions, muffled exclamations, footsteps.

I don't want to go out. I haven't eaten anything since yesterday, but that doesn't matter. I have some whisky left and tap water, awfully chlorinated, true. Sometimes I have the impression that my angels get up and walk around the apartment, making sure that I don't notice them.

Someone just slipped something under my door. I distinctly perceived the miniscule rustling. Under the door to my room, I can already make out a pale, flat spot on the somber marble of the vestibule; it threatens me, though it's only half visible on the threshold, an arrow that links my universe back to that of the living.

I advance slowly, bend over, and pull, hoping to see it dissolve in a cloud of steam like a bad fantasy. No. A message. I won't read it in the room, temple of the Dead, nor in the salon, but in the work area, the bathroom, or the kitchen. Yes, the kitchen. In opening the letter, I already know what it contains. “Convocation de la Questure” — that's what they call the judiciary police here — “for an affair concerning you . . .” That could easily pass for an international jargon of low Esperanto. “For an affair concerning you . . .”

I place the paper on the kitchen table, slowly, very slowly, and the very moment the yellowish form — covered with official stamps and fingerprints — touches the plastic surface, I know that, truly, there is only one, sole affair that still concerns me.

An affair concerns me . . .

I look at my watch. In a few hours it will be November.

November, which always brings me something unexpected, though it has always been prepared. . . .