Travesty (7 page)

How long we were held together in that wordless state of sexual torpor
I do not know. Only the movements of our hands, fingers, suggested that even we two
nude luxuriating figures lay under the spell of time. But then Monique herself
effected the transition to what would lead, or so I quite wrongly thought, to our
embrace. She turned her head and looked at me. One moment I was merely the
comfortable
voyeur
who in actuality sees very little, the next I was
looking directly into the small, handsome face of my Monique and growing suddenly
expansive at the sight of the tears on the cheeks, the wet nose, the familiar, hard,
dark scrutiny which I seemed to detect in the filmy eyes. Yes, I felt that now I was
performing, so to speak, not merely for myself but for Monique’s own
attentive contemplation. She was watching me, she was waiting, I thought that in a
moment she would creep to my arms.

But how wrong I was. Because even now and betraying not the slightest
sign of her intention, Monique was already preparing herself to become like nothing
so much as a cat in a sack. She smiled, I felt forgiven. In a spasm of her former
childish energy she was on all fours, I rose on an expectant elbow. She leapt to her
feet on the floor and struck and held a suggestive pose, I responded with more
explicit and vigorous manipulation. She stripped off the little black threatening
belt, in eager anticipation I sat up and held out one
beckoning
arm to her. She raised the belt above her head (rather than tossing it away as I
thought she would), and even then I merely exposed myself still further to what I
thought was going to be some new form of erotic stimulation. Would you believe
it?

Even when I beheld and felt the first lash across my thighs, I thought
she meant only to whip me lightly to ejaculation, a process, which, at that moment,
I imagined as a fulsome and brilliant novelty. But when I received the second lash,
this time across the eyes so that instinctively I covered my face with both my arms,
and then received full in the lap the pain of the little metal grips affixed to the
tips of those four silken straps, of course I realized that she meant quite the
opposite.

Yes, with terrible precision and on an ascending scale of strength and
tempo, my little mistress thrashed me on face and lap, chest and lap, until I
thought the very possibility of sexual discharge was no longer mine. I groaned, I
tasted blood, I cowered. My great bird was dead. And yet throughout the ordeal,
while attempting hopelessly to protect myself, still I was somehow admiringly aware
of the legs apart, the dark flashing eyes, the vindictive, animated dance of that
small, nude girl, the black straps that flew from her fist like the snakes from the
head of some tiny and gloriously tormented Medusa. She flayed me. She did so with
joy. And even that was not the end of it.

Because when at last she stopped, not from fatigue but from an
unbearable excess of exhilaration, she flung the now useless garter belt into the
very lap she had but
a moment before so fiercely beaten. It was a
gesture of superb contempt. But as if that gesture of contempt were not enough, for
an instant she looked around the room helplessly, trapped in the passion of her
distraction and clear purpose, and then in wickedness and exasperation flung herself
down beside me among the bolsters and with the furious fingers of both hands brought
herself to an orgasm that would have satisfied even a cat in a sack. At least it
satisfied Monique. In my defeat and discomfort I too felt a certain relief, a
certain happiness for Monique, and if in the midst of helplessness and pain I had
nonetheless been able to photograph her benign expression, surely I would have set
up the tripod, triggered the blinding light. As it was I merely gave myself to the
sound of the rain and finally, on all fours, made my way to my clothes.

Well, it was an instructive night, as you can see. An hour, two hours,
and as from nothing a new bond of accord was suddenly drawn between Monique and
myself. I learned that I too had a sadistic capacity and that the commiseration of
Honorine was even vaster and sweeter than I had thought. But what is still most
important about that particular and now long-lost night is that it reveals that I
too have suffered and that I am not always in total mastery of the life I create, as
I have been accused of being. Furthermore it illustrates that I am indeed a
specialist on the subject of dead passion. At any rate, and for better or worse, I
abandoned Monique when you entered our household. Somehow your
presence made Monique’s unnecessary. But of course there are moments,
such as this one, when she still dances inside my head with a vividness quite
comparable to that of the life enclosed within our own small world which is
moving—need I say it?—with the speed and elasticity of the panther in
full chase.

I am always moving. I am forever transporting myself somewhere else.
I am never exactly where I am. Tonight, for instance, we are traveling one road but
also many, as if we cannot take a single step without discovering five of our own
footprints already ahead of us. According to Honorine this is my other greatest
failing or most dangerous quality, this propensity of mine toward total coherence,
which leads me to see in one face the configurations of yet another, or to enter
rose-scented rooms three at a time, or to live so closely to the edge of likenesses
as to be eating the fruit, so to speak, while growing it. In this sense there is
nowhere I have not been, nothing I have not already done, no person I have not known
before. But then of course we have the corollary, so that everything known to me
remains unknown, so that my own footfalls sound like those of a stranger, while the
corridor to the lavatory off my bedroom suddenly becomes the labyrinthine way to a
dungeon. For me the familiar and unfamiliar lie everywhere together, like two
enormous faces back to
back. I am always seeing the man in the
child, the child in the grown man. Winter is my time of flowers, I am a resigned but
spirited voyager. Of course the whole thing is only a kind of psychic slippage, an
interesting trick of
déjà vu
, although Honorine insists that
it is a form of mystical insight. She is inclined to idealize me in her own
reasonable and admirable fashion. But then I must add that at certain times she has
found my mental disappearances, as she calls them, not merely disconcerting but
fearful. And yet I have never given Honorine literal cause for anxiety, I can
promise you that. She will be the last to propose any ready answers when she learns
what has become of us tonight.

But no doubt I have been meaning to say that every more or less
privileged person contains within himself the seed of the poet, so that the wife of
each such individual wants nothing more than to be a poet’s mistress. In this
respect Honorine has been especially fortunate.

Do not be alarmed,
cher ami
. The matter at hand is not
necessarily so very important. But we might as well spare ourselves whenever we can.
The problem is that there is exactly time enough for me to forewarn you that in a
few seconds we will be passing directly through the center of the only village that
lies between the beginning of our trip tonight and its conclusion,
and that mars an otherwise quite empty road. The little place is known for its
ruined abbey, or perhaps it is a ruined mill. But believe me, please. This route was
the most fortuitous I could select. I wished only for an unimpeded journey. However,
the sore spot of this little village was unavoidable. At any rate, you deserve to
know the worst and the best, and should be as clear as I am about our situation and
hence be in a position to prepare yourself moment by moment to achieve understanding
and avoid merely shocking or destructive surprises. So let me warn you that tonight
we will encounter only three genuine points of danger, though unhappily the rain has
become a kind of general hazard, albeit one out of your hands and of little interest
to me. But back to the three genuine points of danger. The final turnoff to the
abandoned farm, the Roman aqueduct, and the village we are rapidly approaching
—each of these will present us with grave danger, which I will not attempt to
conceal, as I have said. However, I am confident about the aqueduct while our
journey itself is preparation for the final turnoff which, hopefully, by that time
you will encounter as something quite beyond danger. So we may discount the final
turnoff. I may even go so far right now as to guarantee you its serenity.

But to be perfectly honest, the village is something else again. It is
careening toward us this very moment, only a few words or a few breaths away. Of
course the little street through that village is short, hardly more
than several lengths of the car or one of those sylvan paths that take you from
the intersection of two dusty roads to the turnstile at the edge of the field. So it
is a short village street but obstinate, and unlighted, and extremely narrow, and
bordered for its entire length by a high, sinuous stone wall overtopped by the now
wet tile roofs of the village houses and the limbs of an occasional dead tree.
Throughout our passage through the wretched place the side of the car will be within
touching distance of the heavy stone. If you insist on looking, you will see an
infinite rapid shuffling of rock and wood; iron door handles and high broken
shutters will fly in your face; our way shall consist of impossible angles, a near
collision with the fountain in the central square, a terrible encounter with a low
arch. We shall have become a locomotive in a maze, and the noise will be the worst
of all. Our lights will be like searchlights swiveling in unimaginable confinement,
and a forlorn, artificial rose and the granite foot of one of their crucified
Christs and a sudden low chimney will all approach us like a handful of thrown
stones. But the noise will be the worst. It will be as if we ourselves were a rocket
firing in the caves and catacombs of history. Let us hope that the cats of the
village are not as prevalent as the rabbits of our rural highway. Let us hope that
we are not deflected by a shard of tile or little rusted iron key or the slick,
white femur of some recently slaughtered animal. Otherwise we shall brush the stone
walls, swerve, bring down the entire village to a pile of
rubble
which we shall no doubt drag after us a hundred meters or more.

There is nothing to be done about the sound. But you may well wish to
close your eyes, or simply lean forward and bury your face in your hands. The entire
deafening passage will last an eternity but also no time at all. Why see it? Why not
leave the seeing as well as the driving to me? And you might amuse yourself by
considering what the peasants will think when we shake their street and start them
shuddering in their poor beds: that we are only an immoral man and his laughing
mistress roaring through the rainy night on some devilish and frivolous escapade. Or
consider what we shall leave in our wake: only an ominous trembling and a half dozen
falling tiles.

But do you see it? . . .Just there? . . .That huddled darkness
of habitation? . . .The stones in the rain? . . .Here it is. . . . Hold on
. . .

Come, come,
cher ami
. It is behind us. But now you know how
trustworthy I really am.

Do you realize that among all the admiring readers of your slender
and now somewhat rare volumes there are those who, if given even the briefest
glimpse into your life and mine, would consider me a silly
coward
and you a worthless soul? If the invisible camera existed, and if it recorded this
adventure of ours from beginning to end, and if the reel of film were salvaged and
then late one night its images projected onto a tattered white screen in some movie
house smelling of disinfectant and damp clothing and containing almost no audience
at all, it is then that your malignant admirers would stand in those cold aisles and
dismiss me as a silly coward and condemn you as a worthless soul. As if any coward
could be silly, or any soul worthless. But then it is what you at least deserve,
since you have spent your life sitting among small audiences in your black trousers
and open white shirt and with your cigarette in your mouth and your elbows on your
knees and your hands clasped—like a man on a toilet—telling those
eager or hostile women that the poet is always a betrayer, a murderer, and that the
writing of poetry is like a descent into death. But that was talk, mere talk. Now,
if given the chance, you would speak from experience.

As for me, I have said it already and will not hesitate to say it
again: I am an avowed coward. I am partial to cowards. If I am unable to detect in a
stranger some hint of his weakness, some faint gesture of recognition passed back
and forth between us furtively and beneath the table, or at least the briefest
glimpse of his particular white flag raised in the empty field that is himself, then
I am filled with hopelessness, with a sadness as close to despair as rain to hail.
But who is not?
Who in the very depths of the dry well of his
“worthless” soul does not loathe the stage setting that holds him
prisoner? Who does not fear the inexplicable fact of his existence? Who does not
dread the unimaginable condition of not existing? It is easy enough to say that
tomorrow you are going to turn into a rose or a flower. But this optimism of the
believer in the natural world is the cruelest ruse of all, a sentimentality worthy
of children. Of course I am overstating the situation grossly. But if you cannot
find the rift in your self-confidence or admit to the pale, white roots of your
cowardice where it thrives in your own dry well, then you will never ride the
dolphin or behave with the tenderness of the true sensualist.

Only a bumpkin would call your cowardly bad-dreamer
“silly.”

What,
cher ami
, still arguing? Still unable to put aside
self-preservation, the survival instinct, the low-level agitation of the practical
mind, the whole pack of useless trumps of the ego? (In the deck that represents the
ego all the cards are the same and each one of them is a trump. But these are the
liars, the worthless trumps.) But why continue wasting your time and mine by
inventing false arguments which I will only refute? Your arguments are hardly gifts
to the mind. You are not interested in what they mean. It pains me to see
you pulling them out of your sleeve—another argument,
another trump—and in each one to hear you shout what you have been shouting
the whole night: stop talking, stop the car, set me free. That has been your only
refrain, through all I have said. But why can’t you listen? Tonight of all
nights why can’t you give me one moment of genuine response? Without it, as I
have said, our expedition is as wasteful as everything else.