The Necrophiliac Page 2

  January 1, 19...

  I celebrate the New Year in good company, that of a concierge from rue de Vaugirard, dead of an embolism. (I often learn of this sort of detail during the course of a burial.) This little old woman is certainly no beauty, but she is extremely pleasant, light to carry, silent and supple, agreeable despite her eyes that have fallen back into her head like those of a doll. Her dentures have been removed, which causes her cheeks to sink in, but when I strip off her awful nylon blouse, she surprises me with the breasts of a young woman: firm, silky, absolutely intact — her New Year’s gift.

  With her, love is imprinted with a certain calm. She doesn’t inflame my flesh; she refreshes it. Normally so miserly with the time I spend with the dead — time that runs away very quickly — trying to take advantage of each second in their company, I lay next to her last night to sleep a few hours like a husband next to his spouse, an arm slipped under the thin neck, a hand resting on the belly where I had found a certain joy.

  The little concierge’s name is Marie-Jeanne Chaulard, a name that the Goncourt brothers would certainly have appreciated.

  The breasts are truly remarkable. In pushing them together, a tight passage is obtained, plump, infinitely soft.

  I lightly caress the hair — thin, grey, pulled back — the neck and shoulders where a silver slime, like that left by snails, is drying now. . . .

  January 11, 19...

  My tailor — a tailor who maintains the devoted manners of a bygone era and who speaks to me in the third person — finally couldn’t prevent himself from suggesting a less morose wardrobe for me. “For however elegant, black is sad.” And so it’s the colour that suits me, for I am also sad. I am sad that today I must separate from those I love. The tailor smiles at me in the mirror. This man believes he understands my body because he knows how I dress the manhood in my pants and because he discovered with surprise that the muscles of my arms are abnormally developed for a man of my profession. If he knew what purpose these fine muscles could also serve. . . . If he knew what use I have for this manhood, which he once noted in his book that I wear to the left. . . .

  February 2, 19...

  A client this morning had a few nice words for an eighteenth century Portuguese mariners’ chest. “How beautiful it is! You’d think it was a coffin!” What’s more, she bought it.

  May 12, 19...

  I can’t see a pretty woman or a handsome man without immediately wishing he or she were dead. Once, back in the days of my adolescence, I actually wished it with passion and fury. There was a neighbour three or four years older than me, a tall brunette girl with green eyes I saw almost every day. Even though I wanted to, it never would have occurred to me to merely touch her hand. I waited; I wanted her death and that death became for me the pole around which all my thoughts gravitated. Shall I then say that I longed with an earnest and consuming desire for the moment of Morella’s decease? I did. More than once, the mere meeting of that young girl — her name was Gabrielle — threw me into a tremendous excitement that I knew, however, would pass the very instant that I took it upon myself to make the first move. Instead, I spent hours picturing all the dangers and ways of death that could strike down Gabrielle. I loved to represent myself on her deathbed, imagining the exact details of the environment: the flowers, the candles, the funereal odour, the paling lips and the badly shut lids revealing the whites of the eyes. One time, meeting her by chance in the stairs, I noticed that my neighbour had a painful cut at the corner of her mouth. I was young, in love, and romantic, which led me to immediately conclude that she had a secret penchant for suicide. I ran and locked myself in my room, threw myself on the bed, and devoted myself to solitary pleasures. In my mind’s eye, I saw Gabrielle delicately balanced, hanged from a ceiling hook. From time to time, the body, dressed in a white lace slip, turned at the end of the rope, offering a look at every possible angle. The face pleased me greatly, even though it was inclined and half-concealed by the hair, sinking that enormous tongue — which was almost black and filled the open mouth like a spray of vomit — into shadow. The arms — a beautiful dull brown — hung from gently dislocated shoulders; the shoeless feet were pointed inward.

  I renewed this fantasy without modifying anything every time my desire demanded it, and for a long time it brought me intense pleasure. But Gabrielle left town; not seeing her anymore, I ended up forgetting her, and the image that had caused me so much joy was eventually worn out in its own time.

  August 3, 19...

  Henri, dead of scarlet fever at six — though I never catch the slightest sickness — is a brave little man. He has the perfect body for playing with, for enjoying, even though games and pleasures have to take place on the external surfaces. This child is so tight that I have to renounce more profound delights at the risk of hurting both of us. In vain I tried various techniques, some of which I was naive enough to think infallible. But Henri is succulent the way he is. The inside of his thighs, slightly concave, allow for an almost perfect union. As he is, unfortunately, quite advanced already, I don’t know if I will be able to keep this child much longer. Besides, I’m hardly saving him, not hesitating to play with him in warm baths despite the fact that I know, unfortunately, they advance his degradation. His flesh softens from hour to hour; his greening stomach sinks in, rumbling with bad flatulence that bursts into enormous bubbles in the bathwater. Even worse: his face frowns and becomes alien to him; I don’t recognize my little Henri anymore.

  August 7, 19...

  Yesterday evening, I took my leave from Henri whose odour was becoming intolerable. I had prepared a strongly perfumed bath so that I could once more press the deliquescent little body against mine. Henri gave me a surprise, for the dead are full of the unexpected — I think of Marie-Jeanne’s breasts; I think of still others. He finally permitted me to really penetrate his flesh, softened as a melting wax: his way of sweetening our farewell. I dried him in a bath towel; I put back the little blue brushed cotton pajamas he was wearing when he arrived; I smoothed out his brown bangs that the bathwater made to seem almost black. In the car, I had seated him next to me, supporting him with one hand, driving with the other. I drove slowly; I was not in a hurry to arrive. As always in such cases, I had a heavy heart. “No, not yet,” I repeated. I crossed the Seine at Saint-Cloud, but it was only at Maisons-Laffitte that I had the necessary courage. I returned to Paris in a long procession of trucks and tractors, the smell of crushed grass, the blasts from car horns, the gleam of headlights. Suddenly, I saw my face in the rearview mirror inundated with tears.

  November 20, 19...

  I won’t go out tonight. I don’t want to see anyone and I would like to have the store completely closed by the afternoon. Four years ago to the day, I had to take leave of Suzanne.

  At that time, I wasn’t yet keeping a journal, but, now, I want to write to relive the story of my meeting with Suzanne.

  It all started in a dramatic, dangerous fashion, and right from the start we were threatened together, the one by the other, the one for the other. It was an autumn evening, very warm, a bit foggy, the sidewalks glistening with wet leaves. November always brings me something unexpected even if it has always been prepared. I went to look for Suzanne in the Montparnasse Cemetery. Waiting. Anticipated happiness, like every time. I only knew her name, that she was thirty-six, that she was married, without a career. Very strange to know her. Everything went normally and I had no trouble hoisting her over the wall; she was little and thin. I guessed I had no more than a dozen steps along boulevard Edgar-Quinet before I reached rue Huyghens, where I had left my car, but the fog had probably misled me, for I very quickly found myself out of the cemetery and well short of the place I had envisioned. I hurried as best I could, glad that Suzanne was so light, when I suddenly thought my heart was going to stop. Two cops on patrol were coming to meet me. They weren’t hurrying, but they blocked the only possible retreat; already I could distinctly hear the atr
ocious squeal of tires. Holding Suzanne firmly in my arms, I threw her against the cemetery wall. Happily, she wasn’t dressed in one of those horrible funeral gowns but wore an ordinary jersey suit and street shoes. Out of the terrifying squeal of tires, a headlight beam touched our legs: those belonging to a kissing couple. Behind me, the hostile world, cops, stupidity, hatred. In front of me, this unknown woman, her face tilted in the shadow of my own, this woman who was called Suzanne and for the love of whom I was risking my own destruction. I thought the moment would never end, until a voice already en route towards Raspail barked, “Oh shit, nice lovers’ spot . . .”

  It took me I don’t know how many centuries to overcome the paralysis into which the terror rooted me — immobilized as in a nightmare — and start walking again to my car. Even though I wasn’t stupid enough to measure the value of things by the difficulties involved in conquering them, I already knew that this trial was the counterpart of unspeakable bliss.

  Suzanne . . . A petty bourgeois with finely coiffed blond hair, a polka-dot blouse under a classic suit. Her wedding ring had been removed. At this hour, her husband wore it, broken down with grief — or maybe not — between the green plants, the sideboard, and the television set, somewhere in the apartment on the rue de Sèvres.

  Rue de Sèvres . . . The Sèvres bridge . . .

  She wasn’t pretty, probably never even was, just nice with her turned-up nose, her eyebrows raised in great surprise. Now death must have surprised her, maybe between the items purchased from the supermarket and the apple tart confection, mowed down in one swift blow, by a heart attack or something like that. There was no sign of a fight or even an appeasement, nothing. Nothing of the surprise of being dead. Suzanne had soft skin, almond-shaped nails. In lifting her blouse, I noticed the carefully shaved armpits. She was wearing underwear made of a crêpe de Chine of a quality far superior to that of her suit, from which I concluded a dignity, a genuine feminine modesty. Her body showed that she had always respected it with a sort of asceticism, but a likeable, civilized, lenient asceticism.

  Suzanne . . . The Lily . . . There is purity each time that a new threshold is crossed. She had crossed that of death.

  I sensed from the first moment what Suzanne would be for me. Also, even if very chilly, I lost no time in turning off the heat, establishing those sly drafts that refrigerate the rooms in a moment and last for hours. I prepared some ice. I kept Suzanne away from everything that could harm her. Except me, alas!

  I returned to her, impatient as a young spouse. Her delicious odour of bombyx was just as it should be. I carried Suzanne to my bed. With a trembling hand, I removed her bra, her little panties. The wait took away my trembling; the tension of my desire didn’t permit me to prolong the moment of possession any further. I threw myself on that charming dead girl, and without even removing her garters or her stockings, I took her with a fury and violence that I don’t believe I had ever experienced.

  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.

  December 1, 19...

  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.

  December 30, 19...

 
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.