The Necrophiliac Page 3

  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.

  January 7, 19...

  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.

  March 15, 19...

  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 . . . !

  May 10, 19...

  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.

  June 7, 19...

  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?

  July 1, 19...

  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 . . .

  My Ivry virgin had, above all, a confounding particularity. One might say that in death she avenged herself of her long abstinence. Never have I encountered such an unusual sex as hers, living in this death with a tremendous, autonomous, unfathomable life. Sometimes it dilated itself like a fishbowl to the point that I thought I had lost myself in a sort of abyss, other times it seized me subtly, held me, fed off me with a gluttonous lapping. Another disturbing particularity: my sperm disappeared into her without leaving a trace, mysteriously absorbed by this blotter-woman, by this carnivorous plant.

  For several days I let myself give in to the temptations of the turbulent Ivry virgin, even if it wasn’t without fear, as if, faking death, she would suddenly be able to open her eyes and, reanimated by my substance, devour me. What’s more, her agitation grew as the days went on, but, thankfully, the reassuring odour of the bombyx augmented proportionally.

  One evening, my mistress suddenly opened her mouth, just as Suzanne had done before. But not having had an education, the Ivry virgin did it with a lion’s yawn, revealing at the same time an irregular and badly-cared-for set of teeth. Another time, while avoiding her malicious sex, I searched for passage in her backroad; she omitted a series of incongruities that discouraged me. Without attaching an excessive importance to this type of accident, I prefer from now on that it doesn’t repeat itself. But the Ivry virgin had many pleasant sides, and I am far from forgetting the pleasures she gave me.

  Nevertheless, all good things come to an end. Mademoiselle, I thank you for your visit and your company. You are very nice, but all your artifices and your different forms of femininity won’t be able to extract from me that which I no longer possess. Absolutely drained, I ask myself if you aren’t some sort of succubus. . . .

  July 24, 19...

  I am strarting to miss my Ivry virgin, my living-dead woman whose palpitating flesh knew how to surround mine and inhale my substance. Something that isn’t encountered twice in life, nor twice in death . . . Melancholy over not even knowing her name. Magic that escapes from me. Nevermore.

  I didn’t appreciate that woman enough.

  Was I ironic — behaving with the sort of irony that’s nothing more than the bad coat of the shameful poor? Did I forget — to forget is to omit from feeling again, it’s a folly of the soul and the body — did I then forget that I fall in love each time? One day, by chance, I was walking behind two German students and I heard one say to the other, “Denn jedesmal, verliebe ich mich heillos . . .” I could have said the same was true for me. Ich auch, leider, ich auch . . . The truth is that I was cowardly enough to blush to myself over the unusual moustached virgin, over my Kirghiz princess with the retractile, recitative vagina. Of course I loved her . . . Unless certain words shouldn’t be used, for it seems that the necrophiliac, as he’s presented in the twilight of the popular imagination, doesn’t have the right to claim them.

  Otherwise, a nice episode a few days ago. A Petit mort pour rire, around eighteen or twenty years old, alas quite demolished by an accident. But serene, fraternal. A friend I call “Peachskin,” even though he had another name and the peach skin in question, far from be
ing his, was merely a vehicular adjuvant.

  September 2, 19...

  A traumatic, unexpected adventure.

  I was going to spend the day in the Fontainebleau forest because the weather was splendid and I had little desire to remain shut up in the store. I stopped at Barbizon for a few minutes. Passing by the bakery, I noticed an announcement: “Closed due to death.” My black clothes and my stranger’s ways had attracted the attention of an old woman leaning at the window. Without doubt, she thought I had come for the funeral. Actually, she was hardly mistaken; I always come for funerals, for a perpetual mortuary festival, for a wedding funeral. The dead draw me from quite far by unknown labyrinths.

  “You arrived too late,” said the old lady, “he was interred yesterday afternoon. What a beautiful man! How terrible! The wheel of his delivery truck entered him there.”

  She indicated the top of her abdomen. I thanked this woman and went on my way. I had read the name on the front of the bakery. “Pierre,” I repeated to myself. Pierre, a beautiful man . . .

  I remember the afternoon as if through a fog. I had lost the notion of time, measuring my wait not by my watch but by the light. The light . . . My enemy . . . Why had I been named Lucien, me the lucifuge? Separated from my habitual environment, the hours seemed longer than ever. I slept for a while in the car, and realized with surprise upon waking up that it was already two o’clock in the morning. I would be unable to describe the Barbizon cemetery, certainly banal, with its pearly wreaths and its crying angels. I found the freshest tomb without trouble, surmounted with flowers piled up like hay for a mule. I had no trouble moving the earth, nor in opening the coffin, which, nevertheless, seemed abnormally large.

  A beautiful man . . . Heavens! He measured barely less than two metres and was well in proportion. They probably tried to save him at the hospital, for a thick bandage, marked in its centre with a watery stain, squeezed his monumental torso where the dense brown hair curled. Never had I seen a dead man so calm, with his somewhat heavy Roman profile, his sweet white skin like that flour he kneaded over the years into bread for the living. I had immediately understood that it would be impossible to displace Pierre in a single go. Taking infinite pains, I managed, nevertheless, to extract his body halfway from the coffin. I felt ashamed to enjoy him right on the spot, in the hostility of the open world, with the danger of chance, for the clandestine need walls to protect against terrestrial murmurings, curtains to stop the watchfulness of the stars.

  Pierre’s head bumped regularly against the wood of the lateral panel; his torso was implicated in the same turning movement that one sees in certain tortured trees, while his waist was folded abruptly over the edge of the coffin, liberating the base, dislocating the long, strong legs. I noticed that Pierre must have often given up in life that which he gave to me in death. That hardly bothered me, but I was saddened by the incongruousness of the posture, the narrowness of the coffin, the sudden charge of a rat. Before leaving Pierre, I laid him out again for better or worse in his coffin and pulled the shroud back over him. He might have passed for a sort of “Christ in the Tomb” in the arms of a profane Joseph of Arimathea.

  It was all over the day before yesterday. I feel like it aged me twenty years. That was the first time that I didn’t offer one of my funereal friends the comfort of my bed, the calm of my room.

  January 12, 19...

  “Jerome B., fifteen years. Without occupation. Resident, avenue Henri-Martin. Passy Cemetery. Two p.m.”

  To be looked into.

  January 14, 19...

  There were a lot of people at the interment of Jerome, which I attended to be able to find his tomb again more easily. And out of desire, curiosity, sympathy. Nice, crisp weather. All the upper crust of the sixteenth arrondissement, in cashmere raincoats and mink pelisses. I found myself next to an old lady in a violet hat who never stopped chatting. “Two days of a sickness thought to be benign then wham he had just finished such a good trimester at Janson-de-Sailly the awful grief of his parents poor Charles and especially that poor Zouzou oh, yes for you don’t know it maybe but he never called his mother mom but Zouzou those two adored each other in an unimaginable way but are you a part of the family how do you know Jerome?”

  I responded that I was his Latin professor, but the old lady carried on immediately with the thread of her monologue.

  The parents. Him, very thin, very elegant, lost in his grief as in a faraway country. Her, a young woman with blue eyes tumefied by tears, with an opulent cascade of chestnut hair, poorly concealed by the black veil.

  A fat guy, stuffed like a sausage into a fur-lined raincoat approached the tomb and, in an artificially choked voice, read a funeral prayer imitating Bossuet. It was the Latin professor. The real one.

  When night arrived, I parked the car near Pétrarque Square and, once more, all went without a hitch. It seemed I was protected by Hermes, god of thieves and guide of the dead. He inspired a thousand subterfuges in me, steered the objects of my passion right to my bed without encumbrance.

  Jerome. He is as big as me, but so thin that in two hands I can almost imprison his hips. He doesn’t know what to do with his long arms, nor where to place his long legs, more gangling than a colt’s. His chest, his hair, his pointed face have a salty savour, as if they have been bathed in tears, but until I had purified it with my saliva and dried it with my caresses, his sex had the terrible taste of lavender.

  I’m looking at Jerome. I bring him back to life for a moment of the Infernal Empire. His private bath opens onto the trees of the avenue. He is “Pop,” because he wanted it that way and because Zouzou does everything he wants, always a mess with his little flasks that he forgets to cap and his big English soaps all over the place. He even has a useless electric razor, hidden at the bottom of a drawer — no sense in Zouzou noticing it; it would make her laugh. She enters without embarrassment, without even knocking. While he brushes his teeth, he sees her smiling blue eyes in the bathroom mirror. She pinches his butt, ruffles his hair, kisses his neck between the shoulders, there where his vertebrae protrude, then takes off running. He follows her, his mouth full of toothpaste, lashes his towel, which limply slaps the door that she has closed.

  Spread out over her bidet, Jerome soaps himself up with lavender, slowly, so slowly. When he closes his eyes, he sees a woman with chestnut hair framing a blank space in which he can’t manage to place a face. He forces his imagination, searching for this face with the obstinacy of an insect; suddenly he believes he has found it, but he can’t, he can’t.

  January 15, 19...

  Last night, I had moved the armchair in my room so it faced the large Venetian mirror I love so much. I had placed Jerome on my lap; I chewed his neck with its silver sheen, right between the shoulders, there where Zouzou surely kissed him in the daytime. In the mirror’s grey fern patterns, among the foliated frost, I saw Jerome dance like a big marionette controlled by the movements of my desire.

  January 16, 19...

  Jerome. Hieronymus. In his Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch painted two young men who played with flowers. One of them planted fond corollas in his companion’s anus.

  Tonight, I went to look for cypripediums at the florist, and with them I decorated my friend Jerome, whose flesh already complements the subtleties of their orchid-green, brown, and violet sulphurs. Both have the same plump brilliance — as if sticky — both achieve that triumphant state of a substance at its peak — at the extreme accomplishment of itself — that precedes effervescence and purification. Stretched out on his side, Jerome seemed to be sleeping, his sex introduced into the calyx of a cypripedium, whose liquor inundated him, while a cascade of lively flowery odours escaped from the swarthy bruises that marbleised his rose-coloured secret.