Diary of an Innocent

by Tony Duvert

  If this aspect of Duvert s texts truly exists, it presents one of the hardest of his lessons for us to take in. Our initial and defensive reaction will obviously be: Well, I don’t sleep with little boys! But anyone who has the inclination, the mind and the stamina to absorb a larger part of Duvert s oeuvre will eventually be subjected to his careful and detailed inversion of our system of values, obsessively and meticulously worked out according to the most stringent rules of reasoning, with the help of Marxist theory. His worldview certainly is audacious but never lacks rigor. I would go so far as to say that its repercussions are as inescapable as the oppressive systems he is unraveling. They support his claim that our intimate and private lives are just as wicked—indeed, more so, because of their hypocrisy—than the disturbing descriptions in this book.

  This allows the dialectic of the book to justify the narrators plea: he is innocent. According to Duvert’s reasoning, it is an innocence that approaches sainthood (in the sense of Sartres Saint Genet) because the protagonist chooses to suffer (and, in fact, there are even passages in this book in which he chooses to live for several days on bread and water, because he finds this preferable to confronting the social networks of the outside world). By his “sins,” he is critiquing, or even neutralizing, all of ours, which are not only oppressive but entangled in exploitive social functions that have constructed themselves as incontrovertible and reach far beyond us. And though it may be true that the protagonists life-style is helping no one, we—as cowards and upholders of the very order that oppresses and exploits us—are harming many. Into the libidinal, alternative, alienated world which this narrator so categorically invites us, it inevitably becomes our shit that stinks, not his.

  I wanted to talk about birds, but the time for that has passed. In spring there were storks; they were gray and scrawny, like the dead branches of the nests they built on some of the embankments, far away to the south. Later, they stretched pitiful wings, fanned them disjointedly with an ancient sound and slowly soared off.

  In this city it was the time for fasting, and I began writing. Call it winter in this world without seasons; my friends desert me; living weighs more heavily. Sunny days go by without celebration. Then, at twilight, life can begin again. People are already sitting down to eat at the cheap open-air restaurants and getting their bowls of chickpea soup. It’s a loose, spicy puree mixed with lentils and fairly acidic tomatoes, swimming with beans and vermicelli; it tastes good, smells of roasted grain; it’s starchy and hearty and it burns. I don’t feel comfortable in this house. A widow and her daughter are sitting to my left, almost on the ground, on a straw-and-dried-flower mattress. I’m on the edge of an iron box spring, which another straw mattress has converted into a couch; the two women are leaning back against the edge of a similar bed; the older brothers, who are on stools, complete the circle. In the middle is a low table. The mother has placed the soup pot next to her, in one corner. She’s sitting cross-legged with her dress and apron hiked up to her knees, and she has large tits, a flat, square face, smooth white skin, and a narrow mouth and eyes; she’s slurping soup from a small wooden ladle, glancing up at me briefly with a touch of suspicion, mixed with contempt and amiability. I feel like one of those arthritic old dogs that the women pet because it belongs to a crony. I’m having sex with one of her older sons, and maybe she’s aware of it; the forced smiles that form creases and dimples in her chubby face make her hard little eyes seem colder.

  For my admiration, she’s offering the two little boys in the family, sitting on some rag cushions below a bare wall. They have on worn, but still spotless and untorn, athletic suits that also serve as pajamas; they aren’t eating, just staring at us silently. I hardly know them. The seven-year-old has a doll’s grin, you’d say he was pretty, he’s the youngest; he has curly hair, a long face with a heavy jaw, eyes like a girl, a touch of wickedness to his cheeks and on his lips; he keeps grabbing me by the shoulders and kissing me, looking for flattery; I push him away.

  I like the other one, who has a round face and short hair, a flat nose that can wrinkle. His eyes are steady, serious, at times a little absent; he acts terse, out of politeness; he doesn’t speak and has touched me only once, to bite my hand while they were taking our picture. He’s nine or ten. Between two gulps of soup, the woman of the house asks me which I prefer. I choose the little surly one. They’re surprised, make a joke of it, insist he’s not good-looking, ask me again and I answer the same. There’s a moment of shock, as well as rancor under the laughter, which I don’t understand. We start again, I’m supposed to redeem myself; visitors have always adored the youngest and been turned off by the other, the mother insists.

  Afterward, it’s made clear to me why my answer induced such a bad reaction. When the father was alive, he preferred the boy I like, and disregarding the other five, considered him the best son. There was nothing advantageous in it for the kid, nor did it appeal to his vanity. Then the father died, his spouse became boss, and the serious little fellow who’d once been the preferred was cast aside, while the youngest son got put in first position, and the eldest, a hardworking numbskull, took the old man’s role. The account is as blatant as a children’s story. The night they question me, I have to incarnate the father himself, back from a long war or trip to put right the injustices of a cruel mother. We’re in the time of kings and fairies, simple, straightforward ordeals; the little boy’s tragedy is as clear as the big typeface in the books kids read on vacation.

  I don’t give in. The mother consoles her little cipher, and I wonder which of the two are looking more angrily at me. It’s the little one who scares me, he’s going to choke: his brows are knit, his skin yellow with bile, his cheeks swollen, his mouth trembling, his nostrils pinched, pulling his nose into an eagles beak, and he’s picking fiercely at little black boogers and forgetting to respond to the flustered fondling of the old woman, who’s beginning to look whiny.

  The boy I’ve chosen is studying me, his face lit up with surprise, as if I’d just kept him from being hit. He stays sitting on the ground with thighs spread, knee to chin; and he’s bare-foot, scratching between his toes with a finger, shifting gently from one buttock to the other and sending me playful little winks mixed with laughter that opens up his face. They let him have his day. Then he falls back into his usual reserve, and his eyes get their faraway look. The men have begun to talk about other things; but now and then, on his own, he still breaks into the surprised smiles of someone having a good dream.

  It would be better to think of a name for certain boys. I’ll take them from a novel by Quevedo; I have hardly any books here, and that will do. I just need to follow the order of the first chapter: I come to Francesco, the author’s first name, then Pablos, Pedro, Diego, Andrès and a few others. For the moment I only need the first two. Lets call Francesco the teenager who brought me to his family and Pablos the little brother I preferred.

  I don’t know if these first names are a good match; some people would think they are, others wouldn’t. But choosing accurate or attractive ones isn’t important; its enough for chance to decide, the way it does in the case of real births, depending on people, languages, matings, here or there, for no particular reason. Besides, Francesco, who’s probably about seventeen, has manufactured a legend about how he came into the world. Around that time his father was serving a three-year prison sentence for concealing weapons, though he didn’t know that he was. His family put up with sneers, suspicion and hunger. So, when the father got out of prison, it was like a resurrection; they feasted all night, sang, cried out of pleasure with reunited friends, women, neighbors, rich parents, it was a celebration; and Francesco was born two days later.

  At first I reacted the way I was expected to; the story had been told well, he’d used his most astute speaking voice, complete with innocent eyes and some very nice expressions. Really, a lovely story, with Dad as God and the nativity of Francesco.

  “But since your father was in prison, how did he make you?�
�

  “What do you mean, make me?”

  Then he understood and blushed a little, his face changed, his voice fell. I felt ashamed. He said, “Uh, I dunno. That’s how they told it to me. I was too little!”

  We’re at the table at my place. He’s picking at some raw vegetables that he’s prepared, tomatoes with salt, green peppers, olives, radishes split crosswise and salted, kind of bland, like the taste of cold water. He holds back, looking shamefaced and vaguely hostile: I’ve deprived him of his family legend, all he’s got left is an orphan’s face.

  The book by Quevedo that I walk around with is The Life of the Adventurer Don Pablos de Segovia, Ideal Tramp and Image of the Swindler. I like this novel a lot, despite the fact that I haven’t read it. The child that I dubbed Pablos isn’t a swindler, nor even a rascal. But he seemed to have a great appetite for living when we talked. A quiet, determined student, he didn’t brag about school; laughing delightedly, he shows me an assignment he scored an A on, in a notebook filled with praise and good grades. He gets up at five in the morning to read his notebooks and books; sunlight trickles silently onto the patio of the house; he studies in a low voice; nothing distracts him. He doesn’t say anything about this work, but in the evening, before nine, he gets dazed, lies down wherever he happens to be, withdraws and falls asleep. He doesn’t get a lot of it.

  He’s unaware of the first time I saw him because he was already asleep, in the most deeply recessed of the beds, which form a tower of flowered bleachers in the room I came back into. They put me next to him. His head is on the other side, which I can’t see because it’s facing down; and right beside me are the bottoms of his smooth, dainty feet, the curled toes forming two pinkish rosary beads. Then they lift him up to put him to bed in another location. He doesn’t wake up. I can see the somewhat coarse sweetness of his handsome, impenetrable face; his four pale, sturdy, naked limbs dangling limply; and in the gape of his briefs, his little boy’s prick, mischievous in a glint of light that tongues it furtively as they carry him off. This plump sex, exposed in its shell of creased fabric, looks like a fleshy face, chortling for no reason, the kind you’d discover by parting the edges of swaddling inside a crib. Pablos’s other face: less innocent than his shameless slumber would make you think, but more naive than I’m hoping when—gripping his dick and balls through his underpants to demonstrate what he’s saying—he calls them my loaf of bread and my grapes.

  This imagery has an origin. On a photo that was just taken, Pablos was wearing an old pair of wrinkled cotton trousers that were too short for him, to go play in the dirt alley where his family lives; the fly and the entire front, tight along his stomach and struck by the slanting sun, were full of weird bulges, knots, worn, raised areas, one of which looked kind of obscene, long and stiff like the member of a faun. We had a good time with it; and when the kid saw the photo, he laughed, too, but explained that it was only because there was some bread in his pocket that day. And the word migrated from this conspicuous crust to the invisible thing it had suggested.

  As for the grapes, on my table I have some chocolate with raisins, Pablos ate some of it and, as he retold the bread joke, found a better way to describe himself: with the word grape on his lips, his eyes and his finger on the gilded bunch decorating the wrapper, his other hand tugging between his legs at his two balls to verify the resemblance.

  Long months passed between the evening of the chickpea soup and that pleasant afternoon of the loaf of bread; then a lot of gloomy days that I don’t see any end to. A little twelve-year-old boy, Pedro, who used to come by a year ago, used a piece of fruit another way. During his first visit, he stays by himself for a while, frozen on his chair, or rather, slumped on it with slack shoulders, the back of his head sunk into his neck and chin high, his eyes sluggish, white and vacant the way they are during a medical exam. I’m talking to his brother in the next room because I haven’t understood if they’re going to have sex together or one by one. This older brother, Diego, who’s sixteen, is small and looks somewhat childlike, but he has a big prick and doesn’t take kindly to little brats. When we come back, I’ve decided to wait until later to go to bed with Pedro; but even so, I’d like to kiss him, touch him before he leaves today. Standing behind his chair, I slip a hand into his clothing, without undoing it, until I’ve reached between his legs, and immediately regret choosing his brother, whom I’ve known.

  Notwithstanding, under Pedros clammy, lightweight “scrotumette” is a large, hard and rather cold ball. Taken aback as if I’d discovered some disgusting infirmity, I palpate it. And then I understand what it is: an apple. The boy had grabbed it and hidden it while he was alone. His older brother, who sometimes flaunts his principles to me, wouldn’t mess around with such stealing. So I keep quiet and search for the child’s eyes in the mirror opposite; they meet mine, he suppresses a smile, then gives into it but avoids my glance. Now he’s blushing; a wave of pride, even a certain preening, floods his face. I keep my hand where it was. Standing next to us, Diego probably thinks his little brother is getting hard, and that I like his dick.

  Apples are expensive in spring, and so are bananas. I keep these fruits for guests, who eat a lot of them and often arrange them into red-and-green cocks and balls, ready to crunch into. Not many boys like boys; but they like being a boy, showing it, being it together.

  One of them mockingly put a bizarre-looking, disgustingly purplish plum on his fly, made of two asymmetrical fruits stuck together unevenly, the first lower than the other, like testicles. He used a vegetable for the penis, a carrot, maybe; there were some odd ones that were smooth and thin, hairless baldies. One of those carrots was forked, making a bifid prick against I forget which belly, and it was like jerking off times two.

  I was living in a run-of-the-mill part of town, two furnished rooms in a small building with a garden, a new neighborhood, where it was easier for foreigners to stay than in the immense old quarter. It was expensive, bright, sterile, modern. The boys liked coming there; they ate, smoked, had cold drinks, hung out on the balcony, took baths, gabbed, slept. To them I seemed easy to be around, the fact that I’m twenty-nine didn’t put them off. So I was happy to let it go on.

  A teenage friend of Francesco criticized me; he’d offered to buy me a beer in an old columned cafe as vaulted and as dirty as an entrance lobby. He said that I was wrong to waste my money on boys, I should have been saving it to buy serious things. I said that I’d rather have sex and be nice to those who said yes. He shrugged, and as if recommending a recipe for tea or some syrup as a laxative, described his remedy: get hold of some weekly magazine with pictures of women; and when I felt like fucking, open it, look at a photo and satisfy myself with my hand.

  “While thinking of a woman, understand?” he insisted heatedly, his voice emphatic, saddened by my obstinacy. Among these boys, jerking off is called Mrs. Five Finger. It’s a more easy-going term than the French slang, la veuve Poignet, or the Widow Fist. Pablos said they did it under desks at school, and mentioned a buddy who was older than him and came in the inkwell; then once this concoction was discovered, he accused Pablos, who was still too young to have any jism, of doing it. It’s a made-up spiel, part of the international routine of Mrs. Five Finger. In another version, the inkwell is filled with piss, and Pablos lets it be believed that it could be his. Ever since Madame Clot’s cooking-pot, the utensil in which Jean-Jacques Rousseau claims he pissed (there aren’t any to be found in Geneva, just as you don’t find any chamber pots that smell of asparagus in Combray, either), baptizing all containers with an orifice that appeals to their willy is the trivial pursuit of little boys.

  Holding up his thumb and forefinger, Pablos shows how he rubs his member. I call it Mrs. Two Finger, and he immediately takes the ball by inventing Mrs. Three Finger, fingers making a hat floating in the wind.

  The boy who gives me advice about polluting magazines is earning a little money as a bird-catcher. In the olive tree gardens surrounding the city, or in the neare
st country woods, he uses birdlime to trap tiny sparrows; the males bring forty francs, and the females, which there are more of, or which are easier to catch, go for only two, because they don’t sing. But in the wicker cages the merchants carry around, they’re all mute, bristly, starving tremblers. This must make it possible to sell the females at a high price by pretending they’re frightened males. The boy swears it isn’t true.

  In this modern neighborhood, I didn’t have many chores to do. Paltry furniture, bare walls and a clean sky. I like breathing the air here; in the evening it spreads the odor of flowers and trees over a large distance. There aren’t many flies. No mosquitoes. The sun is strong, the nights mild, it rarely rains except for brisk, heavy showers. My windows were always open; under the table, there was a worn raffia mat that caught the crumbs from meals; but I’d always find it clean. The birds moved so quickly that I only caught sight of them one time when they thought I was dead. On the balcony their cry was composed of two joyless, gratuitous notes, vibrant, like the whistle signaling that hoodlums are assembling. From the balcony, the birds would dart under the table. I run to close the window, but they’re faster than me, except for one.

  I walk toward it with a vague bullying desire. Animals make me feel like a boy in his prime; as soon as I’m alone with one of them, even a vicious one, I get ideas. It would be touching to catch this bird, hold it in my hand and jerk off with the other hand, to wet its beak. But either I’m not mean or depraved enough, or I’m lazy, with a philosophical mind, and a mania for listening to the preposterous thoughts that pop into my head, like little good-for-nothings do, before they’re capable of reasoning, and some giggly old fogies.