Diary of an Innocent

by Tony Duvert

  But let’s not call what I have thoughts. The acts they inspire fill them out, deceive me about them. The words make them evasive.

  My captive took refuge under the little bed that serves as a couch. I lie down on it suddenly, and the bird flutters away along the tiled floor, rises and, like a bumblebee, crashes against the mirror several times. The collisions are brutal, really loud. Later it’s clinging to a curtain. I hope I can touch it, but it takes off. Yet it seemed to have come to a halt, hovering in front of my head to get a look at me. Its eye is cold, intense, black: the eye of a lizard or iguana. Because its ancestors were reptiles; its gray feathers, scales; and its wings, pudgy paws.

  It lets out a harsh, full cry. It perches on the sideboard; creeps under the bed; comes back at top speed to crash against the mirror. When it falls, it remains a little out of it, hides under something, comes out in tiny hops, takes off, gets knocked out, goes to hide or comes immediately back to the attack. For a moment I think it’s idiotic for laying siege to the mirror as if the sky were behind it; but if it flies into the window where the sky really is, it won’t get to it that way, either; its only mistake is making the wrong mistake. They call you a heretic for less, but this is just a bird.

  It flies some more, shrieks in my face, slams against the mirror again, doesn’t shit. I open the window; the sky comes in, and the bird flies off into it. In a sparrows head, this is the proof that you can pass through mirrors. Afterward, other birds came to peck away at the crumbs. I shut myself up in the room in order to leave them in peace.

  The bird-catcher rarely came to my place. He liked to drink beer, wine, but hid it because of his age, though he was tall.

  One time he came over drunk, plopped himself down with a grin, then looked trounced, nodded his head, was silent for a long time; his eyes dulled, then they closed, were wide open, flashed with anger to deny the fact that he’d drunk. I liked it. I opened a bottle; he watched me, grimaced, fell back into his mindless state. Then he decided to go vomit.

  He couldn’t hold it back all the way to the toilet and projectile-vomited an enormous, winey spurt onto the white wall. He’d eaten some bright-colored raw vegetables; I really liked the way he’d chewed, because the vegetables were delicate, graceful filigrees, like those paper chains little children cut out. I put the boy in an armchair by the window. He takes a breath, lets out his stomach, sees the setting sun and the trees, hears the games being played in the avenue lined with orange trees. He started to feel better, got control of his expressions again, joked, excused himself, cleaned up. The filigree strands were building up in the bidet, we forced them down. He stayed for dinner and to sleep, something that usually never happened.

  He has a pleasant face, intense eyes, a big noiseless laugh, a long, muscular, satin-smooth body, very tempting. But we don’t have sex together. Despite the fact that he goes with an old guy from time to time, with me he’s embarrassed to; he sees us as too alike, feels like I can see through him.

  He chuckles as he’s getting undressed. When we brush against each other under the sheet (we had to cover up and turn the light out), he stifles his hiccups in the pillow, against his shoulder. And that laugh of a little girl upset about being tickled, a fem little guy with awkward curves and a hollow voice, shows that he’s dying of embarrassment. Kiss me? He gently takes hold of my neck but bursts out laughing when he touches my mouth. Get fucked? He feels me up, tries it out, claims it’s too big. I grab his prick, which is as hard and straight as a chair leg, long enough to put two hands on it, if not more—but its shaking from hilarity as are his stomach and ribs. Nobody knows how to uphold his propriety so affably. We settle down, rest on our laurels, pull apart, sleep.

  Later on, he was forced to work in a garage and had a hard time doing it. He was covered with black grease right to his eyes, he’d grown eight inches, had hollow cheeks and looked worn out, a defeated expression. Out of depression he started drinking, stopped going home with foreigners.

  Soon after school had started again, Pedro, the boy with the apple, stopped coming over, too. I wasn’t seeing any other kids and didn’t know how to find them. Eight to ten gloomy days went by. I’d liked his visits.

  In the afternoon when school got out, I’d often be coming back from the market. I’d take a quiet avenue, which was divided by a median strip planted with very short palm trees. There were a lot of well-dressed passersby, but not many cars. Everybody looked indifferent, respectable, was going for a walk, taking his time.

  I saw a few little kids at the foot of a palm tree, catching a hail of yellow fruits being tossed down by another who’d climbed up to the center of the tree; they were unripe dates that tasted bad, rather sour. They greeted me casually, and I glanced at the kid in the tree. He had nice calves with a summer tan that had already faded on his forearms as a result of his washing up; he was pretty stocky, in mismatched clothing, his pants covered with patches, with the bearing of someone playing hooky from school, a look no longer admired in France except in illustrations engraved a hundred years ago. Finally, the imp’s face is revealed—its Pedro. He was far from outgoing, but today his entire face is convulsed in laughter, and he calls out to me, lets go and slides down the trunk. He grabs his schoolbag, gathers some of the fruits, dumps his friends and comes over to have sex.

  He says he stopped going to my place out of fear of his brother Diego, whose relation with me was strained. I told him there was nothing to worry about.

  Plucking a little boy perched high on a tree, in the lovely late afternoon sun; freedoms of another world. I wasn’t comparing my climber to a bird, we would have despised each other. Because, though people may see birds as lovey-dovey little things, for me they seem tough and flighty. As for children, I don’t know anything about them—except for Pedro, a pigheaded little beast with a tough hide, clutching his tree like a peasant, a stubborn donkey.

  Around two in the morning, I left Francesco and Pablos’s place, then went even further south to hang out under the ramparts. Down there, when the night is deserted, immaculate bellies soar around you in long, white-winged arcs—barn owls, crossing from one wall to the other in the series of courtyards you go past. Farther on, I took some unfamiliar alleyways inside this maze, which led me to my place a mile or so later, after I’d gotten my bearings. The meager lights, a vivid orange dotting the broken line of facades at unequal heights, twinkled like country lanterns. No one. Everything was silent, a pure kind of silence.

  Lost in these images of low houses and stars, I suddenly noticed an airplane—a boy with his arms spread like wings, roaring like a supersonic jet, which spun, twirled, landed and turned into a car; it rumbled as he activated the gear shift, grabbed the steering wheel, and in a booming voice that cracked, revved up the engine, then used his fists as fenders and braked suddenly against another car, to pee on it.

  I went up to him. He was fourteen or fifteen, not hideous given the moron he was, with the strong, simpleminded expressionless mug I was expecting. In this place, idiots often go around freely, as do nutcases who aren’t violent; people put up with them. The morons pee-pee tool was a colossal sausage, a fresh pink. He looks at me looking at it, and when he’s finished pissing, leaves his fat piece hanging to concentrate on better seeing what I’m seeing. I’d like him to fuck me. But we don’t say a word, won’t move. I point to his penis with a gesture of my chin. He doesn’t understand. I do it again. He doesn’t understand. Again. He doesn’t understand. Again, and he thinks he understands and points to it himself. I nod. Yes. He grabs hold of it, looks at me, at it, at me, strokes it, looks at me, pumps it up to an enormous size. Suddenly he stops, knits his brow, puts the wilted thing back in his pants, and as if he were remembering how the world is made, raises the finger of a visionary and gravely indicates the night sky, to show me that God was looking down on his innocent prick.

  Francesco lives with other guileless types. He’d spent three days in a neighboring town, with some friends and some girls. They go down there
regularly to have some fun where things are slower; they drink, dance, have sex, for a few francs they rent the back part of a house from the villagers, who tolerate these adolescent escapades. When he got back, he told me about something he happened to see one morning. On an out-of-the-way street, two kids were glued together standing up against a tree, their shorts around their ankles. Francesco (because he likes boys) was turned on but indignant, and told them, “Hey! Aren’t you embarrassed to do that outside?”

  And the little pipsqueak who was plowing the other answered furiously, “Leave us alone! In the first place, he’s my brother!”

  Francesco respects family; he shut up and walked away. The little couple went back to work right away.

  Because Francesco’s the biggest liar I know, his story, which is almost formulaic, may not be true. True, however, to what I know about some children and their turn-ons, which are as old as the human race.

  In a village in France, I’d tried to rape a dog, and I was no little scalawag anymore, but an adult. I was biking and camping alone. At sunset, I found this picturesque village with sun-dappled stones and houses on a slope. And waiting for me was an empty fenced-off meadow, equipped with some pay toilets. I was feeling sociable. Unfortunately, this was no town like Francesco’s, but a village in our country. There was no one but a stray dog who wanted to speak to me. You take what you get. I would have had to go to the tobacco—convenience store, a cafe-grocery, which you’ll find in every village, just as you will monuments to the dead. And in such establishments you’ll find grannies and grandpas doing business and chatting with the inhabitants. Or maybe go knocking on the church door? I don’t know what to do to meet some fellow creatures.

  The dog, who’d seen me, was as frustrated as I was, and had begun following me. He was an ugly little bastard, timid, as stupid as they come, he’d look at you briefly like an animal that isn’t petted. I lured him into my tent with chocolate. He was distrustful but finally came in. He had quite a meager dick, limp to the touch, poor little thing. He didn’t bite, was a giggler, acted nervous, reluctant to sit down. I took down my briefs, and he sniffed me in front and behind, without much enthusiasm. He didn’t like chocolate very much, either. I tried what else I had, and he chose the bread. Then I let him go. Next I jerked off while imagining that the bastard was pounding me hard. I’d gotten off, vaguely, but couldn’t stay alone in my meadow, so I went walking through the village again. Untouchable children, teenagers with dodgy eyes, old people whose averted faces were spying on you, groups that closed rank as they passed by. Not even a public urinal. Soon, some warmhearted country TV series had emptied the streets. It was curfew. I walked for a long time past these beautiful, lifeless houses; sinking colors, fresh smells, the rustling of trees, the limpid shadows of night had a tenderness that tore right through you. Those are life’s saddest evenings; and it’s not the dog’s fault—nor mine.

  If this memory, or others that are older and less abstinent, filled me with a sense of shame, Francesco’s stories relieved me of it, because so many involved relations with animals. One of his brothers was drinking wine with two buddies; they caught a dog, shut her up in a little room, kept her in there and fucked her; but when it was the third gang-banger’s turn, the others let her out and she fled at skidding and pulling behind her the one who was banging her, his member stuck so that he had to follow her on his hands and knees. Several years after it happened, the practical jokers were still laughing to the point of tears.

  Francesco claims that he caused a poultry holocaust at a tiny religious school—a kind of kennel into which poor parents tossed their children to get God and the alphabet drummed into them. The teacher (or should we say keeper, since he’s paid by tips) was a torturer, which was the rule among these parochial equivalents of the greasy spoon; he spent less time teaching reading than whipping his charges and trying out punishments from which they emerged with bleeding skulls, unless it was their hands, or the soles of their feet. And Francesco got his revenge for this abuse by pummeling the old priest’s farmyard with his dick: chickens, pigeons, ducks and even one goose.

  Now, if he was this victim, he still may not have been this torturer. As I’ve said, bringing up the subject of Francesco certainly involves quoting his lies, which form the essential part of my memory of him. And at five or six, your rod is too thin to choke a goose, and even a simple pigeon. If it happened when his cock was as big as it is today, I’d believe him; given the two or three times in the space of a year that we hooked up and I wanted to get poked by him, I can guess what a small biped without a backside must have been feeling. And some diarrhea that he described as yellow, red and greenish after having buggered a chicken one day has, dare I say, the color of truth to it.

  The best was a steer. The boy was thirteen; he’d been given the animal to lead it to an open-air area where they were going to slaughter it to eat for a celebration. He ended up alone with the steer in the shade of a tree. A young, attractive steer. But its hole is too high for the boy. He goes to get some stones, a stump, builds a step, grabs hold of the steer’s loins, pushes away the tail and slips in like a puff of air. The steer didn’t even deign to feel the jab, but Francesco got caught by a man and was beaten for having seasoned the beef for the festivities while it was still alive.

  I’m less curious when it comes to intercourse with goats; everything has been said about that shepherds’ companion, its fiery vulva, its graceful ways, its sensitive face. I’d rather go back under the trees for a pastoral lyric in which there are no animals, just the affectionate gesture of a child that I found touching. Francesco was ten. Between two pranks, he’d often do Mrs. Five Finger with another brat in the olive gardens. But it was his habit to wet his hand before stroking his penis. So our little fellows sat side by side, each concentrating on himself to produce some thrills. But it was hot. Francescos mouth was dry; soon he couldn’t keep going, through lack of saliva. So the other child quite obligingly spit a thick, frothy jet into Francescos palm, rescuing his chance for pleasure.

  Love between boys is prohibited, but the morals of the common folk allow a few remnants of it; they hook up a little when there are no girls or women available. Small boys aren’t considered any different than men, they aren’t taught to be innocent, they’re attracted to the bodies of adults, and if they’re the forward type, they want to have sex like anyone else; even prepubescents seem to think it’s completely natural for people to be interested in their little penis, of which they’re more than half proud.

  Sex acts are simplistic, whittled down to the essential, and sometimes brutal. Butt-fucking comes close to being a feather in your cap, but being the one on the bottom makes you a degenerate, though less so at a young age. Nevertheless, even among my most reluctant partners, I rarely encountered a tensed-up anus as happens in our country: the interdiction is in their minds rather than their organs.

  Coldness when it comes to masculine sex is proof that it’s punished yet indulged in at the same time; you keep from being a homosexual by mistreating those whom you’re with. You’re supposed to keep it strictly secret, which is an illusion, since everybody likes to talk about it. Those who do the act with virility or venality don’t hide it much; those who have a real desire for it hide it fearfully. You’re not afraid to be queer, you’re afraid to be associated with the name; as if the dominant form of eroticism had one part that was forbidden but couldn’t be given up, which you persecuted in those who embodied it openly.

  Foreigners are less subject to these constraints, and when you’re with them, you are, too. What these foreigners think of you doesn’t count, which works in their favor. And since they seem free of their negative mores when you meet them, it’s often assumed that such is the way it is in their country. You go out of your way to look for them, because you can go out with them without too much of a risk and simultaneously look down on them for agreeing to it. You might also make a few bucks, but it’s usually not about prostitution.

  A lot of
these boys, when I was alone with them, were friendly, sensual, good-tempered and sweet, very free with their bodies. In a situation that they saw as shameful, they could have acted cynical, nasty, dishonest, but I saw almost none of that. They were, instead, rather defenseless, brimming with innocent warmth, politeness, cheerfully content, friendly and soft in a way that they weren’t with women. Like daydreamers, AWOL for a night in a secret land in which they did not live; they were only half there. The presence of a woman would have elicited the sense of duty, the role-playing, the kinds of aggressions and anxieties that boys are trained to have; with me, on the other hand (a queer and a subhuman about whose opinion they didn’t care a fig), there was nothing to gain, to prove, to test. They became good boys despite themselves.

  Then, once they returned to ordinary life, they came back to their senses and the laws by which they lived. They denied the strange pleasures their bodies had experienced, rejected me because I’d been satisfied by it. Without the freedom to disown what they’d done, none of these boys would have come over to see me; without the right to dismiss me, none of them would have touched me. I saw almost no exception to this rule; it was the only thing that let so many boys from the lower classes dare—heterosexual though they considered themselves to be—indulge in forbidden love on a regular basis.

  Being rejected like this put me in a kind of isolation that was new for me. In France, social life is so hideous that I don’t mind being on the margins or being subject to it. Exclusion has the same value as those who enforce it; the disgust my country often inspires in me protects me from its judgments. Here I was suddenly deprived of such a freedom, because I passionately admired this city, its inhabitants, the customs of its common people, the street, the elements of daily life; everything we’d lost was still alive here. Unfortunately, I’d be accepted only to the extent that a queer can be. I’d be a piece of shit for some boys, a whore for others, innocence for some; I’d be kept apart like a bad scene.