by Tony Duvert
During those first days, Francesco insisted on raping me with his ass. I only succeeded once in making him come in my hole, which I had, however, indoctrinated for that. Useless lessons, Francesco has no cock. It’s something other than him, it doesn’t follow him, and when it’s in my ass it’s not he who’s coming. Whether it was a new or unknown cock would make no difference to me, a dildo is good, I’d loan him a messenger bearer who looks like me while I fucked with this phantom. As it becomes familiar, this rerouting becomes impossible; but I can’t reattach it to Francesco either; there’s no circuit running between him and it. So I’m indifferent to it. Sometimes I look at it afresh for itself, isolate it, and it interests me for a moment, so I suck it, knead it, try to put it in. Then Francesco comes back, and I have the feeling that I’ve had an orgasm with a dead, mummified organ, as if I’d stolen a piece of him that he keeps in his pocket, in the way that someone operated on would keep at the bottom of a tube of formaldehyde his appendix, finger, a fragment of bone that a surgeon removed from him. I’ve never had that feeling of a divide between a boy and his member, or seen my appetite for a penis ruined because of it.
I met Diego (Pedro’s older brother) a while after I’d left my trick-turning hotel for the little modern apartment that I have described. Francesco would come over spontaneously, he found Diego there and was jealous. They hated and avoided each other.
However, I only saw Diego from time to time, as was the case with his little brother and all the others. That’s what was convenient for them, there was nothing about their lives that could be blended with mine. Their families kept track of them more and left them less penniless than Francesco’s did. They went to school or had a trade. Homosexuality wasn’t in their future. Having sex entertained them but didn’t arouse them. They approached it coolly, with the calm ease of boys who leave school in the evening to play tennis, or go to the pool, meeting up at the playing field with their basketball or football team. Their relations with girls were just as relaxed. They liked to come, but no feelings were taken advantage of and the mildness of their customs found an advantage in doing it.
It isn’t that they’re indifferent. They willingly boast about their city, claiming that everybody in it only wants to have sex and does it better than anywhere else. I don’t know. But it’s impossible to take your pleasure more calmly. No superstition, no fever, love is seen as a well-rounded summer day, a form of leisure no more important than their youth, which is this carelessness.
They didn’t need me, they simply wanted a few bills to buy trinkets, amuse their friends, spruce up their outfits, date girls. I was a sort of distant relative, void of interest, whom you come to see and then put up with because of the small sum of money you get in the process. And I began to take on the habits of forlorn old codgers who expect such visits, get ready, set aside a few bills to slip to them without embarrassment, choose drinks, treats based on the age and the taste of the person who was coming, a particular chocolate with pistachio nuts, these fruits, that kind of fruitcake, a hearty roast. The pitiful profession of the uncle, a name I knew before having practiced it.
They discovered that I wasn’t miserly. It suited them, but they also distrust someone with easy money. Some, however, didn’t see it as on the square—like a kid working in a service station who’s disconcerted by a big tip, and just in case rewipes your windshield that he’s just cleaned, and you flash him a big smile through it. The generosity of such impulses left me feeling unhappy. My usual youngsters were sure to find what money they needed at my place without my having to throw them on my bed each time. They were understated about their taking advantage. This taste for giving without compensation didn’t come quickly to me. Then it grew to the point that the role of business became minute. I felt relieved, despite some undecipherable sadness that had nothing to do with money.
Hence, only Francesco was really free; alone or almost so, he was fanatically gay. He wouldn’t have had to fear competition from Diego. But he had hoped to win me completely; he surrounded me with manageable friends so that my desires wouldn’t leave our circle; he organized his reign without guessing what a mistake he was making, like those drowning people in comic strips who think they’ve come to an island and climb onto the back of a whale. I was the wrong territory to conquer, I didn’t stay in one place.
Diego gave him other reasons for being vexed. He was younger than Francesco; with his small size, his muscles and nice proportions, at sixteen he looked like less than fourteen. Diego wasn’t one of those semiwhore bad boys; neither was he the kind of dazzled slave who gravitates around you. He wasn’t from the old city, didn’t set foot there, lived in an apartment building. Diego was going to school, as the dunce, but conscientiously so; he never hung around where he wasn’t supposed to, conducted his love affairs discreetly and rapidly; his loyalty, honesty were irreprehensible, entirely devoid of imagination; he just didn’t know how to fabricate a lie. His family was a little poorer than Francesco’s; his absent father sent money. Diego wasn’t trying to charm, he pleased without really knowing why. Diego wasn’t homosexual, didn’t put himself in that situation, had small flirtations. And finally, Diego was so handsome that, next to him, Francesco—snickering and tense, all his ploys and games ruined like a tart’s make-up is by a downpour—looked like a rat, and smelled like one.
Diego, on the other hand, envied the glibness, ease, adroitness of the other; hurt for some obscure reason, he’d pull a sour face and not say a word. But he was neither a gossip nor someone who taunted: I never found out what he thought of Francesco.
Just as in the northern countries, where brunette boys are preferred, with their curly black hair, in the south, people admire what’s rare, paleness and blond straight hair. Francesco, who was obsessed with appearances to the point of idiocy, thought less of himself for having dark skin and tight curls; he displayed total contempt for those who were darker than him, made fun of me if I liked a boy who wasn’t light-skinned enough. I’d answer him sternly. Sometimes, when he got undressed, I noticed scratches and red marks on his body; he’d admit having violently scraped himself in the bathtub to make himself whiter. His inferiority complex and the values it made him revere appeared in all his actions and life choices; his prejudices about color, however, spared his friends. He was the only one in his family who’d turned out dark-skinned; he was miserable about it, though he knew that pale-skinned types were only trying to get browner. He didn’t link the two, and while I was getting a suntan, he’d exclaim in a delighted tone, “Wow! Really! You’re getting so red!”
Nevertheless, his attempts at cultivating a white-skinned look made him seem pallid and gray in the light of summer; then he took some sun and he himself thought it offered a big improvement.
Otherwise, having this skin color humiliated him—especially in front of Diego, who was blond and white. Diego wore his hair at half length, with large curls; it was actually a soft chestnut brown in which gold, beige, tawny colors, mahogany were closely interwoven; the highlights were blond, over a deep, velvety color background, with clashes of chiaroscuro. Diego cared for and styled that hair guilelessly and with flair. Its lightness flattered him, pure and simple. His body was smooth, of a delicate amber and scented in certain folds like an orange-tree grove under the sun, his skin plump with luminous flesh, without the hardness of a lot of boys. These signs of lushness upset Francesco endlessly.
He was upset, but troubled. Diego attracted him. The somewhat gruff, taciturn or thuggish behavior of the kid, his dull voice, his not very mobile face, its paucity of expression, his stocky, tight body, his delicate features that blurred between the solid mug of a boxer and the ravishingly sweet face of a little guy with big eyes, awoke the old Hollywood broad in Francesco, who’s wild for blokes, biceps, narrow bottoms, the movement of shoulders—and in me, the lover of children, amusing children, little brutes who smell like milk.
So Francescos tenseness and jaundice when faced with the other expressed all jealousies
and all desires. It was difficult for me to decide between the two boys, whom it was impossible to keep together. Once, when Francesco is there, Diego happens to stop by; I send him away, Francesco is too sensitive, you have to keep your dates with him. Diego leaves and doesn’t hold it against me. Another time, he’s there at the expected time and Francesco arrives without advance notice. Diego immediately gets ready to leave, as if he’s respecting an implicit hierarchy; and Francesco settles in as the master, pretentiously and mockingly. It’s the end of the afternoon, Diego doesn’t come often and only stays for two or three hours; so I have him sit down and tell Francesco to come back later. He reddens all the way to his ears and slams the door. He’ll reappear a week later, dead drunk, contrite, sentimental, ridiculous.
Then he gets accustomed to what I will not compromise. He’ll give up his place at the table, in bed, when Diego or another sleeps at my place, during school vacations. But he’ll slander every boy that I see, although he doesn’t know any of them (because I meet them very far away from the usual places). One of them is a used-up slut, the other only goes after fags to rat on them to the police, another is syphilitic, another attacks people with a knife, another just came out of prison or is a drug addict, another is spreading the worst stories about me, another has an butthole like an airfield radar system, another wants to have my eyes poked out and to have me thrown into a cell, all of them are rotten, ugly messes, ridiculous, thieves, liars, and they smell bad. His nasty, nervous, snickering face, his spiteful little phrases that pop up about anyone at all, even a child, the moment he’s seen him with me, the pitiful quality of the accusations he invents (several of which only stigmatize his own life) will, like other things, cool my friendship.
I feel that this text has to be given a bit of freedom, if not I’ll quit after two more sentences—yet no reader can put up with as much as I do. I often see these long paunches dilating my books, when I get closer to the middle; whereas a well-formed stomach seems to be composed above the navel of blocks of muscle side by side, like flagstones, kitchen tiles, cobblestones, mosaic. But almost all books have flabby centers, hammock concavities. It’s probably like the hollow that you see in beds, chairs that have been used for too long. The springs need changing.
Or this lap transformed into a fakir’s board, with narrowly placed nails sticking up. But let those nails be so many stiff cocks. The next chapters, to return to what’s going on.
Diego is fucking me.
When I met him (I use the word met as freely as I breathe) he wasn’t alone. It’s the time when, getting out of work and before dinner, people stroll past the lovely, brightly lit shops. A calm, varied, cheerful slowness as they come and go. It was already night.
Diego’s friend is a taller boy, square-shouldered, thickset, very ugly. Young males often go around in pairs, at the least, and also these couples are often composed of a frightfully ugly one and a handsome one. Diego called his friend the monster. He said that this fright attached himself to him against his will. They go to the same school, the ugly one’s Diego’s foil, and Diego is his powerhouse for meeting people.
Diego is so well behaved that I’m hesitant to approach them. If I’d known that everyone thought he was the most beautiful kid in the city, I would have been even more timid. His trousers, which fit well, are decent in front, less so at the behind. He seems like a child. His eyes don’t avoid mine very much and that decides it. I’m greeted cautiously. All three of us sit down on a cement bench off to the side.
Diego is silent. The monster takes possession of me immediately. He bogs me down, is glued to my right side, leans and twists against my shoulder to speak right in my face and stare at me with his squinty eyes. He wants to prove to me that he’s the best friend conceivable. He even shows me a school certificate, his monster pedigree: imperturbable, incapable cretin, deserving and servile. The more I pull back, the more he advances. He’ll gobble my nostrils until I’ve admitted that no one is as worthy as he is. I try with difficulty to speak to Diego, to look him over. But it’s as if the monster had an extendable neck, he manages to stretch his head in front of ours without budging and, with the help of raucous remarks, banana smiles and a drizzle of saliva, he shuts our traps. It’s a horrible scene. I’m grimacing. He takes that to mean that I have a migraine, which only makes him lust after me at closer range. He has a low, sunken, hairless triangular skull. While his snout roams to within a finger’s width of my cheeks, I’m wondering if he laps or crunches.
I’ve never seen someone show off his face so insistently. If it were attractive, it would interfere with me just as much. He wants to unload his educational future on me. I don’t question his capacity for success. I don’t question the rest, either: those gargoyle lips, a big pug nose, two or three eyes that I thought had been ripped out of an ox or pig and stuffed into his sockets to fill them; prominent cheekbones like thin shoulder blades; narrow, receding cheeks, a chin like a chicken’s rump; yellowish skin completely overrun by black down. But he’s hoping before long to change into a monkey—like the Beast in the fairy tale, who, moved by love, becomes a man.
He’ll show me a letter that he received. The author is a Norwegian father. He had come here with his wife and children. He fell in love with the monster. He writes that he keeps his photo over his heart. He admits that their love was impure: he likes something, he says, that the boys find humiliating. He congratulates himself for not having committed it: I was right to respect you. But he talks about it endlessly, out of fear that the other won’t understand what he should answer. The Norwegian hopes to come back. Bizarrely, he ends the letter: Sleep well, my little one.
So, the monster thinks he’s handsome. Diego has never received any letters like that, which certainly proves it. His beauty isn’t powerful enough to catch the eye of a daddy.
A strange letter, certainly. Impossible to read a self-portrait that is better written. A queer ravaged by shame and lust, feverishly cultivating family values, kneeling before the petit-bourgeois myths of Childhood and Adolescence, Purity and Self-Control. Married for twenty-five years as a “cure.” Wrenching his guts year after year, hatching three daughters with noses like a pelican’s, legs like a crane’s, new ideas. A practicing Christian, in order to thin out his marriage duties. One bamboozled person, one frigid wife, three coituses, three virgins and God; and nearing menopause, a little trip, a zoophilic crisis that opens his eyes and compromises an entire life of retention, the tortuous desire to pollute the ample buttocks of a monster: impossible love. A desperate effort saves him from the abyss. The Impossible Teenager is disappointed: he damn well wants to be hit on the palm with a tidy sum, was expecting a subsidy. A touching misunderstanding. However, he should have informed the Norwegian, who comes up with two or three saddened sentences about the beautiful friendships that money dirties. A clear and simple refusal. A cryptic allusion to his ass—which stands for the word respect in alchemical language. Tender slobbering, some blub-a-blub, some complaints and then, Sleep well, my little one. He must have been weeping as he signed it, this Norwegian. We all get off the way we can. On his moist heart, that photos going to rot fast. The wallet will stay in good shape: Death in Venice isn’t written into the family budget.
I’m not surprised by the fact that if a monster takes a portrait out of his pocket, it will be one that gives you the willies. What’s really excruciating about this nightmare person is his stupidity. I like cretins a lot, but innocent ones. They’re light and soft like litde clouds, just a little bit disturbing when something disconcerts them, but blowing on that shadow makes it disappear. Whereas halfwits like the monster weigh a hundred tons, and their weightiness comes from the social and moral normality to which they adhere. One of Francesco’s older brothers has the same heaviness, the same stupidity, the same orthodoxy. But whereas the others have class, he simply passes for a nut and they make fun of him. They’re wrong, he’s a decent boy.
There’s no question of my mocking the monster, these messages
are too evaporative, his ears have the impassive, pitlike openness of a ditch for pachyderms, you need heavy food brought in by trucks.
For a month, and even longer, he insists on disturbing my evenings, when it occurs to him. The first day, I manage to separate Diego and bring him back alone. But ten minutes later, someone knocks: it’s the impossible teenager, who’s been tailing us. I send him away. No explanation will dissuade him from returning. Once and for all he has got it into his enormous skull that he can be loved by me, because he made a Norwegian cry and because I go with Diego.
Impossible to extricate myself amiably. Francesco (the monster will also end up disturbing us when we’re together) will end up threatening him with the police. The monster feels he is the victim of injustice that surpasses human comprehension; he’ll resent me until the day he dies. I didn’t even dare offer him a cigarette; if he knocks on my door when I give him the cold shoulder, he’ll carry me off under his arm if I’m polite. At the same time, such bestial stubbornness charms me. Remaking the world so that the most obvious and elementary signals don’t function, where nothing that we learn is assimilated. I’m like a test a chimpanzee can do, but that’s too difficult for a gorilla. The monster hammers at the cage; though we’ve spent the last thirty days showing him where to press to open the gate, he just keeps shaking the cement walls with enormous, furious gestures.
Diego, who has not a grain of nastiness, uses the word monster laughingly. He has accepted this parasite with indifference, or fatalistically. When he goes to my place after school, he uses ruses to keep the imbecile from coming along. If not, he finds it altogether amusing that a boy so hateful, so manifestly repugnant tries to gain entry to the same place where the kindly ways of all others gain them welcome entry. The clumsiness of a bear that ruins its snout on some wire mesh when he has seen a fox cub or cat slip by.
For vengeance, the monster dreams up telling whoever wants to listen that he fucked me and caught syphilis. When
