by Tony Duvert
I learn that, I think about some brutal reprisals. He’s finally succeeded in getting me interested in him. The reprisals won’t be necessary. Everybody knows he’s a cretin; at school, Diego has spread the story of his unfortunate love affair. The moron with the brain of a bear is ridiculed. Boys have a keen sense of irony; their ridicule doesn’t kill, but it’s victorious.
Recomposing this episode by putting myself in the place of the monster.
I’ll think about him often. Perhaps because as a child this happened to me almost invariably; at the beginning of the school term or after, I’d come across an oaf of this type who took me to heart and whom I went through hell to get off my back. I keep their portraits in my mind, opposite those of the boys I was seeing—just as there’s a permanent memory of the monster between Diego and me. It’s not the only time that situations from children’s lives have reappeared in my life as an adult, and although the characters may be different, all is familiar, returning cyclically as if my presence had eternally to reproduce the same phenomena, regardless of my age, the circumstances or the place.
Diego enjoyed imagining that I’d said yes to the monster and that he’d gone to bed with me. How he’d kiss, etc. Diego would awkwardly distort his features to imitate that banana smile. This superimposition of the two boys confused my heart. But pervert that I happen to be, to the extent that Diego recounted them, I’d experience his fantasies about the monster intensely, try them out. There are some disturbing dolts that make you giddy enough to want to go to bed with them. In this case, I didn’t find a way to become enchanted by the disgusting image: that lopsided face, twisting to look at mine, those gargoyle lips speaking to my nostrils, those squinting, porcine eyes that searched mine with the passion of a dog’s muzzle in another’s behind.
This is the foundation of my fakir’s plank. It’s what’s stubbornly there and never touched. Behind the pretty silhouettes of Diego and other boys who visited me during that period, the nightmare at my door, in the street, in the shops, is this twilight prowler with big paws, who hunts down benefactors like other half-wits strangle little girls.
Lying completely naked as I usually do, and immersed in a good book, I distractedly scratch my anus with a large knife from the kitchen that was lying there. I notice a white thread on the point of the blade. I dry it off and, by pricking myself a bit, I collect one or two others, which hang gently from their heads. I understand why my hole itches and swallow some worm powder. Buying this medicine gives me the instant impression of being a father, because they ask me how old the child is; it felt sad to admit that it was just for me.
These worms, whose eggs I may have ingested as I sucked a scamps anus (although my youngsters are very well washed), are nice-looking, amusing, and I could let them live a bit, especially since the poison will make me vomit two nights in a row. But they tickle too much, and if a boy fucks me and collects two or three of these threadlike little guests on his knob as if he’d just fucked the rotten shit of an old corpse, I fear he’d have a bad opinion of me.
Another disgusting ailment I had for a week was an abscess that appeared—I don’t know why—in a lymph node in my groin. It came to a head, lengthened, swelled into an apricot and was very painful. I had trouble walking. Then a movement I made as I sat down squeezed it, making it burst. That explosion provided me with a strange, graceful, pink-and-round pleasure, like an orgasm, but without any waves. The hole was symmetrical, a bit smaller than a cigarette burn, was pierced at the side, almost near my balls; and I would have believed what I saw was coming from a testicle: a brownish puss, followed by creamy white, which flowed out thickly, slowly, calmly and continually, like toothpaste. Later, having my hole, which had lengthened and oozed, I identified with those hermaphrodites in Renaissance medical drawings who exhibit a vulva flanked by male organs at the base of their stomach. I had those organs and that opening, in the exact same positions. Walking back and forth at home, always undressed, the movements of my steps made me feel my vulva, and I’d begin to get hard.
It wasn’t the illusion of having a woman’s genitals that excited me, but the reality of that slit, which because of the defect it created in the crease of my thigh, gave the feeling inside me (in the space of the sore lymph node) of something like the impress, or negative image, of a cock, a new cavity that I found disturbing but welcome, and that doubled my body such as it was, yet didn’t feminize it.
The abscess healed. I also caught scabies several times, but only the first case was bothersome, because I didn’t know what it was. For a month, I scratched myself to the point of drawing blood, and I imagined fleas and bugs everywhere. Infected crusts formed (I’d often taken care of similar things on the feet or forearms of the boys), and finally I had a name for it. I had to disinfect my entire room, my clothing, myself. Afterward, when I got scabies again, a few closely spaced soapings were enough to stop the invasion. Strangely, I haven’t had the itchies for at least six months, although I rub shoulders continually with a little world of vagabonds in tatters that I wasn’t frequenting at the time when I caught scabies.
No venereal disease. Not more than in Paris, moreover, where the usual age of my partners, I suppose, saves me from the scourges that the shameful pricks of adults rain down upon the world. As a consequence, in my life, I’ve only had one brief case of syphilis; I got it from a young straight who spent an hour in the opposing camp, doubtlessly because he simply wanted to dump his treponema there, the way you go to a stream to drown a litter of cats.
Francesco gave me the gift of crabs; I loaned him some insecticide. Good-humored moments when we powdered our bodies together, crotches and rumps floured in white, Pierrots, carnival ume, fetes galantes.
Never any fleas. And I’ve only had one case of head lice. I’d gone into a vacant lot, in the evening, with a very small beggar boy. After we finished, I went back to the avenue and a young policeman in uniform approached me. He’s an attractive-looking boy, shy, full of smiles, but very boring because he likes abstract conversations; he asks me what I think of homosexuality. As he speaks to me, he gently picks a gray flea from my shirt collar; we study it; he throws it away. I explain to him why I was harboring it. He laughs, but he’s not interested in children.
Pablos thought he had lice. I took advantage of this by fondling his hair and covering him with kisses. I thought I saw a few nits. I came back after running to some pharmacies—I’d been looking for a lotion that was fairly pleasant and reliable. I wet his head, massage it. He’s content. His older brother confiscates the bottle, as it’s his habit to hijack anything that enters the house. Francesco comes on as if he’s liceless; lying on a bench, his head on the lap of his sister, who’s seated near him, he lets her caress him. She’s a childish, pretty girl, clever, a virgin, with a penchant for sarcasm; she often pretends that she’s supposed to marry me, and recounts what happens next so crudely that I would almost say yes. Like a lot of other girls here, she talks about her period with the boys, to her brothers, without any more embarrassment than they complain about the corns on their feet. As for marriage, she’d really like to find out what my cock is like before deciding definitely (she’s sure that Francesco is taking molds of it and could clue her in). This freedom in language is common but doesn’t interfere with the modesty of their mores. The advantage is that boys and girls don’t need abstract lessons to understand how they’re made. Pablos, that prepubescent pipsqueak, knows a girl who bites his cheeks to gall him, and he punches her; she has also offered him a ring, then a second—and what else, I wonder, since he enjoys depicting her vulva to me with his hands, and he slides in a finger to show the clitoris. This kind of science is a delight; Pablos’s face doesn’t light up like that when he describes his prick or—always using his fingers or mine—creates anuses. (And in passing, it occurs to me that, in the sex education books we had as teenagers, texts and drawings hid from girls even the existence of the clit. As for the butthole, no benefactor of youth has ever understood how to talk a
bout it. They already have enough to do when it comes to the genitals, poor people.) The difficulties in sexual conditioning, the trouble they have imprisoning the proliferations of the body in a small, hygienic hetero organ, remind me of the puzzle confronted by a prince in a legend. In front of a palace that he wants to enter without being seen or heard, he has to bind the hairs of his horses tail; if a single hair unfastens and strikes the wall, it will resonate like a gong struck by an enormous weight, and the evil fairy who lives in this palace will capture the young man, betrayed by his poorly bound tail. I no longer know if the story is French or Hungarian. But those charming fish-faced princes who claim to be selling schoolchildren’s development so they can manhandle their genitals, obviously have the same problem. If the least bit of an urge escapes them and doesn’t remain shut up in the pee-pee pipe, the entire body will vibrate to those forbidden things our hideous libido adores and that deliver our souls to it. It is to this ingenuous example that I resort when, at the exit to a sex education class (my coat half open and my trousers at my ankles, my member turgescent and my eyes bulging), I explain to the boys why males, even prepubescent ones, also like someone to make them a baby—despite what dad or his rubber-gloved associates and nickel-plated philanthropy have been able to claim.
After Pablos’s gesture had attracted my attention, I noticed that the presence of the clitoris in the boys’ depictions of girls is as frequent as the absence of breasts. Their love objects aren’t very “matronesque”; these girls are, instead, poorly idealized and asexual—and they want them to be round and plump, fulsome. It’s interesting to compare the drawings of the older boys with those of French youth. In our country, the naked lady is a doll with big boobs, a strangled waistline, enormous lips, thighs pressed together, glued together (women, those extraordinary mysteries, wear a skirt because they have a monolithic pedestal in place of legs). The genitals aren’t even depicted; a triangle of hairs is as far as it goes—pierced, however, with a rudimentary hole if drawn by the perverted. The boys here construct a completely different kind of woman. The build of a young man, a chest with no breasts, an ordinary mouth, no waist, hips that don’t curve out, but legs parted as if they were squatting, and a collection of little circles or ovals descending like a line of buttons: navel, vulva with clit, anus. A few hairs as decoration. Very often, in a corner of the page or under the heels of the girl: a stiff cock seen in profile, pointing toward the holes. No man on the end of it. This arrangement, according to Francesco, is in line with reality; the boys, who aren’t very concerned with the missionary position, enjoy it when their lady climbs on top and does all the work. Me too; my preferred method of being poked is sitting on a cock. No other position more freely and heartily exploits the member that you’re consuming.
Strange orthodoxies, in any case. It doesn’t surprise me that these kids go to bed so willingly with men: they’re too materialist and, when lured by a hole, pass up that arsenal of rubber, knives, plugs, ligatures, eyecups, cramps and conjugal counseling needed by the young people of the bourgeoisie to protect their equilibrium.
But I’m forgetting my story about lice. The older brother empties the rest of the bottle on his mop. He’ll find a pile of creepy-crawlies that have kicked the bucket when he later combs his hair. Pablos, none; he shrugs his shoulders with the halfhearted smile of children who are cruelly disappointed but want to look satisfied. He combs his hair again. I like this scene, which takes place as well when I arrive at the house. Pablos welcomes me joyfully, gives me a big hello, opens up his nice, sparse living room for me, seats me next to him, laughs, babbles, and suddenly remembers that he isn’t pretty; so he runs to the television where he keeps the brush in a basket of artificial flowers. And standing in front of the old mirrored closet to the left of the set, concentrating, his little nose tensed, smoothes his short hair, and as a finish twists the front into a curl and, arms dangling, the brush in one hand, comes back to me with a delighted face. His interest in his appearance is limited to that. At my place, the messiest kids spend a long time carefully combing their hair after they shower. The flatter it is, the better looking it is. When it’s well arranged as they’ve been taught, still pomaded and shiny with water, there they are again; I compliment them obediently; they laugh with pleasure and, forgetting their exemplary beauty, they are again ready to mess up their mops in my arms.
Diego styles his hair less awkwardly. He came to see me at a place where I had a tub, and I liked bathing him, giving him a shampoo. Such a toilet wasn’t necessary but like everyone else here, he had a vice that French teenagers, too tormented by the ideal, rarely cultivate: a taste for washing himself. No convenience pleases my visitors more, whether dirty or clean, than a bathtub, a shower. Some of them linger there longer than in my bed. I listen to them splashing about, gasping, singing, whistling, clinking bottles; and then the long silence during the time they do their hair. I rarely bother them. Only Diego and his little brother have endured my penchant for being the master bather almost every time. While washing them, I could admire and touch them without their reacting; if not, they’d start kissing me and hugging me, friendly enough actions but interruptions to my pleasure. And then I didn’t have the gumption to put them back at the distance necessary for watching.
Diego, who’s rather shy, was originally embarrassed at the idea of my accompanying him into the bathroom. But he didn’t put up much of a fuss and was laughing. So on the first day I forced him, before we had intercourse, and washed his back. I was hoping to plunge my hand all the way to his buttocks, but he didn’t want to stand up in the bathtub and dried himself while he was still half underwater. My shampooing conquered him, he moaned and sighed with closed eyes. The following times, I remained standing and watched without bothering him. He acted as if he were alone. But when it came to washing his back, he finally looked at me and, with a gentlemanly smile, silently held out the washcloth. He was also willing to get up and be rubbed all over.
When I’d separated him from the monster and brought him home that first day, I’d felt ill at ease, overwhelmed. For months, or even years, I hadn’t met a boy as handsome—that was the impression I had, I don’t indulge in any soul-searching in such situations. I had no idea what I’d obtain from him. Obviously we’d go to bed, but then what?
He’d had his first man at the age of twelve. He tells me how this young man on a bike, riding by a movie theater in front of which Diego was waiting with some other children, started winking at him. Alerted, a bit anxious, but interested, Diego slipped away quietly from the group. The bicyclist met him farther off and arranged a get-together.
These precocious sexual experiences were far apart, sensible, secret, almost chaste, with very few people, who had a lot of consideration for Diego; he doesn’t even know how to kiss yet. At the beginning, his kisses are simply an opening of his lips, which feel calm, comfortable. They moisten gradually. He lets his teeth be licked, then his tongue, and during this time, his warm eyes, so very white, and such a soft brown, stray toward the ceiling. It’s as if he were patiently tasting an exotic dish to get an idea of it. It’s an effect of his lack of imagination: disturbed by seeing my eyes so near, he tries to refocus his and it doesn’t occur to him to close them since mine, which serve as model, stay open. The only open path is up: and rather than daring to lower his eyelids, he stares at the sky. As soon as I can endure closing my eyes, depriving myself of a ravishing vision, he’ll imitate me and will be relieved of my face. He’ll also learn quickly to kiss like an expert, either delicately or in a smutty way, mirroring everything I’ve done to him that he has conscientiously assimilated. He’s a docile, sensual boy, despite his ways; he sensibly learns what’s shown to him, as long as it doesn’t disturb the state of middle-of-the-road thinking and behavior that is his method of succeeding.
At first he fascinates me, and I immediately prefer him to Francesco and his clique. I’m hoping to make him attached to me, and I fantasize abducting him. Luckily, he’s not the type you
can associate with. He doesn’t speak much, keeps up his guard, remains well brought up, and his company is banal, dismal, although without any annoyances, and with rare flashes of whimsy. In his loutish poses I detect some pleasant, agile traits, self-confidence, an independent mind, depths of straightforward kindness, so many things that Francesco lacks. But it will obviously be a long time before Diego manifests them. His very infrequent smiles are extremely attractive, as are his tokens of affection and his sleep, his grouchy sign language for drinking or smoking, his full, childish lips sucking on the end of a filter. His easy laughter goes just as well with his face as his withdrawn moods, or the empty, steady expression he has when he fucks.
Like the little boy that I see in him, he undresses. Sturdy little curves, white purities, pretty buttocks, ideal proportions, soft skin, a strong fragrance. None of this matches his cock, which isn’t very childlike at all. When it’s soft, yes: it’s a modest, sweet blond apricot under a very short preadolescent bush. But then it gets hard, amply and infallibly, and becomes a large fat, long member, with a simple, regular shape, a well-formed head that is smooth and silky, pale in color, and of an incredible hardness that is neither bony nor flexible. Stretched across the most beautifully molded stomach. So much academicism is almost disappointing. It’s why I was so smitten, given my imported superstitions. Diego, who has a head of hair that falls all the way to his glans, from his neck to his buttocks, from the lyre of his hips to the roundness of his knees, is a perfect pederast’s stereotype, a masterpiece of aesthetic and sexual cliches. There’s more than enough to set you trembling a bit, as long as you believe in it. I believed in it. It won’t be he who’ll deliver me from it, in fact, but opposing things. He’ll begin to bore me. And as he’ll stroll completely naked through the house, this Beaux Arts model in reduced form, with his model penis for the office of a sexologist, though in too large a format, will even stop seeming to be alive. However, he has no affectation, he’s not studied, he’s canonical despite himself.
