by Tony Duvert
I had a lot of trouble finding a lodging hidden away enough. When Francesco was in a bad mood, he claimed I wouldn’t be able to; or, if I succeeded, I’d be ostracized. My neighbors would avoid me, no boy would dare enter where I lived, the children would stone my door; people don’t like it when you come in and upset their neighborhood. Francesco was lying. He would have preferred me to keep living in the new city and it’s fawning dog pounds for johns. He offered to help me look, but he did nothing and collected false information. In the end, as I was about to give up, one of his friends—the affable skirt-chaser—took things in hand and, bringing Francesco with him, found me the place to live that I no longer hoped for, at the very back of a dead-end street.
The neighborhood is poor and opulent looking at the same time, the houses are solid, large, very old, with massive walls; they have big, open-air patios, mezzanines, terraces, tiling that’s cool and quiet. You live there in moderate ease. The lifestyle brings to mind the petit bourgeois eighteenth century of the common folk. Even in the evening, the men spend less time in their homes than in the streets around them, corners with fountains where stands are squeezed together—some of them very small, just lean-to’s, the others made of a large niche in the street with a counter or stall to stop at. These shops, and their shadow when it’s made by the sun, are a rallying place to take a break, have some conversation; boys, children gather around them or sit beside, settling into all of the niches, all the surrounding structures.
At the corner of a street with the lane where my cul-de-sac ends, there is a tobacco stand and, in a deep loggia, a very lowly fruit-seller—who acts so lordly in such a fierce way that I don’t dare buy anything from him. He has the sturdy face and the bare neck of an old man from Antiquity, his head shaved, his short half-moon beard white, without a moustache, a big nose, round cheeks, deep wrinkles. A disability keeps him prostrate; a straw mattress in his loggia is enough for him, and he puts his goods almost level with the ground. When I pass, he watches me with a hard face and eyes like hot coals. Few people I’ve known have intimidated me to such an extent. He is, however, peaceable; all day he pets an orange-haired cat that sleeps on his shoulder, and he has adopted a poor yellowish-white dog with wild eyes that the brats of the neighborhood were torturing; he also lets the boys sit on the edge of his crates to chat. Lying behind a rampart of melons and watermelons, or sometimes, if the sun is mild, on the sidewalk where they’ve pulled his straw mattress, he makes you think of Diogenes; I get the impression that his pale, moist, sparking, intelligent, circumspect eyes, powerful with contained rage, are reproaching me for the hatefulness and crimes of all of humanity.
Closer to me, opposite a plain-looking chapel, is a bakery. This is where people bring in dough kneaded for cooking, as well as homemade pastry. Set some distance below ground level, it offers the warm, aromatic pit of its door, through which you see, on plank shelves along a wall, the entire row of round loaves. I pass little girls with the bearing of women who hold on their head with one graceful arm a tray covered with a cloth, under which is the bread they’re bringing in to cook, and metal sheets with rows of little cakes made of yellow dough. These load-bearers, their hair pulled up coquettishly into a headscarf to expose their neck and its brown ringlets, their small ears delicately pierced with a tiny golden ring, have the incredible softness, the capricious ease, the ravishing, casual, sensible countenances of those who appear in the ancient paintings of Venice.
There are ugly ones, too, but I’ll talk about that another time.
The flat is one of the four sides of a large square house, buried in those next to it, with no facade but the narrow, high wall that forms the end of the cul-de-sac. On the ground floor, a door with a knocker; very high up, a small window with a wooden marquee and a forged grill. I push the door, enter with my head lowered, and I’m in a dark corridor that, beyond a bend, joins the patio and the landlords house. I’m not going that far. I open a second door at the entrance of this corridor, go through it, close it: this is where I live. First there’s a staircase lit by a window looking onto an adjacent property; you’re blinded by it halfway up if you’ve come out of the shade. Above, three rooms in a row. Very old, and perhaps built for a bourgeois or merchant of the past who wanted a flat with some pomp (since the rest of the house is ordinary), these rooms are laid out like those of an old palace. One has the little window with the marquee that overlooks the cul-de-sac, the others have larger windows that overlook the patio. The top of the walls are decorated with ornamental paneling and stucco; the high ceilings, covered with illuminations, have slender fake beams contained in recessed casing. The encrusted colors of this joinery, its sheen, with figments of brown, gold and greenish. No hallway, the rooms communicate directly; the two on either end are raised a step in relation to the one in the middle, whose extravagant ceiling calls to mind the dome of a chapel; the rain comes in there. Monumental doors, decorated with paintings on both sides. Each of their leaves contains another door that is as large as a child. I thought of Pablos when I saw that, imagined him going through it. They’re taller and wider than him, he gets through them easily, whereas I have to slow down and stoop. In the evening, or if it’s cold, I close the large doors and only use the little ones; and merely by the rhythm of their steps as they walk from one room to the other, I’d be able to tell the age of my visitors. Little musical doors full of caprice, glidings, a filter for children.
Walls of bare plaster. Decorated wooden cupboards. At the back of my bedroom—a rather narrow room where I write and sleep—behind a pediment of woodwork and color, is a deep alcove with a slightly raised floor and very low ceiling, cut in the shape of a trapezoidal prism and supported by a frieze of innumerable little capitals made of sculpted wood, painted in a floral motif, accentuated along the walls by woodwork with russet illuminations and other finely worked molding. My amateur attempts at sleep, some of which are alcohol-induced (but I only drink in spurts, these days, very spaced apart, because I hate getting drunk alone), my reading, my editing of rough drafts, my jerking off, my sessions of sex, my beautiful visions of bellies, thighs and faces take place on that big bed that this alcove presents like an altar.
With its strong walls, its austere luxury, its windows pierced high in the walls like those of a dungeon, but full of light, this place has a powerful subdued atmosphere, which is striking, welcoming, encompassing.
Then the bathroom, constructed at the back of an adjacent passageway, reduced to a faucet without a drainpipe and a hole for shitting. The flat lacked independence, I was living there with the owner and his family; but the rooms located below mine were junk rooms, while the thickness of the walls cushioned the noises coming from the patio. The bend in the corridor protected the comings and going of the boys below from anyone who might be watching. On the sides, no neighbor could be heard; and in the house, no one was living above the ground floor. The apartments character, its inconvenience, prevented anyone from sensibly choosing it. I moved into it the day after it was found for me.
I had my suitcase and a bed bought and delivered that afternoon. It was as if I were camping out in a historic chateau after visiting hours; but I wasn’t afraid of ghosts. The nocturnal light that fell from the window on the cul-de-sac, the moonbeams and starlight were startling; and, being a ghost myself, I’d wander endlessly in that darkness invaded by shadows and glimmers. Everything seemed immense to me, and mystery created spaces.
It has shrunk, become commonplace since; I see my refuge in its actual size; I’ve built, measured, explored what’s around it. It’s no more than three rather small rooms, half broken down, overloaded with decor without artistic value, the kind of thing a new-money storekeeper, a canon with a good stipend or a prosperous madam must dream of; and the day I leave this place for anywhere else, I have no idea whether I’ll miss it.
About a month after I moved in, I received some money I’d been given, lent. I had a toilet put in, as well as a shower, hot water, a washbasin, a hotplate
, and a few pieces of furniture, some dishes and sheets I’d bought. The rooms were filled in successive stages; now that they have things I can use, they’re nice to live in.
What to make of this strange refuge, this piece of the old regime, which you’d imagine as a sanctuary for sophisticated Old-World types, devotees of Sade, vampires from horror stories, the exiled, the living dead? Why this secrecy, these premises, these expenses, debts, this work? I know. But the effect of this place on my life is that it has eviscerated everything from it, and I’ve given up what I was expecting of it. I have no desire to describe these mental changes, these changes in my actions, desires, plans, ideas. I feel as if this metamorphosis is negligible; it offers only myself to recognize at the end of these incarnations. Naked, empty, paralyzed, but gifted with ease, alacrity, movement. I never hoped I’d be such a convenient object between my own hands, so uselessly obedient to myself.
Among the crude intentions I had in moving, the most important was having boys stay with me. The kind of thing that required countless ruses for the impoverished people I was encountering when I lived in the new part of the city. Letting one or several of them live close to me. I didn’t want to make them captives, I wanted to be a welcome stopover. This was materially, financially, socially impossible.
A preposterous idea, a badly chosen place, a freedom that no one had any need of. My home was only a retreat, a prison perhaps; in the evening, the big and little boys who went with me were full of precautions, whispering, furtive ways, the sharpened attention of convicts who were escaping a fortress; but they were coming to my place.
I’m a bit ashamed in recalling this period, the errors in thinking I was amassing. My horde of kids themselves healed me of it. The way they glided in before disappearing. The way I’d find them so different, so preferable, in the street—schoolboys or panhandlers, almost always fatherless (the others are watched more closely, and have less of a reason to seek adventure). It was in contemplating these flights of birds that I renounced taming any of them.
Now here they come again, these birds; I have writer’s tics, you’d say.
Therefore, I won’t be hosting any children—no more than I’d know how to be a father, mother or teacher. You aren’t taking care of children when you avoid the society to which they passionately desire to belong, or when it avoids you. Not that this is an obstacle that stops those who procreate; the last of the social outcasts produces his brats just like others do. But I don’t procreate the children with whom I copulate; as a consequence, I maintain the kind of considerations that parents don’t worry about. Stupid considerations; the demand for order and education, norms, butchery, come from the children themselves, from where they’re from. Because they want to become as human as us, the monsters.
When I’m older, perhaps, I’ll have less scruples than I do. And if my worst tendencies endure obstinately, if I resign myself to everything as I age, I’ll take a prisoner and play the father thing for him. Apparently it’s normal to welcome that decline as a benediction. But I’ll make love with my pupil, and I’ll impose a sacrifice on myself that asexual parents don’t: I’ll prevent him from resembling me. I like my life, I’m committed to it, I prefer to live in my head than in any other; what I am, what I do, however, is no better than the opposite—and has the inconvenience, sometimes palpable, of keeping me apart from everybody. The first duty of human beings, they say, is to be happy. I chose the worst path for achieving that; it’s not that I regret it, but I don’t dare bring anyone else along with me.
First of all, I’ll encourage everything for this child that can render him normal, ordinary. So he’ll have the most popular tastes, the blandest leisure activities, the most common reactions; he’ll learn to read by deciphering ads in magazines; he’ll reflect little and think nothing.
From the youngest age, I’ll seat him in front of a television. The rest of the time, I’ll put him in the company of his little peers, who, under the influence of respectable adults, will tell him the correct slogans and endow him with an exact awareness of what he should want to be. Whether he becomes sanctimonious or a Communist, a follower of gurus or the rules of calculus makes no difference to me, because he’ll be on the right side. Since 1 won’t be capable of restraining myself, I’ll at least show him how ridiculous and harmful what I’ve chosen is. I’ll encourage him to make fun of me, to turn up his nose at the least thing I touch or admire. And by being a living example of the unsightliness and anxieties that come with a lack of discipline, I’ll make a more normal, more average man out of him than any normal, average father would know how to do with his children.
He’ll have no vice, peculiarity, curiosity whose consequences he can’t observe in me, and that doesn’t inspire extreme repulsion in him. Each time he shows a tendency to veer from the norm, he’ll think of me, my problems, my failings, what’s said about me, my filthy books, the kinds of happiness I’m deprived of and my disgusting obsessions. He’ll learn not to confuse my depravities with freedom, my mental abnormalities with intelligence, my pleasures with pleasure. In this way, he’ll become the child of my neighbors, my concierge, the policeman standing on the corner; the child of radio broadcasts, pop songs and mainstream magazines; the child of doctors and teachers, grannies and the State; the child of the other children. And that combination of favorable elements, while positioning him right in the center of average values, will open for him all doors to happiness.
If he grumbles, I’ll force upon him the kind of development he may not have had in a real family: I need absolution for my pederasty, and I’ll do it by demonstrating how it can transmit and instruct norms better than paternity itself. That is because normal people are so convinced of the universality of their vision of the world that they sometimes do too little to contaminate their progeny with it. My own parents were like that. If they’d known what relentless structuring produced balanced, mature, adjusted adults, they wouldn’t have left me alone so often. Because I followed my whims, obeyed them, starting at the earliest age, I became attached to a countless number of things I happened to discover, and I learned to enjoy them, remaining deaf to what could have saved me from them while turning my base curiosities and obfuscated pleasures into irresistible vices that the best therapists would, as a consequence, have difficulty eliminating without destroying me as well. Obviously, I don’t at all reproach those who educated me; their system was rigorous, conformist, and if it had been applied relentlessly, it would have produced the best effect. But it didn’t even succeed in making me buy a car or love hashish, things that even the clumsiest of fathers know how to get their sons to do today. There were just too many blank spaces, too many unsupervised hours; I knew too well how to take an interest in myself; and since I was by far the youngest of the children, they unfortunately credited me with an innocence of which, on the contrary, I was the only one deprived. The result, for example, was that just when one of the older ones was being humiliated each night at table by being forced to imbibe drops meant to cure loneliness, I, beyond suspicion, smooth-cheeked and prepubescent, was jerking off only on days when I wasn’t ass-fucking.
Once this habit of perversion was established, I gradually understood everything that attracted me, always choosing the crooked path, and not even for the purpose of winning any prestige from such lack of convention so that I could later ascend to the dominant class; it was, instead, purely for pleasure, because that was the only thing my poor head ravaged by orgasms was still capable of feeling. This was the effect of the good opinion that people had of me, the times alone I was allowed, the withdrawal of my isolated family that avoided others and their excessive confidence in the order of things.
What can I do with myself now? Even my adult reasoning strengthens me in the choices made for his own use by the child I used to be. However, his age deprived him of all judgment, and anything he could do was wrong. If I think like him, it’s because he has twisted my brain. He made me into a maniac who reproduces his actions and cravings,
a sexual retard, an unmarried man who’d rather fondle brats than father any, a blind person who has never known the beauty of breasts, beards, homelands, factories. Until my last hour, I’ll be the puppet of his ideas, fixations; and if there’s an autopsy, they’ll find only this deformed, imbecilic, insatiable gnome, who has been tyrannizing me for more than twenty years, and whom no sensible observer would consider human. He was mistaken about everything: not once did he find out how to become attached to something that everyone appreciates or approves. Actually, there was only one normal object that he made me love—boys—which half of humanity seeks and desires, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to say as much about other things I like. Except, when the child I was took on a worthy object for once, he forgot that it was recommended for a gender other than his; so he only knew how to be normal at the expense of an anomaly worse than all of them. This is the monster who was allowed to become me.
It’s true that, during those years, society wasn’t yet so calcified, so totalitarian; it was hovering to a small extent between old bourgeois notions and progress; we were applying prewar rules to a time that was the beginning of today. Obviously, such lopsidedness will be what will make certain educations so ineffective. But there’s nothing to worry about now: our new society is coherent, there isn’t anything about it that it’s not aware of, it’s in touch with all its parts and knows how to control them. It’s enough to dunk anyone at all into it for him to become like everyone else—with the happy illusion of being only himself—and for him to behave exactly like all of us—with strictly personal reasons for doing so. And it’s only in families that are too indrawn, anachronistic, authoritarian or poor that a few abnormal types are still being produced. The open, well-subsidized family of tomorrow won’t experience such failures of reproduction.
