Diary of an Innocent

by Tony Duvert

  They invited me to become part of their family life, they’d do my housework, washing, there’d be a place for me at the table, I’d have television in the evening, coffee in the morning. I refused these propositions as time went by; I liked them, but I was thinking about all the things I’d have to sacrifice, the streets, squares, fountains, my social nature, in exchange for this tender world of soap operas and dinner plates. So I gave my work as an excuse, my strange schedule. No one seemed offended. They went out of their way to do a thousand little favors for me, seeing that they thought I was pleasant. Then, without throwing me out, they chose to ignore that I was there; I’d walk up the street into my palace.

  An inhabitant of the city would pay three times less rent for this place; I made it comfortable, and I left the issue behind me; a little ruse let them make me pay for the electricity for the entire house. I accepted these disadvantages while imagining what I’d get in exchange. My life is discreet, my guests rare and quiet, my money is sound, easy; people who are more virtuous than me are miserly, and people more honest than my hosts are intolerant. So we were well matched. But at the beginning we didn’t know it, and now discovering how much alike we are has made our blood run cold.

  Two boys of fourteen or fifteen are facing each other under a tree. Their flies are open. I’m on my knees with both cocks in my mouth. One of them is short and very hard, salty with sweat. The other, which is larger, is half limp and has big balls with such thin, satin, liquid skin, but they’re so fulsome and pliant that I’ve never touched anything like them. I already know this boy, he’s been to my place. He’d get very hard but doesn’t know how to fuck. When he gets on top of me, he acts like a swimmer who panics in the water while assuming he’s learning how to swim. For him, things happen without you, he takes his plunge, and then, it happened. I’d help him, but he’d immediately begin to struggle ridiculously, would slip out of the hole, the buns, fall off the bed. During this tumult, I’d be sucking the prick of a nice little boy, a mutual friend. They’re panhandlers by profession. This prepubescent has a big, agile knob; on his knees with his stomach pressed against my cheeks, he pounds me so coolly, happily, easily, that the other seems like a muddling simpleton. The balls of this bad swimmer traumatize me because I don’t know any form of matter, living or inert, natural or manufactured, with a surface that has such a fluid absence of texture. A bag of limp milk glass.

  In the room overlooking the cul-de-sac, if I sleep there at night, I hear the calls of tortured children, or infants in desperate distress. They’re female cats in love. These growls have an anguished brutality and aren’t like the usual feline noises.

  Very rarely, donkeys braying. Little birdsong on the patio, the terraces. A window had a broken pane for a while. In the morning, an impertinent sparrow slipped through it and visited my place. I hadn’t yet swept; it pecked about and hopped tranquilly from room to room, a round little thing, it’s head very erect, like the bearing of a well-to-do bourgeois inspecting an apartment that he wants to rent. When I appeared, it took off so quickly that its flight barely made an impression on my retina. The place must have been uninhabited for a long time with the pane broken, and that bird had developed the habit of flying down into it, obviously to eat insects; the ease with which it whizzed through the hole in the window and grill was proof of such familiarity. Later, it put up with me if I didn’t move at all. It would hop up onto my bed, look at me, jump to the ground and continue its walk. A quick glance, from time to time, to verify my nonexistence. I put some water and bread down for it. It sampled some. It would announce its entrance to me from outside with its rapid call, and then a rustling sound. It was the time when the sun was at its most beautiful.

  Some little boys, cats, birds, mimosa a few lines down from here, finishing with some little dogs, and in the meantime, a host of other vapidities: I certainly am an unusual pornographer. I’ll only make a few old maids like myself queer. I’d better take another look at my methods for inciting debauchery.

  Francesco is carrying a large bouquet. A lot of roses, some mimosa, branches with blue flowers and yellow centers and some snapdragons. I don’t know why he’s giving me this. It’s not even a gift; it’s just attached to the end of his arm, and then he puts it down. He doesn’t say anything about it. We won’t discuss it.

  When it was hot, a reddish gray lizard that was a lot more fearful than my bird used a wall of the room to chill out. He’d be spread-eagled against the white background, where the graceful details of his legs, head and tail stood out. No matter how far away I was when I appeared, it made him vanish.

  There are a lot of insects in my room, each according to its season. At first there were some little tortoise-shell-colored cockroaches, but not very many. Black insects followed them for a three-month period; they were disgusting and fat as two fingers. They lived in the woodwork ornamentation in my house. I sprayed insecticide everywhere. With their shiny carapaces and petrified pose, their suddenly darting about, a slight shock ran through me each time they appeared. Shoe in hand, I’d crush them, and their bodies made an explosive pop that disgusted me more than anything.

  A shy little boy with a crew cut, against a wall, is smiling at me. But as I get nearer, he gets nervous. Speaking to him and stroking his head doesn’t reassure him. Touching his fly does. His smile widens. His cock is stiff in a second, his slender stomach is fleshy and cool, and when his willy is in my mouth, he grabs me by the hair and begins to fuck hard. It isn’t holes that frighten him, even ringed with teeth, even when wielding his little pencil—white as an egg—in them. My lips and tongue suddenly register an event no other boy has made them experience: along his prick, in the urethra, a pellet makes it way to the head, a lump like an alarm clock in the neck of an ostrich that is swallowing it—or rather, vomiting it. It’s the little kid’s ejaculation, without a drop. Afterward, he puts away his penis and continues waiting against the wall, a bag of groceries in his hand, his pocket better stocked.

  He was so ethereal, and the strokes of his prick so powerful, and his sweet little face so limpid, that the faraway world to which he welcomed me, that unreal and salacious shore, leaves me with an immaculate nostalgia, beyond feeling, beyond desire. I recognized inside myself the place where it exists; it’s the one that is the hardest for me to make contact with, the only one that I can’t attain without a guide—and I can never predict who’ll take me there.

  Lady readers of my books who are on their last legs will interpret this as a psalm to their goateed darling, his angels, his little loincloth. (I have another gift to make before I’m finished.)

  However, I did experience the alarm clock in the ostrich’s neck in my anus, a few years ago. The boy was eighteen or twenty, and when he ejaculated, several bumps passed through him. These urethral knots seem merely to be a phenomenon of the nervous system, because their movement is slow, and my little boy without sperm had them as well. Otherwise, the spasms are less perceptible, whether they drench you or not.

  There were some ants: little blond ones in columns, big black ones by themselves. Only two spiders, one fat and pink with transparent legs. An invasion of winged ants; at night you had to close the windows. I didn’t always remember to. Ferociously rapid whirling around the light bulbs, a hundred ants of every size, some of them larger than a wasp.

  Sometimes a caterpillar or sleeping larva, bright pink and laughable.

  Some woodlouses.

  A few flies, but skittish ones that irritated your skin.

  Crickets, all summer. They would get lost at my place. I’d take them and toss them back out the window. They’re hard to catch, their leaps are sudden.

  Two grasshoppers.

  A praying mantis, so beautiful I wanted to kill it. All I had was white wine. I drown it in it. Soon it stops moving. After a few hours, I remember it, see that it’s stiff, remove it, spread it out so it will dry in good shape. But soon it’s standing up on my table; it sobered up. I renounce destroying that bizarre beauty; b
ut I imprison it for a little while under a glass and study it. It sees me, as well; and if I bring my face closer, it stands up straight, opens its wings, raises the two hackles of its legs and shakes them as if to claw at my nose. What fury. That eater of little males comes on better than I do. I let it go.

  One time, the women who live below me call out to me when I leave; they’re afraid. The man brought back a bag of wheat they put in a well-lighted room for junk, and a viper slid out of it. It’s undulating on the tiles. Its small and very pretty, svelte, supple. I don’t know how it’s going to survive; we chase it and it slithers into the place where the cockroaches are hiding, a fissure in the cement. Impossible to get it out of there.

  A few years ago, in Paris, in the street, I petted an enormous spider. It was at night. A boy I’d cruised was with me. We see the large animal run along a wall and wedge itself into a corner. So I lean down to pet its back with my index finger. It felt fragile, soft. It leapt and escaped. It was hideous, I hadn’t had anything to drink, I wasn’t in a sentimental mood, my companion was a pretty idiot, I never did it again.

  One stormy evening, I had gone with a boy down to the banks of the Seine. There are a few trees, and we hide between them and the wall. It’s warm out, about to rain. The bateaux-mouches go by, and when their projector lights sweep the quay we shrink away. The storm bursts forth; we move to a dark corner, under the bridge. And on every side, stampedes of rats rush out across our path, fleeing into the distance. A bum is standing behind the walls of a cardboard box. He sees that we’re sucking each other, but what he grunts is incomprehensible. When it stops raining, we come back out, the bum’s digs stink too much. Still more fat rats, countless, terrorized under the blue light. Their pelts are rabbit gray. A big cock shoots near my feet.

  Several days before a big meal, from his farm the man brought back a sheep that scampered about. They kept it in a nice room where they’d spread out some hay. The odor of this litter invaded the house. It delighted me. There was a lot of bleating, because the sheep, which would walk around the courtyard, was talkative; and the little girl would answer it word for word. She bleated extremely well, just as seriously, as tremulously. She inserted sharp giggles between the phrases, but the sheep didn’t learn to laugh. Or else it learned, and the sniggering I attributed to the little girl was his. These conversations lasted more than an hour; they were so pleasant to listen to that I’d stop my work to open the window. Then the day for the feast arrived. The sheep disappeared. The odor of the litter persisted: but I no longer heard any bleating, from either the victim or the child.

  I had announced a gift; that was it. You can’t have a real book without one or two passages to serve as dictation or as reading for schoolchildren. As long as the teachers speak highly of my name to their students, I wont ask for any money if they use the story of the sheep—which I’ve written without thought of any profit, as demonstrated by its decency. They’ll even be allowed to change any difficult words.

  Francesco doesn’t like cheese, except for goat cheese, if it’s fresh and made like simple curdled milk and then pressed. Spendthrift that I am, I bought some Roquefort; this moldy rubbish violently repulses him, and its price disgusts him. At noon the next day, we have lunch with Pablos. When I take out my moldy stuff, the older one refuses, so the little one says no, too. But he looks at it, smells it, and suddenly he’s curious to taste some. Francesco, stupefied, watches him; the youngster swallows a long buttered piece of bread covered with this exotic and ruinously extravagant garbage, and he munches on it with such voluptuous pleasure that my own slice of bread seems dull to me.

  In their house, they tried to produce some red-hot farts for me. At a time when Pablos was so serious, Francesco explained, the only thing that could break him up, make him laugh, was to hear a fart. Francesco farts in my bed, as a joke, and I began to fart, too, to answer him. Like the little girl braying with the sheep. When it’s a matter of farts, not brays, it is, alas, the opposite of howling with the wolves. Francesco prepares his rockets, his trills, inflects them and launches them until he feels that his shit, from all the pushing, is going to come out. Sometimes as a prank, he catches one of his winds and releases it at my nose by opening his hand. The more it stinks the more he laughs. You can bet I give it back to him. After our songs we shake out the sheets.

  Evenings, an old neighbor lady often comes to their place for the television. She has known Francesco since he was born; he turns around with his butt pointing toward her and launches some gas. The lady shakes her head with good-natured indignation and cheerfully shoos away invisible flies. The mother laughs to high heaven.

  So Francesco asks me, “You want a fart?” I say yes, but it has to be a red-hot one. The brothers, the sister mimic the farts they’re trying to find in their bowels. Pablos points to some of them for me as they take off. None were the right color.

  One time, I have Pablos on my right thigh, we’re chatting. And a light, threadlike, silent, odorless wind slips between the crack of his buttocks, which are open deep along my knee. I tell him. Pablos gets up and chases away this bad spirit by beating his hand against emptiness. We describe and describe again the shape of it and how it tickled. Francesco is there, and he can’t stop laughing about it.

  When Pablos told me his weight and height, together we calculated the weight of a slice of his body having a thickness of one centimeter. It was based on approximating him as cylindrical. He measures 49 inches and weighs 57 pounds, or is it 57 inches and 49 pounds, I can’t remember. The weight of his slices amazes him. He studies them along his stomach. Until evening, he goes out to tell whoever will listen the big news that slices of him weigh such and such number of pounds. They question him with wonder. Slices, really?

  Between our caresses, or during television, Pablos sends me kisses and parts of himself. He plucks his lips, his cheeks, his nipple, his thigh, places them in the hollow of his hand and blows them delicately toward me. I have to seize them in flight and kiss them. I send some back to him. He chews them while inflating his cheeks.

  For cooking, Francesco brings spices in cones made of sheets of written-on notebook paper. The shopkeeper wraps them that way—they don’t throw away anything. I read correct addition exercises and poems in violet ink, in big regular letters. Francesco was surprised that these discount wrappers pleased me; he only tries to decipher those that are printed for industrial products. But if I want some of them I will have them: Pablos’s notebooks. They’re covered with drawings in color pencil. Pablos filled these notebooks during the school year when I was unaware of his existence but had already met Francesco.

  He draws very well, with careful, untiring enthusiasm: men, objects, animals, scenes of the city. He copies a lot, invents a bit, creates complex amalgams, outlines strongly, frames things, saturates them with color; expressions are mostly fractured on the page. But these ponderous images have the blurriness and inconsistency of the things one dreams while sleeping. He gave one a big cat’s head with yellow eyes, rimmed ears, a nice muzzle, just like his nose. He had also shown me two jagged pitchers he drew and cut out and asked me which I preferred. They were identical. I chose one arbitrarily, guessing the trap he was setting for me. He seemed aggressive and gave me the cold shoulder for several minutes; the pitcher I’d pointed to had been done by one of his friends, Pablos’s was the other. Love is based on the same kind of error, except in the positive sense. But Pablos gave me his pitcher.

  Francesco enjoys jerking off with my sperm. For example, he’s seated on my cock, I’m fucking him; when I’m ready to come, I take out my cock and finish with my hand on his big balls. He collects the liquid to anoint his member and has a long, creamy jerk-off session that drenches my chest.

  I had two tubes of depilatory. I showed them to him and explained how they’re used. This interested him a lot. We use the cream to remove what down there is on the butt and farther inside, as well as the surrounding areas. Francesco has nothing to take off, but this nothing bo
thers him. He says that he himself plucks his anus by twisting the hairs between two fingers; he claims that it burns and that they just come off. I’ve tried but I hurt myself. When the cream has done its work, we scrape it off and rinse off in the tub (I was living in the neighborhood that had bathtubs). The product has made the skin of his butt soft as a baby’s prick. Excited, I fuck him standing in the water.

  A short distance from the weightlifter’s shop, I’m happily talking with a young fruit seller, not very clever but with an open, pleasant face. He gives me nibbles of what he sells, I give him packs of cigarettes. One night, without my being able to remember why, I’m on all fours and go through the door, which is low as a cat flap and lets you enter the place by passing under the fruit stand. I remain on all fours with the stand right over my head and close the door. Dark, except for a rectangle of light in front of me from the shopkeeper’s lamp, where his feet and legs are. He bends down with a guileless expression to see me crouching in my corner and is naively delighted, embarrassed. I put my hand on his crotch. My gesture makes him laugh—oh, that. He takes out his stiff cock, which is very nice looking. I touch it, he laughs, gets up to wait on someone, squats again, gives me back his cock and thick balls with their sleek flesh. I suck him. Very surprised, at first he pulls his penis away, then surrenders it to me. He extends a hand toward my groin, but that part of me is too far away; so he caresses my cheek and lets himself be sucked, and a smile floats on the open lips of the distracted kid. A mustached man, resting on a straw mattress to my left, is kicking me with his knee. The two are joking. I swallow, the boy gets up again, I leave my corner. The simpleton, still vacant and cheerful, hands me a fistful of dried fruit.