Diary of an Innocent

by Tony Duvert

  We begin again, then he gets up and begs to use my typewriter. The table is about four feet from the bed. I let him. Delighted, he sits down. I put a piece of paper in it, explain a few details to him, and he types with one index finger. My machine is solid and heavy, beautiful-looking.

  Finally, I discover that my teenager is not only knock-kneed but half-witted. However, normal people notice such a thing right away. Someone must be taking care of him, he’s groomed and dressed well enough.

  In my room there are two fans, one on the table, the other on a chest of drawers. They’re no longer on at night, it has cooled off. While I rest, the noise of the typing stops, and the innocent, dying of curiosity, timidly toys with one of the fans, then with the other, then with both. There are buttons for changing the speed of the blades.

  He sits back down and he types in the humming sound of the machines. I have a camera that someone loaned me, but no film. The innocent, a music lover, plays with the shutter release. He’s agile with his hands, I fear nothing.

  On the sheet of paper he’s typing, there’s something to read: in fact, his finger invariably follows the keyboard from left to right and top to bottom, and he writes pages of it. I showed him the capitals and the numbers, but he forgot how to do them.

  He leaves his seat only in the middle of the night, in order to sleep. His sleep is restless, he peppers me with kicks, then he calms down, and I feel the youthful body against me.

  In the morning, we jerk off. Both of us, once. Then, immediately after, it’s his turn, one against the other. During it, when he’s about to come, he bumps into me, finds my ass, pushes brutally into it and shoots all the way up me. This rape excites me, and I jerk off to it. Again? Ah, since that’s how it is, he begins again, too. We get back in position. He has trouble coming, strokes his cock, which is nice, average and fairly thick, and he practically tears his guts out in order to come. His abdominal muscles are so tensed that they form a thick trapezoid in the middle of his stomach, drawn from the base of his ribs to his penis; on each side, the flesh is scooped out. By jolts he relaxes that beautiful contraction, gets it back, looks at my cock, kisses me, whacks off, pants, drools, tears himself apart, contracts all the way to his toes, puffs out his muscles and comes.

  He goes to the toilet and spends a long moment surrounded by the noises of water. He comes back looking very cheerful, fresh, kisses me tenderly on the mouth; his is scented. It’s not toothpaste; that sugary, aromatic flavor is my shaving cream. He must have mistaken the tube. Even so, he smells good.

  Once more he gazes at the typewriter and sits down in front of it. I fall asleep. The noise of the keystrokes is interrupted; it wasn’t fully pleasurable. He goes to look for the camera, places it in front of the machine, turns on the two fans, pours himself a soda, lights a cigarette and, having accomplished that assemblage of pleasures, sits back down and types.

  During my siesta, these noises, this ritual bring me a strange pleasure. Little shivers run through me at moments, like those caused by the fascinated caresses of Andrès. But it’s no longer a matter of vanity, if it was that; rather, it’s the solitary, inexhaustible, blissful aspect of his passion for my objects making me shiver.

  I have a hard time removing the innocent from his tasks so he can eat lunch. He has a wounded and infected ear that I bandage. Next, I’ll wait until he wants to leave. I like him so much that if he stays, I’ll keep him.

  But he leaves.

  Weeks pass. I can’t find him. Some of my panhandlers know him. I’m told that a man has already fallen in love with him and that he wanted to take care of him; but one evening, in the restaurant, the innocent, seized by anger, will take off a shoe, throw it in the face of the benefactor and sweep the table clean. The end of love. I wonder what the man said to him, I’ve never seen anyone sweeter, more reasonable and more manageable.

  At last I find him. He’s mostly in rags, this time. He doesn’t even have shoes any more. But he’s adopted a dog, a funny kind of dog that laughs. The dogs here, members of a minority and mistreated, are fearful and nasty; they growl at humans, get stones thrown at them, and you can see their ribs. But that dog liked humans. Another half-wit.

  The innocent plays with him, forgets about me. I buy him shoes, give him money, the dog laughs. Nearby is an old woman seated on a step. The innocent goes over to her, lies down against her, they chat. Then he remembers me, dashes over laughingly, kisses my hand, mouth; I’m a bit shy, but he seems so sad when I half refuse his lips that I let him do it, hard.

  Impossible to bring him to my place, he’s with the old lady. After that, I never saw him again. I tell myself that if someone annoys him enough and he reacts violently, they’ll lock him up. Nothing else is waiting for him.

  Months after our breakup, I saw Francesco again. Early one night, on a long, deserted avenue, a moped approaches. There’s a handsome boy on it, but his face is hard and his sideburns are too long, giving him a pimpish look. Then I recognize Francesco. I don’t know if he recognizes me. But around thirty feet from me, he slows down and makes a halfturn; once he’s done that, he turns his head in my direction and lets out a long gob of spit, without looking at me. The moped disappears very quickly.

  I saw Diego again. His hairdresser finally adopted him. He’s magnificent, a hairdresser, laughs, has grown taller, even has a salary. His work outfit is very elegant. The yellow-paper hair has improved, the darker colors have been preserved. Diego proudly recounts his latest flirtations: goodbye to girls, now he likes little boys. His perverse loves are as stereotypical and boring as the normal ones were; wherever he goes, he walks a straight line. To make fun of him, I remind him of his school friends, their names, what he would say. He answers that that was last year. These days, in order to change his tastes, he allows up to twenty-two years old. He’s seventeen; quite a generous grace period. Besides, fucking little boys isn’t disreputable, and he knows one that’s so handsome, so blond, so suitable, who can take his big cock so willingly, the whole shebang!

  My conversation with Diego surprised me; I thought he was too fearful and got too much advantage from the order of things. His prosperity must have helped him. I like his frankness: the little shy hetero from the epoch of the monster is as loyal, as cheerful and as nice a kid with his new values, he’ll make an attractive man, and that increases my gloom if I think of Francesco.

  At my place, the gas bottles are empty. I hate going out when I’m in this book, I ate my meal cold and uncooked. Then I missed having coffee and discovered a combustible: crumpled pages. Those I tear out of my manuscript are more numerous than the ones I leave and the rough drafts. I’ve already sorted out what I could find in various shirts. All that has lasted a week, with my reserves of food—I only eat right before bed. I burned my writing on the tile floor of a well-ventilated room; sitting on the ground, I held my frying pan, my saucepan over flames and I cooked some steak, eggs, heated up some soup, coffee, milk, several cans of tinned food, refreshed some dry bread. I’ll obviously be the first author to be fed by texts he doesn’t publish.

  I kept the innocent’s typed pages. And I’m reading them, reading his finger, his face, his pleasure, his passage. Shivers return when my eye yields to the law of these signs. Is there a law that is so different in the series of words that I put down? I think about the typing monkey who, if he types anything at all and endlessly on a keyboard, will reference all the masterpieces in the world—and also, as long as he’s at it, will write his own. If anyone is like him, it’s me and not the innocent.

  But contrary to the monkey of probabilities, I’m not eternal; and I have a bed, a belly that living on air won’t fill. So I have to choose my words; maybe it will keep me from writing masterpieces, but there will be more of a chance that what I type will feed me if I publish it rather than bum it. As for the language of the innocent, I envy it, but few people would read it.

  I saw the boy with the dog again. His head was shorn. He had a new dog, white with red spots like the o
ne from last year, but sickly and trembling, with a heavy belly. I told him to feed it milk and not crusts, and to let it walk a little, since he carries it all the time. Later he reappeared with other panhandlers. I’m shown the milk, the dog: the little animal scampers about, is more lively, wags its tail, runs like a puppy toward the hands or feet you shake to entertain it.

  In the evening, the dog slept at the bottom of the kid’s immense pocket. He woke up, yawned, was brought out to go pee.

  Two whores stop, short young women with big bottoms, in trousers, wearing a nice perfume. Polite and polished old gals. They see the dog; the heaviest one bends down and picks it up, raises it to her eyes, checks its sex (female), gets soft-hearted, cuddles it, wants to buy it. The kid paid a franc for it. She offers ten, fifty, then a hundred. My panhandler refuses, very sullenly. The lovely ladies keep talking. Nothing doing. They put the puppy back on the ground. The big pink-and-almond behinds move off toward the lights of the cafes.

  An instant later, the little one asks if I want his dog as a gift. Surprised, I say that I wouldn’t know what to do with it; I don’t even have a courtyard for it to piss in, and I move around too much. He nods. The kid puts his creature back to bed, and it sleeps against the edge of the pocket.

  After an interruption of several weeks, I see this little guy again. He’s alone, very badly dressed, his face is lean and gloomy, his voice cold, his head completely shaved. He denies that the police picked him up. His dog is dead.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tony Duvert (1945–2008) is the author of fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction. His fifth novel, Paysage de fantaisie (Strange Landscape), won the prestigious Prix Médicis in 1973. Other books translated into English include the novel When Jonathan Died and the scathing critique of sex and society Good Sex Illustrated (Semiotext(e), 2007).