by Salim Bachi
“Other people change their faces one after the other with uncanny speed and wear them out. At first it seems to them that they’ve enough to last them for ever, but before they’re even forty they’re down to the last of them. Of course, there’s a tragic side to it. They’re not used to looking after faces; their last one wore through in a week and has holes in it, and in many places it’s as thin as paper; bit by bit the bottom layer, the non-face, shows through and they go about wearing that.
“But that woman, that woman: bent forward with her head in her hands, she’d completely fallen into herself. It was at the corner of Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I began to tread softly the moment I caught sight of her. Poor people shouldn’t be disturbed when they’re deep in thought. What they’re searching for might still occur to them.
“The street was too empty; its emptiness was bored with itself and it pulled away the sounds of my footsteps and clattered around all over the place with them like a wooden clog. Out of fright the woman reared up too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there, the hollowness of its shape. It cost me an indescribable effort to keep looking at those hands and not at what they’d torn away from. I dreaded seeing the inside of a face, but I was much more afraid of the exposed rawness of the head without a face.”
IWAS WORKING on a modern literature PhD about Casanova at the Sorbonne. I supplemented my hours of study with practical research carried out with the help of fellow students, who were chosen for their long hair, ample bust and slim legs. My first victim was a slender schooner called Caline, who had a mane full of Venetian-red highlights.
I’d learnt from reading The Memoirs of Casanova that young women in the lagoon city covered their hair with a mixture of saffron and lemon, then dried it on the terraces of the palazzi in summer to obtain this particular colour. Caline had no need of such methods to suffuse her face with light. When she undressed, a quick look down below confirmed that the truth is often hidden from plain sight. So, as a fascinated disciple of Mesmer, another illustrious character from that sublime century, I moved closer to that stomach, full and round as the sun, and kissed it with burning lips and a penetrating tongue.
And Caline, who wasn’t shy—her dissertation was on the eighteenth-century libertine writers—spread her thighs so that I could explore all the subtleties therein. Being an assiduous researcher, I pored over her sex to extract its very substance. I parted pretty Caline’s lips with the delicate touch of a butterfly-collector extracting the lepidopteran from his net. My fingers were gently spreading the brightly coloured wings of the lovely insect I was about to devour, when Caline shut her elytra against me and turned over to show me her buttocks. No one could find fault with that; she had such perfect, round, firm buttocks that the mere sight made a poor student like myself lose control: my proboscis lengthened and knocked against that arse, then entered via the dark line splitting that miracle of nature into two globes, while Caline, an amorous nymph searching for her imago, pressed back against my cock.
Caline wasn’t a screamer. When I disappeared between her thighs, a ship sucked in by that maelstrom, she didn’t make the slightest murmur, she just fluttered her wings like a belladonna or amaryllis flower, and the skin of her face turned the colour of her hair, her gaze blurred and her eyes rolled up before closing as she flowed, liquid and dreamy between my fingers: Ophelia floating on the water in her white veils.
Caline was flighty, just like the butterflies, and I didn’t manage to capture her often; despite lying in wait for her when she came out of lectures, she evaded me, as evanescent as a soul, shifting like those flames adored by the Persians, which divided the world into darkness and light. I put up with my lover’s changes of mood and let her go with good grace. I consoled myself with another woman, whom I met in the university cafeteria, and who was the polar opposite of Caline.
Mazarine was preparing to take the teachers’ certificate in philosophy and looked like Shakespeare’s dark lady. Another man might have said she was bad news and would have run a mile. She dressed all in black and would lose herself in endless dark reveries that would suck me down and destroy my proverbial good mood. Mazarine looked something like one of the Divine Marquis’s heroines. She was a philosopher imprisoned in her boudoir. Mazarine spent her time pondering on being and nothingness, taking roads leading nowhere, and dividing herself between being and time; that is, when she wasn’t discussing ethics with Nicomaque, her classmate. Nicomaque was fond of Spinoza and was wondering whether he shouldn’t soon join Toni Negri, now in prison, in order to support the armed conflict begun in Italy two decades earlier.
Mazarine and Nicomaque, who thought I was a political simpleton and a philosophical jerk, believed that the Republic had been superseded since the death of Socrates and no recourse to method would reinstate it. Even Das Kapital, armed with its will to power, was, beyond considerations of good and evil, powerless to bring back the ancient liberal heresy and the illusion of democracy. Purely to annoy those morons, I would launch into a defence of Socrates, then invite them to a banquet in one of those revolting little restaurants in the Latin Quarter, where you could drink as much wine as you liked, on Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, for example, or somewhere between the Rue de la Harpe and the Boulevard Saint-Michel, now entirely given over to second-hand-clothes shops and hordes of American girls looking for adventure in the oldest and most authentic quarter of Paris. It goes without saying that my invitation to travel was usually ignored on the pretext of urgently having to read the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which I confused with the ficus of my childhood, which grew on the Cours de la Révolution in Carthago and which, instead of enlightening my mind, provided me with shade in the scorching midsummer heat.
When evening came, Nicomaque went back to sleep in his tub and I was left alone with Mazarine in a room that Pascal would have liked, before falling asleep between two harrowing infinities. As a hedonist, some might say a cynic, I pounced on Mazarine because it has long been known that man is a wolf to woman, and women are the future of men, when they lie down on a bed and accommodate the seed that never dies in their womb.
A dedicated reader of the Diary of a Seducer and the 120 Jours de Sodome, I found I was armed with the necessary, contingent concepts to appeal to Mazarine, who was more like Justine than the Princess of Cleves when it came to what she liked in bed. Mazarine never took off her clothes, you had to rip off her dress, her bra, her black lace knickers, and tear off stockings held up by an ingenious system. Mazarine liked to be bound and treated roughly by her lover who, fascinated once more by this new experience, let himself be guided by his mistress’s unbridled imagination as she invented obscene storylines, scenes in which he played the lead, often an oriental potentate dressed as a caliph from the Arabian Nights or a lascivious sheikh straight out of a Tintin comic book.
The Bashi-Bazouk captured the innocent Mazarine, threw her down onto the floor and dragged her by the hair onto a carpet that she’d spread out beforehand. I then ripped off her clothes as she fought back wildly, kicking out in all directions, which put my back out and left me black and blue.
When Mazarine was naked, I skilfully tied her up and suspended her from the ceiling. I became a master of knots and knew all the tricks of the trade; one day, my expertise even earned me an invitation to Japan. I stayed in one of those fine wood-and-paper houses which were designed to withstand earthquakes, tsunamis and other disasters, and had high, sturdy rafters from which young women with coal-black manes could be hung like lanterns.
In the meantime, insatiable, crazy Mazarine screamed and raved, and spat at the poor leather-clad wretch wielding a ridiculous cat-o’-nine-tails, trying to quieten her before the police showed up and arrested this Indiana Jones for assault, gross indecency, breach of the peace at night, false imprisonment and acts of barbarism. So with a heavy heart, I gave Mazarine a good spanking, which calmed her down. She wept a few tears before untying herself and subjecting me to the worst
-imaginable indignities in retaliation. These erotic devices, which equalled anything in De Sade—I employed his hilarious methods every evening—eventually wore me out. I missed lovely Caline and her more temperate ways.
So you can imagine my relief when Mazarine went to Italy with Nicomaque to join the Red Brigades, or what was left of them, scattered here and there in transalpine prisons.
CRINOLINE’S MANE OF HAIR was almost red. She was luscious as a watermelon, with a beautiful face and rare, almost superhuman sex appeal. Men’s eyes lit up like Chinese lanterns when she walked down the street. She could have been mistaken for Norma Jean, not so much Marilyn, although she moved in the same fluid way, sashaying like a flame about to be blown out. Like the Californian bombshell, Crinoline dreamt of setting the world on fire as an actress after causing a couple of dozen hearts to self-combust. She’d worked in a drama school, but had never been paid a fee; still, she had fingered the purses of every man in the troupe, from the extras to the director, Yannis Karski, who was a fan of the theatre of cruelty.
His actors performed naked and experimented with strange choreographies. You could be sceptical at the sight of those well-fed young women and men piled on top of each other to simulate the death camps. According to Yannis Karski, their performances in Avignon had been even more awe-inspiring. That had been on the fringe circuit, of course, murmured the director, who organized free workshops that entailed taking his students for long rambles in the woods. The aim of these exercises was survival in a hostile environment. Without provisions or a compass, the apprentice actors had to find their way back after camping out for several days in very overcrowded conditions. Naturally, repeated Yannis Karski, they had to throw all their inhibitions to the wind and abandon all bourgeois notions of morality.
Crinoline was proud that she had passed through the great Yannis’s hands. He’d opened up new horizons for her, and had moulded her after the crucial step of taking her as his mistress.
“Yannis has gone beyond Aristotelian theatre. He has challenged five thousand years of tradition. No more mimesis! We were totally in the Noh! We danced, drank, and fucked under the stars. You wouldn’t understand. We suffered too. A lot.”
With Yannis Karski’s help, Crinoline had become a mediocre actress, except in bed, where she turned into a lioness and devoured me, screaming noisily. Crinoline was a pleasure-seeker with the voice of a bald prima donna in rude health. She would straddle me for hours while sounding the alarm, engulfing me so entirely that I forgot the world, my ears filled with her roaring orgasms, my prick and balls were drenched. As well as being a songbird, Crinoline was a one-woman fountain. The first time, I was taken aback when I was showered by the forceful stream she projected. I was sure she’d pissed on me.
That wasn’t the case at all, explained the young woman, who produced copious amounts of a liquid that was as colourless and odourless as eau-de-vie. Crinoline was a little ashamed at spilling herself like this. I tried the liqueur that Crinoline distilled, but it didn’t taste of anything. Crinoline was right. It was a mysterious product which no one had thought to patent. It was a shame. Liquid women like Crinoline were on the verge of extinction, so they had to be protected like the panda, polar bear or blue whale. There were renowned scientists who thought that these women drenched their victims as they climaxed in order to dampen their ardour. Snapping your banjo string was a real danger with those vixens who came onto you like amazons, turned you on like little dynamos and pressed your valves as if you were a trumpet in a free-jazz solo. In their own way, they were sparing their rides by splashing them with water to cool them down.
Other engineers in female mechanics claimed that these women simply pissed on their lovers to satisfy some obscure fantasy. A hypothesis called into question by my knowledge of liquids, which was as bottomless as the ocean, since I’d personally sampled all the cunts in creation, particularly Giovanna’s, and she was a woman who loved her water sports.
I didn’t deny there was something comical about the tsunamis orchestrated by Crinoline. And yet my desire increased tenfold and my cock grew even longer because of them. I lost my memory between Crinoline’s thighs as she raced over me like a locomotive, making me blow my whistle for minutes on end. But, one day, Crinoline left me. Yannis Karski had returned and wanted her back in his troupe. She took French leave, slipping away like the water between her legs. I missed her a little, but not that much.
It didn’t take long to replace her: a plump professor at the Sorbonne; a few nurses picked up at the Salpêtrière Hospital one day when I had a problem of an intimate nature that led me to consult an eminent urologist, Professor Fawcett, who declared me fit for service and introduced me to his entire team, as well as his wife, who was only too happy to finish the consultation that her husband had started; two student nurses sunbathing in the Jardin du Luxembourg, whom I fondled behind the Medici Fountain; my neighbour at 35 Boulevard du Montparnasse, who was unfortunate enough to ask me for a knob of butter and who lost her virginity while dancing her last tango in Paris on the bedroom floor; the cleaning lady who was young and pretty and who looked nothing like the horrible Madame Pinto she occasionally replaced; a racist Portuguese woman; and an Egyptian opera singer I met in the Parc Monceau—she lived in the apartment block opposite and practised scales fit to deafen her neighbours, who called her a North African cow and a Maghrebi bitch, causing her to seek consolation in my arms. Then there was the baker’s wife who lovingly kneaded and baked my baguette; the cashier from the Franprix supermarket in Rue Vavin, whose glasses drove me wild because removing them excited me more than unzipping her dresses between the cartons of Candia milk, Nestlé chocolate and plain or fruit Yoplait yoghurt; and the RATP driver who came to my aid when I was attacked by two skinheads on a Metro train and whose light green uniform, which cinched in her breasts and waist, was, in my opinion, a sensual triumph and by far my most favourite thing. There was also the only female taxi driver I ever met who didn’t look like a man and who listened to The Four Seasons, which led us to improvise a Baroque recital in the Class C Mercedes she’d parked in the middle of the Bois de Boulogne, while strange onlookers gathered to watch and listen to the concert. Not to mention the female passers-by described by Baudelaire, the girls of Paris, the cheeky skirts on the Pont des Arts lifted by the wind, love at twenty, the young girls painted by Pascin; and a reincarnation, at the exact age she was when she met Picasso, of Marie-Thérèse, whom I left for fear of ending up in jail again—I wasn’t a famous painter and moral standards had changed a great deal in a century; and the girls from the Bateau-Lavoir, Place Émile-Goudeau, who were reading the engraved bronze plaque that said that various famous painters had lived, worked and loved in this square: Modigliani committed suicide, Chagall played violin on a roof, Soutine flayed animals which, in his lifetime, frightened the burghers of Calais, whose company I never sought out, being so afraid of the greed and stupidity criticized by Flaubert; and the women of Montparnasse between the Rue Campagne-Première and the Rue de la Gaîté where, one evening, I had greedily kissed a young Italian tourist and taken her to a hotel room on the Rue Delambre to worship her stomach, legs and buttocks; and finally, one night at the far end of the Île Saint-Louis, another willing stray, whom I covered with my voluminous black coat, then caressed and penetrated, while the bateaux-mouches illuminated us and the tourists cheered because Paris is the town of lovers, Paris is a celebration and Paris will always be Paris for those who love each other everywhere, on the banks of the Seine, beneath the porches, and in the streets, like cats and dogs.
XII
THE SORBONNE. The Cour d’honneur. The building dated from the nineteenth century and provided a setting for the seventeenth-century chapel built by Richelieu, a rare example of classical architecture in Paris. This was where that wretched highway robber was buried, then exhumed by sans-culottes, who dismembered the body and threw it to the jubilant crowd. The skull was eventually retrieved, in two pieces, during Victor Hugo’s centu
ry, and replaced in the chapel where it was sealed in concrete. The cardinal had a hard head and a quick hand when it came to fleecing the Parisians with crushing taxes. The people of Paris, before they disappeared in the late fifties to be replaced by a bleating herd motivated only by childish nonsense, were vulgar, tumultuous, free and resentful. The women were strumpets and nags, who hadn’t yet begun to regard themselves as Belle Époque courtesans. And, more than a century after the Cardinal’s death, a few stout-hearted fellows, whose great-grandfathers had died crippled by debt, unleashed their fury on his wretched sepulchre in the name of revenge.
I was waiting for Caline again, and again she was late. A young student was sitting next to me, her things—a bag, various papers and a CD—were spread out on the stone bench on which we were sitting. She looked anxious. And yet she was talking nineteen to the dozen, trying to fill the empty spaces in her head. She was chatting to her friend. A scruffy young man, looking trendy in Levi’s jeans and jacket. They were talking about Nietzsche, and Plato. Nothing they said was worth repeating. An exchange of platitudes, scraps from their lectures, clichés gleaned from books. We live in such ignorant times!
Tourists walk by in single file. Some of the sheep are interested in the chapel, the others in the sundial which is supposed to tell the time. When, I wonder, will they ban mandatory package holidays? Will we have to wait for a global epidemic or a viral plague to force nations to ban flights, travel from the Antipodes, Teutonic charters, Tunisian beaches, the Vatican, Mecca? A new religion will soon be born that will proclaim the reign of Intelligence and Pleasure, and I shall be its Prophet.
