by Bernard Uzan
I answer no; he insists, by attempting to prove that this a good thing for me, like a catharsis, a useful experience, a way of breaking with my years of solitude…he insists and insists and in the end here we are in bathing suits posing like Apollo on the stage, with a dozen other guys who must be spending most of their time in the gym working on building up their muscles and who look like cartoon characters.
Gaston is eliminated in the first round but I make it through the second and third rounds to reach the finals with two other clowns… Gaston is screaming his pleasure and joy, he is applauding loudly, laughs to tears like a child when the winner is announced and is given a trophy and a kiss from Miss Pau. It’s me! I won! The horrible stunted child, the one who limps, the ridiculous little cripple is now Mr. Muscle Pau. Nobody understands why tears are rolling down my cheeks, why I look so unhappy. I made it you bunch of greenhorns, and you can’t stand it and I say no to you! I say no to everything, to everything because I have defeated you. Now I can refuse everything.
“Julien! How handsome you are. Come, come next to me!”
You want me? Well then, you shall have me. Mr. Muscle Pau is going to be all yours. She’s smiling; she looks like the little girl I saw the other day at the carnival in Pigalle: she was sucking on a huge caramel lollipop and she had a big smile and her cheeks were on fire.
I’m so thirsty, I feel like having pineapple juice. When I was on the island of La Réunion, I was drinking pineapple juice five times a day.
But for god’s sake, I’m amazed, she’s going to direct operations and I must do the same... My head between her legs, I’ll go into the deepest part of her, to her greatest intimacy. And then it’s the whole symphony.
“Julien, Julien, it’s good, it’s good, Oh! You’re driving me crazy, I can no longer ah … I can no longer… I can’t…take me, take, take me please!”
I pretend not to hear her words…and I continue my work, without thinking about anything, without any kind of pleasure, without displeasure either but with no feelings whatsoever…
…Goya looks at me and smiles, and on the other wall I discover the reproduction of a picture of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. But why is the same identical reproduction in every young woman’s studio? That picture is becoming some kind of mania or a trauma of sorts; it has to correspond to some obsession. If I were a psychologist or a modern art critic I’d be able to find an explanation, those people always have something to say.
“Julien, you don’t understand, I want it, I want to. I beg you, make me feel like a woman!”
She finally says the great fateful words!
Better and better, or rather worse and worse, psychology in the bedroom.
“Make me feel like a woman!”
Perhaps mother used to say those same words to Carmelo.
I shouldn’t think about that or I’ll lose my hard on. In any case I can only give in when faced with such insistence. I lay on top of her. She lets out another Ohhhhhhh! The third time in the afternoon, she’s repeating herself. Every time I screw a woman I have the feeling that I’m working in a factory, I come and go like a piston, my back follows and I watch the goings on like a bystander watching a train go by… It’s five thirty in the afternoon at St. Sulpice church… The walls in the room are covered with cracks, the paint is peeling off, the furniture is chipped, the faucet in the kitchen is running uninterruptedly, everything is fucked out, my piston keeps on doing its job; if I were to do this every day I’d go nuts.
I can’t bring myself to pretend that I love her or play the man in love with this woman who is free of any inhibitions…it’s something I can’t bring myself to do, even if I could, since I specialize in playing romantic lead roles.
Yes… I am playing the leading young lover in the romantic title roles.
The first time I tried that kind of part was to leave its mark on me forever. I’m sharing the dressing room with the other main male role and I have established a good and almost friendly relationship of mutual respect with him…. On opening night we’re extremely on edge because someone told us that Jean-Louis Barrault was present in the audience. Jean-Louis Barrault, the hero of the French theater, who played the mime in the movie Les enfants du paradis, the director of the Odéon national theater. During the intermission we hear someone knocking softly on the dressing room door. We open and it’s Barrault, a skinny little man all wrinkled like an old apple. He smiles and says, “I appreciate the play very much, you’re both very much in character. I can see that you have worked hard at it and given it a lot of thought.” We smile with pleasure; the great Barrault likes us. Perhaps he might choose us for a part in his prestigious company, and then he adds, without smiling and very seriously, “But I must say that one of you two has also a lot of talent…” He comes up to us and we shake his hand with all the respect he deserves. He closes the door quietly, probably heading back to the audience to listen to the second act and my colleague, who has a much more sophisticated sense of humor than I, laughs aloud, shrugging his shoulders.
I am more in a bad mood and don’t laugh.
My colleague will go on and have a great acting career. I keep getting parts in the former colonies, in the “Maisons de la Culture,” and a few suburban theaters.
St. Sulpice rings on the quarter hour…. Boredom becomes unbearable; I must think of something else, like…. Something that has nothing to do with her, who still moans like a top that’s turning on itself… let’s see. a man drowning—no it’s the same thing… the slaughterhouse where they’re cutting the heads of bulls with a single slash of the sword—no it’s also the same thing.
The slaughterhouse is a truly fascinating place and I think I have seen the most incredible of them all.
I’m on the island of La Reunion to play the role of Perdican in On ne badine pas avec l’amour by Musset and the part of Horace in The School of Wives by my master, Molière.
The island of La Réunion, a French island lost in the Indian Ocean, an exotic jewel isolated from the rest of the world, far from everything, a paradise given to man to take advantage of it shamelessly, and I am enjoying myself like a man possessed. I drink in all its exotic charms like a convict with two years left to live or fifteen years to catch up on.
I am living with the other actors in the plays in a huge villa on the beach of St. Denis and the first five days are dedicated to rehearsals during the day and starting at six every evening the party begins… We are screwing every one of the little ladies of the island with their ebony and mahogany bodies, and for the ladies of the French theater, the men of La Réunion with their bronze bodies. We drink white rum from the bottle, swim naked in the Indian Ocean, and basically live like colonizers who think they can do as they please because they are white, they are from the parent country, and on top of everything else they are actors.
We are or rather we act as Greek gods in a conquered land...a bunch of real assholes that fully justify the hatred and the contempt some people could have for what we represent.
Every evening on the beach I barbecue lobsters, which were simply resting peacefully on the boulders and invite me with their heavyset eyes to grab them and eat them.
After five days of that kind of life full of enrichment and surprises where I make my contribution to bringing culture to the colonies I go to sleep around two in the morning like every other night after drinking my bottle of rum and dancing like a jerk with half-naked dolls on the moonlit beach.
I’m awakened by horrible screams that seem to come from outside, the screams of children or women being disemboweled, accompanied by crashing sounds as if the trees were being smashed with power hammers… I snuggle closer to the girl with nipples as sweet as pineapples asleep next to me and I whisper a few worried words. She doesn’t wake up; she sleeps happily satisfied after having tasted the love of an important person and she is indifferent both to my fear and the screams.
I muster all the courage I can and finally get up while she turns around and snores. We mee
t down stairs in the hall—Jean and two or three other actors in the troupe—and even though we can recognize the jitters in each one’s eyes we all decide to go and see the reason behind those deadly screams… We go outside in the moonlight, not a breath of wind, the ocean is absolutely calm without a single ripple, the screams of women and children are now more intense and have become intolerable and some in our group don’t want to keep moving forward…
Jean and I walk on in the direction of the incessant screaming, wondering how many women and children are being killed. We walk for some twenty minutes on the sand and cross a thicket until we reach a clearing. The screams of women and children that are tearing through the night have now increased with the screams of men talking and calling each other and we think we recognize Creole singing that is hoarse because of the heavy drinking.
Under the white moon, the night is as clear as day, filled with horrible searing sounds.
Jean pulls at my arm and is repeating again and again: “Julien, what is it…what is it…” We get a bit closer….in a corral that is the size of a school yard, surrounded by barbed wire, we can see scores of giant pigs running in every direction as they are being pursued by men armed with machetes and clubs. The pigs are screaming in fear and confusion and once the machetes and clubs beat down on them, they scream and howl in their pain and death… God! They really appear to be suffering like human beings, their voices are human, their screams are human. Blood spurts everywhere and the sound of bones being crushed is deafening; the pigs fall down without a struggle one after the other on their backs or on their sides, crying just like children…. Pools of blood are formed and flow outside the corral where they have dug trenches so that the blood accumulates in large puddles.
Men are running after the animals savagely, mechanically, and when a pig falls they all converge on another one… On an adjoining wall two men are sitting with their legs dangling as they are singing and drinking rum.
From a truck parked next to the corral comes the sound of a radio playing French love songs. I think I can recognize the voice of Edith Piaf as she sings.
Non, rien de rien, non je ne regrette rien...
From time to time one of the men on the wall sings along with Edith. And meanwhile the screams of the pigs that are being massacred go on and on… Wild dogs are assembled all around the corral, barking and lapping up the blood that is constantly overflowing in the channels and growling with pleasure… The hallucinating scene goes on and on. Jean begins to throw up and I grab him by the arm and we walk back.
I wake up the girl with the sweet pineapple breasts who still sleeps and ask her if she knows anything about the massacre. She answers: “Oh, yes, don’t worry…it’s the slaughterhouse,” and goes back to sleep…the slaughterhouse… the slaughterhouse…
“Julien, Julien, I’m coming, I’m coming…it’s so good, more, more, make me come some more, I’m going to die, you bastard… You’re a bastard, you make me come too much. I never have come as much as with you….”
They all say the same things to the last stallion that mounts them, the last one to speak is always the one who is right, or rather the last one to fuck is right.
Amen!
“Bastard”? I find her language rather rough.
That’s the least one can say, she is coming... She is all dripping with tears everywhere, her mascara is running, she looks like a character in a Fellini film where actors wearing white make up cry over their sorrow and misfortune and the tears streak down their cheeks whitened with chalk. They cry just like this bitch who is in tears because I’m fucking her. Oh! But yes, I’m still fucking her, it had escaped my mind almost completely. Well now it’s time to change the program.
“Turn around.”
“…?”
“Nicole, turn around.”
“Yes Julien, anything you want.”
Even from the back she is beautiful, suntanned with white lines. I ride her with fervor.
“Yes, Julien yes! Oh! It’s so good! I’m going to come again.”
She’s going to come again…she is! And I’m back on the assembly line. I suppose orgies must be just like that, working on the assembly line. You put in the screws without really knowing what you’re doing. I’ve never been to an orgy because I don’t like the company of other assembly line workers. The assembly line…the invention of the petty bourgeois class, of communist exploiters like Lenin, you work on the assembly line, make love on the assembly line, die on the assembly line while you are in chains.
To make love to a woman you love—I wonder if that is really good or whether it’s also as boring as the assembly line. She keeps on moaning and I’m wondering what the hell I’m doing there on a bed I don’t know with a woman I don’t know who is moaning. She’s had enough, she wants me to come now, she wants my seed she says, she wants my honey, she insists. I’m still hard but I can’t…I can’t do it… Nothing wants to explode, the machine is broken, it refuses and won’t give any life on this death bed; the machine seems to be telling me very coldly: No! It’s not for you!
After almost two hours at work the machine can still go on but it can’t cross the finish line, it can’t end triumphantly… Once again…
I am a great, an extraordinary lover. I can control and last a long time as hard as a sword but what they don’t know is that the sword can’t end in triumph, it cannot…
The Buddhist monks with whom I spent three months a few years ago would be the first to be surprised. I went into their temple during one of my trips to Asia, the devil only knows why they accepted me…
I developed an interest in Buddhist philosophy for a long time and I hope to find the solution to my problems thanks to it, answers to my anxieties. But actually for three months I spend whole hours in contemplating my navel and looking within my deepest soul for the true meaning of my self without finding it. But I do learn one thing that will stay with me forever and will turn me into a desirable and popular man: that is how to control my ejaculation. I can reach an orgasm without ejaculating and therefore be in control of myself, of my partners, and I believe of the universe.
No one warned me that I was risking what I am experiencing now: that I can no longer ejaculate at all but can hold an erection for hours without being able to reach the final moment.
And now like a fat, satiated and ruminating cow, she sleeps. She sleeps and I am there wide-awake and dizzy, my eyes are open, my belly is empty and my legs are feeling flabby, my heart is blank and my feet flat.
And Nicole… sleeps, with her nipples dilated, bloated, and hairy; she sleeps quietly while I torture myself, and die quietly. I have known another one like this who after doing it would fall asleep loudly sucking her thumb; she must have been born dissatisfied; another one would smoke three cigarettes in a row just like Lauren Bacall; another would have an ice cold bath like Joan Crawford. Another one would sing West Side Story and the one that wanted me to sing West Side Story; and Mercedes, who would get hungry; and Julie, who would get thirsty; and Eliane, who wanted to go out; and Michele; who wanted to stay home and….I, the extraordinary lover, I remain knocked out by emptiness and the impossibility of emptying myself.
He’ll never make it, but you’ll see, but no, but yes, but no yes, no, no, yes, no, nothing, nothing at all...
I must get out of here and get out fast, very fast, I have to leave… But I watch her sleep and I stay for a long time. I’m fed up with my fucked-up self, my fucking skin. She’s now just a woman asleep and I can’t leave her all alone; if she wakes up suddenly calling my name and I’m not there it would be horrible. I look at her and she looks like Mother suddenly on her hospital bed.
My mother…is sick in bed and I’m strong, she needs me and if I feel like it I can laugh in her face and just walk away, turn my back on her and she’ll scream after me, she’ll call out for me and I’ll pretend I can’t hear. My mother is defeated.
Now it’s my turn.
I can recite poems, sing or shut up, pout, scream
or make jokes, I can dance in the room in the hospital and even play castanets and she…she remains lying down, motionless, speechless, without moving her lips, a supplicant begging for my presence with her eyes. I am the king, the king of my sick mother… No more servants, no more husband, no more Carmelo, nothing left, but me, only me.
Me and my mother, my mother and I.
Mother, Mother why did you do it, why did you betray my father’s love, and my love with another man? Why? But I can’t tell her anything, I can’t think of anything.
Mother, poor Mother, you’re suffering, you’re going to die, and I forgive you, I don’t hate you anymore, I look at your poor face of what used to be you and I see nothing that was you. If only you knew how much I love you, I think it, I whisper it, I say it to you in a very low voice… I tell you and you smile with happiness as you cried of despair.
“Julien, how could you live with all those years of pent-up hatred? What did I do for you to hate me so much?”
She cries, long tears roll down her face and she once again becomes the mother of my childhood..
“My son, if only you knew how much I suffered when I felt your hatred, your despair and your silence.”
“Mother, you suffered and I, I died ten times, so tell me now, tell me everything.”
“Your father never really managed to recover. He suffered too much and could never forget what he’d lived through. He was a poor man, sick and unhappy, destroyed by his own life.”
“Don’t say that. He wasn’t a poor man, he did everything for me. He tried everything.”
“No, he couldn’t, he was incapable of it, the pain had made absent, he was never able to forget, his life was filled with ghosts and horrible visions, he saw destroyers of shadows everywhere and turned me into a hopeless shadow. Perhaps someday you’ll understand the truth and shall forgive me and you’ll finally be at peace with me and above all with yourself.”
“I would rather hold on to my illusions about him, that’s all I have left to avoid sinking, to avoid losing myself completely. Leave me with my illusions about him.”
