The Sextine Chapel

by Hervé Le Tellier

  Anna and Harry. On the third floor of a building on rue des Francs-Bourgeois in Paris, Harry, wearing a dressing gown and with two days’ grey growth, opens the door to Anna, who drags him at once into the bedroom. She sheds her clothes on the way, and is naked by the time she pushes him onto the bed with a laugh. Anna whispers into his ear: “Do you know what? The sexual act is to time what the tiger is to space.” “Who said that, you?” “No, Bataille,” Anna replies before nibbling his stubby penis tenderly. Bataille? Harry has never heard of him.

  Once again, Harry notes that Anna has nothing over his wife, but for him, variety is definitely the spice of life.

  Harry and Oriane. In a trendy Parisian restaurant, Oriane has dragged Harry into the palatial toilets, tiled with mosaics and azulejos. There, sitting on the pine seat, she drags him toward her. She pulls down his trousers, his boxer shorts, kisses his belly, strokes his buttocks, his thighs, and smilingly brushes, but only brushes, against his upright member. Not even a minute has gone by before an overexcited Harry is ready to beg for her to act.

  Oriane is tempted to ask him for money, just to see his reaction. OK, she says to herself, but what’s the going rate?

  Oriane and Vincent. The last rays of the April sun caress the statues of the Jardin du Luxembourg and Oriane’s greying hair. She and Vincent, sitting on a bench, are quietly discussing Biblical forbidden fruit, while a growing and unstoppable erection in Vincent’s trousers is about — he knows — to push him into trying to kiss her. He lets his dick do the thinking. Because, as the French put it, he clearly doesn’t have enough blood to feed both his brain and his cock at the same time.

  Vincent sometimes thinks that he would choose his partners more carefully if he had a vagina rather than a penis.

  Vincent and Chloe. On the goum rug of a bourgeois apartment, Vincent and Chloe are copulating in the so-called missionary position, which, incidentally, Bonobo monkeys also adopt. Chloe raises her legs, and grips Vincent’s pelvis with her thighs, thus making his penis enter her even more deeply. Vincent’s pace speeds up, scarlet heat radiates from his glans, which is rubbing against the membrane of her vagina, the delicious burning sensation sets his entire belly on fire, making him lose control completely.

  He doesn’t want to say it, he doesn’t want to say it, but then, he says it anyway, I love you, I love you. He immediately regrets this moment of abandon, even though it intensifies his orgasm.

  Chloe and Johann.

  Smothering the world

  Pressed over my ears

  Her thighs

  wrote the celebrated poet Teishi Hiro, whose work Johann is translating. His tongue takes another turn around Chloe’s sex, and the haiku’s poetic assertion comes true at once. Chloe’s vulvae have a sapid, almost salty taste. The Japanese poet would have found just the right adjectives to describe the unique tang of women’s sexes. Maybe he would have used the word umami, which is unfortunately untranslatable.

  As regards the senses, Johann wonders, if he were blind, whether he could stop himself from wondering out how cute the woman he was tonguing really was.

  Johann and Qiu. On the Romanesque capital of a pillar in the cathedral of Autun, an anonymous artist once sculpted a Flight to Egypt. His untaught technique doesn’t mean that his work isn’t also technically taut, Johann thinks. Beside him, Qiu, who has never before had such a hirsute lover, is stroking his chest again and again in fascination. Then, her hand follows the pathway of hair down his belly and, what a surprise! further still, into his boxer shorts. Fantasy is to sex what religion is to the real world, Johann thinks to himself, unwittingly parodying Karl Marx.

  As for his book, he thinks he’s now found the title: The Penis Mightier than the Word (his publisher will turn it down, however, on the grounds that some female readers won’t dare ask for it in bookstores).

  Qiu and Xavier. Buzz buzz, goes the irritatingly persistent Cairo mosquito. Its jolting hum saturates the vibrant air in Xavier’s room, meanwhile his face is nosing into Qiu’s pussy, proving to her once more that, as Boris Vian rightly said, the tongue is a sexual organ occasionally used for speaking. Or for eating, Hugo von Hofmannsthal added, long before the invention of Beaver Steaks.

  Qiu blushes up to her ears as she remembers having once called a student, who could pick up languages like a parrot, a cunning linguist.

  Xavier and Elvire. On the terrace of a Paris bar, Xavier is drinking a half pint of Gringo Honeymoon and Elvire a glass of barley water. Elvire’s cell phone beeps; she reads the text message, sighs, and says she has to go, before bending down beside him and whispering in his ear. He won’t be able to recall exactly what was said, but it featured — in no particular order — the words balls, dick, suck, swallow, fuck. She kisses him on the tip of his nose, then hurries away.

  Does Xavier realize that some people are willing to spend $4.50 a minute to hear such things? Though there are discounts for loyal customers.

  Elvire and Laurent. Two o’ clock in the morning: the television is broadcasting the next day’s schedule again and again. Laurent, curled up behind Elvire, is stroking her clitoris with his finger, while insinuating his penis, which is still seeking full rigidity, into her slightly sore vagina. They have made love so many times this evening that this attempt may well not succeed. Then the remote control tumbles off the bed, switching the image to a porno film featuring actors in far finer fettle than the two of them.

  Where had Elvire read that pornographic films multiply by four hundred the number of asses you see in a lifetime? Yes, but, she thinks, 63 % of all statistics are false.

  Laurent and Sofia. It is stiflingly hot. Lying on a cotton duvet in a three-room apartment in the southern suburbs of Paris, furnished by a Swedish manufacturer, Laurent and Sofia are rubbing their gleaming, agile bodies against each other. Laurent finds Sofia extremely exciting, but also as smelly and sweaty as a cyclist. She suddenly shifts away from him and goes down on his member, which she takes in her mouth and sucks energetically. To their mutual surprise, he comes between her lips only seconds later, with a jet of sperm as quick as a bumblebee’s flight.

  Sofia tells him, with a certain pride, that her tongue piercing heightens men’s sensations during fellatio. Laurent feels rather disorientated.

  Sofia and Zach. Lying on the teak deck of an elegant yacht, Sofia has spread her tanned thighs. Rocked by the gentle swell of the Aegean Sea, she surrenders herself to Zach, who is stroking her clitoris with a gently precise fingertip. When he notices signs of imminent orgasm in Sofia’s breathing, Zach whispers his Bataille citation into her ear: “The sexual act is to time what the tiger is to space,” which he still does not understand. She gently gauges his penis in her hand.

  “You call that a tiger?” Sofia replies quite simply, either playfully or cruelly, who knows? And who, Zach wonders, said that in sexagenarian, there is still sex?

  Zach and Galata. In his Epigrams, Martial wrote: nemo est, Thai, senex ad irrumandum (no one is too old, Thai, to be sucked off). Perhaps not, but on the patio of this superb country house in the Lubéron, Galata’s heroic efforts are having no effect on Zach’s member, which remains more like a noodle than a triumphant totem pole. She gives it a final kiss, before diving into the (guitar-shaped) pool, while Zach, to lighten up the atmosphere, tells her his joke about “A new drug, called Viazac, ever heard of it?”

  It’s half Viagra™ and half Prozac™: you don’t get a hard-on but you don’t give a damn. Galata laughs politely; she’s already heard it.

  Galata and Niels. In the sauna which Niels has had installed in his Soho apartment, Galata is glistening with sweat and presenting her buttocks to him, while he strokes them, kisses them, and, after a long moment of hesitation, separates her two globes so as to rim her backdoor, the one-eyed beast, the artists’ entrance, the evening star, the maw, in other words that violet carnation famously celebrated by Rimbaud.

  If my sex life became public knowledge, Niels thinks, then everyone would be horrified. He sup
poses that everybody probably thinks the same thing, but this fails to reassure him.

  Niels and Ursula. The convent, which survived the great Lisbon earthquake of 1666, is now a charming hotel. In the “Ambassador” suite, Ursula’s chocolate-brown skin is being set off by the whiteness of the sheet across the four-poster bed. Her dark hand brushes against Niels’s forehead, with its slightly receding hairline. She was born in California, and tells him that the name comes from calor, heat, and fornia, fornication, so it means “hot sex country.” He finds this rather dubious.

  Then he explains to her that the avocado takes it name from the Spanish aguacate, derived in turn from the Mayan ahuacatl, which means testicle; she doesn’t believe him either.

  Ursula and Ben. On a lemon-yellow Japanese motorcycle, Ursula and Ben are speeding through the night towards Bâton Rouge. Ursula, sitting behind Ben, is hugging him. Suddenly, she takes off her gloves, unzips him and starts stroking his penis, which is both dangerous and not especially easy, given her position. She nevertheless succeeds. It is the first time that Ursula has had a lover as black as she is but, of course, at this time of night, and from where she is sitting, sex is color-blind.

  The position is not a very good one for Ben, who is already so tormented by a rather irrational complex that he has bought a “penis enlarger” on the Web (an utter fraud, by the way).

  Ben and Irma. Irma willingly admits that the idea is rather crazy. At dusk, she has taken Ben out onto the zinc roof of her apartment block in Montmartre. There, lying on a blanket, they stare at the night lights of Paris. The wind raises her cotton skirt, revealing her naked pink buttocks between which Ben gently slides one finger, then two. Irma groans and arches her back so as offer herself more easily to her lover. Ben vaguely feels that this is not the right time to admit that he gets vertigo.

  All of this staging, Irma thinks, is a bit over the top. And anyway, when you actually act out a sexual fantasy, is it still a fantasy?

  Irma and Philippe. On the snowy balcony of a Zermatt chalet, Philippe, in boxer shorts and thick socks, is trying to even out his tan in the high-altitude sun. Irma is moving her hand up and down his swelling member. Before Philippe, she had never been with a circumcised man, and she is amazed by the particular texture of the skin around the glans. Speaking so softly that Philippe cannot hear her, she suddenly whispers something to his penis — which cannot believe its ears.

  Irma quoted Mao Ze Dong: “There are no straight roads in the world.” “And no straight dicks either,” Jiang Qing, his wife, would sometimes add.

  Philippe and Wendy. It’s battle stations at the office: Wendy has had to cancel her Sunday squash match with Karin. But this technical translation — which was supposedly urgent — has not progressed very much: Philippe is holding his young trainee against the thick windowpane overlooking Neuilly and the river Seine, and his hand, after kneading her buttocks, has slipped beneath her cotton panties as far as her fine blond hairs. “Ass, dick, finger, come what may!” as Prévert used to say. But nothing much does come, because her clitoris is far from Philippe’s finger and showing how elusive it can be.

  Wendy decides to guide Philippe. For the clumsy, the clitoris is the Rubik’s Cube of sex: they can fiddle around with it for hours without getting anywhere.

  Wendy and Dennis. The electric door of the garage closes automatically. Wendy groans: “I’m not going to make love on the front seat of a car!” To which Dennis replies: “OK, we’ll use the backseat then,” and this argument overcomes the pretty brunette’s principles. Thus, leaning on the central armrest, she is now receiving his attentions. He takes her from behind vigorously, belly against buttocks. At first she nibbles the leather, then starts yelling, although bellowing might be a more appropriate term.

  All these cries, all these pointless cries, it’s something that annoys Dennis even more than people who talk during a play.

  Dennis and Katia. Beneath a painting depicting the almost Stendhal-inspired anagram by Jean Dupuy, Katia and Dennis are testing the solidity of an easy chair. Without taking off the skirt of her suit, this middle-aged lady has spread her thighs on the armrests, and is being penetrated by the young man, whose trousers have just slipped down over his socks. For the first time, Katia feels that the fear of revealing her aging body outweighs her desire to excite her lover. Tears of terror run down her cheeks.

  It is only later that Katia will point out to Dennis that Crete is also an anagram of erect.

  Katia and Rémy. A little lost in the huge super-king-size bed, surrounded by Chinese furnishings — fake Qing antiques bought in Hong Kong — Rémy, on his knees, is raising Katia’s hips as she lies on her back, thighs open. His nonchalant penis is dangling between his thighs. It would not take much for the beast to recover its form, and Rémy tries to find a source of excitement in Katia’s beautifully round breasts. Unfortunately, the fact that he knows they contain silicon implants weakens his libido even more. He suddenly starts breathing faster, gasping for air.

  For the first time, Katia realizes that the word orgasmic has always reminded her of the word ogre, but never of asthmatic.

  Rémy and Yolande. In Robert Debré Hospital, room number 12 smells slightly of ether. In the distance, the soft hum of the Paris ring road can be heard. On the hospital bed, with its steel bars, Rémy, his nose in the pillow, is penetrating Yolande’s vagina with regular deep thrusts that get faster and faster, before he ejaculates inside her with a long roar. Yolande hasn’t come, but she gently strokes Rémy’s balding head, while his heart is beating fit to burst, just as it does in certain novels.

  Is it the ether? His head is spinning slightly. Rémy would love to die like this; Yolande would just hate that.

  Yolande and Farid. In an attic room overlooking a Parisian courtyard, the faucet is dripping regularly into the sink. Curled up on the unmade bed, Farid is stroking the hand of a sleeping woman, whose face is mature and finely wrinkled. Didn’t I just beaver old Yolande beautifully, lick her listless, tongue her tweeter, nibble her nub, and suck her sweetness, says Farid to himself, who was in need of a little affection too.

  What is sure, the young linguist thinks, is, put like that, things sound quite utterly different.

  Farid and Mina. The thunderstorm has crackled into life at last and warm raindrops are wrinkling the pool of a country house overlooking the Gulf of Sperona. Mina has swum over to Farid, who is sitting on the tiled steps. Without leaving the water, she takes hold of his penis and presses it between her breasts, where it recovers its vigor and full dimensions. In what the French call the “notary’s tie position,” Mina jolts up and down over his glans, occasionally applying a sweetly rapid lick to his urethra. Farid is going to come, he knows it, despite the disapproval of his ever-present inner voice.

  Mencken was right, Farid thinks: Puritanism is the awful fear that someone somewhere might be happy. Yourself included.

  Mina and Terence. Naked on the bed, Mina looks asleep, and her slender hand is resting motionless on Terence’s muscular buttocks. He is toying with a lock of her brown hair, admiring her proportions and the matte sensuality of her skin. He stretches out his arm and parts the curtains just a little, so as to cast her in a better light. He opens the window and the Marseille world of sounds and yells bursts into the room. He lies down next to her.

  Now — Terence says — I’m going to count to three then snap my fingers, and all you will remember is that no one has ever made love to you like this before.

  Terence and Anna. Using the pretext of protecting him against the Atlantic sunshine, Anna has invited Terence beneath her poly-cotton domed tent, which is supposed to reduce condensation and increase oxygenation. But it is now in a rubbery humidity that her swift fist is moving up and down over his stiff penis. Like Terence, she is a birdwatcher, and she confesses, without slowing up her energetic attentions, to a predilection for the grey wagtail family (Moticilla cinerea), because of their extraordinary tails. Just then, Terence’s wagged tail hits the poly-
cotton and Anna’s hair.

  This will be a great memory, Terence thinks, unless, as with many good memories, it turns sour.

  Anna and Laurent. The showers on the campsite of the Deux Leyres valley are ringing with Anna’s attempts at smothering her groans. Ouhhiiii, mmmmh, hoouhouu, waaii, her onomatopoeias defy exact transcription. Doubled over, leaning her left hand against the tiles, she is squeezing Laurent’s balls in her right hand, while he penetrates her from behind. She hasn’t had time to rinse her hair and the foam from her shampoo is stinging her eyes. She murmurs “Terence,” and Laurent asks “What am I?”

  Suddenly, a spitting, hirsute alley cat slips through the door. Laurent, in utter astonishment, wonders what exactly this pussy is after.

  Laurent and Wendy. The little red Fasten your seatbelt light has just come on, and the Berlin — Chicago airbus has resumed its reassuring purr. Beneath a grey and red Lufthansa blanket, Wendy and Laurent are pretending to sleep, their bodies touching. She has removed her panties, hiked up her skirt, opened Laurent’s fly, and is attempting to introduce his astonishingly stiff penis into her vagina. Air hostesses are proverbially discreet. With this girl, Laurent thinks, I feel like I’m a cigar going to bed with a lighter.

  After a series of multiplications including centimeters, frequency, and various other intimate parameters, Laurent figures out that over the past twenty years his penis has traveled 21.5 kilometers inside a female body.