Philip Chemla
I’d like to suffer for love. The other evening, in the theater, I heard these words: “Sadness after intimate sexual intercourse one is familiar with of course … Yes, that one knows and is prepared to face.” The lines are from Beckett’s play Happy Days. Oh, the happy days of sadness I’ve never known. I don’t dream about a union or an idyll, I don’t dream about any more or less durable romantic felicity, no, I’d just like to know a certain kind of sadness. I can guess what it’s like. I may have already felt it. An impression halfway between a sense of something missing and a child’s heavy heart. Among the hundreds of bodies I desire, I’d like to come across one with a talent for wounding me. Even from a distance, even absent, even lying on a bed beside me and turning away. I’d like to come across a lover armed with an indiscernible, flaying blade. That’s the signature of love, I know it from the books I read long ago, before medicine stole all my time. Between me and my brother, there was never a word. When I was ten, he got into my bed. He was five years older than me. The door was ajar. I didn’t understand very well what was going on, but I knew it was forbidden. I don’t precisely remember the things we did. For years. Strokes and rubs. I remember the day he first came to me, and I remember my first orgasm. That’s all. I’m not sure whether we kissed, but the place that sort of thing would eventually occupy in my life leads me to believe he must have kissed me. As time went on, and until his marriage, more and more it was I who approached him. No word passed between us. Except for his No when I presented myself. He’d say no, but he’d always give in. I remember only silences between us. No exchanges, no language meant to sustain an imaginary life. No coincidence of emotions and sex. We had a shed in the back of our yard. I’d go there and gaze out through a broken windowpane at the life in the street. One night a garbage truck driver spotted me and winked. The night was dark and the man inaccessible in his high cabin. Later, when I wasn’t so young anymore, I’d go chasing after garbage men. My father, whose brother was in Guinea, had a subscription to the magazine Vivante Afrique. It was my first porn magazine. Matte bodies on matte paper. Stalwart, protective farmers, nearly naked, sparkling on the page. I hung a picture of Nefertiti on the wall above my bed. She kept watch like an icon, untouchable and somber. Before I went away to boarding school, I used to go to various public gardens and offer myself to Arabs there. I’d say, use me. One day when some guy and I were taking off our clothes in a stairwell, I sensed that he was going to swipe my cash. I said, you want some money? He melted into my arms. Things became simple, almost tender. My father is unaware of a big part of my life. He’s an upright man, very attached to filial relationships. A genuine, good Jew. I often think about him. I feel freer since I started paying. My position is more legitimate, although I have to redress the power imbalance. I talk with some boys. I ask them questions about their lives, I show them respect. I address my father mentally, I say, well, there certainly is the occasional detour, but generally I stick to the main road. On Saturday evenings or sometimes during the week, after I’m through seeing patients and there are no meetings to attend, I go to the woods, or to the movie theaters in parts of town where the right kinds of boys can be found. I say to them, I like big dicks. I demand to see theirs. They pull it out. It’s stiff or not. Recently, when I’ve chosen someone, I want to know if he’s into slapping. (I don’t offer to pay more for slapping. Slapping mustn’t be part of the negotiation.) It used to be that I’d ask the question in the car. These days, I ask beforehand. It’s an incomplete question. The entire question would be, will you hit me? And immediately afterward, will you comfort me? You can’t ask that question. Nor can you say, comfort me. The farthest I can go is, stroke my face. I wouldn’t dare say anything more. Some words have no place in such a setting. It’s a strange command,
comfort me. One can imagine giving all the other commands — lick me, hit me, kiss me, use your tongue (many don’t) — but not comfort me. What I really want can’t be stated. To be struck in the face, to offer my face to the blows, to present my lips, my teeth, my eyes, and immediately afterward to be stroked, caressed just when I least expect it, and then to be struck again, with the right rhythm, the just proportion, and after I come, to be embraced, supported, covered with kisses. Maybe that perfection doesn’t exist outside the kind of love I don’t know. Ever since I began to pay and thus became able to control the order of events, I’m free to be myself. I do what I can’t do, and get what I can’t get, in real life. I kneel, I abase myself. My knees sink into the earth. I return to total submission. Money binds us as well as any other attachment. The Egyptian put his hands on my face. He held my face, he pressed his palms against my cheeks. My mother did the same thing when I had an ear infection, she tried to cool my burning fever with her hands. Otherwise, in normal life, she was aloof. The Egyptian licked my mouth. He disappeared into the night, like the garbage collectors in days gone by. I walk along the side path, I plunge into the woods. He’s not there. If I make an effort, I can still feel the dampness his tongue left on my lips. A dizzying summary of some knowledge I don’t have. Jean Ehrenfried, a patient I’ve grown attached to, gave me a copy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. He said, a little poetry, doctor, would you by chance have time for that? He opened the book in front of me and read the first lines (I noted in passing that the timbre of his voice had thinned since his last visit): “If I cried out, then who among the angelic orders would hear me?” It’s a small book. I keep it near my bed. I’ve reread those lines, thinking about Ehrenfried’s diminished voice, about his combinations of polka-dot ties and fancy pocket handkerchiefs. For weeks those poems have been waiting under my bedside lamp. I get up at six-thirty every morning. I see my first patient an hour later. I can see around thirty in the course of a day. I teach, I write articles for international journals of oncology and radiation therapy, I go to fifteen or so conventions a year. I have no time to put my existence in perspective anymore. Sometimes friends drag me to the theater. I recently saw that Beckett play, Happy Days. A little umbrella under a dazzling sun. A woman whose body is sinking deeper and deeper, sucked into the earth. She wants to endure lightheartedly and rejoices in minuscule surprises. I know about that. I admire it every day. But I’m not sure I want to hear any other words. Poets have no sense of time. They draw you into useless melancholy. I didn’t ask the Egyptian for his telephone number. I generally don’t ask. What good could come of it? Still, sometimes I get guys’ numbers. Not his. But he left a mark on me, something I can’t define. Maybe it has something to do with Beckett’s evil genius. The Egyptian isn’t what I’m searching for in the rendezvous spots behind the big worksite fence in Passy. Although I even look for him in assignation rooms where I’ve never seen him before, the thing I’m really seeking is the smell of sadness. It’s an impalpable thing, deeper than we can gauge, and it has nothing to do with reality. My life is beautiful. I do what I like to do. I get up in the morning bursting with energy. I’ve discovered that I’m strong. I mean, qualified to make decisions and take risks. My patients have my cell phone number, they can call me at any time. I owe them a lot. I’d like to be worthy of them (that’s one of the reasons why I want to keep up with the science and carry on oncology research alongside my clinical practice). I’ve known about the existence of death for a long time. Before I started studying medicine, I could already hear the clock ticking in my head. I bear no grudge against my brother. As for his place in my life, I don’t know exactly what it was. Human complexity can’t be reduced to any causality principle. It may well be that had I not lived through our years of silence, I would have had the courage to face the abyss of a relationship comprising both sex and love. Who can say? I generally pay afterward. Almost every time. The other must trust me, as though offering a token of friendship. But the Egyptian I paid beforehand. I took a chance. He didn’t put the bill in his pocket, he kept it in his hand. That bill was in my field of vision all the while I was sucking him. He put the bill in my mouth. I sucked his cock and the money. He stuffed the banknote in my mouth and put his hands on my face. It was a pledge with no tomorrow, a promise no one will ever know. When I was a child, I used to give my mother pebbles or chestnuts I’d find on the ground. I’d also sing little songs to her. Offerings at once useless and immortal. I’ve often had to convince patients that the present is the sole reality. The Egyptian boy put the banknote in my mouth and placed his hands on my face. I took everything he gave me, his cock, the money, the joy, the sorrow.