I longed to understand what went on in men’s bodies, why danger turned them on…Some stories on the subject had made a powerful impression on me. The one my Cambodian husband Khim had told me, for instance, about the Viet Cong who’d received a dozen fragments of shrapnel in his crotch. Khim had operated — successfully, he had thought — but the man had come back to the hospital two days after his release. ‘What’s the matter?’ Khim had asked him. ‘You told me you were fine.’ ‘Yes, Doctor,’ the man said. ‘I felt fine when I was released…But every evening when I go out to fight, excuse me, but…I get a hard-on and the pain comes back again.’ Khim checked and found a tiny piece of shrapnel embedded in the man’s penis, so he reoperated…Or the stories Aziz’s uncle told me about his military service in Algeria in the seventies: ‘The intellect is soluble in weapons, my dear Rena,’ he told me once. ‘The minute a friend got promoted, even if you’d been hanging out with him since grade school, he suddenly started looking down his nose at you and insisting you salute him every time you ran into him. His Kalashnikov made him forget everything else; he became that intoxicating power…’
Working on Misteries, I sometimes felt like relieving the planet of nine-tenths of its phallophores — who, by their constant insecurity, the uncertainty of their being (Who do you think you are?: the male question par excellence), their passion for weapons and power, their scheming and rivalry, their scuffles and brawls of all sorts, are driving the human species towards extinction; at other times, on the contrary, I wanted to fall to my knees in gratitude because they’d invented the wheel and the canoe, the alphabet and the camera, to say nothing of developing sciences, composing music, writing books, painting paintings, building palaces churches mosques bridges dams and roads, working hard and selflessly, giving unstintingly of their strength and patience and energy and know-how, century after century, in fields, mines, factories, workshops, libraries, universities and laboratories the world over…Oh, men! Wonderful, anonymous, myriad men, suffering and sacrificing yourselves day after day so we can live a little better, with a little more comfort and beauty and meaning…how I love you!
Whenever possible, I would drag one man away from the pack, shower my attentions on him…and remunerate him. Yes: whereas men pay prostitutes to forget their individuality and play the generic Female, I paid men to renounce the comfort of the group and usher me into their privacy. Having gone home with them from stadium, colloquium, stock exchange, parade or training field, I’d ask them to talk to me, take out their photo albums, and show me the teenager, toddler and infant they’d once been. As they did so, they often wept — and I consoled them. Men are so grateful when you shower ‘that much attention’ on them. I learned to sense where they needed loving, go straight there and give it to them. I learned to take their faces in both my hands, smooth away the lines of worry between their eyebrows and on their foreheads, graze their noses with my lips and draw my fingertips over their cheekbones, ever-aware of the skull with its black eyeholes and gaping grin, right there behind the skin. I learned to slip into their souls, lick and suck them, drive them mad with my caresses, allowing them to arch their backs and discover the incomparable pleasure of passivity, calming them down so their true strengths could surge forth, instead of the phony ones they trot out for display the rest of the time. Gradually their defences would crumble and melt. I can’t even look at a man anymore without wondering how, under the onslaught of my love, his face and body would relax, fill up with light, be transfigured…
Subra sighs contentedly.
Putting her Canon back in its case, Rena returns to where her father and stepmother are sitting on the bench across from poor sick Neptune. She finds them slumped against each other, snoozing. A moment later, they head slowly for the Palazzo Pitti.
Pitti
This may be our only chance, Rena tells herself, to spend a little time with Italian Renaissance painters. I must, oh I simply must get Ingrid and Simon to fully appreciate their works.
Just what do you mean by fully appreciate? Subra asks.
Well, the way I do. Or the way I would, if…
If what?
Er…if I weren’t quite so nervous. Or if Aziz were here…
Aziz can’t stand museums.
Okay, not Aziz. Someone else…
Kerstin?
Kerstin, right. Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens, Veronese, Van Dyck, Andrea del Sarto, Velasquéz, Raphael…Some of this greatness has to rub off on their souls!
But her father, made groggy by his nap in the sun, takes every chance he can to sit down and nod off again. And Ingrid is oblivious to the technical feats of the Italian masters (perspective, shadows, shading, nuance, trompe-l’œil). With disarming naiveté, she responds only to the content of their paintings.
Saint Agatha, for instance. Any number of paintings depict the lovely Sicilian maid carrying her breasts on a tray. Great are the masters who have taken up this theme; subtle are their colours; skilful is their arrangement of forms and hues on the canvas. But every time she sees one, Ingrid cries, ‘Isn’t that dreadful?’, forcing Rena to wonder whom she hates most — the Christian virgins or the Roman monsters who martyred them.
According to the guidebook, Agatha was a sweet young thing born in Catania, Sicily in the third century A.D. When the Roman prefect Quintianus started cutting off her breasts to punish her for her conversion to Christianity, she cried out, ‘Oh, cruel man, how can you mutilate me like this? Have you forgotten your mother and the breasts that fed you?’
Bad mistake, Rena says to herself. The last thing you should do when threatened by a macho is to mention his mother. That’s rubbing salt in the wound. If you want to escape alive, you should talk to him about the weather, politics, sports — anything but his mother. In a macho’s brain, the word mother is a raw nerve; I know of no exceptions to this rule. Whenever a man boasts to me that mothers are sacred in his culture, I know for sure that women get the short end of the stick there. Anyway, Quintianus freaked out and ordered that Agatha be dragged over hot coals until death ensued.
‘Isn’t that dreadful?’ says Ingrid.
How can people not notice, Rena goes on (Subra hanging as usual on her every word), that the accoutrements of érotisme noir, from de Sade to Madame Robbe-Grillet, from Réage to Bataille, come straight out of Christian martyrology? Whips and chains, hairshirts, blasphemy and transgression, pleasure derived from punishment and pain, Saint Theresa swooning as she is pierced by the angel’s ‘arrow’…
‘Not my cup of tea,’ said Fabrice, laughing, as, during a visit to him in hospital, I described a few of my libertine misadventures — for instance the evening when, rigged out in black stiletto heels, a basque and a garter-belt, my thighs sheathed in fishnet stockings, a padlock dangling from my clitoris, gagged and bound yet at the same time armed with a whip, I walked upon, nay, trampled Jean-Christophe’s swollen testicles as he writhed in pleasure and shouted, Fuck God, Madame! Oh, would that I had sodomised you with the barrel of my Kalashnikov! Would that I had pissed into your left ear! Would that I had scattered holy wafers all over your alabaster breasts!..‘Not our cup of tea, in fact,’ Fabrice corrected himself as he laughed and clapped at my parody. ‘Haitians think highly of French literature in general, but they draw the line at érotisme noir. They just can’t get off on whips and chains — the memory of slavery is too recent.’