He gets you to eat, coaxing you into swallowing yogurt and fruit.
Once you finish eating, your eyes close all by themselves: you are all in. He carries you upstairs, lays you in your bed; before falling asleep, you notice that he has sat down next to you and taken your hand.
You wake up. There is a pale radiance: it must be early morning. Mygale is there, close to you, asleep in an armchair, and your bedroom door is wide open.
Your legs are still sore: the cord was tied very tight. You turn onto your side to see Mygale better. You think back to the preposterous story he told you in the car. Something about a gangster? Yes, a criminal on the lam who wanted Mygale to alter his face. And you were the hostage!
You are not sure about it anymore. Sleep is returning. A sleep punctuated by nightmares. Always the same images: Mygale is cackling; you are laid out on a long table beneath a blinding spotlight. Mygale wears a white surgeon’s smock and hat, and he laughs wildly.
In your perception his laugh is amplified, and it hurts your ears; you wish you could sleep longer, but no, the anesthesia has worn off. You are coming back from elsewhere, the dream images are still vivid, and Mygale is laughing. You turn your head, and see that your arm—no, both arms, are restrained. A needle is sticking in the crook of one arm, attached to a tube through which liquid falls drop by drop from a flask of serum waving gently way up above your head. You feel dizzy, and then, little by little, you are assailed by violent shooting pains from farther down, from your lower belly. And Mygale laughs.
Your thighs are parted, and you are hurting. Your knees are clamped into supports of tubular steel, as though you were on one of those tables used by gynecologists to examine…God, it hurts! The pain spreads from your genitals into your abdomen; you try to lift your head, to see what is happening to you—and Mygale is still laughing.
“Hold on, little Vincent. Let me help you.”
Mygale has picked up a mirror and, grasping you by the nape of the neck, he holds it between your legs. All you can see in the glass is a mass of bloody dressings, and two tubes hooked up to bottles.
“Soon, very soon, you’ll see everything better.” Mygale is apoplectic with laughter.
But you understand what he has done to you. First the injections, the developing breasts—and now this.
When all trace of the anesthetic’s effect was gone and you were fully conscious, you screamed and screamed for a very long while. He had left you there in his operating room, flat on your back, bound to the bench.
He came back at last. Leaned over you, still laughing. Would he ever stop laughing?
He had brought a cake, a little cake with a candle on it. Just one.
“My dear Vincent, we are going to celebrate the first birthday of someone you are going to know very welclass="underline" Eve.”
He gestured toward your belly.
“There’s nothing there anymore. I’ll explain everything. But you are not Vincent anymore. You are Eve.”
He cut the cake, took a slice, and mashed it into your face. You hadn’t the strength even to cry out. Grinning, Mygale ate his own piece. Then he uncorked a bottle of champagne, filled two flutes, drank his, and flung the contents of the other over your head.
“So, my little Eve, have you nothing else to say for yourself?”
You asked him what he had done to you. It was very simple, he told you. He proceeded to push the examining table into the other cellar room, the room where you had been imprisoned for so long.
“My dear girl, I’m afraid I was not able to take photographs of the surgery I have just performed on you. But since it is a very common procedure, I can explain it to you by means of a short film.”
He started a projector, and on a screen hung on one wall an operating room soon appeared. An off-screen voice, not Mygale’s, delivered a commentary.
“Following a hormonal treatment lasting two years, we are able to perform a vaginoplasty on Monsieur X, with whom we have had numerous preparatory consultations.
“We begin, after anesthesia, by cutting away a flap of the glans penis 1.2 centimeters in length, then we detach the entirety of the skin of the shaft of the penis down to the root. Next we dissect the pedicle, likewise to the root. We proceed in an identical manner with respect to the dorsal vasculo-nervous pedicle of the penis. The aim is to bring the anterior layer of the corpora cavernosa down over the root of the penis.”
You could not take your eyes off the spectacle of these men in surgical gloves with their scalpels and forceps, cutting into flesh as Mygale had cut into your flesh.
“A second intervention calls for a scroto-perineal incision 3 centimeters in front of the anus, the exteriorization of the penis through this incision, and the continued dissection of the skin and the flap of the glans penis.
“Here we continue to isolate the urethra and separate the corpora cavernosa along the median line.”
Mygale laughed and laughed. He got up from time to time to adjust the focus and pat you on the cheek.
“A third stage involves the construction of a neovagina 4 centimeters wide and 12–16 centimeters in depth. Here we see the closing of the anterior extremity of the sheath of the penis and the invagination of the skin of the penis into the neovagina.
“The glans flap is exteriorized so as to form a neoclitoris. The skin of the scrotum, which has been kept very thin, is itself resected and will serve to create the labia majora.
“Here we see the same patient several months later. The outcome is very satisfactory: the vagina is a good size and completely functional; the clitoris is perfectly active and sensitive; and the urethral orifice is well positioned and attended by no urinary complications.”
The film was over. You had an itching sensation amid the pain in your lower belly. You wanted to urinate. He had introduced a drain, and it was by way of the resulting strange sensation that you arrived at a new perception of your sexual parts. You cried out once more.
It was awful; you could not get to sleep. Mygale shot you up with tranquilizers. Later on, he undid your restraints to get you on your feet. Taking tiny steps, you walked round in circles. The drain dangled between your legs along with the two tubes, each leading to a vacuum bottle that was supposed to suck up your secretions. Mygale held one bottle, and the other was thrust into the pocket of your robe. You had no strength at all. Mygale soon took you out of the cellar and set you up in a small flat. There was a dressing room, a bedroom…The light blinded you, for this was the first time you had left your prison in two years. The sunshine bathed your face deliciously.
Your “convalescence” lasted a very long time. The drain disappeared, the two bottles also. All that was left was that hole, down there between your legs. Mygale obliged you to have a plug in your vagina all the time; otherwise, he said, the skin would close up. You kept it inside you for months and months. There was a very sensitive place there, too, just above: your clitoris.