I think that death, when it comes, is ardently desired by the body (abrupt spring shower), that it is just the respite from a fatal disgust.
Succeeded in vanquishing my prejudice against Balzac, the man of podgy literature, formed from his portraits, which always portrays him as a ruddy chowhound with greasy hair and smelling like an old pipe, and the titles of his books, Cousin Bette, Cousin Pons or The Magic Skin, which too readily evoke provincial malice. The short stories read from the small book Suzanne loaned me (“Facino Cane,” “El Verdugo,” “A Tragedy by the Sea”), are now Borgesian, now Hoffmannian (another remark by a hack).
Right now I am reading, with a rather stricken detachment, Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood: stricken because these are memoirs which are meant, with half a century of distance, and setting aside Nazism, to somewhat represent my kind of life, due to the fact of homosexuality, due to the fact of writing. But the life described seems not worth the effort, and I find myself doubting whether my life coincides too much with this life, perhaps because the writing is disappointing (I cannot identify with C.I., since my desire is incapable of identifying with his writing).
Pain isn’t heroic: it cuts me from writing. But what is marvelous, is the realization that pain is endurable. I imagine that death won’t be very different from life: I am already living at such a distance from those who are dear to me.
Dreamt of the absence of suffering.
And drinking him at the root, devouring T.’s progeny (being the anticipated ogre).
The man in the restaurant, sitting across from me, who is all of a sudden overcome by unease, and who expels his meal onto the cheese plate, his dentures fall out with the last hiccup. The verging embarrassment of nausea. The owner catches him: “What came over you? That’s not done! You should have gone to the kitchen. We’ll get you a fresh plate.” He found himself all of a sudden delivered from his discomfort, but a bit shameful, and with sunken cheeks, mollified by the absence of teeth. He picked the dentures up out of the vomit and rinsed them with the pitcher before putting them back in his mouth. This spectacle like a manifestation of my own illness.
A strange thing happens, as soon as I enter a museum, infallibly, I become hard, with each slow rubbing step, my sex is rolled back and irritated, swelling along the length of my pants: in the midst of antiquity, a vital reflex catches me off guard, like that of a hanged man, I harden among all those dead faces, those stone busts, those blazing flat tints.
Alternation of the desire for death (certainty) and the desire for life (doubt); one and the other are dependent upon the state of suffering, on the whole the desire for death has the better of quietude.
Now dreams are nothing more than the fastidious recital of the day which must be lived the next day, as though with the fear of not being able to live it.
I think, as I write these notes, that they represent a precipitated cycle: to exhaust, everything, in myself, in my body, in my writing, close the chapter. (If death doesn’t surface, naturally, at its extreme it will be necessary for my body, for all my energy to set off on a film project, otherwise my desire for cinema will only have been a desire for death. But hasn’t everyone in his life a dream, unrealizable, or rather which he decides will be unrealizable—because cinema is actually very realizable—hasn’t everyone a need for an aberrant dream? Kafka dreams and rages of writing, only his inhibited desire (the office) juxtaposes the reality of his activity (the volumes which comprise his oeuvres in the end. As for me I write, without much regret, but I seethe with the cinema).
Something is happening contrary to the original fantasy: whereas I was imagining T. to provide for my death, to come running to assist me, and to survive my own body by warming it and plowing it to the extreme limit, until it comes apart in his hands, now at the very premises of rot (this perhaps false impression that my mouth is fetid) I look to distance him from it, I move away into an even greater solitude, my mood becomes enigmatic, repulsive.
T. who says on the telephone: you have been my elect.
The story of marbles, recounted by Ilse Bing: in the thirties, in Paris, she evokes, at a friend of Cocteau’s, those marvelous marbles, in agate and woven with translucent filaments, with which she played as a child. Those marbles have already become antiquities. The next day, there is a knock at her door: it is that friend, who wanted to do something special for her, and who has just found such marbles at the flea market, he gives them to her. She then tries to have with these marbles, still marvelous, the same rapport she had with them as a child: she palpates them and examines their transparency, rolls them in her palm, even puts them in her mouth. But the marbles were more alive in her head, and, she says (since we were speaking of this painter), “Nicolas de Staël painted my marbles.”
Resolution, and (momentary) deflation of the death fantasy: such that I am in love with spasms (a spasmophile), and it pleases me that my real sufferings are drawn from the same sources as my symbolic sufferings: everything might come from that inability to absorb calcium, which is perhaps the most raging residue of my relationship with my parents (since they conceived that deficiency, and thereby this body, and thereby this heart...)
I also enjoy this illness because it calls me to a sort of organic order, of permanent injunction (really, then, take medication to avoid it? won’t it avenge itself, since it elected my body, since my body elected it?)
Desire for a sovereign love (but when sovereign love passes near me, hinted at by its figuration, as soon as it grazes me with its green gaze, or its light linen summer clothing, it only provokes a hesitant and spineless paralysis, which leaves it time to disappear, and leaves me in shock, as after a death. I curse myself for not having stripped it of that disappearance). Imagining of a child who would be my master forthwith. I wish to offer this child a gift, to celebrate that encounter, but the child is no longer there, and I transpose that desire onto T., to whom I never offer gifts, and the idea of the child disappears in its own wake. There remains only T., sovereign in turn.
To write with pure words.
I set about writing the novel (Le désir d’imitation): instant boredom with a fabrication, I know everything that will take place (as in a short story no doubt, but here the distance is agonizing), but the writing especially, as it is producing itself, rather wheezingly, seems but a pale illustration of ideas, what remedy for that? The fabrication of the novel makes me lazy, but it is a laziness tied to sadness: I put off the moment of this writing, because when this writing is accomplished, perhaps this writing will be dead (it is perhaps preferable to circle around the idea of the novel, to dream it, like in Gide’s Paludes, and to botch it, rather than succeed, since the successful novel is perhaps a very banal form of writing).
Place du Châtelet, in front of the fountain with the sphinx, waiting for T.: after the euphoria caused by the sound and the lights of the water jets, like a fly catcher for faces, comes a somewhat sad thought: it’s marvelous to wait for someone, I could be in the same place, and be waiting for no one, and that will happen to me one day. Then the sadness is reinforced: the desire to cry or for a mad gesture, to throw myself to the bottom of the water with a stone inextricably knotted to my body. The moment of reunion is always painful, billowing, because two types of violence collide, the nervous contraction of the one who runs against his delay and the near murderous relaxing of the one who is subjected to it (the only recourse is to imagine telepathic signals: I’m on my way, wait for me a while longer). It would then be necessary to be quiet, and for each to endeavor to go toward the violence of the other while dissipating his own.
Love for T., at once sublime and miserable: sublime by its quality and its force, miserable because it must be shared too much.
While fucking T., him on his back, his legs knotted around my hips, and exerting myself, sweating, to give us pleasure, one of my arms slid behind his back and embracing him by the waist, I have the impression I am dancing with him, that each thrust of my cock is a step I make him take (on a vital dance floor).
What (adequate) mode of relation will I find with G.? He doesn’t want to be sucked off, or fucked, not passively, not actively, he doesn’t want us to jerk one another off, and yet he is there, at a distance, in the same surface as I, he is breathing the same air and the only exchange we have is that of the air traveling through our bodies, so I propose to him that he take a very strong alcohol into his mouth, and with his face over mine, let it run slowly into my open mouth, so I suckle this poisoned liquid, and an electric current can at last be exchanged from one body to the other...
The pleasure of learning from my concierge that she was worried by my absence.
T.’s departure, mine. Germany and America, the letters (when T. is gone, the journal is out of order, letters take its place).
Run into my mother on the bus. She has come to Paris to have a bit of skin biopsied, to be examined for an eventual cancer. Scleroderma.
Since photography can be but an event of light, without a subject (and that is the moment at which it is the most photographic), I would like one day to throw myself into a narrative that would be but an event of writing, without a story, and without boredom, a true adventure.
(The four days in Berlin with P. who revealed himself to be an adorable companion, funny, very attentive. Reply to Anno’s letter: “I like your smell (you want to know what I think of you, and yet I washed your scarf which could have recalled it to me, I drove it out, I only kept its texture, its color).”
The other day I wrote that it was necessary to surrender to pure events of writing (just as the most pure photos are pure events of light), without a subject, without a story. But what would be especially necessary, would be not to describe the world at all (which I have never, in fact, done), to no longer want to put it in writing, or the long continuous, quotidian, strip, which comprises the relation one has with it (the journal). I would like to retreat even more into myself, and only have dealings with the most interior events, because the world, now, seems disappointing, invisible, to me. Like being reborn after a death (because it might be the full stop of this activity), I would seek a more rare consciousness of writing...
(Barnabooth: a delicious beginning, then chatter and postcardiness. Tolstoy. Paludes or the wings of a generic novel.)
Perhaps one day I will cease to write altogether. Perhaps that day is near.
Hard to live without T.
Arles. Letters to T. State of active prostration (I don’t leave my room before three o’clock in the afternoon). Reading. And I am left in peace, the telephone doesn’t ring, no maid comes to knock on my door. Gentle heat, bare chested beneath my open shirt. The noises that reach me, lightly, dogs barking, television sets, muffled car motors, aren’t even unpleasant.
“Absence of T. and loss of writing: I am as though I had been disconnected, cut from my amorous nerve.” (The notes in the journal are often the fact of an exaggeration, a temptation; thus this sentence, that I write in a letter to T., and which I copy out: it has a core of truth, really a core, a deep core, ultimate, but it is also a bit dishonest: I am not abandoned to such a degree by writing, but tempted to be so, this state (or its supposition) pleases me, it is a fictional milestone, I take pleasure in dreaming myself T.’s creature, Frankenstein of writing...)
(The problem is to make time pass, to retrieve, in this state of solitude, the time I devote to others.)
I always think of death, but I am afraid of the destruction of my body. The only possible imagination of it, now (besides the syncope, the cardiac arrest), resides in the image of an embrace with T., in which I would not take him with me, but in which, by squeezing him in my arms, I would pull from its hiding place behind my bed a revolver, and I would blow my head off. I would then beg him not to fear the spurting redness, and to see it as a dance, a waltz, the perhaps obscene wriggling that death will impress upon my body...
I continue to loaf around this room, I read, not yet washed, and Dostoyevsky opens in his text, toward me, many little doors to make me think of myself... I read the Russian names, the names of women, and these names of beloved women, irresistibly, evoke I. I dream of a weeklong abstinence, at the end of which I would arrange to meet with her, at night, outside. I explain my madness to her and at a distance, completely clothed, I penetrate her. Finally, at the point of orgasm, I kiss her. My thought has just been: I was in the belly of a woman, in a belly like the one that conceived me. I have seen I. several times this past while, she is very chaste and very faithful, and like me dreams of impossible embraces...
My heart trembles.
As soon as I leave the hotel room, I have the impression that my person, and not only my body, and not only because of the heat, is damaged by the outside, gnawed upon, that it is corroding, like a rare fume which had been contained in the room, and which, from out of this reclusion, multiplied, reinforced itself, and which finds itself suddenly dissolved in contact with foreign bodies, gazes. So I sit down in the café breeze to augment this impression (the gaze on one’s self is the only way to resist that corrosion).
More serious impression of abasement at the mere contact with others at a dinner; dining alone, like last night, I maintained some dignity.
Being stretched out, in underwear and socks, on a red skai sofa, in this unknown room, while the wind is blowing hard outside, here is an idea I would never have imagined my life would bring me; it is a situation without importance, fleeting, which suddenly appears to me, like a slide, in an almost joyful despondency (be wary of the ease of words and that they don’t say very exactly what they should have said).
The deposed functionary, at a loss for power, at a sadness for power, who monologues and who quotes van Gogh, Baudelaire’s correspondence.
(The landscape leaden from the heat makes me want to die.)
I dream that at a market two malefactors accost me, surround me, and point a knife at my throat, drive it in a bit to frighten me, I empty my pockets for them, there is little money, but out of cruelty the one who is holding the knife runs it slowly, barely touching my skin, in a long gash between my nose and my ear, just beneath my eye. I think: slash, scar, they get away, what to do? Keep the slash, which is a red line, which doesn’t run (I can already glimpse the scar it will leave), or have it erased? My father comes to my rescue. I am stretched out flat on my stomach on a bed and I want him to fuck me, he comes behind me and as he penetrates me he says: “Accursed is he who has his ass stuffed,” he says this with a bit of a laugh, as though to excite me. As he continues to fuck me (he goes about it a bit like T.), I touch his stomach, which isn’t all that flabby. Then my mother knocks on the door and gets angry, my father had bolted it, just as he did when I was small, and he was fucking my mother, while I was at school; my father is thrown into a panic by the discovery, I wake up.
Sympathy, perhaps even more so, for a disadvantaged, infirm woman.
The driver:
There are certain intoxicating moments due to technology, to modernity: for example driving at high speeds in a stable car, which crosses, which has some contempt for the landscape, while listening to beautiful music, powerful, very well reproduced by the stereo. Then the mind seems to be gliding at the speed of the car, and exhaling the music itself, the body is immobile but it seems to disperse to the four winds, in space, and the mind becomes one with the landscape, taking a haughty and elated point of view on existence. Myself, fairly blasé, can no longer taste such exaltations, but I feel that they continue to exist in foreign bodies, and I like to feel them vibrate near me. I apply myself to them in my leisure hours. I take a road, any road, with this car that I purposefully chose for its power and great stability and in this resonance chamber I compress the purest, the most violent music (and perhaps, in keeping with my mood, Wagner or the Police). There remains a space by my side, the space of a body that will be able to taste the exaltation. I drive until that body, at the edge of the road, catches in the beam of my sight, most often a hitchhiker. This chase remains chaste. I don’t say a thing. I drive then a bit faster, I turn the music up a bit louder and I feel, by my neighbor’s breathing, by his position on the seat, by the tenor of his gaze, caught in an oblique rearview mirror priorly adjusted, and which makes itself, this gaze, both vague and decided, that he is caught in the feeling of exaltation I have lost. So without a word, by the sole fact of a concentration of my mind, I can reach his heart, which is beating faster, and unfasten it from its coating of grease, muscles, take it into the full of my hand, for several seconds. This imagination is sufficient, the exaltation thus passes from his body to mine, which was otherwise unable to reach him without this relay. Sometimes it happens that a bird, pushed by the wind, is projected full force against the rearview mirror, leaving the red stain of its little heart there, I don’t like that.
I am quite afraid that my mother will bury herself alone, that alive she’ll start to throw dirt onto herself, to cover herself: that dirt could be her cutting herself off even more from the world, her being angry at her children, or it could even be the scleroderma that she set in motion to gnaw at her skin.
Having a hard time waiting for T. in his absence: a dull and tenacious desire, like coming before him, dying before him (the idea of death abridges distances).
Not a shred of energy (not even energy to type on the machine, to copy something out, or write an article) but I am getting drunk, am moldering in reading.
Approach of the holidays, and if death spirits them away, will it be death by boredom, or death by love? It must be death by love, of course.
Suzanne is losing weight.
Gide (The Fruits of the Earth) is doing me good.
Besides the twinge below my ribs, my human machine is running smoothly: I eat twice a day and I sleep ten hours a night, every evening I masturbate in front of pornographic drawings, I am rested, regularly emptied of my tension, I don’t touch a single foreign body.
In the street the child goes toward the prostitute, he addresses him, he knows very well that he is the prostitute, that’s why he addresses him, and he says to him directly: “I want to sleep with you, how much do you want?” The prostitute says: “It’s three hundred francs.” The child says: “But I’m a child.” The prostitute says: “The price is the price.” The child says: “I only have fifty francs.” The prostitute says: “Three hundred, the price is the price.” The child: “But I’ve never done it.” The prostitute: “Two hundred and fifty, not a franc less.” The child: “But I’m a child.”
My mother’s hysteria, at lunch, at the sight of my hands:
“Your nails are purple, your nails are purple...”
“You’re getting on my nerves.”
(Extreme purity and extreme perversity of Japanese literature: Tanizaki.)
I dream that T. is nibbling my shoulder under my clothes. We have just been reunited, I press myself against him, and all he does is that, nibble on my shoulder, but his recovered presence renders this instant, this sensation sublime. I close my eyes very hard and I repeat faster and faster: “This can’t be true, this can’t be true,” as though to delay the moment at which doubt will rob me of him, at which I will realize that in fact this body next to mine is barely real. I wake up and I cry. I confront the cold of the room to write this down, naked and somewhat disgusted.
This dream reconciles me with T., at whom I was furious for not having had news. Then I turn my jealousy into excitement, and I jerk off thinking of his pleasure (I imagine him in a sauna sucking the cocks of a multitude of young boys), it’s five thirty in the morning, the time zones are likely responsible for this nocturnal agitation.
(Turning my imagination inside out, like a glove, slipping it from jealousy to excitement (the support is the same? imagine a horsehair glove lined with angora), from mortified abstinence to mischief is now the only possible acclimatization to the pain caused by waiting for T.)
A terrible oppression: the idea that T. could be dead (I’m worried stiff).
If T. is in fact dead, at this time, I become unworthy of my life, unworthy of his death: every lived instant becomes irretrievable, accumulates on a slate, runs into debt.
A book in itself is nothing, or is but little: it’s the imagination of others that makes it, that refabricates it (thus must publishers have this intuition, of the force of the suggestion of a book).
(A letter from T., a thousand leagues from my concern.)
I notice that one of my teeth, in the middle of my mouth, on top, has become transparent in places while blackening the enamel.
Dreamt that President M. was relieved of his duties. Despite my meager sympathy, I cried at this news.
The more money I have, the more the idea of a lack of money is anguishing (having a million in my bank account always paralyzes me).
My breath smells of sulfur.
A horrible point of view.
(Another letter from T., telling me that his life is driven by desire, which explains why he doesn’t provide a return date.)
Hatred suddenly of the place where I live; I hate this table and I hate this armchair, I hate my bed, I hate these walls, not to mention the hatred for myself.
I decide to stop waiting for T., I disconnect. The quietude after the intolerable, but there is no quietude without loss of love (love is a tension, love is a fantasy, love is unreal and the terminated waiting emancipates me from this love).
I dream of a round mausoleum, in the form of a dome, traversed from end to end by the recumbent statues of the lovers buried there. Thus their bodies, side by side, part the stone as though to clear a passage toward the sky, flight. In my dream they are lying flat, calm, but in the morning I imagine that they want to extract themselves from the stone, or that they are kissing one another with force, that their embraced bodies, penetrated one upon the other, make an obscene figurehead for the monument, their bare feet emerge entangled on the other side: their stomachs, their sexes are absorbed into the emptiness. The inside is like a planetarium: on the whole wall of the dome a starry night is painted and level with the ground the recumbent statues of the two lovers are retrieved, this time in their true dimensions and in white marble against the black ground. At their sides an angel has fallen, like Maillol’s statue of a woman on her side and off balance that I like so much.
Elba. Dream that first names have been replaced by common nouns. A boy is called Silence, another Feeling, those are the first names of my dream.
By dint of beauty, of complexity, of conscious style, Flaubert’s correspondence is paralyzing, almost humiliating: I find myself a modest, poor hack, and worthless in comparison with my own dreams of writing.
My sperm thrown against the cold stone is immediately gulped down by the ants. I’m waiting for an angel.
Return to Paris. I’m like the animal, the prey seized by the certainty of his death: I come to a halt.
Today, in the métro, my first love entered the compartment in which I was seated, and I exited immediately so that he wouldn’t see me.
Being called a faggot on the street.
Dream that a ball of fire (directed by the hand of God?) scores out the landscape and surrounds me.
Discover that the hairs that have grown on my chest form the shape of a bat.
The smile of a sad child.
The pleasure of destroying one’s body.
A deal, bribery of my parents: now you must buy my life, day after day, because I want to be a crippled child.
Until T.’s return, desire for lethargy (I would like to be master of time: place my life in a six-day parenthesis, sleep without end).
“Imagine that you are fucking a body in which all the sadness of the world has come to dwell. Have the sweet power of the morning sun that dissipates the mist. Imagine that you are fucking the sadness and that you extract it, otherwise soon you will be fucking death.”
Right now I am suspicious of everything I write (and this suspicion often leads me to tear it up).
Lenz by Büchner returns me to the lost excess of sensations.
Incapable of the slightest warmth with my mother.
I would like to describe the moment experienced with T., yesterday evening, upon his return, that excessive moment of suffocating pleasure, of hot fluttering when planted in my ass, behind me, I faced him suddenly, completely, without detaching myself from him, to kiss him. (And this impression of drawing vice from the snifter valve, of feeding from one same sexual spring, one same dependency.)
(A book is a request for love.)
“When do you write?”
“Not all the time.”
“So you aren’t a writer?”
“I am a writer just as the venomous animal stings from time to time, when provoked, when walked upon, when attracted. The venom can be an amorous sap.”
Once more, T. invites me to do gymnastics, and I tell him: it’s rather toward the destruction of my body, or toward its symbolic forms, that I want to go. And in the evening, without his expecting it, I extend the retort of the cat-o’-nine-tails with which my father used to beat me, I say to him: I want you to extract all you can, with all your strength, and to the blood, from these lashes. You can’t know how I have awaited these blows, eagerly, all day long, how they exhaled from your eyes, from your love, and how they made me hard without your knowing it... (imaginary dialogue).
While reading the first part of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, I tell myself that there cannot exist a perfect narrative, which says everything at once, and which doesn’t warrant repeating. If I had written this text, I would perhaps already have detached myself from the idea of writing, that’s what I tell myself, it must be false.
(Smell is tied to pleasure, and I am tied to smell, especially since this aroma to which I am subservient is tied to the possibility of death: amyl nitrate.)
While tidying, while sorting my papers, I realize I don’t like anything as much as this forced writing, which hastens, which squeezes into staggered rows on little crumpled pieces, writing standing up, writing in the dark...
The father (to the mother): “How could we have made a big boy like that” and he slides a fifty-franc note into his son’s hand.
Lassitude of sexual activity, even of the beloved body.
Press conference, department meeting: the impression of being at a point in my life, totally astray.
Always astonished that desire is to such a degree fixed in the face.
I feel my body: slight gingivitis, cramps in my balls.
T.’s father, who is sixty-three years old, was molested by a neighbor.
The birth of a love (German literature): remembering how as a child I had spread out the map of Germany in my room, and how I liked that form as I could have loved a body: that full form, very slightly flared, and totally abstract (I didn’t imagine anything), was also terribly erotic...
A man who was holding at the end of a leash a little dog with only three legs walked past me and the look he gave me signified that he too had one less leg, and that all the looks of pity that one could direct at his dog insulted his own infirmity.
At the moment of my orgasm, planted in my ass, T. retrieves my sperm in the hollow of his palm and in turn smears my face with it as he comes.
Thessaloníki. The retarded child, in the dining room: the suffering the action of eating imprints on his face, the way each mouthful renders his expression. And how his brother, by his side, looks at him from underneath, with a murderous air.
To write one day the story of the young hemophiliac Russian prince (how the threat of blood loss conditions his life).
Describe one day the breath of an old man.
The woman is naked beneath her fur coat, which she barely opens as the cars pass. Something pallid and curved emerges between the two swaths of the beaver, a soft fur, thick, a bit worn, nothing smooth, nothing shiny, nothing rough, the breast perhaps or the round line of the belly, a white and faint burst barely discernible in the brown, dull fur, the red tuft of hair is swallowed by the shadow, a hand in the pocket holds the coat in front, and makes, as certain cars pass, a more ample movement of aeration, of ventilation, it’s the middle of winter. My father’s car, the old Rover 90 that he bought secondhand for two thousand francs, brakes, even with the woman, his suede jacket is tossed onto the backseat, he lowers his window and leans out to look at her more closely, she approaches the car a bit and he takes off again like a shot, circles the block three times, then disappears.
The old man is wearing a pair of white raw canvas pants, held up by thin used suspenders, a yellow shirt open on his pink and drooping chest, barefoot in sandals, brown spots on his naked skull. When he speaks, with a pained, moist delivery, his eyes become almost fixed, like those of a blind man. Men press around the old man to get his signature, his signature costs money, the men believe the old man will die soon and they get his signature, every day, hundreds of papers. Sometimes his trembling hand, without his being asked, starts to make a drawing, the face of a young man appears on the page but when anything other than a mechanical signature is asked of his hand, it becomes recalcitrant, doddering and nothing appears on the page other than those few sticks of white or black crayon which he hasn’t identified with in a long time. Out of weariness the old man gets up and brushes past me, he opens his mouth and I can smell his breath, it’s a very dense layer that very quickly dissipates, a spicy breath that doesn’t have a stink, and I am trying to define this particular odor that I haven’t inhaled since childhood, when Tonton the Clown took me on his knees, but his elderly breath wasn’t pure, it was mixed with an alcoholic breath, here his breath is a pure elderly breath, not fetid but long fermented, like a decoction of organs, the stench of an obscure marsh, but what does this odor remind me of in the end? not the earth nor mildew, not fungus nor velours, not ether nor vomit, something else, indefinable, both unbreathable and heady, sweetish, very slightly nauseating, not rot but its fumet distantly sifted.
Ablation of one of my mother’s breasts.
First letter to my mother.
I am in Athens: the day of the operation, the 7th (I am ashamed after the fact of having said to her, to give her confidence, that it was “a good day”), I have a need for conjuration, I touch wood, without warning, when someone is speaking to me; I have fear, but it’s an abstract fear, that I scarcely extend to my consciousness, I imagine nothing. At night, I hesitate to make phone calls, to get news, finally I give in.
The following morning I force myself to call, on that little black Bakelite telephone, and I am relieved, both anxious and relieved, that the call cannot be connected, the line to France is always busy. I leave for a painter’s studio, and he shows me female nudes, there is great violence in this painting, and not only an intoxication of painting, an erotic rage, big nasty strokes of the brush. Two days earlier I remember I wrote the word breast in a text, and it’s a word I never write, that I keep at a distance from my fingers. On my way back from the painter’s studio, I dial the number again and since it still doesn’t connect one of the two women who have accompanied me dial the number in my stead, as though to relieve me, already, of something painful. Finally she hands me the receiver: it’s ringing, someone answers, it’s Louise’s voice and she tells me forthwith the most cutting words that have ever been spoken to me: “Your mother had surgery yesterday, she had a breast cut off,” immediately the receiver falls from my hands, it’s as though instantly something had been excised from my body, as though someone were driving me mad with pain by attacking the flesh that had given me my flesh, the breast that had provided for my life. I sob, I moan, I scream, I’m like a lost child, far from my mother, I feel the hands of the two women who are present gently in my hair. I pick up the receiver again and I hear something still more terrible: she doesn’t know this intimate thing about her body, it has been hidden from her, to spare her, and I must know it in her place, and in this absurd anteriority of consciousness it seems I in turn am being subjected to the ablation, without anesthesia, it is upon me that her wound is impressed, and I don’t dare imagine it. I don’t dare imagine the redness in that place, and the bandages, and also the biopsied, extracted flesh, peeled perhaps, the lost nipple, crumpled somewhere in a bag, blood soaked, wizened. I immediately pack my luggage to take the plane. In the airport concourse, I meet Moustapha, a boy I run into every two years or so, for whom I immediately have a very strong sympathetic recall, then I lose sight of him. He is going home precipitously as well, following a telephone call, because his sister just had a tumor removed and she is unconscious. He gives me for my mother a small rug he bought on an island, with his last drachmas. On the airplane I distance myself from him to write my mother, it’s the first time I write her and I find atrocious, after the fact, that it was necessary for her to be amputated for me to attest my love for her. I tell her that I will love her more, that I love her more, but the next day I think with horror that this means: die and I will love you even more, you know.
From the airport I take a taxi and I arrive at the hospital. It’s already night. I circle the building and I see an illuminated, transparent stairwell, I see small silhouettes descending among which I could recognize my father. Through the unpolished glass of the windows of the rooms I try to see a shadow that could be my mother’s. I in turn climb the stairs breathlessly, with my luggage, and without my knowing it yet, because I haven’t unwrapped it, I am carrying the small painting P.K. offered me. I knock on door two-hundred and fourteen and my father and my mother emerge behind me, with a catheter full of urine in her hand, she is wobbly, he is holding her up. I see for the first time a very old woman with a yellow complexion, with chewed-up lips. My father lays her down and I take her in my arms as I have never held her, I remain pressed against her for a long time, without disgust, my disgust for her doesn’t exist anymore. I give her my letter and I force myself to talk to her about living things from my trip. I unwrap the painting to look at it at the same time as them and it is very beautiful, luminous, it shows a young bare-chested mason who is holding a plumb line.
This woman, who never wrote a thing in her life, only letters, began to write, to keep a journal, to recount the smallest fact of her hospital life, the slightest intrusion into her room, the slightest gesture made on her body. She wrote until the anesthesia, when the torpor had completely diminished the awkward sticks of the traced letters, she wrote to her husband: happy birthday, because the day of her operation coincided with his birthday. Before she had asked him to throw the roses he’d bought her into her coffin.
My mother turns over slightly in her bed and by the opening in her nightshirt, I see a transversal cotton strip fastened under the arm, which she complains about enormously, as though it had been twisted during the operation. She asks my father, in front of me, before we leave, to rub her back with a massage glove, and I discover a very pretty back, the back of a very young woman. At night I can’t turn onto my right side, on the side that hurts her, it’s hurting me too.
In the evening I have dinner with my father. In the taxi which passes in front of boulevard du Montparnasse he shows me a café he once went to with my mother as a young girl, he tells me how he accompanied her home afterward, “nicely,” to her aunts’ pharmacy. I try not to show that this memory of youth pains me in the extreme. We go wish Suzanne and Louise a good evening, and Louise, who is still a bird of misfortune, announces to us with joy that a man was devoured by a lion. We dine at the Alsatian Taverne, my father eats sauerkraut, I eat oysters and cheese.
On my way home, as soon as I enter, the small photo of T. that is placed on my bookshelf, leaned against the wax mold of my hand, that little photo that shows him somber and that I like so much, starts to fall. I pick it up, I put it back and it falls again, then another small photo that he sent me from the United States falls, an old photo which shows a crouched child, with folded knees, on a rock in the middle of the sea (a situation he seemed to experience, a child in whom he recognized himself), this photo in turn falls and a feeling of powerlessness comes over me, like the impossibility of mastering objects. First why does T. start to fall when I enter into the room?
My mother hugs the letter against her wound as though through the bandage the words could permeate it, cauterize it.
Now my father calls my mother “my Amazon, my little girl, my little pussycat, my little doll,” but she’s also a little doll he wants to wrap in the coffin of his gentleness (at the flower shop I can’t stand that the saleswoman lays the flowers flat on the paper then that she vacuum seals them in a sort of cellophane, each strike of the stapler is the strike of a nail in the wood).
She says that her body now, that her skin is made of cardboard.
I must say of this cancer that I expected it, that it is in the logic of my mother’s history. For ten years, for twenty years (how to know how it began exactly) my mother has been worrying sick, she frets, she chews on her lips. Cancer is just a conventional suicide, acceptable (because misfortune valorizes existence), underwritten by social security.
I will first paint T. wearing a long black dress, then naked, with a Sioux headdress on his head, the thin band of a quiver strapping his torso.
I am trying to understand the substance of the skin, I examine it, everywhere now I scrutinize the skin of faces without really looking at them, the base will be a matte white, porcelain white, with a bit of gray, the gray of rings under the eyes, a bit of yellow, corpse yellow, a bit of blue, vein blue, a bit of red, the deep red of flesh. Once I have that particular white, I imagine the rest will come on its own.
The mother says that she has been happy, that my father made her happy, that he never beat her; says that she never had a personality, that she is lazy, and when she has sorrows, that she sleeps.
In keeping with her recovery, points of irritation, of antipathy begin to surface again in my relationship with my mother.
She says that she smells of blood, she repeats that her body is cardboard.
The woman who smiles every time she wants to cry.
The heat of the hospital room makes me want to sleep, my heart beats faster and my mother enumerates the composition of her meals.
The beginning of a secret dream: have T. painted by all the painters I like (for T. also to be the sole collection of my life), put all the money I earn into it, like a permanent homage.
The famished man, so famished that food disgusts him, that he can’t even stand the idea of it, the enunciation of it, and who instead of buying himself food buys himself gastronomic magazines (the livid man who seems to satisfy himself with this reading).
The gaze of the young poliomyelitic boy on the métro: in his place I would be the greatest of criminals, or the greatest of lovers.
Only death will put a full stop to this journal.
My mother’s stomach full of shit (to combat her constipation she is given a currant-flavored jam). She talks like a little girl, who demands points for good conduct because she is able to lift her arm each day a little bit higher. She cries. She has asked to be bandaged up again, even though her last stitches were removed today, she can’t stand to see herself without a bandage, she asked that a young man be turned out, an intern, when she found herself bare chested (new junction point in the community of our anxieties). Before her, I feel like a deadweight, a mortifying and not a vivifying presence, I already regret it, but I can’t help it.
I think that if I were the friend of a child, I would find these gestures of tenderness totally new, the obscenity would be pulverized, or rather each obscenity would be an attempt at superior purification (Laurent met this evening at B.’s).
I know that my mother would like me to rub her back with a massage glove and some eau de Cologne, like my father does when he’s there, she lets me know it, she tells me in a roundabout way, but it is impossible for me to anticipate her request.
Dreamt that I was reunited with my childhood friend, Jean-François, but he was nothing more than a head, whose body had been entirely destroyed in an accident. He put his head in the sand, level with my feet, to give me the illusion that his body was buried there. I wondered what I could do with a head.
The mother who tries to show her wound to her son.
The father who says to his son: “I am mediocre.”
My mother’s torso gridded with black lines, squares and points, like a landing strip.
The new room, bright, spacious: the intervention of light, which renders the situation bearable (no longer the cavernous light of the hospital).
A sort of illness in Anne’s presence: not the suspension of homosexuality, but staggering desire, not for her really, but for the desiring gaze directed at her by the boys on the street, when I am beside her, and that I would like to cause to veer, or ricochet several centimeters over (desire to prostitute the friend’s body, to deliver it to the first come, instead of taking it myself)...
Marinate in my frustration without having recourse to T.’s body.
The suicide, the son of the condemned woman had left this note: “I don’t want to know whether my mother will die or whether she will live, I don’t want that suspense, I want neither hope nor hopelessness...”
Suffering from the lack of purity, where to find it now?
Now T. doesn’t care about this journal.
Naked with T. under my comforter, I speak to him of a cluster of smells that go back as far as childhood and which make my cock beat in his hand: fresh wood chips, wool and red hair; he speaks to me of the joiner.
The mother’s suffering: she cries in my ear on the telephone.
P: I had toward this man a crooked attachment. I could have said both that I loved him, and that when he found himself in front of me I often wanted to jump down his throat.
(Move.)
A neighbor who practices the musical saw.
(The soldier on the train: I don’t remember his face anymore, but to say that his face lacked totally in spirituality brings him to mind, the redness of his cheeks, his close-cropped hair, his fairly stupid gaze. Only all his spirituality seemed to dwell in his hand, in the nobility of the veins subtending the skin, in the sophisticated limpness of the wrist which clashed with his conventional roughness.)
The vague sort of heat that seizes me now, at a single glance, and which snatches from me the desire to be beaten, beaten to death.
The mother who says: “We aren’t old people. We still make love.”
That there may yet be a child on the street to make a sign of the cross.
The unknown boy at the restaurant who shows his tongue, by chance, not by demonstration (not to make fun) and who immediately engenders the desire for that tongue to support my cock.
The other evening, eating with my aunts, I see Suzanne emerge from the stairs, somewhat unsteadied by the effort, but with something new on her face: the tension, the torture of a burdensome premeditation, and the victory over herself which has just ensued, appeasement. On the last step, still gripping the banister, she emerges among us and announces, with solemnity: “Hervé, I am giving you the two rugs in the living room... You’ll have to go down to look at them, because they may not please you, I’m giving them to you...”
Going back downstairs, after dinner, to her apartment, and before even going to see the rugs, she says: “I know that I am growing very old and that I am reaching the end of my life, there are holes in my memory, but especially at night I am no longer able to find sleep, my memories persecute me. I realize that I have rejected so many people who offered me a hand, who were prepared to love me. All my life I have shown great malice, egotism... For example, when I was an adolescent, there was a headmistress whom I admired, whom I adored. One day, I was making a needlepoint, she walks past me, looks at the needlepoint and asks me: will you make one for me too? I answer no, to this woman whom I loved, I refuse. Why did I say no?”
I tell her: “I imagine a sieve through which, continuously, the bulk of life passes, a semifine sand that runs nonstop. You find yourself with a half-deserted sieve, through which the sand now barely runs, but whose mesh seems to have retained the noise of the past flow, and returns it to you. You find yourself with this nearly empty sieve, but which stopped big obtuse stones, with hard, cutting angles and sides so smooth that they retained nothing of your history. That residue torments you, but it’s the sand that ran through which is the bulk, the important things of your life. They have no more meaning than do meteorites, hieroglyphs to which you may have lost the key. For you can no longer know whether that woman’s request, your headmistress, was not indifferent, coquettish, polite, and whether the tone of her voice, even, hadn’t wounded you. You may have had reasons, at that moment, for refusing her your needlepoint, but you have forgotten the reasons, and you are left only with the refusal, which wounds you now certainly more than it wounded her...”
Later she says to me: “Around me I feel only enemies. They are all awaiting the outcome of my death, like a relief, like a profit. I wanted to say it to you, at least once, you will have been the only friendship of my old age.”
Another evening, I go see the showing of a short film and I realize as I am leaving that there is more than a two-hour wait before my meeting with T.: not enough time to go home, and too much time to wander the streets. I go to the cinema to see Hôtel des Amériques by André Téchiné and I am very moved by the way in which he maintains, completely, inside the calculation of admonishment, his integrity, his purity. At the end of the film, in the whirlwind of couples adrift, more than ever does this idea resonate, pronounced by Bruno the other evening, that one is most often “with someone, in the place of someone...”
After having wanted to leave my seat, moved, somewhat stalled by a handicapped man who was sitting beside me and who had difficulty getting back up on his feet, grabbing his crutches, I take a gloomy set of stairs, I walk on the spot behind the man but it seems suddenly more cruel to me to walk on the spot behind him rather than to pass him at a run, and I find myself debilitated on the street.
I take the métro to go to my meeting, in a café-brasserie to the right of Châtelet. By chance of the arrangement of the people massed around the counter, I settle into a spot right in front of the cashier, several centimeters from her face. She’s a discolored blonde with massive hair arranged in cascades of ringlets, lacquered, decorated atop with a crown of golden laurels, and she has a repeated gesture, with her ringed hands, between the coins of her cash register, the arrangement of her hair and her choker which is suffocating her. She is surrounded by a cloud of skimpy little servers and voices racist points of view with them. They seem bound by this strange thing which is “doing nights.” I look at her, fascinated, for a half hour, without moving, the counter empties around me, I remain alone, suspended to her gestures and her words. T. doesn’t arrive and I am suddenly indifferent to it, whether he is late, or even if he doesn’t arrive, I don’t even think about it. I embarked on a perception of this counter that completely prolongs the film, which is its most beautiful shot. Finally the woman subtracts herself from my observation, which she had feigned not to notice, whispering to a server, while designating me: “I much prefer a nutcase like this to an Algerian...”
T. arrives and literally I don’t recognize him, it’s impossible for me to synchronize with him. First he doesn’t notice, he’s very talkative, he has just left work, he’s asking me questions, I’m not answering, I can’t say a word and he doesn’t notice, he continues to talk very quickly. I follow him into the street, a bit staggered, behind him. I ask myself what I’m doing with this boy, what compassing error, in my life, could have granted him such importance. I no longer believe in this importance. His very beauty seems completely unreal, is of no concern to me. At some point, he turns around, because once more I am not answering one of his questions, but this time he noticed, and he asks it again, he turns around, he sees me, he is struck full force by my gaze that doesn’t recognize him. He shakes me, he says that I’m crazy, that he fears my madness. I cry throughout dinner, without pleasure, the wall is against my head and I would like for my head to project itself onto it, hard enough for it to remain inlayed there. I cry and he says: “I find your life to be frightfully sad, without generosity, I don’t mean a material generosity, draftless, sealed off.” I say to him, and it’s like a lament, a supplication: “I want to die, why isn’t there someplace on the body a little cork one could remove, and by which one would empty oneself all of a sudden?” He says to me: “That cork exists, it’s your carotid, there, on your neck, I saw there was a utility knife at your place, you can cut it, but be careful, you mustn’t cut horizontally, you’d be sewn back up, you must follow the vein upward.”
Yesterday evening, on the bus (I remember these three stories in a row, this morning, in a café, while waiting for a museum to open) something exactly similar, exactly inverse, happens to me. I sit down in front of a boy, whom I have never seen before, and I can tell I’m looking at him as though I have always known him, as though he were my best friend, and I collide with his amnesiac gaze, his distance, his irritation. It’s something other than desire, but it’s something that encompasses desire: he isn’t particularly handsome, his skin is even a bit gray, his eyes are brown, his hands are small and hairy, but I want to melt into him, I beg him to recognize me, I’m prepared to do anything, for him to bite me, for him to beat me, for him to stuff my ass.
The mother who recounts her nightmares (the nurse who straps up her toes while the doctor puts his cigarette out on her arm).
A short news item, today in the paper, electrifies me: “A prisoner from the Valence (Drôme) remand center, who had been hospitalized following the physical cruelty inflicted on him by his cell mate, died as a result of his wounds. Jean Rivière, aged nineteen, had been detained for seven months for burglary and theft. He shared his cell with Karim Djaffri, aged twenty, a deserter from the Carcassonne marine infantry regiment, detained for armed rape. Djaffri had been inflicting himself on his fellow inmate for a long time, forcing him to endure punishment and sexual abuse.” I would like to carry in my arms the body of the deceased, bandage it, but more than anything I would like to be offered as new pasture to the body of the criminal, and for him to sacrifice me in the same vein.
Afraid of the wind at night, afraid like a child of the dark.
