The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (13 page)

like a vast barge, and had forced the town to huddle itself against the mountainside. We stop and, standing one in front of the other, pick out other villages as if looking at a map. More cautious men take you first by the shoulders and your breasts, tickling around the base of your neck with their lips. But Jacques always starts by taking hold of the buttocks. He immediately grasps the fact that there is nothing under my designer houndstooth-check, bustier dress, which I shed in one swift movement as if sloughing off a skin. He slips in from behind, gently ex- ploring my pussy with his little probe, but not trying to penetrate. I press my back against him. The air temperature is perfect. A correlation develops between the space around us and the way his hands wander ex- pansively over my breasts and stomach. I do, however, avoid these caresses because, even when his dick has really stiffened, I don’t take it in my cunt before devoting just the

briefest fellatio to it. At last I offer my rump. Balancing on my heels, with my legs slightly bent to be at the right height for the lovely, lubricated tip, I put my hands on my tensed thighs and spread my fingers. It is quite a tir- ing position to maintain without any other support. But what a good hammering I got that evening, my rear end grasped between his hands, pinioned and kneaded, with my top half thrust forward over the Roussillon plain as it slowly dissolved! I can clearly re- member then thinking to myself, in one of those hyperconscious states crystalized by pleasure, that one day I would have to find a way of putting into words the extreme sensa- tion of joy when two bodies that are joined together feel as if they are unfurling. To un- derstand this, you just have to imagine those time-lapse shots you see in shows about the wonders of nature that show the petals of a rose suffusing with oxygen and methodically smoothing themselves out.

We are all subject to social laws and under obligation to family rites: we conform to what is now called “business culture,” and even in the intimacy of our sexual lives we instigate habits and institute a code applic- able to only two people—a “couple culture,” you could say. So al fresco sex forms part of Jacques’s and my couple culture. In the same way that I have put colored thumbtacks into a globe to show the places I have visited, I could mark off on detailed maps the ruins and the rocks, the bends in the road and the clumps of trees where someone looking through binoculars could have stumbled across the quiverings of a minute two- headed silhouette. Early one morning, against the sour-milk-colored rocks of a steep mountainside, me with my body braced in its usual position, clutching the narrow trunk of a young tree with sparse fo- liage, with my shorts scarcely lifted. We are joined by a second man: are we in the area

on vacation? Have we lost our way? Once he has moved away, we speculate that—to avoid possible burglaries—he must work guarding the hermitage, which was in fact the reason for our climb. Another chapel, this one in ru- ins but still with high walls standing proud on a flat plateau with a crisscross of little walls around it, those of the long crumbled sacristy where it’s good to walk and imagine its inhabitants, as in an ancient ruin. The short nave is in full sunlight, the choir in the shade, the altar of dark gray stone is intact. I lie down on it, too high off the ground to be taken there. While Jacques leans over and amuses me with a few playful licks, I keep my eyes wide open, gazing at the sky defined by the ridge of black walls; I could be at the bottom of a well. Once again we end up up- right, in a tiny space just big enough for the two of us, and whose use we can’t really guess. A corridor? A recess for a long-lost statue?

Other ruins, other razed spaces, this time a huge fortified farm and its outbuildings, and the plateau that—from its steep banks—it still seems to defend. I should point out an- other particular of our couple culture: between a third and a half of our sexual em- braces are an interlude in a photo shoot. On this occasion the latter was long and com- plicated. I’ve brought a variety of clothes, some very delicate, and I’m afraid of catch- ing them in the bushes and the piles of stone. Same problem when I have to change clothes between poses, especially with a silk chiffon dress that corkscrews in the wind. Jacques is going for light contrast and gets me to ex- plore every nook and cranny of the ruins. I walk carefully over the stony ground because my shoes have sharp, high heels and pointed toes that hurt. I also have to avoid the goat droppings because, before we turned this ru- in into a photographic studio, a herd of goats used it for grazing. More than once, I climb

the walls barefoot, then Jacques hands me the shoes and I slip them on for a few poses. For each pose, I have to find a compromise between the precise position Jacques asks for (down to the last centimeter of how much pubic hair is showing and how wide the thighs are spread, or how tightly the see- through top fits) and the pain in my feet as I try to balance or position my buttocks next to clumps of brambles. While my gaze wanders over the 360 degrees of the panor- ama, my body is reduced to an extremely narrow margin for movement. Once in posi- tion, I obey my instructor reluctantly. Then, before the film runs out, I in turn ask him to take a last few pictures of me walking naked along the wide path that slopes gently back down to the car, left in the middle of the plateau. After so many constraints, I need to move forward in the hot air like an animal of the savannah.

The open door of the four-by-four will be an unnecessary screen; we’ve already seen that there isn’t a car anywhere near the sole inhabited house on the plateau, and its in- habitants must, therefore, be out. Is it be- cause of the two hours spent within reach of thousands of nature’s lowly little assaults, or perhaps because of my hovering suspicion that Jacques has recently grabbed other asses than mine behind this metal screen? My vagina isn’t ready. In these instances, I separate the lips and moisten them hastily with saliva surreptitiously tranferred to my finger tips. There will still be a bit of resist- ance, but the glans will scarcely have forced its entry before the juices have started flow- ing and soon the whole cock will have as- sumed its place in a suitably moist cunt. I think that first I put one leg forward and pushed it against the running board, perhaps to open the vulva a little farther, but it must be said that, if I have to turn my back on my

partner, I like nothing better than jerking my ass back against him. To do this I have to keep my waist limber and it’s better to have my feet together. The more I stick my ass out toward him, the more I can fantasize that my ass has taken on the autonomy normally at- tributed to the head—the seat of thought which lives on independent from the rest of the body—thus, my ass is the counterpart of my head. While I sought out Jacques’s organ as if I were going to yoke it up to myself, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror, with my body connected to his and to the whole background. When I see myself in the act, my features seem devoid of expres- sion. There must be moments when, like everybody else, I make faces, but when I chance across a reflection in a window or mirror, I don’t look the way I think I do; at that moment my gaze is vague, looking in- ward as onto a open space, but trusting, as if trying to find some point of reference.

The practice of open-air fucking became anchored in the way Jacques and I organized our lives right from the beginning of our re- lationship. A visit to his grandmother in a nondescript little village in the Beauce region included a compulsory stop by the side of the road. He would park the 2CV on the shoulder, we would nip through a hedge and find a field rising gently up to the horizon, then we would disappear into the grass. We had to wriggle about laughably to get out of our tight-fitting jeans. I would put my jacket down on the grass under my head for fear of insects, and Jacques’s jacket protected the small of my back. Having not grown up in the countryside, I took naive pleasure in these hasty couplings of just two half-bodies; suddenly my legs and buttocks were not at the same temperature as the upper half of my body, which was still clothed, and Jacques somehow had to manage with his underpants and the waist of his trousers

hampering his thighs. There is a childish pleasure in those naked parts getting off, as if the swaddled other half were an alibi.

The Mediterranean landscape in which we took to living for several weeks a year is very rugged, but its low vines and scrubland offer hardly any hiding places and even fewer nat- ural beds. There isn’t any grass, and as there are no trees, I often had to hang on to the windowless door of an abandoned car or to the uprights at the opening to a pigsty, my rear end jutting out all the farther as my eyes and nose struggled with its stench.

We often used a track that led up to a field of young vines planted in crushed white rocks, a track that has almost disappeared since we stopped using it. We identified some favorite spots along that track as time went by. Halfway up, right before it steepened, it widened out onto a sandy plat- form, and all along one side the sand gave way to an outcrop of curved rocks; you could

have fun imagining that they were the backs of hippopotamuses breaking through the muddy waters of a river that also bore along dented old gas cans and broken pallets. I could lie down on the smooth surface of the rocks with Jacques leaning on his arms like an awning above me, giving me a few quick thrusts of his cock. But it wasn’t easy for him to get deep enough in this position. The solu- tion was for me to turn around and get on all fours, like the Roman she-wolf on her pedes- tal, receiving the very special offering of her devoted priest.

Farther up there was a hairpin bend in the track. On one side, there was a ditch that ac- ted as a dumping ground, and every time we passed, we noticed that its contents had mys- teriously changed: the carcasses of agricul- tural machinery, the Cyclops heads of wash- ing machines, etc. On the other side, a pale colored rock ran along it for several meters, shear like a wall. Despite the intensity of

reflected light, it was one of our elected stop- ping points, because there, too, the smooth rocks comfortably accommodated the palms of my hands, but also—and why not?—be- cause we unconsciously liked to feel that our bodies came from the jumbleness around us. As there were no leaves to wipe ourselves with, and we didn’t always think to come equipped with handkerchiefs, I would stay turned toward my rock for a few moments, with my legs apart, watching the come falling from my pussy onto the ground in a lazy drool the same whitish color as the rocks. Farther up again, on top of the plateau, the track ended in a huddle of trees where the remains of picnics sometimes mingled with the dry bushes, which might have offered a bit more shade. But we stopped there only a few times. You had to get there in the first place, and when we did, the business had of- ten already been seen to. Jacques would not have been able to resist the undulating

buttocks under the skirt or shorts in front of him, their movement as regular as breathing, marking out the rhythm as I walked; while I would be making the ascent absorbed in the thought of his eyes on me, giving me plenty of time to ready my cunt, which I can com- pare only to a baby bird’s tirelessly gaping beak.

For some indiscernible reason, then, the couple culture I am describing played out its adventures mainly in bucolic settings. It’s true that fucking in sunken tracks is less risky than on the porches of buildings, though I’d hasten to point out that, with oth- er lovers, both Jacques and I did use urban locations. But Métro station corridors (where an employee uses the jostle of the crowd to brush imperceptibly over my buttocks—a ta- cit invitation to join him in a storeroom cluttered with pails and brooms) and little cafés in the suburbs (where joyless men take me in turns on a bench seat in the back

room) are places I have visited with Jacques only in my imagination. And even then, was I taking him there? I have stopped doing it now, but there was a time when I liked to re- decorate the room with my elaborate fantas- ies, gradually detailing the settings and the positions I adopted, in an almost questioning tone of voice because I would wait for Jacques’s acquiescence, which he would grant in a neutral voice and with the indiffer- ent spontaneity of someone who’s thinking about something else (but he was probably only feigning indifference), while his tool worked sweetly and steadily. I draw two con- clusions from these points.

The first is that, within a couple, each per- son brings his or her own fantasies and de- sires, and these combine into shared habits that then modulate and adjust to one anoth- er and, depending on the extent to which each partner wants them to be realized, cross the barrier between dream and reality

without losing any of their intensity. My ob- session with numbers found its realization when I practiced group sex with Claude and with Éric, because that was how their desires fused with mine. On the other hand, I did not feel any frustration at never taking part in group sex with Jacques (even when he told me he had done so without me); it must simply be that that was not the way in which our shared sexuality expressed itself. It was enough for me to tell him about my adven- tures and to intuit that they found some res- onance in his fantasies, just as it was enough for him that I was a willing accomplice for his photographic reportages in those vari- ously polluted landscapes, and an exhibition- ist ready to expose herself for his lens—even if my vanity would have preferred more flat- tering backgrounds and more stylized portraits…

The second conclusion is that natural spaces do not feed the same fantasies as

urban spaces. Because the latter is by defini- tion a social space, it is a territory in which we express a desire to transgress codes with our exhibitionist/voyeuristic impulses; it presupposes the presence of others, of fortu- itous looks to penetrate the aura of intimacy that emanates from a partially naked body or from two bodies soldered together. Those same bodies out under the clouds, with only God as their witness, are looking for the op- posite sensation: not to make others come into the pocket of air in which their rapid breathing mingles but, thanks to their Eden- ic isolation, to let their pleasure spread as far as the eye can see. The illusion there is that their ecstasy is on the same scale as this ex- panse, that the body housing them is dilating to infinity. Perhaps the tipping into uncon- sciousness known as the
petite mort
is felt more keenly when the bodies are in contact with the earth, teeming with invisible life and in which everything is buried. Granted,