The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (15 page)

When I compared this place to the suburb of my childhood, I was amazed that there was so much space lying fallow. There must have been a sort of feudal urbanism dictating that each building should be able to project its entire shadow on the ground in the evening. Inside, the rooms were much larger than those in French apartments of a comparable standard. One’s voice echoed in the bath- room, and the tile that covered the floor of the entire apartment was so clean that it made it all the easier to appreciate the full extent of the space, as if someone had just finished buffing it, in honor of our visit. After a couple of years, Enzo moved to Milan. The buildings were older, the apartments even more spacious, the ceilings higher. There was no more furniture. It was such a pleas- ure wandering around it with nothing on, as pristine as the fresh paint on the walls, as close to my essence as the bedroom was to its, furnished as it was with only a bed and

an open suitcase! Pulling off my sweater and letting my skirt slip to the floor caused an in- rush of air that aroused my entire body.

The reader will understand more readily why I have made such an intimate connection between physical love and a mastering of space when I explain that I was born into a family of five living in a three-room apart- ment. And the first time I escaped the place was the first time that I fucked. That was not why I left, but that was what happened. Those who have been brought up in more well-off families where each member has his or her own room where privacy is at least re- spected, or also those who have walked to school in the country, may not have had the same experience. Discovering one’s body would not have been so much of a tributary to the need to expand the space within which

the body moved. Whereas I had to cover geo- graphical distances to reach parts of myself. I had to go from Paris to Dieppe in a Renault 4 and to sleep facing the sea to learn that somewhere in a part of me I could not see and had not imagined, I had an opening, a cavity that was so supple and so deep that the extension of flesh that made a boy a boy, and me not one, could be accommodated there.

The expression has fallen into disuse, but it used to be said of a young boy or girl who was not supposed to know how the human race is perpetuated—and by extension how love and the satisfaction of the senses are connected—was “innocent.” I remained al- most completely innocent until I had direct experience of the first act of that process. I was twelve when my periods started. My mother and grandmother got into a state and called the doctor, my father popped his head around the door and asked with a laugh

whether I had a nosebleed. So much for teaching me the facts of life. I had no clear idea of where this blood was coming from, and I couldn’t distinguish between the pas- sages through which my urine and my peri- ods passed. One day the doctor tactfully ex- plained to me that I should clean myself rather more thoroughly than I had been with my washcloth; otherwise, he said, sniffing the latex-covered finger that had examined me, “it doesn’t smell very nice.” I eventually suspected something because of a scandal at a rock concert. My mother and her friends were talking about it in front of me. The con- cert had caused an outbreak of violence, and the police had had to intervene. “Apparently some of the girls were so far gone that they even took the billy clubs and stuck them up themselves!” Put them up where? And why exactly would they want billy clubs? Ques- tions that unsettled me for a long time.

I was an adolescent but had retained the ignorance of my infantile onanism. As a very young girl, I had realized that some games afforded me exquisite and incomparable sen- sations. I played with dolls in a specific and unusual way. I would gather the crotch of my panties into a thick strip and wedge it into the cleft between my legs right up to my but- tocks, and I would sit down so that the fabric dug into me slightly. In that position, I would take the tiny concave hand of a plastic Ken doll and let it roam over a naked Barbie. In later years I replaced the action of the bunched panties with a rubbing of the two swollen lips at the front of the cleft. I had stopped playing with dolls, but I would pic- ture myself in a situation similar to that of the Barbie, and I was entitled to the same diet of caresses. Perhaps because this activity gave me so much satisfaction, I didn’t try to find out more about the ways in which a man and a woman can be together. But here is the

point I wanted to make: while, in my mind, several different boys ran their hands over my body, in reality that body remained hunched, almost paralyzed, apart from the tiny to-ing and fro-ing of my hand clamped in my groin. My mother had not slept with my father for several years. He stayed in what had been their bedroom, and she moved into the second bedroom to share the double bed with me, while my brother slept in a single bed to one side. Even when you haven’t been told anything, you instinctively know which activities should be kept hidden. What a paradox that I should have been forced to acquire such dexterity to give my- self pleasure while barely moving or breath- ing, so that my mother, who brushed against me when she turned over, wouldn’t feel me quivering! The fact that I had to rely more on mental pictures than on blatant physical caresses may well have developed my ima- gination. Despite my best efforts, it did

happen: there were times when my mother shook me and called me a dirty little girl. When I went to Dieppe with Claude, I was no longer sleeping in the same bed as my moth- er, but even then—and for many years—I still masturbated in a tightly hunched ball. Fin- ally, I could say that when I finally opened my body, I learned to uncurl it.

Space rarely opens up to us all at once. Even in the theater, when one more curtain needs to be raised, the process can be labori- ous, the heavy fabric rises slowly or, when the scene is still half hidden, the mechanism gets stuck and some occult resistance defers by a few seconds the spectator’s mental in- volvement in the action. It is well known that we attach special importance to the trans- itions in our lives and the places they oc- curred. The sensual pleasure I feel in airport lounges is perhaps a distant echo of the act of emancipation I achieved when I accepted Claude’s invitation to go with him, and

stepped through the door with no knowledge of what the end of the journey would bring. But space is only ever an immeasurably large balloon with a hole. If you blow it up too fast, it will readily turn on you and deflate just as quickly.

I must have been thirteen or fourteen when I belatedly witnessed a “primal scene.” As I walked along the hall, I saw my mother on the threshold of our front door with the friend who used to come and see her when my father was away. They were exchanging a slight kiss, but her eyes were closed and her back was arched. I took it badly. She took the fact that I took it badly badly.

Three or four years later I first saw Claude framed in the same doorway. It was June. It was late when we arrived in Dieppe, and found a place to camp. We couldn’t see very well to put up the tent. At the time a lot of students took amphetamines to keep them awake so that they could study through the

night before an exam. Claude must have taken some so as not to get tired on the jour- ney, and he offered me one. Inside the tent, we didn’t sleep. When he asked me quietly whether he could penetrate me, I was trem- bling. I couldn’t really say if it was because of what was happening or because of the drug. In any event, I felt thoroughly unsure about my state. A few months earlier I had in- dulged in some heavy petting with a boy. He had put his erection onto my naked stomach and had come there. The next day I got my period. My knowledge of physiology was so hazy that I thought this blood meant I had been deflowered. Particularly as, after that, I waited a very long time for my next period (young girls’ cycles are often irregular and can be disrupted by emotional upheavals), and I thought that I was pregnant! I told Claude that I would say yes if he asked me the question again and used my name. He couldn’t have been expecting that sort of

demand, and he willingly said “Catherine” several times. When he withdrew, I was scarcely aware of a fine thread of brown along the top of my thigh.

The next day we hardly left the tent, where there was just room for our two bodies. We lay on top of each other and rolled over, sep- arated from the people next to us by the can- vas, through which a golden, sandy light filtered. There was a family in a nearby tent. I heard the wife asking irritably: “But what the hell are they up to in there? Aren’t they ever going to come out?” and the man calmly replying: “Leave it! They’re tired. They’re resting.” We did manage to extract ourselves from our lair to eat something on a little ter- race. I was in quite a daze. As we headed back to the tent, I noticed that the beach and the campsite, which was set slightly back, were cut right across by a cliff that ran per- pendicular to the sea.

I don’t remember exactly how my parents got me back, but it was not without drama and not for long. A few weeks later there was the episode in the garden near Lyon. A few weeks after that, I went to live with Claude. The trip to Dieppe had allowed me to “be- come a woman,” and I had established the right to come and go as I pleased. All the same, as I look back on it, our frolicking in the tent seems like child’s play and reminds me of the way I used to hide from adults by pulling my sheet up over my head, creating the confined but vital space of a little house of my own. Succumbing to a forbidden activ- ity in a place regulated by communal laws, poorly protected by a thin or flawed screen, by a bit of foliage, even by a wall of human accomplices, derives—at least in part—from the same ludic spirit. It represents an ele- mentary mechanism of transgression that, paradoxically, belongs less to extroversion than to introversion; you don’t make an

exhibition of yourself, you turn in on your in- timate pleasure, pretending to ignore the fact that it might accidentally erupt in front of spectators who are not expecting it and might even try to stop it.

My explorations of exclusive locations on the outskirts of Paris not only filled me with the euphoria of wide-open spaces but, on the flip side, with that of a game of hide-and-seek. On a fairly broad street a stone’s throw from the Soviet embassy, I once found my refuge in the back of a Ville de Paris van, because one of our group was a city employee. The men came in one by one. I knelt to suck them or lay down and curled to one side, the better to present my ass to facilitate their access. Nothing had been provided in the back of the van to soften the ridged surface of the metal floor, and each jolt was quite painful. But I

could have hid there all night, not so much stiffened because of my uncomfortable posi- tion but rather dulled and lulled by the at- mosphere of my unlikely haven where I curled up and sunk and like in those opaque dreams, watched myself sink deeper. I didn’t have to move: the rear door was raised at regular intervals, the man jumped out and a new silhouette slipped in. In that creaky vehicle I was like a motionless idol unblink- ingly accepting the homage of faithful follow- ers. I was as I had imagined myself in some of my fantasies (like, for example, the one when I’m in a caretaker’s quarters with only my ass protruding from the curtain, which serves to hide the bed), offered to a long suc- cession of men who stood outside stamping their feet and yelling abuse at each other. A 2CV van is worth a caretaker’s lodge any day. But I left my metal palanquin before they were all done. Éric, who had been keeping watch, explained the following day: on the

one hand, the men were in such a state of ex- citement that they were beginning to get ag- gressive, and on the other hand, the van was threatening to tip over.

The cabs of semis are much better suited, mainly because they are equipped with a bunk. I can never catch sight of the girls waiting by the side of the road, their bodies covered in a patchwork of skimpy accessor- ies, a demi bra glinting above the low-cut top—which doesn’t quite meet the miniskirt, which allows a glimpse of the garter belt be- low—I can never see them without thinking of the little jump they have to make on one foot to reach for the step in order to get up to the customer. I am familiar with the impul- sion the body needs and the brief subsequent ascension that carries that body up to two tough men who greet it delicately, accus- tomed as they are to limit their movements in the cramped cab. My good fortune was not having to name a price or to wait out in the

cold. I didn’t spend much on my outfit, either. I would wear just a coat or a raincoat that fell open like a dressing gown on the way up. Once when I was snuggled into one of these bunks—which just happened to be in an International Art Transport (one of the main transporters of art) truck parked near the Porte d’Auteuil—I received the most careful handling. On that occasion only one of the two truck drivers took care of me, at great length, to the extent that—to my sur- prise—he kissed me on the mouth and went on fondling me after he had come. The other one watched, first by adjusting the rearview mirror, and then he turned sideways but did not touch me. It got late, we chatted; it was a very convivial situation.

Snuggling down into a narrow bunk is an experience closely identified with childhood. Jacques and I shared one in a second-class sleeping car on the way home from Venice during a railworkers’ strike, and we were

trapped in a compartment with a big family. We had to come to some sort of arrange- ment. We had elected to have one bunk for the two of us, one of the very top ones, which are very hot and can’t be reached without undertaking the most perilous and ridiculous contortions. The parents had taken the two bottom bunks, and the children had distrib- uted themselves as best they could among the three remaining. We then settled into one of those lazy positions in which the hu- man race will continue to derive certain de- light for a long time yet (even if that means forgetting the entire repertoire of the
Kama Sutra
): that is, our bodies lay closely curled in a concave arc, and I warmed my buttocks against Jacques’s lap. When all the night- lights had been switched off, we took our pants down and had a deep, slow fuck. Without a word or so much as a moan dis- guised as a comfortable sigh, with no move- ment other than the imperceptible