Night in the Afternoon and Other Erotica Read online

  NIGHT IN THE AFTERNOON AND OTHER EROTICA

  BY CAROLINE LAMARCHE

  TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY HOWARD CURTIS

  Copyright © 2000 by Caroline Lamarche

  Translation copyright © 2000 by Howard Curtis

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lamarche, Caroline.

  [Nuit l’après-midi. English]

  Night in the afternoon / by Caroline Lamarche; translated by

  Howard Curtis.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13:978-0-8021-9950-8

  I. Curtis, Howard. II. Title.

  PQ2672.A3686 N8413 2000

  843’.914-dc21 00-028791

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  CONTENTS

  Night in the Afternoon

  Paso Doble

  The Island

  The Man with the Rooster

  Black Country

  NIGHT IN THE AFTERNOON

  I don’t have any memory of my childhood. Any memory at all. Except this. I’m alone in a little bed, lying the wrong way up, my head knocking against the bottom of the bed, deep beneath the sheets, and I’m choking, because I can’t find the way out, and I cry for help, I’m choking, I’m going to die, I cry for help. Downstairs, in the big drawing room, there’s a reception, noises of conversation, the tinkling of glasses, nobody can hear me. But in the corridor, the maid passes. She hears a faint sound, like the whimpering of a kitten, comes in, sees the hump in the bed, and throws back the covers, like the curtain in a theater. I am saved.

  1

  The kittens were born three days ago. And for three days I’ve been bleeding. Four days, in fact—the day before the kittens were born, when I got up from the bed in that short-stay hotel, in that room I’m going to have to talk about, I saw a little drop of blood on the sheet, so light it was already dry, caused, I guess, by one of those things he used to penetrate me.

  “There’s a bit of blood,” I said, utterly surprised, as if suddenly discovering that I had lost my virginity.

  I folded the corner of the sheet, thinking of the manageress. She was a beautiful woman still, but fierce-looking, authoritarian, and I didn’t want her to notice the blood. I wanted her to rip the sheet off the bed, roll it into a ball, and throw it into the washing machine with the others, all smelling of sperm and sweat—the rooms were all taken that afternoon, we were the last to arrive—and then boil the sheets slowly and throw them into a scorching hot dryer, until they were light and soft again, just things to sleep on.

  When the kittens came out, they were huddled together in a sticky pouch. Then their mother tore it, and out they slid, wet and blind. Their mother—I call her Douce—is black and white, like my childhood maid, with her black dress, white apron, and white gloves, all childhood maids are black and white, there’s nothing else to distinguish them, you can’t tell from their faces how old they are, or what they have under their skirts, or what their feet or arms look like. But they carried me the way a mother cat carries her young, instinctively, and just as a kitten forgets its mother, so I forgot them. That’s how motherhood should be—a story of maids and young masters, happy in the knowledge that you don’t belong to each other, and that the kisses and the blows won’t be a burden, happy that you owe your life to an anonymous hand in a white glove, and you don’t have to spend your whole life blessing it or biting it.

  The man had a white glove too, a white latex glove. I saw it afterwards, when the two hours were up and I was looking on the floor for my clothes. A short glove, the kind maids used to wear. It was on the floor, on the not very clean carpet, along with flesh-colored dildos and colored plastic clothespins and other things I preferred not to examine too closely. I didn’t even see the strap, it must have been wide, as wide as a belt, maybe it was a big belt with a buckle, because of the two distinct scars I had, like razor cuts, one to the left of my navel and the other on my right breast.

  “I used something wide,” he told me later. “I didn’t want to leave too much of a mark, because of your boyfriend.”

  Back home, it hurt a lot when I peed. There was a sharp burning sensation, and blood in the bowl. Although it was a hot day, I felt so cold that I filled the bathtub with very hot water, and when I started washing myself, I couldn’t stop.

  You mustn’t touch the kittens for a day or two. If you pick them up during that time, the mother refuses to feed them, or else eats them. That’s something we’ve always known about animals. It’s humans we know very little about, or are only just starting to learn. Nobody ever put me on my mother’s belly and left me there, still wet from my birth. What they did with me was wash me, wrap me in a pretty bundle, and put me in a cradle next to the big bed.

  I don’t have any memory of childhood, any memory of bodies from my childhood, either mine or my mother’s. I construct a memory out of men’s bodies, belatedly save myself with men’s bodies, as an adult I invent a childhood, wet from the sperm that gave me birth.

  There was one whole day when I was saturated with the thing, when it clung to my skin. As if I’d never left that short-stay hotel, or its sickly smell, or the crumpled sheets pulled up so that the bare mattress showed through. But I didn’t try to rid myself of it. I didn’t even look at my body. I stayed at home the whole day, huddled up in bed. From time to time, a little blood ran between my legs. When evening came, I stripped off and looked at myself in the mirror.

  Gilles rang the bell while I was looking at myself in the mirror. I had no idea he was coming. He came out of the blue, at a crucial moment when what happened could either have become fixed or disappeared. When his gaze rested on my naked body, the whole thing became real. I wish I could extract the essence of that gaze, drink it in little sips, or lay it between my breasts, absorb it like a perfume, knowing it’s something I’ll never have, that straightforward way of looking at things, so sober and inscrutable, so fair in its judgment that you just have to respond immediately and with total sincerity.

  I remember his toneless voice. “What happened?”

  And I see my body again as it appeared to me in the mirror—bruises on the crotch, wide red streaks on the thighs and buttocks, and on the belly too, close to the pubic hair, and those two distinct cuts, one on the right breast, the other to the left of the navel.

  “Something stupid,” I replied.

  And for a time, the memory was labeled “stupid”—the time it took Gilles to get used to it. Then he undressed, sat down on the edge of the bed, and began to touch me. He did it very gently, until I greeted the orgasm by stretching my arms and legs and crying out, as usual. When everything was calm again, he touched me very lightly in the places where I had been hit, like a doctor examining a patient.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  So I said, in a solemn voice, that naked, defenseless voice that coming always releases in me:

  “I answered an ad.”

  The truth is, I answered a dream. One night
I dreamed that an unknown man took me by force, with grim determination, his gestures so precise and quick he could as easily have been murdering me as making love to me. Above our two bodies, two birds were flying. One was a peacock, his tail spread in a helix, flying the way no peacock has ever flown, graceful as a swan and strong as an eagle. The other was a bird-woman with blood-red feathers. She spiraled to the ground, crash-landed, and lay there in her scarlet finery. I recognized myself in her, I was that winged woman, it was my face that looked up at the sky while my body surrendered to the stranger’s violent lovemaking. Beside us, an open box, containing an assortment of instruments—pliers, tongs, scalpels. I looked at them, surprised and deeply curious. Who was going to open me up, and why? I trembled with desire, the desire to be at the mercy of tools like those, which cut through flesh, pull the wounds open, and keep them open.

  I never read the paper with the classified ads, I never buy it. I read the daily papers. Not the stuff about politics. The kinds of things I read are crime reports, stories about rapes, or else film and theater reviews, interviews with actors. I admire judges and film directors, but I think actors, like criminals and their victims, are worthy of the brightest and most unequivocal thing I have in me—fascination.

  It was Gilles who gave me the paper with the classified ads, because I was worried about what would happen to the kittens after they were born—I didn’t want to put any of them to sleep, I wanted them all to live. In the paper, you can offer kittens to give away, everyone does it. There are several sections: “houses, apartments, furniture, cars, animals …” A pity they don’t have a section for “babies,” babies to give away, so you can choose one, just like that, and take it home with you in a Moses basket bought specially, all in pink gingham, a surprise for the man you love, even if he’s not your man and never will be.

  Usually, after “animals” come the personals. And there was the ad. It wasn’t the only one, there were thirty at least, but that’s the one I saw, straightaway, because it matched the dream, gave off the same vibrations, as if it had a magnet hidden in it and my pupils had turned into iron filings.

  “Masterful man seeks flexible young woman to share intimate moments …” There followed a post office box and the name of a town, my town, the town where I worked, where I loved, with its black canal under an open sky and its motionless barges, the very town where I live.

  I can still see myself sitting at the kitchen table, writing, I can still see myself throwing the letter in the nearest box, the one at the corner of the avenue. It must have been ten in the evening, and the air smelled of vanilla, or more likely lime trees in blossom. The neon signs of the restaurant floated in the black water of the canal. People passed, chatting, and on the café terrace a guitarist was passing a hat around. It might have been the south of France, or a secluded cove in a Greek port, a cove where boats don’t go, only people strolling idly up and down the quays. I thought of the customers at the agency. They’re always on the lookout for unusual destinations, and I try my best to satisfy them, because it’s my job. My way of changing scenery is to answer an ad, with the night air starting to smell of vanilla and the cool dirty waters of the canal stirring memories of vacations.

  “I couldn’t help myself … Do you understand?”

  “No,” Gilles said.

  He lit a cigarette and took a drag, screwing up his eyes. When he opened them again, the circles of his lashes were like two stars.

  “It was bound to happen. I should have known one day you’d do the dirty on me.”

  That gentle voice of his, absorbing the catastrophe at the speed of light. Gilles always wins, even when he loses.

  I laughed. “As long as I don’t give you a baby—”

  Gilles stood up abruptly, leaving us, the bed and me, in disarray. You don’t give a baby to a man who’s married with kids, you make do with crumbs, gaps in the schedule, improvised lovemaking at the end of the day, and you take your pill every morning, because you’re a big girl and you have a sense of responsibility.

  But all I want, sometimes, is a baby, and for everything else to disappear. A baby in my belly, and then in my arms, like my sister. My sister has a baby already, and she’ll have more, she’s the kind of woman who lives through her belly— the belly that makes babies, not the one you give your lovers.

  Once I’d mailed my reply, the world seemed to shake around me, tiny cracks spreading rapidly like ripples across a calm surface. The very next day, a stranger would have my name, my address, my telephone number, the suggestion we meet in a local bar, a little bit of information about me—height, weight, hair color, details of what I’d be wearing so he could spot me easily. He would have the power to confirm the appointment or not, to turn up or to stay away, to station himself under my windows and watch me coming out every morning and follow me to the travel agency, or else approach me and see a smile form on my face … I had started to smile at passersby, as if every man I met could be the stranger. It was a vague smile, ambiguous—I might have been smiling because of the fine weather, or because everyone on the street was wearing flannel and cotton, but I could just as easily have been smiling like a woman in love, because of some secret that only I knew. I did have a secret—the dream. I knew nothing about the man in the ad, but the dream had inflamed me, I was excited and afraid at the same time, as if approaching a ritual. Waiting for the appointed day, I was like a disciple preparing, bending my neck in imagination, kissing the hand of the Master and the attributes of his office—pliers, tongs, scalpel.

  But when the day came and I saw the man—he had confirmed nothing, leaving me in suspense up until the last minute—when he stood up and walked toward me in the bar I had indicated in my letter, he seemed so nondescript, I found him quite ugly. He didn’t shake my hand. I couldn’t read anything in his eyes as he looked me over, except perhaps a touch of annoyance, as if my red scarf—the color I had indicated—was excessive, my makeup artificial, my perfume obvious.

  We sat down on the terrace. He ordered a coffee and I asked for an iced tea. He started to talk, mopping his forehead with a paper handkerchief. For a moment I thought he was going to say he had been sent by his Master, the way it happens in the stories. He certainly gave no impression that he found me attractive, or even that he was looking at my body with any thought of what he would do to it. In fact, he seemed completely uninterested in me. All he did was talk, on and on, as if to reassure himself. I listened to him, dumbstruck, thinking about the ways I could refuse, preparing them, polishing them. I looked at his narrow shoulders, his slightly stooped back, his very short hair, blond verging on red, his freckled skin, very white on the arms, red on the face because of the sun that day, and his eyes squinting under the light. I thought of what I would tell Gilles. “You know, I answered an ad, just to see, and when I saw the guy, I realized—” I would describe the man to him, making fun of him, just one more little massacre among thousands of others on the planet, like squashing a mosquito, nothing more. Then I would stroke Gilles’s thick iron-gray hair and run my finger over his long lashes, and I would ask him to touch me lightly between my shoulder blades, in the sensitive spot we discovered by chance while making love, and in other places too, everywhere, with those long supple fingers of his that travel over my body with the boldness and gentleness of a beautiful language.

  “I have a boyfriend,” I told the guy.

  He didn’t look at me. He seemed worried.

  “That’s a drag. I don’t want any problems with your boyfriend.”

  He gulped his coffee, took the cookie from his saucer, unwrapped it, and gave it to me. “What are you looking for, exactly?” he asked through thin lips.

  “I don’t know.”

  I finished my tea, then ate the cookie, saying, “Thank you very much,” like a schoolgirl. The sun was burning hot, the terrace packed. It seemed to me the man was constantly asking the same question, with the addition of a few crude words, almost like a doctor probing for symptoms.

&
nbsp; “What is it you like? Every woman’s different. How about fellatio? Or sodomy? Some like it, some don’t.”

  I felt tremendously weary. “I don’t mind it,” I said. “I don’t mind anything.”

  Just then, I remembered the dream. I felt numb.

  “As long as I’m dominated,” I murmured, “I’ll do anything.”

  We arranged to meet the following week.

  * * *

  The next day and the days after that, I worked as usual, ate, slept, shopped, went about my business, saw Gilles occasionally. But all that time, I was waiting. While I slept, while I ate, while I talked to customers, while I kissed Gilles gently on the lips, I was waiting. I was cool, self-possessed, a victim of a condition that is very familiar to me, the total freezing of my emotions. It’s a chronic disease, inherited from childhood, imprinted in the genes of well-to-do families, masters of their possessions and their affections. Nothing in my life gives me any motivation to break free of the condition, except dreams, those subtle combinations of vivid images that somehow conspire to save me. According to what they tell me, I form attachments or break them.

  The red-headed man had suggested we go by train. The hotel where he wanted to take me was in the city, and you could never find anywhere to park. I arrived at the station five minutes before the train left. He was waiting for me under the clock, looking anxious.

  “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  He was more familiar than before. More worried too. I wondered why he didn’t have a suitcase or an overnight bag with him. Where did he keep his whips and chains? If I couldn’t be attracted to a Master—I’d abandoned that idea the first moment I met him—at least I wanted a ritual, symbolic objects, I wanted blindfolds, rope to bind my wrists, whips of different sizes, dildos, harnesses, leather collars. The lack of accessories revolted me. But I didn’t let anything show, and I didn’t ask any questions. We got our tickets and went onto the platform, and I continued to be very formal with him.