Night in the Afternoon and Other Erotica Read online

  It was a suburban station, a quiet station with only two tracks. There were red roses on the walls, and a black cat running into a tunnel covered with graffiti, naive and crude but fairly mild suburban graffiti. There were also two black women in bright dresses, standing on different platforms and shouting across the tracks. They were telling each other a story we didn’t understand, and laughing, with easy, uncontrolled laughter, African laughter. While we waited for the train, the red-headed man took out some mail from the pocket of his light leather jacket and opened it. A pornographic magazine, some publicity for the Erotica Show, and a letter. He skimmed through the letter and handed it to me.

  “Read it.”

  “It’s not addressed to me.”

  “Read it.”

  I read quickly, in a fog. It was a woman like me, answering his ad. She had watched S/M videos, and liked what she saw, but she was afraid. Did he do things like that— whip women till the blood ran, hang them by their breasts, sew up their labia? Would she be branded, sodomized with different-sized objects, gang-banged? I looked up. The man was watching me.

  “I don’t reply to women who are afraid,” he said.

  “I’m not afraid,” I said, watching the cat move along the wall with the red roses. In the silence, the black women laughed. Everything could stay like this, forever.

  * * *

  By the time we got off the train, the city was like an oven. It was too early, the room was booked for three o’clock, we had half an hour to kill. We walked until we found a café. As the red-headed man pushed open the door, something fell to the tiled floor with a slight noise. It was a bright pink plastic clothespin. The man bent down, picked it up, and stuffed it in his pocket. Where had it come from, and why was he so anxious to retrieve it? It was a mystery, and because of it, one of those slight shifts took place in my mind, the kind that take you into another world, where the faces look like paintings and the tables and chairs like film sets, so that everything is suddenly like a fiction, and life is transfigured by something as small as a pink clothespin falling on a tiled floor.

  We ordered two coffees. For some reason, I had the idea it wasn’t the right time of day to ask for a glass of wine, and for a moment that trivial detail became the focus of all my anxieties. All the same, I needed a drink.

  “I think I’d prefer a little wine,” I told him shyly, feeling I was blaspheming.

  Without hesitation, the man stood up, went to the counter, and changed my order. He came back and sat down. We said nothing until the coffee and the wine arrived. The waitress was middle-aged, strong and brown-skinned, her hair tied in a loose bun. She was wearing a white apron over a black dress. It would have seemed old-fashioned anywhere else in the city, but here, in this area of offices and ministries, it seemed just right. All she needed was white gloves, and she’d look the way maids used to in the old days.

  The red-headed man and I started to talk. We seemed to have been saying exactly the same words over and over since we first met. I told him again that I needed to be dominated, that I’d do anything as long as I was dominated. He showed me the magazine he’d received that morning, a touch apologetically, it seemed to me. It wasn’t up to much, he said, it was commercial, he didn’t know why they still sent it to him, he didn’t ask for it. I leafed through it. There were photos of naked women with shaved pubises sitting on bottles or masturbating themselves with their fingers, their nails enormously long. There were women licking men’s cocks, and women with brooches in their breasts, dog collars around their necks and whips in their hands. Some of the women wore figure-hugging leather suits that covered them from head to toe, their faces masked, with only a slit for their eyes and a circle for their mouths. In these outfits, they either stood in dominating poses or lay with their legs apart on leather gynecological seats with stirrups for the feet and straps to hold the limbs in place. The photos were mediocre, revolting in their banality. I told him so, adding that it was a pity, an artist like Mapplethorpe could have done something marvelous with a subject like that, and I repeated “marvelous,” but I was thinking of Mapplethorpe’s flowers, because I hated all the rest, all those nudes of Mapplethorpe’s that meant so much to people who treat sex as some kind of bodybuilding exercise. The tulips and orchids, though—from the front or the side, open or closed, they were so perfect they made you want to cry, they were marvelous, that was the only word you could use. The man agreed, though he seemed a bit embarrassed. Maybe he’d never heard of Mapplethorpe.

  I turned a few pages and came to the ads.

  “Obviously, there’s something for every taste,” he said, a trifle shamefaced, as if he was personally to blame for the advertisers’ whims.

  I had to read slowly to try to decipher the abbreviations and the specialized terms. I asked him to explain about certain practices—fetishism, for example, or the use of women as maids at high-class evening parties, or the stretching of the labia to eight centimeters, attached with elastic bands to the thighs under a miniskirt.

  “It’s ridiculous,” I said, and forced myself to laugh heartily, like a playground supervisor trying to share the children’s jokes.

  Yes, he muttered, it was ridiculous, that was why he never advertised there. He placed his ads in the Saturday paper, and he made them discreet, just enough so that a woman interested in things like that would understand. I looked up and stared at his pale eyebrows and, with sudden intensity, recited from memory: “Masterful man seeks flexible young woman to share—”

  He interrupted me, not at all aggressively, and explained patiently that two or three years ago, even such a mild ad would have been censored by the paper and returned to the sender. Today you could write that sort of thing if you were careful. “Flexible” was more acceptable than “submissive,” for example, and anyway, “flexible”—he hesitated—“looks better.” As he spoke, he shot me a somber and almost vindictive look. Our eyes met. I started to leaf through the magazine again, mechanically.

  “I’m very flexible,” I said, my eyes lowered. “I can touch my toes with my fingers.”

  “The people who are interested in these things,” he said, “go a lot further than that.”

  An uneasy silence fell, filled for him, I guess, with visions that went “a lot further.” The phrase amused me. I was starting to find the man interesting. Without intending to, he was demonstrating the huge gap between us. There was something quite ridiculous about the two of us together. We were so different, we seemed like grotesque caricatures to each other. A well-bred doll who never went “a lot further” and a bad guy who couldn’t be taken seriously, each twinkling like a star in its own sky, light years from the other—me with my dreams of birds, him with his weird questions. Would I like to be dominated by several men, for example? I just had to say the word. There were plenty of people interested, the main difficulty was finding a day and a time that suited everybody.

  “You have to realize, life isn’t like in the books, where people arrange to meet in dungeons with all the right equipment. In life, you have your job from nine to five, your family from five to nine, apartment buildings are full of housewives and screaming brats, and ten of you can’t all go up to a hotel room at the same time. But anyway, if you want to, I can try. How about it?”

  He laughed, a feeble laugh that made me nauseous. I smiled. There was quite a long silence, filled with the noise his spoon made as he stirred his coffee.

  “Anyway, I’m a stickler for hygiene. No penetration without a condom.”

  “Of course,” I said, and thought of the men I’d known. None of them could stand the things.

  “Around here,” he added, “there are times during the day when the sewers are clogged with all the condoms coming down. Which just shows they’re all at it—lawyers, doctors, government employees, all of them—all day, every day, but especially in the afternoons, in private houses, little hotels, that’s all there is around here, all the streets are full of them, but you won’t see anything, they all look anonymous from the outside.”

  I listened, fascinated. The city was a gigantic brothel.

  “That’s marvelous,” I said.

  “Marvelous” again. It was a word we used a lot when I was growing up, a very kind and tolerant word—a marvelously close family, a marvelous reception, a marvelous piece of charitable work, a certificate of excellence at school, that’s marvelous, dear, marvelous.

  He smiled rather distantly, without looking at me. It was nearly three o’clock, and the wine was going to my head. I asked him about his family, that’s what you’re supposed to do to put people at their ease when the conversation drops, it’s what I was taught to do when I used to visit Margot in her old people’s home. Margot, the last survivor of a generation of maids in black dresses and white aprons, Margot red-faced and wrinkled in her old age, like one of those varieties of apples they don’t grow anymore. I was fifteen years old, fifteen years of comfort and breeding, with a pleated skirt over exquisite calves, and a kind smile, a perfectly sincere smile that hid a marvelous sadness, the sadness rich children feel when they discover that there’s no way to cross the divide between their world and the world of those poorer than themselves, and that the whole universe will always be divided in two, till the end of time. Margot responded with good grace to my well-bred compassion, like someone speaking from one bank of a river to someone on the other bank, while contemplating the majestic river between them, an impassable border.

  The red-headed man, though, replied with bad grace, and something of that old delicious sadness came back. His was a real hard-luck story—he was abandoned by his parents at birth. There really is such a thing as denial of paternity, it’s even written in the parish registers for everyone to read, you just have to ask, he said insistently, as if anx
ious to convince me. The fact that it was down in black and white seemed to be what impressed him most. The rest followed naturally. Brought up in institutions. As a teenager, ran away from it all. Found a job as a messenger in the city, then as a waiter in a restaurant. Then this and that—little jobs. Twenty years of little jobs. He might have been talking about a twenty-year love affair, or a twenty-year career. A real loser, in other words, but a good guy all the same, the cream of the underprivileged, who hadn’t joined the ranks of those who rape or kill because of their grim childhoods, the kind of men who get mentioned on the front pages of my favorite newspapers.

  He repeated that he was free during the day, and that in the future we could see each other at whatever time suited me best.

  “Abandoned at birth.” Someone actually wrote that in black and white. In a register intended to record death as well as life, the kind of register that had recorded the births in my own family—“son of…, daughter of…”—branching out into a solid, well-respected tree, decorated with coats of arms.

  “In the future,” he’d said, and “whatever time suits you best.” A man who didn’t seem busy, who didn’t slot me into the gaps in his day, a man abandoned by time. There were people all around us, businesspeople, a few workers with broad shoulders and solid trades, and there I was, sipping my glass of wine, and there was the man, so totally at my disposal I couldn’t bear it, drinking his third cup of coffee and letting time pass.

  “Well,” I said, “it’s after three. Are we going or not?”

  “Why? Have you changed your mind?” He seemed unconcerned. “Do you want us to stay here and talk?”

  It seemed to me we could easily do just that. But we fell silent again, and the effect of the wine was wearing off. We either had to say goodbye right now or let our bodies do the talking.

  “If we’re staying,” I said, “I’ll need more wine. If we’re going, let’s go quickly, I need to be a bit drunk like this to go.”

  He paid the bill and left a large tip. I never leave anything, I just pick up the change. A cup of coffee’s expensive enough, for something you could just as easily drink at home.

  “I didn’t think people tipped anymore.”

  “I’ve been a waiter,” he said simply. “I know what it means to get a tip.”

  I felt a new and unexpected emotion. Something like respect for him, and for people like him, the kind of people he defended when he said “keep the change.” Shame, too, at having thought for so long that a nice smile was enough.

  We went out. We turned onto one street among all the others. I looked at the sun-drenched housefronts.

  “Don’t try to look for it,” he said. “You can’t see anything from outside.”

  The house was tall and gray, with a nineteenth-century front and a solid door. We went in without ringing. Here we were, we’d arrived, it’d soon be over, this thing that would be just like the red-headed man—rather strange, rather sad, on the margins of other people’s lives. Suddenly, I thought of Margot. Whenever I went to see her, I told myself the same thing: It’ll soon be over. An hour in another world, and then straight back home—instant relief. I remember a big four-poster bed, just one, that took up a whole wall and a corner of the window. I remember a chair—maybe there were two, but Margot always sat on the bed when I came, and I sat on the chair, so there must have been just one. There was a washbasin somewhere, I can’t remember where, and a wardrobe, I can’t remember that either. I wonder if you saw those things when you were fifteen. I wonder what you saw, when you were fifteen. You saw people’s bodies, Margot’s very thick legs that seemed swollen with water, you heard her labored breathing, you remember she kept saying: “My emphysema.” You saw her yellow complexion, her partially toothless smile that made her look like a witch, you breathed in the sickly smell, you heard the irritating ticking of the big red alarm clock, but you kept coming, bravely, every week, because the whole edifice—good deeds, love, the sense of life—had always rested on Margot. You came to hear Margot talk about her youth, the time she worked for your family as a maid, and how, whenever the trains were on strike, she would walk to work, two hours there, two hours back, following the railroad track because she didn’t know the roads well, and besides, work is sacred, and you mustn’t disappoint your employers. She’d had good legs in those days, but now they were heavy, not to mention the emphysema. You came because Margot asked you one day if you were going to marry and have children, and when you answered yes, of course, she told you in a low voice that if it hadn’t been for the work and the employers’ children, especially “you, dear, I pulled you out of this incredible jumble of sheets, you could have suffocated,” if it hadn’t been for all that, which added up to a kind of family life, she would have married. Yes, the opportunities were there, but first take care of those close to you, those closest to you—those who employ you and whom you end up loving—because in any case, men always manage, even with a broken heart. You came because Margot whispered that kind of thing as she looked through the half of the window that wasn’t hidden by the bed. You came because there was a broken heart, a belly as dry as a pod on legs that were too thick, and it was fascinating that Margot could laugh, despite everything, and love you so much that one day she gave you her bracelet of imitation pearls and imitation stones, in a setting of imitation gold. You ran errands for her, fetched her cotton balls, aspirin, a battery for her flashlight, and you brought her flowers from Mama’s garden, flowers the gardener had grown, flowers that didn’t cost anything. You brought cakes you’d made yourself, you were good at making cakes, but only cakes, because for everything else there was the cook to do it, that was why you didn’t know how to make coffee or fry eggs, but cakes, yes, you invited your girlfriends over on Saturday afternoons to make cakes, and on Sundays, after Mass, you went to see Margot and had coffee and cake. And then when you started college, far enough away so you didn’t have to come back every week, you said goodbye to Margot, thinking you’d see her in a year, and two months later, Margot died, and some time after that, you received in the mail a little package of her last treasures—the red alarm clock, a statuette of Our Lady of Lourdes, a boxwood rosary— along with a note from the lawyer saying she’d put it in writing that she wanted you to have these things. It was all so sad and so typical and proved how useful love was—it must have been love that prolonged the old woman’s life through all those visits. And maybe you should give yourself to the red-headed man in the same way, only here there was an added sense of the ridiculous, how ridiculous it was going to be, fucking in a short-stay hotel, and how disgusting, because here there was no love, and certainly no death.

  A little entrance hall. A staircase. To the left of the staircase, a door with a window, leading to an office. The door was closed, and there was a note stuck behind the handle: “I’m at the grocer’s. Indicate the room you’re using and the time you arrived.” Followed by room numbers from one to ten, with little circles that had to be blacked in. They all had been, except for number seven.

  “I’ll go have a look at the room,” the red-headed man said.

  He ran upstairs. I stayed where I was, leaning against the front door. And then the door opened, pinning me against the wall, and the manager came in. She looked me up and down. She must have been beautiful once, and maybe she still was. I find it hard to judge that kind of tired, rather casual beauty. The red-headed man came back down.

  “I’ve been up to see room seven. Apparently it’s the only one free.”

  The woman looked at the paper with the circles. “That’s right, number seven. You can have it.”

  I thanked her and smiled, quite boldly. I wanted her to see it meant nothing for me to come here, it was no different from going somewhere to have a drink or see a show, there was nothing special about this place, it was just an ordinary house, and I was just a weary traveler, a guest being shown to her room for an afternoon nap.

  “Two hours,” the woman said. “Two hours and that’s it. Any more and it’s extra.”

  We went upstairs. Our room was on the second floor. There were other doors, all closed. The house was completely silent, as if all the rooms were empty, or as if everyone really did come here to sleep or to listen in silence to what was happening in the other rooms—what was about to happen in room seven, for instance, where the red-headed man was stepping aside now for me to enter.