Vanessa Duries - The Classmate

“Once,” V*** thought, I had an affair, during an evening at Lille, with a woman who had long ago passed her sixtieth…her sex was dry like a smoked fish and it had the same odor, and the taste…” But visibly, Lauren

didn’t see the same things in the film as V*** did, and sighing, V***

wondered if her experiences during the past two years had made her age too quickly and had ruined her for simple things. Two years ago this film would have seemed audacious. Today it was a sentimental film designed for pimpled adolescent masturbation.

How did Lauren touch herself? On her back? On her stomach? While beating down on her button? While forcing a finger into her cunt? Did she play with her asshole, perhaps? Did she make herself cum quickly, as a hygienic measure? Or would she take her time? What fantasies nourished her caresses?

Her mind wandered. She no longer looked at the screen but the magnificent profile of her friend.

Lauren’s arm was two centimeters away from hers, on the large synthetic velour armrest. “I’ve got to touch her,” she said to herself. “I’ve got to take her hand.”But goddamn, those two centimeters were hard to cross! “I am nothing,” V*** said to herself, and if I don’t reach out to take her hand, I’ll go home and hang myself. Lauren watched the screen, immobile, her profile taut. “I should reach out before we learn who the criminal is,” and she felt that the moment of the revelation was approaching. She advanced her fingers, brushing those of her friend, and at last, took them. She tightened her moist hand around a hand as lifeless as a cadaver, as if Lauren had not felt her take her hand. V felt overwhelmed with happiness. She caressed, with her thumb, Lauren’s open palm. The young girl had not stirred nor moved a centimeter.

V*** caressed the fingers that she was permitted to, then climbed her wrist, the forearm, the curve of the elbow. Lauren watched the screen intensely the last spasms of an intrigue sewn with all too predictable

threads. Her lips were just slightly open and V***, astonished, would have thought that she was in the midst of cumming.

The generic ending paraded across the screen. During the three or four minutes of pointless details, the chief operator, stunts, make-up and other technical considerations, Lauren didn’t move and left her dead hand within V***’s fingers.

When they left the Crater Theater, they were grabbed by the cold. The city was swept by the wind. Lauren wrapped herself up and leaned on V***. Arm-in-arm they followed the rue de Languedoc towards the historic city center, until reaching the rue de la Chaîne.

—Do you want to come up and have tea? the tall blonde asked.

V*** wondered if there was something more than the words said in an atonal voice.

—Of course,” she answered, —we’re freezing our butts, I’d drink anything warm.”

She watched while Lauren heated the water, emptied a teapot still full of tea from the morning, took out blue china teacups. It was within these careful gestures, and a glance that avoided her own, that there was something of a promise…

—I’m going to turn up the heat, Lauren said, —while the water warms up.

They were so cold that they hardly gave the tea time to brew. They served themselves large cups, poured slowly for the pleasure of re-warming their hands by holding the burning pot.

They took a sip at the same instant their eyes met and the coincidence made them smile.

“I can’t just let things stay like this,” V*** reproached herself. At the same time, she felt strangely paralyzed, as if her next act would change the

order of the world.

Vanessa’s manuscript ends here.

Photographs of Vanessa

Maxim Jakubowski

By the time I came across Vanessa Duriès’ book in a boquiniste’s dusty box by the Seine in Paris in the summer of 1994, Vanessa was already dead. I knew nothing of this yet. I read the short novel back in London, intrigued by its intensity and courage, often stunned by the extremes of what we might term perversions its female protagonist endured. It rang true.

It felt intuitively like more than just an update of The Story of O , another tale of submissive slave and master.

On the back cover of the original French edition, Vanessa Duriès smiles at us, smiles at me, fresh-faced, almost innocent, beautiful, an attractive young girl emerging from adolescence, curly-haired. Could this, I wondered, be the real author of this dangerous tale of womanhood defiled and proud? The face, the dark eyes that led me, the accidental reader, into the depths of her soul, as her body stood tall under the bite of the whips, the obscene penetrations of every conceivable aperture, the random punishments, the rituals of torture and humiliation. I strongly suspected something of a hoax. Maybe, Vanessa Duriès and that candid photograph were the cover for a pseudonymous pornographer who had somehow hit a chord somewhere inside me?

There she is, luminous, wondrous and young.

Tell me it isn’t so, Vanessa, I wondered.

I rang her French publisher, Franck Spengler, and offered to acquire the rights and get the book translated into English and asked him the obvious questions.

He had harbored the same doubts when the manuscript had originally landed on his desk. But he had met Vanessa Duriès and was soon convinced

that not only was she the author of the story, but that it was one-hundred percent autobiographical.

The book appeared in France in March 1993 and had an immediate impact. Vanessa appeared on various television programs and disarmed interviewers and opponents with her evident sincerity. Here was an attractive young student who had been plunged by the power of love into the most depraved depths of the S&M world, and stood proudly by her experiences unashamed, almost defiant; invigorated by her vigorous devotion for Pierre, her master, an older man who had led her into this new, shadowy life.

One day, I would like to see video recordings of the programs Vanessa participated in on the occasion of the book’s launch. Something inside me beckons the sound of her voice, with a warm Southern regional accent—she came from Agen, not far from Bordeaux; I wish to see the way her eyes must have twinkled under the studio lights, how her body moved in fascinating ways, her lips opened and curled, how the curls of her dark hair fell upon her neck as she defended her experiences head held high. It will be the only chance I will ever have to see Vanessa in motion.

I have press cuttings from her newspaper and magazine interviews from the same period. She is a year older than the back jacket photograph, twenty-one now. The curls in her hair are less evident in this blurry photocopy of a photocopy. She sits on a park bench, her winning smile shyly aimed at the camera, wearing a simple white blouse under her quiet, conservative jacket. She is holding a book, probably her own. She looks like just another pretty French student. In anther photograph, even blurrier, she sits again, pensive this time, her gaze directed downwards, her skirt hitched up to mid-thigh; it is possibly the same suit, but here she is not wearing a shirt, the jacket is buttoned and you can see a simple, sober

necklace around her fragile neck. She holds her hands together. Under the jacket, I know she is not wearing a brassiere; there, peer closer, are the breasts of Vanessa, the breasts that have been whipped, beaten, the nipples that have been twisted, tortured, pulled to the limits of the skin’s endurance, licked, pierced by needles, lovingly caressed.

Two months after her book’s publication in France, in May, 1993, Vanessa was asked, I assume by her domineering master, to pose in the nude for a skin magazine, no doubt in another test of her submission. Six more photographs of Vanessa.