Vanessa Duries - The Classmate

THE CLASSMATE

VANESSA DURIÈS

Contents

Preface , by Franck Spengler 7

Laika , by Florence Dugas 9

The Classmate 13

Chapter Two 21

Chapter Three 27

Chapter Four 33

Chapter Five 39

Photographs of Vanessa,

by Maxim Jakubowski 43

Translator’s Note 54

Preface

by Franck Spengler

Ihave for a long time hesitated before deciding to re-read the pages that Vanessa Duriès entrusted to me. I was afraid of reliving an immense sadness. Vanessa and I had quickly established an almost filial rapport, quite different from the classic editor-author relationship, and far from the desire that she inspired or which she enjoyed inspiring. It is true that her young femme-fatale allure incited strong feelings that left few of those who came into contact with her indifferent. As it was, Pierre, my father-in-law, a great bibliophile, was the first one to receive a signed freshly-printed book from her. His embarrassment, mixed with a certain childish pride, amused us. I did not belong to the S & M seraglio with its decorum and its rituals; thus, she perceived me as a sort of non-judgmental father-figure who was concerned only with the text, and nothing but the text of her book.

I spoke to her as I would with my own daughter, Vanda, who at the time was thirteen when Vanessa was twenty. Vanessa used to call me regularly to tell me about her life, the people she ran into, difficulties with her parents, her doubts about the S&M milieu that had already become familiar to her and which she distrusted. Vanessa offered her body, but detested the venal aspect, whether moral or financial, while maintaining an amazing objectivity about the customs that she practiced.

Today, thirteen years after that terrible accident in which Vanessa perished (along with Nathalie Perreau, another of my writers, and my friend Jean-Pierre Imbrohoris) this unfinished text, of which she had sent me a first draft while she worked on the next, would take on a completely different dimension. Behind this story that I had given Florence Dugas to read, one perceived the unspoken changes in Vanessa’s behavior as I saw it.

To publish this novel that took a life is to render homage to one who was interrupted by fate. Had the text been finished, we would have had a great erotic text that could have been called, “Transformation of a Submissive”

because I strongly believe that it would have marked, for Vanessa, the abandonment of her bonds.

Laika

by Florence Dugas

When Frank Spengler confessed to me, “one evening, half-misty, in London” that he kept in his files the first five chapters of a novel once drafted by Vanessa Duriès, the legendary author of The Ties that Bind , I begged him to give them to me for editing. Convincing him was more difficult than I had anticipated, and I had to plead.

So now I am in possession of what should have been a major work of erotic literature, if the brutal collision of a shiny Mercedes and an expressway railing hadn’t ended the life of one whose “Master”, J-L

had named, “Laika,”–her submissive name, her pet name. I read these forty pages all at once–five chapters, five ill-fated chapters that had escaped the crash. And then I re-read them, slowly, letting my spirit and my hand escape towards dreams. . .

Vanessa had with her, in the Mercedes in which she was killed, the entire manuscript–as did Camus, who had in his briefcase the nearly-finished manuscript of The Last Man, which would be published thirty years later after the automobile driven by his publisher struck a tree.

Vanessa’s text disappeared in the aftermath of the accident, not burnt, because Fate was compassionate enough to save the heroine’s features and body—intact, beautiful, unchanged, as in my memory, like in the cover of her short book without an end—infinite. Instead the car was ripped open, its passengers ejected, and the shirt-carton that held the pages opened under the impact. The wind blew hard on the A7 near Montélimar and the pages were scattered amongst the olive trees and the vineyards of the Rhone Valley.

It amuses me to imagine the shaggy head of a laborer finding, hanging on one of the vines, a page covered with round, magnificently feminine handwriting, and deciphering, in a cautious early morning, episodes of lust and fornication.

Lust, I have written—now I should review the term. That story, in which the

title, written between parentheses, was only a working title—a symbol of that life, also between parentheses—is essentially a love story. Because the

“classmate” from Toulouse is certainly Vanessa, who had just begun English studies in Bordeaux, but it is also about what she found there.

Vanessa (her pen name) had at a very young age been initiated by he who she called her Master into the classic structures of S&M traditions.

In a sense, that is all she knew: the whip, the crop, the chains, the clamp and gags, the unknown men who would force her. . . All that she creates with virtuosity in the first chapter is in some sense a bridge between The Ties that Bind and this story. Nowhere there is the beauty of love, the tenderness, the passion, the adolescent attraction for the Other, that way of holding hands, of just touching, of swimming inside desire like a fish in the water—there is only that satisfaction of desire that, after the last ecstasy, leaves you feeling only thoroughly frustrated until the next debauchery.

Should I confess that the style-less style of The Ties never really satisfied me? That the plain business-like behavior of the uncultured Dominant has always made me feel sick? And that it is a great pity that so much of the apprenticeship has been a raw genius modeled upon a story lacking all passion, except in the Christian sense of the word...

Having said that, I will draw an essential difference between The Ties and its author. Vanessa was very young when she was taken in hand by J-L. She was quite pretty–and had I found her in 1993, I confess that I would have thought then, like a celebrated character out of DeSade: It is true that the little slut is well made, and I swear that before the end of the day I will have enjoyed the pleasure of fucking her.

Circumstances would decide otherwise.

All of that is to say that it is necessary to completely disassociate Vanessa and her first work. The Ties was written under the influence.

The pages of her novel that have been rescued offer the fascinating spectacle of a butterfly leaving its chrysalis–excuse me for the cliché of that image, but I don’t see any other.

The Classmate is a love story. That the author has roughly decided to narrate it in the third-person shows her desire to distance herself from her passion to try to analyze it with objectivity. But though she undoubtedly wanted to hide in the shadow of the first name of her pen name (the manuscript carries only the initial V***) it is clear, at the same time, that it is her, no one but her, who narrates and who lives what is narrated.

I would like to think that in some part of the Pink City or somewhere else, lives that young girl with whom Vanessa fell in love, a pure and almost innocent girl—a half-virgin who was one day loved by a young woman who had learned everything about love, except love itself. I would also like to think that in the automobile that traveled towards its fate, Vanessa would think of that child of desire, more than in her

“Master” whom she had had loved harshly and from whom at the moment of her death she was, mentally at least, already detached. A

“Master” that survives from this world, in narrating to whomever would listen that he “initiated” Vanessa to the suspect delights of sadomasochism, and who would venally circulate the photos and the videos of these experiences. A miserable wretch who never understood that he had within his hands a woman full of heart and of spirit, and who believed to have understood her because he had whipped her and lent her to the pathetic habitués of the French S& M world.