Nancy Huston - Infrared

Saint Agatha, for instance. Any number of paintings depict the lovely Sicilian maid carrying her breasts on a tray. Great are the masters who have taken up this theme; subtle are their colours; skilful is their arrangement of forms and hues on the canvas. But every time she sees one, Ingrid cries, ‘Isn’t that dreadful?’, forcing Rena to wonder whom she hates most — the Christian virgins or the Roman monsters who martyred them.

According to the guidebook, Agatha was a sweet young thing born in Catania, Sicily in the third century A.D. When the Roman prefect Quintianus started cutting off her breasts to punish her for her conversion to Christianity, she cried out, ‘Oh, cruel man, how can you mutilate me like this? Have you forgotten your mother and the breasts that fed you?’

Bad mistake, Rena says to herself. The last thing you should do when threatened by a macho is to mention his mother. That’s rubbing salt in the wound. If you want to escape alive, you should talk to him about the weather, politics, sports — anything but his mother. In a macho’s brain, the word mother is a raw nerve; I know of no exceptions to this rule. Whenever a man boasts to me that mothers are sacred in his culture, I know for sure that women get the short end of the stick there. Anyway, Quintianus freaked out and ordered that Agatha be dragged over hot coals until death ensued.

‘Isn’t that dreadful?’ says Ingrid.

How can people not notice, Rena goes on (Subra hanging as usual on her every word), that the accoutrements of érotisme noir, from de Sade to Madame Robbe-Grillet, from Réage to Bataille, come straight out of Christian martyrology? Whips and chains, hairshirts, blasphemy and transgression, pleasure derived from punishment and pain, Saint Theresa swooning as she is pierced by the angel’s ‘arrow’…

‘Not my cup of tea,’ said Fabrice, laughing, as, during a visit to him in hospital, I described a few of my libertine misadventures — for instance the evening when, rigged out in black stiletto heels, a basque and a garter-belt, my thighs sheathed in fishnet stockings, a padlock dangling from my clitoris, gagged and bound yet at the same time armed with a whip, I walked upon, nay, trampled Jean-Christophe’s swollen testicles as he writhed in pleasure and shouted, Fuck God, Madame! Oh, would that I had sodomised you with the barrel of my Kalashnikov! Would that I had pissed into your left ear! Would that I had scattered holy wafers all over your alabaster breasts!..‘Not our cup of tea, in fact,’ Fabrice corrected himself as he laughed and clapped at my parody. ‘Haitians think highly of French literature in general, but they draw the line at érotisme noir. They just can’t get off on whips and chains — the memory of slavery is too recent.’

Kerstin once told me how nonplussed she’d been, arriving in Paris to pursue her medical studies in 1967, at the mixture of Gothic eroticism and dogmatic Marxism in the French intellectual milieu. Aged twenty-four, she’d already undergone a fair number of sexual initiations in the hippy communes of Stockholm, and had had to repress her laughter when a Leftist high school teacher announced his intention of showing her what was what, sex-wise.

‘Alain-Marie, his name was,’ she told me as we ate out together for the first time, washing our food down with liberal amounts of wine. (Our relationship had swiftly moved from professional to personal and the acupuncture sessions had had no effect on my insomnia.) ‘Alain-Marie took The Revolution very seriously. To show his support for the future dictatorship of the proletariat, he wore a red neckerchief. The son of a Catholic family from the provinces, he got a big kick out of blasphemy: his favourite book was Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, and when he saw a nun or a priest walk down the street he couldn’t refrain from going “Bang-bang, you’re dead!” For weeks on end, though I was dying to make love with him, he gave me lectures on Bataille’s theory of transgression.’ ‘“You bitch in heat, you dare to want,” that sort of thing?’ I asked. ‘Exactly. To my Swedish mind, all this was fascinating but also terribly frustrating.’ ‘Yet you desired him in spite of it?’ ‘Well, he was a Frenchman, right?’ Kerstin answered. ‘I mean, he spoke such beautiful French! I was turned on by the mere idea of making love with a Frenchman, given their worldwide reputation in the field.’ ‘It’s an overrated one, wouldn’t you say?’ ‘Unfortunately, my sample is too small to do the statistics.’ ‘Well, from my experience, intellectuals are the worst by far. Same problem as with French novels. They spend so much time holding forth on literature and eroticism that they’ve forgotten how to tell stories and make love. Hyperintellectualism is an STD specific to France.’

Having endured an entire semester of lectures on the subject of desire qua transgression, Kerstin had all but given up on getting laid by this man. At long last, however, Alain-Marie decided she was ready to move on from theory to practice. They were walking side by side down the Rue Mouffetard, it was a gorgeous spring day, a market day, she was wearing a flimsy dress, and suddenly Alain-Marie caught her by the hand and dragged her into Saint-Médard Church. ‘What’s up?’ she asked him. ‘Shhh!’ he said, putting a finger to his lips. And then, gluing his body to Kerstin’s, he started caressing her through the silky material of her dress. Apart from a few little old ladies kneeling in prayer and an organist doggedly practising Bach, the church was empty. ‘Come with me, I want you,’ Alain-Marie whispered into Kerstin’s ear (fortunately one of her erogenous zones) — and, so saying, he pulled her into one of the small side chapels, where the confessionals were.

Though she knows this story off by heart, Subra is in seventh heaven.

The confessional turned out to be locked, foiling what must have been Alain-Marie’s plan — but they slipped behind it, into the furthermost corner of the chapel. Glancing up, Kerstin noticed that the painting on the wall across from them (chosen in advance or just surrealistic coincidence?) was none other than an Education of the Virgin. ‘I’m going to look after your education today, little one,’ the Marxist-Leninist muttered. Kerstin found this a bit ludicrous, given her age — but if it could help him, who cared? Turning her around and pressing up against her from behind, he lifted her pretty dress and pushed aside her panties with his fingers. ‘What sins have you committed this week?’ he asked. ‘You must tell me every one of them without exception…Sins in thought, word and deed…’ Sensing that something was about to happen at long last, Kerstin repressed a titter and blurted out, ‘Yes, Father, yes, Father…’ And he: ‘So you’ve been naughty? Very naughty?’ And she: ‘Yes, Father, very, very naughty.’ She wracked her brain in search of a nice juicy sin, but her imagination always failed her at critical moments like this, and she drew a blank. Luckily, though, she saw that Alain-Marie didn’t need it anymore, the Education of the Virgin would be enough — and since she herself was slippery with desire, things went smoothly from there on in. He continued to berate her in time with the organ music: ‘Ah, ah! You naughty little girl, here’s your punishment, here’s what you deserve, and if you go on sinning it’ll be worse next time, yes, much worse, I’ll take a candle and shove it… aaaaah!’ —within a few seconds the inundation took place. ‘And you never enlightened him on the subject of your virginity?’ I asked Kerstin. ‘Of course not. If we spoil their pleasure we spoil our own, don’t we?’…

‘Yes,’ Rena acquiesces, nodding. ‘It is dreadful.’