Hervé Le Tellier - The Sextine Chapel

This astonishment is followed by delight and then a certain regret, because he guesses that he’ll never dare demand such a thing from his future partners.

Wendy and Xavier. The brass bed stands majestically in the middle of the bedroom, on the second floor of a town house in Saint-Cloud, where Wendy, a young “au pair,” still tanned from the tropical sun, is surrendering herself to Xavier, the household’s eldest son. As naked as her, on the flowery sheet, he is stroking her breasts, then her belly, before gliding across her clitoris and introducing the full length of his middle finger into her moist sex. Wendy arches her back, cries out with pleasure, while Xavier feels her ischiocavernosus and bulbospongiosus muscles contract, thus imprisoning his finger.

Unless, the young medical student suddenly wonders, the correct terms are ischiospongiosus and bulbocavernosus?

Xavier and Yolande. Trapped for the past twenty minutes in the bleakly motionless cargo elevator between the second and first floors of the teaching hospital in Tours, Xavier and Yolande are keeping themselves busy. Clumsily, the houseman is kneading the nurse’s generous breasts while she (with a more expert touch) is removing his penis from his fly, which rapidly loses the consistency of a sausage in her fingers. Meanwhile she continues to hold a lively and cogent conversation with the outside world, here represented by the repairman.

As for me, Yolande thinks rather proudly, I can talk the hind leg back onto a donkey.

Yolande and Zach. It little matters how Zach, Professor of Latin at the University of Aix-Marseille, ended up at the wheel of this damned Massey Ferguson tractor in the middle of the fields of Beauce. What does matter is that he is licking the erect left nipple of Yolande, who is sitting beside him. It is sometimes said that the moment when the nipple appears is the moment sexual relations have begun, and so it is, because Yolande straddles him, in the so-called Andromache position.

Zach is about to penetrate Yolande when she cries out: “Oh, look! The spires of Chartres Cathedral!” and its competing erections immediately make his go limp.

Zach and Anna. Under a porch in rue des Francs-Bourgeois in Paris, Zach leans against the wall and draws Anna toward him. He slips the coolness of his old professorial palms through a gap in her dress and onto the warmth of her young student buttocks. Then he murmurs a Georges Bataille quotation into her ear: “The sexual act is to time what the tiger is to space,” though its meaning has always rather eluded him. “See you tomorrow,” Anna replies, before disappearing up the staircase.

How exasperating: in Zach’s pants, Sildenafil, an active ingredient discreetly swallowed in the form of a blue pill, is slowly and pointlessly coming into effect.

Anna and Harry. On the third floor of a building on rue des Francs-Bourgeois in Paris, Harry, wearing a dressing gown and with two days’ grey growth, opens the door to Anna, who drags him at once into the bedroom. She sheds her clothes on the way, and is naked by the time she pushes him onto the bed with a laugh. Anna whispers into his ear: “Do you know what? The sexual act is to time what the tiger is to space.” “Who said that, you?” “No, Bataille,” Anna replies before nibbling his stubby penis tenderly. Bataille? Harry has never heard of him.

Once again, Harry notes that Anna has nothing over his wife, but for him, variety is definitely the spice of life.

Harry and Oriane. In a trendy Parisian restaurant, Oriane has dragged Harry into the palatial toilets, tiled with mosaics and azulejos. There, sitting on the pine seat, she drags him toward her. She pulls down his trousers, his boxer shorts, kisses his belly, strokes his buttocks, his thighs, and smilingly brushes, but only brushes, against his upright member. Not even a minute has gone by before an overexcited Harry is ready to beg for her to act.

Oriane is tempted to ask him for money, just to see his reaction. OK, she says to herself, but what’s the going rate?

Oriane and Vincent. The last rays of the April sun caress the statues of the Jardin du Luxembourg and Oriane’s greying hair. She and Vincent, sitting on a bench, are quietly discussing Biblical forbidden fruit, while a growing and unstoppable erection in Vincent’s trousers is about — he knows — to push him into trying to kiss her. He lets his dick do the thinking. Because, as the French put it, he clearly doesn’t have enough blood to feed both his brain and his cock at the same time.

Vincent sometimes thinks that he would choose his partners more carefully if he had a vagina rather than a penis.

Vincent and Chloe. On the goum rug of a bourgeois apartment, Vincent and Chloe are copulating in the so-called missionary position, which, incidentally, Bonobo monkeys also adopt. Chloe raises her legs, and grips Vincent’s pelvis with her thighs, thus making his penis enter her even more deeply. Vincent’s pace speeds up, scarlet heat radiates from his glans, which is rubbing against the membrane of her vagina, the delicious burning sensation sets his entire belly on fire, making him lose control completely.

He doesn’t want to say it, he doesn’t want to say it, but then, he says it anyway, I love you, I love you. He immediately regrets this moment of abandon, even though it intensifies his orgasm.

Chloe and Johann.

Smothering the world

Pressed over my ears

Her thighs

wrote the celebrated poet Teishi Hiro, whose work Johann is translating. His tongue takes another turn around Chloe’s sex, and the haiku’s poetic assertion comes true at once. Chloe’s vulvae have a sapid, almost salty taste. The Japanese poet would have found just the right adjectives to describe the unique tang of women’s sexes. Maybe he would have used the word umami , which is unfortunately untranslatable.

As regards the senses, Johann wonders, if he were blind, whether he could stop himself from wondering out how cute the woman he was tonguing really was.

Johann and Qiu. On the Romanesque capital of a pillar in the cathedral of Autun, an anonymous artist once sculpted a Flight to Egypt . His untaught technique doesn’t mean that his work isn’t also technically taut, Johann thinks. Beside him, Qiu, who has never before had such a hirsute lover, is stroking his chest again and again in fascination. Then, her hand follows the pathway of hair down his belly and, what a surprise! further still, into his boxer shorts. Fantasy is to sex what religion is to the real world, Johann thinks to himself, unwittingly parodying Karl Marx.

As for his book, he thinks he’s now found the title: The Penis Mightier than the Word (his publisher will turn it down, however, on the grounds that some female readers won’t dare ask for it in bookstores).

Qiu and Xavier. Buzz buzz , goes the irritatingly persistent Cairo mosquito. Its jolting hum saturates the vibrant air in Xavier’s room, meanwhile his face is nosing into Qiu’s pussy, proving to her once more that, as Boris Vian rightly said, the tongue is a sexual organ occasionally used for speaking. Or for eating, Hugo von Hofmannsthal added, long before the invention of Beaver Steaks.

Qiu blushes up to her ears as she remembers having once called a student, who could pick up languages like a parrot, a cunning linguist.

Xavier and Elvire. On the terrace of a Paris bar, Xavier is drinking a half pint of Gringo Honeymoon and Elvire a glass of barley water. Elvire’s cell phone beeps; she reads the text message, sighs, and says she has to go, before bending down beside him and whispering in his ear. He won’t be able to recall exactly what was said, but it featured — in no particular order — the words balls, dick, suck, swallow, fuck. She kisses him on the tip of his nose, then hurries away.