Jonathan Littell - The Fata Morgana Books

* * *

I climbed back up into my tall square tower, suspended high above the city. Down below, behind the last buildings, grey, metallic, the sea stood like a long wall beneath the pale summer sky; when a big ship passed by, it looked almost as if it were flying slowly beyond the city. Many cranes, blue or green, crisscrossed the sky with their stalks; to the right, the round mass of a small mountain rose to hide the line of the sea. I turned my computer on and inserted the disk my friend had left me. It was a short pornographic movie, made not by professionals but evidently by the people in it, two men and a woman, along with a fourth, the one holding the camera, who was never shown. Of the two men, the first was still young, with a massive body and closely cropped hair; the other was already settling into a hairy layer of fat, and wore long, rather outdated sideburns joined to his moustache. The woman wore black stockings and a red mask, and her coarse body showed signs of age; when she lowered her head, her chin formed thick folds with her neck; but she had magnificent hair, black and heavy, tied back at the neck by a rubber band. The two men were caressing her body; then the younger one began to fuck her, while the other dragged his cock over her lips. She was groaning softly, full of her pleasure but also attentive to the scene. The relationships between the characters intrigued me: there must have been a husband involved, or at least a lover, that seemed to me unavoidable, for this was obviously no callgirl paid for the pleasure of the two men, on the contrary, it was the men who had been placed at the service of this woman’s pleasure, yet something in their attitudes, especially in hers, passive in her pleasure, suggested that she had not organized the scene herself, but that it had been organized for her by another, who was thus sharing her pleasure. But who was it? The fat one with the sideburns, more open, less hurried in his gestures than the young one? Or the one holding the camera, whose lens remained focused on the body of the woman and what was happening to her? But one couldn’t entirely rule out the possibility that the camera was held by another woman. Yet to these four actors had to be added a fifth, the main character of this little movie: the gaze. The entire spectacle had been staged with it in mind. There was of course the gaze of the man or woman holding the camera and studying the scene through his or her viewfinder, just as there was my own, contemplating it on my computer screen; but the gaze of the three naked figures on the green sheets was also put into play, redoubled not just by the expectation of the film to come, but also right then and there, by a large mirror that occupied the entire wall next to the bed, where they took turns observing themselves. At one point, a man — the fat one, or the one filming? — uttered a phrase in a language that I did not understand, Italian perhaps or some local dialect, and this phrase seemed to me to say: “Do you like what you’re seeing?” for the woman, still being fucked by the young one, was attentively watching herself being fucked and filmed in the big mirror. “Yes, yes,” she panted; and the camera was no longer filming the three intertwined bodies, but just their reflection in the mirror, where the woman, sprawled in her pleasure, her eyes like black marbles in her red mask, gazed at herself panting, her mouth open, her tongue out like that of a bull exhausted by the matador’s elusive red cloth, obscene and beautiful in her obscenity. She contemplated herself this way for a long time; then, slowly, she rolled her head over to the prick offered to her mouth. Afterwards, it went on, they moved her around, took turns penetrating her; and she, while giving in to their arms and bodies, to their greedy members, was also constantly observing herself in the mirror, as if to assure herself, Yes, that’s really me, that sublime whore there, with the beautiful hair and this body that’s so heavy and so female, being fucked by these two men, ah what happiness. The men too looked at themselves, but shiftily, snickering at times. It ended ritually, with their sperm on the woman’s mouth, her face, her mask, her breasts, a brief orgasm frightfully meager after her own, which overflowed this little twenty-minute-long movie.

* * *

These images, so clumsy and ordinary, filled me with joy: transported into rapture, as if by the sweetness of a ripe peach, I felt as if I were about to lift off from the ground. Outside, now, it was dark; the city’s lights shone in front of sky and sea confused into a single vast endless black surface. I watched the video several times; each time, it stuck in my gaze, nailed all my desires, usually so fluid, to a single blind point before which I found myself transfixed, breathless.

* * *

However, as I rather quickly discovered, this was just a poor sample of a considerable series, mass-produced by a production company a little savvier than the others; yet this knowledge changed nothing, absolutely nothing: these images remained what they were, frozen in the eternal repetition of their so violently human perfection. I no longer left my room, I hardly even moved from my mattress; I could just barely get up when I felt an urgent need. Eating, drinking, they no longer concerned me; of course I was ill, but I had no way of knowing that unless someone told me; but no one came, I stayed there alone in the midst of my funhouse mirrors, which altered not the image they reflected, but the very person who was mirrored. The same friend finally gave me, by telephone, some good advice: “You should go find a doctor.” I had two doctors — thin, stiff women in their long white smocks, one still young and quite attractive, the other much older and more talkative too. “You definitely do not look well,”she said with birdlike gestures.Together,they had me undress, listened to my chest, palpated me, examined the various orifices of my body, with comments that were cryptic to me, but no doubt rich in meaning for them. In the end, I found myself lying on my belly, with the older doctor, who had pulled on latex gloves, delicately parting the cleft of my buttocks, and the two women stood leaning over my anus as if over a well, calmly discoursing on what they saw there. They sent me home with some medicine, somewhat randomly selected I think, and I took it at random too, in the following spirit: if my condition got better, then the remedy was good, and if it got worse, then it was bad.

* * *

Despite my poor health, I still occasionally watched the little film. I had finally realized something: more than the sight of it, which had so absorbed me, it was the sound of this scene that moved me so violently. I made this discovery entirely by chance; by mistake, I had cut the sound on my computer; muted, these images were nothing more than grotesque gesticulations. Whereas all I had to do was close my eyes and listen to the groans, the gasps, the broken, stammered words, the interrupted breathing, to find myself rapt again: a dazzling, almost blinding discovery, this, but limited nonetheless, in that the echo of these sounds, which at first opened the way, itself ended up forming an elusive obstacle, flexible but insuperable; caught in its snare, I found myself once again rejected, brutally returned to myself, and thus everything began all over again, in a crazy whirling that only rooted me deeper in my own impossibility.

* * *

“Come with us!” my friend had called out, peremptorily— how to resist such a command? Thus I found myself with a whole company of people in another city, where a feria was taking place. Jubilation reigned in the streets, borne by a huge crowd, happy and overexcited, maddened as much by the liberties allowed on these few days as by the sun, the alcohol, the laughter, and the disordered jostling of bodies. We walked about aimlessly; whenever we felt like it, we would drink some chilled wine, standing in the street or packed into crowded cafés. Toward evening, my friend announced: “Come, let’s go and see the bullfight.” But I needed a cigar for that, and so I went into the first tobacco shop I saw, where the shopkeeper barked out: “A cigar, sure, but which one? What kind do you want?”—“Whichever you like, as long as it lasts through six bulls.” In the arena, people were crammed into the stone tiers; the ring spread out at our feet, a pale disk surrounded with red by a bright barrier of painted boards. Nothing could trouble its calm orderliness: not the shouts and gesticulations of the crowd, not the music started up by the brass band, not the succession — by turns measured and frenzied — of figures formed and dissolved by the men in glittering costumes around the bull, a black, brutal monster overflowing with vigor, and yet so quickly killed. When the mules dragged away its body, the blood inscribed a long red comma on the sand; men quickly raced forward with rakes to erase it, so that nothing would come to disturb the placid surface that reflected the glory and triumph of the killer of bulls. Everything delighted me, the movements that won roaring ovations as well as those that elicited boos, and I paid as much attention to the long ash on my cigar as to the horn of the animal, appearing and disappearing in the undulating folds of the pink and yellow capes. Already the fifth bull was charging out of the depths of the arena. The man who had to kill it was, apparently, famous for his talent, the purity of his style and of his movements. When the bull stopped, panting, nervous, confused, he provoked it from very far away, almost the opposite side of the red circle, before moving forward with tiny steps, stiff and with his back arched, using his voice and his cape to encourage the animal to charge, which it always ended up doing; then, motionless, feet together and chest proudly flung out, the man would calmly make the animal flow around him, like a current eddying around a rock. I had, of course, had the rules of the game explained to me: nothing required the man to remain in place, to offer his belly or his loins to the horn, so close sometimes that it snagged the gilt decorations on his costume; it was a question of etiquette, which in this affair was everything; wounds or death weren’t taken into consideration. And now the man was getting ready to kill the bull; drawn up onto the tips of his toes, turned sideways, he was aiming his long curved sword at the back of the bull’s neck, straight between the horns of the exhausted animal, doomed but still raging; his left hand with its piece of red flannel crossed in front of his body, he dove straight in; a moment later, he was bouncing on the horns, a limp puppet, a rag doll, grotesque in his beautiful gilt costume, as if he were to remain caught up there forever, while his assistants rushed in shouting and vainly waving their capes. Finally he fell to the ground, the men drove the animal back, others tried to carry away the wounded man; “It’s nothing,” he seemed to say as he got up and grasped the sword held out to him, “it’s nothing.” He returned to stand facing the bull. His face, his hands, his shining outfit were coated in blood; arched back, in profile, he held his sword up with his fingertips, in a perfect triangle with his arm, as if to salute his adversary, and he stared at it with two round, black eyes, empty of all thought except the perfection of the gesture to be repeated, eyes that gazed at the animal to be killed the same way they would have gazed at a mirror. Then he made one swift gesture, and already he was turning his back on the staggering bull, dragged into the ballet of capes thrown under its muzzle, the sword planted to the hilt in its neck; he walked away without turning back, toward the red barrier, as the animal collapsed heavily behind him, its four hooves in the air, pointed at the sky.