Authors: John Hawkes
Our villages carved out of old bone, our forests shimmering with
leaves the color of dried tobacco, our village walls over which the dead vines are
draped like fishing nets, the weight of the stones that occupy the slopes of our
barren hills like sculpted sheep, the smell of wood smoke, the ruby color of wine
held to the natural light, the white pigeon drawn to the spit even as he becomes
aroused on the rim of the fountain—surely there is no eroticism to match the
landscape of spent passion. There is nothing like an empty grave to betray the
presence of a dead king in all his lechery. The blasted tree contains its heart of
amber, you can smell the wild roses in the sterile crevices of ancient cliffs,
suddenly you find the whitened limb of a tree sleeved in green. Yes, ours is a
landscape of indifferent hunters and vanished lovers,
cher ami
, so that but
to exist on such a terrain, aware of blood and manure, of the little paper sacks of
poison placed side by side with bowls of flowers on the window ledges of each
village street, or aware of the unshaven faces of our local pharmacists or of the
untended pubescence of the girls
who work in our markets and
confess their fantasies in our darkened churches—yes, simply to exist in such
a world is to be filled with a pessimism indistinguishable from the most obvious
state of sexual excitation. I am a city person and not without my own form of
pragmatism. And yet whenever I have seen from the window of this very car a glimpse
of a distant woodland, I have thought of the royal hunting party mounted and in
pursuit of a fevered stag, and thought of the sound of the horns, the lovers in that
boisterous army, pretty and plumed, flushed and separated on their tossing horses
but riding only in wait for the day of the chase to give way to the night of the
tryst, when the mouth that took the brazen hunting horn by day will take the elegant
and ready flesh by night. Yes, we who are the gourmets and amateur excavators of our
cultural heritage know in our cars, our railway trains, our pretentious
establishments of business, that we have only to pause an instant in order to
unearth the plump bird seasoning on the end of its slender cord tied to a rafter, or
a fat white regal chamber pot glazed with the pastel images of decorous lovers, or a
cracked and dusty leather boot into which some young lewd and brawny peasant once
vomited.
Yes, dead passion is the most satisfying,
cher ami
.You have
hinted as much in your verses. But no wonder I have always thought of Honorine as
mistress of a small chateau and nude beneath a severe black hunting costume for
riding sidesaddle, though she has never
been on a horse in her
life. And you can imagine my pleasure when Honorine did in fact inherit from her
mother, that noble woman, the small chateau which I myself named Tara and which you
and I have filled with the deadest of all possible passion. You don’t agree?
You disclaim anything but vitality and tenderness in your relations with Chantal and
Honorine? Then perhaps it is only my own passion that is so very dead,
cher
ami
.
But the owl is watching us. And look there. Rain. Just as I expected.
Soon the invisible camera will be trained on us through the wet and distorting lens
of our windshield.
But I too once had a mistress. You did not know? Well, I hope that
despite all you have been told about the power of your sullen allure you do not
consider yourself the only person to have received the gift of love as seen through
the prism, as I may call it, of another woman, though it is true that my own
experience was confined to a single mistress and not to a pair. Never in my lifetime
would I have contemplated a pair of mistresses. I am one of those lesser and hence
more limited men, as you well know.
But little Monique was quite enough for me at the time. At the
beginning of our friendship she was only a few weeks into her twentieth year, which,
come to
think of it, was exactly Chantal’s age when you,
in all your mysterious naturalness and unconcern, determined to extend to her the
love of the poet, if you will indulge the expression. Then too, Monique was a shade
smaller even than Chantal, a fact I take to mean not that I was trying to duplicate
my daughter in my mistress but simply that I was lucky enough to win Monique with a
single glance and that she was the smallest person with whom I ever shared what she
used to call the dialogue of the skin. Her size was important to me not because it
mimed specifically the small size of Chantal and Chantal’s lovely
grandmother, but only because it bore out so perfectly an idea that has obsessed me
since earliest manhood: that the smaller the woman one regards the greater
one’s amazement at the vastness, fierceness, of the human will.
So Monique was remarkable, then, for her startling size, the utter
harmony of her physical proportions, the immensity and even dangerous quality of her
will. Her self-assertiveness was staggering. Of course she never failed to obey me,
and yet even when she conformed to my simplest suggestion (about what to eat, what
not to eat, some article of clothing, and so forth) she did so with beautiful
vehemence, as if she were acting on her own prideful volition instead of mine. But
never fear, she gave as good as she received.
If I loved Monique for her size, I loved her equally for the nature of
her skin and its complexion. Tight, painfully and wonderfully tight over the
entirety of her
little face and limbs and torso, so thin and
tight that actually I used to fear the consequences of a slip of the threaded
needle. And of course her skin was white, almost glazed, in fact, and whiter even
than Honorine’s fair skin. And you know that my predilection for whiteness is
just as intense as my appreciation of the Mediterranean hues.
Short skirts, short hair, bright blue lacquered shoes, occasionally a
blouse tastefully crocheted, and the inevitable silk stockings as if always to
confirm her threatened womanhood—I can still see her, one of the most
inventive girls and strongest human beings I have ever known. I used to meet her
twice a month on a schedule so strict that it did not vary more than several minutes
from one occasion to the next. We were equally intolerant of lateness, though the
flowers I carried and the luxury of the car I drove always gave me the advantage in
these matters of time and demonstrations of anger. But we enjoyed each
other’s anger, and vied with each other in the creation of embarrassing
public displays of bad temper. It was as if we shared between us an unspoken
agreement to parody the lovers’ quarrel, the domestic disagreement, whenever
possible. Yes, even now it gives me oddly pleasurable satisfaction to recall how
often I submitted to the insults she shouted at me on the most crowded of street
corners (in the sun, in the rain, in the darkness after a splendid meal), and how
she in her turn bore with quivering fury the disciplinary blows I so often inflicted
with the edge of my
heavy fork on her fragile wrist, usually
under the eager eyes of an old waiter in the most elegant of restaurants. But as I
say, it is a familiar and convenient pattern, this happy ritual of disruption and
reconciliation. We relied on it totally, Monique and I.
At any rate Monique was proud, opinionated, hostile, inventive. It
never failed to delight me that she could be so cruel of tongue, so vicious, or that
a chest as small as hers was capable of such heavy breathing, or that she could
become so quickly subdued and smaller than ever once seated in the rich interior of
my powerful and highly polished car. But let me tell you that this Monique, whose
youth and personality were so impressive, nonetheless and of her own free choice was
the living example of all the uninhibited nudes I courted in the pornographic
magazines of my own late and isolated boyhood. Not only was she a natural actress in
the theater of sex, not only did she become in her mind and body the very flesh and
activity of all those distant uncountable images of mine, but on top of everything
else she collected in her small overfurnished rooms every conceivable kind of
pornographic or erotic book, magazine, photograph that she was able to discover in
our museums, kiosks, bookstalls, establishments devoted to the equipment and
stimulation of the sexual drive. She lived her very life in unwitting competition
with that rare photographic study which I prepared over the years of
Honorine’s own erotic womanhood. But Monique’s performances were
cruder,
much cruder, than my study of Honorine. And at times they
suddenly revealed my young friend’s sense of humor, whereas there was no
place for humor in my nude or partially nude views of Honorine.
Quick to take offense, quick to become aroused, quick to laugh at
herself and at such exaggerated sexual animation in one so small—there we
have our tireless Monique, who thrived on her pornography old and new and liked
nothing better than to adorn her own little nude figure in the outlandish black
lingerie of those ladies of the boas who in another era so incensed our forefathers.
Yes, she collected and wore all those belts and harnesses and spangled black
stockings as avidly as she immersed herself in her books and magazines. And do you
know,
cher ami
, she had a palate that demanded only the finest of white
wines. Only the finest.
But then there came at last that warm spring night when, suddenly
inspired, I spanked Monique. It was not entirely my fault, and it was the only time
in my life when I fell so close to being the sadistic villain lurking everywhere in
the stories, photographs and fantasies of my little mistress. You will agree that no
one wants to find himself becoming nothing more than a familiar type created by a
hasty and untalented pornographer. We do not like to think of ourselves as
imaginary, salacious and merely one of the ciphers in the bestial horde, to put it
somewhat strongly,
cher ami
. But it was not totally my fault, as I must
repeat, since
the night was rainy and since the hour was late and
since there was provocation, a provocation I did not even think to resist.
Well, you have the picture: spring rain, the city sleeping in its tile
and stones, a wash of faint light from a bulb in a rose-colored shade, the warm
little room smelling of the new season and of the oil of peach seeds with which
Monique had scented her hot douche, and of course the two of us lying nude among the
bolsters (except for Monique, who was wearing one of her scanty black harnesses
known in the parlance of our grand temptresses as a garter belt). There you have it:
the small, young, nearly naked girl on her stomach, the stockings which she had
already removed adrift on the floor, the two of us slowly passing between us a set
of large new photographs as rich and stimulating as ripened cheese. It was a scene
that might have come directly from the writing desk or cold and shabby studio on one
of our poor, dull, unshaven pornographers.
But as I have been saying, I had not the slightest thought of causing
Monique even a moment of pain that night; I was not unusually aware of her childish,
upturned buttocks twitching occasionally in the rose-colored suffusion from the lamp
in the corner; I felt no need to exert any special mastery over Monique amidst the
muffling softness of so many tasteless (but appropriate) oriental bolsters. And yet
when all at once the moment of provocation was upon me, and in fact it was nothing
more than a pouting underlip and some
sort of pert, injurious
remark quite lost now to passing time, it was then that I knew without any
hesitation that I wanted to spank Monique—and to spank her in the
conventional position, with my bare hand, with conscious determination and as hard
and as long as possible. Mind you, until that instant I was absolutely uninitiated
into that commonplace practice of familial punishment. And yet I did not hesitate,
it did not occur to me to spare Monique one trace of humiliation or one grain of
pain: I was not interested in justice or the possible sexual consequences of that
event. To the contrary, thought and action were as one and I seized Monique
abruptly, joyously, and like a vindictive father of long experience pulled my little
startled mistress across my naked lap where I held that sprawled and squirming body
in a grip that made escape impossible. The pleasure of the first long, deliberate
blow was immense. Simply immense.
Well, the palm of my hand was a cruel and relentless paddle. Monique
cried out, I gave not a thought to the sleeping neighbors, I spanked Monique with a
lack of restraint astonishing even to myself. It was as if I could not bring the
flat of my hand into hurtful contact with the soft, private world of her buttocks
often enough or hard enough, so that I increased my efforts and gave myself total
consciousness of touch and sound and enjoyed to the fullest the agitation of her
helplessness. And then breathless, delighted, feeling the heat in my hand and a
sparkling sensation throughout my own
nakedness, finally I
stopped. Only then did she cease resisting. Only then did she go limp, roll slowly
away from me, and smother her angry sobs in one of the bolsters. Her weeping was a
shameless exploitation of her childlike appearance, but it was an agreeable addition
to the pleasure I was then savoring in my exhaustion.
So I myself fell back among the bolsters, surprised at what had
happened but smiling, hearing the rain, feeling my own body filled, as it were, with
crystals of vigor. Partially on my side and in a condition of curious alertness,
peacefully I contemplated the body lying in rare quiescence and with its back to me.
Yes, the buttocks were still pink, and pinker yet because of the lampshade. Every
now and again a tremor passed down the spine or through one slender leg as if,
released from my grip, she was striving now to relieve the discomfort of her small
derrière
by settling her body more deeply into the rolling,
Oriental softness. The spare, black, lacy harness was low and loose on her little
hips, one of her hands crept back and of its own accord began to rub and soothe the
afflicted area. I watched her, I smiled. I did not for a moment think I had done any
genuine harm. It even occurred to me, and with reason, that Monique in her sobbing
was actually just as expectant as I was in my smiling. Of course by now my great
bird, if you will allow the poetic license, was soaring in flight, so that it was
only natural that while I watched Monique’s small hand moving to pacify the
hurt in her buttocks, my own firm hand—the very one with which I had
performed what she later called the abomination—became a
skilled and willing communicant with my distended sex.