A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien
– Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone” [1]
Et comme on passait sur un pont, le prince se mit à la portière pour contempler le panorama romantique du Rhin qui déployait ses splendeurs verdoyantes et se déroulait en larges méandres jusqu’à l’horizon. [2] … A kind of muscular, living pressure – not rubbery, exactly, though it has that same attribute of stretching and contracting, systole and diastole – a portal which does not so much let you in, as allow you to distend yourself. … “And as they were standing below a bridge, he leaned over the grave-stone to observe the romantic panorama of the gully which … displayed? deployed? … its green splendours and wound away in large curves to the horizon.”
You pant and groan – rough, hoarse as an animal. Which is what you are, of course, though circumstances may sometimes obscure the fact for a moment or two. But scarcely here, now. Your ribs crack, crackle with the contrast between sweat and chill. Il était 4 heures du matin, des vaches paissaient dans les prés, des enfants dansaient déjà sous des tilleuls germaniques. Une musique de fifres, monotones et mortuaire, annonçaient la présence d’un régiment prussien et la mélopée se mêlait tristement au bruit de ferraille du pont et à l’accompagnement sourd du train en marche. … Is it four in the morning? Quite possibly. Are there cows in those fields? Not likely; but the children are certainly dancing beneath the disordered boughs of the trees: these children of your city, ill-dressed and ill-nourished, smelling of earth and rain and flesh. And, hark! far-off, through the death-fed trees, the music of a police siren, “monotonous and mortuary, was announcing the presence of an authoritarian constabulary, and the sweet sound blended with the humming noise of cars proceeding over the iron bridge.”
“F … f … fucker, bloody fucker …”
No reply, at this point, seems appropriate or called for. But that is increasingly the case in most of life’s situations, for you. A simple greeting across the lunch counter, a cheery “Enjoy the film!” from a cinema usherette, they each seem to demand the one, correct reply: that witty twist or humorous acknowledgement which would seal your commonality, commensals at the feast of life. You cannot achieve it. It demands a thousand words of long meandering monologue, or none. Here, at least, you should be safe from it, if anywhere. Your ankles itch beneath their heavy woollen socks. The tan Doc Martens boots feel positively puddled with perspiration. The body approaches its crisis – should you be hoping for an expiation of sins? Des villages heureux animaient les rives dominées par les burgs centenaires et les vignes rhénanes étalaient à l’infni leur mosaïque régulière et précieuse. “Happy villages animated the banks dominated by century-old castles” – miserable old suburbs burdened the slopes dominated by a thirty-year-old motorway system – “and the Rhenish vines extended their precise and regular mosaic to infinity.” Steel-shuttered bottle-shops displayed their graffiti-clad corrugations to disappointed late-night revellers: revellers bound for here, for the nettled undergrowth of the gully.
The sense of peril has not abated – an exodus threatened by every shift of that rippling back, those bony thighs – and yet some progress has undoubtedly been made. Another test, another examination, another assessment of some kind of strange achievement. Can you think of tree-alphabets, do arithmetic problems in your head, translate half-remembered fragments of French prose, long enough to climb Mount Moriah? To what end, really? So that we can all sleep?
Quand Mony se retourna, il vit le sinistre Cornabœuf assis sur le visage d’Estelle. Son cul de colosse couvrait la face de l’actrice. Il avait chié et la merde infecte et molle tombait de tous côtés.
Oh, the filthy, filthy brute! Poor Estelle, whose only crime had been to strangle her maid in the ecstasies of mutual cunnilingus. No-one should be made to translate that, in your opinion. You’re not as bad as that, even if you are in the city’s oldest graveyard at the darkest time of the night, performing the act of sodomy on a convenient gravestone, with a svelte young sprite, whose very sex seemed ambiguous until a moment or so ago.
Il tenait un énorme couteau et en labourait le ventre palpitant. Le corps de l’actrice avait des soubresauts brefs. … “His immense knife was stabbing into her living flesh.” Yes, it is hard, achingly hard, which is more than you expected to achieve at first, when approached. That agonising over-excitement which is so fatal to so difficult an enterprise, so profound a challenge, to penetrate the elastic walls of an organ which defends itself so sedulously from intrusion. “The actress’s body jerked galvanically.” You are disgusting! You’ve pulled up the ripped black T-shirt, and are kissing the malodorous shoulderblades and neck-muscles of your … companion in crime; your hands control those smooth brown buttocks, now that you’ve achieved lodgement between them, angling them this way and that to persuade yourself of the pleasure you must be feeling.
And he? What are his sensations? His large hard cock must be throbbing against the lifeless stone, as the gradual surrender of his anus feels more and more like a sharp steel knife swallowed up by quicksand, or like a backed-up case of constipation. Sharp, painful, unclean, fascinating. He’s jerking about more, now, as if losing control of the process, the procès: the trial.
«Attends, dit Mony, reste assis.» Yes, stay still, little one.
Et, se couchant sur la mourante, il fit entrer son vit bandant dans le con moribond. You cannot help but visualise Estelle lying on her back, with the subhuman assassin Cornabœuf straddled across her shit-stained face. Prince Mony thus placed himself between her thighs to enter the dying pussy. … Il jouit ainsi des derniers spasmes de l’assassinée, dont les dernières douleurs durent être affreuses, et il trempa ses bras dans le sang chaud qui jaillissait du ventre. “He thus enjoyed the victim’s last spasms, which must have been horridly painful, and bathed his arms in the hot blood which spilled from her stomach.” You are bent over your victim, victim more of economics than of your insignificant lust, as your cock begins to spasm. The frustration of the double membrane – living and manufactured – is compounded as you retreat, frustrated at the lack of fleshly contact. The condom receives your seed, nevertheless, along with his mingled blood and shit.
Quand il eut déchargé, l’actrice ne remuait plus. Elle était raide et ses yeux révulsés étaient pleins de merde. “When he had discharged, the actress was no longer moving.” A prostitute, no matter how amateurish, must be a kind of actor, must feign enough humanity to promote the customer’s arousal. A boy who bends over to get money may have no interest in the act, but he knows that his masculinity is at the very least called into question by it. You disengage yourself quite quickly from him, half-expecting an elbow in the face or a gob of spit. What he does takes you therefore quite by surprise. “She was stiff and stark, and her revolted eyes were full of filth.” His eyes are bright and alive. He seizes you by the back of the neck (jeans halfway down, limp-dangling cock still cocooned in its ridiculous plastic cover, business shirt rucked up and clinging sweatily to your back) and kisses you hard on the open mouth, his tongue squirming deep inside, bad teeth forgotten.
You are Estelle, his willing bitch, at that moment, albeit fresh from mastering his arse (though could you ever, from the first, think that was what you were doing?) When he releases you, defiant and upright in his grey sweats, you grope your own pants up and reach out the fifty dollars you had ready in the back pocket. He takes it and moves away with a smile, saying, as he goes, something to the effect of “goo’ night,” though it might well have been followed by “cocksucker” or “whitey” or some such epithet. It had, after all, been he who approached you, spoke to you, offered you sex for money; who tongued and fisted your cock hard; and who finally leant himself, his youthful arse, across the tombstone. The Golden Ass: Apuleius. Why didn’t he simply rob you, you wonder? The money was there all along.
It’s funny how a picture forms itself of many small items, half-apprehended. As you walk back up the slope to your car, through the dark whispering tracks of the cemetery, you think of a dream you once had, a long time ago, a dream where a stone statue turned itself head over heels through the grounds of a park, crushing its way, unstoppable, through ponds and woods and walls. His dark buttocks against the white of the tombstone seemed like an indignant sideways face, about to shout out hoarse commands. The rest of the black and white complex of leaves, shadows, trees might have been made to harmonise with this conception into an Arcimbaldo crowd-scene, faces made of bark and flax. And what are they doing, the bizarre faces in this crowded canvas? They’re roaring blindly at the leper, the excluded one. Even a boy prostitute can be more in command of his moment, his place, than that bleeding face, shoulder bowed under the weight of a crosstree. So what does that make you? The crucified Christ? The martyr complex is the first thing to explode when the physical organism goes wrong. In this case, when the arsehole-fucking, graveyard-haunting, prostitute-poking, French novel-quoting, extreme experience-craving – Miracle-in-Mary-of-phlegm – blaspheming fucker cannot … cannot what?
Notes:
[1] "[to sum up, you're tired of this old world]" - Guillaume Apollinaire, "Zone." Oeuvres poétiques. Ed. Marcel Adéma & Michel Décaudin. Préface d’André Billy. 1956. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 121 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966), 39.
[2] Guillaume Apollinaire, "Les Onze Mille Verges." Oeuvres en prose complètes III. Ed. Pierre Caizergues & Michel Décaudin. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 399 (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 884-954 [911-12].
Pander 9 - Crime (1999)[20/1/98]
[1605 words]
[Published in Pander 9 (1999): 18-19;
Nights with Giordano Bruno (Wellington: Bumper Books, 2000): 1, 3, 6 & 10.]
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