Half an hour later, when I was less drunk, it dawned on me that I ought to let Marcelle out of her wardrobe: the unhappy girl, naked now, was in a dreadful state. She was trembling and shivering feverishly. Upon seeing me, she displayed a sickly but violent terror. After all, I was pale, smeared with blood, my clothes askew. Behind me, in unspeakable disorder, brazenly stripped bodies were sprawled about. During the orgy, splinters of glass had left deep bleeding cuts in two of us. A young girl was throwing up, and all of us had exploded in such wild fits of laughter at some point or other that we had wet our clothes, an armchair, or the floor. The resulting stench of blood, sperm, urine, and vomit made me almost recoil in horror, but the inhuman shriek from Marcelle’s throat was far more terrifying. I must say, however, that Simone was sleeping tranquilly by now, her belly up, her hand still on her pussy, her pacified face almost smiling.
Marcelle, staggering wildly across the room with shrieks and snarls, looked at me again. She flinched back as though I were a hideous ghost in a nightmare, and she collapsed in a jeremiad of howls that grew more and more inhuman.
Astonishingly, this litany brought me to my senses. People were running up, it was inevitable. But I never for an instant dreamt of fleeing or lessening the scandal. On the contrary, I resolutely strode to the door and flung it open. What a spectacle, what joy! One can readily picture the cries of dismay, the desperate shrieks, the exaggerated threats of the parents entering the room! Criminal court, prison, the guillotine were evoked with fiery yells and spasmodic curses. Our friends themselves began howling and sobbing in a delirium of tearful screams; they sounded as if they had been set afire as live torches. Simone exulted with me.
And yet, what an atrocity! It seemed as if nothing could terminate the tragicomical frenzy of these lunatics, for Marcelle, still naked, kept gesticulating, and her agonizing shrieks of pain expressed unbearable terror and moral suffering; we watched her bite her mother’s face amid arms vainly trying to subdue her.
Indeed, by bursting in, the parents managed to wipe out the last shreds of reason, and in the end, the police had to be called, with all the neighbours witnessing the outrageous scandal.
3. Marcelle’s Smell
My own parents had not turned up that evening with the pack. Nevertheless, I judged it prudent to decamp and elude the wrath of an awful father, the epitome of a senile Catholic general. I entered our villa by the back door and filched a certain amount of money. Next, quite convinced they would look for me everywhere but there, I took a bath in my father’s bedroom. Finally, by around ten o’clock, I was out in the open country, having left the following note on my mother’s bedside table: “I beseech you not to send the police after me for I am carrying a gun, and the first bullet will be for the policeman, the second for myself.”
I have never had any aptitude for what is known as striking a pose, and in this circumstance in particular, I only wished to keep my family at bay, for they relentlessly hated scandal. Still, having written the note with the greatest levity and not without laughing, I thought it might not be such a bad idea to pocket my father’s revolver.
I walked along the seashore most of the night, but without getting very far from X because of all the windings of the coast. I was merely trying to soothe a violent agitation, a strange, spectral delirium in which, willy-nilly, phantasms of Simone and Marcelle took shape with gruesome expressions. Little by little, I even thought I might kill myself, and, taking the revolver in hand, I managed to lose any sense of words like hope or despair, but in my weariness, I realized that my life had to have some meaning all the same, and would have one if only certain events, defined as desirable, were to occur. I finally accepted being so extraordinarily haunted by the names Simone and Marcelle. Since it was no use laughing, I could keep going only by accepting or feigning to imagine a fantastic compromise that would confusedly link my most disconcerting moves to theirs.
I slept in a wood during the day, and at nightfall I went to Simone’s place: I passed through the garden by climbing over the wall. My friend’s bedroom was lit, and so I cast some pebbles through the window. A few seconds later she came down and almost wordlessly we headed towards the beach. We were delighted to see one another again. It was dark out, and from time to time I lifted her dress and took hold of her cunt, but it didn’t make me come—quite the opposite. She sat down and I stretched out at her feet. I soon felt that I could not keep back my sobs, and I really cried for a long time on the sand.
“What’s wrong?” asked Simone.
And she gave me a playful kick. Her foot struck the gun in my pocket and a fearful bang made us shriek at the same time. I wasn’t wounded but I was up on my feet as though in a different world. Simone stood before me, frighteningly pale.
That evening we didn’t even think of masturbating each other, but we remained in an endless embrace, mouth to mouth, something we had never done before.
This is how I lived for several days: Simone and I would come home late at night and sleep in her room, where I would stay locked in until the following night. Simone would bring me food, her mother, having no authority over her (the day of the scandal, she had gone for a walk the instant she heard the shrieks), accepted the situation without even trying to fathom the mystery. As for the servants, money had for some time been ensuring their devotion to Simone.
In fact, it was they who told us of the circumstances of Marcelle’s confinement and even the name of the sanatorium. From the very first day, all we worried about was Marcelle: her madness, the loneliness of her body, the possibilities of getting to her, helping her to escape, perhaps. One day, when I tried to rape Simone in her bed, she brusquely slipped away:
“You’re totally insane, little man,” she cried, “I’m not interested—here, in a bed like this, like a housewife and mother! I’ll only do it with Marcelle!”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, disappointed, but basically agreeing with her.
She came back affectionately and said in a gentle, dreamy voice:
“Listen, she won’t be able to help pissing when she sees us … doing it.”
I felt a hot, enchanting liquid run down my legs, and when she was done, I got up and in turn watered her body, which she complaisantly turned to the unchaste and faintly murmuring spurt on her skin. After thus flooding her cunt, I smeared come all over her face. Full of muck, she climaxed in a liberating frenzy. She deeply inhaled our pungent and happy odour: “You smell like Marcelle,” she buoyantly confided after a hefty climax, her nose under my wet arse.
Obviously Simone and I were sometimes taken with a violent desire to fuck. But we no longer thought it could be done without Marcelle, whose piercing cries kept grating on our ears, for they were linked to our most violent desires. Thus it was that our sexual dream kept changing into a nightmare. Marcelle’s smile, her freshness, her sobs, the sense of shame that made her redden and, painfully red, tear off her own clothes and surrender lovely blond buttocks to impure hands, impure mouths, beyond all the tragic delirium that had made her lock herself in the wardrobe to toss off with such abandon that she could not help pissing—all these things warped our desires, so that they endlessly racked us. Simone, whose conduct during the scandal had been more obscene than ever (sprawled out, she had not even covered herself, in fact she had flung her legs apart)—Simone could not forget that the unforeseen orgasm provoked by her own brazenness, by Marcelle’s howls and the nakedness of her writhing limbs, had been more powerful than anything she had ever managed to picture before. And her cunt would not open to me unless Marcelle’s ghost, raging, reddening, frenzied, came to make her brazenness overwhelming and far-reaching, as if the sacrilege were to render everything generally dreadful and infamous.
At any rate, the swampy regions of the cunt (nothing resembles them more than the days of flood and storm or even the suffocating gaseous eruptions of volcanoes, and they never turn active except, like storms or volcanoes, with something of catastrophe or disaster)—those heartbr
eaking regions, which Simone, in an abandon presaging only violence, allowed me to stare at hypnotically, were nothing for me now but the profound, subterranean empire of a Marcelle who was tormented in prison and at the mercy of nightmares. There was only one thing I understood: how utterly the orgasms ravaged the girl’s face with sobs interrupted by horrible shrieks.
And Simone, for her part, no longer viewed the hot, acrid come that she caused to spurt from my cock without seeing it muck up Marcelle’s mouth and cunt.
“You could smack her face with your come,” she confided to me, while smearing her cunt—“till it sizzles,” as she put it.
4. A Sunspot
Other girls and boys no longer interested us. All we could think of was Marcelle, and already we childishly imagined her hanging herself, the secret burial, the funeral apparitions. Finally, one evening, after getting the precise information, we took our bicycles and pedalled off to the sanatorium where our friend was confined. In less than an hour, we had ridden the twenty kilometres separating us from a sort of castle within a walled park on an isolated cliff overlooking the sea. We had learned that Marcelle was in Room 8, but obviously we would have to get inside the building to find her. Now all we could hope for was to climb in her window after sawing through the bars, and we were at a loss how to identify her window among thirty others, when our attention was drawn to a strange apparition. We had scaled the wall and were now in the park, among trees buffeted by a violent wind, when we spied a second-storey window opening and a shadow holding a sheet and fastening it to one of the bars. The sheet promptly smacked in the gusts, and the window was shut before we could recognize the shadow.
It is hard to imagine the harrowing racket of that vast white sheet caught in the squall. It greatly outroared the fury of the sea or the wind in the trees. That was the first time I saw Simone racked by anything but her own lewdness: she huddled against me with a beating heart and gaped at the huge phantom raging in the night as though dementia itself had hoisted its colours on this lugubrious château.
We were motionless, Simone cowering in my arms and I half-haggard, when all at once the wind seemed to tatter the clouds, and the moon, with a revealing clarity, poured sudden light on something so bizarre and so excruciating for us that an abrupt, violent sob choked up in Simone’s throat: at the centre of the sheet flapping and banging in the wind, a broad wet stain glowed in the translucent moonlight …
A few seconds later, new black clouds plunged everything into darkness, but I stayed on my feet, suffocating, feeling my hair in the wind, and weeping wretchedly, like Simone herself, who had collapsed in the grass, and for the first time, her body was quaking with huge, childlike sobs.
It was our unfortunate friend, no doubt about it, it was Marcelle who had opened that lightless window, Marcelle who had tied that stunning signal of distress to the bars of her prison. She had obviously tossed off in bed with such a disorder of her senses that she had entirely inundated herself, and it was then that we saw her hang the sheet from the window to let it dry.
As for myself, I was at a loss about what to do in such a park, with that bogus château de plaisance and its repulsively barred windows. I walked around the building, leaving Simone upset and sprawling on the grass. I had no practical goal, I just wanted to take a breath of air by myself. But then, on the side of the château, I stumbled upon an unbarred open window on the ground floor; I felt for the gun in my pocket and I entered cautiously: it was a very ordinary drawing-room. An electric flashlight helped me to reach an antechamber; then a stairway. I could not distinguish anything, I did not get anywhere, the rooms were not numbered. Besides, I was incapable of understanding anything, as though I were under a spell: at that moment, I could not even understand why I had the idea of removing my trousers and continuing that anguishing exploration only in my shirt. And yet I stripped off my clothes, piece by piece, leaving them on a chair, keeping only my shoes on. With a flashlight in my left hand and the revolver in my right hand, I wandered aimlessly, haphazardly. A rustle made me switch off my lamp quickly. I stood motionless, whiling away the time by listening to my erratic breath. Long, anxious minutes wore by without my hearing any more noise, and so I flashed my light back on, but a faint cry sent me fleeing so swiftly that I forgot my clothes on the chair.
I sensed I was being followed: so I hurriedly climbed out through the window and hid in a garden lane; but no sooner had I turned to observe what might be happening in the château than I spied a naked woman in the window frame; she jumped into the park as I had done and ran off towards a thorn bush.
Nothing was more bizarre for me in those utterly thrilling moments than my nudity against the wind on the path of that unknown garden. It was as if I had left the earth, especially because the squall was as violent as ever, but warm enough to suggest a brutal entreaty. I did not know what to do with the gun which I still held in my hand, for I had no pockets left; by charging after the woman who had run past me unrecognized, I would obviously be hunting her down to kill her. The roar of the wrathful elements, the raging of the trees and the sheet, also helped to prevent me from discerning anything distinct in my will or in my gestures.
All at once, I halted, out of breath: I had reached the bushes where the shadow had disappeared. Excited by my revolver, I began looking about, when suddenly it seemed as if all reality were tearing apart: a hand, moistened by saliva, had grabbed my cock and was rubbing it, a slobbering, burning kiss was planted on the root of my arse, the naked chest and legs of a woman pressed against my legs with an orgasmic jolt. I scarcely had time to spin around when my come burst in the face of my wonderful Simone: clutching my revolver, I was swept up by a thrill as violent as the storm, my teeth chattered and my lips foamed, with twisted arms I gripped my gun convulsively, and, willy-nilly, three blind, horrifying shots were fired in the direction of the château.
Drunk and limp, Simone and I had fled from one another and raced across the park like dogs; the squall was far too wild now for the gunshots to awake any of the sleeping tenants in the château, even if the bangs had been audible inside. But when we instinctively looked up at Marcelle’s window above the sheet slamming in the wind, we were greatly surprised to see that one of the bullets had left a star-shaped crack in one of the panes. The window shook, opened, and the shadow appeared a second time.
Dumbstruck, as though about to see Marcelle bleed and fall dead in the windowframe, we remained standing under the strange, nearly motionless apparition. Because of the furious wind, we were incapable of even making ourselves heard.
“What did you do with your clothes?” I asked Simone an instant later. She said she had been looking for me and, unable to track me down, she had finally gone to search the interior of the château; but before clambering through the window, she had undressed, thinking she “would feel more free”. And when she had come back out after me, terrified by me, she found that the wind had carried off her dress. Meanwhile, she kept observing Marcelle, and it never crossed her mind to ask me why I was naked.
The girl in the window disappeared. A moment that seemed unending crawled by: she switched on the light in her room. Finally, she came back to breathe the open air and gaze at the ocean. Her sleek, pallid hair was caught in the wind, we could make out her features: she had not changed, but now there was something wild in her eyes, something restless, contrasting with the still childlike simplicity of her features. She looked thirteen rather than sixteen. Under her nightgown, we could distinguish her thin but full body, firm, unobtrusive, and as beautiful as her fixed stare.
When she finally caught sight of us, the surprise seemed to restore life to her face. She called, but we couldn’t hear. We beckoned. She blushed up to her ears. Simone, weeping almost, while I lovingly caressed her forehead, sent her kisses, to which she responded without smiling. Next, Simone ran her hand down her belly to her pubic hair. Marcelle imitated her, and poising one foot on the sill, she exposed a leg sheathed in a white silk stocking almost up to her blond
cunt. Curiously, she was wearing a white belt and white stockings, whereas black-haired Simone, whose cunt was in my hand, was wearing a black belt and black stockings.
Meanwhile, the two girls were masturbating with terse, brusque gestures, face to face in the howling night. They were nearly motionless, and tense, and their eyes gaped with unrestrained joy. But soon, some invisible monstrosity appeared to be pulling Marcelle away from the bars, though her left hand clutched them with all her might. We saw her tumble back into her delirium. And all that remained before us was an empty, glowing window, a rectangular hole piercing the opaque night, showing our aching eyes a world composed of lightning and dawn.
5. A Trickle of Blood
Urine is deeply associated for me with saltpetre; and lightning, I don’t know why, with an antique chamber pot of unglazed earthenware, lying abandoned one rainy autumn day on the zinc roof of a provincial wash house. Since that first night at the sanatorium, those wrenching images were closely knit, in the obscurest part of my brain, with the cunt and the drawn and dismal expression I had sometimes caught on Marcelle’s face. But then, this chaotic and dreadful landscape of my imagination was suddenly inundated by a stream of light and blood, for Marcelle could come only by drenching herself, not with blood, but with a spurt of urine that was limpid and even illuminated for me, at first violent and jerky like hiccups, then free and relaxed and coinciding with an outburst of superhuman happiness. It is not astonishing that the bleakest and most leprous aspects of a dream are merely an urging in that direction, an obstinate waiting for total joy, like the vision of that glowing hole, the empty window, for example, at the very moment when Marcelle lay sprawling on the floor, endlessly inundating it.