Tom and Nathan hadn’t seen these disappointments in the same way. Nathan wanted more from life than a collection of flirtations or brief encounters, and was more inclined toward love than desire. In fact, that was why he had been looking for the romance of his life and, through his impatience, had thought he had found it in two long-term relationships. As for Tom, he hadn’t formulated any specific wishes, and had never confused sexual habit with love. Meeting Nathan, and the deep fondness he felt for him, had surprised him.
By dawn, they loved each other more than they had the previous dusk. They no longer needed sex, just to be next to each other to welcome the day. The anonymous letters had hastened the deepening of their relationship.
Sharp and shrill, the parrots started squawking, then the parakeets added their chirping to the discordant symphony. Their hullaballoo grew with the daylight. Nathan tried imitating them. He managed after a few approximations, which both men found entertaining. Then Tom walked naked to the window.
“I wonder if we haven’t made a mistake about the anonymous letters, Nathan. We’re assuming we’re the only two who received them.”
Nathan got up and, also naked, went to Tom and put his arms around him. They gazed out at the square, the houses framing the green lawn like a theater set.
“What if several people here received the same note?” Nathan said.
“You’re right, I hadn’t thought of that.”
They looked at the birds. Their mediations still had the laziness of dawn in them, moved slowly, lacked elation and energy. Everything was taking time.
Suddenly, in a tumult of wings, a blacker-than-black crow sprang out of the gray sky, flew across the square, ruthlessly chased away the parrots, and settled at the top of a tree. It cawed, like a prophet of doom cawed, and it was as if miles of solitude formed around this cruel warning. Stooped, head tilted, demeanor stern, it studied the surrounding façades. Its piercing eyes penetrated every house, pitiless, on the lookout for everyone’s weaknesses.
Nathan sensed its hostile examination and shuddered. Tom, on the other hand, smiled and rubbed the hands resting on his shoulders.
“Strange . . . Usually, anonymous letters carry insults or malicious gossip. That’s why their author is often referred to as a crow.”
Once again, the crow cawed menacingly. “But this is something else,” Tom continued gently. “The author is sending words of love, words that provoke love. We aren’t dealing with a crow.”
“What, then?”
“A dove.”
PART THREE
RESPONSES
PRELUDE
The parrots were scratching the feathers of each other’s necks and heads, as an invitation to love. Only the younger ones seemed aggressive, their eyes bloodshot, their wings spread like shields, their claws imperious, their cries belligerent, their beaks sharp, ready for a frantic battle, chasing, pursuing one another, stabbing—no doubt hoping to achieve the same pleasurable result.
Because of this springtime of the instincts, there was great confusion in the trees. While Senegalese youyous, cockatiels, African grays, poicephali, budgerigars, and red-rumped parrots spun around the foliage, couples of lovebirds took refuge in the branches, almost motionless so as not to attract attention. A blue-fronted Amazon parrot was building her nest, grumbling at anyone who came close. Some old macaws who, just like balding men, were losing feathers as they aged, and who flew sparingly, creaked whenever a fight between adolescents or the pursuit of a female infringed on their territory. Last but not least, a dignified sulphur-crested cockatoo with a cream-colored coat sat on his thick branch, shrugging at all this excitement, as if none of it concerned him.
It had been fifty years since the Brazilian consul had opened his cages prior to leaving the country, but the birds were still here. If any adventurer among them ever risked a visit to a garden a few streets away, he soon returned to Place d’Arezzo and these fellow creatures he couldn’t stand but couldn’t do without. How many generations had already succeeded one another in this teeming congregation? No observer had taken the trouble to study it because, at first, all the residents had expected these exotic birds, who were used to captivity, to die out. A few decades later, the fauna still flourished in this jungle. Perhaps some of them had been there from the start, since apparently they can live up to the age of eighty or a hundred.
The vitality of the parrots on Place d’Arezzo both fascinated and inconvenienced the local residents. Even though inner and outer factors—their constant fighting, the hostile environment—conspired to wipe them out, they lived on, chatty, disorganized, and noisy.
What language did they speak, anyway? Their ancestors might have used Portuguese or French, but what was left of that half a century later? What words distorted their shrill cries? Were they saying something? Did it still have a meaning? Or were their desires and urges, their violent energy, just an end in themselves?
1
Do you mind if I go see Frédéric this afternoon? I feel like making love with him.”
Diane had asked her husband the question in the same tone she would have used to inform him that she was going to the hairdresser: a weary tone, almost as if she was annoyed at having to waste her time on such trifles.
“Go ahead, Diane, don’t bother about me.”
Jean-Noël was relieved: Diane was returning to normal . . . For a few days now—ever since the night at Mille Chandelles—she had been fuming with rage, irritable, idle, wandering aimlessly between the four walls, grabbing every opportunity to rant and rave. Her nitpicking bad humor, even though she was its first victim, proved contagious. The whole apartment was affected by the vibrations of her depression, from the plants that lowered their heads to the dirty windowpanes that had trouble letting the light in, the one most in the firing line being Jean-Noël, whom she picked on from morning till night.
During the elegant orgy, Diane had surprised Jean-Noël by causing a scene. When Zachary Bidermann had started to caress her as she was being served up as zakuski, she had sat up and slapped him hard. Naked, dripping with hors d’oeuvres, she had jumped off the table and gone for him, threatening him and driving him back against the wall with her fists. Not only had she transgressed the swingers’ rule, which stipulates a polite dismissal of a partner you don’t want, she had also launched into a violent diatribe interspersed with shocking insults such as “pig,” “piece of shit,” “bastard,” “asshole,” “pest,” “Attila,” “despot,” “snake,” and “murderer,” the words tumbling from her mouth like water over Niagara Falls.
The owners of the club had had to intervene, overpower her, and call Jean-Noël to the rescue. Once they had apologized to Zachary Bidermann, they had done their best to recreate a festive atmosphere among the other patrons, who were all shocked.
Shut up in a boudoir with Diane, Jean-Noël had cleaned her up but had been unable to calm her anger.
“What have you got against him?”
“He’s a shit, and I hate shits.”
“What has he done to you?”
“Nothing to me. And he’ll never touch me. But to others . . . ”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Oh, leave me alone. It’s common knowledge that the son of a bitch throws women away like paper handkerchiefs after he’s had his way with them.”
“He’s a libertine, Diane.”
“No kidding.”
“Like you and me.”
“Shut up, you fool, or I’ll smash your face.”
Seeing that Diane was no longer in control of herself, Jean-Noël hadn’t insisted.
Since they had hurriedly left that catastrophic party, Diane’s anger hadn’t abated. It simmered, and the slightest mention of Zachary Bidermann, either in the press or on the radio, would incense her even further, turning her into a human torch of hatred.
This caused Jean-Noël to rec
all a number of puzzling episodes in the past. When they had met, she had demanded to live on Place d’Arezzo, on the pretext that she had dreamed of living there since she was a child, and had forced Jean-Noël to sell his house in Saint-Genest in order to buy the place she had found. Many times, Jean-Noël had caught her staring at the Bidermann town house through the window, as if keeping an eye on it. And, although she never took any interest in what her peers were fascinated by, she never missed an article or a TV program that featured Zachary Bidermann. The morning Jean-Noël had informed her that Bidermann had invited them to a “neighbors’ party,” she had turned pale, shut herself away, and spent the following week ridiculing the stupid habit of inviting people just because they are brought together by chance. For the date of the famous “neighbors’ party,” she had managed to arrange a charming weekend in Normandy.
Now that Diane’s hatred was out in the open, Jean-Noël thought back to these episodes. What had happened between Zachary Bidermann and Diane? Any other husband’s first suspicion would have focused on an adulterous affair but, if you knew Diane, an affair was pretty run of the mill. And anyway, she usually remained on friendly terms with the men she had amused herself with. No, this was something else . . . But what?
Jolting over the uneven cobblestones, Diane was driving her Fiat across Brussels, inexhaustibly angry with the “bunch of idiots” who had clearly won their driving licenses in a lottery.
When she got to the south of the city, close to the fish market, she parked her car, went into a small courtyard, tapped in a number code, and pushed open the door of a studio flat on the ground level.
Frédéric was waiting for her, a wide smile on his face. “Tell me I’m dreaming, my goddess!”
Diane enjoyed the welcome and turned red beneath the dark eyes devouring her. There was a smell of man, and a man’s mess all around—stacks of books and records, clothes strewn around, the previous night’s TV dinner still on the coffee table.
“I love your apartment, Fred.”
“You know you always have the place of honor here, princess.”
On the back wall, there was a huge, ten foot by six foot photograph of her lying naked on a bloodstained sheet.
She went to him where he sat in his wheelchair. “I want you,” she whispered, biting his ear.
He purred, overcome with pleasure.
Diane stepped back and ordered, “Put on some music.”
“What?”
“The kind of crap you like.”
“Something to make your ears bleed, O divine one?”
“Precisely.”
He pressed the remote control he kept in the right-hand pocket above the wheel, and there was a burst of loud, amplified, deafening metallic sound. Frédéric was a sound engineer, and listened to rock at the volume of a pneumatic drill.
Diane stepped away. In time to the music—or rather, the jagged rhythm of the bass, the only part you could distinguish of that aural magma—she performed a striptease for him.
Intoxicated with happiness, Frédéric watched her, blissful. He was thirty-five, good-looking, with green eyes and large hands—the prototype of the solid, healthy male who attracts girls. Five years earlier, tearing along at a hundred miles an hour, his motorbike had skidded on a wet road, smashed into a concrete wall, and broken his spine. Paralyzed from the waist down, Frédéric couldn’t feel his legs and was unable to command them. Strong-willed and courageous, he had done all the physical therapy he could, strengthening his torso, arms, and shoulders, but his lower limbs were still alien to him, condemning him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
If Diane had known him before he was disabled, oozing health and the joy of being alive, she might not have paid any attention to him . . . But because a friend had introduced him soon after he left the hospital, she had chosen him as a lover.
“Making love to a paraplegic is amazingly erotic,” she was in the habit of telling people, even when they hadn’t asked her.
It was she who took charge, deciding the moment, the rhythm, and the moves.
Alerted by a phone call, Frédéric had already taken the medication that would guarantee an erection. It was a precaution he took just to reassure himself, even though Diane knew how to stimulate him. Because she knew he felt nothing from the waist down, she lavished her attention on the sensitive parts of his upper body: his mouth, his ears, his neck, his nipples. She immediately got down to work, clinging to him like a spider to its web.
“Is he sulking?” Frédéric asked, referring to his penis, which she kept concealed from him.
“Not at all.”
“Oh, good. He’s always sulking at me. Even when I’m excited mentally, he doesn’t tell me.”
“He’s doing what you want, no problem, no need for the vacuum pump today,” she said in an admiring tone.
Frédéric soon realized she was right. He noticed peripheral signs of pleasure in the top part of his body: warmth, sweating, an accelerating heartbeat followed by quivers down his torso and the contraction of his abdominal muscles.
Naked on top of him, her legs spread at right angles on the armrests, Diane loved this splendid discomfort, which gave her a baroque mixture of sensations: the energizing cold chrome, the smoothness of the imitation leather, the plastic warming up in contact with their skins, the moist warmth of his penis, which she enjoyed for the both of them.
An expression of euphoria tore across the man’s face. Diane moved up and down, swaying like a gymnast of pleasure, allowing this disabled male to feel like a man. Thanks to her, he had rediscovered pleasure, agreeing to forget what he had experienced when he was younger, and rejecting disappointing comparisons. Making a clean break with the past had allowed him to enjoy sex again. Diane was a guardian angel to him, a loving, disinterested angel who expanded his diminished life.
Suddenly, realizing she was about to reach orgasm, Diane clung to the chinning bar she had had fixed to the ceiling.
They kept their eyes fixed on each other, taking advantage of the moment. In this narrow corridor where their eyes met, Frédéric had the fleeting impression that he was normal.
She screamed with pleasure.
Happy, he burst out laughing. “You’re a sex genius, Diane.”
“Yes, I know!” she replied without false modesty.
She got off the wheelchair and said, with a wink, “Would you like me to . . . ” She didn’t need to complete the sentence, he knew what she meant. An eserine injection to bring on ejaculation.
Laughing, he shook his head. “No need. I won’t feel anything more. It was brilliant as it was. I’d rather have you than any shot!”
Satisfied, she lay down on a mattress without getting dressed, while he wheeled himself to the kitchen to get them a drink, maneuvering his chair with the skill and strength of an aggressive motorist.
“I still can’t work out if you’re a physical or a mental woman,” he said, handing her a glass. “Are you the most incredible sensualist in the world or is your orgasm intellectual?”
“I gave you credit for being cleverer than that, Fred. You already know the answer.”
“Really?”
“If I were nothing but a clam you just needed to touch to make me open, I wouldn’t have done all the things I’ve done.”
“So you’re the Einstein of the orgasm.”
“You could say that.”
He didn’t dare insist. All she had told him about her adventures—the performance aspect, the quest for extreme situations, the worship of the strange and the extraordinary—was, of course, something he took advantage of, but wasn’t it a sign of weakness? Did she really need all that playacting to reach a climax? A collector of experiences, Diane quickly exhausted them and so was forced to go farther and farther into the unusual. Frédéric, on the other hand, both in the past and now, never felt compelled to seek novelty. He could e
njoy sex a million times in identical ways and not get tired.
“You men just don’t understand,” she exclaimed. She must have been reading his mind, because she added, “In sex, it’s a female characteristic to look for refinement.”
“Refinement or perversion?”
“Perversion is a bourgeois term for refinement. We women are more inventive, more romantic, more adventurous, because we’re more complex. Possibly because, physically, we can come in three different ways.”
“Three?”
She rose to her full height, naked, and stuck her pubis in his face. “Front, middle, and back. Plus the brain. That makes four!”
He sniffed her, rubbed his nose against her skin. Diane was so appetizing that he began to salivate.
“When we’re penetrated, there’s a boundary between pleasure and pain that only we can determine and possibly shift.”
“Really?”
“The proof that sex is a mental thing is that a thrust can be either intolerably painful or deliciously pleasurable. The man may be inside us but it’s our brain that holds the handcuffs.”
“Is that how you explain that some women don’t reach orgasm?”
“It isn’t you men who give us the orgasm, it’s us. By means of you.”
“Don’t exaggerate. If the man is hopeless, if he doesn’t have stamina, I doubt that—”
“You’re just being conceited. I’ve been known to reach orgasm in thirty seconds.”
Having been put in his place, he fell silent.
“Now let’s talk about something else, Fred. Tell me what I should be listening to in terms of hard rock and heavy metal. Bring me up-to-date.”