4
Tell me something, Ludo, do you prefer boys?”
Claudine stepped back, folded her arms, and looked her son’s face over.
Ludovic let the smoke well up slowly from his throat and narrowed his eyes. “I’ve been expecting that question. Given all my failures, I’ve wondered myself.”
“There’s nothing terrible about it. People don’t despise gays anymore.”
He shook his head. “I know there’s nothing terrible about it. Nobody makes fun of a gay man who’s comfortable in his own skin, but they make fun of me.”
“What do you mean? Everybody loves you!”
“Well, people like me well enough, the way they like a child. But when they remember that I’m twenty-six and am just as alone as a panther in a circus, they laugh.”
“Ludo, don’t dodge my question. Is the reason you have problems with women simply that you like men?”
“Simply?” He took out another cigarette, thought about it, and put it down, giving up on the idea of lighting it: he had something important to say. “You know Tom, the philosophy teacher who has a studio apartment opposite?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Do you think he’s handsome?”
“Yes. He’s lost to us women, but he is very handsome.”
“Well, I also think he’s handsome.”
“You see!” Claudine was trembling with joy. Once again, she’d be able to help out her Ludovic. From that moment on, her destiny became clear: she would become the wonderful mother of a perfect, happy, fulfilled homosexual, she would be proud of him and would stand up to the whole world. Of course, that meant giving up on having grandchildren . . . Never mind! Ludovic before everything!
Ludovic raised an eyebrow at the enthusiasm on Claudine’s face. “Tom has a theory: there are no straight men, there are just men who haven’t been laid in the right way; according to him, the whole world is gay. So, one evening when I was doubting myself, I convinced myself that he was the solution to my problems.”
“And what happened?”
“For five weeks, I went on a diet, just to lose the spare tire around my belly. It was easy, I ate nothing but seeds.”
“Seeds?”
“I felt like a hen, but it worked. Strange when you think about it, that the food that fattens poultry makes human beings slimmer. Anyway, looking at myself after a month in the farmyard, I thought I was, if not magnificent, at least passable. So I invited Tom over, gave him something to drink, then told him I’d been wondering if I wasn’t gay. Being a sex maniac who fucks several times a day and reacts to the slightest compliment, he immediately jumped on me and we went into the bedroom. And when we were there . . . ”
“Yes?”
He sighed. “I got the giggles. Terrible giggles. Every time he touched me, I thought it was a joke and I giggled. And when he undressed, I thought it was . . . ridiculous. I . . . I . . . He was quite upset.”
Claudine bowed her head sadly. “You’re hopeless.”
Ludovic was amused at her defeated air. “Sorry, Mother, but I’m not gay. I didn’t think you’d be so disappointed.”
Claudine got up from her armchair, her temples reddening. “So what are you, then?”
He shrugged. How could he answer a question like that? Do we ever know what we are? We are what we do—except that he did nothing.
Claudine started pacing up and down the room, muttering, “Frankly, I have no luck with you.”
This comment didn’t go down well with Ludo. “Sorry for existing.”
“You don’t make things easy for me, Ludovic.”
“Tell me what business that is of yours. My private life is my concern. I advise you not to interfere and to stay in your place, Fiordiligi!”
At the mention of her Internet handle, Claudine assumed an outraged expression. “I was expecting you’d bring that up!”
“How perceptive of you! You don’t think you went a bit too far there?”
“I—”
“Answering a personal ad from her son, is that the act of a mother? It’s monstrous!”
“It was out of love, Ludo.”
“That’s what I mean: your love is monstrous, you think it gives you rights. You think you can interfere in my private life and control everything. Don’t you realize? I thought I was communicating with a woman, and I was writing to my own mother.”
“I’m a woman!” she cried.
He looked at her in alarm. She caught his gaze and held it. Such a lack of awareness was too much for Ludovic’s patience; he couldn’t hold back anymore. “Has it never occurred to you how hard it’s been for me to become a normal adult with a mother like you?”
“What?”
“A mother who never defended me when my father beat me—of course, he beat you too—a mother who ever since has been clinging to me to the point of stifling me.”
“I ‘cling’ to you?”
“I’ll never forgive you for flirting with me on the Internet.”
“Hold on! We didn’t get very far.”
“But how did you know that when you started?”
“With you,” she sneered “I know everything from the start.”
“What if that hadn’t been the case, what if I’d really fallen in love? Maybe I was already in love, but I didn’t have time to find out because I was soon brought down to earth.”
“That shows I respect you. As soon as I realized you were getting attached, I revealed my identity. That’s proof, isn’t it!”
“This has to be a bad dream! You’re boasting about stopping when you shouldn’t even have started?”
“I needed to know.”
“To know what?”
“Who you are.”
“No mother knows who her son really is, especially in bed. You just have to be like all the others and ignore him. That’s the only way to establish a healthy relationship between a son and a mother.”
“A healthy relationship . . . A healthy relationship . . . You certainly aren’t afraid of words! Monsieur goes on about a ‘healthy’ relationship when at the age of twenty-six he still isn’t capable of having a girlfriend!”
“Of course, talking about my girlfriends, either it’s my mother who introduces them to me, or it’s my mother who takes their place. Isn’t that so, Fiordiligi?”
“When are you going to stop blaming me for that?”
“Never, Fiordiligi.”
“Don’t you ever make a mistake?”
“Yes, but I try not to deceive other people, Fiordiligi.”
“Stop it, Ludo.”
“No, Fiordiligi.”
“Ludo, I’m not going to beat about the bush: if you keep repeating that name, Fiordiligi, you’ll never see me again.”
“Fiordiligi! Fiordiligi! Fiordiligi!”
It was as if he’d been overcome by a fit of madness. He started walking around the apartment, yelling that name in an increasingly hoarse voice.
Claudine picked up her handbag, ran to the hall way, and slammed the door.
At that sound, Ludovic stopped yelling. The silence that fell was like a reward. He was intrigued by one thing, though: he didn’t hear the elevator.
He tiptoed to the door, making sure the floorboards didn’t creak. As discreetly as possible, he put his eye to the spyhole and looked out at the landing. Claudine was standing just outside the door, motionless, listening.
“Fiordiligi! Fiordiligi! Fiordiligi!” he roared.
Furious, Claudine kicked the door, grunted something indistinct, and ran off down the stairs.
The scene had aroused a new state in Ludovic, a kind of unease that he decided to call relief. Intellectually, he had been right to denounce his mother’s abuses. Emotionally, he wasn’t pleased at having chased her away, and his hands trembled.
H
e devoted himself to his work. Just so as not to think about Claudine! The cultural magazine he had created still demanded hours of editing.
In the afternoon, writing an article on the American minimalists, he remembered his story about Tom. Of course, he’d invented the whole thing, but it struck him as significant. In telling it, he’d convinced himself that it would have happened like that. Should he try it all the same? Should he force himself to experience what he had no desire to experience, since he already knew the outcome?
“I’m tired of establishing how useless I am. From now on I accept it fully.”
He saw again his mother pestering him to sleep with girls or men.
“What an obsessive! Is it such a burden to her to be a widow?”
For the first time, he realized that the pressure came from outside, not from him. Endlessly, since he was twenty, people had been demanding that he develop a sex life—his pals first of all, then, because he got on better with girls, his female friends, his mother, strangers. His entourage was obsessed with it, whereas he never thought about it.
Meekly, he had listened to their advice with goodwill, then had tried his luck in the market of physical relations. Would he have ventured there without their assistance? Surely not. In fact, Ludovic felt neither the need nor the desire for sex.
In order to relax, he opened a bar of white chocolate and switched on the television.
“Again?”
Zachary Bidermann’s face had just appeared on the screen. Psychologists, sociologists, sexologists, and political analysts were discussing his case and sexual addiction in general.
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s as exotic as an item about gazelles in Ethiopia!” Ludovic exclaimed, both irritated and interested.
A psychologist explained that the individual seeks sensations of pleasure because they liberate endorphins. Or the opposite, retorted a neurologist. But all the assembled experts were in agreement on the vital role played by sex.
Ludo felt like cutting in with, “What if we don’t have a libido?”
The more he listened to them, the more he realized how alienated he felt from the society of his time, where sex was not only obligatory, but had to be successful.
Success in sex, he thought. What a strange idea! Objection, gentlemen: success in life outside sex, can you imagine that?
Happiness, balance, helpfulness to others or to oneself, was that impossible without rubbing your genitals against someone else’s?
Ludo switched off the TV. In performing no sexual activity at all, he had the impression he wasn’t only in the minority, he was a shameful person; he was pointed at with the finger of infamy, was blamed for lacking testosterone.
If my balls had been crushed in an accident, people would at least feel sorry for me.
Yes, he would have been forgiven his physical disability. He would even have been forgiven his perversion.
Sexual perversion is reassuring. People understand it.
Twisted sexuality was still sexuality. People tolerated the urges that threw one body onto another, whatever the result.
Yes, if I collected whips or old socks, my mother would be able to hold her head up high in society. She would even prefer it if I screwed goats or ran after cows. The indulgent mother of a zoophilist, yes, she’d be ready to become that! She would lead a campaign. She’d go to see the king and get him to open his stables once a year. But the way I am, no!
His mother was a good example of the tawdriness of the era, a time that put sex above everything. In other centuries, the case of Ludovic would have been less problematic: he could have taken refuge in a religious order, he could have claimed to be practicing abstinence.
Abstinence? What a laugh! You can only practice abstinence if you’ve been fucking all your life.
The absence of desire, though, the peace of the body—nobody admitted that. Asexuality was only a problem in a time of frenetic sex.
He switched the TV back on just as one of the political analysts was venturing a theory about the link between the appetite for power and the appetite for sex.
“Oh, shut up!”
He ran to the kitchen and took from the cupboards the things he ought to avoid eating: wafers, walnut cookies, cereal bars, white chocolate. A calorific feast that he accompanied with a tub of banana yogurt. He didn’t like eating—he always ate quickly—what he liked was feeling so sated that he wanted either to throw up or to sleep.
Passing the mirror, he glanced at himself.
“A little more effort, Ludo, and you’ll finally be unfuckable.”
He smiled, and even underlined his words with a wink.
Suddenly, he froze. He had only just realized what he had said.
With his unhealthy eating habits and his terrible clothes, he’d been abusing himself in order to put himself out of the game, to withdraw from the race the others wanted him to take part in. He’d been trying to justify his amorous failures by demonstrating that he couldn’t inspire love. He’d been destroying himself to gain peace.
He examined himself again in the mirror. The fact was, he had no real desire to mess himself up, he was perfectly ready to value himself, especially as, in all other aspects of life, he showed refined tastes. Only the pressure of this sex-obsessed world had led him to twist himself out of shape.
He sat down on his favorite cushion and put on Debussy’s Sirènes, a sensual piece of music in which a wordless woman’s chorus mingled with the waves of the orchestra, an interweaving of sounds as fascinating and sophisticated as cigarette smoke on a summer evening.
Even his deepest tastes justified his living apart; classical music isolated him, since listening to it attentively necessitated solitude and silence. That was something he couldn’t and wouldn’t change. It was too late for that anyway. The rest, however, mistreating his body, making it ugly or ordinary . . . Yes, he could free himself of these constraints.
The doorbell rang. He jumped, suddenly remembering that he had made an appointment with Tiffany.
She came in and put her arms around his neck, trembling like a leaf. “Oh, Ludo, I’m so pleased to see you!”
“You’ve had problems with your man!”
Tiffany rushed to an armchair, and while gobbling down Ludo’s little snack, told him about the difficulties she had been encountering with her boyfriend. Ludo listened to these confidences, encouraging her, giving a piece of advice here, clarifying a point there.
Then she started repeating herself, and he took advantage of this to think about his mother. He had never before rejected her like this, but then she had never before committed such an offense. The more he thought about it, the more unforgivable her interference in his love life seemed.
Tiffany, tired of stewing in her own problems, dismissed the subject and talked about the troubles their mutual friends were facing.
“Pat and Jean are over, can you imagine?”
“I know. I heard that Pat had gotten together with Paul.”
“That’s already in the past.”
“So it goes. And how’s Graziella?”
“She’s leaving Aldo. Rudy and Laetitia are splitting up.”
“Even them?” Ludovic said, surprised.
He realized that Tiffany had eaten all the cakes he had put on the coffee table. There, he’d started his diet!
“By the way, Tiffany, I wanted to tell you that I’m OK.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m OK.”
She made an incredulous face. “All right . . . ”
“So there’s no point in your friends and you continuing to think of me as sick.”
“Ludo?”
“What’s a problem for you isn’t a problem for me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about sex. I’m just not sexual.”
She suppressed a smile, then pretended to be looking for inspiration on the ceiling. “As it happens, I thought of you the other day when I saw on the Internet that there’s a new group called the ‘asexuals.’ They’re trying to get themselves recognized.”
“I don’t give a damn. Pointless, I won’t become any more normal by finding people who are just like me. I don’t feel the need to belong to a herd.”
“We must all have a place in society.”
“I have a place, and it doesn’t need to be normal. And besides, the place I occupy is mine, and I’m keeping it.” He leaned forward. “I’m not so sure I’m isolated, you know. What are the great friendships if not asexual relationships? What is father love, mother love, filial love, if not an asexual relationship? The only kinds of love there are that work don’t involve sex. Everyone, without making too much effort, can be a son, a brother, a friend, a father. Rarely all at the same time. And yet the world persists with sexual love, even though it has a tendency to fizzle out. I’m going to tell you something in confidence: the woman I prefer in my life is the one with whom I’ve never had and will never have sexual relations.”
“Who is she?”
He said nothing and went to the window looking out on Place d’Arezzo.
Tiffany came up to him.
He shivered. “You feel sorry for me, is that it?”
“I feel touched by you. And you often amuse me.”
“Yes, but you also feel sorry for me . . . Actually, I prefer compassion to love, it only commits the person who feels sorry.”
“Don’t you want to be like other people?”
He thought about this for a long time. “No.”
She nodded and sighed admiringly, “You’re lucky. I wonder if you aren’t the strongest of us.”
At that moment, through the window, Ludo saw Zachary Bidermann getting out of a black limousine, having just been released from custody, and being assailed by photographers, curious onlookers, and angry feminists, all in the grip of a fever they couldn’t control. Around them, surprised by this flurry of human excitement, parrots and parakeets flew nosily about the square.
“Maybe I am,” Ludovic murmured phlegmatically.