chapter Nine

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EPISODE 17

Smooth road, clear day

But why am I the only one travelin' this way

How strange the road to love should be so easy

Can there be a detour ahead?

(the version with Billie Holiday, of course)

There were things I decided not to tell Laurent that evening. Not just the sordid details of my relationship with Catherine, but also the intimate details. To preserve not only the image of his mother, to whom I owed no loyalty, but mostly to preserve myself.

I told him how Catherine and I relaxed after the boat's departure. I felt happy when I realized she was not willing to leave the island, and I would have at least one more week to get closer to her, until another boat came around. And I felt hopeful, with that new warmth in our relationship.

Catherine was also relaxed, assured that I would not force her to leave the island. She then ceased to be afraid of me, as she would confess many years later, when we were back in France.

"Do you have to start with your reading at once?" -- we had had sex, and just as we finished, Catherine turned to her bedside table in search of a book -- "Can we talk, Catherine?"

'It's late, and you know I like to read before bed.' -- Catherine complained.

'Yes, I know. It's your "bridge into dreams", as you like to put it. But do you have to wake up early tomorrow for any reason?' -- I insisted.

'Okay. What is the agenda?' -- Catherine asked, jokingly. She was suddenly in a good mood, which seemed to happen only when she was sexually appeased.

It was one of the most important conversations we'd have in years, though nothing would change between us because of a few heartfelt words. Our son Laurent, our relationship spanning all almost ten years, what we had and what we lacked -- we talked about almost everything.

I learned that Catherine, back at the Île do Blanchomme, had found me not just rude at first -- she had found me threatening, and invasive.

And when I thought I was being discreet in my looks of desire that scanned her whole body, and that I had managed to hide my erections, I found out it had been the opposite. Nothing escaped her watchful eye, and she had been terrified with what she saw.

'I could not sleep...' -- Catherine confessed to me -- 'I'd wake up to any noise, fearing you were coming after me... I did not see you come into my room that first night, but I heard and saw it when you turned around and left... You were naked and I thought... What kind of sex maniac awaits me here? From then on, I slept with a knife hidden under the mattress.'

'Are you serious, Catherine?' -- I was offended -- 'How could you think that of me?' -- I smiled with bitterness -- 'Perhaps because at the beginning you never looked me in the eye...'

'Avoiding eye contact was part of my self-defense strategy.' -- she laughed -- 'Just picture my situation in that weird house with no doors... If I had to run away from you, where could I lock myself up? And there was no one around to cry for help. I felt trapped, and deeply regretted having followed my mother's advice to go to the Indian Ocean... And all the time you ate me with your eyes, while talking about either the septic tank or the "Blaue Reiter" or anything else... and all the time, this cock of yours inflating those worn shorts, day and night...'

I found out that Catherine had ceased fearing me when she had spied on me, masturbating in the bathtub. I almost choked at the revelation.

''At that point' -- she continued with her revelations -- 'I thought... if you really wanted to, you would have raped me already, instead of jerking off in the bathroom. Then I started realizing how handsome you were, if clumsily, like a big boy, and how you were embarrassed in my presence. And I gave up being aggressive to protect myself and to keep you at a distance.'

'And when that heatstroke came... I was very weak and completely at your mercy... I felt at your disposal lying on that bed... A ripe and peeled fruit being offered on a tray... I still had the knife under the mattress, but I was too weak to reach for it in an emergency... and while you continued to look at me full of desire, and your cock was almost always hard, you never touched me without so much care, and even modesty... I started wondering if you were not some kind of a weirdo hermit, and it got me fantasizing about taking your virginity... Yet, I still feared you'd ask me to leave on the next boat. But when I saw you trying to disguise your happiness upon hearing my request to stay... It was like arriving again to the Île du Blanchomme, and my vacation there had finally started.'

And then I knew Catherine's memories about that afternoon, after the boat's departure, were not so different from my own.

She had asked me to seek the office for the books she had been reading, and asked me to read them to her. When I sat on the floor next to the bed, from where I had been watching upon her  for so many days, she asked me to lie down on the bed with her. I had kept that bed forbidden territory for me, and even when I cleansed or massaged her, I had sat on a stool beside the bed.

While reading, I had to lie down on my stomach, to hide my erection. But every time Catherine moved on the creaking bed, the entire mattress moved too, and every time she turned slightly, tugging the sheets, my cock received the leaps and throbbed like crazy, drooling all the time. If she was teasing me, she had adopted a very subtle way, and I would never have overcome the small distance between us -- I would never have taken the initiative. Or had she been experimenting with her power over me?

I tried to concentrate on the reading -- and to this day I cannot remember if it was Lacan or Bachelard that I tried reading loud very carefully, almost without understanding the meaning of the sentences, but with the best pronunciation that I was capable of -- and trying not to look away from  the letters, though the half-naked body I worshiped was within reach of a breath. Once in a while, Catherine's foot would brush my arm for a second, or it was her hand that slightly touched my leg or waist, then pull out again. 

When I finally went to fetch fresh water for her in the kitchen, I also had to change my underwear, which was all sticky.

That night, when I started massaging Catherine, she asked me to sit on the bed with her, claiming that the stool on which I sat left me in an awkward position. I more than quickly agreed. Nonetheless, depending on me all would have happened exactly the same way -- yet another innocent massege session -- if Catherine hadn't taken my hand and placed it between her thighs... I was surprised, my heart and my erection pounding painfully, because she no longer needed my help to cleanse her, and we both knew it.

'Touch me there...' -- She asked, panting to my first touch, and as my fingers did not know what to do, Catherine lead me. She was experienced, and I was a virgin, but none of us was embarrassed. We both moved toward the realization of a strong desire, and we did not exchange a single word of judgment about our relative positions in that making; the only words heard were Catherine's instructions to me.

Sex, for me, has always been sex with Catherine, and through the years I graduated and post-graduated on her body and her desires. But that first night was... was my first night, our first, and every word would be cliché. I think it was Lacan whom I read to her, because I remember thinking about Courbet's painting L'Origine du Monde, while I had the blonde version of the picture in my hands, the original which was in Lacan's countryside home.

Catherine's moans increased when I started to explore The Origin of the World with my tongue, as instructed by her, and the more I licked and sucked, the wetter it got, giving me more to drink, a thick liquid with a taste that I never imagined could have existed.

And despite the intense pleasure I gave her that way, Catherine never paid me back a blow job, and it seemed it was for the same reason she didn't like kissing --in sex we could do all, but her mouth was not part of it, an organ that she reserved for the intellect, for the brilliant or sarcastic words she sought to constantly utter -- and my tongue or penis were an invasion of that sacred realm that she could not tolerate.

Catherine always tried to be discreet in her attitudes and even look indifferent to most things in life, so that it was always very difficult to know when something was pleasing or displeasing her. Her expression of boredom matched her idea of elegance -- neither of which she could maintain during sex. If she did not like it, she would cut me sharp -- "Stop it!" -- but never without trying to fix or improve it -- "Harder!", "Deeper..." -- and her intense, high-pitched moans were the narrative to her pleasure.

When there was poetry, and a little love between us, she was the choreographer and I, her rhythm and the dancer she commanded.

But usually there was only passion and need, and she acted like a director and I, the diligent subordinate.

'Nasty boy!' -- she said, a little angry and disgusted when I kissed her, my lips still wet and sticky of her own juice, and she pushed me down for further explorations.

Catherine had the most beautiful breasts, small and firm, that would fit in the palm of my hands, and I was never tired of caressing and kissing them. She did not like to be kissed on the mouth, but she never complained of my tongue on her nipples, perfectly round and pinkish. Unlike my calloused hands, my tongue was soft and capable of pleasing her without causing any discomfort, and her nipples hardened under the tip of my tongue, my saliva making them shiny like precious pearls I longed for.

In a corner of my mind, I thought of the legends about that Island of Births, and how the spirits in it might all have been awakened by Catherine's moans and groans, and perhaps were now surrounding us... a haunting idea. 

Unlike her, I was almost silent and could only gasp, surprised, doing my best efforts -- and perhaps in fear?

'Are you sure about this?' -- I asked, when Catherine asked me to penetrate her. It sounded ridiculous, because after all it was not her first time, only mine. And she laughed at my kindness, not ironically, but with a kind of joy, as it were a childish joke.

Catherine was a little disgusted when she led my cock, all wet with precum, inside her. 

 'You need to fix this leak,' -- she would say in another night, when I wasn't so nervous and she was in a good mood --,  'it is very inconvenient...' -- she complained.

But it was this leak -- my dick was smeared with precum and along with hers -- Catherine was quite wet herself when truly excited, so that it was actually easy to realize when she was pretending, or tense, or unhappy --,  which lubricated and helped to alleviate her suffering at the beginning of each penetration.

'Go easy!' -- she cried, when clumsily I almost tripped all the way inside her -- 'You're so big...' -- too big and thick for her, it seemed, and only later, when we would have sex as revenge, motivated by a grudge or anger, was that she did not mind the pain I would inflict her with my organ that was not comfortably fit for hers.

I failed to notice how Catherine's moans had changed to a new tone of annoyance -- over the years,  I would be able to distinguish them when she was pleased, and when she was faking pleasure, when there was pain in her pleasure, or when there was pleasure in the pain -- but that first night I got so lost in my own pleasure as I penetrated her. I closed my eyes, concentrating on the incredible new sensations I felt at each stroke, and just subjugated and abandoned her, burdening her under my body.

Plunging into her, I was a boy and I was the peasant, awkward and rude, riding and hitting her hard, slamming my cock inside her in a frenzy. I was a complete fiasco, but at least I was quick -- the way she strangled my cock did not allow me to last. She had been taking yoga classes, I was to find out, that she had abandoned for the mantras and prayers and all the talk about deities were terribly boring for her, but she had actually enjoyed learning how to have control over her pelvic muscles... And when, shortly after having flooded her, I again remembered her existence and sought her, she refused my kiss.

It wasn't her first time, but still I managed to hurt her, and I was scared when I saw her blood on me. I was desolated.

'It's okay, it's not serious...' -- she was kind and patient with me once she realized my sincere repentance and how, despite my size and age, I had been just a boy in his first time. And Louis Malle's movie  "Le souffle au couer" crossed my mind, how the mother had said to her son "I don't want you to be unhappy, or ashamed, or sorry..."

I had the next fourteen years to try to compensate for that first clumsy, selfish and rude night -- and maybe that was a problem of conscience for me only, not Catherine's desire, for she never required atonement. She was nevertheless satisfied with my commitment to satisfying her in subsequent years, and also for having achieved that kind of power over me, that made her even more demanding.

'And now you can quit teasing my nipple, darling. It's over.' -- she took my hand off her breasts. Catherine fell asleep soon after that, relieved, for she had her potential rapist in her own bed, appeased, and she no longer had to fear me.

When the island regained its immense natural silence, I realized how much it could have been supernatural. On the Island of Births, the only screams that had been heard so far were that of  mothers giving birth... And I wondered if I had broken a taboo by making love to Catherine on that island, surely for the first time in its history, for Herr Weissmann was not married nor had a partner. Catherine's groans and my panting on the squeaking bed -- how would they have touched the spirits imprisoned in the island, waiting to be born on an island that would never again allow them to? What had Armand said about no couples being allowed to live on the island because whatever babies were conceived or born on the Île du Blanchomme would certainly bear one of those tormented souls? Did that thought actually cross my mind on the night I had lost my virginity?

For a moment I was afraid of my own fearful fantasies, but I held tighter onto Catherine, who breathed relaxingly, and watching her, I ended up falling asleep.

There was no need to tell Laurent about my fear of a curse, because I had violated a sacred island. Anyway, it was sacred for the locals only, not for me, and much less for Catherine, with whom I never shared anything on the legends of the Île du Blanchomme.

If there was indeed any curse for that violation, I invoked it to befall on me, though intimately I knew it would be impossible to prevent it from befalling upon us, Catherine and me, as the couple who had disturbed and stirred those energies.

At that point in the narrative, at the Île du Blanchomme, Laurent had only been an apparition that I have not yet deciphered -- I hadn't been even considering his birth. And all the time he proved to be a blessing in my life -- so, why raise some sinister suspicion in him, who had been over-sensitive to this kind of mystical tales since his childhood... when he had already cried fearing for his mother's health? Why break his heart once again, rather than wait until it would necessarily shatter, at the end of this story?

I never became smaller nor thinner, nor Catherine became loser -- we simply adjusted to the pain that was our pleasure. Many partners lose sexual interest for one another along the long years, but between us, it was the only thing left, until the eve of my departure. I was to her more of a gigolo than of a husband for fourteen years, she had said it herself.

And there was our power play, all along. 

At first, Catherine justified being on top explaining to me that her skin was still burning and my weight was hurting her. 

And even when her skin did not hurt anymore, my subservience was to last -- fourteen years.

Topping me,  Catherine controlled and wore me as she wanted to -- I just had to remain hard and hold back my ejaculation, as she commanded me to, and when I came it was with abandonment and relief, while Catherine's orgasms were like the culmination of a power and control exercises -- her pelvic talents included, haha.

I did tell Laurent that it was the happiest time of our lives as a couple -- the couple we never got to be. We ate whenever we had the will, and we surely were hungry because of our intense physical activity.

'You really are a disaster in the kitchen!' -- Catherine laughed at my confusion and the filth I made trying to cook for the two of us.

In the early days of our mating we even bathed together, both out of necessity -- I managed on convincing Catherine about saving water -- and for pleasure.

But as soon as I resumed working in the garden and painting the house, while she was busy reading and writing at the small office that became her favorite corner in the house, and I started to smell to a mixture of sand, sweat and paint, Catherine dismissed our common baths.

She told me she had come to the Indian Ocean at her mother's suggestion, on a journey of research and inspiration -- for many years she had applied herself exclusively to the Faculty of Literature, having stayed over the years solely in France, and now, before dedicating herself to the Master's degree, she had decided to take vacations and a change of sceneries.

Having found in me an attentive listener, Catherine was able to talk for hours about Literature and her greatest passion, which were the Russian writers, especially Dostoyevsky. Her Master's degree would be on Russian poetry, about a woman poet I had never heard of -- Anna Akhmatova, for whom she was preparing a personal, very thoughtful translation.

But she was also on the verge of making a major discovery, which repercussions would boost her academic career, and she might even change the subject of her Master's thesis.

'I think I can tell you about it, since I doubt my secret will leave this island...' -- after a few weeks on the Île Blanchomme, Catherine had begun to share with me that same sense of isolation and disconnection from the rest of the world.

In the eleventh century, she explained, there had been an Orthodox Russian monk with beautiful mystical writings... that she believed to have been a woman, having pretended to be a monk to be able to study and write. She was expecting monetary support in order to carry out her field trip to Russia -- and despite being already in the East, she might have to return to France to arrange the details for that trip.

 Catherine's refined intellectuality, paired with her wealthy sophistication gave me somewhat of an inferiority complex. I could follow her musings and even encourage them in new ways -- but it could never have been enough to compensate the loss of her academic career, when she'd find herself stuck with me in that tropical and barren part of the world, as in exile from the University. 

Over time, she came to detest any mention of her academic past. Sometimes, she was annoyed just at my company -- even if I never brought the issue up, I was the only person by her side to know about the glourious expectations she had cultivated, and that never came to be.

But no matter how much Catherine spoke, she always remained in the discourses and intellectual militancy realms. There was nothing personal, never. She could not -- or would not -- speak of herself. I learned to read between the lines her preferences and emotions when she defended or attacked some author -- but not even about her favorite color or food did she speak, nor of her feelings, or her family, or her former love affairs -- Yves Saint-Laurent being her favourite couturier being the only thing close to something personal I knew about her.

And all the time, she stated ​​clearly that she was only on holidays in the Indian Ocean, and that she wished to return to France as soon as she could... I felt sad, but not so much hurt when I imagined the reason for her delay in going back home were the good things we were cultivating together.

Conversely, although in bed our relationship held no barriers and could not be anymore intimate, out of bed we acted like passengers on a cruise, that knew they were going to disembark at different destinations, and move further towards distinct lives. Therefore, there was some warmth in our conviviality, but not tenderness nor complicity, and in bed there was passion, but never any love. We acted as if nothing was supposed to last between us.

In a relationship with expiration date like ours, we went deep into the kind of freedom of those who would never meet again, but also coping with the resulting indifference for the consequence of our acts. We could entangle our bodies in acrobatic positions, but our souls kept their distance, independent and dettached from one another. 

And after that start that had been like an intellectual locomotive attached to a sexual rocket, I think we could never have made the necessary corrections to a slower and more delicate couple's life, and then on to a family routine, which resembled more to traveling on a precarious cart dragged by a sole mule, ever so slow and full of bumps.

I realized Catherine's annoyance in helping with household chores, like when the bathroom plumbing broke and I had to yell at her to make her come out of bed and mop the floor... But it was her only miserable moment during those happy weeks, when she momentarily lost a lightness and good humor I was never again going to find in her, away from the Île. 

And for fourteen years I was  to continue acting like her employee, providing her room service and continuously taking care of our homes,  in all of the houses that we had together around the world.

How many weeks had gone by in our love idyll? Six, perhaps seven, maybe eight? We were running out of provisions on the Île du Blanchomme, and although once I had come down to the beach to greet the boat and ask the natives to bring food with them the next time they came around -- maybe because I was not specific, what they brought was not exactly pleasing nor appealing to Catherine (nor to me, I have to admit), and it was so little that it couldn't have suficed for a picnic on the beach. I tried angling, but never caught a single fish.

There was a decision I had been procrastinating, and when I asked Catherine's opinion on it, I was surprised at her enthusiasm.

I had decided to again face the world outside -- in part for reasons similar to those that had led me in Paris to abandon my voluntary exile in the old abandoned factory -- because we needed to buy more groceries, and secondly because I was truly concerned with Catherine's vomiting bursts, which seemed to cease at intervals of two, maybe three days, just to start over again. I had suffered from food poisoning myself, but she had had a heatstroke to complicate the matter.

I had even changed the side of the house I was painting to be far from the office where she spent her days, but the smell of the paint would also banish her from the kitchen, and almost prevented her from using the bathroom... Finally, I decided to postpone the painting of the house until she was cured -- but to achieve that, we needed to go to a hospital. At first she refused it, but when she began to feel weak and malnourished, affecting even her sexual desire and the capacity to concentrate on her readings, she agreed we should go.

As much as Catherine was delighted and excited with the possibility of a journey to the Elder Sisters Islands -- to "see people, cars, go shopping, listen to the city noises and breath in some smoke, to remind myself that there is a world that is civilized, and return to the twentieth century" --, I feared she would want to leave the Île for good. I had never understood her reasons to prolong her stay on the island, and at that staged I still doubted even my skills as a lover.

And when she came down to the beach to catch the boat, and she was without her backpack, for a few minutes I was so happy that I jumped on thinking already of our returning together to the Île du Blanchomme, as a couple, to continue with our love...or sex idyll. 

But those two who left the Île would actually never return...

My happiness lasted only a few minutes, because I had immediately to occupy myself with Catherine, who began to feel ill from the first moment she stepped onto the boat.

She vomited with such a violence like I had not yet seen her throw up on the island. She started moaning and begging to disembark, but there was no way back once on the boat. And the nine-hour crossing to the Elder Sisters Islands was just beginning.

She could not stand on her two feet alone, and so I carried and snuggled her in my lap. One of the passengers, a young woman dressed with really bright colors, approached to ask if I needed help -- at least that's what I understood, since I had not learned a word from the local language.

'Who is the bitch?' -- Catherine asked loudly, her voice hoarser than usual, and certain of not being understood by the natives, although the young lady was so close to us.

'She is trying to help us, Catherine...' -- I answered quietly, almost whispering it in her years, holding her tenderly.

'Are you really so naive?' -- she looked at me intensely, though she couldn't get her eyes more than half open only -- 'Or do you think I am the naive one, here?' -- I had to turn my face away from the strong whiff of Catherine's vomit -- 'For a slut like her, a foreigner like you is a treasure... You are her way out of this hole and her passport to Europe, my dear...' -- Catherine clarified, angrily... and I was happy thinking that perhaps she was jealous of me.

But it was that slut who helped me take Catherine to a shady spot on the other side of the boat, where she finally fell asleep on a bench, after having vomited a little more, right on my lap.

I had to agree on Catherine's judgement, however, when the woman started cleaning the vomit stain off my shirt -- a new shirt I had borrowed from Armand -- without my having asked for her help, and in doing it she kept rubbing my chest deliberately. Against my will, I felt that now familiar tingle in my groin, which announced my erections.

But I walked away when, looking into her eyes, I saw malice and evil. I had read Herr Weissmann's reports about terrible witchcrafts and charms made ​​from a single hair -- and why not from the hair on my chest? If I were a treasure, blonde Catherine was a true rarity on those islands, I suddenly realized.

And I never again left Catherine's side during the nine-hour journey to the Elder Sisters Islands -- where, I hoped, we would find a cure for her mysterious disease.

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