THE ENGLISH TEXT OF MY STORY PUBLISHED IN La Revue Littéraire novembre-décembre 2010 n°50 TRANSLATED/INTERPRETED BY NATASHKA MOREAU
...So he rolled around as if drunk, his obscene cod-opera fantasies lurching about uncontrollably inside him.
...So he rolled around as if drunk, his obscene cod-opera fantasies lurching about uncontrollably inside him.
He imagined a deeply serious, dramatic episode, encompassing the whole city, at that especially silent hour of four in the morning. Even the imaginary ghosts were asleep; he was the only witness to a beautiful choreography of the statues, gargoyles, carvings and architectural flourishes, as they let the cold night air bring life to their decayed marble and bronze bodies. He felt the wind from gilded wings on his face, and the floor shook with the stamp of mighty stone hooves. He watched alone from behind a column, unseen, as this army rumbled quite soundlessly through the shadows. He felt as if he was being turned to stone, while all the stones of the city were sucking and sharing his human warmth.
He was paralysed by the sudden physicality of this vision. They had smells, just not of this reality - the terrible hell-horses and their half-animal stench mingled with the alluring yet wholly unnatural perfume of the goddesses, and the dreadful pheromones of the grim-faced warriors. But he experienced it several times, and though its power never abated, he grew used to the surprise, until he could muster enough confidence and poise to summon the girl.
The grand waltz of the sculptural awakening, and its climactic symphonic soundtrack, became coupled to the simplest rhythm of all: the in-out, in-out of sex. He thrust roughly, in time with the dance, and his fear and excitement became the girl's, her face eventually materialising wide-eyed, pale with terror, and flushed from the exertion of a hard fucking. Angels and grotesques swooped through the cold fog around their heads, comely maidens teased him, generals bellowed orders and exhortations at him, and judges judged him. He was torn between the terror of being watched by them all, and the desire to share - but share them with the girl, or vice versa?
(and then, of course, he would come, and collapse, and when he finally had the energy to look up once more, everything was gone, and he knew he would have to find the girl again tomorrow...)
Or he would wander for hours in the hazy afternoon sun, whistling down the empty streets, absent-mindedly stroking his dick, as he repeated to himself over and over: “You don't understand - I'm so happy! I'm so happy and I can't bear not to share it... Listen. If you refuse to share, I'm just going to have to spread happiness all over the end of my cock, and ram it up you so hard you'll have no choice but to smile...”
-----
He couldn't remember how long it had been since he arrived in the city - a year? more? just a few months? - but he was still aware, vaguely, of why he was there, of a lingering idea of punishment and exile. It had long since ceased to matter: it was clear from the very start he would die there.
It was long long abandoned and overgrown. It had been under the drawn-out control of nature for at least as long as it had previously been subject to humanity's manic change - and yet, every day, he felt it was something new, that the exploration would never stop, that he would just continue to walk there. There seemed no end to it.
Memories of his previous life were distant and sketched by outline only. He had been submerged in a world so physically alien to him that he drowned. Overwhelmed by the visual intensity of sunshine and shade on a field bursting with strange information, and by the soft constant touch of the eroded stone walls, he inevitably started to go insane.
The first, rather shocking acclimatisation - to the strange relation of day and night, the temperature, the unsettling proportions of the buildings and streets - ended. He had a dim sense, perhaps, that he had peeled back the first of the city's layers, and there began his slow descent into the imagined ghost life, or lives, that inhabited these squares and streets.
At first, he was struck by a few buildings - the palaces, grand hotels, opera houses, cathedrals, train stations, government offices, jails, museums and the like - and how different they seemed from the rest. He sensed a sinister power, distinct, heavy, and commanding, in these special places, dragging everything in their vicinity towards them.
This; the contrasting nature of the places of residence, and of work; the weeks and months; and his compulsive explorations further afield - slowly, he gathered fuel for his imagination. The faint spectres of the former inhabitants grew immeasurably more solid, and he began to remember the word 'alone.' His passing reflection in puddles, windows, etc., took on an odd significance. He slowly, vaguely, repopulated the city with those who must have lived here, built this city, invested it and all its details with meanings utterly beyond his comprehension.
He became aware of a magical kind of image in the city; he compared it to his own reflection, and found it vastly superior. He had no way of knowing it was just marketing. A vast pantheon remained in place, faded by sun and rain, obscured or eaten by vegetation and mould, on walls or its own structures, or in block-like magazines with long-fused pages, of bizarre choices and fantastic promises. They were all gods, gods of cars, gods of sex, gods of washing up liquids and summer meadows. These were the people who lived here. Everyone who ever lived here was a god.
A thousand murky shots of beautiful girls captivated him. He lingered longest on the streets with the most shops on them. Then, he found massive galleries of paintings, and was all the more fascinated by the faces somehow created so artificially, faces with another human hand in them - and the girls of such different sensuality to those in the photographs he saw outside.
He had no idea that the disparity, of costume, hair, surrounding, and mood, was as a result of a few hundred years' span between ages. In his way, he imagined that all the millions of lives there had happened contemporaneously. Therefore, the painted girls, obviously special, must have been gods of a higher order.
-----
It was around then that he also began to masturbate. The two tendencies might have appeared, at that point, to have emanated from completely different parts of his consciousness, but their convergence was swift and violent.
He found a cracked, weed-ridden stone needle by the river at the confluence of several grand avenues, and he identified it with himself and his penis. The distant towers that circled the city were obviously larger, but something there had more power. He masturbated only against the foot of the needle for a while, but more and more the urge would take him wherever he happened to be, and he began to enjoy the experience of wanking in different environments.
And so, the landscape of the city became sexualised for him. He did not miss the most overt symbols, the large domes, grand arches, and dark passageways, but, more insidiously, he grew to appreciate the subtle eroticism of a crossroads, banal residential courtyard, or sloped roof.
At some point, after weeks of infuriatingly mysterious footsteps round corners, and just-vanished absences, she finally manifested.
One day, walking and wanking in a park, plunged even further into his heady sensual haze by thehot sun and lush vegetation, a sudden sharp vision crept up on him: a couple of park bench lesbians, young, pretty, and, despite being surrounded by hundreds of other ghosts, very much alone in their embrace. Most disturbingly though: they broke from their embrace, and stared at him. He stopped in his tracks, and his erection went limp at the shock, the specificity of the picture, as if these two particular ghosts out of all the millions had suddenly threatened to become very real; he had penetrated the city for the first time, and she was aware of him, ready to commune.
The stillness fell away, and he rushed to the nearest shop. Calmly, for the first fateful time, he wanked to conjure her image - the one true inhabitant of this city, the meaning of this city, the kaleidoscopic girl who turned his life into its very own Zeno's paradox.
It was almost certainly then that he passed the point of no return, when his gentle, dreamy slide into insanity could no longer be reversed. From now on he would just bask in his warm and happy pool of delirium for ever...
-----
But at some point after, a horrifying contradiction came to face him - he met one of his fellow exiles. There were, in fact, probably close to a thousand outcasts there, but the original geography of the city meant nothing to them. The centre provided less food than the wilder suburbs. He did recall a distant awareness, from the passing of the sentence, that he would not be the only one in this situation, so perhaps it should not have been such a surprise that he would cross paths with another entirely real human - nonetheless, it gave him the fright of his life.
Confronted by this ridiculous, ugly, dirty, scurrying little thing that threatened his idyll so much with its real smells and sniffles, and similarity to himself - one response was easiest.
He redoubled his masturbatory offerings everywhere, taking delight in coupling with his prison, giving himself up to it one sticky spurt at a time. He found a high point with a panoramic view and blissfully sprayed his seed onto the wind; he would spatter the walls of tunnels, or down drains, or in letterboxes.
He fucked the girl and the city, violently or tenderly, in alleyways, at windows, in the middle of the road, against trees, on broken glass, in ponds, amidst fantasies brewed from all the images and snippets of confused information he had intepreted there. He raped her, and she tied him up to the needle and raped him. He would spend his days fucking her, just him, for she had reformed her whorish ways, the constant orgies of millions - he foolishly thought he had changed her, perhaps even owned her slightly. He would fuck her in every building, every street, square, garden of the city, and he would spend eternity wandering and masturbating inside her.
He tore at his penis furiously, he covered the city copiously, he conjured her image more vividly than ever before - but he could not erase the knowledge he was not alone. Fear planted a root in this crack, and the more he worried at it, the more it widened.
-----
So, eventually, he could not help being drawn back to this creature. Some residual instinct connected her to his image of the city. Did he have dim notions of saving her, of being the agent of her exultation, from disgusting human rat to something like a god, like the city? Was one a representation of the other?
She had her own isolated madness, and they could barely communicate. Where he was a wanker, she was a singer; instead of his marketing porn dotted around the city, she had records. The city had given him the girls on the bench; it gave her a record player.
In her den, she tried to play him some music, as a sort of nervous disorientated foreplay. It was a disaster. Since his arrival, he had not heard a sound other than his or nature's, and he was already extremely nervous and confused. This artificial primitive screech terrified him, caused an intense dizziness. He fled in tears, and ran to the city's highest still-standing tower, and then ran to the viewing platform at the top, and masturbated, sobbing, lying on his back, watched curiously by a sole pigeon.
Convulsing with guilt, he remonstrated with himself for the merest possibility of betraying his citygirl, and manically pleaded with her, offering his flaccid, scabbed penis to the crumbling balustrades. He knew, though, that she would always be one step ahead of him in Love. He knew, now, he would never be good enough to satisfy the city sexually, she would always be there to welcome others like him, had been doing it since her birth. His sexual equal was the horrible music-screech woman, but he was in love with a massive, intricate, endlessly confusing and hidden city, which was a girl. A chimaera! Her terrifying true nature was revealed to him, and though he could not believe himself in love with such a monster, he knew he had no say in the matter.
In the deepest thrust he could possibly hope to inflict, he flung himself from this, the tip of the biggest penis to thwart his desires with his female city. On the ground, practically every bone broken, crumpled in a spreading pool of deep red, he managed one last wank, and gave all his life to his unrequited love.
