The Necrophiliac (5 page)

I played for some time at caressing the baby, a little boy who, nevertheless, was hardly pretty, with his rumpled face, his stunted limbs, his fat head. The icy calmness of his flesh, the odour of bombyx that he emanated very strongly, soon inspired in me more precise games. I placed the baby without a name on my lap, his head reposing on my knees, his legs coming up at a right angle, his feet almost touching my chest. I introduced myself just between his thighs only to soon realize that I wouldn't get any pleasure out of that. His flesh seemed as bland as a cream soup. Stupidly, I persisted anyway, rushing my movements to a conclusion that brought no ecstasy. Someone even stupider than me might have evoked Gilles de Rais, not so much because of the child, but because of the chosen position, conducive to spreading a subject out on his stomach — a subject who, for that matter, wasn't my victim. I don't like Gilles de Rais, a man of a deficient sexuality, eternal little boy who never stopped committing suicide through others. Gilles de Rais disgusts me. There's only one dirty thing: the suffering one can cause. I didn't keep Geneviève and her baby very long, but the story had a follow-up, or at least, with a bit of bad luck, could easily have had one.

I cast off the bag into which I had placed the two of them, held in each other's arms, so that nothing could separate them before their bones fled into the currents, becoming porous and light like pieces of pumice stone, crumbling and disappearing to be reunited in the lime of starfish. At the very instant when the water closed over them, doors banged into the silence of the night, cries resounded. On the bank, men ran in my direction. “Hey there! Hey!” — “Over there! Over there!” No doubt, I had been seen by the gas factory workers. They chased me like dogs chasing a hare and, like the hare, I ran, zigzagging, to cross the nocturnal streets of Leval. Sometimes their clamour approached dangerously, but all of a sudden they seemed to lose all trace of me. I heard them call each other, shout out injunctions, advice. The walls covered in lacerated posters, the blind facades of warehouses, the abandoned factories passed by at my sides with a dreamlike rhythm. Not knowing where I was, running lost into the maze of hostile streets, I feared, above all, to trap myself in a dead end. And suddenly, the miracle I hadn't counted on: my good old Chevrolet, carriage for all my marriages, wisely stationed along the sidewalk. While I was starting up, I had enough time to perceive, along the edge of a wall, a group of men gesticulating wildly in the light from a streetlamp.
Once more saved!

It's already more than a month that I've been in Naples, very happy to be far away from Paris for a while. I confided my business to a manager who had already taken good care of it four years ago when I stayed in Nice. To tell the truth, the nocturnal chase in Leval greatly affected me. I smelled danger. Not to mention I really wanted to rediscover Naples, the most macabre of cities. Naples, the mouth of Hades. The dead are played with there like big dolls. They are embalmed, inhumed, exhumed, cleaned, decorated, coiffed; they get their sockets stuffed with green or red bulbs, placed in recesses on a wall, get dressed standing up in glass coffins. They get dressed, they get undressed, and nothing is more bizarre than those stiff mummies in their tight clothes, coiffed in tow wigs, a bouquet of dusty wax flowers in their hands. At San Domenico Maggiore, the queens of Aragon, monkey-women in brown leather, shrivelled up in their coffins. The sacristan lifts the coffin lid with one hand, extending the other for his tip — Hermes is also Mercury. But all these mummies are too dried out to please or illuminate the senses much. They lack internal movement and fresh metamorphoses.

Naples . . . Less than a hundred years ago, they still paraded cadavers through the streets like in ancient Rome. Today, one encounters nothing but massive death carriages, flanked by gigantic lanterns, decorated with black ostrich feathers.

Intermezzo all'improvviso . . .
I came back from visiting the Santa Chiara cloister and, wanting to descend towards the Corso Umberto, I took this fantastic staircase described by Malaparte: the Pendino Santa Barbara, where only female dwarves live. Horrible, deformed, often bald, sometimes holding children in their arms who seemed to be made out of grey rags, the dwarves lived there in a restless yelping. Big cavernicolous insects, they occupy the
bassi
, those rooms without windows that open onto the street at foot level, each of them identical: a large bed covered in pink nylon, a television set, and pious imagery.

In front of one of the
bassi
, a crowd of dwarves obstructed the stairs, chattering in a plaintive tone, while those who seemed the most affected occupied the obscure cave where the lamps glowed brightly as if it were the middle of the night. Death had come by there and my heart made that old leap that I knew well. What's more, the dwarves hurried to inform me that one of them, their good friend, Teresa, had just been lifted up to the Heavens. I offered to join them in honouring Teresa at her wake. They accepted with an excitation that was indescribable even for Naples.

Teresa's crumpled, ashen face could have been thirty years old just as well as seventy-five, crowned by indefinable clumps in the guise of hair. She'd been put into a sort of first communion dress that came up to her ears, for she was humpbacked. Several of her companions, climbing on the bed, worked at pawing her, patting her, kissing her, lifting a lock of her impossible hair, caressing her cheek, smoothing out a fold in her dress — all with the monstrous cackling of an aviary. I learned that Teresa had been run over by a car while crossing the via Sedile di Porto and that, with two severed thighs, she lost all her blood before getting sufficient help. It's true that a dwarf can't have very much blood. Lots of gestures were made, lots of cries were let out, and lots of advice was given, but Teresa was already out of blood when the ambulance arrived.

She was brought back to her house; her friends washed, combed, and protected her. She was redressed in white, a sign, they said, that Teresa died a virgin. Virgin or not, I swear that she awakened my desire much more actively than it has been for a long time already, I haven't . . .

Happily, as the weather was still stormy, I was armed with a raincoat that I carried on my arm and thanks to which it was possible for me to cover the state I was in. I only asked myself how I was going to take Teresa out of a district this populated without the help of a car. I forged a thousand plans, one more absurd than the next, as I listened to the chattering dwarves. The heat was stifling. Noon approached. The voices started dragging as they thickened in the vitreous air. The odour of something fried rose to the mortuary bed and the dwarves couldn't help but notice it. There was a sort of wavering or a lull in their lamentations. One of them spoke of making coffee. I intervened, offering them a funeral lunch in the neighbouring restaurant, as long as they could excuse their host for not taking part himself: he would take over the death watch so that they could all eat together. Enchanted, they accepted the invitation and a quarter of an hour later, when I returned to the restaurant where I had prepared their feast, I found them already draped in black satin shawls, coiffed in peculiar antique hats flowered with crepe irises. They welcomed me with cries of joy, then scattered themselves around the Pendino like a flock of crows.

I was alone with Teresa. I closed the door, and, slowly, calmly, undid my tie.

I just visited Capodimonte, the park of mossy tritons with the long yellow château that shelters a marvellous collection of paintings behind the bouquets of palm trees.
La morte de Pétrone
by Pacecco de Rosa . . . An animated composition, but one from which indifference transpires: beautiful, limpid colours, but no intuition of the subject. At least not mine.

Even here, in Naples, in the calm of his villa, Caius Petronius Arbiter, a grand lord, a grand poet, a compromised man, had his veins opened by his doctor. Surrounded by his concubines and his Greek slaves slipping their tongues into his mouth and caressing his hair, which had been mussed by the bath steam, he saw their gaze erased from behind a veil because his own gaze was being snuffed out like a lamp. He heard their tender words pull back towards another planet because he himself was about to leave the earth. Supported by their arms, no doubt, he still had time to measure his solitude. Bowled over by the sweetness of their smiles, he sensed their hands close upon his already inert member; the only force that gushed from him came together into a vermillion coral twig, the perfect arc of which united his wrist with the silver basin. He sensed nothingness invade the network of his veins, the night penetrate his flesh, from his pierced earlobes to his long phalanxes folded under the weight of his rings, while the dancers stuck their vulvas to his body like barnacles onto a ship and the fingers of these ephebi explored his secret parts. Floating into his bath as if into the maternal liquid, Caius Petronius Arbiter sensed his life escaping him as sweetly as it had once come to him.

That's how death should be.

The San Gaudioso catacombs. Those in Paris are nothing in comparison; one must go to Naples to see something like that. Baroque, fantastic, the San Gaudioso catacombs spread out over an immense distance and it is even said that certain forgotten galleries join those of San Gennaro. Women come here to implore the favours of the “souls of Purgatory,” as they naively call the infernal forces, and to practise the worship of bones.

The skulls, often polished with wax, coiffed with wigs, and set on little private altars by the faithful, who are, for that matter, total strangers to them, make for the object of a very active trade on the guardians' part. The atmosphere of these pagan catacombs — for that's exactly what they are — is absolutely unreal. The murmured prayers, the shadows of women projected by the flickering candles onto the macabre, rocky stones, the skeletons and the clothed mummies in their niches, the odour of bones and of offerings form an indescribable environment. Straight off, I was enthusiastic.

Finding myself in a less frequented gallery, my attention was suddenly solicited by the little games of one of the faithful. It was a fat little woman like they all are over there. She must have been around thirty years old and visibly belonged to the middle class; maybe she was the wife of a local merchant or a subordinate official. With one knee resting on the seat of a chair, she leaned over its back, her rump jutting out and her neck held forward, bringing her face closer until she touched a skull set on the molding. The profile of the woman and that of the skull detached themselves neatly in the reddish glare of a lamp, the one cupped under the smile of the other. The woman had succeeded in introducing her tongue into the jaw, and, lit from behind, I saw it lick and wriggle between the dead teeth, bent and pointed like a horn of coral — that old phallic symbol the Neapolitans wear against the evil eye.

At times, the woman brought that tongue, which I guessed would be surprisingly hard and fleshy, up to the incisors of the dead, running it along the exterior of the teeth like a hand caressing a keyboard; at other times, she plunged it in as far as she could to lick the inside of the molars and the roof of the mouth.

She was enjoying herself so much that she hadn't heard me approach. I observed her for a while before she suddenly noticed my presence and sat up, stifling a cry.

“You have nothing to fear from me,” I told her, “but don't you want to get back to what you were doing just now?”

The woman studied me with distrust. I repeated my request, and the flash of an idea that no doubt seemed brilliant to her spread across her face:

“If someone sees me, I will say that it's you that forced me to do it.”

I confess that I was confounded by this vulgar ruse with which she managed to turn around the situation. But already, and without saying another word, she had returned to her skull, the eyes half-closed, the tongue stuck out.

That which was unusual about the spectacle and the place, combined with the euphoria I felt as soon as I had entered the catacombs, had an effect on me that a necrophiliac doesn't often experience. I wanted this woman, even though she was alive. I lifted up her black dress and, pulling down her cotton underwear, I discovered a large rump, polished and diaphanous as the wax of the candles around us. It was even smoother to the touch than the sight. Having slipped my hand into the crack, I pulled out my fingers soaked in an opaline liquor that disconcerted me — the dead don't secrete anything like that — and would have repulsed me if its odour hadn't recalled that of the sea, image and sister of the dead. And so, the thought that all flesh carries within itself the seed of its destruction revived the desire I had for this woman, but that desire abandoned me the very instant I tried to make deeper contact, like a house of cards that collapses as soon as it is touched. The woman turned towards me, her face distorted with anger:

“I'm going to say that you tried to get violent with me.”

I didn't understand why her resentment led her to threaten me like that. In any case, I distanced myself as quickly as I could.

In my apartment in Posillipo, I felt suddenly invaded with bitterness and sadness. I wanted to live and I wanted to die, but I couldn't live nor die. Is that the Garden of Gethsemane?

I don't know why, but this morning while fixing my tie, I briefly recalled a very old image of my neighbour from adolescence, that Gabrielle who pleased me so much when she appeared to me hanged, the eyes sunken back in her head in a last ecstasy.