Excerpt from Pussyboy (translated by Tobias Ryan) — Patrick Autréaux

Jusepe de Ribera painted La mujer barbuda for the Vice-Roy of Naples, his patron, and a lover of natural anomalies and circus oddities. So say the erudite historians. According to the writings of the time, we see a virile Italian woman from Abruzzo, wearing a beard a hand long. She is nursing a child. Her breast is bulbous, placed slightly high, a kind of giant molluscum pendulum, its nipple offered to the infant. A half-step behind her, her husband appears as the protector of this extraordinary being, a guardian on the periphery of his wife’s strange majesty. Their faces are serious, firm. That of the man is resigned, bitter maybe; on that of Magdalena Ventura, one can’t but read the pride of one who has known the mocking cruelty of others, who is not ignorant of it as she displays her apparent duel nature. Ribera has made what passes for monstrous into a human work, where strangeness is eclipsed by a solemn discord. “The Great Miracles”, says a stone tablet on which rests a striated conch. We can imagine a shell grotto, domain of an androgynous beyond, of which the Abruzzese is perhaps the living avatar. A God-Mary-Joseph, at once both husband and wife:

for He who is mighty has done great things for me

The incarnation of ambivalence or paradox, the monstrous exhales its fog, and, playing unease on a spectrum that ranges from fright to disgust, presents a vacillation that, when waking in the morning, throws our minds out of whack. It is this which foments, unbeknownst to us, incongruous comparisons, but may also unearth, in overturning an interdiction, the indistinct and shocking reality in which we live, and that we reject. We often prefer the clarity of lies to the smouldering truth that comes our way. Because the monstrous is, first and foremost, life, searching like a blind larva, veering, groping, and prospecting; life at its limits, trying to find its future forms or simply that which unknowingly invents new worlds. It is what we encounter when we plunge into the details, when we stray from the prefigured and moral contours of how we are represented. To recognise the monstrous as life is going higher or delving deeper; it is looking much further, or much more closely.

And what does that baby feel, suckling at the breast of this woman who resembles a man? As is the monstrous, so too is strangeness the remit of a lazy eye. But if I were to become a child again, that child whose vision has lost its clarity, if it were possible, in that moment, as it is happening, with a silencing matter-of-factness, forgetting who you are and what you know, momentarily eclipsed; if I were to become again that indistinguishable one, then I would no longer see the monstrous, and my gullet would be replete with every language of humanity, and fertile too with an acceptance of all the forms within me, which droning normality would later demand lie dormant again or be snuffed out for good. Sex sometimes awakes such flashes wherein phantom memories are superimposed on the present, such as the moment when, one summer’s afternoon with Zak, I was a child craving to take in my mouth what was no longer the head of his cock but a soft, round teat. My lips and my eyes, closed horizon, floor or bed, and far off like some regurgitated sensation, a belch rising as though I had been burped, having drunk a cupful of desire too great – a nipple that you look at, and then push away before you suckle on again. And transformed by this tableau, when my lover takes between his lips, then fully in his mouth, my breasts’ areola, I become a bearded woman. Knowing what he is doing, measured by the reliability of my reaction, he is almost childlike when he lifts his eyes toward me. A breast and its milk, a penis and that other milk. He and I, taking turns, switch roles in movements that inhale and suck. The first gestures of life, of survival. Organs are confused, they lose their reproductive function becoming nothing more than totems, symbols, undifferentiated teats, cock or breast. But this lack of distinction comes to contaminate we who enact it: he loses in virility what I gain when I’m with him in the feminine. We advance, one toward the other, by a softening of that which distinguishes the roles we have been attributed. In the mounting excitement, our places do not, perhaps, change, but their designation becomes more imprecise. Between he and I, it is not a game of in-and-out for a cock-breast in an orifice, but rather the coming and going of sensations and emotions that we refuse to clarify. Even if Zak is always very quick to get his act together; men don’t like to lose their bearings for too long.

Naked breast that would shame the rose, spoke from experience the libertine Marot:

A bon droict heureux on dira 

Celluy, qui de laict t’emplira, 

Faisant d’ung Tetin de pucelle 

Tetin de femme entiere, & belle. (Note 1)

It is the nipple which he takes between his fingers, and upon which, sticking out from between the lips, the fuse of a tongue acts like a pumper hoping to rekindle embers. Breast which bears witness, wrote dear Clément. And what do you bear, pretty pink little tip, you who make so much else bloom? You’re lucky, Zak sometimes says, seeing how this simple touch opens and unravels me. I become a whole breast in his hands. I am nothing but the nub which he makes hard, and where the storm stirs. Sometimes flat as a blank slate, where do you get to pink-tipped titty? To what caves, to what plains? Still there where the mind which does not think, a body, certainly, passes and lets out a whisper, a moan or gasp. I become a hot-air balloon, well anchored, yet, to the ground, but dilated, and close my eyes to better taste the sweetness of that mucus membrane which channels to what within me would like to ascend. Not so much reaching for the sky as embracing it. The gods are also born of pleasure – whether begotten by a raven, a tortoise, a big-horned ox, a black ibis, a crowned hawk, a demanding sky, a virgin pregnant by an angel or some kind of giant clam.

The breast is an adipose and glandular exuberance which issues from the skin. So the anatomists would say. And we must return to science if we are to understand the mystery of that which rises up inside us when a tiny spot on the body causes heated reliefs to distend the bedroom walls, when a continuous wind beats against the windows, and the imminence of a revelation turns to cosmic terror. How to comprehend that this rosy button could release storm clouds capable of capsizing you? In that it emerges from the skin, and is a dense network of tiny nerve endings that produces such thunderous racket? Knowing that the breasts develop from two cutaneous crests running from the armpit to the groin, from a simple budding point that deepens, thickens, and becomes a little cave of glandular treasures, you pay a different attention to the finger and caressing hand: it is no longer a body that shivers but an entire hinterland.

The incongruity of erogenous zones and gestures. For one, the head or neck, for another the soles of the feet, which we rub, or, for another, that are kissed; for others still it’s the cleft of their buttocks or chin we lick, their ear lobe we nibble. So many emblems sketching out a typology of foreplay. From the time of my first lover I discovered that I was a man with electric breasts. Even though, in the intimacy of my personal eroticism, the importance of theses little bits of flesh was gradually growing, I began to cover my chest, which now held a knowledge that made me blush.

But we are in my room at night. The grotto, he says. We recommence. It is his favourite game. My nipples are electrical switches. He grazes me and the light sparks. Then, grabbing the fat of the chest, he forms a breast, small round admittedly, which he kneads in his palms to make bead with a simulacra of milk. To see him looking at me with his mouth full of that flesh makes my dick even harder and, by a neat reversal of the hybridity which lives within me, pushes me all the while to open up. He is shrewd in his use of the blazon. The more I feel like a woman, the harder I get.

Come to think of it, Ribera’s bearded lady is no more astonishing than the young woman who, according to the Qur’an, was impregnated by an angel who announced:

I am but a Messenger from your Lord, 

[come] to announce to you the gift of a pure son. (Note 2)

This is the text under whose protection we had put ourselves: the story of Mary, intermediary of God’s mercy and the most reliable advocate of the afflicted. The wonders she has begotten or accomplished are innumerable. The angel spoke in her breast, and it was filled with milk. A secondary connection, milk has caused a number of theories to swell; and that which certain prophets drank has produced an array of miracles. Tales of the Virgin’s milk, it seems, come from a Christianity under the influence of the Orient. Among the relics of great figures, the milk that nourished the infant Jesus gained a special place in the sacred care of the Middle Ages. It filled a number of jars and was the object of comical simony. It passed through the hands of Muslims, who believed it to have thaumaturgical powers, and found its way into medieval Western pharmacopoeia. And just as tiger bones, deer antlers, pangolin scales and rhinoceros horns were ground into powder, just as people drank slug juice, syrups of metal and stone, and just as they bathed in kelp on Midsummer’s Eve, so too could wounds and aberrations be smeared with that ointment. Such was the case of the anonymous monk, mentioned in a collection of miraculous events, who was restored to his senses in being anointed; or the man whose cheek was being eaten away by a terrifying, putrid canker, and was cured by a sprinkling. The following were also likely to submit to the power of this atomic remedy: leprosy, plague, cholera and, above all, quinsy, a kind of violent infection of the throat which makes the tongue stick out like a panting dog’s – rabid or rutting, the chronicles don’t specify. Not to mention the holy preacher Bernard de Clairvaux, hostile, yet, to the Immaculate Conception, before whom the Virgin, coming to life, made three drops spring from her breast, which the pious man then brought to his lips, perhaps to efface his great timidity. And what words, what shouts, what whispers, what plaint, what profound silence this gesture subsequently drew from his sanctified mouth! It was worthy of a crusade, and a massacre of souls sent to heaven or hell before their time. Whatever the method used, the miracles produced by the Virgin’s milk are countless, whether she squirted it on the faces of the sick or insane, or offered them her teat to suckle. It is still preserved in precious reliquaries, silver vessels, gold and crystal doves, hewn birds with amethyst breasts; and sometimes its miracles continue, as at the Church of San Luigi Gonzaga in Naples, where, so the tourist pedlars say, the milk liquifies on the feast of Our Lady. Such reliquaries were, however, suspect even to clerics, as with such an abundance of milk one might wonder, along with Calvin, whether the Virgin, rather than the mother of God, was not a herd of cows – sacred cows, though that may be. The powder, we would soon discover, was crushed chalk, though it did sometimes come from the Bethlehem grotto. There, a creamy-coloured rock is believed to encourage lactation (Christian, Jewish and Muslim women are said to travel there on pilgrimage still). They say that a few drops of that holy liquid, or even just one, falling on the rock, softens it – milk, vitriol or anti-matter? It is also said that if a man were imprudent enough to drink a little of that nostrum, he would immediately develop swollen tits. This raises a serious question: did Jesus change sex because of his mother? Did he, too, become a bearded girl? And could that not have been the Annunciation? What theological upheavals this hypothesis would provoke!

***

Phone call. It’s him. A whirlwind tears through. Gone is the sweetness of those untroubled dreams I harbour when I think about him. Zak is on his way, and already everything has turned upside down, already everything is pitching and slamming. Because as soon as he arrives I want him to assail me. Even on the days when we’re in less of a hurry, a silent restlessness resides in me throughout his visits, even once we’ve dried off. The disorder endures, suspending us. Desire is a rift. His presence opens me up from scalp to ass, as though I were a pot of honey into which he can plunge his fingers at will, licking them clean before demanding a spoon so he can tuck in more greedily. I have no right to rest, nor to that withdrawal of the body as, passion subsiding, it shuts down. Besides, he is careful to leave me tumescent, and I remain at his disposal. Deferred pleasure. And then, the next day or a few hours later, he leaves; order is restored and I’m alone with the mental picture show replaying those hours. A few spunks to relax. I can finally get on with my work. And better appreciate the humility of words, sentences, and all and every desire to write. And if that rift, from scalp to ass, has closed, its scar remains, as sensitive as a fontanelle. It is along there again, in a week or two months, that he’ll run his fingers to split me open.

Thanks to Zak’s precise dexterity, I am gradually discovering myself, like those countries whose porous landscapes are furrowed, gnawed, and buffed by the elements, but softened by low-lying and luxuriant vegetation. Through him, I have become one of those high plateaus whose hollows open into caverns lined with sculptures fashioned by time and the dripping of water, into petrified subterranean forests, into reservoirs where, we might suspect, are gathered the many who have disappeared, primitive vermin of alien properties and forms, albino frogs, or blind fish. From my body, he has made another, reversible. A long-ignored chasm, into which he lowers me hanging from the rope that is him, suspended above the jewel of pleasure, where

perhaps I came

to find myself and know myself again. (Note 3)

What an interpreter he is! Virtuoso. Even if, as he once said, he has never dared do with anyone else what he does with me. Nonetheless, in his instinctive knowledge of my expectations, this master watchmaker has a stubborn delicacy. No uncertainty hinders his gestures. He runs according to his own mechanisms, adjusting my body to greater complicity with his, making each give up unto the other what neither had imagined they could achieve alone. Glued to him, I no longer feel anything but this wordlessness-imagelessness; I become an instrument, his instrument; I chime on the hour; I follow the Way; I belong to time immemorial, and, in delicious torment, am delivered to Zhuangzi’s dexterous butcher.

The boy is hardly talkative. And while making love, he maintains this restraint. I have on occasion asked him to teach me his favourite dirty words in Arabic or Berber, but I’ve had to give up on expanding my arsenal. He categorically refuses to sully his mouth. And though I might happen to utter one or two that make him blush, which other friends have taught me, I’ve never managed to get out of him those same spices which his voice would transform into a subtle aphrodisiac. He was capable of letting a few conventional French obscenities fly, which did not vary throughout our relationship, but never the hoarse sounds, exhaled in his language, that would have made me give myself to him more vigorously still, and unconditionally. It was clear that for Zak transgression was only less inhibited in French.

In this little notebook of verbal bric-a-brac, where, since adolescence, I’ve noted terms which I don’t know or whose meaning I’ve forgotten, or which, on some occasion, I found incongruous, I no longer read a list of words but a meaningless text, as though I were reeling off a litany in an almost foreign tongue. Zak was here yesterday. Done nothing since. I need that time to recover. I leaf through the notebook, incapable of anything else. I read or rather caress the words to find a snag that will draw me from indolence – and get me hard by some other means. Later, tomorrow, when I want to enjoy that moment again, I will set to writing the hours I spent with him, in which I discovered yet more of myself – that evanescent intimate thing which connects me to an innocent recess. And waiting, I knock together, at random, my little lithophone. So many suivez-moi-jeune-homme. Out loud, they distort. Strange relics of fragmented, forgotten texts which suddenly all, contaminating, imply something obscene.

So I begin.

I write what silences language and then makes it sprout.

I could also, more boringly, list only the spicy words, the kind which you hold in one hand. I’ve cum like a clever frog over many of them; their faces becoming blurred, they seem to weep and then begin to exhale that sui generis fragrance, which, so physiologists say, or according to the poet, smells like almond blossom (or chestnut flower, according to another). Just so the pure sap of a spent cremaster perfumes. Don’t think I’m unaware that anatomists have attributed distinct flavours to these somewhat discredited alembics, which nevertheless insure our pleasure and the perpetuation of the species. Onto the random words whose faces I splash, in their shining eyes when it rises and they wait to be lovingly anointed, here spurt the drops which make a spring: a lubricating and antiseptic liquid, John the Baptist of new life or, possibly, of demons. It was Mr Littré (unfortunately for my presentation not the famous linguist but an older colleague – no matter, let’s play on without worrying about precision) who gave his name to the urethral glands which produce the portentous liquid, unworthy surely of cleaning the dust from the sandals of the powerful, but which at least facilitates ejaculation. And this sap can be savoured as a foretaste of the fire that promises fabulous concentrates. We know – and Socrates was made to recall by the foreigner from Mantinea, Diotima of the Symposium – of the links between poetry and the erotic, and I am conscious that every time I receive the spray of my lover’s love, I write much better. Even if, as I apply myself to supping his sex with my fornicating lips, I forestall untimely and premature gushes with a Don’t-come-in-my-mouth-please. Some have had this privilege; Zak does not. A sign of the limits of our entente.

Do we ever know why we start a book? Why we go out on the pull? Why we choose this one, who has an air of the night, or that, who shines like the moon? Maybe it’s to better see the sunrise. For a long time, I’ve been talking about my pornographic book. I accumulated notes and quotations. Reread poems and erotic anthologies. I spoke about porn so as not to have to explain what I wanted to write, to hide what I was going to write from myself. Why? It’s a question that arises with every book, with every sentence even. And it’s by breaking through without having to respond that we can sometimes invent what has otherwise eluded us. The question is a sphinx on the road, it tracks us, devouring us if we can’t find an answer entirely our own. I have no interest in playing exegete of my intent. Nonetheless, an image returns. A detail from a long tempera panel. On the garden side, Saint Benedict holds a large, red book. It is closed, and, on it, he is touching a wound. The man is observing the Annunciation; on the opposite side a nun is on her knees praying. If we read this piece as a metaphor, which it no doubt refuses to be, the slit which the saint’s finger brushes becomes the gash of a vulva – lips from between which ink could be drawn. But who writes like that any more? Or rather than ink blood, saliva or another liquid. And the saint says: I put my finger in you, two, more, I form the passage and renounce doubt, as the seed comes from the invisible. And pleasure brings us back to life. Lippo di Andrea, 1420. Lippo, let’s play with out fingers and mouths. It is a certainty that artists from other times amused themselves with the forbidden signs they had hidden in their works. And anyway don’t they say that a pornographer is no more than the gawking eye?

Zak the artist loves to spread the slit-hole into which he’ll slide – and look at it at length. For myself, I don’t see the beauty in it. It is him who reveals it to me. 

Writing is a sign of inadequacy. It is also, perhaps, so the saint remarked, a way

not [to] devote ourselves entirely to the work … (Note 4)

Writing. Fucking. It seems to me that here an analogous movement is enacted that thirsts for truth, seeks it, and suspects it can be no more than a limit. Depending on the season, we can go horse-riding or camping on the steppe (and that’s a little what a repetitive transcript of the sexual education I received from the boy might look like), but you have to know there is a place, even a faltering place, where you can hold on even in the face of its faltering. Mortal sickness of desire that delights us. Then the shaman who performs miracles intervenes. And it is not impossible that Zak has been, for me, that ambiguous being, that sorcerer who works away at you and uncovers the vertigo of honest gestures. Every telephone call, every message from him turned me on. I got hard at the sound of his voice in a frank, immediate and magnetic way. Perhaps because his visits are ever more infrequent, our relationship has never got old. And I know that as soon as we see each other again, we’ll get hard together, forever young. Writing to celebrate that innocence, to celebrate that youth. 

1  Ah! Right the man who says that he 
Is blest who fills you generously 
With milk, to turn you, ma petite, 
From virgin’s Breast to Breast complete.

(Tr. Norman R. Shapiro, Lyrics of the French Renaissance, Yale University Press, 2002)

2  Tr. M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur’an, OUP, 2004. 

3  Berenice, Act V, Sc. 6, Racine, tr. A. S. Kline, 2018.

4 Translation from the archives of Carmel de Liseux: https://archives.carmeldelisieux.fr/en/archive/cj-juillet-1897/#le-14-juillet

***

Patrick Autréaux is a French writer, living between Paris and Cambridge (USA). The view of illness as an inner experience informs his first cycle of writing, ending with Se survivre (Verdier). He is the author of dozens of books and articles in French. His new novel, L’Epoux has just been published by Gallimard.

Dans la vallée des larmes is available in English at UIT Books (USA) and his essay “A School of Life” appeared in Socrates on the Beach (Issue 9).

Recently, Pussyboy (Verdier), a novel about an erotic passion, was translated into Spanish at Canta Mares (Mexico).

Tobias Ryan is a translator from Wales, UK, based in Paris, France. His writing and translations have appeared in Firmament Magazine, Berfrois, Hyperion Magazine and elsewhere. He is co-Editor-in-Chief of minor literature[s]. Twitter: @tobiasvryan