La Peau blanche
Joël Champetier
(Excerpt from chapter 1, p. 10-14)
Describing a fuck fest is not easy. If the act is often chastely veiled, it's for aesthetic as well as prudish reasons. I would go that way too if the following events didn't compel me to give a more detailed account. We finished undressing, Manon the fake blond and I. After slipping on my ten dollar condom, I collaborated with my partner in some variations on the theme of mutual penetration, then I went back to my initial position, on my back, with the girl straddling me, panting and working herself into a lather. It was fortunate for me that she was such a professional as several irritants were keeping me from enjoying the experience with the required abandon. The mattress was too soft. It was too hot. The girl's hair kept falling in my eyes. Even worse, a dull roar seemed to be coming from the door, from the closed window, from the very walls, like a white noise, a mix of music, muffled laughter, floors creaking, horns, shouts in the distance with, throughout, the groan of the air conditioner, on its last legs. Even though I closed my eyes, stroke the girl's thighs and tried to lose myself in the rhythm of her pelvis against mine, part of my mind couldn't leave the noisy cocoon in the midst of which we were writhing. Suddenly uneasy, I thought I was ridiculous and I had the humiliating feeling my erection was on the verge of going limp.
Much later, I assumed that this sudden anguish was caused by the first shrieks I had subconsciously heard. Or maybe there had been no shouts yet, perhaps I had only perceived some dull shock somewhere in the building. A raised voice. The scraping of a suddenly moved piece of furniture. Or the insubstantial fluctuation in the noise that emanated from the walls, those bare white walls on which you could notice traces of paint applied carelessly with a roller. Even when the first cries became audible, I didn't identify them at once, interrupted as they were by our panting and the soft sighs of the mattress
But finally, despite the general noise, I understood that the hoarse sound was not a rumbling coming from the building's innards, but a cry coming from a human throat... I caught Manon by the arms.
"Stop, stop!"
She obeyed, laughing. She thought I was coming.
"No. Shut up. Don't you hear?"
"What?"
"Shut up!"
I would have pushed her off, but that would have made noise. I kept her close instead, even though her sweating body had suddenly become completely odious to me. She didn't move, in baffled silence. I stayed like that for long seconds, covered in icy sweat, heart beating violently.
This time the call was horribly clear. It was Henri. Who was screaming my name.
Good God! I pushed the girl away and jumped out of the bed. With shaking hands I put on my trousers, no underwear, my shoes, no socks, and I fought with the unwilling sleeve of my shirt. Ten times at least I verified that my wallet was in my back pocket. Manon the fake blond, standing at the foot of the bed, was watching me as I was dressing, gnawing on a nail. Under her bleached forelock, her eyes were wide with fear. Hesitantly, she held out a hand and feebly squeezed my shoulder.
"Don't go. Stay here."
"What the hell is that?"
"Don't go. None of our business."
A short, far-off sound: the sharp noise of shattering glass. A girl's shriek, short too. I burst out of the room just as Henri bellowed again. Shit! I ran along the corridor, hand on the wallpaper as though I needed something tangible to assure me I wasn't dreaming. I turned left, almost ran down a big guy also alarmed by the shouts. He asked me a question in a testy voice, with such a heavy accent that I didn't understand. I had no time for him. I thought I recognized the door Henri and his girl had gone through... without being sure, since all the doors looked the same. I put a hand on the doorknob. Locked. On the other side, Henri cried out again, half sob half desperate groan. I pushed on the door. Either the wood was rotten or I did not know my own strength, because I broke the door frame with ridiculous ease.
Despite everything that happened afterwards, despite what I know to be the truth - the truth! - the first picture indelibly seared into my memory is this: in a room as banal as the one in which I was fucking a moment ago, under the soft light of two cheap ceiling lights, a bed had been pushed against a vanity with such force that the mirror had shattered. In the middle of the carpet, between make-up jars and scattered shards of broken glass, the young redhead whore was pinned on her back, her face bloody, her lean naked body almost hidden under Henri's who was also naked and bearing down on her with all his weight. Suffocating and grimacing with pain, she was trying to open the hand that was strangling her, Henri's hand, pitiless, massive, disproportionate against her delicate neck. The girl's other hand, sticky with blood, was trying to push away Henri's other fist, which held a knife.
Henri turned his eyes to me, two dark wells of hate and murderous madness. I was too thunderstruck to react and even to imagine any possible reaction.
The big guy behind me also entered the room. He shoved me aside, saw, and stepped back, swearing. And there, meaning and perspective suddenly changed under my very eyes and left me even more stunned than I already was. In the couple grotesquely locked in combat before me, Henri was not the attacker. He was defending himself!
© 1997 Éditions Alire & Joël Champetier
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