Dolorosa Soror by Florence Dugas Read Free Book Online Page B

each time, until I become almost a perfect hollow, a champagne glass, an exquisite piece of porcelain, nearly immaterial. What you call my masochism, because there is no other word for it, ends up engulfing me, relieves me of the condition of being."
    We have drunk a great deal. Her voice, marked by that drowsy drunkenness that precedes sleep, is of a frightening whiteness.
    "J. P. whips you—he tells me so," she continues. "And you also beat me. But they aren't the same. You look for yourself in the pain, but I like it for what it takes away from me: my skin, desires, dreams. To no longer be only flesh, because flesh is nothing. Pain puts me somewhere else. Everything becomes blurred. Sometimes there is even a moment—maybe you have noticed this—when the pain itself fades away. I become plea- sure, pure pleasure—in other words, nothing."
    "What about us?" I ask after a short silence.
    "You mean because I say I love you? With you, I give you all of myself, my body, my cries, my tears, because I don't care about them. I give you everything I don't want. That's the para- dox, you see: at the end of the Way of the Body, the body is no longer there. Only the egotistical sensation of emptiness remains. It's not for you that I let your fingers bury themselves in me, not for you that I touch you. I could just as well touch a statue. That would be less involving, that's all. Less varied. Marble can be learned—slowly, but nonetheless learned. A body is a composite of metamorphoses, and with each gesture, at every instant, you have to be attentive to the modifications of the body of the other, to its undulations, its flights..."
    "So, not with me more than J. P.?"
"You a little less than he. J. P. is profoundly egotistical; he lives in a state of self-absorption you're still far from. He is already nearly completely empty. Maybe he has always been: it's a gift."
    "Okay. And what will you do when you are finally a master in your Way?"
    "I will kill myself," she says. "Death will be just a completion. The perfection of my annihilation. Nothing new: an organ note."
    She brings the bottle of champagne to the foot of the bed and, her mouth open, empties the last drops onto her tongue. I lean over and manage to steal several of these last tears from her mouth. She lets herself be kissed with compliance, but without passion. Am I really nothing more than one of the many tongues that have come to gather honey from hers?
    "There's no more champagne," she murmurs.
    She throws the bottle against the wall with a violence I never would have suspected. The glass explodes, then falls to the floor.
    I look at her. She is completely drunk, lying down, her eyes closed.
    Lose her? No. I don't want to lose her. I don't want to.
    She turns on her other side. The mass of her long curly hair consumes her face. I look at her for a long time, in the void.
    I shiver. I take a bedspread and cover her up again. I get up, telephone J. P. "Yes," he says. I take a shower, dress, and go out. 2
    Horizontal delirium. Drunk with blows.
    "Keep it," he says, giving me the whip. It is a long bullwhip1, very fine, made of black lambskin. At the end, a short nylon tip that ends in a knot. "Go home," he says. "I have work to do."
    Notes
    1.Their relations were so completely dual that as soon as we three got together, which happened rarely, the silent protocol stipulated that Florence alone had the right to beat Nathalie, and that I would never whip Florence in front of her. However, as soon as I was alone with one or the other of them, I was exclusively the master of the game. I treated them like twin sisters in masochism, without seeing very well what was specific to either one of them.
    2.I know that in writing these lines Florence re-experiences her former sensations, as when she takes the same streets, or rides the elevator up to my place, knowing that in the moments to come she will be a pure wellspring of cries, and that she will leave with her buttocks on