The Fata Morgana Books by Jonathan Littell, Charlotte Mandell Read Free Book Online

their own skin, it was just the texture of their lives, a pleasant and caressing thing perhaps, but one they could do without: at the very most, sometimes, pleasure might seize them by the throat as they slowly removed these garments in front of a man’s avid desire. As for me, they transformed me completely, they made me a free oscillation, around which my desires floated freely, coming to bear on everything and nothing, settling only to take off and settle on their opposite, before coming back or going elsewhere, and I no longer knew if I was man or woman, unless someone told me. This made me astonishingly mobile and I loved that. But it was also possible that this was all a dream, like that other dream in which I was trying to decipher notes I had made when I awoke from yet a third dream, a long wonderful story, just like this one. I could see the words, a few doodles hastily sketched out, I was trying to reconstruct this lost dream, which fled from me imperceptibly but steadily, like sand trickling from one cone of the hourglass to the other; it escaped me just as this story is escaping me. To tell the truth, I never really knew if I was asleep or awake, this too someone had to come and tell me. But reality was never lacking in people ready to determine it, however arbitrarily, like that friend, the one on the stairs who should have been dead, but who was shaking my shoulder, laughing: “Hey there, are you sleeping?” He sat down opposite me and ordered, drank, ordered another. “I have something for you,” he said, “I know you, you’re going to like it.” He took out a disk from his pocket and put it on the round table. “What is it?”—“You’ll see, you’ll see.” Already he was getting up and walking off without paying; that made me glad, I was happy for him for his trust, his freedom, his lightness. The disk, silvery in a thin, transparent square case, remained on the table, I forgot it when I left; I’d only taken a few steps before the waitress caught me by the sleeve to give it back to me. She had a beautiful smile, brown, silky skin: she too wore her body with ease, as if it weren’t a miracle.
* * *
I climbed back up into my tall square tower, suspended high above the city. Down below, behind the last buildings, grey, metallic, the sea stood like a long wall beneath the pale summer sky; when a big ship passed by, it looked almost as if it were flying slowly beyond the city. Many cranes, blue or green, crisscrossed the sky with their stalks; to the right, the round mass of a small mountain rose to hide the line of the sea. I turned my computer on and inserted the disk my friend had left me. It was a short pornographic movie, made not by professionals but evidently by the people in it, two men and a woman, along with a fourth, the one holding the camera, who was never shown. Of the two men, the first was still young, with a massive body and closely cropped hair; the other was already settling into a hairy layer of fat, and wore long, rather outdated sideburns joined to his moustache. The woman wore black stockings and a red mask, and her coarse body showed signs of age; when she lowered her head, her chin formed thick folds with her neck; but she had magnificent hair, black and heavy, tied back at the neck by a rubber band. The two men were caressing her body; then the younger one began to fuck her, while the other dragged his cock over her lips. She was groaning softly, full of her pleasure but also attentive to the scene. The relationships between the characters intrigued me: there must have been a husband involved, or at least a lover, that seemed to me unavoidable, for this was obviously no callgirl paid for the pleasure of the two men, on the contrary, it was the men who had been placed at the service of this woman’s pleasure, yet something in their attitudes, especially in hers, passive in her pleasure, suggested that she had not organized the scene herself, but that it had been organized