The Necrophiliac by Gabrielle Wittkop Read Free Book Online

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.
July 16, 19...
    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.
August 5, 19...
    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