The Necrophiliac by Gabrielle Wittkop Read Free Book Online Page B

case, I distanced myself as quickly as I could.
    In my apartment in Posillipo, I felt suddenly invaded with bitterness and sadness. I wanted to live and I wanted to die, but I couldn’t live nor die. Is that the Garden of Gethsemane?
September 12, 19...
    I don’t know why, but this morning while fixing my tie, I briefly recalled a very old image of my neighbour from adolescence, that Gabrielle who pleased me so much when she appeared to me hanged, the eyes sunken back in her head in a last ecstasy.
October 16, 19...
    I am tempted to believe that Hecate has cast a benevolent regard over me. Death is kind to me, the tireless purveyor of my pleasures — and if they are sometimes incomplete, it’s only due to my own debility.
    A long time ago, I might have thought of the happiness that the simultaneous presence of two bodies would bring me, and I might have imagined in my mind’s eye a sort of tableau vivant (or more like a still life). Something, in any case, that I never really counted on, a forgotten dream, returned to the night where dreams dissolve.
    I was very stupid to not believe in miracles.
    Tonight, I want to record every detail of the adventure so that I can remember them all, for everything is happening so quickly and in such an unexpected way that I feel like my memory is threatened. It’s true that I always feel, in some way, as if a part of myself, if not my whole being, is under some obscure threat. Or under the threat of a threat.
    I went to Sorrento and, on the way back, I stopped for a glass of wine at Vico Equense, in a hotel where they know me. Built into the edge of a cliff, the hotel dominates a little cove closed off by rocks, which is accessed by an elevator, the interior of which is always dripping. As it was the middle of the week, with the season already over even if the sea was still warm, the hotel and its beach were empty. A deserted feeling weighed on the terraces, the bar, the dining room. It was like a veil, a detention, a constraint. In the hall, I bumped into the patron and remarked that he really looked out of it. The staff whispered to each other. When Giovanni, the one who serves me the most often, brought my wine, I asked him why everyone seemed so troubled. He looked around carefully to the left and right before confiding in me in a half-whisper:
    â€œIt’s because of the two Swedes, the brother and sister, two young clients who were fished out of the water this morning. Those two who swam like fish! One of them must have had some trouble and the other wanted to help. Yep . . . drowned, it really gets you . . . as if they did it on purpose to not die alone. . . . But what a blow for the hotel!”
    He also taught me that the two swimmers had been fished out right after the accident, though there had been no success in reviving them, and that the first steps had been taken in Naples to have the Swedish Consulate warn the parents — they were surely going to arrive by plane, concluded Giovanni — and that the two drowned bodies might even be transported to their own country to be buried. Until then, the bodies had been left in the little grotto on the beach since no one came there in the off-season and the beach huts had already been taken down. It seemed that all my blood went straight to my heart. I put a mask of indifference over my face and pretended to interest myself with other things. Is it possible? I repeated to myself. How? I had to come up with a seamless plan. In less than an hour, it was developed. I left the hotel and took the drivable road that leads to the Faito summit to wait for night. I couldn’t truly hide from myself that the mission was full of danger. My entire project could degenerate into a horrible catastrophe at an unexpected interruption: the sudden barking of a dog, an encounter with octopus fishers who sought their booty almost every night with enormous lamps. . . . But I was determined. It was simply a question of