Читать книгу Salt on my Skin - Benoite Groult - Страница 11

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First of all, what am I going to call him so his wife never knows? A Breton name, anyway, for that’s what he had. But I’d like him to have the name of a bard, one of those absurdly brave Irish heroes who lost most of their battles but never their souls.

Or a Viking name perhaps? No, the Vikings were fair-haired. Celtic rather since he so belonged to that race of sturdy dark men with light eyes and a touch of red in their beards, that people of no precise place, whose history is disputed, whose very existence is more a matter of poetry than fact.

I want it harsh and rugged to go with that solid build of his, the dark brown hair which curled low on his forehead and down his powerful neck, those vivid blue eyes which flashed like two rays of sea light beneath his bushy eyebrows, his high cheekbones and the copper-coloured beard he grew when he was at sea.

I try one name then another, turning him round before the mirror of my mind… This one doesn’t convey his angry, obdurate look when crossed, that one doesn’t match that weighty walk of his.

‘Kevin’? Well, maybe, if I could be sure it would be pronounced in the English way and not ‘Quevain’. ‘Yves’? No, that sounds like an Icelandic fisherman, and I’ve come across too many ‘Jean-Yves’ on holiday in Brittany, all of them skinny and freckled. ‘Loïc’? Possibly. But I’d like something more unique, a name for a cormorant.

How about ‘Tugdual’? ‘Gawain’ – one of the knights of the Round Table? Or ‘Brian Boru’, the Charlemagne of Ireland? But in French you pronounce it so that it means ‘brilliant Boru’, and the light English r, that back and forward movement of the tongue mid-palate, becomes a graceless French gargle.

And yet, to suit him truly the name must have a chivalric ring. And who more chivalrous than Gawain, son of Lot, King of Norway, and of Arthur’s sister, Anne; Gawain who died in single combat with the traitor Mordred? The Arthurian stories tell us he was prudent, wise, courteous, magnanimous, of matchless prowess and unfailing loyalty to his liege lord. Not a poet, it’s true, but a man eager for adventures and heroic deeds, who fulfilled his duty whatever the cost. This is the Gawain of the Breton cycle, and this is how he is, the man in my story.

In real life I thought his name silly, and, from the moment we knew each other, I made up nicknames for him. Now that all I can do is commit him to paper I dedicate this final name to him, a name beautiful to write and beautiful to read, even in the modern version: ‘Gauvin’.

But not without a certain apprehension do I join that band of writers who try to capture those pleasures called carnal which can get such a grip on the heart. Like many who have tried and many more, no doubt, who have given up in despair, I shall find that words don’t help one express the ecstasy of love, that transport so intense that ordinary frontiers dissolve and we discover bodies we never suspected we possessed. I know I shall make myself ridiculous. I know my unique emotions will be mired in the banal and that every word, every forlorn, drab, coarse, grotesque, even frankly repellent word is waiting to betray me.

And how to write from the heart about the surgings and subsidings, dissolutions, resolutions, and resurrections of desire? What sort of emotion is evoked by the word ‘coition’? Co-ire, the Latin for ‘go together’. But when two bodies go together, what becomes of the pleasure?

Then there’s ‘penetration’. We’re in the law courts here: ‘Did penetration actually take place, Miss Smith?’ ‘Fornication’ has a whiff of surplices and sin. ‘Copulation’ is ponderous, ‘coupling’ animal, ‘sleeping with’ boring and inaccurate, and ‘fucking’ altogether too brisk. Well then, there’s ‘swiving’, ‘tupping’, ‘hauchmagandy’, ‘quenching the fire’. These, alas, are the forgotten coinings of a youthful language, before it was bridled by sobriety. In these days of verbal inflation, when words fall out of fashion as fast as our clothes, we have only grubby obscenities rendered meaningless by constant repetition. The worthy ‘making love’ is always at hand, ready to serve but devoid of emotional thrill, neither scandalous nor erotic. Not fit for literature, then.

As for the organs which produce this pleasure, every writer, male or – perhaps more so – female encounters a whole new set of pitfalls: ‘Jack’s rod was rigid, swollen to bursting Mellors’ phallus raised itself, superb, awe-inspiring…’ The assistant-director’s balls, your adorable scrotum, his penis, your pubis, my vagina dentata, your clitoris, Beatrice. How to avoid becoming comic? The very science of anatomy loses its neutrality when sex comes into the picture. Words, recalcitrant bastards, insist on independent existence or impose received images on the transparency one seeks, coming as they do from slang or Latin, slime or the sublime. Where they exist at all, that is. For as far as the female orgasm is concerned, even the best writers display an appallingly meagre vocabulary.

One just has to forget everything and start afresh – forget press pornography, hard or soft, mucous membrane journalism with its relentless accounts of sexual acrobatics churned out by cynical hacks on subsistence wages. Forget more especially fashionable post-modern erotica which cloaks its nastiness in high-flown jargon.

All the same, there’s no way I can tell my story without describing the sin of firkytoodling, as sexual play was known in the sixteenth century. It was by abandoning themselves to firkytoodling that my hero and heroine became enslaved to each other. It was in quest of firkytoodling that they pursued each other to the ends of the world. It was because of firkytoodling that they were never able to part, though in every other aspect of their lives they were as apart as they could be. It would be nice to say that this love came from the marriage of true minds, or a childhood bond, an extraordinary gift or a heart-rending disability of our hero or heroine. But facts had better be faced and the bare fact is, these two weren’t meant to know each other, were even meant to despise each other, and it was only the speechless language of love which made them able to communicate. It was the magic of his thing in her whatsit – and perhaps a touch of the destiny one always likes to invoke in these matters, or mysterious forces or the play of hormones or whatever – which bound them so inextricably that they overcame all obstacles to their love.

What I’ve got to do is make the commonest act of all seem dazzling. Why write at all if you can’t dazzle? So how can I describe that hope of heaven which gleams between the legs of men and women, making a miracle of an act which takes place everywhere and has done since forever, between sexes – opposite or the same – pathetically or gloriously? I’m not endowed with any special knowledge or with words which haven’t been used or abused a thousand times before. This is no voyage to an undiscovered country: love has no terra incognita. In the end, there’s nothing more commonplace than a cunt unless it’s two cunts. When it comes to it, a phallus of the finest quality ejaculates just like any common or garden cock. Prudence would dictate giving up now. Between the pitfalls of pornography on the one hand and insipidity on the other, very few writers have scoffed at the dangers and achieved literary masterpieces that shine with an insolent brightness. But it’s only after the event, once one’s failed, that prudence seems such a desirable quality. Isn’t all literature imprudent anyway?

But, in spite of all this, what a beautiful risk it was to write the opening lines of this impossible story: ‘I was eighteen when Gauvin entered my heart for life, or what I took to be my heart, though at the time it was still only my skin…’