THE CLASSMATE
VANESSA DURI�S
Chapter Two 21
Chapter Three 27
Chapter Four 33
Chapter Five 39
by Maxim Jakubowski 43
Translator�s Note 54
by Franck Spengler
Ihave for a long time hesitated before deciding to re-read the pages that Vanessa Duri�s entrusted to me. I was afraid of reliving an immense sadness. Vanessa and I had quickly established an almost filial rapport, quite different from the classic editor-author relationship, and far from the desire that she inspired or which she enjoyed inspiring. It is true that her young femme-fatale allure incited strong feelings that left few of those who came into contact with her indifferent. As it was, Pierre, my father-in-law, a great bibliophile, was the first one to receive a signed freshly-printed book from her. His embarrassment, mixed with a certain childish pride, amused us. I did not belong to the S & M seraglio with its decorum and its rituals; thus, she perceived me as a sort of non-judgmental father-figure who was concerned only with the text, and nothing but the text of her book.
I spoke to her as I would with my own daughter, Vanda, who at the time was thirteen when Vanessa was twenty. Vanessa used to call me regularly to tell me about her life, the people she ran into, difficulties with her parents, her doubts about the S&M milieu that had already become familiar to her and which she distrusted. Vanessa offered her body, but detested the venal aspect, whether moral or financial, while maintaining an amazing objectivity about the customs that she practiced.
Today, thirteen years after that terrible accident in which Vanessa perished (along with Nathalie Perreau, another of my writers, and my friend Jean-Pierre Imbrohoris) this unfinished text, of which she had sent me a first draft while she worked on the next, would take on a completely different dimension. Behind this story that I had given Florence Dugas to read, one perceived the unspoken changes in Vanessa�s behavior as I saw it.
To publish this novel that took a life is to render homage to one who was interrupted by fate. Had the text been finished, we would have had a great erotic text that could have been called, �Transformation of a Submissive�
because I strongly believe that it would have marked, for Vanessa, the abandonment of her bonds.
by Florence Dugas
When Frank Spengler confessed to me, �one evening, half-misty, in London� that he kept in his files the first five chapters of a novel once drafted by Vanessa Duri�s, the legendary author of
So now I am in possession of what should have been a major work of erotic literature, if the brutal collision of a shiny Mercedes and an expressway railing hadn�t ended the life of one whose �Master�, J-L
had named, �Laika,��her submissive name, her pet name. I read these forty pages all at once�five chapters, five ill-fated chapters that had escaped the crash. And then I re-read them, slowly, letting my spirit and my hand escape towards dreams. . .
Vanessa had with her, in the Mercedes in which she was killed, the entire manuscript�as did Camus, who had in his briefcase the nearly-finished manuscript of The Last Man, which would be published thirty years later after the automobile driven by his publisher struck a tree.
Vanessa�s text disappeared in the aftermath of the accident, not burnt, because Fate was compassionate enough to save the heroine�s features and body�intact, beautiful, unchanged, as in my memory, like in the cover of her short book without an end�infinite. Instead the car was ripped open, its passengers ejected, and the shirt-carton that held the pages opened under the impact. The wind blew hard on the A7 near Mont�limar and the pages were scattered amongst the olive trees and the vineyards of the Rhone Valley.
It amuses me to imagine the shaggy head of a laborer finding, hanging on one of the vines, a page covered with round, magnificently feminine handwriting, and deciphering, in a cautious early morning, episodes of lust and fornication.
Lust, I have written�now I should review the term. That story, in which the
title, written between parentheses, was only a working title�a symbol of that life, also between parentheses�is essentially a love story. Because the
�classmate� from Toulouse is certainly Vanessa, who had just begun English studies in Bordeaux, but it is also about what she found there.
Vanessa (her pen name) had at a very young age been initiated by he who she called her Master into the classic structures of S&M traditions.
In a sense, that is all she knew: the whip, the crop, the chains, the clamp and gags, the unknown men who would force her. . . All that she creates with virtuosity in the first chapter is in some sense a bridge between
Should I confess that the style-less style of
Having said that, I will draw an essential difference between
Circumstances would decide otherwise.
All of that is to say that it is necessary to completely disassociate Vanessa and her first work. The Ties was written under the influence.
The pages of her novel that have been rescued offer the fascinating spectacle of a butterfly leaving its chrysalis�excuse me for the clich� of that image, but I don�t see any other.
I would like to think that in some part of the Pink City or somewhere else, lives that young girl with whom Vanessa fell in love, a pure and almost innocent girl�a half-virgin who was one day loved by a young woman who had learned everything about love, except love itself. I would also like to think that in the automobile that traveled towards its fate, Vanessa would think of that child of desire, more than in her
�Master� whom she had had loved harshly and from whom at the moment of her death she was, mentally at least, already detached. A
�Master� that survives from this world, in narrating to whomever would listen that he �initiated� Vanessa to the suspect delights of sadomasochism, and who would venally circulate the photos and the videos of these experiences. A miserable wretch who never understood that he had within his hands a woman full of heart and of spirit, and who believed to have understood her because he had whipped her and lent her to the pathetic habitu�s of the French S& M world.
I regret only that, due to financial reasons, Franck did not agree to my request: reproduce the manuscript pages, the ones that Vanessa left. The ones that I read the first time�those forty-three pages of quadrille paper, written in the regular handwriting of little schoolgirls who have not yet graduated, a regular oval handwriting with little circles dotting the �i�.
It is a story of love and death...here she narrates only of love�and that is just as well. Death has come to put a full stop to Vanessa�s human trajectory� the arc of a circle that ejected her body from a car, while the pages of her love flew away on the winds.
How many of them were there? Because she is blindfolded, she really has no idea. Five men have already cum in her mouth. Two others, at least, in her ass. All of them in her cunt as best as she could determine, because she is nothing more than hot lava and bruises, and when they ejaculated inside her their fluids were confused with her own secretions.
Much later when she was released she realized that she carried on her thighs long mixed strings of sweat and cum.
V*** is bound to a block placed at the center of the basement. She rests on her stomach on an old piece of wood eroded by the strokes that over generations traced the stigmata of butchered animals. To the extent that she can judge, it is not the odor of her own scarred flesh. For two hours she has regularly been whipped or struck on her buttocks, thighs and back.
Sometimes the executioners would pause and take her in one way or another.
Her dear Master was absent, and no one held her hand. Why had he submitted her to this slaughter? Oh, for just a minor fault, she tells herself.
Did she really have to be so committed to be punished? as he had tried to convince her. He had made an appointment for her at an esthetician, to have her completely waxed. And at the last moment, she canceled because her buttocks and the interior of her thighs were still freshly marked with the whip. Of course, he had expressly arranged for the appointment with the express purpose of exhibiting to that anonymous woman who would look with her wax and tweezers between V***�s buttocks and her anus, V*** as his submissive, his dog, his object. And it was less due to shame than due to respect for others that she had wanted to wait a few days for the cuts to fade. �To the block,� her Master decided, �you�ll be tied to the block!� She knew what that meant, because he had imposed the punishment before, at the beginning of her training. But that night he had accompanied her and had held her hand while four men manipulated her at their whim.
That night was nothing like this night. She answered the door, nude under a trench coat. Her gestures and responses had been written in advance and all she had to do was recite the lesson she had learnt. �Good evening, I am V***, Master J-L�s dog, and I need to be seriously punished.� At the entrance she removed her raincoat and got on her knees, her hands behind her back.
Master Damien, at whose home she finds herself, has told her something along the lines of, �Very well, you�re a good little slave.� She does not remember the exact phrase, they always use the same words, the same codes. There is nothing more predictable than the rites of S&M. He leads her to the basement, a cave set up like a dungeon. He immediately binds her to the block, on her stomach, her legs spread, her arms and legs tied with cords to the legs of the block. Then he carefully covers her eyes. He left her there for a good while. She could hear, upstairs, laughter and the tinkling of glasses. How many of them are there? she asked herself.
Strangely, she felt unaffected. Unstimulated. She wondered if she hadn�t begun to change. During those first times, the simple sight of a whip was enough to make her abundantly wet. The thought of being taken by another man in front of her beloved Master excited her considerably. Then, little by little, the excitement diminished as the idea dawned on her, unconsciously at first, and later in a more and more obvious fashion, that she had been exploited, sexually and psychologically, by people who did not respect her.
By common people completely enslaved by the idea of fucking a girl who was so pretty, so willing; to make her suffer abuse and humiliations. The kind with potbellies who came to shake their fat against her pretty little ass, the ones who wanted everything their women refused them, the women who refused to participate in the parties.
After a while, she heard them come down the wooden stairs. �let�s whip her first� a man�s voice said. �No,� another protested, �I want to take her dry.� She felt two hands spread her buttocks wide in the Oriental fashion. A man took her in the ass with difficulty. She cried out�all of a sudden and guiltily for having done so. One of them would tell her Master, surely...The man thrusted for a minute or two, then another came and forced her mouth open. Though she sucked him with determination, she couldn�t help but notice that neither of the two men were well-endowed by nature�a seeming constant within the world of S&M. It was as if the �Masters� compensated for their indelible personal humiliation with the whip, their orders and restraints.
Afterward they whipped her, then came the lash. The men who followed in her rectum were oiled by previous ejaculations. It was only after the fifth or sixth penetration that one of them realized she had a vagina.
�How many of them are there?�she repeated to herself. You would think that Master Damien had convened all the dominators and debauch�es of Toulouse by proclamation and forced conscription. �Master J-L�s dog is at our disposition tonight.�
At a certain point, a voice said, �She�s made of paper mach�, you can�t even see the new marks...� so they put her on her back, spread out like a frog in a laboratory dissection. They made two or three inept comments about the two gold rings that pierced her.
For a while they mostly fucked her in front, while the others whipped her breasts and her stomach. �Let�s mark her on her shaved pussy,� one suggested. And one of them administered six blows of the lash on her Mons Venus and the labia majora, making her scream.
In the beginning, she had heard the clicks of cameras. She could also recognize the special friction of paper leaving a Polaroid. Then she noticed
a soft purring, and she realized that they were filming.
Then they put her back on her stomach, because they wanted her mouth.
The odor of old blood from the block filled her nostrils. She felt a wave of nausea, causing her to spit, without wanting to, the cum of one of the participants that sprayed down her throat. She would have to be severely chastised, of course.
�Nausea,� she thought to herself, under the rain of blows. �Nausea,� and she suddenly realized that she really was nauseous, not physically, but morally. Inside that sordid cave there was no passion, nor love, nor tenderness. �Have I experienced any part of love?� she asked herself.
It was like a revelation. No, her �Master� did not love her, and already in her head she had put the word in quotes.
She burst into tears.
Since, just then, the largest participant was annihilating her ass, one might think that she had started crying because of the barbarous intrusion into her ass�which she barely felt because the blows and the successive ejaculations had almost anesthetized her. Pain has a peak and beyond that she would come down. �Take it out of her mouth, she is going to choke,� a voice counselled. The queue that scraped her throat withdrew, and she began to weep, to cry to the point of losing consciousness. She would have loved a friendly voice to comfort her, to speak words of love, a hand to caress her hair. . .Instead all she heard were the same ritual and vulgar exclamations. One of the men who sodomized her said to another in attendance, �Take her from behind, I�ve really opened her up.�
From that moment on, she ceased to be really conscious of what they did to her. She wasn�t simply above the scene as it happened, enjoying the spectacle of the detached body that had the air of being her own. No, she was within her own internal torment, in that shame that overflowed, the
certainty that only her obedience was appreciated. She was only a hole, a garbage dump�a Kleenex for the garbage to vent their mechanical orgasms.
She was nothing but her own grief, the immense grief of being alone, abandoned, more alone than she had ever been: because she knew, suddenly, with a certain blinding knowledge that the sex was only a dead-end; that the loveless acts belonged more to instinct than to eroticism, and that he was already looking elsewhere. She had been groomed, for a year and a half, by and for sex. She had thought that she was nothing more than that�a dog that could only aspire to be be humiliated and beaten...And then a voice grew in her, the voice of stories for children and adventure stories for adolescents: �Love me...�
She is soiled by the rejection of her roots, her culture, her family. She thought, like Gide, �Family I hate you!�without realizing that what she screamed in silence was really �Family, I hate myself!� and that self-loathing defined everything.
It wasn�t simply that she was no longer a virgin�a cultural and ethnic taboo�but that she did everything that the most used-up and compliant whores did. She had become abhorrent in the eyes of her own father�and soon the idea that her father had suddenly opened the door and seen his daughter impaled at the end of a queue, nailed to a cross, marked with the whip from shoulders to heels, being lead to an orgasm...
...bound to a butcher block placed in the center of the basement. She is lying on her stomach on the old piece of eroded wood...She cries.
She realizes suddenly that she has passed the stage of adolescent rebellion She is beyond saving, even. But who could love her now? What man, upon seeing her whipped, gashes on her ass, her asshole open like a door, her breasts striated from the blows of the whip, would dare tell her, �I love you, I love you and I will love you...�
She burst into tears.
...bound to the butcher block. The men have left. Master Damien himself has disappeared.
Towards morning, she again heard heavy steps descend the staircase.
Then the voice of Damien: �Fuck her, she�s yours...� Two men entered her immediately: one in her cunt, the other in her mouth. As she didn�t suck, he held her by the temples and fucked her mouth like you would force an ass.
From the smell, she thought he was African. Their cries, that they couldn�t hold back, �ah the whore, she�s really good, this slut...� �Hey, can I fuck her ass, Boss?�convinced her that they were both black.
The man who was in her mouth ejaculated a thick, pasty cum. �God that was good, � he concluded, as he buttoned himself up, �I�ve still got to finish my route.� It was then that she realized that she had been handed over to the neighborhood�s trash collectors.
A tramontane wind overwhelmed the university campus. V*** was late and wanted to run towards Lecture Hall B where the first class in English literature would be held. But the wind was like a wall, and she could only advance by taking small steps, her head leaning forward against the gusts.
The lecture hall was full. There were no seats and many students were even sitting on the steps. V*** imitated them, taking out, as best she could, a thick pad and pen, and waited. The brouhaha was intolerable. She threw a glance to the right and to the left. She could only see rows of shoes. She raised her eyes. The girl sitting to her right must be very big, because she had not managed to tuck her long legs under the plank of the desk. She held them together at an angle, her knees at the height of V***�s face. She rapidly crossed and uncrossed her legs. V*** smiled. The girl had a very cool white skirt. She looked at her. She only saw a refined profile, very fine, a little like the head of a swan, a sublime neck, the line of her shoulders showed an extraordinary purity. �She can�t be real,� she thought, �she�s stepped out of a novel.�
The bustle in the back ceased suddenly and V*** turned her attention towards the stage. The professor had just come in�a man between two ages, as would befit a permanent student, a little grey around the temples, glasses like half-moons perched down on his nose, an aquiline profile, hollow cheeks, and as she must have noticed from hearing his first phrase, a curiously metallic voice, mocking and cocky.
�There�s a lot of you, he said.
He looked over them all with a certain authority that ended in dominating them, given that he was down below.
�There�s still time to change careers, he continued. Chinese, perhaps?
Or quantum physics?
There was some servile laughter. V*** was becoming impatient. But she reflected that there are thirty-six thousand ways of breaking the ice.
�I would like to propose something, if I could, the professor continued.
A way of obtaining your university course credit without even having to be present�without having to take any tests, or any other measures. And one that will permit me to empty this lecture hall.
There were murmurs of interest. The comedian had his public. Nothing like promising them the moon.
He went to the blackboard, picked up a piece of white chalk and wrote, in a weak hand, hardly legible,
Then he turned back towards his audience.
�It�s a verse from Dylan Thomas, the greatest Welsh poet of the century
�one of the greatest poets of the century. The beginning of a poem. Now, pay attention: I offer full credit to whoever provides me with a satisfactory translation of this verse. But if you cannot by next class, you will remain here until the end of the semester, and you will take hundreds of pages of notes and you will sweat through English literature.
He smiled.
�That�s the deal, he added.
�My name is Lauren, the stunning blonde said.
She had bumped into V*** in the confusion at the end of class. They each excused themselves at the same time, using the same words. They laughed, and decided to invite each other to a chocolate at the university cafeteria. V***, keeping in mind social niceties, could not detach the spirit from the perspective seen from between the tapered thighs of her classmate,
that glimpse of a little white panty, so cute, and the very pure line of her pussy. �What would she think if she knew that my Master had prohibited me from even wearing a thong? After he had me pierced with the rings, even wispy fabric is a discomfort. And what would she think if she saw my ass?�
The session at Master Damien�s had taken place just five days before.
V*** had just started to scar. The deepest gouges would still bleed if she stayed too long in the shower. The hot water softened the skin and the scabs; the wounds would reopen. �What would she say if I told her that I had been whipped, fucked and assfucked for an entire night? I am sure that she is a virgin��
But there wasn�t time to ask her the question. The young girl was splendid, but with a bewitching beauty�bewitching under her uniform skirt, under her sensible skirt, her tousled hair. As if she had never been out and about.
Pens in hand, they tried to find an adequate translation for the verse by Dylan Thomas. They could see the inversion, the �Once below a time�
instead of the archetypal �Once upon�: the �I was� instead of the classic,
�there was� but how to render his intent?
�It�s as if he�s saying he comes from a buried time, �Lauren said. She had a Northern accent and at first V*** thought that she had said �tie.� �
We�re all from a subterranean time,�added the tall blonde.
�Yes, V*** said, �it�s true that we are not what we seem�She felt embarrassed by this banality and blushed�not exactly, she felt herself redden, all the while knowing that her half-Magrehbi skin wouldn�t let her show any redness. But Lauren wasn�t so na�ve, she had spotted the brilliance of her brown eyes.
�So, you�re not simply a liberated young woman, right? You�re whose slave, your parents�? The suddenness of the question startled V*** and left her speechless.
�Why do you ask me that?�
�No reason, evaded Lauren.
She recovered by switching to English, talking about the class, her options, her future career. She saw herself as a translator, but being stumped by the first phrase she had been asked to translate irritated her deeply.
They would see each other again in class and each looked forward to their second meeting. Lauren invited V*** to dinner at her place that evening.
She had just arrived in Toulouse and didn�t know anyone. �No more than me, V*** lied, I just came from Pau.�
It was a strange evening, full of half-secrets, false laughter, stories from childhood. Their adolescence still stuck to their shoes. Lauren had just finished high school, V*** had taken a year off. They were the same age�
twenty years old�just within a few months of each other.
And just as V*** had thought, at least based on what was said that evening, Lauren was a virgin.
Just two unimportant, no future flirtations, she insisted.
V*** got home late. The wind was still blowing and made it difficult to think. It was only when she finally got to her little studio that she thought again of Lauren, or perhaps, that she realized that she had been thinking of how the young girl had accompanied her in her wanderings through the windy labyrinth of the Pink City.
She got undressed and into bed with the firm intention of sleeping. But the thought of those long legs, the bright glimpse of the little white panties just didn�t stop, and for the first time, she began to caress herself while thinking about the body of a woman. Then, quite consciously, as if she
wanted to correct a mistake, she started thinking about a story in which she seduced Lauren, just enough to lead her to her beloved Master, who would make her his second slave�
Beloved? She had better think again, she did not want to see Lauren turned over to the hands of that old sodomite. She visualized clearly her tall, vine-like body, whipped in every sense, but it was not her Master who held the whip�she did.
She stopped touching herself. She did not have the right.
She turned on the night light, then the ceiling light. She looked at the walls. On the left, the Master had made her install a wall of mirrors, so that she would always be able to see her body marked by the whip or the lash�
he knew that she had a terrible and strange feeling of pride upon seeing herself so slashed. On the wall in front of her, photographs, by the hundreds: to establish his hold on her, even when he wasn�t there, J.L had made her pin-up all of the hardcore shots in which she is the broken heroine. Overviews of her lacerated body, penetrated in every way, standing, hung on a St. Andrew�s Cross, on all-fours�and still her same plowed flesh, the same cocks that opened her, that were buried in her. V***
sitting, her hands tied behind the back of a chair, doing her best to swallow the large cock that smothered her. V*** on her back, irrigated by sperm or urine�depending on the circumstances�
When she first looked in the mirror, the traces of the whip remained, the blues turning yellow, the worst time for bruising. As she examined one of the photographs, she feasted her eyes on the humiliations, as if she wanted to convince herself that she was only that�flesh for cocks. Above it all the image of Lauren floated and what she had seen that afternoon�the long legs and the demure panty.
She stopped fighting it and her hand plunged between her thighs.
It didn�t take her long to cum.
T hey kept seeing each other�in class, and elsewhere. For snacks, study sessions, sometimes in the late evenings. V*** profited fully from the absence of her master: she healed, and she came to think that her soul was also healing, and that Lauren was the agent of her recovery. She had hidden in the black notebook the photographs that made official her status as a submissive, and she had many times invited Lauren to her little shabby but discreet student apartment. Without making the ambiguous gesture that she never dared to do. Curiously, (wasn�t she curious, really?) she didn�t even dare touch her, she who had spontaneously dared the worst, and all the rest of it.
At the fourth or fifth meeting, after an afternoon spent working on a particularly arduous English version of Henry James, she realized simply that she loved her. That she wanted to take her in her arms, drown her face in her straw-colored hair, tell her tender things, kiss her full on the mouth�
That evening, the most she dared was a kiss on the cheek. Later, after Lauren left, she caressed herself while it was still light, her hand thrust inside and while caressing herself saying out loud everything she wanted to do to her friend, her lover, her; Lauren�
Towards the end of the second week of that standstill relationship, Lauren suggested that they get together in the evening at the swimming pool. V***
accepted enthusiastically, but once she got home she started to have second thoughts. She took off her clothes and examined herself thoroughly in the mirror There were a few traces of the bruises remaining, very pale, with only light discolorations. �In the water,� she thought, �they won�t be noticed.� Then she looked for a swimsuit. There was nothing except the one that she had used in high school for swimming class, a one-piece suit,
designed more to conceal than to reveal. She decided to go the next day and buy a sexy two-piece.
At last, just before sleeping, she took a tweezers and trimmed her bikini line (to �make the swimsuit� as they say). After her master left, she had let the hair grow back�a major infraction, according to their rules, but she figured that she would shave on the day of his return. Her hairs grew back, very dark. She hesitated: what if she were to shave completely, all at once?
She thought the little wire-like hairs that grew back would give even more volume to her Mons Venus.
She bent over between her thighs, catching each hair with precision in the tweezers. The contact of the cold steel on her skin make her shiver.
Suddenly it reminded her of the day when a mistress opened her with a speculum before inserting an inflatable cock in order to widen her, to widen her to the dimensions of all the cocks that would come that evening to fuck her. Was it the memory of that scene, or was it the image of Lauren as the mistress that wouldn�t let go? She felt overwhelmed and pushed a prying finger into her sex. She was on fire�and dripping. She lubricated abundantly�and undoubtedly had been for a while. Her body had reacted to her own secret thoughts even before she had brought them to the light.
She needed to finish what she had started, to surrender later to the masturbation session, the only moment of the day when tension was satisfied for a moment�though it would return, even stronger, a moment later.
Three days before, she had lunched at the university cafeteria with Lauren. They had run into each other, and the two young girls were sitting pressed next to each other with the trays holding their deplorable in-flight meals. V*** felt the warmth of her friend�s leg against her thigh, and towards the end of the meal, not being able to take it anymore, she went to
the Ladies� Room and made herself cum, very quickly. When she came back, Lauren looked at her and said, with her ordinary innocence:
�You look kind of worn out�
If she had only known that at the same time beads of wetness continued to glide down V***�s thighs.
The two young girls eagerly jumped into the warm water of the pool.
Outside it had started to drizzle and it was still windy.
V*** had eagerly anticipated seeing her friend undress, but Lauren was already wearing her swimsuit underneath her clothes�a real swim-team one-piece. While her classmate stepped into the shower installed in the foot bath, her only minor satisfaction was to let her eyes linger on the line of her neck, so desirable, and to the undulation of her buttocks, so tempting.
Lauren was a vine, both in length and in quality. V*** thought that in comparison her hips were too big and her breasts were too large for her small frame.
In the water, it was much worse. Lauren swam like a professional, with a fluent crawl that let her cover two lengths of the pool before V*** had completed three strokes. Then she agreed to swim breast stroke with her, to chat�and while waiting, V*** out of breath, responded with monosyllables. She looked at the drops of water lingering on Lauren�s face like tears�and the desire to make her cry overwhelmed her. Then she recalled her sobs at Master Damien�s. She wondered if these were her own tears that she saw flow down the face of her friend.
They showered together. With native fluency, Lauren slid the straps of her suit off her shoulders. She had very white small breasts ending in a barely defined point. V*** slipped off her bra�she was suddenly ashamed of her breasts, the dark aureoles that testified to her Mediterranean origins more than anything else.
�Your breasts are magnificent, Lauren murmured, �I would like to have such beautiful boobs.
Did she like them?
In the locker room, it was much worse. Lauren, having slipped off her suit completely, finished by drying her blonde pubis�and even there, with a clear gesture of grace. And then she slipped on the inevitable white panties. �You don�t wear panties? she asked V***, seeing her slip directly into her jeans. V*** asked herself what her friend would say if she knew that wearing pants was itself an infraction of the code imposed by J-L, and that she loved to feel the rough fabric cut sweetly into her sex. She smiled mischievously. �I�m an idiot, I forgot them. Apparently, Lauren had not seen the two small rings that pierced her labia.
Afterward they went for chocolate. Just like in the pool, Lauren dominated the conversation. And V***, normally so witty, found little to respond to in the banter of her friend.
She accompanied her to the entrance of her building, rue de la Cha�ne, two steps from Saint-Sernin.
�Well, OK, �til tomorrow, said Lauren.
She turned her cheek. V*** kissed her as close as possible to her mouth, and her friend imperceptibly moved back. She started to laugh.
�A little more and you�ll knock me over, she said.
�Who knows? V*** answered, �maybe you�d love that. Lauren shrugged her shoulders and went upstairs.
V*** remained for a long time in the street. She looked up at the two lit windows on the fifth floor. �I�m an idiot,� she thought, �I�m acting like a teenager.� Then she realized that was what she had missed, precisely that.
Slowly she walked back to her own place. In the mirror, for once, she did not look at her scratched buttocks or manhandled breasts�just her face.
She scrutinized it for a long time. For the first time in her life she saw that it was her soul was broken, and that was more painful than the blows of the whip.
Master J-L would return the next morning. She went up into her tiny bathroom, and she shaved and plucked completely. She observed her sex and her anus up close in a pocket mirror, to make sure that she had missed nothing. �Do I really want to do this?� she thought. �Do I really want to be whipped, this time?�
At the same time, she said to herself, a passion for Lauren was a major inconvenience.
She hadn�t mentioned her to J-L, who without a doubt would insist that she introduce her to him. She would atone for that under the blows of the whip, starting tomorrow.
She had been taken by all kinds of men and women in front of her master without ever having any feelings of betrayal. On the contrary, all that the others did to her reinforced her attachment to him. But the very idea of her love for Lauren was a major infraction�a betrayal.
�Why a betrayal? she all of a sudden said aloud, �I don�t love him anymore.
Having said it aloud made her happy. She lay down, naked, and caressed herself softly, as Lauren would certainly have done if she were there. Her fingers moved on that beardless skin like a prepubescent little girl touching virgin silken flesh. Light touches, an imperceptible stimulation, the scratch of a fingernail�She put her finger in her cleft and dripped steam. �I love you,� she said, I love you, I love you��She repeated it like a mantra while frantically stroking her clitoris. When she came, she pushed two fingers into her cunt and cried out, drowning her hand in her woman-fountain.
�We�re going up to Paris this weekend, her Master announced. Make yourself pretty, I want to be proud of you. We�re leaving in two hours, by train�it won�t take as long as by car.
V*** feared these homecomings above all. Nine times out of ten, the sessions led her to the point of breaking, her legs turned to jelly, with the sensation of not being able to take a step�without mentioning the pain, the burns of the whip or the lash, the spasms of her stomach or her ravaged anus. The worst was her breasts, because of the pincers. What had made him so proud at the beginning now made her smile less. And yet for almost fifteen days she had been without her ration of suffering.
�It�s going to be a general presentation, continued her Master. We�re taking our submissives with us from all over France. You�ll see, for once, that you will not necessarily be the star. But I will be angry if your obedience is less than exemplary.
Submissives...The �Masters� and other �Dominators� gargled with this theatrical vocabulary�they said �Submissives like they might have said,
�Maids��so as to reassure themselves at the same time. V*** was still feeling unsubmissive. She had not escaped from her father to �submit� to the first man who came along. She loved excess, in sex. There were masochists just like there were blondes or brunettes. But from that, to make it a religion, and to lose all sense of humor�the papal seriousness and the ceremonies for which J-L had trained her for two years made her snigger more and more. The masters! Those imbeciles were only too excited to get to abuse her�
�I really don�t want to, she objected. Next week I have a crazy work schedule.
�No fake tears, J-L interrupted. We�re at the end of October. You don�t have mid-terms until January.
�I�ve got a big translation assignment.
�You can work on it on the train, he said. On the way there. Because on the way back�
He had an evil smile.
�Get down on all fours, he ordered. No, better just squat. I am going to assfuck you dry. It will be an excellent gymnastic exercise.
She knew that the discussion would end this way so she had taken the precaution of coating her anus and the first centimeters of her rectum with a suitable lubricant. She took the requested position, her head in her arms, and whimpered while he forced himself inside her. She whimpered the whole time because he wanted to hear her whimper. For the first time she was not herself. She felt nothing. A dildo would have been more exciting.
Finally, he withdrew. His cock shrank before her eyes. �He came,� she said to herself, �and I felt nothing.�
�Go get ready, repeated the Master while he got dressed. He had a smug look that made him instantly loathsome.
�Alright,� she thought. Paris will be the last time.
During the entire trip that Friday evening, they did not speak so as to not have to say anything. V*** worked on a translation of a sonnet by Shakespeare, and she let her spirit wander over the masked illusions,the ambiguities.Shakespeare wrote to a man whom he treated as a woman. She thought of a woman that she wanted to treat as a woman�the idea of touching Lauren�s body made her wet, instantly.
Paris was grey. They had left the sun in Toulouse. J-L had reserved a room in a hotel on the corner of Boulevard Arago and rue Saint-Marcel.
The elevated Metro, in front of the only window, roared past every three or four minutes. �This is intolerable,� she remarked.
�What do you care? objected her Master, �we�re not going to be spending much time here. Get ready, make yourself pretty. Make-up, perfume. Stockings, your trench coat, nothing else. We�re not going far.
They walked as far as Gobelins so they could get a cab. The already-winter wind climbed up the length of her legs and brushed her sex. She asked herself why she still obeyed. What she was looking for, she had already found. The answers were in Toulouse.
They turned up at the home of a famous dominatrix, who had set up a dungeon in the 14th
In the taxi that took them back to their hotel, around 4 a.m., she curled up into a ball in her raincoat. She had lost her stockings. J-L didn�t say anything�undoubtedly he felt he was beginning to lose her, because he had an almost animal intuition. �Nothing really original,� she thought, �I�ve spent the whole night wandering in a clich�.�
The �Mistress�had required that she get down on her knees right at the entrance and pay her homage by carefully licking her cleft. She smelled foul�a loathsome mixture of Chanel and urine. V*** obeyed with her usual passivity. Then she was relieved of her raincoat, and taken to the participants�a dozen men and women�who exclaimed admiringly. Some of them whistled.
She wanted to leave, but she let herself be overcome by events.
�No imagination,� she thought to herself. She had been worked by the whip, fucked in front and behind, lashed, hog-tied, seated on a stake that monstrously distended her anus�a prelude to a fist-fucking attempted first
by two women and then a man who stuck his fist in to plug her up; who made her scream as he forced himself in up to the wrist, who spent five long minutes kneading his fingers in her viscous insides, and who made her suck his fingers when he finally withdrew his hand from her ass.
That was the signal. The theme of the evening was uro/scat. She was ordered to piss in front of everyone, into the mouth of a submissive who was even more lowly than her. Then they forced open her jaws with a metal bit to more easily use her mouth, the final receptacle of all the water droplets they would release.
During the entire evening her spirit did not wander for a second from Lauren�Lauren in the shower, her diminutive breasts, buttocks without blemish, her adolescent body still growing quickly, her straw-colored hair and her blonde pussy, her large, na�ve, doe-like eyes�She did not feel the blows, nor the cocks that forced entry, nor that waste that sought to transform her into a toilet bowl, as it was so elegantly said in those circles.
She was no longer of this world.
They returned to the hotel where she fell into bed like a dead weight, without even washing.
They slept till late. In the afternoon, they decided to go to the cinema.
Ridley Scott�s film,
First, her buttocks hurt, the Parisians hadn�t pulled their punches. The indifference of her Master convinced her of her own indifference. A story was written there, in that ultra-modern, antiseptic theater, where in the film Sigourney Weaver incarnated an improbable queen of Spain. Worse, Depardieu, in the starring role, was hard to tell apart from one of her
tormentors from last night, a fat pig who wore a mask: she still felt his stomach swaying lewdly while he ravaged her anus, flopping like a wet flag against her kidneys. A half-impotent who lost his hard-on to his visible annoyance every thirty seconds, as if she were responsible for his condition
�the word came into her head and made her snigger at a particularly dramatic moment. Was it possible that it had been the actor himself?�The sound of Christopher Columbus� feet splashing in the waters of the Caribbean reminded her of the belly that slapped against her back and the sluggish prick that nevertheless managed to clear a path in her rectum, which opened like the mouth of an asphyxiating carp.
They walked along the boulevard, discussing the film. J-L had enjoyed it greatly. When she dared to say that she had found it seriously boring, he interrupted, �You don�t understand anything, it was tremendous�� He spat.
They picked up the pace, in silence, and went back to their room. �I�m tired out,� J-L said, and he plunged into his car magazine and in a few minutes sank into a perfectly blissful late afternoon siesta.
V*** watched him sleep. Was it possible that she had devoted almost two years of her life to this sweetly snoring man? The labored breathing of a man who was too well-nourished was the last straw. Sometimes a ridiculous detail kills passion in a few seconds. An ill-timed reflection, a weakness in a profile, a belly disgracefully covered with curly hair.
During all of those two minutes, the elevated train passed in a clash of tortured iron.
She went out and telephoned Lauren and remained on the phone for a long time.
�Let�s go to the movies, Lauren suggested. I really want to see that film.
The film was
The film confirmed her worst predictions. All the clich�s of the S & M
circus were covered within two hours. And Sharon Stone was a caricature of her own self�down to the deliberate absence of panties.
There was so much dead air in that falsely trendy film that she made good use of it by reflecting. She was sitting next to the person she loved most in the world. Point number one. The return journey with J-L had been tiresome, and just as in the onward journey, she had found refuge in Shakespeare. Second point. Their story was over. Besides, after six days he had given her no news and she wasn�t waiting for any. And this film was inane. Last point.
It was while watching the police psychologist (played by Jean Tripplehorn) disembark, while looking back and forth from the screen to Lauren�s taut profile, sitting cutely at her right, that she began to conceive of an audacious hypothesis: did Lauren identify with one or the other protagonists? And did they give her a part in her interior cinema? Based on all evidence, the two women in the film shared a complex amorous relationship. Furthermore, in maintaining another relationship with Dorothy Malone, a sixties-something escapee from Douglas Sirk�s sublime films from the 50�s.
�Once,� V*** thought, I had an affair, during an evening at Lille, with a woman who had long ago passed her sixtieth�her sex was dry like a smoked fish and it had the same odor, and the taste�� But visibly, Lauren
didn�t see the same things in the film as V*** did, and sighing, V***
wondered if her experiences during the past two years had made her age too quickly and had ruined her for simple things. Two years ago this film would have seemed audacious. Today it was a sentimental film designed for pimpled adolescent masturbation.
How did Lauren touch herself? On her back? On her stomach? While beating down on her button? While forcing a finger into her cunt? Did she play with her asshole, perhaps? Did she make herself cum quickly, as a hygienic measure? Or would she take her time? What fantasies nourished her caresses?
Her mind wandered. She no longer looked at the screen but the magnificent profile of her friend.
Lauren�s arm was two centimeters away from hers, on the large synthetic velour armrest. �I�ve got to touch her,� she said to herself. �I�ve got to take her hand.�But goddamn, those two centimeters were hard to cross! �I am nothing,� V*** said to herself, and if I don�t reach out to take her hand, I�ll go home and hang myself. Lauren watched the screen, immobile, her profile taut. �I should reach out before we learn who the criminal is,� and she felt that the moment of the revelation was approaching. She advanced her fingers, brushing those of her friend, and at last, took them. She tightened her moist hand around a hand as lifeless as a cadaver, as if Lauren had not felt her take her hand. V felt overwhelmed with happiness. She caressed, with her thumb, Lauren�s open palm. The young girl had not stirred nor moved a centimeter.
V*** caressed the fingers that she was permitted to, then climbed her wrist, the forearm, the curve of the elbow. Lauren watched the screen intensely the last spasms of an intrigue sewn with all too predictable
threads. Her lips were just slightly open and V***, astonished, would have thought that she was in the midst of cumming.
The generic ending paraded across the screen. During the three or four minutes of pointless details, the chief operator, stunts, make-up and other technical considerations, Lauren didn�t move and left her dead hand within V***�s fingers.
When they left the Crater Theater, they were grabbed by the cold. The city was swept by the wind. Lauren wrapped herself up and leaned on V***. Arm-in-arm they followed the rue de Languedoc towards the historic city center, until reaching the rue de la Cha�ne.
�Do you want to come up and have tea? the tall blonde asked.
V*** wondered if there was something more than the words said in an atonal voice.
�Of course,� she answered, �we�re freezing our butts, I�d drink anything warm.�
She watched while Lauren heated the water, emptied a teapot still full of tea from the morning, took out blue china teacups. It was within these careful gestures, and a glance that avoided her own, that there was something of a promise�
�I�m going to turn up the heat, Lauren said, �while the water warms up.
They were so cold that they hardly gave the tea time to brew. They served themselves large cups, poured slowly for the pleasure of re-warming their hands by holding the burning pot.
They took a sip at the same instant their eyes met and the coincidence made them smile.
�I can�t just let things stay like this,� V*** reproached herself. At the same time, she felt strangely paralyzed, as if her next act would change the
order of the world.
Vanessa�s manuscript ends here.
Maxim Jakubowski
By the time I came across Vanessa Duri�s� book in a
It felt intuitively like more than just an update of
On the back cover of the original French edition, Vanessa Duri�s smiles at us, smiles at me, fresh-faced, almost innocent, beautiful, an attractive young girl emerging from adolescence, curly-haired. Could this, I wondered, be the real author of this dangerous tale of womanhood defiled and proud? The face, the dark eyes that led me, the accidental reader, into the depths of her soul, as her body stood tall under the bite of the whips, the obscene penetrations of every conceivable aperture, the random punishments, the rituals of torture and humiliation. I strongly suspected something of a hoax. Maybe, Vanessa Duri�s and that candid photograph were the cover for a pseudonymous pornographer who had somehow hit a chord somewhere inside me?
There she is, luminous, wondrous and young.
Tell me it isn�t so, Vanessa, I wondered.
I rang her French publisher, Franck Spengler, and offered to acquire the rights and get the book translated into English and asked him the obvious questions.
He had harbored the same doubts when the manuscript had originally landed on his desk. But he had met Vanessa Duri�s and was soon convinced
that not only was she the author of the story, but that it was one-hundred percent autobiographical.
The book appeared in France in March 1993 and had an immediate impact. Vanessa appeared on various television programs and disarmed interviewers and opponents with her evident sincerity. Here was an attractive young student who had been plunged by the power of love into the most depraved depths of the S&M world, and stood proudly by her experiences unashamed, almost defiant; invigorated by her vigorous devotion for Pierre, her master, an older man who had led her into this new, shadowy life.
One day, I would like to see video recordings of the programs Vanessa participated in on the occasion of the book�s launch. Something inside me beckons the sound of her voice, with a warm Southern regional accent�she came from Agen, not far from Bordeaux; I wish to see the way her eyes must have twinkled under the studio lights, how her body moved in fascinating ways, her lips opened and curled, how the curls of her dark hair fell upon her neck as she defended her experiences head held high. It will be the only chance I will ever have to see Vanessa in motion.
I have press cuttings from her newspaper and magazine interviews from the same period. She is a year older than the back jacket photograph, twenty-one now. The curls in her hair are less evident in this blurry photocopy of a photocopy. She sits on a park bench, her winning smile shyly aimed at the camera, wearing a simple white blouse under her quiet, conservative jacket. She is holding a book, probably her own. She looks like just another pretty French student. In anther photograph, even blurrier, she sits again, pensive this time, her gaze directed downwards, her skirt hitched up to mid-thigh; it is possibly the same suit, but here she is not wearing a shirt, the jacket is buttoned and you can see a simple, sober
necklace around her fragile neck. She holds her hands together. Under the jacket, I know she is not wearing a brassiere; there, peer closer, are the breasts of Vanessa, the breasts that have been whipped, beaten, the nipples that have been twisted, tortured, pulled to the limits of the skin�s endurance, licked, pierced by needles, lovingly caressed.
Two months after her book�s publication in France, in May, 1993, Vanessa was asked, I assume by her domineering master, to pose in the nude for a skin magazine, no doubt in another test of her submission. Six more photographs of Vanessa.
The first picture occupies two-thirds of the double-page opening spread, a loving close-up of her face, eyes peering at the lens, a spotlight reflected in her dark pupils, her delicate upturned nose, the sharply drawn eyebrows highlighted by an imperceptible scar where the bridge of her nose begins.
He lustrous hair partly in frame, tousled, brown I know (although all the photographs are in black and white�yet again, cause for infinite regret, that I shall never witness the colors of Vanessa�s skin, the shades of her bare flesh). Her right cheek is partly obscured as her face lies on a blanket where the leather strands of a whip are spread-eagled touching her full lips and the underside of her nose. Vanessa watches me, the hint of a naked shoulder trimmed away, a black bra strap breaking into the frame. This is Vanessa, the abominably beautiful Vanessa who allowed utter strangers to sodomize her at will, to introduce foul foreign objects inside her body. This is my favorite shot of Vanessa, the one where she is paradoxically at her most open, naked, receptive. She looks at me from the glossy page, her features almost life size, the pores of her skin crudely magnified.
I turn the pages of the magazine.
On the left page, she appears sitting awkwardly askew on a cloth backdrop holding a riding crop. She is nude, her heavy breasts leaning
towards me, the reader, the voyeur, around her neck a collar to which a thin metal chain is attached. The make-up on her face is too harsh (as it is in all the photos to follow),giving her features a hardness which is alien to her nature. She no longer smiles. Her stockings climb up to midway up her thighs.Around both her wrists are thick leather straps connected by a metal chain. For a brunette, her nipples, her areola are surprisingly pale.
The right-hand page is all photograph. A defiant look in her eyes, Vanessa sits legs wide open on a low black table. A dog collar around her neck, her breasts encircled by a complicated leather harness connected in a subtle arrangement of straps to the lower part of her body where her sex is open to our gaze. Her clitoris is clearly visible, jutting out under the conjugated pressure of the leather bands that surround her slit, inner lips swollen but held together by a metal ring attached to the lower point of entry of her outer cunt lips. She is wearing stockings, a different pair from previously, high heels, still the same straps around her wrists and, in her left hand, holds another whip, seemingly the same as on the opening spread shot. Her pubes are shaven clean, so that the delightful obscenity of her open sex is inescapable, enhanced by the shining ring dangling there. She has thin arms, the veins of her left arm visible as she leans back, thrusting her shoulders forward. Around her waist there is a heavy leather band, adorned with a myriad baroque metal studs.
The waistband is the only adornment left on the next photograph which shows us Vanessa lying downwards on the cloth, her left hand holding her breast, her legs upwards, a knee bent, feet cropped out of the shot. Still she doesn�t smile. Her shaven sex unbearably bare, with a hint of darkness surrounding it, closed. I perversely approach my myopic eyes closer to the photograph and notice a few blemishes, pimples maybe, irritations of the skin from the passage of the razor blade over her shorn pubic area. On the
next page, a right hand side one, another full-page photograph, the most indecent of all, Vanessa on a high-back chair in all her pornographic splendor. Stockings, high heels, and her thighs crucified apart. Another leather harness surrounds her open sex. She holds her arms upwards and pulls a metal chain through her open mouth, between her teeth, the hint of provocation in her eyes. Her full breasts, nipples paler than ever, adorned by a curtain of six metal chains connected to a leather collar that circles her neck and extends into three branches, two on each side of her breasts, holding their weight up by the sides, biting no doubt into her skin, the final branch separating the round globes of her femininity and anchoring the metal chains draped across her offered chest.
She wears the same outfit in the last photograph, double-page spread which ends the feature, with the final text of the interview that accompanies the photos superimposed in the top right-hand corner. She is leaning on one arm. Her legs are partly open, her sex lips slightly creased by the position, her nipples visibly erect. There is a slight stain on the underside of her left breast; I am unsure whether it is an actual birthmark or a fault in the printing of the photograph. Her full lips are closed, the colors of the dark lipstick surrounding the shape of a perfect kiss. The make-up circling her eyes is too dark, ages her beyond her twenty-one years. There will be no photographs of Vanessa at twenty-two. This immodest pose, as they all were, this brazen exhibition of her body is the last picture we have of Vanessa Duri�s, author of
Seven months later, on the 13th of December 1993, returning from a festival in Montpellier, in the south of France, which she was covering for a magazine, she died in a car crash, traveling towards Paris, together with three other passengers in the car, two other writers and their child.
She was bringing her French publisher the first thirty pages or so of what she hoped would be her second book,
Vanessa Duri�s had the guts and returned to tell us the story.
Goodbye Vanessa. The images of your sex, your pale nipples and quiet smile, the story of your experiences, will always remain within me, and I will miss you badly.
T his is an unauthorized translation of the surviving manuscript of
The translation is produced for no commercial gain.
The Maxim Jakubowski article comes from the afterword to the American edition of
The photographs are scans from a copy of the �ditions Blanche edition.
The French edition contains a letter from Vanessa Duri�s to Franck Spengler. This has not been translated. Similarly, Florence Dugas appended a proposed ending to the fifth chapter. This has not been translated either.
More information about Vanessa Duri�s can be found on Wikipedia.
Clues to the identity of the Parisian �famous dominatrix� mentioned by Vanessa in Chapter 4 may be found in a profile of Catherine Robbe-Grillet by Toni Bentley (author of
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