The Classmate Read online

  The classmate

  Vanessa DurièS

  Contents

  Preface, by Franck Spengler 7

  Laika, by Florence Dugas 9

  The Classmate 13

  Chapter Two 21

  Chapter Three 27

  Chapter Four 33

  Chapter Five 39

  Photographs of Vanessa,

  by Maxim Jakubowski 43

  Translator’s Note 54

  Preface

  by Franck Spengler

  I have for a long time hesitated before deciding to re-read the pages that Vanessa Duriès 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.

  Laika

  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 Duriès, the legendary author of The Ties that Bind, I begged him to give them to me for editing. Convincing him was more difficult than I had anticipated, and I had to plead.

  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 Montélimar 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 The Ties that Bind and this story. Nowhere there is the beauty of love, the tenderness, the passion, the adolescent attraction for the Other, that way of holding hands, of just touching, of swimming inside desire like a fish in the water—there is only that satisfaction of desire that, after the last ecstasy, leaves you feeling only thoroughly frustrated until the next debauchery.

  Should I confess that the style-less style of The Ties never really satisfied me? That the plain business-like behavior of the uncultured Dominant has always made me feel sick? And that it is a great pity that so much of the apprenticeship has been a raw genius modeled upon a story lacking all passion, except in the Christian sense of the word...

  Having said that, I will draw an essential difference between The Ties and its author. Vanessa was very young when she was taken in hand by J-L. She was quite pretty–and had I found her in 1993, I confess that I would have thought then, like a celebrated character out of DeSade: It is true that the little slut is well made, and I swear that before the end of the day I will have enjoyed the pleasure of fucking her.

  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 cliché of that image, but I don’t see any other.

  The Classmate is a love story. That the author has roughly decided to narrate it in the third-person shows her desire to distance herself from her passion to try to analyze it with objectivity. But though she undoubtedly wanted to hide in the shadow of the first name of her pen name (the manuscript carries only the initial V***) it is clear, at the same time, that it is her, no one but her, who narrates and who lives what is narrated.

  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 habitués of the French S& M world.

  I regret only that, due to financial reasons, Franck did not agree to my request: re
produce 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.

  Chapter One

  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 debauchées 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 maché, 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 blindin
g 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.