Free Dolorosa Soror by Florence Dugas Page A

lovingly.
    ***
    
"Tiresias," J. P. says, "was originally an ordinary young man.
    But one day, while walking through a clearing, he met two coupling serpents. Did he disturb them? Did he kill them? Little matter, but there he was, suddenly changed into a woman.
    "Seven years later, again walking through a clearing...two serpents coupling...he disturbs them and kills them...In an instant, he's a boy again.
    "Some time after that, a fight among the gods. 'In matters of love, men really have it good,' say the goddesses. 'But you women have it best,' protest the gods. The idea (a bad one!) to ask Tiresias, who after all has been both sexes. Called before them, he reveals that if pleasure were composed of ten portions—like Camembert—women would get nine, and men one.
    "Hera, outraged that one of Zeus's ex-wives had already eaten her piece—and that Tiresias had betrayed the great secret passed from mother to daughter—blinded him. Zeus, moved to pity by such treatment, but not being able to reverse it—a little like the story of Sleeping Beauty, in which the evil spell cast by the spiteful old fairy cannot be nullified—gave Tiresias as compensation the gift of second sight. And seven lives."
    "Nice story," I said.
    "That's why he knows everything, from the very beginning, about the secret of Oedipus. And if you connect that to the passage from the Banquet on the myth of the androgyne..."
    "Well, am I looking for my masculine complement or my feminine double?"
    "We aren't coming back to that again, are we? You're looking for your own and the other sex. One cock in front, one behind."
    "God, you can be vulgar!"
    "But why? Does it bother you so much to say you like to be buttfucked?"
    "It's the word I don't like. It's off the mark, metaphorically. Somebody who gets buttfucked is a bastard, a jerk. Or an idiot."
    "Okay. sodomized, if you like. You like to be sodomized. Very deeply. Your asshole is as open as a cow's. Gaping."
    "J.P .!"
We burst out laughing.
    Notes
    1.Thus I allowed myself from time to time the illusion of continuing to manipulate them, whereas I was only, and more and more rarely, a tool, a strategy of love.
     
    Chapter IX
    Christmas
     
    I needed to cover her with resounding jewels, as the poem says, so we went into a rather dimly lit boutique full of barbaric baubles on the Rue Saint-Andre" des Arts. Very heavy necklaces and bracelets, combinations of worked metal and polished gem-stones, iron, copper, and feathers.
    We tried on every piece of this flashy paraphernalia, one after the other. The dull color of iron sliced into the pale pink of her sweater and the more luminous pink of her neck and hands. I sampled all sorts of earrings, looking for something that lengthened my neck, which I find a bit short.
    "It's too bad," I said, "that you don't have pierced ears. They don't have clip earrings here."
    The salesman approached us. His skin was a mix of black and yellow little seen outside of the Antilles. His eyes were very clear, his nose small, just barely flattened, and his lips thin.
"If you want to get your ears pierced, I have everything we need, and it doesn't hurt at all, you know." I knew. Nathalie hesitated. "My mother never wanted me to," she said. Was that an objection? I took it as an acceptance. Besides, she wasn't protesting.
    "Wait here," said the so-exotic salesman.
    He came back with a little pistol. He disinfected her earlobe with alcohol—the odor instantly invaded the tiny boutique— then pinched the lobe into the mechanism and pierced it, at the same time installing a gold-balled stud. One ear, then the other. Nathalie bore the procedure with great dignity. Hardly batted an eyelash when the needle pierced her lobe.
    "Good girl," I said, touching her cheek.
    Then I turned toward the man.
"Make a second hole in her left ear, above the other, please." She moved as if to get up, then sat down again. "That's going to hurt a little more," he said. "Miss has tiny earlobes. I will