Read Online The Necrophiliac by Gabrielle Wittkop - Free Book Online Page B

the fifth floor, that their behavior causes me to reflect. They stare into the corners with a look of prudent suspicion. They observe me slyly, and, most of all, they sniff the apartment’s odour, shifting their eyes. They sniff and sniff, searching their memory, finding nothing that’s right; sniff again, until a strange worry spreads over them. Then they become hunted beasts and escape. When I try to get them back to work, they give me the most vague answers with a frightened look, shaking their heads if I offer to increase their wages. I put a new ad into the papers and the same story begins again. One day, however, one of the cleaning ladies had the courage to ask me why I always wore black clothes, even though I wasn’t in mourning. Another, very young, already fat, and whose name I’ve forgotten, declared in a local store that I smelled like a vampire. Always this old and aberrant confusion between two beings so fundamentally opposed as the vampire and the necrophiliac, between the dead that feed off the living and the living who love the dead. I don’t deny, nevertheless, that after several days, the perfume of the bombyx transforms itself into an odour like that of heated metal that, more and more acrid, thickens finally into a stench of entrails. Each of these stages has its charm — even if the last announces separation — but never would I have the idea to eat the flesh of one of my friends, the dead, nor to drink the blood.
    As for the concierge, for a long while now she has stopped being surprised that I don’t have a “girlfriend.” And since the slightest “boyfriend” has never appeared either, she simply concluded that I am a sort of Joseph, a real loner. All the better. There are certain truths that rudimentary souls would have trouble accepting. My boyfriends with anuses glacial as mint, my exquisite mistresses with grey marble bellies, I bring them at night into my old Chevrolet, while everyone sleeps, and I take them all back to the bridge at Sèvres or the one at Asnières.
December 3, 19...
    This morning, while I was taking care of my correspondence, a client made a request that troubled me. It was a man of around forty years, with a ruddy complexion in the first stages of baldness, dressed like a lawyer or the director of a business. He looked over the furniture, the porcelain, the paintings, but mostly the curios, seemingly looking for something. Then finally, approaching my table: “Tell me, sir, don’t you have any amusing netsuke? It’s specifically those of Koshi Muramato that I’m thinking of.” For a second, our stares met. How many know Koshi Muramato, the master of the eighteenth century, who, in his Kyushu workshop, consecrated himself exclusively to macabre netsuke? The dead sodomized by hyenas, fellating succubi, masturbating skeletons, cadavers interlaced like nests of vipers, fetus-devouring phantoms, courtesans impaling themselves on the stiffness of a dead body. . . .
    â€œI’m sorry,” I responded, “but usually the people who own the works of this master hesitate to give them up. Nevertheless, if you would like to leave me your address, I can, if I happen to find something . . .”
    He refused with a curtness that made me suspect that he had understood I would never sell him anything of this sort. The netsuke of Koshi Muramato — I save them for myself! Only a necrophiliac can collect these objects, and the man intrigued me.
    â€œWould your prefer to stop in again?” I suggested.
    â€œI don’t live in Paris. It’s very rare that I come here.”
    He nodded goodbye and left. I wouldn’t have disliked discussing the macabre netsuke with him: offer him a few words — certainly vain — then smile at him knowingly. Not to offer him fuller knowledge, but to see if he would grasp that I understood. That’s all. For if necrophiliacs — they are so rare —