Affairs of Art by Lise Bissonnette

survive.
    â€œGetting in? I’ll drop you in Nice or wherever you want.” I was a wisp of straw who had been chosen. He guessed that I was a tourist, new and starving for every turn in the road, for every landmark in the France of my dreams. He turned off now and then into low sleeping villages, he drove slowly and the wind stayed between us, warm, he described knolls and stars. But France, he said, was not Italy, where the genuine painters’ villages were to be found, across the border to which I must now make my way. The roads became streets, the city was drawing near, there was a promontory where he switched off the lights and let the car glide to the very edge of the escarpment.
    Everything was dark, Vitalie, when he placed his right hand on my left thigh and I didn’t push it away. He was gentler than a woman as he unbuckled my belt. We drank each other, one after the other, and I did not hesitate for a moment. Afterwards, as he stroked the nape of my neck, he asked me my name. Bruno Farinacci-Lepore spent the night with me, in my furnished apartment in Nice, teaching me acts of which I had been prescient. I learned. I was in an elsewhere, my body was foreign to me and it broke away, happy.
    He left rather late the next day, after coffee and croissants at an Arab bistro in the Marché aux Fleurs. He chatted on and on, he’d started speaking again as he’d done at the symposium, his tone so sharp and definitive that it erased the night. Already I was pretending to be used to it, able to change registers as I changed lovers. I seized the moment, for I believed it to be the last, surely Bruno Farinacci-Lepore enters a number of lives that way, lavishing a little of his glory along with his sperm, all the while truly teaching the ways of contemporary art, where I had the impression I was starting from scratch.
    Nice was not a place for a long sojourn, he said. The best galleries dared not show anything more modern than Pignon or Fautrier, and even in Saint-Paul-de-Vence the Fondation Maeght was becoming a little too embedded in its rich fifties slot. “Surely you won’t spend the summer studying Giacomettis.” On the back of an envelope addressed to him he made a list of his favourite places in France and Italy, secluded or common avant-garde galleries where I’d be received as an equal when I turned up with a recommendation from him.
    He drove away in his white convertible and his now wrinkled tunic. It was close to noon. Despite the harshest of suns, he knotted a silk scarf around his neck, red with black stripes, which he’d extracted from the glove compartment. I’d had just enough time to think him ridiculous when he disappeared on the street that goes up to the Citadel.
    I had been in France for a mere four days and already everything had been deflowered: the promenades, the Mediterranean, the historical sites being trampled by tourists. I’d got over everything. Matisse had been merely a painter of balconies, like the thousands of those that looked down on and concealed a coastline reeking of automobiles, his colours came from the market, and his odalisques were trashy and cheap. A stickiness was making my stomach turn.
    I came back to the apartment under the eaves of what had been a bourgeois Savoyard house, where the walls were peeling in perpetuity. It was nearly as dark in the daytime as at night. In the lamplight the sheets on the unmade bed were yellow, two big flies buzzed around the light and the reek of sweat that would take a while to evaporate in the still moist air.
    I realized that the stickiness was in particular the fluids of the night before finally being plastered to my belly. I spent hours sitting upright in an armchair in the corner, aghast.
    I had quite readily enjoyed sex with a man, with a body like my own. I had understood and accepted all his desires, and hours later I still was not rejecting them. And yet never until then had I been stirred