It was impossible for me to move her body so much as an inch. I had to pull her dress down over her legs before I could press against her. She put up no resistance, nor did she give me any assistance: she remained as immobile and indifferent as a piece of wood, and had it not been for her intimate, secret warmth I would never have known that she “knew.”

It was about this time that the doctor who prescribed quinine was called in. The impression I received during the visit, the impression of his resemblance to a mouse was confirmed, as I mentioned above, by a freakish, totally absurd incident.

One day I was lying next to Clara, feverishly tugging at her dress, when I had a feeling there was something out of the ordinary in the room. It came more from the vague yet acute intimation of the extreme pleasure I was anticipating and could not share with a foreign presence than from anything tangible, but I was under the impression that we were being watched by a living being.

Alarmed, I turned my head, and what did I see on the trunk, just behind Clara’s powder compact, but a mouse. It had paused next to the mirror on the edge of the trunk and was staring at me with its tiny black eyes. The lamplight had given them two gleaming golden spots, which pierced me deeply and peered into my own eyes for several seconds with such intensity that they seemed to penetrate my brain. Perhaps the creature was searching for a curse to call down on me or perhaps for a mere reproach, but its fascination soon ran its course and it suddenly disappeared behind the trunk. I was certain the doctor had come to spy on me.

This supposition was confirmed that very evening as I took my quinine. Illogical though my reasoning was, I found it perfectly acceptable: the quinine was bitter. The doctor had seen the pleasure Clara could give me in the back room and to get even he had prescribed the nastiest medicine on earth. I could just hear him ruminating over his verdict: “The grrreater the pleasure, the more bitter the rrremedy.”

A few months after he first treated me, he was found dead in his attic: he had put a bullet through his brain.

The first thing I asked myself when I heard the gruesome news was, “Were there mice in the attic?” I needed to know. Because if the doctor was well and truly dead, a band of mice would have to set upon his corpse and extract all the mouse matter he had borrowed during his lifetime to be able to carry on his illegal human existence.

Chapter Three

I was, I believe, twelve years old when I first met Clara. But no matter how far back my childhood memories go, they are always linked to sexual awareness. I find my early experiences of sexuality every bit as nostalgic and pure as my early experiences of night, fear, or friendship, and in no way dissimilar to other melancholy phenomena such as the tedious wait to “grow up,” which I measured concretely each and every time I shook hands with someone older than myself, trying to determine to what extent the weight and size of my tiny hand, lost in a mass of gnarled fingers, differed from the enormous one pressing it.

Not for a moment in my childhood did I disregard the difference between man and woman. There may have been a time when all living beings coalesced into one clear whole of motion and inertia, though I have no precise memory of it: the “secret” of sex was always present, a secret as concrete as an object, a table or chair.

Yet when I examine those distant memories carefully, I find that what relegates them to the past is my misconception of the sexual act at the time. I had a completely false picture of the female organs and imagined the act itself to be much more ceremonious and strange than what I experienced with Clara. All my interpretations — from the erroneous to the increasingly accurate—had an ineffable air of mystery and bitterness about them, gaining slowly in consistency like a painting made on the basis of rough sketches.

I can picture myself as a small child wearing a nightshirt that comes down to my heels. I am weeping desperately, sitting on a doorstep that leads into a sun-drenched courtyard with an open gate and an empty square beyond, a hot, sad, noonday square with dogs sleeping on their stomachs and men stretched out in the shade of their vegetable stalls. The air is rife with the stench of rotten produce, and large purple flies are buzzing loudly in my vicinity, alighting on my hands to sip the tears that have fallen there, then circling frenetically in the dense, scorching light of the courtyard. I stand and urinate in the dust. I watch the earth avidly drink up the liquid. It leaves a dark spot, like the shadow of a non-existent object. I wipe my face with the nightshirt and lick the tears from the corner of my lips, savoring their salty flavor. I resume my seat on the threshold, feeling very unhappy: I have been spanked.

My father had just given me a few slaps on my bare backside in my room. I don’t quite know why. I am thinking it through. I was lying in bed next to a girl my own age. We were supposed to be taking a nap while our parents were out walking. I didn’t hear them come in and don’t know what I was doing to the girl under the quilt. All I know is that when my father suddenly tore off the quilt the girl was beginning to acquiesce. My father turned red, lost his temper, and spanked me.