Dolorosa Soror Read Free

that month (it was September) I still had traces of tan and bathing-suit lines. I counted forty-something parallel marks. Each one looked like a double impression, a handwritten note in the margin of a book. The skin was slightly raised and swollen, with a more pronounced cleft where the clasp of the little chain had struck.
    Did I mention that he put the chain back around my neck before leaving? I looked at it again from the front. The wedding ring of antique yellow gold bobbed between my breasts, as usual.
    At that instant, and for the first time, I felt a strange pride in having been beaten and marked. Since then I have felt this way each time the mirror has thrown back to me the image of my broken flesh. By the next day the pain had passed, leaving only the geometric testimonials on my decorated skin. In the days that followed, I observed with eager curiosity—and also detachment—the lines slowly effacing themselves. Soon only several bluish marks remained; then the skin was again immaculate. This seemed to make it call out for another homage.
    He phoned me eight days later.
    Notes
    1. Let's be clear: I do theater as much to find myself as to express myself. As with carnival masks, it's never "just for laughs." J. P. constantly puts himself onstage. In other words, he is always trying to find himself, without any luck, and his self-assurance (which is limited to detachment, or reserve, as we shall see) is only, when all is said and done, a request. If we still love each other, it's only when one of us looks at the other from the wings. With the exception of these lines, all the notes in the following pages are the work of J. P., whom I asked to respond as if he were hearing this story read aloud. I did not censor anything he wrote. But I still ask myself what prompted him to slip in a note here rather than there...
    2.Florence's story is peppered with theatrical citations, a reflection, no doubt, of her training, of roles learned for the stage, that come back in full force in real life.
    3.Florence suffers early on from what I call the "quotation effect." Behind each sentence, each pose, she thinks she can discern text, arrogant borrowings from other sources, without quotation marks. Words of love strung end to end. Gestures, like memories of scenes written by others, for others.
    4.Florence sometimes still hesitates to speak in the past tense. Writing also helps in this respect, to perpetuate what have proved to be fallible and fleeting moments.
    5.When I compare these first days to what I have made her suffer since, or what she herself inflicted on Nathalie, to speak of pain with regard to this first experience seems exaggerated. Florence writes, curiously enough, as if this were the first time, as if she were recopying, without knowing what comes next, a sort of journal kept day by day. As if she were unaware, at the moment of drafting these lines, that she would later be whipped until her blood ran. As if she did not remember that sometimes, although we saw each other only for very reputable reasons—work, for example—as soon as we would begin to grapple with the Sophocles scenario she was supposed to be finishing, she would want to sleep with me. Before leaving, I would ask her to lift her skirt so I could mark her with the crop or flogger; I wanted the marks to keep her company until our next meeting. I wanted her to rediscover, the next day, when she was in an elevator or on a staircase or on the street, the very welts she had the impression everyone could see through the light fabric of her clothes. Wanted her to have those feelings of embarrassment and pride—and let life pass by, indifferent.
    6.Internal autopsy, as they used to say. Florence very often visualized the interior of her body, the creamy jets striking the purple membranes, brought to life by the cock laboring against them. One day, when seven or eight men had come in her mouth, one after the other, as she would tell it later on, she had