The Necrophiliac Read Online Free PDF Page B

unknown labyrinths.
    â€œYou arrived too late,” said the old lady, “he was interred yesterday afternoon. What a beautiful man! How terrible! The wheel of his delivery truck entered him there.”
    She indicated the top of her abdomen. I thanked this woman and went on my way. I had read the name on the front of the bakery. “Pierre,” I repeated to myself. Pierre, a beautiful man . . .
    I remember the afternoon as if through a fog. I had lost the notion of time, measuring my wait not by my watch but by the light. The light . . . My enemy . . . Why had I been named Lucien, me the lucifuge? Separated from my habitual environment, the hours seemed longer than ever. I slept for a while in the car, and realized with surprise upon waking up that it was already two o’clock in the morning. I would be unable to describe the Barbizon cemetery, certainly banal, with its pearly wreaths and its crying angels. I found the freshest tomb without trouble, surmounted with flowers piled up like hay for a mule. I had no trouble moving the earth, nor in opening the coffin, which, nevertheless, seemed abnormally large.
    A beautiful man . . . Heavens! He measured barely less than two metres and was well in proportion. They probably tried to save him at the hospital, for a thick bandage, marked in its centre with a watery stain, squeezed his monumental torso where the dense brown hair curled. Never had I seen a dead man so calm, with his somewhat heavy Roman profile, his sweet white skin like that flour he kneaded over the years into bread for the living. I had immediately understood that it would be impossible to displace Pierre in a single go. Taking infinite pains, I managed, nevertheless, to extract his body halfway from the coffin. I felt ashamed to enjoy him right on the spot, in the hostility of the open world, with the danger of chance, for the clandestine need walls to protect against terrestrial murmurings, curtains to stop the watchfulness of the stars.
    Pierre’s head bumped regularly against the wood of the lateral panel; his torso was implicated in the same turning movement that one sees in certain tortured trees, while his waist was folded abruptly over the edge of the coffin, liberating the base, dislocating the long, strong legs. I noticed that Pierre must have often given up in life that which he gave to me in death. That hardly bothered me, but I was saddened by the incongruousness of the posture, the narrowness of the coffin, the sudden charge of a rat. Before leaving Pierre, I laid him out again for better or worse in his coffin and pulled the shroud back over him. He might have passed for a sort of “Christ in the Tomb” in the arms of a profane Joseph of Arimathea.
    It was all over the day before yesterday. I feel like it aged me twenty years. That was the first time that I didn’t offer one of my funereal friends the comfort of my bed, the calm of my room.
January 12, 19...
    â€œJerome B., fifteen years. Without occupation. Resident, avenue Henri-Martin. Passy Cemetery. Two p.m.”
    To be looked into.
January 14, 19...
    There were a lot of people at the interment of Jerome, which I attended to be able to find his tomb again more easily. And out of desire, curiosity, sympathy. Nice, crisp weather. All the upper crust of the sixteenth arrondissement, in cashmere raincoats and mink pelisses. I found myself next to an old lady in a violet hat who never stopped chatting. “Two days of a sickness thought to be benign then wham he had just finished such a good trimester at Janson-de-Sailly the awful grief of his parents poor Charles and especially that poor Zouzou oh, yes for you don’t know it maybe but he never called his mother mom but Zouzou those two adored each other in an unimaginable way but are you a part of the family how do you know Jerome?”
    I responded that I was his Latin professor, but the old lady carried on immediately with the thread of her monologue.
    The