MATZNEFF IN TUNISIA, 1972-3
Gabriel Michel Hippolyte Matzneff (born 12 August 1936) is a prize-winning French writer, who began writing journals in 1953. Presented here are all the passages of Greek love interest concerning his three stays in Tunisia recounted in Élie et Phaéton. Journal 1970-1973 (Elijah and Phaethon. Journal 1970-1973), published by la Table ronde in Paris in 1991. The translation is this website’s.
Two earlier visits to Tunisia in 1966 were described in Matzneff in Tunisia, 1966.
Third visit, April to June 1972
The next day, 11th April, Matzneff went for two months to Tunisia, where Tatiana joined him on 25 May:
I dream of Tatiana, of Mike.[1] The tête-à-tête with a bottle of red haut-mornag makes me sentimental. [...]
Thursday 13. Sitting in the little square, I work on my novel. Camels loaded with (illegible word); idiotic tourists; little boys - one, thirteen, extremely beautiful. Harmony. A moment of absolute happiness.
[...] A fruitful session of work (five full pages!) interrupted by a nice lunch with the Roussopouloses and, at the end of the day, the wind having died down, by an amorous encounter with a pretty little boy in the palm grove.[2]
“Tonight,” he says, “we can go back to the palm grove.”
“Thank you very much! I prefer to sleep at night. Tomorrow afternoon is better.”
“If you want to sleep, you shouldn’t come to Tozeur. Here, one doesn’t sleep.”
“?”
“We don’t sleep because we are devils; devils never sleep.”
Sic, and he is twelve, thirteen at most! It’s as beautiful as Byron. […]
Saturday 15. Excellent day’s work: six and a half pages. But colic, sunburn (I was unwise enough to go back to it at the Oasis pool) and a slight weariness of these boys who lack true sensuality and have a monotonous and limited conception of sexual pleasure. [...]
I only have to leave the hotel to meet a young person. The embarrassment of choice. It almost cuts off desire. Above all, it leaves me with a head to read for work.
[...]
Thursday 4 May. Letters from Tatiana and Mike which I use the same day (coincidentally) for my Chapter XVIII.
Mike, Deep End.
Friday 5 May. Second letter from Mike, written eight days before the one received yesterday! [pp. 204-9]
Readers following Matzneff’s journals in chronological sequence should here return to Elijah and Phaethon, 1970-73.
Fourth visit, 6-24 January 1973
Wednesday 10 [January]. What is certain is that my break with Tatiana[3] will lead to a quarrel with Mgr. Antoine (a de facto quarrel, if not an explicit one), who has shown himself in this story in an equivocal and unpleasant light (cf. my letter to Olivier Clément).
A walk in the Corbeille. A boy flirts with me. He is very young but not really pretty. I give him a kiss on the cheek. He tells me about his friend Moktar who, he explains, is his age, very handsome and with whom I could have “a little love, like with women” (sic). [p. 293]
16 January. The loudspeaker plays an English pop song. The word birds makes my heart beat. Birds is what Mike used to call girls when he talked about them with his friend John. And suddenly I see Mike (whose image has become blurred lately) with his red mouth, his slightly ironic pout, his bright smile, his slitted eyes, his blond locks - that adolescent, animal health. [p. 297]
18 January. [...] Abdelkader comes to greet me. He is flanked by a ravishing little friend: thirteen years old, beautiful black eyes, pretty full lips opening onto very white teeth. We go for a walk beside the Bedouin tents. The dunes were favourable for clandestine love affairs, but the sun was setting and it was getting cold. Magnificent full moon. We made an appointment for tomorrow: the boy (Lazare?) will take me to a quiet corner where we can drink palm wine and cuddle.
Friday 19. [...] Between the swimming-pool and dinner, palm wine and the fresh lips of the pretty little Lazhar.[4] [p. 299]
Readers following Matzneff’s journals in chronological sequence should here return to Elijah and Phaethon, 1970-73.
Fifth visit, 28 April – 28 May 1973
Matzneff stayed in Kairouan until 26 May:
Thursday 10 [May]. […] 11.30 a.m., at Thierry’s.[5] In the mail, a letter from Mike! The first one after seven months of silence! I open it, trembling. But no, it’s a good letter, affectionate, in a different handwriting from last year’s, bigger and elongated. Not a word about Tatiana, but on the other hand he tells me about his interview with the colonel of the Grenadier Guards! [p. 338]
[340] 16 May. I write to Roger Peyrefitte[6]: “I work like an angel, even though in Kairouan there is no lack of opportunities to play the devil.” [p. 340]
In Tunis:
27 May. [...] In the evening. Thierry returned by car to Kairouan, I picked up a fifteen-year-old boy, Hédy, on Avenue Bourguiba. Or rather it was he who picked me up. We had passed each other and suddenly I realised that he had turned around and was walking beside me. I took him to my room at the Hotel du Lac.[7] [p. 343]
Readers following Matzneff’s journals in chronological sequence should here continue to Matzneff in Italy, 1962-73.
[1] Tatiana was Matzneff’s 25-year-old wife, whom he had married on 8 January 1970, she having been his mistress since January 1965. Mike was a beautiful blond English boy, aged 15 or 16, whom they had met six days earlier in Paris (through their Russian Orthodox circle) and with whom they had both fallen in love. Matzneff had already “kissed him fiercely”, but so far his and his wife’s mutual passion for the boy did not appear to have caused any tension between them.
[2] If the account of Nil Koytcheff (ie. Matzneff)’s life in Matzneff’s highly-autobiographical novel Isaïe réjouis-toi (Isaiah rejoice) is accurate, this was only his second sexual encounter with a boy since his marriage to Tatiana Scherbatcheff more than two years earlier, the first having been in Luxor fourteen months before this.
[3] Matzneff had been willing for three-way love between himself, Tatiana and Mike, but Tatiana had tried to monopolise Mike for herself as well as pursuing a lesbian affair, leading by this time to the break-up of their marriage (with Matzneff seeking a divorce) and Mike distancing himself from them both, all recounted in Elijah and Phaethon, 1970-73.
[4] In Matzneff’s autobiographically-based novel Isaïe réjouis-toi (Isaiah rejoice) the boy with whom Nil Kolytcheff (ie. Matzneff himself) has sex is described as “thirteen-year-old Moktar, a ravishing boy escaped from a painting by Mariette Lydi.” Their first love-making is lyrically described:
[Nil] closed the book, took a sip of lemonade, called Moktar, who ran over laughing and lay down beside him. Nil buries his face in the curly nape of the child’s neck, kisses the graceful shoulders, the velvet back, intoxicating himself with the wonderful warm, soft, perfumed skin. He turns the child over and over, tasting him inch by inch, like a cream cake, savouring every mouthful, not missing a crumb. […] Nil drinks the waters of Lethe from the boy’s mouth. Moktar too is an icon of God, even if there is no God, even if icons are made to be broken. There is no such thing as an encounter, there are encounters, and Moktar is a delicious one. A star in the night. Moktar rests his cheek on Nil's stomach. His eyes are open as he watches the sun decline.
[5] Thierry Garcin. Matzneff gives no further explanation of who he was.
[6] Roger Peyrefitte (1907-2000) was the author of the prize-winning Special Friendships (1943) and the pre-eminent boysexual writer of his generation. Matzneff had known him since at least November 1970 and they were well-established friends by this time.
[7] Here is Matzneff’s fictionalised description of this encounter in Isaïe réjouis-toi (Isaiah rejoice), where he himself is called Nil Kolytcheff:
Fifteen is also the age of the brown-eyed boy in the bottle-green jumper whom Nil picked up in Tunis on the eve of his departure for Rome. He immediately offered to accompany him to his hotel.
“They let you take boys up to your hotel?”
“You’ll see, we’re going to manoeuvre like leaders.”
Blessing to the misappropriation of minors, a section of old English women, Cook style, strategically occupy the lobby of the Hôtel du Lac and the attention of the doormen, so it’s without a hitch that Nil and the kid get into the lift, which hurtles towards the tenth heaven like a rocket from Cape Canaveral. One side of the lift, which is very long, is occupied by a mirror. The boy clings to the neck of Nil, who bends down. Out of the corner of his eye, Nil looks at himself in the mirror, kissing a pretty fifteen-year-old boy on the mouth. It’s very exciting. On the bed, it’s even better.
Usually, Arab kids aren’t fondlers, they don’t like flirtation or caresses, they lack sensuality, snap, one has fired one’s shot, good night company. This one is different, very feminine, purrs like a cat, likes to caress and be caressed, doesn’t play the little male.
Later, when they leave the Hotel du Lac, without incident, the boy will take Nil to the house of a friend, a cook in an embassy or something, who lives near the station - where last year, at four in the morning, Nil took the bus to Tozeur, among the fat, tattooed, veiled ladies and the chickens hanging by their feet, their heads down, their crests miserable. The mysterious cook will put them up in a room with a mattress on the floor, hot tea and a mixture of hash and kif, then slip away like a shadow. Nil and the kid make love again, drink tea, smoke a few sebsi and get high. The next day, they say their goodbyes at the airfield. Nil promises to come back next winter.