"ACTING OUT" by Arno Calleja (tr. Katie Shireen Assef)

In chapter one, there’s a couple. The man has dark thoughts, the woman sexual ones. They live for years together in their separate thoughts, their separate tensions. Until the moment it becomes unbearable: they have to act.

And so the woman takes lovers, goes out to swingers’ clubs, starts getting into S&M. The man tries to kill himself three times. He fails, three times. Finally, he takes up painting.

In his paintings the man depicts obscure images, violent scenes. He starts to sell.

One night, for the woman, a session goes wrong: for twelve hours she is locked in a dungeon. On a St. Andrew’s cross. She loses consciousness. She is traumatized. 

The woman goes out less often, withdraws into herself. The woman spends more time with her husband, whom the painting and the sales have rejuvenated. They start to sleep together again. In tenderness.  

One night, the wife wants to be tied up, insulted, humiliated. The husband tries, but he doesn’t know how to go about it. The wife cries: she’s at the end of her rope. The husband apologizes. Frustration sets in. Soon the old tensions return, unbearable. The husband kills himself again. This time, he succeeds. She buries him. 

The wife becomes frigid: all the old excitement has died in her. She sells the house. With the money from the sale she buys another house, in a place by the sea, isolated. 

One day, walking along the beach, she runs into a former lover, invites him over. They sleep together again. But something is broken in her, and it doesn’t work. The former lover is drunk. At the end of his rope, infuriated, he tries to strangle her. She knocks him unconscious, runs away, leaving the former lover’s body in the living room.

In her car, she drives for a long time. She arrives in the Lot. Checks into a hotel. On the wall in her room, there’s a painting by her dead husband. She weeps.

In her room, the phone rings. It’s the front desk. There are visitors downstairs. She goes down. It’s the police. She throws herself into the swimming pool. She sinks. They fish her out again. The police bring her to the station. Interrogate her. She says that the lover was violent, and that’s why she knocked him out. They release her.

The wife gets back on the road, returns home. In the garage, there’s a box filled with the dead husband’s old paint tubes and brushes and canvases. She unpacks everything. She starts to paint. At first, just to try it. And then in a frenzy, more and more quickly, every day. Every night. She doesn’t paint scenes but faces, cocks, pussies. Unnaturally large-scale, disproportionate closeups. 

The woman reconnects with her old acquaintances, members of the clubs and the S&M circles. The acquaintances buy her paintings. She lives at night in the garage, in her painting. She lives at night. In the daytime she sleeps. The sexual thoughts no longer come to her. She works. She makes money. 

One night, she falls asleep in the garage. On the sofa. She dreams of her dead husband. The dead husband floats in a swimming pool, eyes closed, talking out loud to himself. He says, and to think that the brain of it all was at our fingertips. She wakes up in the calm of the garage. It is morning. She is happy. 

Another night, the woman’s phone rings. At the other end, a voice, one she knows, orders her to do things. To hold poses. To put things inside herself. To crawl backwards on all fours. She is terrified, but it’s beyond her: she is at the voice’s command. 

The voice calls again. At first, once a week. And in the garage, the woman obeys. Leaving the painting aside. Once a week, it goes on all night. Then it’s every other night. Then every night, the voice is there. And the woman in the garage no longer paints. She obeys. Burns. Inserts. Every night. She stops selling her paintings. 

After three months of branding herself, of carving her flesh, exhausted from being at the voice’s command, after three months of shedding her blood, one night the woman collapses in the garage. The voice phones again but the woman is on the floor, unconscious, and she doesn’t pick up. 

Within the hour, someone comes to the door. Rings the doorbell. Knocks. And with a screwdriver works the lock on the garage door. Opens it. It’s the voice. The voice brings the woman to its car, drives her to its home. Cares for her, feeds her. Tends to her wounds.

After three days, the woman wakes up. She sees the voice from the phone. It’s a man, someone she thinks she recognizes from her S&M days, but whom she doesn’t in fact know. A shared acquaintance must have given the voice the woman’s phone number. 

They talk. The man is affable. The woman regains her strength. 

The man brings the woman back to her home. In the garage, they drink a bottle of champagne. The woman wants to paint him naked. The man says yes: and the sessions begin, at night. In the morning, the man goes home to sleep. It goes on like this for six nights.

At the end of the seventh night, in the morning, the painting is done. The man is happy. The painting is beautiful. The man buys the painting from the woman. The woman, too, is happy: it’s her first full-length portrait, where the body is intact.

And so they open a bottle of champagne and drink it. The man gets dressed to go home. In front of the garage door, they shake hands.

The man hangs the painting on the white wall in front of his bed. He smokes. He looks at his painted self. He stops leaving his apartment. He thinks. With his phone, he takes nude photos of himself: he strikes poses. He starts a blog. He posts his different poses. The photos circulate on screens, inside rectangles. One night, he receives an email.

It’s from a man. He has a request. He brands flesh with a whip, that’s his specialty. He would like to brand the man in the painting, and asks. The man in the painting refuses.

The next day, there’s another email: a woman, she proposes a meeting. The man in the painting refuses.

Some days later, there’s another email: from a woman, a different one, she has a request, would like to meet him. The man in the painting accepts.

In a café, they meet. They talk. The woman tells him what she has in mind: an initiation. She would like to become a slave. The man in the painting refuses. He gets up and leaves. At home, he organizes his photos within the rectangle of his screen. He smokes. He stops going out.

One day, the man in the painting calls the woman with the request. He suggests someone, a master of his acquaintance, who might be interested. The woman with the request refuses. She wanted him, not another. The man in the painting is moved. He writes to her, SMS messages. The woman with the request responds. Three days later, they see each other again, in a cafe, a different one. She pleads with him. The man in the painting emerges from his solitude: he accepts.

It’s a game of narration. The woman with the request is his character.

The man in the painting is the author, he narrates the perverse tales. She has duties to fulfill: in the evening, at his place, she submits to the narration. He orders the poses, enforces the restraints. Her days are spent without him, since she works. And so she obeys from a distance, follows the orders that he dictates in texts.

Her duties, in the daytime: to taunt the men at her office. Early in the morning, to suck off the janitor. To eat asparagus the night before and then piss in all the wastepaper baskets. To touch herself under the table at meetings. To keep an object stuck up her butt all day long.

She loves him. He is the master: he commands. 

For each task accomplished, there’s a photo to be taken with her phone: the janitor’s glistening cock. A soiled wastepaper basket. The plug sticking out of her butt. Her face covered in saliva: all the duties of the day, fulfilled.

One night, at his place, with a leash around her neck, she serves him on all fours: she is his dog. Men arrive, guests of the man in the painting. The man in the painting is the master. The master offers them his thing: the men use her.

After hours of this, the woman is exhausted. In pieces. The men leave. The master lets the woman into his bedroom. She sits down on the edge of the bed and looks up at the painting, looks at him. She recognizes him. It’s the first time she’s seen his naked body.

The master goes into the living room. He turns on the television. It’s a documentary. There’s an orangutan smoking a cigarette. The orangutan is dependent. For ten years, the zoo’s visitors have been slipping him lit cigarettes through the bars. The master turns off the television. In the bedroom, the master joins his thing. She is sleeping.

The next morning, it rains. They wake up together. She loves him. He looks at her. She is his thing. On the skin of her cheek is a film of dry sperm. He loves her. The need to be alone leaves him, he can feel it. He kisses her. Ten days later, the master sells the painting, his portrait.

The buyer is a friend of his, a collector.

The collector is a bald man. He lives off his fortune: he travels. He has a house in the hills, where paintings hang on the walls. Portraits by the hundreds. And drawings, landscapes, interior scenes. One evening, the collector throws a party.

The guests arrive. Rich people, beautiful people. The man in the painting is there with his thing. The man in the painting introduces his thing to the collector. Everyone is drinking. The view is sublime: there are clouds in front among the hills, and down below, the sea.

Then, someone screams: two men are fighting. Brawling, they fall into the swimming pool. Blood swirls on the water. The men are fished out of the pool. One of them is the man in the painting. They are separated. The man in the painting gets in his car and drives off. He escapes.

His thing stays behind, panicked. The others try to reassure her. She drinks, she calms down. A couple offers to walk her into town, to her hotel. She goes with them, but her master isn’t there. She panics. They walk her back up to the collector’s.

All the rich, beautiful people have left. The party is over. The thing sits on the sofa with the bald collector. The bald collector tells her about the man in the painting: a widower. Newly retired. Turned away from a life of dissolution. Turned away from S&M. Aspiring to solitude. Things she already knows.

The thing asks to see the painting of the man in the painting. The collector says no, he’s sold it. She starts to cry. He calms her down. She drinks. She swims naked in the pool, where the blood no longer swirls. Finally, they sleep.

In the morning, the thing takes a bus down to the water. She stands before the sea, goes in, swims naked. The waves hit her, she swallows mouthfuls of water. She gets out, she has no towel. She dries off in the sun. On the skin of her cheek there’s a trace of salt, or a film of sand, it’s hard to say. Her rumpled clothing on the ground, the curve of her back, her gazeless stare: the signs are all there, that she wants to die.

She goes back into the water. And indeed, she drowns. They fish her out, but it’s too late. Then there’s a body at the morgue. Someone comes to identify it. The person who comes to the morgue is the man in the painting. He recognizes the body. Says its name. Signs the papers. The death notice. He is sad. He shuts himself up in his apartment. Never to come out again. 

One day, the man in the painting’s phone rings: it’s his daughter. The daughter of the man in the painting wants to see him, to know him. She grew up in his absence. 

The man in the painting accepts. Drives to where she lives, in the Ardèche. Meets her boyfriend. Their children. His grandchildren. Something nauseates him. Something about the couple, their family, nauseates him: he leaves.

The daughter of the man in the painting is devastated. Abandoned by her father a second time, she falls into depression. The boyfriend of the daughter of the man in the painting worries for her. They stop talking. One morning, the boyfriend leaves with their children. She stays behind in the house. She starts to write. It’s a story of animals, of hunters and adventurers traveling up a river. One evening, drunk, she burns all the pages and leaves the house.

She walks into the forest. She has no headlamp. Soon, she can’t see anything. She falls asleep on the cold ground. By morning, she is almost dead. She calls her boyfriend: he doesn’t answer. She dies. Five days later, she is found by some people out walking. At the funeral, her father, the man in the painting, is there. He cannot cry.

The father of the dead girl starts driving back home. He stops at a gas station. In the gas station restroom, he runs very hot water over his face. He buys candy. He reads the newspaper. It’s there that he is able to cry, with his mouth full, chewing Tagadas.

The father of the dead girl arrives home, pushes the living room furniture flush against the walls: he opens up the space. He walks into town, buys oil paints, jars, canvas. He returns home. He starts to paint. At first only smudges, smears, blocks of color. Things of that nature. 

One day, a shape takes on its own presence, he insists: it’s a face. The next day, the father recognizes the face inside the rectangle of the canvas: it’s his own, vaguely. He insists. Gives the face a big nose, wounded eyes: there, he recognizes himself. When he’s finished painting, the father starts to drink. He is drunk. He is happy.

One morning, the father of the dead girl calls the collector and invites him to come see the paintings. The collector comes, looks, leaves without buying anything. The father returns to the workshop. He insists.

One night, the painter sabotages the canvas with words, with phrases he writes across it. The words cover the canvas. He insists. He insists and from now on, when he paints, the words cover the entire canvas. He writes. In the end, there is nothing left of the painted image. The canvas is nothing more than an object made of words, of terrible phrases in big block letters.

Then the painter copies the phrases into a notebook. He sends the notebook to his grandchildren.

After a week, the father of the grandchildren responds. The painter takes his car and drives to the Ardèche. They meet each other.

The father of the grandchildren, in his grief, has also started to paint. The painter asks to see the father of the grandchildren’s paintings. The father of the grandchildren shows them to him: they’re black monochromes. In a certain light, at a slant, you can see, drawn in very fine pencil, the shapes of floating bodies. Effigies, perhaps. 

The painter names a price. The father of the grandchildren agrees. They shake hands. That’s the end of chapter one.

This translated extract of the novel TU OUVRES LES YEUX TU VOIS LE TITRE (Le Nouvel Attila, 2017) is published with the permission of Arno Calleja and Le Nouvel Attila.  

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Arno Calleja is a poet, novelist, and dramaturg who has published eight books of poetry and prose, most recently the novel La rivière draguée (Editions Vanloo, 2021). A book-length poem entitled Le blanc de l'oeil and a novel entitled Le Mal appliquée are forthcoming in 2025. He lives in Aix-en-Provence, teaches writing workshops throughout the south of France, and regularly collaborates with theatre companies. 

Arno Calleja is on Instagram @arnocalleja

Katie Shireen Assef is a writer and translator of French and Italian living in Marseille, France. She is currently reading all of Fleur Jaeggy.

Katie Shireen is on Instagram @katie_shireen