A LAST GOODBYE: QUAND MOURUT DAVID
BY GORRIT GOSLINGA

The following apparently true story by Dutch teacher Gorrit Goslinga (1949-2009), set in the French département of the Gard, appeared in Koinos magazine, issue 9, 1^st Quarter 1996, pp. 9-12, published by the Amikejo Foundation in Amsterdam. In view of the author’s description here and in an article in Koinos issue 3 (1993) as having happened just after he was driven out of Sri Lanka by the civil war there, it probably happened in 1987.[1]

The drawing accompanied the original article. The photos accompanied the author’s related article, “The Rocher de la Morgue”, in Koinos issue 3 (1993), p.7.

Among my effects there is a short note in schoolish handwriting. It reads CHORLIE David, 131 Rue de Couroquet, 38000 Nimes. The street does not exist, as I established on the first occasion when I happened to be in the capital of Gard. Post codes beginning with 38 belong to the department of Jura, far from Nimes. And David Chorlie doesn’t exist. At least not any more. I have never heard anything more of him, or of the threat that surrounded his disappearence. In the story Rock of the Morgue (KOINOS 3), I promised to tell David's story. It took a long time before I succeeded in getting it down on paper. Now that human deficiency has gradually elbowed the joie de vivre from the spotlight and my series of traveller's tales is coming to an end, it would seem to form the obvious conclusion, although putting the memories into words has been painful.

I’d left Sri Lanka early that summer. I had been lightly wounded as the result of a bomb attack, impeded by riots and a curfew, and finally had found that my apartment had been looted by a pair of boys I had thought were my friends. Those were only the high points of three weeks of pure misery, about which nobody should think that I will ever write. I was completely wiped of the map. After several days back in Holland, I decided to go back to the Ceze valley, where I had already camped in earlier summers, to recover. It was a Mediterranean paradise of several square miles, comprised of four adjoining naturist campings. The temperature was no less than that on the coast of Ceylon, but infinitely drier. It hadn’t rained since April. All the grass was withered, and the characteristic campfires were strictly forbidden. 

I sat in the shadow on one of the lower platforms of the Rocher de la Morgue, watching the little beach on the other side where families and groups of youths were enjoying themselves in and near the small stream. Unlike July, when Dutch filled the air, now, in mid-August, it was only the sound of French that reached me. One figure especially caught my eye. A boy of about fifteen sat apart under a bush by the water, smoking, his feet in the water, his bare buttocks in the burning sand, his tousled, sun-bleached hair waving in the light breeze. A green bath towel lay casually next to him. He was just as much alone as I. 

Once I had noticed him, I seemed to see him everywhere. He was frequently walking around without any discernable purpose. Sometimes he wore his towel slung around his hips, but generally he was carrying it in his hand, in which he was also holding his swim trunks (which he never put on), and, hidden in its folds, a pack of shag tobacco. We began to nod to each other in greeting. I realized that I found him perhaps not beautiful, but certainly attractive. His olive body, a half-tint lighter only in the loins, was slim to the point of being skinny. He was the opposite of muscular; the flowing lines lent something feminine to his appearance. That was belied, however, by his slender hips and his prominent member, with sparse hair at its root and constantly changing in shape and length. But even more striking were his eyes: large, Bambi-brown and sad.

Salut. He sat down next to me on the beach, uninvited, in the furious sun, where I sat to dry off. What’s more, he offered me his hand formally, and then, without further ado, began to rattle away to me in French. I interrupted him to say that I was Dutch, at which he, only momentarily disconcerted, switched into reasonable English salted here and there with French words. The tempo was now calm enough. I answered him in French, with some words of English scattered in, and this became our lingua franca. 

His story pretty much came down to this: he couldn’t get along with his parents. Particularly not with his so-called stepfather, actually just his mother’s boyfriend. He is not my father, he emphasized time and again. He could get along with his mother reasonably well, but she never stood up to her boyfriend. He was given little or no pocket money. What annoyed him worst was that he was forbidden to smoke. He had an idea: could I loan him 50 francs (then about ten dollars). Although I definitely found his presence, and the fact that he had sought me out, pleasant, I couldn’t help feeling a bit uneasy. Had my recent experience in Sri Lanka made me unnecessarily distrustful? Playing for time, I replied that I had absolutely no money with me. It was in my car, parked at a camping area about a half-hour’s walk away. And if he did get so little money, how was he ever going to pay back what he borrowed? He promptly answered that he certainly could get money from his own father. That might take some time, though. But he was also willing to do chores for the 50 francs. Could he come along to my tent? It didn’t matter that it was a long walk; he had nothing better to do. That day, after showing him where my tent was, I gave him a pack of cigarette tobacco as an “advance”. As his “security”, he wrote down his name and address, changing the eight in the postcode to a zero when I informed him that his home lay in Gard. 

When I came back from the restaurant that evening, the neighbours told me that a boy had waited for me for a long time. Between the inner and outer walls of the tent I found a half-full bottle of mineral water and half a package of chocolate cookies that hadn't been there before. The following day David even told me that he had lay down to sleep in my tent, a remark that did not leave me unmoved. That day he cleaned up my car, tent and camp table, and I made a couple of photos of him while he worked. He also let me take a couple of portraits of him while sitting in my folding chair. After that he stood straight up, with a corner of his bath towel covering his abdomen, and told me to back off and take a shot. Before I could press the shutter, he purposefully removed the only thing that had covered him. I wondered if he saw posing as a part of his work. Nothing, however, was said in so many words. I felt that people were watching us. 

Our time together lasted six days. Now, more than six years later, it seems much longer. And it wasn’t really six days. One day he wasn’t anywhere to be found. He had done le speléo (spelunking), he told me the next day. Had I missed him? It is strange, but as vivid as the beginning and the terrible end of our time together may be in my mind, so the memories of the days in between are fragmentary. Once we climbed onto the raft that lay anchored in the river. A little boy who knew him addressed him by another name. He corrected him: I’d rather be called David. He didn’t believe in that other name. He told me that David was officially his middle name; I preferred to believe that he saw me as his Jonathan. On another occasion - or maybe it was the same day - he showed me off to his parents (for that’s what he called them then). His mother’s boyfriend, lumbering and hairy as a Neanderthal, looked so completely different from David that I began to believe his story, almost in spite of myself. But then he told them that I was a Belgian, and named a different camping ground as the one where I was staying - while doing so casting me a glance which begged for my silence - and all my doubts came flooding back. 

Perhaps the most beautiful moment was the time that I had packed all his things in my backpack. Free of everything, he walked barefoot over the hot pebbles of a piece of no man’s land. He said he loved it that way, being entirely natural. When I am free, I am always totally naked, he shouted. How did it happen then, that he was not equally tanned all over? He had gone hiking through the interior of Corsica, and there he had had to wear pants. Then he broke into song: My name is David and I walk in the... Qu’est-ce que la prairie en Anglais?

In the morning we sat together on the Rocher de la Morgue, and he was serious. I can’t take it any more. Let’s leave here together. Can’t you take me to my father? He’s also gay. We had never talked about sexual preference; there had been one time, though, when I had said yes when he asked if I found him beautiful. I’m fifteen; it’s legal, he had added, unasked. I hadn’t responded. I could see people looking at us everywhere. He had planned his flight out in detail. I can be outside the reception desk at your campground very early in the morning. There is no barrier in the road, and they don’t lock the gate at night. I asked him if he had any identity papers on which to travel. No, because I’m only fourteen. That’s how plans for the great escape ended.  

The end came like a bolt out of the blue. We were sitting by my tent, and David had been pressing me again for some money. He sat next to me on my air mattress with his towel around him. I decided that he could do some shopping for me, and at the same time buy some tobacco for himself. He stood up, directly beside me, and loosened the towel. For just a second I had a close-up view of a staggeringly big hard on. Then the towel was tight around his waist again with the bank note in its folds. He set off in the direction of the cantine but didn’t get more than thirty feet. Suddenly his mother and her friend appeared. He’s got an erection, the mother screamed, grabbing David by the arm. Apparently misunderstanding her, or carrying out a previous plan, the man began to make photos of me. I heard David scream, repeatedly, that nothing had happened. That was true: aside from the handshake with which it all began, we had never touched each other. Within moments other people gathered around us; someone addressed me in Dutch, and I was trying to talk in three languages at the same time and couldn’t make myself understood in any of them. I tried to ask something, but got only threats in response. Then suddenly it was all over, and I stood alone a few yards from my tent; I have no idea how David disappeared. He could just as well have been taken up into heaven as been swallowed up by the earth. 

That night I didn’t sleep. The next morning it appeared that they had moved out of their rented caravan, leaving an empty hole in the middle of the high season. In the afternoon, the temperature dropped by ten degrees, and a cold wind sprang up. A misty rain blew in that evening.