Thérèse and Isabelle Read online

  “Don’t listen to her,” she said.

  The monitor was urinating in her chamber pot.

  “She will go back to sleep,” I said.

  Isabelle rubbed her toe against my instep, a sign of friendship.

  “She’s gone back to sleep,” said Isabelle.

  “If she was listening for us . . .”

  “She’s a pain.”

  I met Isabelle’s mouth with mine; I was afraid of the monitor; I drank down our saliva. It was an orgy of dangers. We had had darkness in our mouths and in our throats, we knew that peace had returned.

  “Press me down,” she said.

  “The springs . . . they’ll squeak . . . we’ll be heard.”

  We were talking among the dense foliage of summer nights.

  I was pressing, blotting out myriads of alveoli.

  “Am I heavy?”

  “You will never be heavy. I’m a little cold,” she said.

  My fingers saw her wan shoulders. I flew away, with my beak I picked up wisps of wool caught in thorny hedges, I laid them around Isabelle’s shoulders. I was drumming on her bones with my downy hammers, my kisses tumbled down one after the other, I launched into an avalanche of tenderness. My hands relieved my tired lips: I molded the sky around her shoulder. Isabelle sat up, she took my wrists, she fell back down and I fell with her into the hollow of her shoulder. My cheek rested in a contour.

  “My treasure.”

  I was talking to the broken outline.

  “Yes,” said Isabelle.

  She said, “I’m coming,” but hesitated.

  “I’m coming,” Isabelle said again.

  She tied her hair back, her elbow swept over my face. I waited.

  A hand came to rest on my neck: a winter sun whitened my hair. The hand was tracing veins, downward. The hand stopped. My pulse was beating against Isabelle’s hand, its mount of Venus. The hand climbed again: it drew widening circles, it dropped away into nowhere, it was extending the waves of sweetness around my left shoulder while my right shoulder on the pillow was abandoned to the night striated with the other girls’ breathing. I was learning the velvet nap of my bones, the aura of my flesh, the infinities in my shapes. The hand was lingering, bringing dreams of lawn shawls. The sky pleads charity when your shoulder is caressed: the sky was pleading. The hand was climbing back, fixing a wimple of velour up to my chin, the persuasive hand descending again, pressing, replicating curves. In the end it was the pressure of friendship. I took Isabelle in my arms, I quivered with gratitude. I smoothed her hair, she smoothed mine.

  “Can you see me?” asked Isabelle.

  “I can see you. I want to give too.”

  “Listen!”

  “. . .”

  “No, nothing . . . They’re sleeping and those who aren’t won’t tell on us.”

  “I want to give you . . .”

  She cut me short, she slipped under the covers, she kissed my short curls.

  “Horses,” a girl cried out.

  “Don’t be frightened. She’s dreaming. Give me your hand,” said Isabelle.

  I was crying with joy.

  “What’s wrong? Turn on the light.”

  “No, don’t. No, no . . .”

  “But you’re crying?” she asked, alarmed.

  “I love you: I’m not crying.”

  I dried my eyes.

  The hand undressed my arm, stopped near the vein, around the crook of my elbow, grew promiscuous among its patterns, followed them down to the wrist, to the tips of the nails, resleeved my arm in a long suede glove, fell from my shoulder like an insect, perched at my armpit, rubbed at the tuft of hair. My face tensed, I listened to my arm as it answered the adventurer. Willing persuasion, the hand brought my arm, my armpit, into the world. The hand wandered over the babbling of white bushes, over the last frosts on the prairies, over the first buds’ oozing. Spring, which had been chirruping with impatience inside my skin, burst out in lines, in curves, in parabolas. Stretched out on the darkness, Isabelle was tying ribbons around my feet, unfolding the binding of my turmoil. Hands flat on the mattress, I was carrying out the same spellbinding labor as she. She would kiss what she had caressed, then, with her light hand, she would ruffle and flick with her feather duster of perversity. The octopus in my guts was quivering, Isabelle was drinking at my right breast, at my left. I was drinking with her, I suckled on shadows when her mouth moved away. The fingers returned, encircling, weighing the breast’s warmth; the fingers finished in my belly, hypocritical wrecks. A tribe of slaves all sharing Isabelle’s face was fanning my forehead, my hands.

  She knelt on the bed:

  “Do you love me?”

  I led the hand up to those rare tears of joy.

  Her cheek wintered between my thighs. I turned my flashlight on her, saw her fanned-out hair, saw my belly raining silk. The flashlight slipped, Isabelle veered into a new tack.

  We seemed to be marrying with fangs in our skin, horsehairs in our hands: we were reeling on the teeth of a rake.

  “Harder, harder,” she said.

  We bit each other, we thrashed at the shadows.

  We slowed, we came back with our plumes of smoke, with black wings at our heels. Isabelle leapt out of the bed.

  I wondered why Isabelle was redoing her hair.

  With one hand she laid me down flat on the bed, with the other she tormented me with the yellow light.

  I hid behind my arms:

  “I’m not pretty. You’re intimidating me,” I said.

  She saw our future in my eyes, she was looking an instant ahead, she was keeping it in her blood.

  She got back into bed, she lusted for me with gold-sifter’s fingers.

  I was flattering her; I preferred failure to preparations. Making love with her mouth was enough for me: I was afraid and I called for help with my finger stumps. Two fine paintbrushes were wandering among my folds. My heart was beating in a molehill, my head was full of compost. Suddenly everything changed. Two alternating fingers were attending on me. How masterly her caress, how inevitable her caress . . . Closed, my eyes were listening: the finger grazed my pearl, the finger waited. I wanted to be capacious, to help it.

  The regal and diplomatic finger was advancing, withdrawing, choking me, beginning to enter, offending the octopus deep inside, bursting the cloud of unease, stopping, starting up, waiting close to viscera. I was clenching, I enclosed the flesh of my flesh, its marrow and its vertebrae. I rose and fell back again. The finger that had not hurt me, the finger come in gratitude came out. The flesh ungloved it.

  “Do you love me?” I asked.

  I was hoping for confusion.

  “You mustn’t shout,” said Isabelle.

  I crossed my arms over my face, I listened beneath my eyes squeezed tight.

  Two fingers entered, two pirates. Isabelle was tearing open and beginning the deflowering. They were oppressing me; they wanted, my flesh did not want.

  “My love . . . You’re hurting me.” She put her hand over my mouth.

  “I won’t complain,” I said.

  The gag was a humiliation.

  “It hurts. It must. It hurts . . .”

  I gave myself to the night and without wanting to I helped the fingers.

  “You can, you can . . .”

  I leant forward so as to tear myself, to make Isabelle’s fingers crack, to be closer to her face, to be near my injured sex: she threw me onto the pillow.

  She was pounding, pounding, pounding . . . We could hear loud slaps of flesh on flesh. She was putting out the virgin eye. I was in pain: I was approaching freedom but I couldn’t see what was happening.

  We listened to the sleeping girls, we sobbed for breath. Her fingers had left a line of fire.

  “Let’s rest,” she said.

  My recollection of the two fingers grew sweeter, my swollen flesh began to recover, bubbles of love rose up. But Isabelle was there again, the fingers turned faster and faster. Where had this mounting wave come from? Smooth
wrappings inside my knees. My heels were drugged, my visionary flesh was dreaming.

  “I can’t go on.”

  “Quiet.”

  I lost myself with her in this tender gymnastics.

  The fingers were too short, the knuckles were obstructing our fever, the knuckles would go no further.

  “I want to,” Isabelle grieved.

  The springs creaked, again we could hear each slap of flesh.

  “You’re hot.”

  “I want, I want you!”

  Isabelle crashed into my arms. The sweat running down her face, her hair, her throat, wet my face, my hair, my throat. Her last gift after the deflowering.

  “You’re calling me? You want me?” Isabelle asked.

  She returned again, obeying already and to the point of paroxysm.

  The fingers’ whirling reached as far as my languid knees but they did not bring the unearthly wave I was expecting. The pleasure was approaching. It was only an echo. The slow fingers left me. I was greedy for her presence.

  “Your hand, your face . . . Come closer.”

  “I’m tired.”

  Make her come, make her lend me her shoulder or indeed let her borrow mine, make it so her face is near mine. I must trade my innocence for hers. She is out of breath: she is resting. I have to move to hear her living. Isabelle coughed as if she were coughing in a library.

  I sat up with infinite care, I felt completely new. My sex, my meadow.

  “Say good night to me.”

  Isabelle jumped.

  “Say good night . . .”

  I turned the light on. I had seen the blood, I had seen my reddened hair. I turned it off.

  She sat up on her knees in the bed and, naturally, I presented my curly-haired nest so she could bury her face in it. What could I say to her while her cheek was cradled there? She was spoiling me.

  “I want to give,” I said.

  “Be quiet.”

  “I want to give.”

  I turned the light on, looked down at my reddened hair.

  “I’m ashamed,” I said.

  “Ashamed of what?”

  “Of the blood.”

  “You’re silly.”

  I went up to the curtain, I crossed one leg over the other, I posed, I turned the light on myself. I was naked: I wanted to be artificial.

  “You’re upsetting me,” said Isabelle.

  She stood up.

  She was coming. She was hiding her face in her hands, her hair flowing down all on one side.

  “Oh.”

  I welcomed her into my arms. With my teeth I picked the dried blood from under her fingernails. I put her to bed.

  I laid my little girl down, I lifted her head, patted the pillow, smoothed, freshened the bed.

  “You are looking after me,” said Isabelle.

  I was warming her foot on my breast. Isabelle was giving me a child. Now we would be making love, now I would be laying him back in the cradle. I have never wanted children other than the people I have loved. For me, they were love.

  “I’m going, Isabelle.”

  She was holding me back by the hips, with all her strength.

  “I’ll scream if you go.”

  I stayed.

  “More supple,” she said to the hand that was no longer mine, that she was guiding.

  I entered the old refuge.

  “You’re nodding off,” she said.

  My finger was dreaming, I was quietly wandering.

  She put her arm on mine, I tingled with pleasure as our arms met.

  You have to remove yourself in order to give. I wanted to become a machine that was not mechanical. My life was her pleasure. I looked beyond Isabelle, I was working inside the belly of the night. We drew into accord as we vanished together. The moan. She sat up, she frightened me. Already the shadow of that pleasure, already. Was she dying or indeed living? The rhythm would tell. I followed everything in her; with my mind’s eye I could see the light in her flesh. In my head there was another Thérèse, her legs open, thrown up to the sky, receiving all that I was giving to Isabelle.

  “Come and rest,” she said.

  I became a child again.

  Living, stretched out, floating, parted, in contemplation, we could believe in eternal rest. The brook of solitude was so cool:

  “I want to tell you . . .”

  “You’re happy. Don’t question it,” said Isabelle.

  We had put our nightgowns back on.

  I said:

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m just living. And you?”

  “I was listening to your heart. Such a prison . . . Are you listening to it too?”

  “I don’t feel sad,” said Isabelle.

  I turned to face her:

  “You’re not sleeping?”

  “I was seeing us in a cinema. I was misbehaving, not being good,” said Isabelle.

  “In a cinema . . . That is strange . . . It’s possible that reminds me of something. Yet it isn’t a memory. It’s as if I had been to this cinema that I don’t know,” I said.

  “It won’t happen. We aren’t free,” said Isabelle.

  “Let’s run away.”

  “I’ve no money.”

  “Me neither. We’ll sell what can be sold, then we’ll take the train, let’s try. We won’t starve to death.”

  “We shan’t run away. We have to be here. We can have every night to ourselves if we are careful. Do you hate the school?”

  “Not at all. I’m afraid they’ll make me leave . . . Will you see me between your classes? Say, will you see me?”

  She didn’t reply.

  Two rosettes became one.

  “Who told you?”

  “I’ve always known,” said Isabelle.

  “I’m hungry.”

  She opened the drawer in her night table, without looking away she pushed a bar of dusty chocolate into my mouth.

  “Eat,” said Isabelle, “eat and calm down.”

  My cheek bumped against the flashlight on the pillow.

  One after the other I lit up the palms of her hands, far from our union.

  “I need you,” I said.

  “I need you,” said Isabelle.

  “Yes. Yes,” I moaned.

  “Someone’s there,” said Isabelle, calmly.

  She stood up, looked out into the passage.

  “No one. No one was there,” said Isabelle.

  She leaned over the bed. Isabelle was not going to lie down again.

  She was frolicking between my thighs, she drew alarming figure eights, drawing them bigger and bigger, she was stroking as she bent over me.

  Three fingers entered, three guests that my flesh swallowed up.

  So she came back to bed, like the acrobat bending low who carries his partner balanced on his fingertip.

  “You aren’t listening to me,” said Isabelle.

  “I’m listening. You’re telling me little things, you have come back, you are inside me. The rain . . . Oh, yes . . . yes! I don’t hate it. It’s a friend. Yes, yes . . . Let’s die together, Isabelle, die while you are me and I am you. I’ll stop thinking that we will be parted. Let’s die, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t want to. I want this. I want to be deep inside you. Dying . . . that’s too stupid.”

  “If I had leprosy would you abandon me?”

  “I don’t have it, you don’t have it, we haven’t got it. Why are you turning the light on?”

  Isabelle took her hand away, she crossed her arms over her face.

  “Would you leave me?”

  She shrugged.

  “Look at me,” I said.

  “I’m looking with my eyes closed.”

  “If I were to die tomorrow would you stay alive?”

  She turned to me. She appeared within a frost-edged bramble each time she turned around like this.

  “You would stay alive. You’re not answering.”

  Isabelle pressed her hands together. Impulses, twitches w
ere flying across her face: her spirit was in ferment.

  “It’s a difficult question,” said Isabelle.

  She would not open her eyes.

  “Answer!”

  “These questions are too big.”

  Isabelle lifted her eyes. Now she was staring at me:

  “Do you really want to die with me when you say that? Truly? You would really like us to die at the same time?”

  Isabelle threw back her head. She was thinking hard.

  “I don’t know anymore,” I said.

  “Give me your hand,” she said. “No . . . don’t give me your hand. Not now.”

  “You are so beautiful . . . I really would like to but I couldn’t. I can’t imagine you dead. You’re so beautiful . . .”

  “Think about us. Could you?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know anymore. It is good to be alive. And you? What about you?”

  “Yet if we don’t want to be parted,” said Isabelle.

  “You could?”

  “We shall have to come around to it,” said Isabelle. “You couldn’t now, but I’m not cross with you. I never thought I would ask that of you. From a cliff . . . one night . . . together . . .”

  “It’s awful, what you’re saying.”

  “How easily you frighten! With you, it wouldn’t scare me.”

  “Don’t think about it, Isabelle.”

  “I told you: these questions are too big.”

  “You are beautiful. I don’t want to lose you.”

  Isabelle turned back to the partition but I said it again into her hair, to her eyes, that she was beautiful. She hated the tinsel of cheap compliments. She closed up, she was far away.

  “Lie down, take up the whole space. Be beautiful,” I said.

  Isabelle straightened:

  “Listen: it’s three in the morning. I don’t want to leave you.”

  She clung to my neck. The night had betrayed us. I adored all that was vulnerable.

  “Take the flashlight. I’ll do your hair. Would you like me to?”

  She shrugged, indulgent:

  “Do you hear? It’s raining.”

  It was only the last sighs of a soft-hearted night.

  I picture her face in fantasy: her hair tumbles down over her shoulders but she is not wretched. Her little nose will never grow old. The earthworms will be sated but her little nose will never change. This will be the tomb’s treasure, this is the perfect little bone. How austere her straight little nose is.