Jean-Philippe Toussaint: The Truth about Marie

Our bodies entangled and our eyes closed, we caressed each other frantically, but we weren’t kissing, we couldn’t kiss, a sort of ban prevented us from doing so, an unspoken rule, imperious and invisible, too many things were converging at this moment, too many emotions, such as pain, concern, and love, all mixing together in our hearts, there must have been a slight lull, a pause to catch our breath, she swept a loose curl from her face, and I saw then a wild gleam in her eyes, a look of freedom, of lust. Her back arched against the wall, her thighs bare under her white T-shirt, Marie was challenging me with her eyes — there was a sort of defiance in her gaze, something taunting, sexual, perverse, as if willing and ready for anything. She leaned back against the wall as if to invite me, and I pressed my body to hers, feeling her pubic hairs through the threadbare fabric of her T-shirt. She had nothing on under her T-shirt, and I slid my hand up her shirt, felt the smooth skin of her quivering stomach under my fingers, our bodies fused together, caught in the moment, she moaned as she dug her face passionately into my neck, her thighs were hot, moist, I caressed her stomach and slid a finger into her vagina, gently, and a shiver, hot, wet, sweet, ran up my spine.

It lasted only a minute before Marie slipped away gracefully, she slid out of my arms and was gazing at me tenderly in the half-light. Tears had run down her cheeks when I was holding her, and she hadn’t tried to hold them back, nor had she dried her eyes, they were silent tears, almost invisible, tears that had streamed down her cheeks as naturally as a heartbeat or a breath of air. Marie, stunning, her eyes welling with tears in the half-light, Marie, torn between contradictory impulses, a passionate desire competing with her self-restraint, Marie who’d had as much need to give herself to me as to keep her distance, Marie who’d needed to hold me as tight as possible for comfort and consolation and who’d put up no fight against the physical desire she felt rising in her when I’d taken her in my arms, Marie who’d drawn me to her with that defiant look, as if challenging me to touch and caress her, no sooner had she felt all this than she broke away from my arms, whose clasp she undid with care, as though she’d simply realized the impossibility of loving each other at this moment.

I hadn’t realized it right away, not immediately, nor shortly thereafter, but much later the thought came to mind, in a flash and by chance, in a sort of panic and shock — in spite of the difficulty, impossibility even, of putting into words what had transpired, what, in the course of my life, had occurred to me in a natural sequence of silent and ineluctable facts, but which, once articulated, suddenly became incomprehensible, or shameful, as, perhaps, certain homicides evoked before an Assize Court, seemingly plausible acts when committed, become shocking, unspeakable, abstract with the passing of time and once placed under the implacable light of words — that this was the second time, that night, that I’d stuck my finger into a woman’s body.

Back in my small one-bedroom apartment on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas, the place was deserted, Marie had left. The bed was empty and unmade in the drab light from open window, its top sheet tossed on the floor, wrinkled, balled-up. I bent down to pick it up and saw then in the middle of the bed, on the bottom sheet, two or three drops of dried blood. These were not round, red or regular spots, but rather two parallel streaks, a large and a small one (the smaller was a miniscule replica of the larger), which, after some sort of contact or friction, had spread over two or three centimeters, the stain of which had almost disappeared, its edges hardly discernible, two streaks ingrained in the white cotton of the sheet, my bed marked by two russet dashes in the form of small and skinny cephalopods or of the armored limbs of a shellfish.

Marie, the other Marie, had told me that night, I’d understood, she’d made it clear to me, it wasn’t said explicitly when after eating we’d returned to my place on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas, but she’d kept her tiny panties on all night and I didn’t try to take them off, I’d understood without her telling me, we’d kissed on the bed when we got back, the room was broiling, we were sweating in my single bed, both of us dripping in sweat, the sheets sticking to our clammy backs, we were kissing and frolicking around in the heavy darkness of the steamy night, I was gently playing with the soft fabric of her tiny light blue silk panties, stretching and pulling at the elastic, the rain fell violently through the open window, and we were holding each other half naked in my small bed, eyes closed listening to the storm rage like those on Elba, I no longer knew where I was, nor whom I was with, sketching gestures with one Marie that I’d finish with the other, lost in love’s limited repertoire — caresses, nudity, darkness, humidity, tenderness — and it wasn’t until much later that I realized I had, on the tip of my finger, a bit of menstrual blood.

And, mentally following the trajectory of these few drops of blood on my finger, I imagined the absurd loop linking Marie to Marie this night. This blood, soon without any definable color, consistency, or viscosity, lacking any veritable material reality, as my fingers came into contact with diverse materials throughout the night, sheets, clothes, wind, fading a bit more with each contact, softening in color, before the rain washed it away completely, these few specks of blood, which although no longer materially present were nonetheless symbolically significant, had caused me to trace mentally their course from Marie’s body, their source, through all the successive places I’d passed that night, for I must have carried that mark with me everywhere I went, from my room in my small apartment on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas to the landing of my floor, down the staircase and soon onto the street, through Paris, down rue Vivienne, then rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, in the rain and lightning, as though fire and water must naturally attend the mad course of those invisible blood particles on my finger as I raced to Marie’s.

I was looking at those drops of dried blood on my bed, knowing where they came from, but, in a sort of mental confusion and daze, I associated this blood with Jean-Christophe de G., as though this were his blood, as though, in my bed, there were a few drops of Jean-Christophe de G.’s blood, blood that Jean-Christophe de G. would have shed that night in Marie’s apartment, blood belonging to him, a masculine blood — blood of drama, violence, and death — and not the feminine blood it actually was, not the delicate blood of life and femininity, but of catastrophe, and, in a sudden paroxysm of irrational fear — or lucidity — I understood then that if Jean-Christophe were to die this night, I’d have to explain why there was blood on my sheets, I’d have to defend the fact that there was human blood in my bed, this vertiginous blood at once dead and alive — this unspeakable blood — which led me to link Marie to Marie the night of Jean-Christophe de G.’s death.

Marie called me in the early afternoon to inform me of his death. Jean-Baptiste is dead, she told me (and I didn’t know what to say, having always thought his name was Jean-Christophe).

Jean-Christophe de G.’s real name was Jean-Baptiste de Ganay — I found this out a few days later when coming across his obituary in Le Monde . It offered a brief and somber account of his life. A few lines in small font with no mention of the circumstances of his death. The names of his relatives. His wife Delphine. His son Olivier. His mother Gisèle. Nothing more, the notice similar to a brief announcement. I meditated for a while on his birth date, 1960, which suddenly seemed so distant to me, lost in the past, already deeply buried in a distant twentieth century, hazy and unapproachable, another time altogether for future generations, more so than the nineteenth century for us, due to these two ludicrous numbers at the beginning of each date, this strange and incongruous 1 and 9, reminiscent of the surreal Turbigos or Almas, city districts whose numerical correspondence on the telephone pad provided the first digits of the old Parisian telephone numbers. He was a man of our time, a contemporary in his prime, and yet his date of birth already seemed strangely archaic, as though it had expired in his lifetime, a date stuck in the past, soon without any currency and patinated by time, as if from the outset it bore within itself, like a corrosive poison hidden inside, the seed of its own dissolution, its definitive disappearance in the vast rush of time.