Violette Leduc - Thérèse and Isabelle

“Eleven o’clock,” Isabelle said.

We wanted to hear the impact and the dying away of the school clock’s eleven strokes. I stared at words on the first page without seeing anything. She took back my book, turned off the light.

Isabelle pulled me backward, she laid me down across the eiderdown, lifted me, held me in her arms: she was releasing me from a world I had never lived in to launch me into one I could not yet inhabit. With her lips she parted mine, moistened my clenched teeth. The fleshiness of her tongue frightened me: the foreign sex did not enter. I waited, withdrawn, contemplative. The lips wandered over my lips: a dusting of petals. My heart was beating too loudly and I wanted to listen to this seal of sweetness, this soft new tracing. Isabelle is kissing me, I tell myself. She was drawing a circle around my mouth, she encircled my trouble, put a cool kiss at each corner, she dived down to place two notes, returned, rested. Beneath their lids my eyes were wide with astonishment, the thundering of the conch shells too vast. Isabelle continued: we descended knot by knot into a night beyond the school’s night, beyond the night of the town and of the tram depot. She had made her honey on my lips, the sphinxes had gone to sleep once more. I realized that I had been missing her even before we met. She listened to all she gave me, she kissed condensation on a window. Isabelle tossed away her hair under which we had sheltered.

“Do you think she’s asleep?” Isabelle asked.

“The monitor?”

“She’s asleep,” Isabelle decided.

“She’s asleep,” I agreed.

“You’re shivering. Take off your nightgown, come here.”

She drew back the covers.

“Come without the light,” Isabelle said.

She stretched out against the partition, in her bed, at ease. I took off my gown, I felt too new standing on the carpet of an ancient world. I had to rush to her straight away for the ground would not support me. I lay down on the edge of the mattress, ready to creep away like a thief.

“You are cold. Come closer,” said Isabelle.

A sleeping girl coughed, tried to divide us.

Already she is holding me back, already I was being held back, already we tormented each other, but the joyful foot that was touching mine, the ankle rubbing against my ankle, reassured. My nightgown tickled me while we embraced and swayed together. We had stopped, we had returned to memories of the dormitory, we listened to the night. Isabelle turned on the light: she wanted to see my face. I took the light from her. Lifted by a great wave, Isabelle slipped into bed, rose, plunged her face to mine, hugged me tightly. The roses were fraying from the belt she put around me. I put the same belt around her. And yet I wavered. I did not dare.

“The bed mustn’t squeak,” she said.

I looked for a cool place in the pillow, as if it were there that the bed would not squeak; I found a pillow of blond hair. Isabelle gathered me to her.

We embraced again, we wanted to engulf each other. We had cast off our families, the world, time, certainty. Clasping her against my gaping open heart, I wanted to draw Isabelle inside. Love is an exhausting invention. Isabelle, Thérèse, I pronounced in my head, getting used to the magical simplicity of our two names.

She swaddled my shoulders in the ermine of her arm, placed my hand in the channel between her breasts, on the fabric of her nightgown. Enchantment of my hand beneath hers, of my neck, my shoulders clothed by her arm. Yet my face was alone, my eyelids growing cold. Isabelle knew it. Trying to warm me up all over, her tongue danced at my teeth. I closed up, barricaded myself inside my mouth. She waited: this is how she taught me to open myself, to blossom. She was my body’s secret muse. Her tongue, her little flame, charmed my blood, my flesh. I responded, provoked, fought, tried to be more violent than she. The slap of lips, the hiss of saliva became nothing to us. We labored hard, but as we slowed once more, in unison, grew careful, the draught grew richer. After so much saliva passed between them, our lips parted in spite of us. Isabelle dropped into the hollow of my shoulder.

“A train,” she said, so as to catch her breath.

Something is crawling in my belly. I am frightened: there is an octopus in my belly.

Isabelle drew a childish mouth shape on my lips with her finger. The finger dropped from my lips to my neck. I seized it, drew it along my eyelashes:

“They are yours,” I told her.

Isabelle is silent. Isabelle does not move. If she’s asleep, it’s over. Isabelle has returned to her ways. I don’t believe in her anymore. I have to go. Her box is no longer mine. I cannot get up. We have not finished. I don’t know anything but I know we haven’t finished. If she’s asleep, it is abduction. Isabelle drives me away while she sleeps. Make her not sleep, make it so the night will not end our night. Isabelle is not asleep!

She lifted my arm, she nuzzled at my armpit. My hips were growing pale. I felt a cold pleasure. I was not used to receiving so much. I listened to what she took and what she gave, I shimmered with gratitude: I suckled her. Isabelle threw herself elsewhere. She smoothed my hair, she stroked the midnight in my hair and the midnight trickled down my cheeks. She stopped, marked an interval. Forehead to forehead, we listened to the swirl, we abandoned ourselves to the silence, gave ourselves to it.

A caress is to a shiver as dusk is to a lightning flash. Isabelle shone a rake of light from my shoulder all the way to my wrist, ran her five-fingered reflector along my neck, over my nape, behind me. I was following her hand, I saw through half-closed eyes a neck, a shoulder, an arm that were not my neck, my shoulder, my arm. She ravished my ear as she had ravished my mouth with her mouth. The move was cynical, the sensation singular. I froze, I was frightened by this refinement of animality. Isabelle took me again, held me still by the hair, began again. The icy fingering shocked me, Isabelle’s serenity reassured.

She leant out of the bed and opened a drawer in her night table. I seized her hand:

“A lace! Why a shoelace?”

“I’m tying up my hair. Be quiet or you’ll get us caught.”

Isabelle was tightening the knot, preparing herself.

She whom I awaited had come prepared. I was listening to what is huge, what is alone: the heart. A small blueish egg fell from her lips where she had left me, where she took me up again. She opened the collar of my nightgown, confirmed my shoulder’s curve with her forehead, with her cheek. I accepted the wonders she was imagining on the curve of my shoulder. She was giving me a lesson in humility. I took fright. I am flesh and blood, I am alive. I am not an idol.

“Not so much!” I begged.

She closed my collar.

“Am I too heavy for you?” she asked gently.

“Don’t leave. .”

I wanted to clasp her in my arms but I didn’t dare. The clock spat out quarter hour after quarter hour; Isabelle was tracing a snail with her finger in that poor little space we have beneath our earlobes. She was tickling me in spite of herself. It was bizarre.

“Harder,” I begged.

She took my head in her hands as if I had been beheaded, she drove her tongue into my mouth. She wanted us wasted, lacerating. We were tearing each other to pieces with stone needles. The kiss slowed in my guts, it vanished, a hot current in the sea.

“Again.”

“For ages.”

We stopped kissing, lay down and, phalanx to phalanx, we charged our finger bones with what we didn’t know to say to each other.

Isabelle coughed and our interlaced fingers went silent.

“Let yourself go,” she said.

She kissed the points of my collar, the red braid on my nightgown, she molded the bounty of our shoulders. Her careful hand traced lines over my lines, curves upon my curves. I glimpsed the halo of my revived shoulder, I listened to the light in her caress.