Violette Leduc: Thérèse and Isabelle

I stopped her.

“Let me go on,” said Isabelle.

Her voice lingered, her hand sank into the covers. I felt the shape of Isabelle’s neck, shoulder, and arm along my neck, encircling my shoulder, the length of my arm.

A flower opened in every pore of my skin. I took her arm and thanked her with a purple kiss upon the veins.

“You are kind, you are good,” I said.

“You say I am good!”

“What can I do for you?”

The poverty of my vocabulary discouraged me. Isabelle’s hands were shaking, they were adjusting a muslin corselette over the fabric of my nightgown: her hands were shaking with a maniac fervor.

She sat up on the bed, seized my waist. Isabelle rubbed her cheek against mine, she told a comforting tale with her cheek. She dropped her hands to my chest. We listened to the meowing of a cat in the main courtyard.

Isabelle’s fingers opened, closed again like daisy buds, they freed breasts from rose-shaded purgatory. I was waking into spring with the babbling of lilacs under my skin.

“Come, come here again,” I said.

Isabelle stroked my hip. My skin caressed became a caress; stroked, my hip shone through my intoxicated limbs into my languid ankles. It was torture, tiny tortures, in my belly.

“I can’t go on.”

We waited, we kept a sharp lookout for the shadows.

I took her in my arms but I did not embrace her as I wanted in that narrow bed, I did not engrave her in me. A peremptory little girl appeared:

“I want, I want.”

I want what she wants, if the creeping octopus would leave me, if stars would stop shooting down my limbs. I await a flood of stones.

“Come back, come back. .”

“You aren’t helping me,” said Isabelle.

The hand advanced under the fabric. I listened to the hand’s coolness; it listened to my skin’s heat. The finger explored where the two cheeks touch. It entered the gap, came out again. Isabelle caressed the two cheeks at once with one hand. My knees, my feet were crumbling away.

“It’s too much. I tell you it’s too much.”

Indifferent, Isabelle stroked quickly, on and on.

It was torment, it was hot prickling. Isabelle fell forward onto me.

“Are you happy?”

“Yes,” I say, dissatisfied.

She slipped into bed, laid her cheek on my belly; she listened to her child, for it was there that my heart was beating. I held out my arm, reached her face, her mouth, her hair so far from mine, my body was calmly wretched:

“Come back. I’m alone.”

“. .”

The weight of the head that slipped into my crotch was frightening.

She was coming back, she was offering me a kiss with her good girl’s lips on mine.

Isabelle clawed at the fabric over my pubic hair, she entered, withdrew, while not entering and not withdrawing; she rocked me, her fingers, the fabric, the time.

“Are you happy?”

“Yes Isabelle.”

My politeness annoyed me.

Isabelle persevered differently, one monotonous finger on a single lip. My body took on the light of that finger as sand takes up water.

“Later,” she said, into my neck.

“You want me to go now? I must go back to my box?”

“You must.”

“You want us to part?”

“Yes.”

There was a storm somewhere near my heart:

“Look, it’s too early.”

“Think of this evening, think of our other evenings. You aren’t tired but soon you will be,” said Isabelle.

I stood up, focused my flashlight, I licked my lips but found none of the salt from Isabelle’s lips.

We leaned together over her watch, avoided catching each other’s gaze.

“Take care when you cross the passage.”

“I shan’t take care.”

I left.

Here you are again, you abandoned things. My bed is no longer my bed. You will do my bidding, things, otherwise I shall crush you. I have a museum of relics in the box opposite mine. She said it’s enough. Now is a night of obstacles. Her smell belongs to me. I have lost her smell. Give me back her smell. Is she sleeping? Yes, she is asleep inside the tomb that is her bed, she is savoring the oblivion of her pillow. She is sending me away: she has taken all of me. I cannot rest on what no longer exists. I hurl my flashlight away, I worry at the bars of my bed, I bite the soap, chew the dental paste, scratch myself, punish myself.

I turn on the light, turn it off, turn on, turn off. I signal even through her sleep that I’m awake, that I am waiting for her. I turn on, turn off, I want to shut off her breathing. I want to see her again.

I left my box, stopped there before her curtain, my hope fixed on the orange light between my fingers.

Her name, my devotion.

The other girls and the monitor stuff themselves with darkness and with absence. I stay watching, I scorn all that.

“Are you sleeping?” I whisper, wanting the reassurance.

Words extracted from the silence and delivered into shadows.

I go into her box, approach the cadaver.

Blind and deaf, Isabelle plots, looking upon a world with the eyes of sleep. The obsession with rest resides behind the sleeper’s forehead. Like the last of the magi, I lean over her. I try but I dare not wake her. A sleeper never completes her work. I turn out the light: the silence lies close on my temples. I turn it on: the sleeper is lying on her back, she makes an offering of her face to the ceiling, she poses on the pillow like a invalid suffering even in her sleep, she drags along her sleeper’s inheritance which we shall never know. I sit down at the foot of the bed, on the soft eiderdown that slips off, I stare at her, I do not decipher. I touch my own hand — for that of the deeply breathing statue. She is sleeping without an eiderdown. She will get cold. So this is not merely a rock upon a platform. I go nearer. I steal the scent of hyacinths from her sleeping mouth, I lift her, hold her to me tightly until I’m seized by a mad happiness that makes me laugh. I laugh. Isabelle awakens at my lips. What a Christmas. . I have waited so long for the opening of those lids, wished so much for my rebirth in her eyes.

“Didn’t you go?”

“I came back.”

She seems to be reflecting. No. She is resting, prolonging her cure of oblivion in my eyes. She speaks:

“Were you there watching me?”

“What? Say it quickly.”

“Nothing. Tomorrow. .”

“It is tomorrow. Say it, say it.”

“Nothing.”

She falls back on the pillow. Refreshed Isabelle abandons my arms, my hands. The nonchalante will go back to sleep.

“Don’t disappear!”

My alarm distracts her.

“Come back to my mouth,” she says.

At last she stirs, she says it into my hair, near my ear, and I turn out the light for the abyss inside a kiss.

“You sleep while I am here.”

“Was I sleeping?”

“While you were sleeping we were separated.”

Isabelle listens to me with all her soul.

“I was unhappy. You’re not sleeping now?”

“You must forgive me. I was so sleepy. And you, you haven’t slept?”

“No. I was waiting.”

“I promise I will not sleep when you are here.”

“Oh, you promise,” I said.

I hid my face in my arms.

“Are you crying?”

“I’m not crying.”

“If you cry we will be caught,” says Isabelle.

“Then we’ll be caught. So what?”

“Aren’t you looking forward to tomorrow evening?”

“Let’s run away. Tomorrow we will be free.”

“Keep your voice down,” she says.

“You don’t want to. Why?”

“Because it’s impossible.”

“I’m going for good,” I say.

I left once more.

Isabelle followed me into the passage:

“You think we’ll be able to embrace when we’ve a policeman on either side!”