Violette Leduc - Thérèse and Isabelle

“Open the door,” begged the voice.

Someone was rattling the doors.

I saw the eye that filled the hole cut high up in the lavatory door.

“My love.”

Isabelle had come from the land of deluge, of upheaval, of crisis, of devastation. She was throwing me a liberated word, a plan, she was sending me the breath of the North Sea. I had the strength to say nothing and to be proud of it.

She is waiting for me but this is not safety. The word she said is too much. We watch each other, we are paralyzed.

I threw myself into her arms.

Her lips were seeking Thérèse in my hair, at my neck, in the folds of my apron, between my fingers, on my shoulder. Oh that I could multiply myself a thousand times and give her a thousand Thérèses. I am only myself. Too few. I am not a forest. A wisp of straw in my hair, a slip of confetti in the folds of my apron, a ladybird between my fingers, soft down on my neck, a scar on my cheek will flesh me out. Why am I not the crown of a willow for her hand caressing my hair?

I framed her face:

“My love.”

I contemplated her, I was remembering her in this present, I had her beside me from last moment to last moment. When you are in love you are always on a railway platform.

“Are you here? Are you really here?”

I asked her questions, I demanded only silence. We chanted, we moaned, we discovered ourselves born actors. We squeezed each other until we nearly suffocated. Our hands were shaking, our eyes closed. We stopped, we began again. Our arms fell back, our inadequacy astonished us. I was shaping her shoulder; I wanted rustic caresses for her, I desired a rolling shoulder beneath my hand, a shell. She closed my fist, she was smoothing a stone. Tenderness blinded me. Forehead to forehead we told each other severely no. We clasped each other for last time after last time, we fused two tree trunks into one, we were the first and last lovers as we are the first and last mortals when we discover death. The cries, the roars, the noise of conversation in the schoolyard came in waves.

“Harder, harder. . Squeeze me till I suffocate,” she demanded.

I squeezed her but I did not stifle the cries, the courtyard, the boulevard, and its sycamores.

She freed herself, drew back, returned, she turned me into an armful of flowers, she threw me down, she said:

“Like that, it’s like that. .”

Her strength made me sad.

“But I want to hold you tight.”

“You don’t know how,” she said.

Melancholy, Isabelle considered me.

I cast her against the lavatory door; I reeled against the cistern. She braced herself against the door, the hook fell at her feet. Already she was making up for my poor effort.

“Come back,” she said.

She tipped her head to one side, she cooed to me slantways.

“Don’t move. I see you,” I said, lost in her.

I was plunging into her neck with my teeth, I was breathing in the darkness beneath her neckline: sycamore roots were shivering. I hold her tight, I stifle the tree, I hold her, I stifle the voices, I hold her, I banish the light.

“Is it true?”

“It’s true,” says Isabelle.

We watched the heart of blue sky through the hole in the door, we saw that the early morning sky was brooding over the earth.

Isabelle signaled that we were not looking at each other intensely enough. Love is excess. Our stares faltered, lost their way, resumed. I traced a student’s shriek in Isabelle’s eyes:

“I would like to eat you.”

I pushed her against the wall, I pinned her hands down with my palms. My lashes fluttered in her lashes.

“It’s incredible,” she sighed.

My eyebrows brushed Isabelle’s eyebrows.

“It’s incredible the way I’m seeing you,” she says.

We are talking. It’s a shame. What is said is murdered. Our words that will not grow any bigger or any lovelier will wilt inside our bones.

I plunged into her eyes, I found clear water.

“I. .”

Words wither feelings.

I put my hand over her mouth. Isabelle wanted to tell me.

“I. .”

I was suffocating her while she wanted to confess. I lifted my hand from her mouth; her arms fell back.

“Don’t be afraid. I will not say it.”

She looked sorrowfully up at the sky in the heart-shaped hole. I had hurt her. We were lifted by the tempest of shrieks.

“Don’t you understand?”

“I don’t understand,” says Isabelle.

“Whatever you wanted to tell me. . you’ll tell it later. Later.”

She took my hands from around her waist. The sky was changing inside the heart: the lovely celluloid sky depressed us.

“It’s too stupid. A moment ago we understood each other.”

“Now we don’t understand each other at all,” says Isabelle.

Eyes closed, her virtuous twin spoke for her. I stepped back a pace, caught Isabelle’s sweet silhouette. She emerged from a fading dream, the shouts from the courtyard piercing us through.

“Are you sulking?”

“I’m not sulking.”

“Speak.”

“No.”

The statue will sink into the wall, will be absorbed by the lavatory wall.

“Are you leaving me?”

“I’m also waiting,” she says.

Round fullness of her no spoken low, compressed beauty of the snowball in May that I’ll neglect when I begin to die far away from gardens.

Secretly I gazed at the bituminous color of the still water. Isabelle raised an arm, pulled at the tortoiseshell pin in her coil of hair but did not draw it out. I was elated by her unfinished gesture. Isabelle had not opened her eyes. Her arm fell back, conquered by the lavatories’ torpor.

I held her in my arms, with all the strength of my repentance, I breathed her in, I pressed her to my belly and she became my loincloth; I tottered with my darling embedded in me.

Isabelle was making my ankles drunk, rotting my knees with ecstasies. I was like a fruit stewed in her heat, I had the same liquorous seeping. Pincers softly tortured me. Her hairpin fell into the toilet bowl, we lost our balance. I plunged my hand into the water, fixed the pin back in her hair.

“I want that hand,” she said.

Her cherishing was freezing me. I was parted from my hand which I no longer recognized. I reclaimed my hand, with my lips I dried her wet lips, I thrust my tongue into her mouth. Isabelle linked her hands together: she was creating an altar for my chin.

“My woman.”

“Yes,” replied my heart, a rose.

She told me to turn around, she wrapped her arms around me; she enthralled me, she used every resource. I was ashamed to turn my back to her. I would present her with a lumpish mass that I could not make slimmer. The blood rushed to my cheeks, my throat, as I was feeling for her tangled hair and crumpling her apron. Her hand was making my breathing uneven. I was sobbing without sound, without tears. Isabelle was sobbing too, pushing her hand down on my apron: my clothes were touching me. A shout from the schoolyard split through my chest; my heart began to beat down where the shout had been. A girl was practicing the piano, the rhyme she chanted reminding me of the cool drops scattered by a fountain in a park. My breath came evenly again.

“What time is it?” I ask.

“Recreation is extended. There won’t be study hour today.”

“I know. The time?”

I freed myself. She gave me a look of disdain.

“School can burn down for all I care.”

“Me too. It can.”

“While I couldn’t care less if they expel me, I do care about losing you. Don’t you understand?”

“Parted, that we will be,” I say.

Isabelle threw herself on me. She was wrenching at my wrists:

“Parted, us? You’re mad. Anyway, not before the summer holidays.”