Thérèse and Isabelle (8 page)

Isabelle pressed her hands together. Impulses, twitches were 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.

“What's wrong with me, what are you looking at?”

“Nothing.”

I didn't dare talk to her about her immortality. She took my hand, she laid her cheek in it.

“Let me fix you.”

Isabelle was happy to give herself to me:

“What are you doing with me?”

“I'm putting flowers on you.”

“You do know this is serious?” Isabelle said.

“I'm not playing.”

“But it's not real. We mustn't waste our time.”

“You are lovely and I'm making you lovelier.”

“I won't have you make an idol of me.”

I saw the scintillation of my tears. I did not cry.

“What have I done to you, tell me what I've done to you,” I begged. “I wanted to ornament you . . .”

“That's all?” asked Isabelle.

“That's all.”

But I loved her with crepe bows on every finger. She sat up in the bed:

“I know it: we will be parted,” she said.

I gathered up the bedspread, I struggled with the bolster.

We had created this celebration of oblivion
to time. We hugged to us all the Isabelles and the Thérèses who would be in love after us, with other names; we ended up clutching each other in the midst of creakings and tremblings. We had rolled, entwined, down a slope of darkness. We had stopped breathing to bring a stop to life and a stop to death.

I broke into her mouth as one goes to war: I was hoping I would ransack her entrails and mine.

The note of a whistle, a train, a station, but the silence remained, weighing on our heads. Isabelle put her hair on my shoulder.

“Are you sleepy?”

“I'm not sleepy.”

She mumbled it.

Something came away from my hip, fell upon the mattress: a hand. Isabelle was asleep. The dawn would be our dusk, from one minute to the next.

My face brushed against hers.

“Don't sleep.”

The dawn, ever punctual when something somewhere is dying, lay waiting with her trailing chiffons. Small boats could be seen heaving themselves clear of the reeds.

“Don't sleep . . .”

I prized the hand away from its ringlets, I listened out across my kingdom. Her sleeping excited me. I planted my eight-year-old, little girl's lips on her pale lips, I betrayed Isabelle with Isabelle herself, I cheated her of the kiss that I was giving her. She awoke at my mouth:

“You're there?”

She was talking: she was bringing me the finest of the shadows where she had been resting. I was breathing the sulphurous haze of her presence.

“You want to?”

“Yes,” said Isabelle.

We skimmed and flew over our shoulders with the wild fingers of autumn. We hurled great striations of light into nests, we fanned caresses, we wove patterns out
of the sea breeze, we wrapped our legs in zephyrs, we held the hum of taffeta in our palms. Entering was so easy. Our flesh was in love with us, our scent sprayed up. Our leavening, our bubbles, our bread. The back and forth was not servitude but back and forth of beatitude. I was losing myself in Isabelle's finger as she was losing herself in mine. How our conscientious fingers dreamed . . . What weddings of movement. Clouds helped us. We were streaming with light.

The wave came on reconnaissance, it intoxicated our feet, it swept through again. Lianas were released, a clarity grew within our ankles. The unfurling sweetness was complete. My knees crumbled to ashes.

“It's too much. Tell me it's too much.”

“Be quiet.”

“I can't be quiet, Isabelle.”

I was kissing her shoulder, giving myself up to the shipwreck once more.

“Speak.”

“I can't,” said Isabelle.

“Open your eyes.”

“I can't,” said Isabelle.

“What are you thinking about?”

“You.”

“Speak, speak.”

“Aren't you happy?”

“Look . . . No, don't look.”

“I know. Soon it will be light. Close your eyes, ward it off,” said Isabelle.

The sun was rising, Isabelle was falling asleep again.

I was yawning in the wet and milky meadows, I demanded help and protection from the sleeper, possessor of the dark night whose passing I lamented. In her head my sleeper held night that could never come to an end, in her heart my sleeper held the song of the unsleeping nightingale. I breathed lightly, I was barely alive next to her.

She was embracing me, she did not forget her anxiety while sleeping:

“You're not asleep.”

“I'm asleep. Sleep.”

A few girls turned over: the dawn was shimmering in their dreams.

I got up and Isabelle got up too. I went out into the passage but she dragged me roughly back into her cell.

She opened her gown, she showed me her pride, she made me sore with her thigh between my thighs. I wanted to go. Her sleep had made me desperate.

“Don't go!”

Isabelle collapsed:

“Why did I sleep, why?”

She was shaking.

Too much love wearies.

“Do what you would like to do,” I said.

She licked, she scented the night's residues on my face, she kneeled.

Her face found its way, it was exploring me. Lips saw and touched what I would not see. I was humiliated for her. Indispensable and neglected, so I was with my face far
from Isabelle's face. Her damp forehead troubled me. A saint was licking my stains. Her gifts impoverished me. She was giving too much of herself: I was guilty.

“Go and rest. There's one girl studying already,” Isabelle said.

I obeyed. I threw myself into the river of sleep.

“I hope we find you quite awake now,” said the monitor. I was asleep on my feet.

“The relative propositions may consequently indicate different circumstantial relationships . . .”

Isabelle was saying this to someone else. Isabelle was already tidying her box.

I woke up properly, dressed with care, ready for her greeting. She came in with a whirlwind's scorn while I was smoothing brilliantine through so as to be like a precious bloom.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

We could not look at each other.

“It's a fine day.”

“Yes, it's a fine day.”

But the sun was being hoisted over us. We looked down.

“Are you ready?” asked Isabelle.

“No. You can see that.”

Her name, which I was avoiding, my saliva, which I could not swallow . . .

“Would you like me to help you?”

“No.”

“I would like my watch back,” said Isabelle.

“Of course. Your watch . . .”

I fussed around the night table.

“Put it on my wrist,” said Isabelle.

We saw each other again, we looked once more with the eyes of our night.

“Please, put my bracelet on.”

“Tell me if I make it too tight.”

“It's easy. There's a mark.”

“Can't you do it?” Isabelle asked.

“I can,” I said.

“Your voice has gone,” she said.

“Has it? Will you excuse me? I must finish tidying up.”

I tossed the lid of the washbasin onto the floor, I emptied the basin.

“Too much racket in there,” said the monitor.

“Don't file your nails in here. Don't file your nails . . .”

“Why not?” asked Isabelle.

“Not here. Not now.”

“But you're dusting . . .”

“Don't file your nails. Stop.”

Isabelle opened the window in my cell.

“You threw out your filings?”

“You didn't like it,” said Isabelle.

I put away the soap, I cleaned the porcelain dish where I kept my toothbrush.

Isabelle is ready to stab me. This idea ran through me while I was putting away the towels and sponges on the towel rail. I was expecting the bite of a knife.

“Did the monitor see you come in?” Isabelle did not want to reply.

I took up the honeycomb towel again, I dried the tooth-glass.

“Does she know you are here?”

Suddenly she pulled my hair. She plunged her dagger into the nape of my neck.

“Someone's coming,” Isabelle said.

Isabelle tore herself from her task. She edged the curtain aside, she slipped out.

“False alarm. No one's in the passage,” said Isabelle. She reassured me. She had vanished.

But the monitor had come:

“There was someone in here with you. Don't deny it. Your friend's name?”

“Friend?” I said contemptuously.

“Why are you smirking?”

“Isabelle was helping me. She helps me when I am slow. Our old monitor knew that.”

“You surprise me. I thought you two did not get on. Hurry along then, hurry, we're going downstairs,” said the monitor relieved by my words.

Andréa, a half boarder who used to come in early, who lunched with us in the refectory but dined and slept in the country, spent her Thursdays and Sundays looking out on a meadow, beside a stable. Andréa made charming winter quarters. Her eyes shone with cold, the ice melting her always-chapped lips. I would shake her hand; I was touching the oxygen of freedom.

“Is it sunny over your way?” I would ask.

“The weather's the same as here,” she would reply.

“No more frosts?” I would ask, out of nostalgia for the white frosts.

“The frosts are over. My father is sharpening his scythe for the harvest,” she said.
That morning, I left Andréa to her white frosts.

“Renée was showing me some photographs. What do you think of this one?” Isabelle asked me before we went into the refectory.