Women's Barracks (16 page)

But I sensed that in the depths of her being, Claude retained a vague remorse over having initiated Ursula to a vice for which there was no true natural leaning in the girl. And I wondered what it was that Claude sought so devouringly in one girl after another, since it was clear that she did not seek to develop a Lesbian liaison. First she had seduced Ursula, then Mickey, and recently there had been a fresh young recruit, Renee. What was this unappeasable hunger for the young, the innocent?

And then I remembered a story Claude had confided to Ursula, in their most intimate days. They had been talking inconsequentially about things that made one feel guilty, and Claude had told, first, of a cat she had once picked up on the street and brought home, a skinny half-grown cat with no charm whatever. Her lover of the moment had leaped with disgust at the sight of the animal, and had advised Claude to throw it out the window. Finally she had put it out in the street. Her guilt over abandoning that cat had haunted her for years, Claude told Ursula, just like her guilt over an abortion.

And then, in the tumbling way in which Claude had of linking the most trivial and the most consequential of events, as though they were of equal importance, Claude had related how she had once found herself pregnant, and had suppressed the birth of the child. She had been living with the same lover who had objected to the cat—a dissipated journalist whom she had met shortly before her divorce from her first husband. When she found herself pregnant she vacillated for two months, unsure in her own mind about having the child. Not that she had any fear of scandal. But the inconvenience... Still, she had been tempted, feeling something marvelously warm growing within her. Day by day she had studied her breasts, which seemed to grow fuller and harder, and her belly, which was soon to fill itself with child. She had almost decided to have the baby; and then suddenly, after the incident with the cat, she had sought out a doctor and had an abortion. She had done that like almost everything she did, on impulse, without reflection. When she found herself stretched on the operating table, with two nurses strapping down her legs and the doctor bending over her with the chloroform, she had realized that she was about to kill her child, and it was too late. Remorse had entered her with the odor of the chloroform, and she awakened, empty and alone, with this remorse within her. Since then, Claude had tried to have another child-she had tried with lovers, with her second husband—but she had never again conceived.

As I recalled this story, it seemed to me that Claude's first instincts toward Ursula, and probably to all of her girls, had been nothing but maternal. And while with girls like Mickey the adventure quickly turned to erotic sport, there had been in Ursula a truly childlike response, and this had touched Claude more than she knew. It seemed to me that she felt guilty toward Ursula and at the same time resented the girl for having let her have her way, for having allowed herself to be drawn into the game. It was almost a motherly resentment over the bad behavior of her child. Claude would have loved to find an Ursula who was faithful to her childhood, and who would remain only a child for her—her little girl.

All these unhappy feelings in Claude were augmented by her boredom in the little switchboard room where she had spent the last two years. Almost daily she was becoming more irritable. Her rages were proverbial in Down Street. One encountered less of the charming, smiling, and beautiful Claude, as her place was taken by a nervous, aging woman, always quarreling with someone or other. All the discontented souls of the barracks came to her switchboard room to complain and conspire. Claude was continually discovering new enemies.

At the same time, her liaison with the colonel continued. She went out often with him, and drank a good deal. Several times she had been brought back to Down Street dead drunk. Officers in foreign uniforms would be seen taking her out of a taxi in their arms. She would be put to bed and would immediately fall asleep, to wake up in the morning in bad humor, because she was ashamed of herself. Her name was often seen on the punishment list for having returned to the barracks drunk. Claude pretended to consider this amusing, especially since the noncommissioned officers were rather in awe of her, and rarely carried out the sentences they gave her. Corporal Pruneface didn't dare send her to the kitchen, and Machou wouldn't ask for her. They all knew that Claude was Colonel Max's mistress, and they preferred to be in her good graces. Aside from Max, Claude went to bed occasionally with one woman or another, at Down Street and elsewhere.

The most extraordinary thing in all this was that Claude was essentially a good woman, with an astonishing childlike purity. She could take drugs, get drunk, go to bed with the first man who came along, but she never uttered a cynical word, and she was never blasé. A bouquet of flowers gave her more pleasure than the most luxurious of gifts. One might tell her the most naive and innocent tales, and her face would immediately light up. If someone were to say, "The Holy Virgin came down onto the altar in the barracks chapel and told Mickey to put on a blue dress," Claude would certainly have been the only woman in Down Street to believe in the miraculous tale.

If any of the girls needed money, she could always ask Claude for it. Claude would give away her last sou, just as readily to a new recruit who had arrived at the barracks only the night before as to her best friend.

And there was another side to Claude. She had gathered among her friends in Down Street an altogether weird collection of women, as different as possible from herself. These friendships were utterly platonic, and these women possessed qualities that Claude alone could see. For instance, there was Paula, the only recruit totally unaffected by the vogue of sex at Down Street. She was the typical old maid of all the ages, the same anywhere in the world. Even in uniform she succeeded in dressing like the "woman in the green hat." Her khaki skirt dragged nearly to her heels. Her cap fell over her nose. A grayish bun bounced against her neck. She was ageless and colorless and even her voice had no recognizable character.

Claude declared that Paula was an exceptional patriot. The Captain was highly embarrassed when she tried to find an occupation for this patriot, for besides all her other shortcomings, she had no training or aptitude for office work, and she was in ill health and couldn't work in the kitchen or in the household. Finally they made a sacristan of Paula. She appeared only at the hours of religious observances, and no one knew what she did in between times. Besides, no one was concerned. Claude was the only person to take the slightest interest in Paula. She even attempted to persuade us that Paula was attractive, and she was continually finding new ways for Paula to arrange her hair, which Paula obstinately rejected.

There was another old maid—an Alsatian, dry, dark, and always in bad humor. Claude pretended that she was good nature itself, and dragged this woman from bar to bar to distract her. The Alsatian opened her soul to no one but Claude. She worshiped her, mending her stockings, making her bed, polishing her buttons. With everyone else she was acid-tempered and always dissatisfied. But with Claude she was completely transformed. The celebrated charm had worked on her too.

There was a little blonde Provencale whom Claude had baptized "Baby" and who was the most stupid, most vain, and most good-natured little thing to be found anywhere. She had rosy cheeks, blue eyes, and a perfect pretty-doll face, and she dyed her long eyelashes pale blue. Baby was interested only in boy friends, whom she recruited with great perseverance from the navy. Claude lent her own civilian clothes to Baby whenever she went on leave, gave her money, and bought her the little cakes of which she was especially fond. And with Baby, as with Paula and the Alsatian, Claude's relationship was never anything but completely normal.

Now Ursula took her place among these neutral and restful friendships. She saw Claude as she was, a disoriented woman filled with rare qualities, and with common faults; a woman who would be old soon enough, but who preserved astonishing areas of youthfulness in her heart. Ursula defended Claude to me. At bottom, Ursula felt, Claude had done her no harm; she had never harmed anyone, for there was nothing destructive in her.

Ann had a date in town with her new love, Lee. She arranged with the hall guard not to mark down the hour when she went out, for Petit watched her ceaselessly. Petit knew that Ann was secretly seeing Lee, and the poor woman's eternally vigilant jealousy had become the newest joke of the barracks. Petit questioned the guard, searched through the register, and was even to be seen lurking in the entry hall, waiting for Ann to come home. And during her lonely hours of vigil she drank at the bar, offering rounds to the girls, and taking one or the other of us into her confidence.

One evening as I was talking to Mickey, Petit got hold of us and proposed that we come have a drink in a military canteen near Down Street. It wouldn't have been healthy for us to antagonize her, and so we accepted, though Petit was generally known as a bore. And when Petit was drinking she became more and more lugubrious, and her air of a little old man became increasingly pathetic.

When Petit opened the door and we entered the canteen, all the soldiers in the place turned their heads to gaze at us, with particular attention to Mickey. They seemed to be sizing us up, wondering if the lively-looking Mickey was in the clutches of the elderly
gousse,
wondering, I suppose, whether I too belonged to that sect.

Mickey tried to give the men the eye, as though to reassure them that she was a real woman; but Petit had installed herself directly in front of us, at a little table, so there could be no side flirtation. Now Petit began recounting her troubles with Ann.

"Yes, it's horrible," Mickey sympathized, with her English intonation, and opening wide her large blue innocent eyes. Though she was intrigued by someone like Claude, the love affairs of a real Lesbian like Petit were a matter of complete indifference to Mickey.

It seemed to me that our indifference, the indifference of the "normal" world, made the life of such women even more tragic. For they suffered from their loves, like any other woman, but without the balm of sympathy and understanding.

Petit went on with her grief. It seemed that the newcomer, Lee, had acquired a complete dominance over Ann. Lee was very rich, Petit complained, and showered Ann with gifts. When the three of them were together, Ann and Lee behaved as though nothing at all were going on between them. They took pains to turn away Petit's suspicions. Tricky lads, Petit said, but she knew the truth well enough. She knew that Ann was being unfaithful to her. And Lee also, for that matter, for Petit had gone to bed once or twice with the Englishwoman herself. But Petit wasn't going to permit herself to be treated that way. There was going to be an explosion, they'd see! Ann belonged to her! And she went on complaining, and then she began to grieve for her life at home in France, where her two friends were waiting for her, two girls who had always been faithful to her.

Petit knew, of course, that Mickey had made love with Claude, so she addressed herself to Mickey, as to someone who was sure to understand. But Mickey was obviously not listening.

I wondered what Mickey was thinking about. Probably she was letting her mind roam over her years in the barracks, thinking about Claude, about Max, about Robert and the other men, and then coming back to Petit, and drifting from Petit to the Lesbians, and wondering about the soldiers who were eying her, and remembering a theory of love that Claude had once propounded to her.

Love, love, love—even what Petit was talking about was love, and my mind, too, wandered on this all-absorbing subject. I was still like a bystander at a carnival, watching people risking themselves on a slippery revolving floor, whirling and bumping and sliding and falling and half getting up and slipping again, and sprawling on the spinning floor. Why did they have to do it?

"Come on, come on," the people sprawling on the floor would cry, laughing hysterically and beckoning to the timorous bystanders like me. Indeed, Mickey had often given me the most meticulous explanations of her love affairs, and of Claude's theories on the subject. As Petit's monotonous complaint continued, I recalled one of these explanations for love between women.

In every woman, Claude had told Mickey, there is a need rarely satisfied by men, a need for simply caressing, and she had described how one of her women friends loved to caress the "neutral parts" of her body for hours at a time. The neutral parts were the shoulders, the arms, the throat, the back, the parts that men seemed to forget. The insatiable desire for tenderness was felt most strongly in these neutral parts, which were so rarely caressed. Men made love each in his fashion, more or less expertly, according to Claude, and they were especially fond of those things in women that were different from their own bodies. When women made love with men, it was quite often with joy and passion, yet there was almost always a feeling of deception. It was perhaps the neutral parts that were disappointed, Claude had instructed Mickey. The very body of woman seemed to complain, "I want your love over me, aside from sex, aside from physical desire. I want the feel of your hand filled with a fraternal affection, forgetting my sexuality, just resting with pure friendliness on my arm."

When she had made love with Claude, Mickey had said, there had been long hours when no one was in a hurry, when it had seemed that the entire night could pass without the necessity of reaching a final point, and she had understood Claude's meaning. This was love between women—to be able to rest their heads together, to hold hands. The stroking of a knee, the kissing of a shoulder-all this was part of love between two women, and this in itself could often suffice.

Inexperienced as I was, I felt that I was becoming something of an expert on love, matching the evidence offered by my friends, and I wondered now whether love had the same meaning for Petit, whether with her also love was a tenderness. And I wondered, almost with dismay, whether all these physical things they talked about could really express love. Sometimes when Mickey rattled on with her technical explanations I felt a disgust growing in me, and had to warn myself that I must not let this grow, or I might become like Paula, colorless, unlovely.