by Naomi Holoch
With her face still facing the open closet, she manages to pull up the zipper on the back of her dress by herself. He walks over to her and puts his hands on her waist. He turns her around and cups her face with his hand. With half a grin, as if cautioning her, he adds, “You know, she might be one of those types who likes only women.”
He drops one hand to his side and with the other he grabs her face along her thin sharp jawline and pulls her face up to his. Uncured sharp lemon scent settles bitterly on the back of his tongue. With his lips almost against hers he whispers, “If I ever find out that you two have slept together I will kill you both.”
He presses his opened mouth onto hers, pulling her lower lip into his mouth briefly. He smooths back the hair from her face, turns, and leaves.
3. UNDER THE SAMAAN TREE
The dry clay earth is creamy brown, like their bodies. Underneath them a thick wool blanket, lime green, like the long thin leaves of the bird-of-paradise surrounding them, softens the ground. Their clothing is concealed in a straw bag a shade lighter than the earth. Like a fan, the edges of the densely broad-brimmed samaan dip and sway overhead, evaporating the fine beads of sweat off their bodies as fast as they form.
Kamini props herself up on her stomach and reaches a hand out to part a couple of branches of the bird-of-paradise, so that she can glimpse the house a little way off in the distance. She can see the back of the house, the top of the back stairs outside the kitchen, where she often stands looking over in this direction (One can only find this spot if one knows where to look—behind the fence, down the steep hill with tall razor grass, a little beyond the edge of the forest to the vined, spreading samaan. From the house one can see only the top of the tree, nesting ground of hundreds of noisy parakeets.) Just behind that is where they lie.
After making love, she always parts the branches and pensively looks over to the house.
She feels Anita’s palm touching her, feeling her damp skin, the shape of her arched back, fingertips skirting her bony shoulder blades. Looking at the fenced-off house in the distance, she is unable to respond like she had minutes ago to the slightest coming together of their skins. Anita sits up slightly, beginning a firmer rubbing, a more intent massaging. Kamini knows that Anita has sensed her worry.
Even though there is no one in the forest to hear them, Anita whispers, “What’s happening?”
Kamini lets go of the branches, which spring back up, blocking out the house and the hill. Looking into the wall of bush she remains silent. The fermenting smell of rotting wild fruit floats over them in a wave of a cooling breeze, sharp and sweet. Anita turns to lie on her stomach and puts her arm around Kamini’s back.
“What’s wrong, what’s going on?”
Kamini looks down at the dusty clay earth just beyond the blanket. Reddish brown leafcutter ants with young, bright-green leaves in their mouths, hovering over their heads like umbrellas, march in single file back and forth over the cool ground. Black ants scurry erratically, frantically. She looks at them but does not really see them.
“He says that he’ll kill us both if he ever finds out about us.”
“What! Both? What do you mean? What made him suspect?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did you say to him?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you know what made him say that? Do you think he means it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know why he suspects. He just does.” Anita turns over and flops her back down; her head hits the blanket with an exaggerated thud. She clasps her hands on top of her stomach and forcefully expels a combined breath and the word “Fuck!”
Kamini looks down at Anita’s face, which is oddly bright, a smile taking shape on it. “What are you smiling about?”
Anita unclasps her hands and reaches up to touch Kamini’s cheek.
“He’s always so arrogantly flattered that those men he works with and parties with would like to have you, and so cocksure of himself that they never could. And now he’s worried about me!” She grins shyly, which makes her look much younger than she is, and stares up into Kamini’s face. “I just sort of like the idea that he’s jealous of me, squirming about whether he has you or I do. He’s probably right this minute anxiously wondering if we’re somewhere making love.”
“It’s not something to joke about, Nita. I don’t think he is joking. He would kill us if he found us together, you know! I’m really frightened that he might come looking for us.”
“Does he suspect about this place?”
“I don’t think so.”
Anita extends her arm on the blanket, an invitation Kamini accepts, resting her forehead down on Anita’s shoulder. They lie still for several seconds, then Anita pulls Kamini to rest on top of her. Their chests, stomachs, and thighs are still damp. Their bodies become slippery with sweat, but gentle breezes cool them in the shade of the big tree. The branches of the samaan shift and part to reveal a thin, pale blue sky. Anita looks up distractedly, trying to catch the blue. She turns her head and whispers into Kamini’s ear, “Kam, I have to ask you something. Did you sleep with him last night?” Kamini is still.
“Tell me Kam, did you? When was the last time you slept with him?”
Kamini lifts her head and, without looking at Anita, turns to face the bird-of-paradise bush. Anita is spurred on by Kamini’s silence.
“Kami, you slept with him last night, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Well, when was the last time …? You did, I can tell that you did. God! I can’t stand the thought of him touching you, kissing you, going and coming inside of you. How could you!”
Kamini pulls away, off onto the blanket, stiffening her body.
“What’s wrong with you?” Her voice drops, sounds defeated. “I am his wife, you know! What am I supposed to do? Say no all the time? I am married to him. I can’t always say no every time he wants to make love….”
Anita, hearing her sadness, tugs at her to pull her closer. Her eyes are full of tears, and Anita sits up and says coyly, “You and I make love. He and you have sex, and even once a year is too often for my liking.”
“Cut it out. You make me feel as if I’m sleeping around. If I keep saying no, no, no to him, he will suspect even more strongly. You don’t know him! I wouldn’t put it past him to …”
Anita reaches out and touches Kamini’s lips with hers, taking in the smell of skin, lips, mouth. She slides her lips around to Kamini’s cheek and leaves them lightly resting there, her tongue anxious but holding back. The earthy smell of the forest, alive with decaying fruit, subsides for a moment as Anita feels herself suddenly awakening again to the familiar warm lemon scent, blunted by the evening heat, sharpened by the closeness of Anita’s breath, hovering between their faces. Kamini feels Anita responding to her smell. She lies back onto the blanket as her lover’s mouth follows hers. Her fingers take time curling over Anita’s shoulders, drawing her closer down as she curves her pelvis up toward Anita’s. She lets Anita nestle her body between her thighs.
Kamini glances up momentarily to the top branches of the darkening samaan, bristling with lime green parakeets beginning to land for the evening, ruffling themselves, hopping around, shifting their positions. Responding to Anita, she bends her knees and gradually slides her feet up on either side of Anita’s body.
The blue of the sky has turned warm yellowish white.
Marguerite Yourcenar
In her 1975 preface to Fires, in which her re-imagined tale of Sappho appeared, the Belgian writer Marguerite Yourcenar describes the work as a “sequence of lyrical prose pieces connected by the notion of love.” Born in Brussels in 1903, Yourcenar was the first woman to become a literary “immortal” when she was admitted to the Académie Française in 1981. A self-taught classical scholar, she lived a secluded life off the coast of Maine with her partner, translator, and collaborator, the American Grace Frick. She died in 1981, leaving behind her an acclaimed body of work, marked by its hom
oerotic themes. The following excerpt is a rare moment in the writer’s work where the intricacies of lesbian desire are clearly visible.
SAPPHO OR SUICIDE
Not to be loved anymore is to become invisible;
now you don’t notice that I have a body.
Between us and death there is sometimes only the
width of one single person. Remove this person
and there would be only death.
How dull it would have been to be happy!
I owe each of my tastes to the influence of chance friendships, as though I could only accept the world from human hands. From Hyacinth I have this liking of flowers, from Philip of travel, from Celeste of medicine, from Alexis of laces. From you, why not a predilection for death?
I have just seen, reflected in the mirrors of a theater box, a woman called Sappho. She is pale as snow, as death, or as the clear face of a woman who has leprosy. And since she wears rouge to hide this whiteness, she looks like the corpse of a murdered woman with a little of her own blood on her cheeks. To shun daylight, her eyes recede from the arid lids, which no longer shade them. Her long curls come out in tufts like forest leaves falling under precocious storms; each day she tears out new gray hairs, and soon there will be enough of these white silken threads to weave her shroud. She weeps for her youth as if for a woman who betrayed her, for her childhood as if for a little girl she has lost. She is skinny; when she steps into her bath, she turns away from the mirror, from the sight of her sad breasts. She wanders from city to city with three big trunks full of false pearls and bird wreckage. She is an acrobat, just as in ancient times she was a poetess, because the particular shape of her lungs forces her to choose a trade that is practiced in midair. In the circus at night, under the devouring eyes of a mindless public, and in a space encumbered with pulleys and masts, she fulfills her contract; she is a star. Outside, upstaged by the luminous letters of posters stuck to the wall, her body is part of that ghostly circle currently in vogue that soars above the gray cities. She’s a magnetic creature, too winged for the ground, too corporeal for the sky, whose wax-rubbed feet have broken the pact that binds us to the earth: Death waves her dizzy scarves but does not fluster her. Naked, spangled with stars, from afar she looks like an athlete who won’t admit being an angel lest his perilous leaps be underrated; from close up, draped in long robes that give her back her wings, she looks like a female impersonator. She alone knows that her chest holds a heart too heavy and too big to be lodged elsewhere than in a broad bosom: this weight, hidden at the bottom of a bone cage, gives each of her springs into the void the mortal taste of danger. Half eaten by this implacable tiger, she secretly tries to be the tamer of her heart. She was born on an island and that is already a beginning of solitude; then her profession intervened, forcing on her a sort of lofty isolation every night; fated to be a star, she lies on her stage board, half undressed, exposed to the winds of the abyss, and suffers from the lack of tenderness as from the lack of pillows. Men in her life have only been steps of a ladder she had to climb, often dirtying her feet. The director, the trombone player, the publicity agent all made her sick of waxed mustaches, cigars, liqueurs, striped ties, leather wallets—the exterior attributes of virility that make women dream. Only young women’s bodies would still be soft enough, supple enough, fluid enough to let themselves be handled by this strong angel who would playfully pretend to drop them in midair. She can’t hold them very long in this abstract space bordered on all sides by trapeze bars: quickly frightened by this geometry changing into wingbeats, all of them soon give up acting as her sky companion. She has to come down to earth, to their level, to share their ragged, patchy lives, so that affection ends up like a Saturday pass, a twenty-four-hour leave a sailor spends with easy women. Suffocating in these rooms no bigger than alcoves, she opens the door to the void with the hopeless gesture of a man forced, by love, to live among dolls. All women love one woman: they love themselves madly, consenting to find beauty only in the form of their own body. Sappho’s eyes, farsighted in sorrow, looked farther away. She expects of young women what self-adorning idolatrous coquettes expect of mirrors: a smile answering her trembling smile, until the breath from lips moving closer and closer obscures the reflection and clouds the crystal. Narcissus loves what he is. Sappho bitterly worships in her companions what she has not been. Poor, held in contempt, which is the other side of celebrity, and having only the perspectives of the abyss in stock, she caresses happiness on the bodies of her less threatened friends. The veils of communicants carrying their souls outside themselves make her dream of a brighter childhood than hers had been; when one has run out of illusions, one can still lend others a sinless childhood. The pallor of these girls awakens in her the almost unbelievable memory of virginity. In Gyrinno, she loved pride and lowered herself to kiss the girl’s feet. Anactoria’s love brought her the taste of French fries eaten by handfuls in amusement parks, of rides on the wooden horses of carousels, and brought her the sweet feel of straw, tickling the neck of the beautiful girl lying down in haystacks. In Attys, she loved misfortune. She met Attys in the center of a big city, asphyxiated by the breath of its crowds and by the fog of its river; her mouth still smelled of the ginger candy she had been chewing. Soot stains stuck to her cheeks shiny with tears: she was running on a bridge, wearing a coat of fake otter; her shoes had holes; her face like that of a young goat had a haggard sweetness. To explain why her lips were pinched and pale like the scar of an old wound, why her eyes looked like sick turquoises, Attys had three different stories that were after all only three aspects of the same misfortune: her boyfriend, whom she saw every Sunday, had left her because one evening she wouldn’t let him caress her in a taxi; a girlfriend who let her sleep on the couch of her student room had turned her out, accusing her wrongly of trying to steal her fiancé’s heart; and finally, her father beat her. Attys was afraid of everything: of ghosts, of men, of the number 13, of the green eyes of cats. The hotel dining room dazzled her like a temple where she felt obliged to speak only in a whisper; the bathroom made her clap her hands in amazement. Sappho spends the money she has saved for years through suppleness and temerity for this whimsical girl. She makes circus directors hire this mediocre artist who can only juggle flower bouquets. With the regularity of change that is the essence of life for nomadic artists and sad profligates, together they tour the arenas and stages of all capitals. Each morning, in the furnished rooms rented so that Attys will avoid the promiscuity of hotels full of too-rich clients, they mend their costumes and the runs in their tight silk stockings. Sappho has nursed this sick child so often, has so many times warded off men who would tempt her, that her gloomy love imperceptibly takes on a maternal cast, as though fifteen years of sterile voluptuousness had produced this child. The young men in tuxedos met in the halls of theater boxes all recall to Attys the friend whose repulsed kisses she perhaps misses: Sappho has heard her talk so often of Philip’s beautiful silk shirts, of his blue cuff links, of the shelves of pornographic albums decorating his room in Chelsea, that she now has as clear a picture of this fastidiously dressed businessman as of the few lovers she couldn’t avoid slipping into her life. She stows him away absentmindedly among her worst memories. Little by little, Attys’ eyelids take on a lavender hue; she gets letters at a post-office box and she tears them up after reading them; she seems strangely well informed about the business trips that might make the young man run into them, by chance, on their nomadic road. It is painful to Sappho not to be able to give Attys anything more than a back room in life, and to know that only fear keeps the little fragile head leaning on her strong shoulder. Sappho, embittered by all the tears she had the courage never to shed, realizes that all she can offer her friends is a tender form of despair; her only excuse is to tell herself that love, in all its forms, has nothing better to offer shy creatures, and were Attys to leave, she would not find more happiness somewhere else. One night Sappho, arms full of flowers picked for Attys, comes home later than u
sual. The concierge looks at her differently than she ordinarily does as she walks by; suddenly the spirals of the staircase look like serpent rings. Sappho notices that the milk carton is not in its usual place on the doormat; as soon as she is in the entrance hall, she smells the odor of cologne and blond tobacco. She notices in the kitchen the absence of an Attys busy frying tomatoes; in the bathroom the want of a young woman naked and playing with bathwater; in the bedroom the removal of an Attys ready to let herself be rocked. Facing the mirrors of the wide-open wardrobe, she weeps over the disappearance of the beloved girl’s underwear. A blue cuff link lying on the floor reveals the cause of this departure, which Sappho stubbornly refuses to accept as final, afraid that it could kill her. Once again, she is trampling alone on city arenas, avidly scanning the theater boxes for a face her folly prefers to all bodies. After a few years, during one of her tours in the East, she learns that Philip is now director of a company that sells Oriental tobaccos; he has just been married to a rich and imposing woman who couldn’t be Attys. Rumor has it that the girl has joined a dance company. Once again, Sappho makes the rounds of Middle East hotels; each doorman has his own way of being insolent, impudent, or servile; she checks out the pleasure spots where the smell of sweat poisons perfumes, the bars where an hour of stupor in alcohol and human heat leaves no more trace than a wet circle left by a glass on a black wooden table. She carries her search even as far as going to the Salvation Army, in the vain hope of finding Attys impoverished and ready to let herself be loved. In Istanbul, she happens to sit, every night, next to a casually dressed young man who passes himself off as an employee of a travel agency; his slightly dirty hand lazily holds up the weight of his forehead. They exchange those banal words that are often used between strangers as a bridge to love. He says his name is Phaon, claims he is the son of a Greek woman from Smyrna and of a sailor in the British fleet; once again, Sappho’s heart quickens when she hears the delightful accent so often kissed on Attys’ lips. Behind him stand memories of escape, of poverty, and of dangers unrelated to wars and more secretly connected to the laws of his own heart. He, too, seems to belong to a threatened race, one that is allowed to exist through a precarious and ever provisional permissiveness. Not having a residence visa, this young man has his own difficulties; he’s a smuggler dealing in morphine, perhaps an agent of the secret police; he lives in a world of secret meetings and passwords, a world Sappho cannot penetrate. He doesn’t need to tell her his story to establish a fraternity of misfortune between them. She tells him her sorrows; she goes on and on about Attys. He thinks he has met her; he vaguely remembers seeing a naked girl juggling flowers in a cabaret of Pera. He owns a little sailboat that he uses on Sundays for outings on the Bosphorus; together they go looking in all the sad cafés along the shore, in restaurants of the island, in the modest boarding houses on the Asian coast that poor foreigners live in. Seated at the stern, Sappho watches this handsome male face, which is now her only human sun, waver in the light of a lantern. She finds in his features certain traits once loved in the runaway girl: the same pouting mouth that a mysterious bee seems to have stung; the same little hard forehead under different hair that this time seemed to have been dipped in honey; the same eyes looking like greenish turquoises but framed by a tanned, rather than livid, face, so that the pale brown-haired girl seems to have been simply the wax lost in casting this bronze and golden god. Surprised, Sappho finds herself slowly preferring these shoulders rigid as trapeze bars, these hands hardened by the contact of oars, this entire body holding just enough feminine softness for her to love it. Lying down on the bottom of the boat, she yields to the new sensations of the floodwaters parted by this ferryman. Now she only mentions Attys to tell him that the lost girl looked like him but wasn’t as handsome: Phaon accepts these compliments with a mocking but worried satisfaction. She tears up, in front of him, a letter in which Attys announces that she is coming back; she doesn’t even bother to make out the return address. He watches her doing this with a faint smile on his trembling lips. For the first time, she neglects the discipline of her demanding profession, she interrupts the exercises that put every muscle under the control of the spirit; they dine together; and surprisingly, she eats a little too much. She only has a few days left with him in this city; her commitments have her soaring in other skies. Finally he consents to spend the last evening with her in the little apartment she rents near the port. She watches him come and go in the cluttered room, he is like a voice mingling clear and deep notes. Unsure of his moves, as though afraid of breaking fragile illusions, Phaon leans over the portraits of Attys for a better look. Sappho sits down on the Viennese sofa covered with Turkish embroideries; she presses her face in her hands like someone trying to erase memories. This woman who until now took upon herself the choice, the offer, the seduction, the protection of her more vulnerable girlfriends, relaxes and, falling, yields limply, at last, to the weight of her own sex and of her own heart. She is happy that, from now on, all she has to do with a lover is to make the gesture of acceptance. She listens to the young man prowl in the next room; there, the whiteness of a bed is sprawled like a hope remaining, in spite of everything, miraculously open; she hears him uncork flasks on the dresser, rummage in drawers with the ease of a housebreaker or a boyfriend who feels he is allowed everything. He opens the folding doors of the wardrobe, where, among a few ruffles left by Attys, Sappho’s dresses hang like women who have killed themselves. Suddenly the ghostly shudder of a silken sound draws near like a dangerous caress. She rises, turns around; the beloved creature has wrapped himself in a robe Attys left behind: the thin silk gauze worn on naked flesh accentuates the quasi-feminine gracefulness of the dancer’s long legs; relieved of its confining men’s clothing, this flexible body is almost a woman’s body. This Phaon, comfortable in his impersonation, is nothing more than a stand-in for the beautiful absent nymph; once again, it’s a girl coming toward her with a crystal laugh. Distraught, Sappho runs to the door to escape from this fleshly ghost who will only give her the same sad kisses. Outside, she charges into the swell of bodies and runs down the streets leading to the sea; they are littered with debris and garbage. She realizes that no encounter holds her salvation, since, no matter where she goes, she runs into Attys again. This overwhelming face blocks all openings but those leading to death. Night falls like a weariness confusing her memory; a little blood endures next to the sunset. Suddenly she hears cymbals clashing as though fever hit them in her heart; a long-standing habit has brought her back, unawares, to the circus at the very hour when she struggles with the angel of dizziness each night. For the last time, she is intoxicated by this wild-beast odor that has been the odor of her life, by this music like that of love, loud and discordant. A wardrobe woman lets her into the dressing room, which she enters now as if condemned to death; she strips as if for God; she rubs white makeup all over herself to become a ghost; she snaps the choker of memory around her neck. An usher, dressed in black, arrives to tell her that her hour has come; she climbs the rope ladder of her celestial scaffold; she is fleeing skyward from the mockery of believing that there had been a young man. She removes herself from the yells of orange vendors, from the cutting laughter of pink children, from the skirts of dancers, from the mesh of human nets. With one pull, she brings herself to the last support her will to die will allow: the trapeze bar swinging in midair transforms this creature, tired of being only half woman, into a bird; she glides, sea gull of her own abyss, hanging by one foot, under the gaze of a public that does not believe in tragedy. Her skill goes against her; no matter how she tries, she can’t lose her balance; shady equestrian, Death has her vault the next trapeze. She climbs at last higher than the spotlights: spectators can no longer applaud her, since now they can’t see her. Hanging on to the ropes that pull the canopy painted with stars, she can only continue to surpass herself by bursting through her sky. Under her, the ropes, the pulleys, the winches of her fate now mastered, squeak in the wind of dizziness; space lean
s and pitches as on a stormy sea; the star-filled firmament rocks between mast yards. From here, music is only a smooth swell washing over all memory. Her eyes no longer distinguish between red and green lights; blue spotlights, sweeping over the dark crowd, bring out, here and there, naked feminine shoulders that look like tender rocks. Hanging on to her death as to an overhanging ledge, Sappho looks for a place to fall and chooses a spot beyond the netting where the mesh will not hold her. Her own acrobatic performance occupies only half of the immense vague arena; in the other half, where seals and clowns carry on, nothing has been set up to prevent her from dying. Sappho dives, arms spread as if to grasp half of infinity; she leaves behind her only the swinging of a rope as proof of having left the sky. But those failing at life run the risk of missing their suicide. Her oblique fall is broken by a lamp shining like a blue jellyfish. Stunned but safe, she is thrown by the impact toward the netting that pulls and repulses the foamy light; the meshes give but do not yield under the weight of this statue fished out from the bottom of the sky. And soon roustabouts will only have to haul onto the sand this marble pale body streaming with sweat like a drowning woman pulled from the sea.