The doctor made no comment. He took care of me, in particular.
"Would I be all right?" I said yes. And I was. Deep inside, everything was even fine. It's not every day that one is reborn at twenty. I telephoned J. P. He wasn't there. I simply left a message that he should call me back. My voice was calm, poised. Then I called Nathalie's house; her mother was not there. I told the whole story to Clara, who thought it wise to burst into sobs. That left me perfectly cold.
Detached, rather. Akidia, as the Greeks said. The indifference of grief. I felt as if I were watching myself from the outside.
When I think of it today, now that all the words I use to disguise my mourning cannot efface it, I tell myself that this indifference was a momentary means of survival. A refusal with all my being that looked like rationality. Her death had taken her away, and joined me to her side, definitively.
Palimpsest, as I was saying. I too was a collection of scars, and one does not efface scars with new gashes. New marks just make the old ones reappear. Scars are in the head, all of them. And so? One can't efface pain with pain—nor with caresses, besides. One must live with pain, not construct a whole story around it. I thought of some militant masochists I had met once in an SM support group. Specialists in "leathersex," in whipping, play-piercing. Who looked no further than the first drop of blood! Poor women!
I ended up having to answer questions—and the interrogation lasted interminably because Nathalie was, as they say, "known" by the police. I forced myself not to hear the comments, mezzo voce, of the cops and paramedics. They took away the body. Then everyone left, leaving me alone in a room trampled with footprints. In the middle was a lake of congealed blood, where one could still see, in the hollow, the mark of her body. Where her hand had been. Her hip. Several blond strands of hair were still stuck in the blood.
And since I had nothing better to do, I started to clean up the mess.
Notes
'It was only afterwards that we remarked upon the unusual aspect of the suicide, in which a left-handed girl became right-handed only in order to kill herself. We remembered what Nathalie had told me, what Clara had said to Florence of her strange "business" relationships, and the considerable sums of money we had seen in her hands. The police, whether asked to do so or not, had already ruled it a suicide, and quickly at that. But had Nathalie wanted to leave us with this uncertainty?
About the Author
Since the publication of Dolorosa Soror in 1996, Florence Dugas has been recognized as one of the most gifted eroticists writing in France today. She is the author of a second novel, L'Evangile d'Eros, and several short stories, all published by Editions Blanche, Paris. Dolorosa Soror has been translated into Dutch and German.
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