We went back in the water to swim, the sun’s reflection broke and dispersed into silver glints each time we moved our arms in the water. Marie swam out to the open sea in her magnificent crawl, slow, steady, each movement precise, her arms lifting toward the sky and plunging back down into the sea with a slight delay, then she swam back to me and floated by my side, as though weightless in the water. Marie, elusive, swam toward me then away again, she was laughing, disappearing under the water. At times our legs brushed together, our bodies touched fleetingly in the sea, I caressed her shoulder as I tenderly removed some seaweed from her hair. Nothing was said, nothing stated explicitly, but more than once our fingers grazed and our hands lingered close together, our eyes met and remained locked for an instant. There was a sense of a familiar complicity between us, and I felt a strange mix of emotion and timidity. I wanted to take her in my arms, give myself to her in the sea, hold her body close to mine in the warm water. She swam back to me, her mask on her forehead, her cheeks glistening, she looked happy, and she smiled at me, beaming, mischievous, as though she’d just played a trick on me, and I saw then that she held her bathing suit balled up in her right hand.
Marie had taken off her bathing suit, she was naked in the sea by my side, and I followed with my eyes the fluctuating neckline of her liquid dress, which moved in synch with the water, at times conservative and reserved, a sort of crewneck sweater reaching her chin, and at other times more revealing, bold, daring, dropping all the way to her belly button when she floated on her back, lying weightless in the sea, her stomach and pubic hair glistening, her breasts emerging slightly through the tiny waves washing over her flat body. I didn’t take my eyes off her, following her bathing suit with my gaze, her emblem, the pirate flag of her nudity in the sea. We stopped face to face, and we smiled at each other, I considered Marie naked and masked before me. I approached her and gently squeezed her shoulder, she didn’t back away, her face became serious, she seemed ready to fall into my arms, when suddenly she saw a nacreous glint underwater — a Venus’s ear! — and, slipping out of my arms like an eel, she broke away from me and dove straight down toward the glimpsed glimmer, presenting me with — before vanishing all together — the most graceful noli me tangere conceivable: the curve of her ass plunging into the sea.
Marie was basking in the sun next to me on the rocks. Tiny beads of water covered her naked body, and the sun, drying her little by little, left almost invisible specks of salt on her skin, whose taste I imagined vividly on the tip of my tongue. After a moment, pensive, her eyes closed, she moved her hand gently in my direction and uttered in a soft voice these enigmatic words: “I wasn’t his mistress, you know,” and these words resounded briefly in the silence of the cove. She didn’t say whose mistress, but I’d understood, and I was grateful for her not having named him (as for myself, I pretended to have forgotten his name). Marie lay motionless on her back, her eyes closed, one knee bent, her hand flat against the rocks. The silence grew in the cove, broken only by the soft murmur of the waves lapping below. What was the point in telling me she wasn’t his mistress? That she hadn’t slept with him? This was highly unlikely, if not impossible, even if we could easily imagine that theirs hadn’t been a sexual relationship in a strict sense, or in juridical terms, according to which sexual relations are dependent upon penetration, by whose definition fellatio and cunnilingus are excluded (in short, the activities two people can enjoy without necessarily becoming lovers), but I doubt that was what she was trying to tell me, no, not that. Marie seemed serious, she looked bothered, and the tone she’d used had had the sad solemnity of a confession or admission. I continued to look at her, and I wondered why she’d felt the need to tell me on this day that she wasn’t his mistress (which, by the way, isn’t the same as saying that she hadn’t been his mistress, the past perfect tense she’d used — rather than the pluperfect — allows in its ambiguity this lie by omission). Perhaps she’d simply wanted to let me know she’d never felt attached to him, that she’d always felt free and couldn’t in any case be considered the mistress of a married man, that it was in a way the word mistress, with its social connotations more than its actual reality, that she objected to, denying the word could be applied to her given its incongruity with her situation. I don’t know. Or perhaps she’d simply wanted to let me know that, in the end, she didn’t love him, she hadn’t ever loved him, that, certainly she’d liked him, he’d come into her life at the right moment, she’d loved his kindness, his consideration, his gallantry, his easygoing personality, with him, life was simple, comfortable, reassuring — but ultimately it was someone else that she loved.
Marie and I spent a week together at La Rivercina, our flirting had become more brazen as we relearned each other’s personality, passing one another on the first floor of the house with our towels flung over our shoulders and a seductive gleam in our eyes, crossing paths intentionally in the garden, separating only to return to each other’s side as soon as possible. As the days passed, the distance between our bodies began to dwindle inexorably, becoming more and more tenuous, diminishing every hour, as if soon bound to dissolve altogether. Our bodies grazed, at night, on the terrace, as we cleared the candle-lit table, and our shadows hardly parted in the night, each secretly seeking the contact of the other in the dark. At times, at night, in the kitchen, while we prepared dinner, as I checked the tomato sauce simmering on the old gas stove, a wooden spoon in my hand, Marie would come up from behind me, and I’d feel the silent wave of her body against mine, her bare arm brushing past me as she added to the sauce a few sage leaves she’d picked from the garden, and sometimes I’d even feel her fingers on my cheek, scratching my stubble and teasing me for not having shaved. I’d grab her hand and pull it away, and I thought about how this same gesture could take on different meanings according to the way in which it was carried out, without ceremony or concern, or else accompanied with a stare and clear intent, a sudden gravity, slowing down the act to give it significance and meaning, as I’d done that night in the kitchen, ceding to this sudden impulse without having given it any thought beforehand, spontaneously, ignoring its consequences, holding her hand in the kitchen and gazing into her eyes, our hands and eyes momentarily suspended in time. She wore a baggy white shirt dampened by the humidity and had her old flip-flops on her feet, one of the daisies was in poor shape, probably damaged on some dirt path, looking as if its petals had been plucked (he loves me, he loves me not) by a stray and wistful hand, on the whole a touching spectacle. Marie suddenly looked serious, she became pensive and stepped toward me, and I wrapped my arms around her, for a moment we stood like that against the stove, holding each other in the kitchen, lulled by the delectable bubbling of the tomato sauce simmering over a low flame. It was only an isolated moment of intimacy, but I understood then that we’d perhaps never been as close as when we were apart.
After dinner I’d return to my room, I’d open the window and a rare breeze would pass through the room, through the hot nights on the Island. I’d lie down on the bed, I’d lie still in the dark, keeping the light off to prevent the mosquitoes from coming in. Since the first night I’d spent in this room at La Rivercina, Marie’s presence on the floor above me had haunted me, I knew she was right there above me, I’d hear her moving around in her room and I’d know what she was doing, I could follow her movements in the room in real time, I’d hear the weight of her steps on the wooden floor, and I’d know she was going from her bed to the oak armoire, I’d hear the quiet creaking of its hinges as she’d open it and I’d imagine her choosing a T-shirt for the night, whose color, smell and texture I could picture clearly. At times, the sound of her steps on the floor faded and gave way to the rush of water in the bathroom, the squeal of a faucet turning on and off in a chorus of aching pipes, then the patter of her feet returned to the room, light and swift. I’d hear Marie crawl into bed, and, after a moment, closing my eyes in the dark to concentrate more attentively, I’d hear her fall asleep. There was nothing
physical or material about this, I couldn’t hear the quiet moans and whimpers she made while she slept, no more than the violent storm of sheets she’d set off toward three in the morning, when, pulling with all her might at a stubborn corner of the covers, she’d roll her shoulder furiously trying to turn over on her side, but I could hear the murmur of her dreams playing in her mind. Or could it be in my own mind through which Marie’s dreams now passed, as though, after thinking about her constantly, after evoking her presence, after living vicariously through her, I’d started to imagine, at night, that I dreamed her dreams.
I knew all the silences of the house, its nocturnal creaks, the descending scale of fitful coughs made by the refrigerator in the night, after which it would jolt and then resume its steady hum in the dark stillness of the dormant house. In the morning, waking up at dawn, I’d lie in bed listening to the birds’ first chirps, so quiet that their fluid modulations merged with the surrounding silence. The house was quiet, Marie and I were alone in this big deserted house, sleeping on different floors, the other rooms unoccupied or empty, her father’s office cleaned out, packed boxes ready to be taken away. All was still in the dormant house, I listened and heard nothing, not a single creak or rustle, Marie lay motionless in her bed, I knew she was asleep above me, and this distance between us, this small hindrance of a floor keeping us apart, this tiny separation made Marie even more desirable to me. Unable to turn toward her and gently squeeze her arm when I woke up, I had to imagine her presence on the floor above me, to recreate her in my mind. And so, behind my closed eyes, she took form progressively, slowly shedding her chrysalis as she appeared in my mind, lying on her bed, her eyes closed and her lips parted, her chest gently rising and falling with the rhythm of her breath, one leg under the covers, and the other, loose, hanging over the bed uncovered, the sheet folded snugly between her thighs.
One afternoon when we’d gone for a swim, I found the weather strange at our small cove without knowing how it was different from any other day. I sat down on the rocks and I watched Marie walk along the shoreline. The sea, spread under a veiled white sky, was uniformly gray. The water lapped gently on the shore, murky, slightly troubled, of a lead or lava-rock gray, like an artificial lake around a nuclear power plant. We entered this viscous sea, our bodies hardly cooled by its warm and oily water, swimming cautiously since Marie had spotted some jellyfish, she swam in front of me, tracing a path through the water to help me avoid them, all while turning around, rapt, to point them out (the more we were in danger, the more she shook her finger in frenzied excitement). We’d got out of the water, and we lay drying on the rocks, gazing at the gray sea lapping before us in this apocalyptic lighting. The humidity was high, the air stifling, insects buzzed nervously and stuck to our skin. There are days like this, at the end of summer, when the stagnant heat hangs heavy from sunrise to sunset, weighing down your body and numbing your mind, and finally I realized that my strange feeling at the cove was due to a total absence of blue in the surroundings. It seemed as though, with the help of some sort of computer image editor capable of removing one color at a time, all the blue had been entirely extracted from the setting without affecting the rest of the chromatic scale. All the blue had disappeared, the usual blue of this cove, the radiant blue, the striking blue of the sky and the sea, the Mediterranean’s endemic blue had vanished into thin air. All was haze from the heat and wooly white light. The air was still, windless, not even a slight breeze stirring the rushes in the cove — as though the wind was gathering its strength for the coming storm.
That night, Marie flew into my room at around four in the morning, she swung the door open and darted in, she was barefoot and in a T-shirt, confused, troubled, she came all the way over to my bed and told me that there was smoke in the garden, that the fire was at the gates of the property. I slipped on a pair of pants and followed her out onto the terrace, we wandered in search in the night through clouds of dust. Terrible gusts of wind, which had already knocked over the metal garden chairs, raged up the driveway intermittently. The deckchairs were battered by the wind, their canvas backs turned in and out alternately, whipped by each gust. I ran around the house in search of the fire, but I didn’t see anything, the night was black and windy, impenetrable, the trees sunk into the shadows, shaking together in a wild sway of branches, a whirl of leaves. Smoke now entered the terrace, still light and semitransparent, a few wind-borne plumes, curling slowly in the air. I turned off all the propane tanks in the garden and helped Marie to unravel the hose, to extend it and stretch it over the terrace and all the way up to the windows to protect the house. Marie ran back and forth on the terrace closing the shutters of the first-floor windows. She picked up the hose and went around the house, spraying each side in the night, lingering longer at the wooden shutters to soak them thoroughly, abruptly tugging the hose if she felt any resistance or if it formed kinks on the ground. The spray arched up to the second floor, and the house glistened under the shower. Water streamed down the sides of the house, and the weathered wood of the wet shutters shone in the night.
We didn’t know where the fire was, whether it was approaching or moving away from the property. We knew nothing, the fire was still abstract, distant and invisible, provoking even more terror in us for this very reason, filled as we were with an unimaginable and indescribable fear, when, all of a sudden, at the boom of an explosion in the distance, the fire appeared on the crest of the hill, rising in a sort of gasp, an unleashing of long-gathered energy, and it was then, immediately, that I saw not the few flames I’d imagined issuing from a bush in the garden but a veritable wall of fire on the hilltop in the distance, thriving and dynamic, jagged, blazing in the night in a rage of flames, red, yellow, orange, and copper, hissing and crackling, from which giant billows of black smoke rose to the sky. Although a good three hundred yards separated us from the blaze, we felt its heat at once, we felt its brightness, its power, its smell, its roar, and its speed, flames had already begun to race down the hill and spread toward us, popping and hissing in their pursuit. Marie and I, abandoning the hose without delay, leaving it there on the ground, partially rolled, still busy spraying the terrace, ran off toward the old truck parked in the driveway, Marie wearing only a T-shirt and her old flip-flops, which she’d managed to slip on without stopping, but which held her back more than they helped her to run I had only cotton pants on and a pair of old loafers. Marie jumped in at the wheel and we sped out through clouds of dust. The headlights shone on the road’s spectral surface, white and chalky, while wild shrubs swayed and shook on the roadside as we sped into the night.
Having reached a small white bridge, Marie slammed on the brakes, came to a full stop, looked behind her to reverse, then resolutely took the unpaved road that lead to the equestrian club. We’d hardly driven thirty feet over the bumpy undergrowth than we were stopped by a thick curtain of smoke blocking the road, but Marie didn’t slow down, she continued to speed forward, penetrating the curtain of smoke, at first white, light and volatile, then increasingly dark, an opaque mass of smoke, dense, stifling, whose odor filled the truck. Through the beam of our headlights we saw nothing but smoke and the yellow truck of a forest ranger parked on the other side of the road. Marie had stopped answering my questions, she drove with both hands gripping the wheel, continuing on for a few dozen feet until it became utterly impossible, at which point she stopped, opened the door, and fled through the smoke on foot, I tried to stop her, trailing behind her, she charged down the road determinedly, almost at a run through the dense smoke. Presently there was no horizon, no vegetation, the road had disappeared, we were completely enveloped in smoke. Marie reached the equestrian club, and, fearful, I called out for her, I asked her to come back, but she didn’t respond, she continued to charge forward, stooped and determined, her shirt lifted to cover her face, exposing her naked body, as she had nothing underneath. Many of the club cottages were on fire, a shed was in flames. Screams could be heard here and there, there was great confus
ion around the stables, locked, inaccessible, where the silhouettes of animals stamped and leaped, whinnying raucously in desperation, almost human in their intonation, and yet inhumanly violent. We proceeded through the smoke and we saw Peppino only a couple feet from a stable in flames, a handkerchief over his mouth, striving to free a bucking horse still tethered inside its stable. When the stable roof began to collapse, with a progressive dissolution of boards and sheet metal, Peppino jumped inside the stable, vanishing momentarily into the dense black smoke only to reemerge with the horse, man and horse surging out into the night in a ring of fire, as if ablaze, a halo of flames and incandescent sparks emanating from their dazed bodies. The horse was severely burned, its skin scorched and its muscles bared, a black syrupy liquid oozing from its sides. Peppino ran alongside the horse trying to calm it and take it to shelter behind the fire trucks. Eight other horses had been tied there to a tanker, bound together by the same rope, attached to each other as though in solidarity, a giant shifting mass pulling in every direction, jostling and turning every which way amid swinging tails and tossing manes, a compact conglomeration of agitated and panicked bodies, the sheen of their coats reflecting the fire, the whole beastly mob shaken incessantly by a nervous wave of agitation. They stuck to one another, twisting, drawing back, storming forward and pulling so hard on the rope that they’d knock the tanker off balance, its wheels lifting momentarily in the dust. Residual pockets of fire continued to burn all around in the paddock of the equestrian club, cottages were in flames, barns, stables, the ground itself, the grass ablaze here and there, and Marie suddenly took off toward Peppino. She zigzagged through a grassy area, where plumes of violet smoke hung suspended in the night’s trembling air. Marie made a beeline for Peppino, charging through the spreading fire, lifting high her flip-flops, picking up her pace, running, dancing in place as her feet burned, and Peppino pushed her back angrily when he saw her, furious and beside himself, chasing her away, and Marie turned back around, no longer aware of where she was going, lost, still running, turning in circles, the soles of her feet scorched. A fireman saw her and ran toward her, grabbed her and brought her back to me, leading her under his protective wing, while she laid her head gently on his shoulder.
The Truth about Marie Page 10