The Governesses

by Anne Serre

  In the meantime, the governesses are lacing the toddlers’ sandals, smoothing the hair of the mopheads, and holding their arms out to stroke the tear-stained cheeks of the boys who are frightened of the party. They have nothing to fear, they tell them, all they have to do is watch the others and do likewise, or stand there quietly on their own if that’s what they prefer.

  Eléonore seems so full of life that Gustave finds it scary. He doesn’t dare take a close look at her. Inès is clacking her heels on the tiled floor, rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat, and swaying around. Laura is on the verge of suffocating as she tightens a soft braided lambskin belt around her slender waist. Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat, the three of them dance and tap their feet.

  All they’re waiting for now is Monsieur and Madame Austeur, the long car and the little maids who will scurry around serving wine. The horses have been groomed, the hot-air balloon is spread out next to its basket on the lawn, and the musical instruments are lined up in a row in the hall.

  The garden gates haven’t stopped squeaking as they slowly open to let in delivery boys laden with platters of fish and jellied pheasant, bowls of cream, chilled wines, and the birds that will be released from the windows. Someone’s hanging a last paper lantern above the porch, someone else is shimmying up a tree. Four or five little boys fling themselves from the ground-floor windows, rush up the steps and through the reception rooms, then start all over again.

  Inès is trying out a riding crop. Raising her arm high in the air, she cracks it down with all her might against the floor. You don’t know whether to be scared or to clap your hands in the presence of this sparkly eyed animal tamer — it’s delightful. Everyone jumps back slightly and cries out: “Stop! Stop! You’re crazy!” Eléonore has put a record on the gramophone player, and the booming music can be heard all the way up in the attic where the little boys who don’t want to take part in the party are lying low.

  The preparations are almost complete, but the car still doesn’t arrive. They wait, tapping their feet. They don’t want to spoil the party, so they’re only pretending to play. Time and again, the little boys go into the garden to keep a lookout, poking their heads through the bars of the gates.

  Everything’s in place. The moment Monsieur and Madame Austeur come through the gates in their long black car, the party will begin. A trumpet will sound, and from every quarter grinning figures will appear, falling over one another and screaming and shouting just for the fun of it. The lawn will be seething with life, and in the car they’ll split their sides laughing. Monsieur Austeur will say: “Aren’t they clever! We were so right to hire them, don’t you think, Madame Austeur?” And Madame Austeur will cock her little head and smile. The maids will want to get down and join the merry troupe, but won’t dare ask. The elderly gentleman will have adjusted his telescope beforehand and won’t miss a thing.

  Dusk is setting in and the long car still hasn’t arrived. The governesses are seated next to one another in the hall, on chairs lined up against the wall. The little boys are tired of jumping through windows, and, in any case, Eléonore has just forbidden it, giving the youngest of the toddlers a sharp slap. They’re strolling around on the lawns now, laughing quietly to themselves.

  Night falls. On the second floor weeping can be heard. The governesses have uncorked a bottle of wine and had a dish of fowl and a few walnuts brought for them, and are picking absentmindedly at their food with their fingers. In the distance the gate squeaks. They spring to their feet and, snatching up their cymbals, stand for a minute or two with pricked ears. A sound of car tires on the gravel? No. Nothing. They sit down again. A little boy comes over and asks permission to go to bed; others follow him up the staircase in silence. On the lawn, the hot-air balloon and its basket are no longer visible. The horses have stopped whinnying in their stalls.

  A few more minutes go by like this, then an hour. In the house across the way, the elderly gentleman has packed up his telescope and retired for the night. Slowly, without exchanging a word, the governesses go up to their rooms, stay there for a while, then come back down. When they open the front door, you can see them for a moment in the light from the hall, standing on the porch. They’re wearing yellow gowns and seem to be inspecting the night. Then they slip out onto the path and disappear under the trees.

  The golden gates have opened, letting a stranger in. Eléonore watches him closely, while Laura stands at an open window, holding her breath.

  He makes his way across the lawns, stops to observe the branches of a tree, runs his hand over the bark, looks right, looks left, then walks on ahead. They can’t make out his face for the moment. He walks slowly, throwing his head back from time to time, as though filling his lungs with the cold, damp air. In the house, the governesses have assembled and are asking themselves: “Who is he? Where is he from? Should we let him in?”

  Instead of walking toward the house, he veers off suddenly and disappears beneath the trees. With a clack of wings, a bird flies up from a thicket. Eléonore and Laura rush downstairs and appear on the porch, out of breath, their hair a bit disheveled. They’re not going to let him vanish like that. He has walked into the trap of their vast, lunar privacy; they get their nets out, they’re going to capture him and keep him there. In their blue and brown dresses, they stride off into the woods in pursuit, parting the undergrowth with their razor-sharp ankle boots. He can’t be far. Over there is a patch of green darting between the leaves. It’s him. The hunt begins.

  Is he scared? You’d think he was being pursued by two wild animals. Is that him running now? Yes, there he is, breaking into a brisk trot, bounding across the meadow. They know all the short cuts. There’s no harm in waiting, they tell themselves — take your time.

  And their skirts catch on the brambles, tearing in places. Rainwater from the high bracken splashes onto their trim, polished shoes.

  Their bare arms are covered with scratches, their legs streaked with rainwater, their skirts filled with odors.

  It’s not every day you get to hunt in a household like this. There’s no quarry most of the time. This one will be tackled head-on, licked, bitten and devoured in a ladylike manner. And once he’s exhausted and has nothing further to offer, they’ll leave him. He’ll lie there like a babe in arms, naked on the sage-green meadow, while they will have something to reminisce about on those interminable winter evenings when you stand at the window, longing desperately for a stranger to arrive.

  They make their way down a narrow lane hollowed out like a ditch between two low dry stone walls. All you can see for a second is the tops of their skulls and their hair flying level with the meadow. They can hear him now. He’s there, panting, gasping for breath as he crashes around; he’s more or less stopped crashing, in fact. He’s going to surrender. He can’t take it anymore. Eléonore has pounced on him, seizing him from behind with both hands. They’ve laid him out on the ground and are unbuttoning his trousers. He’s very handsome, a bit soiled by the mud and rain, but that only makes him more desirable. Laura has unlaced the strings of his drawers with her teeth. The breasts of one of the young women have slipped out of her blouse, the other woman has already hitched the skirt of her dress up around her waist. They’re going to settle his hash; and settle their own affairs while they’re at it.

  Growing gentle again in the midst of their frenzy, they pull out a terrified sex. Eléonore has taken it in hand and is squeezing it, gripping it with her fingers and sliding it slowly, very slowly, up and down. Laura has hitched up her brown skirt and is seated on the stranger’s face. His eyelids have closed, but he’s breathing heavily and fast. Little by little, his pale member reddens and starts to rise. He breathes in the scent of Laura the way he breathed in the smell of the air and the wet trees a moment ago. He no longer feels scared.

  His member is erect now, the plum-violet glans shining between Eléonore’s slender fingers. Pulling up her blue skirt, she squats down on top of it, gently
impaling herself on the hot, hard, smooth, erect thing sinking inside her.

  It’s six in the evening by the time they’ve finished. The man has been bled dry, his handsome, open hands lying lifeless beside his body. Because he’s cold and doesn’t move, they put his clothes back on. Then, a bit the worse for wear, but happy and replete, they make their way back to the house in silence.

  They walk through the woods entwined in each other’s arms, their lips bruised and swollen, their bodies appeased at last. In the garden, the children have come out to play. They surround the governesses, cheering them on like victors returning from war. The boys dance all the way to the porch, then disappear with them into the wide, freezing corridor.

  Tonight, Inès will come over. They’ll play solitaire and talk about men. And tomorrow, or in a month, or a year — who knows? — the golden gates will open suddenly, as if by magic, and another stranger will succumb to their spell, trapped in the warm night of their private world.

  Dust on the hills in this month of July. The air is so hot, the sun so fiery, that the grass is scorched, yellow and dry. They’ve taken the children for a walk. Lying down, their flesh pricked by twigs, they watch little wisps of cloud being shunted across the azure sky. A face forms, then the mouth widens, the nose juts out, the hair grows matted: it’s an animal now, waiting to pounce, then melting away in midleap. The little boys are playing, and their cries are like the cries you hear in dreams. The real world, meanwhile, is hot, hard and sizzling, buzzing with insects.

  The governesses lie on their backs smoking little cigarettes, then blowing out the light smoke and filling their lungs with air. They’ve pulled their skirts up over the tops of their thighs so that they can feel the sun on their bare legs, unbuttoned their blouses so that it can flow between their breasts.

  In the distance they can hear a solitary cowbell tinkling, then a dog bark that seems to come from a cave somewhere. The sun burns their skin, tiny runnels of water trickle down their necks and armpits and the folds of their groins onto their sleepy flesh. On their hair spread out across the grass, airy dragonflies walk as if on water.

  Their minds drift back to the stranger: his emaciated face when they had drained all the sap and drawn all the honey from him; his ardent, blind hands searching for something to grasp; his erect member which seemed not to belong to him anymore. They’d love to find him again, restore him to his former state, then dip back into him and draw out that sense of bliss without which they feel bereft. Eléonore has sat up, her face crimson, dazed by the heat. Laura is indolently wiping her streaming body with the folds of her skirt. Dark-haired Inès has fallen asleep in her red dress.

  The children have wandered off and there’s no one around. They pull off their underpants, toss their sandals, skirts and blouses behind them, then, stretching out naked next to their friend, whose red skirt is billowing slightly in the breeze, surrender to the dragonflies who have begun their assault on their gleaming fleeces.

  Eléonore’s is a bulge between two white thighs that will later turn pink in the sun. Curly and less matted, Laura’s is like a patch of lichen below the sweet-smelling belly.

  The sun nestles between their thighs, warming the closed slit gorged with memories and expectation. It’s as though he was there, the stranger, coming toward them. He doesn’t have a name. They couldn’t care less where he comes from, they have no intention of marrying him. All they want is for him to comfort these bodies inconsolable at being cut off from him. To placate the storm in their bellies with his delicious hands, his delicious mouth, his delicious sex.

  Of course, he’ll have to go at it again and again, once, twice, ten times perhaps, for it takes a while for a storm to subside. It’s as though, rumbling around inside that storm, there was thunder from millions of years ago, the lightning of yesteryear and the lightning of today. To extinguish all those fires lit so many times all those eons ago he’ll have to keep pounding at them, over and over; and since in placating those ancestral storms he’ll have whipped up new ones, there’ll be no end to his labor.

  They’ll love him, yes, but only while he’s inside them. The moment he’s outside, they’ll hate him. They’ll pretend to love him, to make sure he comes back, but behind their sweet nothings and tender glances will be two frenzied nymphs who will tear him to pieces if he doesn’t hurry up.

  For the stranger, being tucked up in their silky soft cocoons is a homecoming. He could happily sleep there forever. If he’s tired, it’s because he’s walked a long way and worked hard. What he would like to do is relax for a while and be welcomed into their nest. He wants to lie down inside them and stare at the sky, listen to the sea. But when he does lie down in them, he’s tormented; he’ll never find rest there.

  At first, they didn’t know how to placate these storms. Time and experience are needed. At first, they thought you had to rush everywhere, so they’d race around the garden like madwomen, climbing trees, scaring the birds away, stamping their feet at the gates, hurling all kinds of objects at each other. They would swim or read — feverishly, all night — devour an entire pheasant, tear their dresses, kiss the maids. Then came the first stranger, whom they didn’t trust one little bit. They had heard about love, they had heard about men and the power they wielded. It filled them with dread. They would hide behind the curtains in their rooms, or in some dark corner in a corridor, behind a doorway, and from there would study him.

  If he approached, their faces would be inscrutable, their bodies dumb. They didn’t really have bodies, in fact. So long as the stranger remained outside them, they could examine him all they liked, they still didn’t know a thing about him. And it was because of this fiercely guarded secret that they eventually went up to him.

  They emerged from the shadows where you can see without being seen and walked into the center of the lighted room. They looked him straight in the eye. When there was desire in his gaze they knew that it was somewhere nearby that the secret was hidden. So they tried to open the door, but only a little, just to get a glimpse inside. Of themselves they gave nothing away — not a thing, not even a fingertip. They wanted to know the secret, but without having to share it with him. Again they failed. When they opened the door slightly, they saw the same thing they had seen in his gaze. Nothing more than that. The secret was still further back. They would have to go up to him and let him touch them. They gave him a mouth, a breast, occasionally an entire body, but even when he was inside them, it wasn’t enough. They were still in the dark because they didn’t feel a thing.

  Then, one day, something in their body stirred. Something that went coursing through their limbs, igniting a million sparks that began to glow day and night. They stopped being afraid, opened their golden gates, and sat quietly without moving, waiting for him to walk into the silky trap that was the secret of his own desire.

  They came to know quite a few strangers. A surprising number, in fact, for three governesses locked up in the dark night of a garden. Living as they did, they could easily have never met a soul. But either the stranger would lose his way in the garden, or else, coming in out of curiosity, he would take a step too far, and, with a little click, the golden gates would close behind him.

  They loved watching a stranger arrive. There were times, in fact, when they liked that more than anything, for as long as he advanced, ignorant yet dimly aware of a summons that was never clearly formulated as such, they were all-powerful. Once he had been bound hand and foot and consumed, on the other hand, they turned back into three poor little governesses. If it hadn’t been for the understanding between them, they would have taken their own lives in despair perhaps, since the moment the man had been conquered, they would return to the boundless void of their present home. They had memories, of course; but since when are memories enough to make three distraught governesses happy?

  For not once — and this is not the least interesting part of their story — did they invite a stranger to sta
y. Apparently, it never crossed their mind. A stranger in the house? Good God, no! In the garden: fine. Standing, seated, supine, devouring, devoured: fine. But coming through the door into the great, silent house? No, under no circumstances.

  Why though? Was there a treasure hidden in one of the rooms, so that they had to forbid anyone from entering it? There was nothing of the kind. There were a few valuable objects, of course, and a handful of little boys, it’s true — but since when has anything of that sort prevented a lovestruck governess from inviting whomever she pleases?

  There’s the back room, of course, where Monsieur Austeur presides. It might well be him, the spoilsport standing in the governesses’ way. There’s also Madame Austeur and the little maids, but they’re no great shakes. The figure they cut is insignificant. No, the obstacle is Monsieur Austeur. Not that he ever objects to anything; it’s simply that his presence possesses strange virtues, which seep into and fill every nook and cranny of the house. It’s as though, with Monsieur Austeur around, there was no room in the house for another male presence.

  You can guess what happened next. In order to devour their strangers at leisure, the governesses are inevitably going to think, sooner or later, of ridding themselves of Monsieur Austeur.

  Monsieur Austeur is seated in his smoking room, puffing on his silky long cigars. Monsieur Austeur is the master of the house. It’s midnight and everyone is asleep. At the heart of the house, he sits up late. The throbbing of the sleeping house travels out from him, and to him it returns. The signals he emits are slow and steady; those he receives back — from the governesses and Madame Austeur, who’s tossing and turning on her pillow, from the little boys sleeping like logs and the young maids yawning and thinking about their sweethearts — stream in, brief and chaotic, from every corner of the house.