by Albert Cohen
One morning she invited him for dinner that evening at eight. It was the first meal they had eaten together. So proud to have got everything ready all by herself, and especially proud of her sorrel soup, which she carried gravely to the table. 'Darling, I made it myself from start to finish, the sorrel is from the garden, I picked it this morning.' Highly pleased with the thought that she was feeding her man, thrilled by her mental picture of the wife and servant genteelly ladling out the soup. The pleasure of watching him eat. She felt like a home-maker; she approved. She approved of him too. Good table manners, she thought as she watched him. Her pleasure too in the role of sensible wife. When he asked for a third piece of chocolate cake, 'No, darling, three pieces are too much,' she said sententiously. That same evening he cut his finger slightly, very slightly. Oh how happy she was to tend his hurt, to put iodine on it and swaddle it in a bandage which she sealed with a kiss, like a tender mother.
CHAPTER 42
One evening when their love was young, he asked her what she was thinking. She turned abruptly, making her skirt flare dramatically, a manoeuvre she felt sure would please him. 'I'm thinking how enchanted I am to have met you,' she said. 'Enchanted,' she repeated, delighted by the sudden taste of the word on her tongue. She laughed, walked up and down, knowing that he was staring admiringly, feeling her dress hug her in all the right places. 'And now what are you thinking?' he asked. 'I'm thinking how sorry for myself I am, because the rest of my life will be spent trying to please you, wearing heels that are too high and skirts that are too tight, twirling my dress like I did just now, like Mademoiselle de La Mole in the book, it's quite appalling and I make myself sick, I'm turning into a regular female, it's dreadful.' She knelt and kissed his hand. Deplorable, this urge to be forever falling on her knees. 'Say you'll keep me, keep me by you always,' she said.
How beautiful she was kneeling, looking up at him, with both arms round his hips in the attitude of one who prays, his poignantly slim hips, the hips of her man. 'Let me look at you,' she said, and she drew back to see all of him, checked every feature and smiled, oh perfect teeth of youth. She must weigh sixty kilos, of which forty are water, he thought. I am in love with forty kilos of water, he thought. 'What are you thinking about?' she asked. 'I'm thinking about Kitty,' he said. She asked him to tell her again, because she loved listening to him talk about his sweet little cat, now, alas, no more. So he told her the first thing that came into his head, said that sometimes Kitty was fat and moody, sometimes slender and as friendly as an angel; sometimes she went on purring for as long as it took to eat her dinner, with her little head in her dish; sometimes as good as gold, eyes raised, patient, perfect; and other times as old as time and dreaming of days long ago. 'More,' she said. So he told her that Kitty demanded constant stroking because she was never free of the atavistic fear of danger, and stroking relieved her anxiety. If she was being stroked, she couldn't be in danger. 'I want to have my anxiety relieved too,' she said, and she snuggled up closer. Held by him, she tilted her head and half-opened her lips like a flower in bloom, and they drank each other's sweetness, painstakingly, deeply, lost to the world, and this was the grave and suddenly passionate language of youth, a long, lubricated struggle as lips and tongues conjoined. 'Lower,' she ventured in a barely audible whisper.
'Lower,' she sometimes ventured in a whisper when the mouth-kissing was done, shamed by her boldness, and she sometimes undid the top of her dress herself, and then he would lean forward and reach down to her bare breast, and she would close her eyes at once so that she would feel her shame less intensely, detach herself, know nothing, nothing but the magic of the night which opened to receive her, heedful of the honey that dripped in the night, yielding and deliquescent, dumbly eavesdropping on exquisitely expiring ecstasies, on occasion breaking the silence with a moan of endorsement, on others giving him encouragement and thanks by slowly, uncertainly stroking his hair, sometimes whispering 'The other one now.' 'I love you,' she would add hurriedly, to reclaim her dignity and inject a modicum of soul, and then would moan once more, eyes closed, thoughts scattered, carnimal, her breath rasping and slavering in her throat, in the enchantment of his hovering over her other breast. Oh make him go on and on like this, don't let him move on too soon to the rest, she ventured to think.
When he pulled away to look at her so beautiful in her nakedness, she did not stir, her lips still open and head thrown back, smiling and dazed, happy in the knowledge that she was defenceless and entirely at his mercy, awaiting the resumption, and then velvet night came down again and it was filled with the exquisite torture of her crouching lover. But suddenly she gripped him by the shoulders, pulled him down on her and told him: now.
First nights of their loving, long, stumbling, fumbling nights, desire perpetually reviving, limbs intertwined, secrets whispered, brief and ponderous collisions, turbulent storms unleashed, Ariane submitting, altar and victim, at times nipping her lover's neck with plaintively sharp teeth. Oh her eyes showing white like a saint in ecstasy, and she would ask if he were happy in her, if he were content in her, and ask him to keep her by him, keep her by him always. First nights of their loving, mortal flesh colliding, sacred rhythm, primal rhythm, backs arching, backs lunging, deeply thrusting, rapid, dispassionate thrusting, male implacability, she passionately endorsing, suddenly flexing, reaching towards the male.
All passion spent, she would gently stroke his naked shoulder, grateful, eyes shadow-ringed, and speak to him of what she called their union, tell him whisperingly the bliss he had given her, and whisper even lower as she asked if he had been made happy by her. Then it was his turn to comment, quite aware of the absurdity of their dithyrambic exegeses, but he did not care, for he had never known another woman as desirable as she. He loved those tender interludes, her caress, their affectionate talk, the way they embraced, like brother and sister. Human contact restored, he thought, and he nestled against her while she bewitched his hair.
In these interludes their mood was bright, they were amused by trifles, and both laughed loud when she told the tale of Angeline, a farm-girl from Savoy, who pretended to be sorry for her cow so that the clever creature would respond with a gloomy moo. Ariane took both parts. First she was Angeline saying: 'Poor Buttercup, who's been smacking Buttercup, then?' (To give the story its proper flavour, you really had to say 'Pore' and 'Boottercoop'.) Then she was the cow, answering with a martyred moo. The best part of the story was when the cow answered. Sometimes they mooed together, to emphasize just how smart that old moo-cow was. As you see, they weren't hard to please. They were bright, they were friends, laughing at little things, laughing if he told her about a kitten pretending to be afraid of a chair, or if he admitted that he was terrified by big, buzzing bluebottles which glinted like green metal, or if he said how cross he was when he heard people come out with the cliche about butterflies being pretty, they were horrible, soft, squashable, flying caterpillars, each one packed with nasty lymph, with wings in the worst possible taste which looked as though they'd been painted on by elderly unmarried ladies from another epoch. Oh how happy they were together, like brother and sister giving each other innocent pecks on the cheek. One evening, as they lay next to each other, when she asked him to make up a poem starting 'I know a land across the sea', he did so immediately. 'I know a land across the sea Where blooms the gillyflower; The people there smile charmingly Every minute of each hour. The tiger there is mild as grass, The lion gentle as a lamb, And to all the hoary tramps that pass Ariane gives buttered bread and jam.' She kissed his hand, and he was ashamed to be so worshipped.
If he lit a cigarette at the conclusion of a joust, she felt sad, as though lighting a cigarette was an act of disrespect for her, or even an act of sacrilege. But she let it pass without mention. They can be tactful at times.
Sometimes he fell asleep beside her, exuding trust. Her heart warmed then, for she loved to see him as he slept, loved to watch over him while he slept the sleep of a stranger on whom she gazed with c
urious pity, a stranger who was now her whole life. I have a stranger in my heart, she thought, and silently she spoke words to him, the wildest of words, the most holy of words, words which he would never hear. My son, my lord, my Messiah, she ventured inside herself to say, and when he woke she was seized by the joy that women know in the madness of their loving, oh superiority of womankind! She hugged him close, kissed him hard, entranced by the thought that he was alive, and he kissed her too, deliriously, suddenly terrified by the bones of her skeleton which he could feel beneath her pretty cheeks, and once more he kissed her beautiful young breasts which death would stiffen, and desire would flood back, desire which she welcomed, venerated. 'Take your woman,' she said.
'My master,' she would say, reverently beneath him, and she wept tears of happiness as she bade him enter. 'My master,' she said once more, words of gloriously appalling taste, and he was shamed by such exaltation, but oh how absolutely wonderful it was to be alive! 'Your woman, I am your woman,' she said, and she would take his hand. 'Your woman,' she repeated, and to know that this was so she told him to use her as he pleased. 'Use your woman as you please,' she loved to tell him. Perspiring beneath him, sobbing beneath him, she said that she was his woman and his servant, lower than grass and smoother than water, told him over and over again that she loved him. 'I love you yesterday, today and always, and it will always be today,' she said. But if I'd had two teeth missing that night at the Ritz, two pathetic ossicles, would she now be there, at her orisons, beneath me? Two ossicles weighing three grams apiece, which made six grams. Her love tips the scales at six grams, he thought, leaning over her, stroking, adoring.
First nights of their loving, oh their noble, wild conjoinings, their furious loving, oh beneath his weight Ariane suddenly transmogrified, possessed, transported, Ariane frenzied, frightening, groaning in terrified anticipation, in cautious expectation, watchfully awaiting the coming of imminent ecstasy, Ariane closing her eyes to hasten its coming, her piteously whimpered signal that ecstasy was near, her pleas to her lover: 'Together, my love, wait, wait for me, my love, now, now, O my love,' she would crazily say, and he plummeting through black skies, alone oh so alone, with death quivering in his bones, and life at last in spurting spasm and groan of triumph, his wondrously spent life escaping, his life in her at last, in her fulfilled, in receipt of such abundance, happy in her, beating the rhythm to feel it more intensely, he surrendering above her, she lying like a great blood-red flower which had bloomed beneath him. 'Oh stay, stay,' she implored, gentle and beguiling, 'do not leave me', and she held him closer, breathed his sweetness, held him close so that he would not go, to keep him by her, gentle and beguiling.
CHAPTER 43
One night, when he said it was time for them to part, she clung to him, said it wasn't late, begged him to stay, told him in French and then in Russian that she was his woman. 'Don't go, don't leave me,' she said in golden entreaty. He longed to stay, but it was important that she be kept thirsting for him, crucial that she never associate his nearness with lassitude or surfeit. He felt ashamed for stooping so soon to shabby stratagems, but it had to be so, he had to be the one who was pined for, the one who went away. In this wise did he sacrifice his happiness to the overriding requirements of their love. He stood up and switched on the light.
Through lips still swollen with loving, she said he mustn't look at her, and went to the mirror which hung above the mantelpiece. When she had straightened her dress and repaired her ravaged hair, she said he could look now, and gave him a pleasant, urbane, courteous smile, as though her brazen shamelessness had never been. He kissed her hand in a gesture of deference, which was gratefully received, for they love to be respected when the moans and the sweet, damp name-calling are over. After another ruling-class smile, she reminded him of the old Russian custom of sitting down a moment before one took one's leave. He sat, and she sat on his knee, closed her eyes, and opened her lips.
In the hall, she asked him to stay one minute more. 'No,' he said with a smile. Impressed by the calmness of his refusal, she looked up at him and her eyes worshipped until they hurt. She walked him chastely to the waiting taxi and opened the door for him. Ignoring the driver, she leaned forward and kissed his hand. 'Until tomorrow, at nine,' she reminded him in a whisper, then closed the door, and the taxi began to move. An instant later she was running after it, shouting to the driver to stop. Through the lowered window, she apologized breathlessly. 'I'm sorry, I got it wrong, I said tomorrow but it's four in the morning, so it's tomorrow already, anyway what I mean is that I'll be waiting for you tonight, so I'll see you tonight at nine, all right?' Standing there in the blue moon-washed road, shivering in her creased dress, she watched her destiny disappear into the night. 'God keep you safe,' she whispered.
When she got back to her sitting-room, she made straight for the mirror so that she would not be alone. Yes, she could say tonight already, and there'd be a tonight every day, and every tonight would have its tomorrow. She curtsied to the beloved of her lord whom she beheld in the mirror, then tried out various faces to see how she had looked to him at the end of their night, imagined once more that she was him looking at her, beseeched, offered her lips, and liked the effect. Not bad, not bad at all. But if she added words she would get an even better idea. 'Your woman, I am your woman,' she told her mirror, ecstatic and genuinely moved. Oh yes, that's a look and a half, definitely a touch of the St Teresa du Bernins. He must have been bowled over by it. And when they were kissing and snorkelling nineteen to the dozen, what did she look like then, with her eyes shut? She opened her mouth, closed her left eye, and stared at herself with the right. Difficult to tell. This merely made her look one-eyed, which rather spoilt the enchantment. Pity, now I'll never know what I look like during the performance. How awful me saying performance, because with him just now it was all so serious. Anyhow, if I want to know what I look like when it's all happening, all I have to do is to not quite close my eyes tight and peep through the slits. But on second thoughts there's no point, because when it's all happening he's got his head so close to mine that he wouldn't see anything anyway, so it's a waste of time.
She sat down, took off her shoes, which were too tight, wiggled her toes, gave a sigh of relief, and yawned. 'Phew! peace at last and good riddance,' she said. 'Don't have to be charming any more now that Sir has gone, his nibs, his boobiness, Simple Simon, oh yes, dear, we mean you. Sorry, darling, just said it for a joke, though perhaps a teeny-weeny bit also because I'm too much under your thumb when you're here, it's to get my own back, you see, to show you there are limits, to keep my self-respect, though all the same it's very nice to be all alone and by myself.'
She stood up, made faces to relax, and walked round the room. How wonderful to be able to pad about without shoes, in bare feet, without heels, even though it wasn't a very elegant thing to do, marvellous to be able to move her toes and not to have to be sublime and Cleopatra and awesomely beautiful all the time. And now for a bite to eat, lovely. 'Because, darling, I don't like saying this, but I am starving. I do have a body too, you realize. Though I expect you know that,' she smiled, and she walked airily out of the room.
She went to the kitchen and opened the fridge. Rhubarb pie? Absolutely not, it might be all right for women with bad skin in vegetarian restaurants but not for her. She needed protein, by God's guts, as Corisande d'Auble, mistress to Henry IV, probably used to say. Well, how about some of this sausage, just bite lumps off it, don't bother cutting slices? No, really, not after a night like tonight. Thin bread and butter and jam would be more suitable, more poetical, more appropriate after recent events. No, not enough bite. So she decided to have a large ham sandwich. It was an agreeable compromise.
When she'd made the sandwich, she ran out into the garden to eat it in the cool of daybreak, now festooned with the gabble of waking birds, and she swanked as she walked up and down, saucily hipped and gloriously legged. Chewing hard, brandishing her ham sandwich and proclaiming to the risen sun that
she was fair and beloved of her lord, she took long strides barefoot through the dew-wet grass and smiled broad smiles, and the sandwich held aloft was a pennant of happiness, a flag of love.
Back in her sitting-room, she sneezed. Who cared, since he wasn't there? When her nose tickled again, she sneezed very loud on purpose, saying 'Atishoo!' very distinctly and dramatically. She even went as far as to allow herself the pleasure of peering into the mirror and observing the sorry, snivelling expression of a face which has sneezed. And now, upstairs with you and wipe that nose, and quick about it! In her bedroom, she stood in front of her swing-mirror to blow her nose so that she could watch herself make a noise like trumpets. A pleasant enough sight, but hardly mouth-watering. Never blow your nose when he's there.
She tore down the stairs whistling, ran into her sitting-room, and immediately made a wonderful discovery. On the carpet under the sofa was a cigarette-case, the gold case which belonged to the archangel! She smiled knowingly. Obviously they had gone at it hammer and tongs on the sofa. Lovely hammer and tongs! She picked it up, promised it that they would sleep together, filled it with cigarettes, only too happy to be doing something for him, and besides it was a start to the preparations for tonight. In the ashtray were the butts of the three cigarettes he had smoked. She picked out one and put it between her lips. 'Ariane Cassandre Corisande d'Auble, opener of car doors and picker-up of fag-ends!' she declared.
With the sacred fag-end between her lips, she examined the armchair he had sat in, gazed fondly at the impression he had left behind him. The sight of it made her tingle, but it could not be preserved indefinitely, since the ninny would be here in a couple of hours to tidy the sitting-room. Never mind, there'd be others. 'We have a whole lifetime of impressions in front of us!' she proclaimed. But there was the sofa too, and everything that had happened on it. No identifiable imprints of him on the sofa, which was too mussed up for her to detect anything particular in the mixed his-and-her spoors they had left in their amorous wake, in the bumps and hollows and petrified waves of their sea. Oh, how wonderful it would be to be cast away on a desert island with him for the rest of their lives! She genuflected briefly to the sofa, the altar of their love. And now, let's smoke a proper cigarette, and we'll hold it between our third and fourth fingers, just like he does!