Thérèse and Isabelle

by Violette Leduc

  “Won’t you come in?” she said to her watch.

  The opulence of that hair, which swept over the bars at the head of her bed, over her shoulders, the night table, the lace mat, enveloped me. This sheer screen that glistened, that hid the face of a girl reclining in a hospital room, frightened me. I switched off the flashlight.

  Isabelle got up. She took the book from me, and the flashlight.

  “Come now,” she said.

  She had got back into bed.

  From her bed, she shone the flashlight at me.

  I came forward. Isabelle was gently patting her hair.

  I sat down on the mattress edge. She reached over my shoulder, she picked up my book from the table, gave it to me, reassured me. I leafed through it since she was staring at me; I didn’t know which page to stop at. She was waiting for whatever I was waiting for. I fixed on the capital letter of the first sentence.

  “Eleven o’clock,” Isabelle said.

  We wanted to hear the impact and the dying away of the school clock’s eleven strokes. I stared at words on the first page without seeing anything. She took back my book, turned off the light.

  Isabelle pulled me backward, she laid me down across the eiderdown, lifted me, held me in her arms: she was releasing me from a world I had never lived in to launch me into one I could not yet inhabit. With her lips she parted mine, moistened my clenched teeth. The fleshiness of her tongue frightened me: the foreign sex did not enter. I waited, withdrawn, contemplative. The lips wandered over my lips: a dusting of petals. My heart was beating too loudly and I wanted to listen to this seal of sweetness, this soft new tracing. Isabelle is kissing me, I tell myself. She was drawing a circle around my mouth, she encircled my trouble, put a cool kiss at each corner, she dived down to place two notes, returned, rested. Beneath their lids my eyes were wide with astonishment, the thundering of the conch shells too vast. Isabelle continued: we descended knot by knot into a night beyond the school’s night, beyond the night of the town and of the tram depot. She had made her honey on my lips, the sphinxes had gone to sleep once more. I realized that I had been missing her even before we met. She listened to all she gave me, she kissed condensation on a window. Isabelle tossed away her hair under which we had sheltered.

  “Do you think she’s asleep?” Isabelle asked.

  “The monitor?”

  “She’s asleep,” Isabelle decided.

  “She’s asleep,” I agreed.

  “You’re shivering. Take off your nightgown, come here.”

  She drew back the covers.

  “Come without the light,” Isabelle said.

  She stretched out against the partition, in her bed, at ease. I took off my gown, I felt too new standing on the carpet of an ancient world. I had to rush to her straight away for the ground would not support me. I lay down on the edge of the mattress, ready to creep away like a thief.

  “You are cold. Come closer,” said Isabelle.

  A sleeping girl coughed, tried to divide us.

  Already she is holding me back, already I was being held back, already we tormented each other, but the joyful foot that was touching mine, the ankle rubbing against my ankle, reassured. My nightgown tickled me while we embraced and swayed together. We had stopped, we had returned to memories of the dormitory, we listened to the night. Isabelle turned on the light: she wanted to see my face. I took the light from her. Lifted by a great wave, Isabelle slipped into bed, rose, plunged her face to mine, hugged me tightly. The roses were fraying from the belt she put around me. I put the same belt around her. And yet I wavered. I did not dare.

  “The bed mustn’t squeak,” she said.

  I looked for a cool place in the pillow, as if it were there that the bed would not squeak; I found a pillow of blond hair. Isabelle gathered me to her.

  We embraced again, we wanted to engulf each other. We had cast off our families, the world, time, certainty. Clasping her against my gaping open heart, I wanted to draw Isabelle inside. Love is an exhausting invention. Isabelle, Thérèse, I pronounced in my head, getting used to the magical simplicity of our two names.

  She swaddled my shoulders in the ermine of her arm, placed my hand in the channel between her breasts, on the fabric of her nightgown. Enchantment of my hand beneath hers, of my neck, my shoulders clothed by her arm. Yet my face was alone, my eyelids growing cold. Isabelle knew it. Trying to warm me up all over, her tongue danced at my teeth. I closed up, barricaded myself inside my mouth. She waited: this is how she taught me to open myself, to blossom. She was my body’s secret muse. Her tongue, her little flame, charmed my blood, my flesh. I responded, provoked, fought, tried to be more violent than she. The slap of lips, the hiss of saliva became nothing to us. We labored hard, but as we slowed once more, in unison, grew careful, the draught grew richer. After so much saliva passed between them, our lips parted in spite of us. Isabelle dropped into the hollow of my shoulder.

  “A train,” she said, so as to catch her breath.

  Something is crawling in my belly. I am frightened: there is an octopus in my belly.

  Isabelle drew a childish mouth shape on my lips with her finger. The finger dropped from my lips to my neck. I seized it, drew it along my eyelashes:

  “They are yours,” I told her.

  Isabelle is silent. Isabelle does not move. If she’s asleep, it’s over. Isabelle has returned to her ways. I don’t believe in her anymore. I have to go. Her box is no longer mine. I cannot get up. We have not finished. I don’t know anything but I know we haven’t finished. If she’s asleep, it is abduction. Isabelle drives me away while she sleeps. Make her not sleep, make it so the night will not end our night. Isabelle is not asleep!

  She lifted my arm, she nuzzled at my armpit. My hips were growing pale. I felt a cold pleasure. I was not used to receiving so much. I listened to what she took and what she gave, I shimmered with gratitude: I suckled her. Isabelle threw herself elsewhere. She smoothed my hair, she stroked the midnight in my hair and the midnight trickled down my cheeks. She stopped, marked an interval. Forehead to forehead, we listened to the swirl, we abandoned ourselves to the silence, gave ourselves to it.

  A caress is to a shiver as dusk is to a lightning flash. Isabelle shone a rake of light from my shoulder all the way to my wrist, ran her five-fingered reflector along my neck, over my nape, behind me. I was following her hand, I saw through half-closed eyes a neck, a shoulder, an arm that were not my neck, my shoulder, my arm. She ravished my ear as she had ravished my mouth with her mouth. The move was cynical, the sensation singular. I froze, I was frightened by this refinement of animality. Isabelle took me again, held me still by the hair, began again. The icy fingering shocked me, Isabelle’s serenity reassured.

  She leant out of the bed and opened a drawer in her night table. I seized her hand:

  “A lace! Why a shoelace?”

  “I’m tying up my hair. Be quiet or you’ll get us caught.”

  Isabelle was tightening the knot, preparing herself.

  She whom I awaited had come prepared. I was listening to what is huge, what is alone: the heart. A small blueish egg fell from her lips where she had left me, where she took me up again. She opened the collar of my nightgown, confirmed my shoulder’s curve with her forehead, with her cheek. I accepted the wonders she was imagining on the curve of my shoulder. She was giving me a lesson in humility. I took fright. I am flesh and blood, I am alive. I am not an idol.

  “Not so much!” I begged.

  She closed my collar.

  “Am I too heavy for you?” she asked gently.

  “Don’t leave . . .”

  I wanted to clasp her in my arms but I didn’t dare. The clock spat out quarter hour after quarter hour; Isabelle was tracing a snail with her finger in that poor little space we have beneath our earlobes. She was tickling me in spite of herself. It was bizarre.

  “Harder,” I begged.

  She took my head in her hands as if I had been beheaded, she drove her tongue into my mout
h. She wanted us wasted, lacerating. We were tearing each other to pieces with stone needles. The kiss slowed in my guts, it vanished, a hot current in the sea.

  “Again.”

  “For ages.”

  We stopped kissing, lay down and, phalanx to phalanx, we charged our finger bones with what we didn’t know to say to each other.

  Isabelle coughed and our interlaced fingers went silent.

  “Let yourself go,” she said.

  She kissed the points of my collar, the red braid on my nightgown, she molded the bounty of our shoulders. Her careful hand traced lines over my lines, curves upon my curves. I glimpsed the halo of my revived shoulder, I listened to the light in her caress.

  I stopped her.

  “Let me go on,” said Isabelle.

  Her voice lingered, her hand sank into the covers. I felt the shape of Isabelle’s neck, shoulder, and arm along my neck, encircling my shoulder, the length of my arm.

  A flower opened in every pore of my skin. I took her arm and thanked her with a purple kiss upon the veins.

  “You are kind, you are good,” I said.

  “You say I am good!”

  “What can I do for you?”

  The poverty of my vocabulary discouraged me. Isabelle’s hands were shaking, they were adjusting a muslin corselette over the fabric of my nightgown: her hands were shaking with a maniac fervor.

  She sat up on the bed, seized my waist. Isabelle rubbed her cheek against mine, she told a comforting tale with her cheek. She dropped her hands to my chest. We listened to the meowing of a cat in the main courtyard.

  Isabelle’s fingers opened, closed again like daisy buds, they freed breasts from rose-shaded purgatory. I was waking into spring with the babbling of lilacs under my skin.

  “Come, come here again,” I said.

  Isabelle stroked my hip. My skin caressed became a caress; stroked, my hip shone through my intoxicated limbs into my languid ankles. It was torture, tiny tortures, in my belly.

  “I can’t go on.”

  We waited, we kept a sharp lookout for the shadows.

  I took her in my arms but I did not embrace her as I wanted in that narrow bed, I did not engrave her in me. A peremptory little girl appeared:

  “I want, I want.”

  I want what she wants, if the creeping octopus would leave me, if stars would stop shooting down my limbs. I await a flood of stones.

  “Come back, come back . . .”

  “You aren’t helping me,” said Isabelle.

  The hand advanced under the fabric. I listened to the hand’s coolness; it listened to my skin’s heat. The finger explored where the two cheeks touch. It entered the gap, came out again. Isabelle caressed the two cheeks at once with one hand. My knees, my feet were crumbling away.

  “It’s too much. I tell you it’s too much.”

  Indifferent, Isabelle stroked quickly, on and on.

  It was torment, it was hot prickling. Isabelle fell forward onto me.

  “Are you happy?”

  “Yes,” I say, dissatisfied.

  She slipped into bed, laid her cheek on my belly; she listened to her child, for it was there that my heart was beating. I held out my arm, reached her face, her mouth, her hair so far from mine, my body was calmly wretched:

  “Come back. I’m alone.”

  “. . .”

  The weight of the head that slipped into my crotch was frightening.

  She was coming back, she was offering me a kiss with her good girl’s lips on mine.

  Isabelle clawed at the fabric over my pubic hair, she entered, withdrew, while not entering and not withdrawing; she rocked me, her fingers, the fabric, the time.

  “Are you happy?”

  “Yes Isabelle.”

  My politeness annoyed me.

  Isabelle persevered differently, one monotonous finger on a single lip. My body took on the light of that finger as sand takes up water.

  “Later,” she said, into my neck.

  “You want me to go now? I must go back to my box?”

  “You must.”

  “You want us to part?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a storm somewhere near my heart:

  “Look, it’s too early.”

  “Think of this evening, think of our other evenings. You aren’t tired but soon you will be,” said Isabelle.

  I stood up, focused my flashlight, I licked my lips but found none of the salt from Isabelle’s lips.

  We leaned together over her watch, avoided catching each other’s gaze.

  “Take care when you cross the passage.”

  “I shan’t take care.”

  I left.

  Here you are again, you abandoned things. My bed is no longer my bed. You will do my bidding, things, otherwise I shall crush you. I have a museum of relics in the box opposite mine. She said it’s enough. Now is a night of obstacles. Her smell belongs to me. I have lost her smell. Give me back her smell. Is she sleeping? Yes, she is asleep inside the tomb that is her bed, she is savoring the oblivion of her pillow. She is sending me away: she has taken all of me. I cannot rest on what no longer exists. I hurl my flashlight away, I worry at the bars of my bed, I bite the soap, chew the dental paste, scratch myself, punish myself.

  I turn on the light, turn it off, turn on, turn off. I signal even through her sleep that I’m awake, that I am waiting for her. I turn on, turn off, I want to shut off her breathing. I want to see her again.

  I left my box, stopped there before her curtain, my hope fixed on the orange light between my fingers.

  Her name, my devotion.

  The other girls and the monitor stuff themselves with darkness and with absence. I stay watching, I scorn all that.

  “Are you sleeping?” I whisper, wanting the reassurance.

  Words extracted from the silence and delivered into shadows.

  I go into her box, approach the cadaver.

  Blind and deaf, Isabelle plots, looking upon a world with the eyes of sleep. The obsession with rest resides behind the sleeper’s forehead. Like the last of the magi, I lean over her. I try but I dare not wake her. A sleeper never completes her work. I turn out the light: the silence lies close on my temples. I turn it on: the sleeper is lying on her back, she makes an offering of her face to the ceiling, she poses on the pillow like a invalid suffering even in her sleep, she drags along her sleeper’s inheritance which we shall never know. I sit down at the foot of the bed, on the soft eiderdown that slips off, I stare at her, I do not decipher. I touch my own hand—for that of the deeply breathing statue. She is sleeping without an eiderdown. She will get cold. So this is not merely a rock upon a platform. I go nearer. I steal the scent of hyacinths from her sleeping mouth, I lift her, hold her to me tightly until I’m seized by a mad happiness that makes me laugh. I laugh. Isabelle awakens at my lips. What a Christmas . . . I have waited so long for the opening of those lids, wished so much for my rebirth in her eyes.

  “Didn’t you go?”

  “I came back.”

  She seems to be reflecting. No. She is resting, prolonging her cure of oblivion in my eyes. She speaks:

  “Were you there watching me?”

  “What? Say it quickly.”

  “Nothing. Tomorrow . . .”

  “It is tomorrow. Say it, say it.”

  “Nothing.”

  She falls back on the pillow. Refreshed Isabelle abandons my arms, my hands. The nonchalante will go back to sleep.

  “Don’t disappear!”

  My alarm distracts her.

  “Come back to my mouth,” she says.

  At last she stirs, she says it into my hair, near my ear, and I turn out the light for the abyss inside a kiss.

  “You sleep while I am here.”

  “Was I sleeping?”

  “While you were sleeping we were separated.”

  Isabelle listens to me with all her soul.

  “I was unhappy. You’re not sleeping now?”

  “You must
forgive me. I was so sleepy. And you, you haven’t slept?”

  “No. I was waiting.”

  “I promise I will not sleep when you are here.”

  “Oh, you promise,” I said.

  I hid my face in my arms.

  “Are you crying?”

  “I’m not crying.”

  “If you cry we will be caught,” says Isabelle.

  “Then we’ll be caught. So what?”

  “Aren’t you looking forward to tomorrow evening?”

  “Let’s run away. Tomorrow we will be free.”

  “Keep your voice down,” she says.

  “You don’t want to. Why?”

  “Because it’s impossible.”

  “I’m going for good,” I say.

  I left once more.

  Isabelle followed me into the passage:

  “You think we’ll be able to embrace when we’ve a policeman on either side!”

  She pulled me back into her box, she encircled me anew while I pretended to resist her. It was the first time that she clasped me to her standing up.

  We listened to the vortex of heavenly bodies deep within us, we watched the shadows whirling in the dormitory.

  I brought Isabelle back from a chilly winter seafront, I drew back the sheets, showed her the way:

  “It is late. Sleep. I was wrong just now: you must sleep.”

  “No!”

  “You’re yawning.”

  “Come closer. I want to see you.”

  The flashlight was hurting her eyes. Soon that slack mask would cover her face.

  “Don’t sleep . . .”

  “I promise I won’t.”

  I wait, I watch her. I wait: the spider spins deep inside me, the spider will pounce at my sex if I don’t ask . . . What is there to ask?

  She wonders how long I will last with her drug in my eyes. Our complicity shudders between us, sends waves, while my judge silently judges the future’s kisses and caresses. I look at her as I look at the sea in the evening when I can no longer see it.

  “It’s time to go,” says Isabelle.

  We would rise at half past six. The monitors would push the curtain rings along their rails, coming into our cells to see that we were up. We would strip our beds, wash in cold water while our mattresses grew cold, remake our beds once we had dressed. At a quarter to seven, the girl on duty would open the cupboard, take out the dustpan and broom, clean her cell, leave the broom outside her neighbor’s box. At twenty-five past seven, the monitor inspected our combs, at twenty-five past seven we made sure our hands and nails were impeccable, at twenty-five past seven the bell would ring: we lined up in the passage and went down the stairs two by two. At half past seven we put our shoes on in the shoe room, at seven thirty-five we broke out of our pairs in the hall and formed groups according to our own alliances. At seven forty the porter rang the bell once. The girls lined up in the hall. We would go as far as the refectory, take earthenware pitchers from their rack, butter symmetrical pieces of bread. At ten to eight the headmistress came in. We put down our buttered bread, we stood to attention. At eight o’clock the head monitor clapped her hands. We would rise from the tables, replace the pitchers, push our chairs in against the table, sweep our crumbs into our bowls, and line up two by two in the passage. Girls flew off toward their violins, their primers, their pianos. We took a few turns around the schoolyard, lined up once again to go up to the study room, took our books from our lockers, and studied until half past eight.