A minute before I detected an interesting and dynamic life, an experienced feminist. What happened to her? From her worried voice, I guess a frustration or a dark secret. Could it be her mother’s illness – maybe hereditary – or her Boris? Maybe her father got jailed for dealing drugs. The mystery deepens, what a delight!
She returns with a tray she puts down on the balcony, “Here is okay?”
On the concrete? With my skirt?
She sits crossed-legs in one corner, “The weather is nice.” She removes her shirt and throws it in the bedroom. In her undershirt, she looks even more boyish with her scrawny chest. Ah, if I were not so fat, Etienne wouldn’t have left me. Her ringing burst of laughter cuts short my galloping imagination, “I can put it back on.”
I sit clumsily in front of her. I shouldn’t have accepted her invitation.
Her eyes are gazing into mine, “I mean, if you're embarrassed.”
She reads my mind, now?
“I was only following your train of thought. I don’t have your feminine charms. Look at me, I don't have any! It would be really handy if we could trade bodies, you know?”
What else is she going to come up with?
She pours the coffee and keeps talking volubly about the weather, today’s work, in a monologue which wants to be entertaining. I hear only her sweet nothings, I am elsewhere: Etienne has deserted me, I sail alone, I hurt inside. What to do against this violent feeling of mental suicide? What to do in the emotional isolation he left me?
Tears on my cheeks, my hand shaking, words suddenly pour out of my mouth: “We split up, actually he left me for another girl, I was hooked on him, such a good lover, and then he went off with someone else, can you believe it?”
I stand to blow my nose, to sniff in front of the map of her travels. Why couldn’t I also leave? Go far from here… far from everything… far from everybody?
She comes behind me, wraps her arm around my waist, “I’d take you away, but you’re a stay-at-home girl.”
Her hand on my belly, the other one caressing my hair, her voice in my back, “Go for it, cry to your heart’s content if it can do you any good.”
“I can’t, I can’t cry anymore!”
“But there is more. Don’t you want to get it off your chest?”
I spin on myself between her arms and let go against her shoulder with eyes closed. She is right, I can’t get rid of him, still laughing in my face, his teeth so white, his eyes so languorous, his long hair so silky. I wanted to thrash him and at the same time to hold onto him. I haven’t done anything to deserve this.
“Are you still in love with him?”
Her question strikes me hard. No, I loved him for his resemblance to...
“Are you jealous?”
The cleaver of the words makes bleeding marks in my heart. No, I am bitter.
“Because, you know, he also tried with me.”
What? She knew Etienne? I bit my lip, struggling, “What a bitch! Let me go!”
She restrains me with all her might, “One cures with the hair of the dog that bites one. Do you want to deal with it once and for all or not?”
I swallow my saliva and my pride with a nod.
Her voice is unrelenting, “One day he was waiting for you outside work, he recognized me and he came on to me. He was forward, he made comments on his preferences, he assured me I had sex withdrawal symptoms, he asked if I was turned on by him, if I wanted to do it with him.”
“He put on the same act with another girl.”
Her arm lock relaxes, “I know.”
“We had a serious talk about it, and then I was so upset I went for a walk. When I returned, he was gone. I thought it was over between us. The next day, he came back to apologize.”
She massages my shoulders, “It’s over.”
“He dumped me later. In a night club. A smile on his face and that girl at his arm. Telling everybody…”
“I know, I know.” She caresses my hair, “Let's not talk about him anymore.”
“… that I fucked like a cow, that I was nothing but a country bumpkin. All bloody stupidities, dirty comments.”
The taste of blood on my tongue makes me cry even more, I break free from her embrace, I don't recognize my voice, a language I never use, vicious and filthy, comes out of my mouth, stupid and dirty comments, just like Etienne. She doesn’t blink, she barely steps back, waiting for me to finish, then she touches my lips softly, “You’re bleeding!” Her finger is red, she sucks it. I’m ashamed. She tries to hold me back, her voice seems to come from far away, “By the way, they’re blue!”
“What?”
“Your panties. I saw them when you sat on the balcony.”
I don’t feel like laughing, I want to go, she tries to reason with me, I’m not listening anymore, I dash down the staircase, I run into people I didn't see through my tears. I turn the street corner like a zombie. It’s hot, I suffocate, I hold my belly with both hands, my lip swells, the taste of blood is salty. Another intersection, running, bursts of honks and brakes, I restore my balance and burn my hand on the hood of a car. The sky grows dark or my sight grows dark, I take refuge on the bench of a bus stop. The exhaust fumes make me cough, I jump in the first bus to arrive and I run to the far back. On the seat next to me, a pregnant Arabic woman. I put my hand down on her belly – Little Brother! The woman smiles through her yellow teeth.
― Your grief awakens. Don’t let it overwhelm you.
I must have been four, my fingers spread on the same hard warm ball where he was growing. He didn’t have a name yet.
― You’re hurting yourself for nothing.
Tear of her belly at the delivery. Wound in my womb after mommy’s funeral. I didn’t want to be alone. Little Brother invented stories in the mirror, games in the empty house. His dislocated body on the white tiles, covered with…
“Last stop, everybody off!”
The bus left in a cloud of exhaust, there is lightning in the sky, I am in the urban development zone, far from home and I’m going to slide again into madness if I don’t control myself.
To walk. To walk and command my legs to forget their fatigue, to supplant the suffering in my heart with the one of my body. Yes, certainly, it is possible.
To walk and extenuate myself in the unbearable heat, away from the cooling wind, to break my stupid resistance and the heady memories of the mirror.
To walk and lessen through another torment the one which has been racking me since Little Brother’s disappearance. Mommy, mommy! I saw your sighs, I heard your tears, I felt your voice, I ran to take refuge against your flat belly, Little Brother pulled me by the hand, we went back to our invisible games.
To walk and subdue the torture of his living ghost’s apparition with Etienne, to hear nothing but the repercussions of the pain within my whole body, at each step ahead, and not to think anymore about our mute stories in the empty house, about our silent games in the mirror.
To walk and cross the bridge over the Rhône without looking down, without letting myself be tempted by the vertigo, the eddies...
― Bent over the parapet, hypnotized by the whirlpools of the Rhône, she doesn’t feel the violence of the wind, she doesn’t see the danger. Eh! There is a good reason if we call it baby eater.1
I see Little Brother in the eddies. He kisses me, we melt into each other like in a mirror. He’s everywhere, I see him everywhere, I feel him everywhere…
― It’s impossible, you’re rambling again.
“What a shame, what a shame!” yelled God the Father. The Paternal loud mean voice. The Paternal strong long arms. The Paternal belt slowly undone. Mommy screaming “No, Marcel, no!” I saw my frightened eyes in the mirror. Little Brother lying naked in my place on the bed, he didn’t flinch at his legs being spread apart, he didn’t shout when the belt tore his buttocks, he clenched his teeth. In the mirror. I felt the burning inside, I didn’t shout, I clenched my teeth. And cried.
In the blue-green mirror of the water and the memories, Little Brother tells me, “We must get out of here!”
The evening has come with the rain. The pain in my belly goes down into my legs. I know I’m going to change through this self-imposed suffering. I know this is not the last of my torments. Through these throes, I know that pleasure will come back one day. I feel it hidden deep inside of me, underhand, behind the voice of God the Father shouting upstairs in the dark bedroom, “What a shame, what a shame!”
Mommy died on a day like today. Under the rain, in the mud, I walk with Little Brother in the cemetery. He holds my hand, he kisses me with his eyes. Cold rain in the sky black with smokes, black and cold marble around the deep hole. I’m scared, I’m black, I’m deep, my feet are cold in my shoes in the mud. God the Father cries black tears. My little breasts shiver with cold. His chest is hard like marble. Little Brother is sad, he waves goodbye to me, he becomes transparent, he disappears. Trails of blood on the white tiles, in the mirror, on my legs. I’m afraid. The white of the walls of the smocks of the men of the sheets of the sperm of the milk of the paper of the snow of the butterflies of the dress of the candle of the bouquet of the veil of the stockings of the shoes to hide the blood on the tiles in the mirror to suppress the screams of God the Father upstairs in the dark bedroom from where you had taken me to these foreign, forbidden and virgin lands. Oh, Little Brother, come back to me!
( to be continued )
1 The Rhône river is nicknamed “the baby eater” because of its treacherous whirlpools.
