Marie by Madeleine Bourdouxhe Read Free Book Online

hands and the objects they touch. She reflects that however completely people might fulfil themselves in other spheres, if they don’t possess this understanding between their hands and material objects, they can never have more than an incomplete understanding of the world. It is this mutual understanding that makes movements succeed.
    She likes hands that understand what inanimate objects are saying, and that know how to speak to living things, too. She likes hands that rest on a shoulder and grasp it, hands that suggest all the richness of the heart more effectively than any verbal expressions of love, simply by holding them around a face.
     
    CLAUDINE HAD BEEN WATCHING Marie as she worked away. When her sister had rung the bell, she hadn’t been able to find her dressing gown and had thrown on a beige canvas apron instead, attaching it at the waist with a piece of cord. She hadn’t used a comb, and with her short, dull brown hair all over her forehead, her thin face and her dark unmade-up skin, she looked like a sickly little peasant.
    She talked of holidays that had gone wrong, she yawned, she complained. Marie wished she’d stop: with every word something in her wavered, with every word her love for Claudine was in danger of dying. And when sheherself wanted to talk, she lied a little with each sentence she uttered, because there was this great new thing that she was concealing like a treasure, and which meant that nothing else she might say had any reality. She wanted to leave; and at other moments she wanted to take this grubby little body into her arms and say: ‘Come on, get dressed quickly, and come with me to look at things.’ Look at what? She could only have said the streets, the Seine, the sun, men, women, the buses. And to Claudine, that answer would have seemed stupid.
    As she left, she embraced her sister a little too tightly and told her that she would phone soon.
     
    CLAUDINE LIVED FAR FROM the Right Bank, and the bus that took Marie towards the centre of town travelled the length of the rue de Rennes, crossed the boulevard St Germain and then stopped. A public clock was showing only a quarter to twelve, and since it was warm Marie left the bus and went to sit on one of the benches in front of the church. A fine end of September sun was flooding the terrace of the celebrated café and almost the whole width of the street, lighting up the blue awning of a bookshop. Marie thought of Claudine and how she had left her, with her skinny face, her worn-out old slippers, her makeshift apron. She’d probably be wandering about the apartment now, not doing anything at all; or she might have gone back to bed after her sister had left. Marie’s heart sank. She ought to have taken her by force, made her call her husband and suggest they both come to lunch.If she’d done that Claudine would be with her; Claudine would be talking. And Marie would no longer be alone: she would not be looking at the buses shining in the sun before making their darker passage into the rue Bonaparte. This notion quickly put paid to her remorse. She declared: ‘I am going through a period of self-absorption; it will pass.’
    Self-absorption, yes, that was it, but self-absorption of a rather particular kind. It seemed to her that in the last few years she had held in her hands a series of reins, each of which was tied only to the people who inhabited her own life. ‘Jean, our love will last forever …’ ‘I tell you, it is rare indeed that people love each other as much as Marie and I do …’ ‘Jean, about our love …’ ‘Yes, darling, about our love …’ ‘Jean, you’re not going out all alone to this party after all, are you, without me?’ ‘But no, my sweet, it would never have entered my head to go without you.’ ‘Claudine, I’ve just discovered a little poem by Louise Labé, as I was thumbing through a rare edition in a bookshop … I’ve learnt it by heart, it’s wonderful – listen!’ ‘Wonderful