Marie by Madeleine Bourdouxhe Read Free Book Online Page A

…’ ‘And straight away, Claudine, I looked forward to telling you about it – I’m going to dictate it to you.’ ‘Oh yes, Marie, please let me hear it!’
    So it was that whole minutes, hours, years passed by – all full, fine and perfect in their way, but essentially artificial, for if Marie were not in charge of them, these moments would not exist; she alone constructs them, with her heart, her flesh, her personal desires. This was her only faith, and it shone as brightly as the reins she held in her hands.
    One summer morning, Marie turned her head and looked behind her. She let go of the reins, and her newly liberated hands began to search for something in the past.
    Sitting on a bench in front of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, she stared without seeing it at the corner of the rue de Rennes and the rue de l’Abbaye. Again an image haunted her: of a tall girl with reddish hair adjusting a lampshade so that the light did not disturb Claudine’s sleep, then sitting down at a table with her hands on her forehead, heart pounding in great regular beats, and reading Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.
    She recalled the starched cotton collar that she sometimes wore on top of her dress: the neck was fastened with a false-stitched linen border that kept coming apart, so you had to push it back against the material with your thumb or index finger. Fully recapturing the irritation she had felt in her fingers filled her with a sense of joy and triumph.
    Marie re-awoke to the objects, the sounds and the place where she was sitting to see a man on the pavement terrace opposite; he was turning towards her and waving hello. Recognising him as Marius Denis, she didn’t move. He called to her again and finally got up and joined her.
    ‘What are you doing sitting on that bench, Marie?’
    ‘I’m rushing home,’ she replied, laughing.
    ‘You’d do better to come and have a drink with me. Will you?’
    ‘It’s just as nice here as it is opposite.’
    A little put out, he sat by her on the bench. Marius Denis had desired Marie because he desired women. Perhaps hedesired them quickly and briefly because, as a good psychologist, he always managed to find the particular language that would make them yield to him. In this context, every time he had spoken to Marie she had heard him with good grace and an attentive air; it was he who awaited a reaction that did not come. An intelligent man, he had understood that Marie was not really listening to him, that she remained distant, as if enclosed in some private world. She rarely responded to what he said, and even then never with a complete sentence. Sometimes she would wake up at a word that he had just said, bestowing upon him a sharp look as if she were following a definite path, but then, as if satisfied, her eyes would soften and she would retreat to her distance. He found these brief awakenings of her gaze even more disconcerting than the long periods of dormancy: when her eyes were sleepy there was just a chance she would give in, but when they were clear and bright she would not. A woman who was faithful to her husband and who would not give herself to anyone was rare enough; a woman who would not give herself to him, that was unthinkable. It followed that Marius’s desire for Marie grew ever more acute, but he spoke to her only of generalities.
    They had been at the Sorbonne together: he was involved in many kinds of literary activity so they had several areas of mutual interest. From time to time he slipped in to their conversation an ambiguous, almost bitter phrase, as if to convey to her that if he no longer insisted, everything would continue to depend upon her alone.
    ‘Did you have a good holiday?’ he asked tritely.
    ‘Not bad.’
    After a while, as if realising she had forgotten something, she added: ‘What about you, Denis?’
    She called him Denis. She’d said to him one day: ‘I don’t like calling people by their surname, apart from you: “Marius” is