Sphinx by Anne Garréta Read Free Book Online Page A

perceptible, sensual heaviness of the mouth.
    I don’t know what more to say about this body, although I spent hours contemplating it. But that night, my contemplation was exorbitant, quickly twisting into a desire to take possession…A*** noticed my unusual comportment. I made excuses; I didn’t dare reveal the reason formy turmoil and so I was restraining myself from clearly expressing my feelings. I spent the end of that night in a state of incredible confusion: daggers of desire, scattered snippets of conversation, a fragmented vision of A*** dancing were all assailing me in a blur.
    We separated on a street corner with the light kiss on the lips that wasn’t reserved for me alone. Once home, I was unable to fall asleep, although the night had been, per usual, long and draining. But the exhaustion, which, in the stages of desire, typically follows confused excitation, emptied me of all energy, of even that energy required to sleep. I was turning over in my bed as one might collapse onto a body in the heat of a furious embrace. I was tortured by the memory of A***’s scent, by the residual imprint, barely there, of a shoulder resting against my own this morning as we spoke. The ghost of A***’s presence against mine; a hand poised for a moment on my face, our thighs pressed together in a cramped space. I had the sensation in my flesh of contact with those limbs, no longer there; the effect lingered long after its source had disappeared, retaining the same intensity. A hallucinatory sensation, as if my body had suffered an amputation. This sensation that, even after the split, the separation of our two bodies kept scalding me, kept me awake. I oscillated the entire morning between the rage of embracing only a void, and the memory, the bliss of an instant, of the past night that I was trying so hard mentally to recompose.
    Around two in the afternoon, I got out of bed without having slept, prey to a mixture of despair and exhaustion. Wandering the apartment aimlessly, the shutters closed, I declaimed in an incoherent monologue all that passed through my head for the next two hours. The sound of the telephone, which rang right in the middle of my vociferations, terrified me. I knew who was calling, but I was afraid of answering and betraying my nervousness. Nonetheless, I answered it and managed to controlmyself for long enough to agree to meet A*** around six o’clock at the Café de Flore.
    As soon as we hung up, I hurriedly started getting ready. In the shower, I promised myself twenty times that I would declare my passion that night in no uncertain terms, which I immediately began to assemble and articulate. Looking at myself in the mirror, I swore when I saw the bags under my eyes, which were much worse than usual. Then I wasted a good twenty minutes wondering what clothes to wear on this solemn occasion; I wanted to look my best, which, normally, was the least of my concerns. Look good! Look good! The idea suddenly made me shrug. I observed my naked form displayed in the mirror: was it really that important how I chose to veil my nudity? Since I had lost weight (the mirror confirmed this), my clothes, which I always wore a bit loose, had become rather baggy. I surveyed my wardrobe, still unable to decide what to wear. In a sudden fury to be done with this inner debate on the uselessness of artifice, I grabbed the first pair of pants and the first shirt to fall into my hands. I pulled on my usual leather jacket and left in a rush from the apartment, dreading a late arrival to this decisive rendezvous.

    Before A*** brought me there, I had never stepped foot in the Café de Flore. I held a sort of prejudice against this place that stemmed from an old image of the 1950s to which it was for me indissolubly linked. My aversion to this distressing, foul-smelling intellectualism—also known as “existentialism”—was combined with my distrust of these clichéd spaces where