Blue of Noon by Georges Bataille

Author:Georges Bataille [Bataille, Georges]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Tags: French Literature, Politics, Philosophy, Fiction
ISBN: 9780714530734
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 1935-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Her low voice rose up with great feeling, biting off the last words to end on a note of heartrending weariness:

Ah, why in this world through which we stray

Must flowers and happiness bloom but a day?

Then I said to her, ‘There’s something you can do for me.’

‘I’ll do whatever you want.’

‘It would have been so wonderful if you’d been naked when you sang to me.’

‘Naked?’

‘Have another drink. You can lock the door. I’ll leave room for you next to me, in my bed. Now get undressed.’

‘But it’s crazy.’

‘Remember what you said. You’ll do whatever I like.’

I said nothing more but looked at her as if I loved her. She went on slowly drinking. She looked at me. Then she took off her dress. She was almost insanely ingenuous. She unhesitatingly removed her slip. I told her that in the recess at the far end of the room she’d find one of my wife’s bathrobes among the clothes hanging there. She could slip into it if she had to, in case someone appeared. She could keep on her stockings and shoes and hide the dress and slip she’d just taken off.

I then said, ‘I want you to sing to me one last time. Then you can lie down next to me.’

I was, in fact, aroused: the more so since her body was prettier and younger than her face; most of all because, in her stockings, she was so oppressively nude.

I told her again, this time almost in a whisper. It was a kind of entreaty. I leaned towards her. I used my unsteady voice to feign ardent love, ‘Please, please stand up and sing. Sing your head off –’

‘If you like,’ said she.

She was so unsettled by love and the sense of her nakedness that her voice shrank in her throat. The periods of the song warbled through the room. Her whole body seemed ablaze. The drunken, singing head shook with some delirious impulse that seemed to be destroying her. What insanity! She was weeping, in her wild nakedness, as she approached my bed, which to me was a death bed. She fell on her knees, she fell down in front of me and hid her tears in the sheets.

I said to her, ‘Stretch out next to me, and don’t cry any more …’

She replied: ‘I’m drunk.’

The bottle on the table was empty. She got into bed. She still had her shoes on. She lay down, fanny upwards, and buried her head in the bolster. It was so strange speaking into her ear with the ardent tenderness that usually manifests itself only at night.

I told her very softly, ‘Don’t cry any more. I just had to have you act crazy. I needed it so as not to die.’

‘You won’t die – honest?’

‘I don’t want to die any more. I want to live with you. When you got up on the window sill I was afraid of death. Thinking of that empty window – I was terribly afraid. You, then me: two people dead, and the room empty …’

‘Wait – if you like, I’ll go shut the window.

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