Marie by Madeleine Bourdouxhe

Author:Madeleine Bourdouxhe [Madeleine Bourdouxhe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907970771
Publisher: Daunt Books
Published: 2016-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

THEY SAT ON A VERY LOW BED, at some distance from each other, but their hands were joined. They stayed like that, overwhelmed by this thing inside them, this thing they could not give a name to. They were overwhelmed by themselves.

Marie turned her head towards him, took this new face in her hands. ‘Have you changed?’ she asked, in an anguished voice. ‘I can’t seem to find you again …’

‘No, I haven’t changed,’ he replied. ‘Perhaps I’ve developed.’

It was the reply of a very young man. She couldn’t stop herself smiling, but she felt a profound tenderness arising in her. She pulled his big smooth face closer to her, and kissed him, quite chastely, on the forehead.

They suddenly embraced violently, and immediately recaptured all their passion. But the sea which carried them off this evening was different from the profound depths of joy they had felt on the first night. Tonight, tumultuous waves envelop them, making them pitch, throwing them on to their sides, their backs. They utter no cries or moans, but their silent lips render ever more poignant the prolonged moan of their struggling bodies. They sink in water pockets; groundswells bring them brusquely to the surface only to roll them back again, throwing their heads to the right and then to the left. Hands clutching shoulders, ankles joined, limbs that would never ever disentangle; they want to die together or to let the sea abandon them, rescued, on the same shore.

When, finally, the storm subsides, they still don’t know where they are. They know only that they have opened their eyes together, and that they have landed. But their legs and arms do not leave each other straight away – they remain entangled, as though still enveloped by damp seaweed.

He has a secret little nickname for Marie: it’s only an adjective, perhaps one that all men use; but he pronounces it in a special way, stressing the consonant as if it were two syllables. She repeats the name in reply – it’s the same one she uses for him.

‘What is happening to us?’ she says.

‘I don’t know …’

He lifts the sheets up towards her, gently, as far as her shoulders, but keeping her close to him. They sleep. How heavily they sleep that second night! Marie no longer has the look of a wild young warrior; this time, no lightning has burned their eyes. As they sleep, their features show signs of fatigue, their faces are more sorrowful, more human. How deep their second night is!

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