Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin

Author:Albertine Sarrazin [Sarrazin, Albertine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Norton
Published: 2013-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

9

Within a week, I have exhausted every Intimité and Nous in Annie’s library, and if I’ve read Confidences, I’ve heard some too. I clearly have no talent for tie-making, and Annie won’t hear of my helping her with the dishes or the cooking:

“With your leg, don’t even think of it!”

So, I go walking along the boulevard. I go along, dragging my foot like a turtle lugs its shell, with the same methodical slowness. Summer makes the shadows tremble in the chestnut trees; there, at the end, in the oasis of the intersection. I don’t make it: I turn back and go home docilely, just when I said I would. The eye of my conscience is the face of a watch. If Annie gets back from making her deliveries one or two hours late, that’s her affair; but I . . . I am still ruled by the clock, the clock of others who are afraid of my absences, the invisible prison clock that watches you and brings you back; but then, at Annie’s, I don’t feel so much like escaping.

“A little more wine, Anne? You know, it’s only ten per cent alcohol, not very dangerous. . . .”

At night, after dessert, we talk until the bottle’s finished. Annie and I: two women, deprived of love and splendor: I can’t, she doesn’t want to anymore. All day, we are bound together, linked by the similarity of gestures, of menus, of the sufferings of women, by the needles moving simultaneously, hers to the left, mine to the right: our chairs face each other and I am left-handed, we mirror each other. We sew, we smoke, we hum; from time to time we smile at each other, sighing. . . . But it’s during the evening that we become completely intimate. The camaraderie of the workshop is put aside, neatly relegated among the ties, packed up in the work suitcase; and intimacy is woven, thread by thread, glass by glass, across the table where we preside, among the wax flowers and the piled-up plates.

Nounouche runs between us, climbs up on our knees, cleans up the crumbs and the ashtray, buzzes over our whispers.

“Come on, Nounouche, to bed!” Annie says without conviction at the end of every quarter-hour after eight o’clock.

In front of this minuscule listener, it’s important to talk unintelligibly: Annie wants her girl to “stay a little girl,” talks to her about Santa Claus, about cabbages and roses; she almost assaulted Madame Villon when the latter, wanting to undertake Nounouche’s sexual education along with that of her own girls, showed her some pictures in the medical Larousse; but she sees nothing wrong in letting her stay up with us until midnight: she’ll sleep late the next morning. When she goes to school. . . . Anyhow, what do you think she can understand, come now! Your father is in the hospital as you can see for yourself every Saturday, you must believe your mother: and no one else, if the neighbors say something you just have to answer that they are dopes and we are a bunch of bums.

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