La Batarde by Violette LeDuc

Author:Violette LeDuc
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

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October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May, June, July. I told her I wanted to see waves, she answered that I had insisted on the Riviera and that we were on the Riviera. I told her that she couldn’t forget the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, that she never mentioned it, that never mentioning it made it worse. I told her that she no longer laughed, that she was somewhere else, I was mistaken. She was beside me, she loved the Mediterranean and its little mirrors. The dance of the little mirrors for the Mediterranean, she called it. She called me “little chicken” or “squirrel” so that I should love it with her. I melted with pleasure when she called me those names, but I couldn’t see her Mediterranean. She discovered the noise of the waves. It was “a lullaby,” “the sweetest happiness there ever was.” She discovered new things everywhere, as we discover love everywhere when we are ready to meet it. My headaches, the violence of my migraines in the Riviera sun escaped her. I spoiled things for Hermine, I made her impatient: the light was agony for me until four in the afternoon. Everyone there was having a good time. Hermine was enchanted by the bar set up on the sands; there was a couple dancing there on the platform at eleven in the morning. Hermine said it was like drinking blue cocktails; I annoyed her with my shivering and my cold hands. I didn’t see her Mediterranean, but even so I wasn’t blind. I didn’t dare reveal what I wanted it to be: the violet ink in my inkpot when I was learning to write my alphabet. Hermine at midnight, savoring her cigarette as she followed the rise and fall of the “lullaby” along by the waves. And I, murmuring how much I was enjoying the walk, but lying.

The following day, nailed down by the sun, I watched Hermine watching the Mediterranean. She no longer sewed: the packets of dress patterns outside the draper’s shops held no interest for her. Alone beside the sea at two in the morning, she listened to “the festooning of the night,” then came back to sleep, still draped in a veil of apricot-colored darkness. I pointed out the sculptured white masses floating in the sky, recalling the North where we had come from. She couldn’t see them; she refused to see them. She would slide back into the warm water to escape an eddy of cooler air. Suddenly deprived of her presence, I was both doomed and blessed. We drank silently in the bars while I looked into her eyes, begging for pardon, and she would burst into laughter over the slightest thing, trying to shake me off and yet not conscious of the strain I put on her. Outings, bus rides. Hermine gazed with passion at the indentations of the coast, the shattered rocks, the violent colors. A cypress … the cypress beside my grandmother’s grave, my cry of

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