La Batarde by Violette Leduc

Author:Violette Leduc [Leduc, Violette]
Language: fra
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Gay, LGBT
Published: 2015-02-14T06:14:42+00:00

La �dtarde

mouth. She rejected my suggestion : a red sun, a great, dumb sun sinking into the sea, a shadow lying across her book. I begged her to go on. I had to risk everything, I had to make her remember all the things she'd been deprived of. The little restaurant? Or a dinner of fruit in her room ? She could live on nothing and read as she ate. She smiled, she lost herself in what she was saying with a cruel expression on her face. What would she read ? New books, old books, Biographies, novels, essays. Where would she read ? Everywhere. By the light from the store windows as she walked in the street, by the light of the moon as she rested on park benches . . . She was shouting, and some people at another table began staring at us. She would get up at five in the morning, she would go scrambling over the rocks, she would cut short her vacation, she would live with her sisters, with her father. She was eliminating me, and she was admitting it.

Sunday, November 27, 1960 at twelve-thirty a.m. You can guess, reader, you have already guessed, it is the end of a love affair, it is the end of a tyranny. My fountain pen, lifted from the exercise book, is different. Love. Love has no end. If it had, it would not be love. We go on loving those we have loved in other forms, or else we begin to cherish in other forms those we should have cherished in the past.

Nothing changes, everything is transformed. Sunday, November 27, 196o. Twenty-six years after the events I have just retold, I am watching the end of autumn being wooed in the sky by next year's spring.

Hermine. Violette. Their present is now swept clean. And that monstrous woman who passed us on the Pont de Ia Concorde ? Providence. Through a window covered with nylon net, through the embroidered garlands on a young bride's veil, I can see the clouds distending. I can see two lakes of Mediterranean blue. Hermine, Violette, the azure of our lives is sundered.

*

In Paris began the reign of the elevator. Sitting on our divan, my hands alternately icy and burning hot, I waited, I watched, I listened, I imagined the clatter of the iron grill opening on our landing, I counted the wrinkles on my knuckles. Heavy, unopened, the elevator moved up and down. The cables swung to and fro whenever it began to move. Hermine closed the grill listlessly behind her. I ran to the door, opened it for her, and her face changed. A whole life was over. The woman I hugged against me had no arms. She was blind,

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