Night in the Afternoon and Other Erotica by Caroline Lamarche

Author:Caroline Lamarche
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2000-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

When we emerge from the red house, the man with the blowtorch looks at us again, and this time I don’t lower my eyes. When we emerge from the red house, I’m carrying my orgasm like a pregnant woman her belly, and I want to be shown respect.

3

Sometimes, when Gilles lifts his hand to stroke my face, I quickly shield myself with my arm. The gesture always startles him, as if he’s suddenly found himself transported to another planet. We both float for a moment, nauseous, in a state of weightlessness. Then I start to laugh, and the incident is closed.

I have no power over the arm that rises in front of my eyes. Perhaps the simple truth is, I don’t want Gilles to touch me anymore. But I can’t be sure, about either that or any of the other signs. I eat very little, and only when my body demands it. Sometimes I sleep in the afternoons, curtains drawn against the sun. I get up at night and walk the streets, straight ahead along the canal, until an impulse makes me turn and head back home. Sometimes, when I get back, I find the ginger cat lying on the bed. He looks at me with an air of wild entreaty, as if saying: I love you for the soft bed and the warm room, I love you for the things I’ve forgotten and the things that are going to happen, I love you for the way your hand touches my fur just like my mother’s tongue used to, when I was only a blind, wet ball in a transparent pouch. I chase him away. The following night, he’s back. In the end I’ll have to keep the window closed.

During the day, I have no desire to move. I stroke Douce and watch the kittens sucking hungrily. Douce is thin, and so am I. I talk to her tenderly. Outside the house, I have no desire to talk. My silence is a tribute to the memory of the blows, a constant longing to be spurned, an obsession with the belly. I can’t communicate any of these things, but my silence, my seeming indifference, makes me appear unusually receptive, like an antenna. People have started confiding in me more than they used to. At the agency, the customers take their seats in front of my desk like patients at the doctor’s, and the conversations quickly turn confidential. Now I know, as I didn’t before, why such and such a person chooses to go to Venice rather than New York. It has nothing to do with the actual cities, or the pictures in the brochures, it has to do with dreams of Venice, dreams of New York, free of all reality. In shops, on the way from the fitting rooms to the cash desk, the assistants tell me their life stories. At the market, a woman told me a recipe for mussels cooked in port, when all I was doing was waiting in line next to her at the fish shop.

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