By a whimsical caprice, the page of the magazine had turned over as it slipped onto the carpet. I picked it up, and as I did so I saw them on the back, these three women from the turn of the century. I had never seen them before, having regarded the reverse side of this press cutting as nonexistent. This unexpected encounter intrigued me. I took the photo closer to the light coming from the balcony…
And suddenly I fell in love with them. With their bodies and with their tender and attentive eyes, which allowed one to guess only too well at the presence of a photographer crouched under a black cloth, behind a tripod.
Their femininity was such as would inevitably touch the heart of a solitary and shy adolescent like myself. It was, in a way, a normative femininity. All three wore long black dresses that enhanced the ample roundness of their bosoms and hugged their hips; but notably, before embracing their legs and spreading into graceful folds around their feet, the fabric sketched the discreet curve of their stomachs. The chaste sensuality of this gently rounded triangle fascinated me!
Yes, their beauty was just what a young, still physically innocent dreamer could endlessly call to mind in his erotic fantasies. It was the image of a "classical" woman. The embodiment of femininity. The vision of the ideal mistress. It was in this light, at any rate, that I contemplated the elegant trio, their great eyes shaded in black; their voluminous hats sporting dark velvet ribbons; their old-fashioned air, which in the portraits of previous generations always seems to us to betoken a certain naivete, a candid spontaneity lacking in our own contemporaries that both touches us and inspires our confidence.
And I marveled at the neatness of this correspondence: what my lack of experience in love called for was precisely this generic Woman, a woman still devoid of all those sensual particulars that a mature desire would detect in her body.
I contemplated them with a growing uneasiness. Their bodies were inaccessible to me. Oh, the problem was not the physical impossibility of being with them. For a long time my erotic imagination had learned how to thwart this obstacle. I closed my eyes and saw my fair strollers naked. Like a chemist I could reconstruct their flesh by a skillful synthesis, taking the most banal elements: the heaviness of the thigh of that woman who had brushed against me one day in a crowded bus; the curves of sunburned bodies on beaches; all the nudes in paintings. And even my own body! Yes, despite the taboo imposed on nudity in my native land and, with greater reason, on female nudity, I would have known how to reconstitute the elasticity of a breast beneath my fingers and the suppleness of a thigh.
No, the elegant trio were inaccessible to me in quite a different way… When I sought to recreate their era my memory immediately went into action. I remembered Blériot, who around that time was crossing the Channel with his monoplane; Picasso, who was painting the Demoiselles d'Avignon… The cacophony of historical facts resounded in my head. But the three women remained immobile, inanimate – three museum exhibits with a labeclass="underline" "The elegant ladies of the belle epoque in the gardens of the Champs-Elysées." Then I tried to make them mine, to turn them into my imaginary mistresses. With my erotic synthesis, I modeled their bodies; they moved, but with all the stiffness of sleepers, whom someone is trying to move around, upright and fully clothed, in a semblance of their waking state. And as if to accentuate this impression of sluggishness, in my dilettante synthesis I dredged up from my memory an image that made me grimace: that bare, flaccid breast, the dead breast of a drunk old woman I had seen one day at the railway station. I shook my head to rid myself of this nauseating vision.
So I had to resign myself to a museum peopled with mummies, with waxworks bearing their labels: "Three elegant ladies," "President Faure and his mistress," "Old soldier in a village in the north."… I closed the suitcase.
Leaning on the handrail of the balcony, I let my gaze lose itself in the transparent evening gold above the steppe.
What was the point of their beauty after all? I thought, with a sudden clarity ascendant as the light from this sunset. Yes, what was the point of their fine breasts, their hips, their dresses that hugged their young bodies so prettily? To be so beautiful and to end up thrust into an old suitcase, in a sleepy, dusty town, lost in the middle of an endless plain! In this Saranza, of which, during their lifetime, they hadn't the slightest notion… All that was left of them was this photo, which had survived an unbelievable series of hazards great and small and was only preserved as the back of the page reporting the Peking- Paris car rally. Even Charlotte had no memory of these three feminine figures. I was the only one on this earth to preserve the last thread linking them to the world of the living! My memory was their last refuge, their ultimate abode before final and total oblivion. I was in some sense the god of their trembling universe, of this bit of the Champs-Elysées where their beauty still shone…
I could only offer them the life of puppets. I wound up the spring of my memory, and the elegant trio began their jerky promenade; the president of the Republic embraced Marguerite Steinheil; the duc d'Orléans fell, pierced by perfidious daggers; the old warrior grasped his long pike and stuck out his chest…
"How can it be," I asked with anguish, "that all these passions, griefs, loves, leave so little trace? What an absurdity are the laws of this world in which the lives of such beautiful and desirable women depend on the flutter of a page! For had that page not turned over, I would not have saved them from oblivion, which would have been eternal. What a cosmic blunder is the disappearance of a beautiful woman! Disappearance forever. Complete annihilation. Without shadow. Without reflection, without appeal…"
The sun went down over the far-distant steppe. But for a long time the air retained the crystalline luminosity of cool summer evenings. Beyond the wood the cry of the Kukushka rang out, more resonant in this cold air. The foliage of the trees was flecked with a few yellow leaves. The very first. The cry of the little engine rang out again. Already distant, fainter.
It was then that, returning to the memory of the elegant trio, I had this simple thought, this last echo of the sad reflections in which I had just been sunk. "What they had in their lives was an autumn morning, cool and clear, an avenue in the sun strewn with dead leaves, where they paused for a moment, motionless before the lens. Bringing the moment to a standstill… Yes, there was in their lives a clear autumn morning…"
I suddenly was transported with all my senses into the moment that the smiles of the elegant trio had captured. I found myself amid the ambience of its autumnal smells; so penetrating was the acrid scent of dead leaves that my nostrils palpitated. I blinked in the sun that shone through the branches. I heard the distant sound of a phaeton bowling over the cobblestones. And the still confused murmuring of a few laughing remarks that the three women exchanged before freezing in front of the photographer… Yes, intensely, fully, I was living their time!
The impact of feeling myself beside them on that autumn morning was so great that I tore myself away from its light, almost frightened. I was suddenly afraid of being trapped there forever. Blinded, deafened, I came back into the room and took out the magazine page again…
The surface of the photo seemed to quiver like the wet and vivid colors of a transfer. Its flat perspective suddenly began to deepen, to recede before my eyes. That was how, as a child, I used to contemplate two identical images moving slowly toward each other before blending into a single stereoscopic one. The photo of the elegant trio opened up before me, gradually surrounded me, let me come in under its sky. The branches with broad yellow leaves leaned over me…