“Please, put my bracelet on.”
“Tell me if I make it too tight.”
“It’s easy. There’s a mark.”
“Can’t you do it?” Isabelle asked.
“I can,” I said.
“Your voice has gone,” she said.
“Has it? Will you excuse me? I must finish tidying up.”
I tossed the lid of the washbasin onto the floor, I emptied the basin.
“Too much racket in there,” said the monitor.
“Don’t file your nails in here. Don’t file your nails. .”
“Why not?” asked Isabelle.
“Not here. Not now.”
“But you’re dusting. .”
“Don’t file your nails. Stop.”
Isabelle opened the window in my cell.
“You threw out your filings?”
“You didn’t like it,” said Isabelle.
I put away the soap, I cleaned the porcelain dish where I kept my toothbrush.
Isabelle is ready to stab me. This idea ran through me while I was putting away the towels and sponges on the towel rail. I was expecting the bite of a knife.
“Did the monitor see you come in?” Isabelle did not want to reply.
I took up the honeycomb towel again, I dried the tooth-glass.
“Does she know you are here?”
Suddenly she pulled my hair. She plunged her dagger into the nape of my neck.
“Someone’s coming,” Isabelle said.
Isabelle tore herself from her task. She edged the curtain aside, she slipped out.
“False alarm. No one’s in the passage,” said Isabelle. She reassured me. She had vanished.
But the monitor had come:
“There was someone in here with you. Don’t deny it. Your friend’s name?”
“Friend?” I said contemptuously.
“Why are you smirking?”
“Isabelle was helping me. She helps me when I am slow. Our old monitor knew that.”
“You surprise me. I thought you two did not get on. Hurry along then, hurry, we’re going downstairs,” said the monitor relieved by my words.
Andréa, a half boarder who used to come in early, who lunched with us in the refectory but dined and slept in the country, spent her Thursdays and Sundays looking out on a meadow, beside a stable. Andréa made charming winter quarters. Her eyes shone with cold, the ice melting her always-chapped lips. I would shake her hand; I was touching the oxygen of freedom.
“Is it sunny over your way?” I would ask.
“The weather’s the same as here,” she would reply.
“No more frosts?” I would ask, out of nostalgia for the white frosts.
“The frosts are over. My father is sharpening his scythe for the harvest,” she said. That morning, I left Andréa to her white frosts.
“Renée was showing me some photographs. What do you think of this one?” Isabelle asked me before we went into the refectory.
“It’s a landscape, nicely done.”
Isabelle was making overtures while her hair mingled with mine.
I was afraid I would scream. I stepped backward.
Isabelle threw back her lock of hair, stepped forward. Her cheek pressed a long kiss on mine.
“Stop, I say, stop, you are killing me.”
She pushed me, furiously, into Renée, excused herself.
Younger girls disturbed us with their shouts. I love you and you won’t answer me, said the hand resting in mine. Renée was gazing at the photograph, guessing, probably, at the couple next to her, for she dared not look up. I was caught between the false innocence of the one and the other’s audacity. Isabelle’s hand, through the folds in her apron, was stroking me. It was crazy. I was rotting away, my flesh was bursting ripe.
“You can give back the photograph at the end!” said Renée.
“Leave it. She’s examining it,” said Isabelle to Renée.
Guessing that the glazed paper was my protection, Isabelle fended off the lightning that would have struck right through me, that would have revealed the terrifying halo in my belly. I collapsed, clutching the landscape in my hand.
“Slap her,” Renée said to Isabelle; “slap her, she’ll recover.”
Isabelle did not reply.
“A handkerchief, quick a handkerchief, eau de cologne,” shouted someone else. “Thérèse has collapsed. . Thérèse is ill.”
“Find some vinegar, find some spirit!”
I was listening and resting on the tiles while simulating a dead faint to follow my collapse. I dared not get to my feet for fear of ridicule. I am often exhausted on waking up: I imagine the sorrow, I imagine the absence of sorrow of those finding out that I had ceased to live. Isabelle was still silent, Isabelle was getting used to my death. Girls were shaking me, peering under my eyelids, calling my name; I was not there. I had disappeared because I could not love her in public: the scandal I had spared us would fall upon me alone. I stood up, avoiding the horrid smell of vinegar.
“It was nothing,” I said.
I patted my forehead.
“Go up to the dormitory,” said the new monitor. “Who will go with her?”
She dabbed at my forehead, my lips, with her cursed vinegar.
“I’ll go,” said Isabelle.
We left, a sorry pair, and heard the military step of the girls going into the refectory. Isabelle was embracing a girl who had had a fainting spell. The wretchedness is greater than the fault. We walked without speaking, without looking at each other. She stopped when I stopped, she walked when I started to walk again. I tramped sadly over the mat at the foot of the stairs, I hoped for reconciliation. She. . I loved her all along the banisters, at every step. Every time I lifted a foot I made a vow of reconciliation. She withdrew her arm, buttoned her smock up at the wrist, put her arm around my waist again, to comply with the monitor’s order. It was a nurse who sent me down the dormitory passage, who lifted the curtain to my cell, who went off to her own room. My smock sprayed with vinegar, my wet hair, were disheartening.
She opened the curtain wide, she aired everything before coming in. She would disinfect my soul; she was intimidating me.
“Why did you do that?”
She addressed me like family, she was honeying our past.
“Why did you do that?”
“. .”
“Did you fake it or were you really tired?”
“I faked it. Don’t scold me.”
“I’m not scolding you.”
“Leave that brush alone! Don’t go. .”
She came back into my box and the sun presented her to me. I gave her hand my deepest kiss.
“Forgive me,” I pleaded.
“Don’t. It’s awful, what you’re saying. Are you tired?”
“I won’t be tired until the holidays.”
“I must be seen in the refectory, Thérèse.”
Her weight on my knees was comforting.
“Close your eyes, listen: I collapsed in the hall because you were getting too close. My strength vanished. You were provoking me.”
“It’s true,” said Isabelle.
She opened her eyes: our soft kiss made us moan.
“Someone’s coming,” said Isabelle. “The saliva. . wipe away the saliva. .”
“Not yet at table, Isabelle!” exclaimed the head monitor. “As for you, I’ll have your breakfast brought up here.”
When I returned to the study room, I found an envelope inside my locker. I sat down in Isabelle’s place, since I had no lesson to attend; I contemplated the ink splots on her desk. A few girls were studying in the light of the new day. The white envelope rustled when I touched my hand to my heart; Isabelle’s writing shivered. I put off reading it, I studied a physics textbook, I worked halfheartedly inside my idler’s carapace. The sun was tempting me, the sky’s brightness was tinting my wrists; through the open windows, the teachers’ pompous voices had lost the resonance lent them by winter classrooms.
Seasons, give us your rags. Let us be wanderers with our hair slicked down by rain. Isabelle, would you. . would you set up home with me beside an embankment? We would devour our crusts like lions, we seek out the piquancy of the gales; we would have a house, lace curtains, while the caravans are passing, heading for the borders. I would undress you in the corn, I would shelter you inside haystacks, I would lie with you in the water beneath the low branches, I would care for you upon the forest mosses, I would take you in the alfalfa fields, I would raise you up on the hay wains, my Carolingian lady.