“It’s rising, it’s rising. .”
“Never ending, never. .”
The veil tickled the sole of my foot, the finger spun in white-hot sun, a velvet flame twisted in my legs. Come from far away, the veil flew off even further. Walking on waves. . I know what this means for the torrent of my thighs. I had been brushed by the mantle of the madness that never rests, I had been crushed as much as caressed by a spasm of pleasure.
“Together.”
“It was together. .”
Rest, heavenly curfew. The same death in soul and body. Yes, but death with a zither, with a bullet in the head. Our silence: the periwinkle silence of maps of the night sky. Our stars beneath our eyelids: tiny crosses.
“Don’t go quiet,” said Isabelle.
“I’m not. I’m carrying you.”
I was carrying the child most like her that she could give me: I was carrying the child of her presence.
She soothed my neck with her hair, with her cold little nose.
“Say something. .”
“I can’t. I have you here. .” I guided her hand:
“I have you here and here. .”
I led her hand over my belly.
“Crook your arm,” she said, “crook it as if we were walking out together.”
She gave me her arm and we strolled between Little Bear and Great Bear in our map of the stars.
My blood rushed toward her in jubilation. I turned the flashlight on.
Her pubic hair was not twinkling; it had grown thoughtful. I embalmed Isabelle with my lips, with my hands. Pale sleeping girls were breathing all around her; shades hungry for pallor whirled above her. I opened her lips and killed myself before looking. My face was touching it, my face moistening it. I began to make love to it out of plain friendship.
“Better than that.”
I could not do more.
Isabelle thrust my face deep.
“You shall speak, you shall say it,” she said.
There was a collision of clouds in my intestines. My brain was wild with greed.
“You are beautiful. .”
I was picturing her. I was not lying.
Two petals were trying to swallow me. It was as if the eye of the flashlight saw better because it was the first to see.
“Speak,” begged Isabelle, “I’m alone.”
“You are beautiful. . It’s so strange. . I don’t dare to look anymore.”
Its language all yawnings, the monster that made requests and gave answers was frightening me.
“Warm me again,” I said.
The shadows’ rustling at three in the morning made me shiver.
“Sleep a moment,” she said, “I’ll keep watch.”
“Have I disappointed you?”
“That is for us to face squarely, like everything else.”
The night would be gone, soon the night would leave us nothing but tears.
I focused the light; I was not afraid of my wide-open eyes.
“I can see the world. It is coming from you.”
“Be quiet.”
Dawn and her shrouds. Isabelle was combing her hair in a zone by herself, where her hair was always loose.
“I don’t want the daylight to come,” said Isabelle.
It is coming, it will come. The day will shatter the night over an aqueduct.
“I’m afraid of being parted from you,” said Isabelle.
A tear dropped into my garden at half past three in the morning.
I forbade myself the least thought so that she would be able to fall asleep inside my empty head. Day was taking over from the night, day was blotting out our weddings; Isabelle was falling asleep.
“Sleep,” I said, near the hawthorns that had waited all night for the dawn.
I stole out of bed like a traitor; I went straight to the window. High in the sky there had been a battle, and the battle’s heat was ebbing. The mists were beating a retreat; here and there, in isolated patches, night lingered, greying at the edges. Celestial dawn had come alone and no one would salute her.
“Are you going?” asked Isabelle.
“Sleep.”
“Come back. My arm is cold.”
“Listen. . There’s someone studying.”
“What I used to do before I knew you,” said Isabelle.
Already a bedlam of birds in one tree, already; first glimmerings already pecked away. .
“I’ll do what you want,” I said.
I licked.
Kneeling on the pillow, Isabelle shook just as I was shaking. Let my flaming face, my mouth, be parted from her face, from her mouth. My sweat, my saliva, the lack of space, my situation as a slave in the galleys, condemned to ecstasy without respite since I fell in love with her: all bewitched me. I slaked my thirst with brine, I fed myself on hair.
I see the new day’s half mourning, I see the tatters of the night, I smile at them. I smile to Isabelle and, forehead to forehead, I play at butting horns with her so as to forget what is dying. The melody of the bird that sings and hastens the morning’s beauty exhausts us: perfection is not part of this world even when we come upon it here.
“The monitor is up!” said Isabelle.
The sound of the water in the basin ages us. She has gained strength while we have lost ours. The monitor was washing the residue of sleep from her skin.
“You’ll have to go,” said Isabelle.
To leave her like an outcast, to leave her in secret also saddened me. There were millstones weighing down my feet and I was learning the odor of our sweat by heart.
I sat down on her bed. Isabelle raised her desolate face to me:
“I don’t want you to go. No, go on. It’s too dangerous.”
I loved Isabelle without show, without raptures: I offered her my life without a word.
Isabelle stood up, she took me in her arms:
“Will you come every evening?”
“Every evening.”
“We’ll never leave each other?”
“We’ll never leave each other.”
My mother took me back home.
I never saw Isabelle again.
A STORY OF CENSORSHIP
Here is Thérèse et Isabelle just as Violette Leduc originally wrote it, complete with those precious and acerbic pages that were unpublished until now, its bare and violent language demonstrating a liberty of tone such as no female writer in France had dared to adopt before Leduc.
Thérèse et Isabelle formed the first section of a novel, Ravages, which Leduc presented to the publisher Gallimard in 1954. Judged “scandalous,” this work was censored by the publisher. Encouraged by Simone de Beauvoir, Leduc had begun writing it in spring of 1948. Two years earlier, she had published her début novel L’Asphyxie (“Asphyxia”), a fictional recreation of her childhood in a small town in Northern France, where she had lived with her mother’s “blue, hard” eyes as well as with a loving grandmother. She was also then preparing a prose poem for publication, L’Affamée (“Starved Woman” or “Craving Woman”), which recounted her “impossible” passion for de Beauvoir. Two masterpieces that went unnoticed by the wider public but were greeted with enthusiasm by the literary elite of the time. Leduc was then what we call “a writer’s writer.”
Ravages was to be her first true novel, a project of protracted gestation that turned out to be riddled with problems, as Leduc’s correspondence shows. While suffering from loneliness and from her infatuations with inaccessible people, Leduc revised and reconstructed her former passions on paper. “I have noted the gulf that stretches between the life I am leading and the eroticism of the book I’m writing,” she confided to de Beauvoir.
In its original version, Ravages was intended to retrace the three love stories of its heroine Thérèse. These were inspired by, if not calqued on, the three liaisons that had marked Leduc’s youth: a carnal coupling with a fellow schoolgirl; the time she spent living with a schoolmistress; and her encounter with a man whom she was to marry long afterward. This brief marriage ended with a suicide attempt by the author and an abortion that took her to death’s door. Leduc was to devote three years to writing “Thérèse et Isabelle,” the first part of her book. The challenge was considerable: