Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 24

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Over the course of the next months, letters traveled back and forth between Simone and Jacques. Simone remained in her mother’s home, since Luc had determined that the political situation in Turkey was so precarious she ought not to return. He continued to promise to visit her, but circumstances arose, one after the other, preventing this from occurring. If the letters between Simone and Jacques never grew any more intimate, neither did they grow any less so. Simone lived, as she had during her twelfth year, the year after her father’s death, in a world removed from the physical.

The word “purgatory” had eluded the net of definition. She had leafed through a copy of The Divine Comedy illustrated by Gustav Doré and seen the souls in Purgatory, depicted in shades of gray—lead and slate—abject figures, draped in robes that resembled both burial shrouds and the habits of Mohammedan women, bearing boulders as they moved along a rock-strewn path that wended its way above stark cliffs and fog-shrouded crags. She tried to paste her father’s face into the hollows of those cloaks. The ordinary world—the smell of the ocean, her mother’s whistling as she washed the dishes, her sister Elise’s guffaws—was at best an irritant. The world made sense only when it gestured to what lay beyond: the air in the church, thick with incense, the crucifix on the wall above her bed.

Now the path to the gate was the path down which Jacques had walked. The chair in the parlor was the chair in which he had sat. Even her own son was the infant he had lifted into his arms.

A thick letter from Luc arrived by special post containing a ticket for a steamship departing four days hence. Cecile and her mother packed Simone’s trunks with the same roll-up-your-sleeves, get-on-with-it fervor they applied to spring cleaning. They could not wait to rid the house of the squalling child, Simone’s moodiness. As for Simone, she wanted to be freed from her mother’s house, but she dreaded seeing Luc again, could not imagine receiving his caresses. She thought of pheasants being flushed from fields by hounds, taking wing to escape, easy shots against the sky above.

A week later she was in Istanbul. Luc seemed hardly to notice her diffidence, or if he did put it down to the whims of female nature: skittish, like a horse in a new barn. Give the gal a chance to get settled, and all would be fine. He was fascinated by the child, showing not only the expected paternal pride, but curiosity about the child’s mental and physical processes, his rudimentary acquisition of language—“Do you see, he knows his name. Marcel, Marcel,” and the child looked in his direction—“and when I put the block behind my back—Where did it go? Where did it go?” This interest was not to be confused with indulgence: he was upset that Simone had not yet begun toilet training, making her aware of the latest scientific studies which proved, quite incontrovertibly, that the foundations of a disciplined and well-ordered life were laid down by the regular excretory habits established in infancy.

The first night they were together, Luc thought it best not to press himself on her: no doubt she was tired from the journey and required some time to readjust to his presence. He did want to let her know that his—he formed the word reluctantly, even in his own mind—his love for her had not waned, and so when they lay down next to another in bed that night, he clasped her hands tenderly, and covered them with a series of minute kisses. She shocked him by becoming quite forward, initiating the marital act. At its conclusion, as in the past, he rose and washed himself, and then she did the same, even squatting down a bit—the washbasin was behind a screen—and twisting the flannel around her finger, shoving it inside her, doing her best to remove every trace of him.

When she was having sex with Luc, she imagined Jacques’ presence—not that Jacques was moving in and out of her, but that he was watching them couple with a look of amused contempt.

She spent her days reading novels and staring at the blue sea and blue sky. The servants washed and rewashed the floor (they were horrified that their master and mistress wore shoes indoors) and occasionally brought her child to her.

One day, standing at the balustrade staring at the horizon, she felt a sharp queasiness and realized she was pregnant. She would be sent back to France for her parturition.

For the first time since her return to Istanbul, she smiled a smile that was not forced.