Читать книгу Salt on my Skin - Benoite Groult - Страница 17

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The great experiences of life, birth, illness, death, so often reduce one to utter banality. It’s the platitudes, born of accepted wisdom which work for gut feelings, rather than any scholarly language. When Gauvin kept his promise and joined me in Paris I found myself unable to sleep or eat. I was weak at the knees, had a lump in my throat, a knot in my stomach and a weight in my heart. It was as if every function had been subsumed in sexuality. And those weren’t the only parts of me aflame: a fire raged at my core for three days, a brand from Gauvin’s red-hot iron. Like that vaginal ring in The Story of O.

‘You’ll never imagine where, but I’m on fire,’ I told him, not quite daring to be explicit. We didn’t know each other very well after all.

‘I can imagine where, never stop imagining it,’ he answered with a village boy look, torn between being pleased at this homage to his virility and shocked at the plain speaking he didn’t expect from someone with my education. I enjoyed shocking him. It was so easy to do. His own world was rigid, with people and things allotted watertight compartments where they were supposed to stay.

As I smoothed a soothing ointment over the afflicted area I wondered why the authors of erotic books never mentioned these minor accidents of pleasure. Their heroines have cast-iron vaginas, endlessly receptive to the intrusion of foreign bodies. Mine felt flayed. In the magnifying mirror I could scarcely recognise my neat, distinguished vulva. In its place was an inflamed apricot, swollen, rudely bursting from its usual confines, in short utterly indecent and incapable of admitting so much as a piece of spaghetti. And yet it wasn’t long before I was accepting, indeed imploring, his branding iron, begging him to penetrate me once more with that enormous thing. And, against all physical laws, the first searing pain over, it fitted perfectly, like a glove as one says. Any other time, I should have pleaded for a truce, but there was so little time now. Against expectations, having counted on filling up my tank and going off happily, I found myself wanting him more and more. Being beside him constantly, breathing his wheaten smell, stunned by perpetual desire, absorbed all my faculties. I lay awake at night, nourishing myself with his proximity while he slept. By day, I fed on his handsomeness, the caress of those hands which looked so hard and rough but had a goldsmith’s delicacy when they touched me.

Occasionally, a bit ashamed of ourselves, we tried to restrain our animal frenzy by going to see the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre. Making the tourist rounds instead of love. As it was his first visit to Paris I took Gauvin on a bâteau mouche. But all our sight-seeing trips were cut short. Clinging together, aching with desire, we pretended to stroll around, like normal people. But he had only to let his glance linger on my breasts or brush my leg with his powerful thigh or look at me in a way that had nothing to do with the facade of the Louvre and we’d race back to the hotel room, guilty at our haste but unable to hide it.

Or we plunged into a bar. Only wine, or spirits, could loosen the knot in my throat, each drink bringing us still closer, helping us to forget we would soon part.

‘Just what do you think you’re doing here, Lozerech? Tell me.’

‘No one’s more surprised than me. Just stick with me and we’ll try to work it out.’ He was attempting to make light of something which palpably bothered him. But even as he replied, his leg pressed against mine, and we were off, done for, both of us breathing one of those involuntary sighs which punctuate the body’s impulses.

They were wonderful and terrible, those days. Wonderful because I find it shamefully easy to live in the moment. Terrible, because I sensed that Gauvin was about to offer me his life and that it wasn’t an offer he would make twice.

It was only on the last night, in one of those warm little restaurants which cradle you from the harshness of life, that we plucked up the courage to speak. There was no point in even trying in the hotel. Our hands quickly got in the way of any conversation. And the truth was too alarming: we were there in error. We had staged a break-out from our real lives, something for which we’d be punished one day.

While I fiddled with my fish, trying to hide it under the debris on my plate because I knew I couldn’t swallow it, Gauvin was devouring his food with the concentration he brought to everything he did. And, while he ate, he sketched his vision of the future, as prosaically as he would have negotiated a contract with the Concarneau Fisheries Board. He proposed, at a stroke, breaking off his engagement, changing his job, studying as much as necessary to learn about music and modern art, doing some reading – the classic authors to start with – losing his accent and, finally, marrying me.

He sat there on the other side of the little table, his knees gripping mine, his clear eyes asking if this wasn’t a noble sacrifice. They grew troubled as they read in mine that even the offer of his life was not enough.

I should have preferred not to answer at once, not to murder in two or three words so passionate a love. I wanted to say we could think it over. But his ingenuousness broke my heart. What other man would ever make me so generous and so mad a proposal? Unfortunately Gauvin only operated on a straight yes or no. He would rather tear the heart from his breast than put up with the compromise of seeing me but not possessing me.

I was silent for a moment: all I could offer him in return were those frivolous things which are no foundation for life – the crazy desire and the tenderness I felt for him. I didn’t want to give up my degree. I didn’t want to be a fisherman’s wife. I couldn’t live in Larmor among his fishermen friends. I didn’t want Yvonne for a sister-in-law, or to spend my Sundays at the Lorient stadium, watching him running around in the penalty area. Above all, I didn’t want him to sacrifice his job, his accent, any of his strengths and weaknesses. How did I know I would still love him as an office worker, or even as a shipwright, without the reflection of the sea in his eyes? And would he love himself?

My arguments were useless. His face closed sullenly. He looked dogged, but he couldn’t control a quiver at the corner of his mouth. Christ, how I loved that contradiction in him, between the vulnerability and the fierce impulsiveness of his nature. Seeing his pain made me love him even more. I deserved a beating for that.

As we left the restaurant I tried to put my arm round his waist, but he pulled away brusquely.

‘If that’s how you feel, best I be off tonight. No point in paying the hotel another night,’ he said flatly.

For me, giving up even one night was an insult to life, a rejection of the gift we had been offered. But I could not convince him of that. Lozerech was going back to his own kind, filled with bitterness against city girls who fucked up your life, then went off with a clear conscience. He was constructing a version of events which would fit his own world-view.

‘You’ll be sorry, maybe, that you turned down my offer,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’re too complicated to be happy.’

He didn’t look at me. He never looked me in the eye when he criticised me. He reckoned that in a year – well, five at most – he could catch up to my level. He thought you could catch up on anything. He had no idea of the unfair advantages you get from a prosperous upbringing and a privileged education. He thought one got places simply by hard work. And he wasn’t one to shirk hard work. What was the point of being brave and industrious if you couldn’t conquer obstacles like those? He wouldn’t have believed me if I had told him that it isn’t just books and hard work which make the difference. It would have seemed too cruel, too unjust.

So I chose lesser arguments, more petty, more acceptable, which reassured him in a way. But the one who reasons is the one who loves less. Gauvin already knew this.

The last train for Quimperlé had gone. What joy! Now he would have to come and lie beside me one more time, this brute, who was getting more hostile by the minute. Back at the hotel he asked for another room, but they were all taken. I tried not to let my satisfaction show. As soon as we got to our room he started flinging things into his suitcase, the way they do in films. Then he undressed in silence, hiding his sex to punish me. In bed, I had once more that warm wheat smell of him, but he turned his back on me, that white back of a seaman who has neither the time nor the desire to sunbathe. His brown neck looked quite different, like a game of Heads, Bodies and Legs. I brushed my lips where the brown and white met below childlike wisps of hair, but he didn’t stir. An icy force field of rejection emanated from him, paralysing me, and I lay there, sleepless, as close as I could get without touching him.

In the small hours, sensing that he had dropped his guard, I couldn’t stop myself pressing my belly to his back and laying my cheek on his shoulder. In that silent half-sleep, I felt our deepest beings embrace, refusing separation. Outside our will, or, rather, beneath it, our sexes were signalling one to the other. Gauvin tried to ignore the message, but it was too powerful for him. He turned suddenly and threw himself on to me without any preliminaries, thrusting into the place that was calling him. He came immediately, hoping to humiliate me, but his mouth stayed glued to mine, and we fell asleep breathing each other in until the cruel break of dawn.

At Montparnasse, under the livid light which seems to be the bane of railway stations, we just couldn’t kiss. All he did, as he climbed into the carriage, was put his temple against my cheek, like that first time in the car. Then he turned away immediately to hide his orphaned face, and I made for the exit, my heart full of tears, my mind full of logic, as if they belonged to two different people.

No one spared me a glance. Bereft of the raving desire which I had inspired a few short hours before, I wandered in an indifferent world. Trembling with loneliness I cursed not being able to live our lives according to our desires – my not being able to for sure, and Gauvin probably, once he recognised the implications. I knew I was still imprisoned by the prejudices I’d been taught since childhood. And this rigidity of mine, which in those days substituted for character in me, was appalled by his lack of culture, the way he swore all the time, his mottled windcheaters and plaited sandals worn with socks, his sniggering at abstract art. Only the day before he had annihilated an abstract painting with a few annoyingly sensible words. Nor could I forgive him his favourite singers – Rina Ketty, Tino Rossi, Maurice Chevalier – whom I despised, and had annihilated with a few curt words myself. Nor the way he sliced bread towards himself, and cut up the steak on his plate into pieces. Nor the poverty of his vocabulary which cast doubts on the quality of his mind. It was all too much to remedy. And how would he have taken it? Culture inspired a vague mistrust in him. Fancy words were what ‘sodding politicos’ used to fool ordinary people, ‘the lot of them’. Nothing could persuade him that not all politicians were corrupt smooth-talkers – except for the Communists perhaps, for whom he voted automatically, less from conviction than professional solidarity. Aboard their boats trawlermen form a kind of commune, sharing the proceeds of every catch. Gauvin took pride in not being a wage slave. Where he came from, what counted was doing one’s work well, being honest and having guts. Good health was important and feeling tired a weakness, not far removed from skiving. The value of work lay in its usefulness, not in the time or effort it took.

For Parisians like us who flirted with the avant garde (my father published a modern art magazine), honesty was a rather ludicrous virtue, except in a cleaning lady. Idleness was cheerfully tolerated, so long as it was allied with wit and style. While we despised the village drunk, we felt a certain fondness for the society alcoholics. It might have been amusing to parade my fisherman at a party – after all, my parents were mad about sea shanties and those plaited leather belts with anchor-buckles made by sailors. They admired the Breton berets and clothes in the traditional red or blue sailcloth, carefully faded to look authentic, which only summer visitors still wore. They used the Breton farewell, Kenavo, when they left the village shop, and were charmed by the Breton name of the village baker, ‘Corentin’. My father even wore the local wooden clogs for ten minutes a year, and the spotted socks that went with them. ‘Nothing more practical for gardening,’ he would proclaim, almost prepared to stuff in the traditional handful of straw – ‘so much healthier’.

However, real live fishermen, all hairy and brawny, anywhere but on a tuna boat or trawler, noble though they be in their yellow oilskins and thigh boots – ugh! ‘I really take my hat off to those men,’ but on the oriental rugs of a Paris apartment, with their dirty fingernails and mottled windcheaters – ugh! In 1950 class barriers were impenetrable, and I knew I didn’t have the strength of character to acclimatise Gauvin to these surroundings, immerse him in my culture. And I didn’t want to transplant myself into his. He had no idea of how cruel my family could be to someone like him, what he would suffer if we were to get married, nor did he realise how intellectually isolated I would feel with him.

‘Why do you have to be so complicated?’ he had demanded the night before, making no secret of his hostility. ‘Why can’t you take things as they come?’ Well, I did have to be complicated, actually.

He had promised to telephone before he rejoined his boat, and the thought of that, bleak though it was, made separation less brutal. But the telephone flummoxed him. I should have thought of that. Theirs had been installed only recently, in the draughty front hall of the farmhouse where everyone could hear. For him it was a diabolical contraption, good only for cancelling appointments or announcing deaths. He spoke loudly, articulating each word clearly as if I were deaf He didn’t use my name once. It had been bad enough asking the operator for Paris, knowing she would be wondering what business young Lozerech had there.

‘You haven’t changed your mind then?’ he asked at once.

‘It’s not a question of changing my mind, Gauvin. It’s… well, I just don’t see what else I could do. I wish you’d understand…’

‘Oh, me! I can’t understand anything.’

Silence. Then I asked, ‘You’re off tomorrow still?’

‘That’s how you wanted it, isn’t it?’

He was right. It was impossible to communicate through this horrible instrument. I felt incapable of saying ‘I love you’ into it. Terrified he would hang up, I blurted the first thing that came into my head.

‘Write to me, won’t you? And tell me where I can write back.’

‘It’s a bit tricky. I’ll be living with Marie-Josée’s family while I study for my diploma. But I’ll send you a card as soon as I get to Concarneau.’

‘Oh sure. With your best wishes, I hope.’

Wounded silence. He wasn’t one to shout ‘bloody hell’ down the telephone.

‘Right then. I must be off now,’ he said with finality, and hung up. The black receiver went back on the wooden wall of the farmhouse.