by Naomi Holoch
We heard that Madame Alaird had children. Heard, as adolescents hear, through self-composition. We got few glimpses of Madame Alaird’s life, which is why we made up most of it. Once, we saw her husband come to pick her up after school. He drove an old sedate-looking dark green Hillman, and he was slim and short and quiet-looking with gold-rimmed peepers, like Madame Alaird’s.
“But woii! Madame Alaird husband skinny, eh?!”
“It must be something when Madame Alaird sit down on him!”
That Tuesday or Thursday Madame Alaird’s husband added fuel to the fire of Madame Alaird’s breasts.
“He must be does have a nice time in Madame Alaird breast, oui.”
“Madame Alaird must be feel sorry for him, that is why.”
Madame Alaird went through a gloomy period where often the hem of her skirt hung and she wore a dark green dress with the collar frayed. We were very concerned because the period lasted a very long time and we knew that the other teachers and the headmistress were looking at her suspiciously. Among them, Madame Alaird stood out. They were not as pretty as she, though she wasn’t pretty, for she was not a small woman, but she was as rosy as they were dry. In this time, she was absentminded in class and didn’t look at us, but looked at her desk and took us up sternly in our conjugations. Her breasts, hidden in dark green knit, were disappointing.
We were protective of Madame Alaird. In the wooden and musty paper smell of our thirteen-year-old girl lives, in the stifling, uniformed, Presbyterian hush of our days, in the bone and stick of our youngness, Madame Alaird was a vision, a promise of the dark-red fleshiness of real life.
“Madame Alaird looking like she catching trouble, eh?”
“But why she looking so bad?”
“It must be she husband, oui!”
“Madame Alaird don’t need he.”
“Is true! Madame Alaird could feed a country! How she could need he?”
“So he have Madame Alaird catching hell, or what?”
“Cheuupss! You don’t see he could use a beating!”
“But Madame Alaird could beat he up easy, easy, you know!”
“You ain’t see how the head teacher watching she?”
“Hmmm!”
And so it went for months until, unaccountably, her mood changed. Unaccountably, because we were not privy to Madame Alaird’s life and could only see glimpses, outward and filtered, of what might be happening in it. But our stories seemed to make sense. And we saw her breasts. The only real secret that we knew about her life. Anyway, Madame Alaird was back to herself and we lapped our tongues over her breasts once again, on Tuesday and Thursdays.
“Girl! Alaird looking good again, eh.”
“She must be send that old husband packing.”
“She must be get a new ‘thing.’”
“You ain’t see how she dress up nice, nice, woi!!”
We were jealous of Madame Alaird’s husband and vexed with him for no reason at all. We even watched him cut-eyed when he came to pick her up from school.
“She must be find a new ‘thing’! Oui foo!”
“Madame Alaird ain’t playing she nice, non!”
So the talk about Madame Alaird’s breasts went, for months and months, until we were so glad to see Madame Alaird’s breasts again that we cooked up a treat to please her. The vogue that month was rubber spiders and snakes, which we used to sneak up on one another and send down the boney backs of our still breastless bodices.
Our renewed obsession with Madame Alaird’s breasts, our passion for their snug bounciness, their warm purpleness, their juicy fruitedness, had us giggling and whispering every time she walked down the hall and into Form 3A, our class. Madame Alaird’s breasts drove us to extremes. She was delighted with our conjugations, rapturous about our attentiveness. Her Bonjour, mes enfants were more fleshy and sonorous, her ue’s and ou’s more voluptuous and dark-honeyed. We glowed at her and rivaled one another to be her favorite.
The plan was cooked up to place a rubber snake on Madame Alaird’s chair, so that when she sat down she would jump up in fright. We had the idea that Madame Alaird would laugh at this trick and it would put us on even more familiar terms with her. So, that Tuesday, we put the plan in motion and stood in excited silence as Madame Alaird entered and tipped heavily toward her chair, a deeper, more sensuous than ever Bonjour, mes enfants pushing out of her full, purple lips. All of us burst out, shaking with laughter as Madame Alaird sat, jumped up, uttered a muffled yell, all at the same time. Then standing, looked severely at us—we, doubled over in uncontrollable laughter—she resounded, in English,
“When you are all ready to apologize, I shall be in the office. I shall not enter this class again until you do!” and strode out of the door.
After the apology, made in our forty-voiced, flutey girls’ chorus, after our class mistress ordered it, Madame Alaird returned and was distant. This did not stop our irreverence about Madame Alaird’s breasts. We ignored the pangs of conscience (those of us who had any) about upsetting her and rolled out laughing, for days after. Lustful and unrepentent.
“You ain’t see how Madame Alaird jump up!”
“Woi! Madame Alaird breasts just fly up in the air and bounce back down.”
“Oui fooo! Bon Jieu! Was like she had wings.”
“Madame Alaird ain’t playing she have breasts, non!”
“Bon Jieu oiii!”
In her classes, we lowered our eyes to the burgundy velvet rooms of her beautiful breasts, like penitents.
Violette Leduc
L’Asphyxie (1946), the first novel by the French writer Violette Leduc (1907–1972) and excerpted here, was championed by Simone de Beauvoir and acclaimed by leading French writers, though commercial success did not follow. Constructed in a series of short narratives, the work is unified by the point of view of a young girl who records her own attempts and those of others around her to live their often idiosyncratic lives in a small northern French town, not unlike the city of Arras where Leduc grew up. A controversial writer, Leduc experienced the punishing effect of censorship firsthand when she was obliged to cut a section from the first volume of her autobiography that chronicled an explicitly sexual relationship between two schoolgirls. In the pages appearing here, the energy of young female lives is also linked to forms of mutilation, while the dizzying intensity of their lives—and Leduc’s language—militates against those forces that confine and define female experience.
from L’ASPHYXIE
I was stretched out at the edge of the field, my school bag swollen with useless things at my feet….
She ran by herself, but I didn’t let her out of my sight. I was following her game attentively.
She was running blissfully behind a butterfly. It had her breathing hard. It even had her in a sweat. She hadn’t let go of her school bag. She was going at a gallop. Her glasses didn’t budge…. She existed only for the butterfly. It existed only for the pleasure of the flight. She galloped on, then staggered, then galloped again, tracing with her legs the whims of the butterfly…. An about-face and it began to climb. I saw two violet petals that quivered in the breeze. A breeze that was a delight against the skin. Then I tried to look at the sun. It was impossible. I shut my eyes. I heard the comings and goings of little summer creatures. A hornet took a sudden interest in me. A hen, its work done, began to stutter its satisfaction. Farther away, a novice bugler blew sounds that broke apart before ending….
They fanned the plain with their chilly resonance….
She was coming near. She was going on with her stupid race. Her glasses seemed more solemn than their owner. She bumped into me. Drops of sweat slipped down my back. I realized that I had lost it. I shivered.
“Stop, Mandine!”
I was catapulted into a world where it no longer existed. The heat drew taut like an archer’s bow. The burnt grass was not comforting. The plain offered itself up endlessly to the sun. It was hostile to she who wanted to create soothing hopes, for I longe
d to find it right away, on this plain that hid nothing….
Her circle completed, she ran in front of me.
“Stop, Mandine! I lost it!”
She stopped. She looked at me over her glasses, turning herself into an old woman. That very morning, she had admired it, had fondled it. She knew exactly what I was talking about.
“Mandine, what am I going to do?”
But she too was possessed by an absence. Held in the grips of the desire to possess it, this absent thing….
She hunted violently in her satchel. Then she remembered me.
“You’ve got my sympathy, you poor thing….”
I dropped the subject, letting her look for what she wanted.
I didn’t dare return to my nonchalant stance. Ants were searching for provisions under the grass. If only I could enlist in that colony of slaves….
She had found the box. She pulled it out and struck the last match on it. In that midday light that cut through everything, the small fearful flame evoked pity. Mandine didn’t look at it. Yet it lasted.
She pricked the box again and again with a needle. She was creating the prison and the tomb of the absent one. Her concentration was incredible. Between her lips, her tongue appeared like a large crimson bud. And you could hear her peculiar breathing because the midday plain, all absorbed in this heat of catastrophe, had left room only for us….
Her actions were making her hot. Her cheeks were aflame, her bangs were sticking to her forehead, her eyes full of lust. Her face was becoming interesting. I felt sorry for her.
“You can’t catch it, Mandine. It’s gone.”
She closed her satchel. She stared at me, mean because of her craving.
“It’ll be back. I’ll get it!”
The butterfly flew over us, innocently. She didn’t see it. As for me, I would have happily exchanged my skin for those two wings that would perhaps collapse in the box, against the oblong body that would die without having to justify itself as I would for what I had lost…. Quietly, with no roll of the drums, anguish would soon fall on me, massive as a rock….
“Mandine, tell me what I’m going to do….”
She had it. Her right hand had gulped up the butterfly. She tightened her fist. All her strength flowed into her fist. Her face took on subtlety. Her thick, orderly eyelashes flickered, revealing what Mandine didn’t want to reveal: intense pleasure. Her nostrils made small hollows. Her smile, as fleeting as a bubble, nestled in the corners of her mouth. Mandine, an eagle who seized its prey in silence.
She could no longer keep it to herself. “Get up! Come on, get up!”
Standing, I had to bear the weight of my anguish. I refused to really think about what I had lost….
Mandine was against me, glued to me. Her fist rose up to my chin with the slowness of a censer. She loosened her fingers avariciously. With her left hand, she seized a wing that believed itself to be free. She waved it from the tips of her fingers, like an acrobat who raises another by the strength of his wrist. But it was only a conjuror’s trick in cruelty. I saw the mark of her nails in the palm of her hand. I also saw that the butterfly had left a little of its magical dust…. She continued to wave it and send her sugary young girl’s breath against my neck.
“Let it go, Mandine!”
“…”
She moved it back and forth in front of me, assessing my distress. She pulled away from me, spun around with it, her arm outstretched. She was dizzying the butterfly and herself.
“Let it go, Mandine!”
“…”
With her free hand, she opened the box, imprisoned the butterfly, and shook the box every which way. She was voraciousness itself. She wanted more. She listened. It was beating against the walls. Its sad little taps did nothing to oppress its jailor. Satisfied, she stored the box in her school bag. Order had returned. I was left with the single-minded intelligence of the smartest girl in the class. Now she could think about what I had lost.
“You left it in the cloak room. First though, we’ll look here.”
She ran across the plain of Mons, but I knew that she was looking for another butterfly, that she still lusted after pleasure.
A few scattered drops fell here and there. Although meager, the rain calmed the heat and us as well. It tricked my thoughts and, as the fat drops cooled the back of my legs, I believed I would find it….
I stood up and ran behind her. I tripped several times in the holes left by horses’ hooves: the cavalry came to exercise on this plain. I also tripped over the grocer’s clerk. I knew him by sight. He was stretched out on a young woman. They each had a daisy between their lips, chewing on the stems. They seemed dissatisfied, uncomfortable, undecided, short of breath. They were breathing hard and the flowers moved forward and back. The whole picture lacked elegance. I circled them like a timid dog. He shifted his position. I fled.
Mandine was waiting for me.
“I didn’t find it, but I’ve got an idea.”
“Tell it to me!”
She kept it to herself. It had stopped raining. There was no way to push away the weight of the heat. The clouds had formed a coalition. She took my hand and set us off in a wild gallop toward the school that we had left an hour before. The sun was regaining the upper hand. A few pearl gray veils to tear through…. We were running, but the heat of hell was at our backs. Mandine was only herself when she was running. She told me we would find it. The caretaker would hold it out to me from between the bars of the gate. I listened avidly to this weaver of hopes. If I were to wear glasses as tightly fitted as hers, everything would go better….
The caretaker was snoring, the door of his office partly open. In the empty building, it was a death rattle which was growing….
We had yelled, we had stamped our feet. He had deigned to put aside his sleep to inspect the cloak room and grumble that he hadn’t seen it.
Destroyed, I sat down on the front steps of the school. I imagined my return home, the blood in my veins had practically come to a standstill. I would have exchanged my skin for a caretaker’s so that I could look for what I had lost, asleep on my feet, utterly indifferent. But I needed to think like Mandine: It will turn up, I’ll find it. I would check every house, every closet in the city. Once I had it under my arm, I would give it to my friend. She would take it to my house. I wouldn’t go home. I would live in a toolshed. I would eat peas and raw carrots…. These sterile ramblings didn’t help me to reach a decision. The sun was hiding. The heat was turning into an ambush. It oppressed the earth. A procession of stealthy clouds glided by slowly, a trail of cataclysms on a tight rein.
Then the man from rue de Foulons suddenly appeared. He spoke to Mandine:
“What’s the matter with that child?”
“She lost her umbrella.”
He continued on his way, reassured, in a hurry, released.
The weather was arranging itself for the stage. On the façades of the buildings, it was theatrical. The clouds followed us in a fury. Mandine had led me off in another wild gallop. She was taking me back to my house. We would find it there. I was ready to believe anything.
Our school bags beat wildly against our sides. Children, dogs, and old people watched us. Mandine had been born to run. Her glasses too. She looked like a top student who had thrown propriety to the winds….
We arrived.
I could see Grandmother from a distance. She was chatting with the neighborhood dwarf lady. She gave me an affectionate wave. I didn’t return it, paralyzed by remorse that her state of ignorance set off in me. Her gesture became as simpleminded as that of the young peasants who wave at the express train that flies through the countryside…. I didn’t rush toward her. I belonged to that complicitous sky, to those sullen clouds, to the façade of our house that was bathed in such an appropriate light, to that cherry tree which was being taunted by the wind…. I belonged to the thing I had lost.
“I’ve changed my mind. I’ll leave you here, you poor thing. I’m not going in.
I’d be late. We’ve got that geography assignment….”
The race was suffocating Mandine’s heart.
Standing still, she was once again the well-behaved pupil made of marble.
“Don’t leave me. Stay for one minute. Just one little minute!”
Through her glasses, she understood that at that moment I had no one but her. I was calling out to her for help.
She came in. The weather was growing dramatic. The sky was blaspheming with its color. Stretching out your hand, you could feel heat settle on your finger tips.
As for me, I no longer had any blood in my veins.
Our house was an oasis. The coolness intimidated us. We walked on tiptoe. Up in her room, my mother was singing: I simply met you and you did nothing to try to make me love you. She was practicing in front of her mirror. She never grew tired of herself. Above us, on the ceiling, you could hear her rehearsing the movements of an elegant woman out for a walk.
Mandine coughed loudly to announce our arrival. I was more of a stranger here than she was.
“Who’s there?” my mother asked.
I didn’t dare answer.
“It’s us,” went on Mandine, who wasn’t acquainted with the cold blue eye.
She came down in light shoes. She reached the step that groaned. I was rambling again: I will live in a shed, I’ll eat peas and raw carrots…. Then she was with us.
Mandine admired her and didn’t understand why I was afraid to go home to a such an attractive mother. “So you’ve brought her back?”
She took on a soft voice, boneless and vague. It disgusted me. Mandine found it pleasant. Between the two of them, I was the dunce.
She realized it. “Where did you put your umbrella?” The mask fell away. Mandine took flight. Time shivered. Finally, the storm was moving in. She was waiting for my answer. She looked at what was happening to the sky. “I’m waiting!” I threw my answer at her. “I lost it.”
