Women's Barracks

by Tereska Torres

  What's the matter with me? she wondered.

  From that moment until evening, the strange shivering continued ceaselessly up and down her back, and her heart kept beating, beating. She wished that it were already seven o'clock, and at the same time she wanted to run away, no matter where. Or perhaps to the soft arms of Claude, resting her head on Claude's breast.

  She dressed nervously, telling herself she was an idiot. She couldn't manage to make a respectable knot in her tie, and her hair was full of sand. Her hostess gave her a key in case she should return late. She left at last, quite a bit early, and arrived ahead of time at the church in the central square where they had agreed to meet. The wind was so strong that she was barely able to keep erect. She went into the church to wait.

  Ursula had rarely had occasion to enter a church. She sat down in a corner and looked about. It must have been a Catholic or an Anglican church, for there were statues and flowers. There was the odor of incense and of candles. It was very calm. It must be so strange, she thought, to belong to a church and to feel at home in this huge house. And this little girl without religion, without a creed, without a past, left to herself in a world of which she was ignorant, felt herself in some way linked to a deity who received the prayers of mankind. Not a special god called by a certain name, and endowed by mankind with a list of attributes, but simply that unknown and mysterious force to which people everywhere build temples and toward whom prayers are raised. "God of Mankind," she said, in a very low voice, "you see, I am here. My name is Ursula. I don't know anything about anything. Please make it so that I can understand—so that someone explains to me why everything is, and what I must do. And thank you, God of Mankind, for the sea, the sun, and the sand."

  She felt quite content and much reassured when she went out into the daylight. Just outside the church, Philippe waited, turning over his uniform cap, which was covered with gold braid.

  The other officer was a friend of Philippe's. He was the ship's doctor, and quite naturally Philippe called him Doc. The young woman with him was a very pretty English girl, highly self-assured, very feminine, smartly dressed, and well made up. She examined Ursula with an air of superiority. Philippe, like Doc, seemed to go out of his way to please this young woman, and Ursula found herself with nothing to say. She felt awkward, embarrassed by her heavy khaki clothes and her hair falling into her eyes, and conscious of her hands with the nails cut short. She wished that she also were a grown woman, knowing how to laugh with self-assurance and how to look men in the eye without blinking, and wearing a low-cut black dress, revealing her provoking breasts. She wished she could dance perfectly, wearing high heels and transparent stockings. But instead of being like that, there she was saying nothing, feeling queasy ever since yesterday's meal on the boat, and not able to eat anything.

  Philippe exclaimed at her leaving her plate untouched. He was very fond of eating, and it seemed to him a sacrilege to refuse smoked salmon and to leave a roast un-tasted. To please him, Ursula managed to drink the wine that was served to her.

  The young Englishwoman had the art of turning the conversation easily around all sorts of obvious subjects, which one couldn't remember a moment afterward. The dinner was rather long. Afterward, Philippe suggested that they finish the evening at his place in town. And since there were four of them, Ursula accepted, reassured by the presence of the other woman.

  They took a taxi to Philippe's apartment. It was a modern three-room flat filled with Chinese and Indian knickknacks that Philippe had brought back from his voyages. They all made themselves comfortable in the living room. Philippe brought out whisky glasses. The conversation languished. Doc and the young woman exchanged glances and whispered to each other. Suddenly the young woman rose and left the room. Doc followed her, and Ursula found herself alone with Philippe.

  Chapter 22

  She was seated on the couch. Philippe leaned over her and, as on the day before, began to kiss her. Ursula was astonished to discover that his mouth was already familiar to her. How warm and good it was, penetrating her own!

  With his free hand, Philippe put out the bright lamp and snapped on another, which suffused the room with a dim rosy light, in which everything was intimate and soft. Ursula felt tranquil, happy. After all, his nearness was natural, not frightening at all, quite normal and reassuring.

  Perhaps half an hour passed. Philippe's hand began to explore Ursula. It touched her very lightly, but at the same time much more determinedly than yesterday; a hand that had a will of its own. And as on the day before, a mad panic seized the girl. In the same instant she became rigid and filled with tremors. She didn't want this. She didn't want it at all.

  Philippe sighed, took his hand away, and resumed his kissing. But very quickly he returned to the charge. For quite a while, in silence, the struggle continued. Ursula would become rigid, and then would relax slightly, murmuring only, "No, no." Finally Philippe sat back on the couch next to her. He looked at her queerly, with an air that was neither angry nor astonished. With a quick motion of his hand he brushed back the mass of brown hair that fell in disorder over his forehead. He said, "Why don't you want me to make love to you?"

  In very low broken words, Ursula said that she was afraid, that as yet no man had ever touched her, that she didn't want it. She begged him not to be angry. She liked his kisses well enough, but nothing else. "I beg you, nothing else."

  She didn't tell him that in the depths of her being there was also an infantile panic at being found ignorant, at failing like a schoolboy who hasn't prepared his lesson; a fear that he would make fun of her as of the Englishwomen who didn't know how to make love. She didn't tell him that she was still in terror of the unknown thing before her, of that which came after the kisses, and which could not be in any way like what she had learned from Claude—certainly altogether different.

  Philippe looked at her with astonishment. In his eyes, Ursula could see that he didn't believe she was a virgin—a virgin after a year in the Army! He certainly believed that she was just a little teaser playing the ingenue. After all, she knew how to kiss well enough; it just wasn't possible. He didn't believe it. And this thought pained her very much. She really liked him. She wished she could prove to him that she was telling the truth, and she wished that she could make him happy, but she was afraid, and her fear was stronger than any other feeling.

  At first, Philippe said nothing. He took her in his arms again and resumed his kissing, as though his kisses could convince her better than words. But when it became clear that nothing was going to change in her, he studied her attentively with a reflective air, as though asking himself whether she was after all telling the truth, and whether she was indeed a virgin, a naive little girl.

  Then he said gently, "Why are you afraid, Ursula? I won't hurt you. Why are you afraid to make the jump? Afterward you will be a woman. You have to become a woman someday, and it will make you very happy, you know."

  He said the things that all men say on this occasion, but he said them sincerely, gently, and Ursula was hearing these words for the first time.

  She wanted to cry and to ask his forgiveness. He was so gentle and nice, and she was probably behaving very badly, letting him kiss her and then refusing to go further, like those frightful teasers that Claude was always talking about in disgust.

  She wanted to; she wanted to; but she simply could not.

  Philippe rose, poured himself a glass of whisky, and returned to sit next to her. He no longer attempted to kiss her, but he began to speak of his childhood, of his home and his parents, of their small estate in the Pyrenees, of his brother and sisters, and of a way that his mother had when he was bad of saying that it wasn't he who had misbehaved, but "Popaul." He turned toward Ursula, smiling, and said that it probably wasn't Philippe, but still Popaul who wanted to go to bed with her. Philippe didn't want to annoy her, or hurt her in any way. He was so good, so simple this way, and Ursula didn't know how to explain the gratitude and the tenderness that she fe
lt toward him.

  They talked quietly for the rest of the evening. He spoke again of his voyages. It was always to this that he returned most easily. And Ursula described the barracks, and our warrant officers, and Mickey, Jacqueline, and me, but without ever speaking of Claude. She sensed that Philippe would never have understood, that he would have been terribly shocked.

  It was past midnight. There was a discreet knock on the door. Doc entered with his young woman, who was as elegant and as well made up as before. The young woman gave Ursula a little glance of complicity filled with secret understanding. Doc assumed the well-bred air of a gentleman who deliberately ignores the obvious.

  They played the phonograph and danced a little, and then Doc said that he and the young woman were going to leave. Philippe helped Ursula into her coat, and the four of them left together.

  The streets were black. There was no more wind, and the sky was filled with stars. Doc and the English girl hailed a taxi and drove off. Philippe and Ursula walked on without speaking.

  At her door Philippe asked her to meet him the following day for dinner. He apologized again and said that everything was Popaul's fault, and then he took her in his arms and kissed her very long and gently.

  Chapter 23

  For the first time in her life, Ursula failed to close her eyes all night long.

  She listened to the regular breathing of the three sisters and heard them sigh in their sleep. She saw the stars fade little by little and the dawn inundate the sky.

  Well, then, she wasn't normal. For how could Ursula know, all by herself, that she was behaving exactly as any pure young girl behaves the first time a man tries to make love to her? She told herself that she would never get out of her difficulty, that she would .never have a home or children, that she would remain doomed to solitude all her life, like Ann, like Petit. She couldn't rid herself of Philippe's words: "Why are you afraid to make the jump?"

  But she wanted to make the jump, she wanted to love a man, to know what a man's love was like, to be linked with that endless chain of human beings who joined with each other in the same way, and told each other the same words, always entirely new since the first man and the first woman.

  Why was it, while she found Philippe so good, so handsome, and so nice, that his hand frightened her so, that she contracted so at his touch? Could it be because of an idea she had from Mickey's and Claude's descriptions, that there would be pain in losing her virginity? Perhaps it was only that—a simple fear of pain.

  And then, if she should prove to Philippe that what she had said was true? For she sensed that at bottom Philippe continued to disbelieve her. He would then really know that she was a virgin. He would be ashamed of having doubted her word.

  To vanquish her deep fear, to prove to herself that she was normal—that was it. It was the only way to save herself. Otherwise it would be too late. This was her last chance. If she didn't take it now, she would never be able to accept intimacy with a man.

  Ursula struggled all by herself, groping for an answer, searching in her immature and uninstructed mind, encumbered as it was with all the false ideas that she had gleaned haphazardly during all her life, searching with her primitive consciousness, and calling upon the most profound instinct of creation.

  That night, without knowing it, Ursula told herself the things that Catholics tell their priests during confession, and that Americans tell their psychoanalysts. But she had no one to counsel her and to clarify her idea of herself.

  The day pierced through the net curtains. The three girls stretched like cats.

  Ursula had made up her mind.

  She didn't eat anything all day long. She couldn't. Her throat was so contracted that it was impossible for her to swallow.

  She went to the beach, crouched against a rock, and tried to think of nothing at all. The dog laid his head on her bronzed knees, waiting for her to play with him.

  A little green hill rose just behind her. Ursula climbed it with the dog. Once on top, she beheld the immense sea, open in all the directions that Philippe had shown her. Newfoundland, New York, Rio de Janeiro.

  On the hill there were queer little stakes projecting from the ground all about. Ursula tried to pull one out, but it wouldn't give way. She finally abandoned it and went down the other side of the hill, with loose stones rolling under her feet. Some fishermen in a little boat made signals to her, shouting. Ursula couldn't understand their cries, but she waved her hand in greeting to them.

  It was only when she reached the bottom that she saw a large sign barring the way up the hill: "Do Not Climb. Mortal Danger. Mined Hill."

  It was at least something to tell the family. They all gasped. They didn't cry out, for they were after all British, but the mother and father grew pale, and the three little girls sighed, "Oh, dear." But Ursula, after her original fright, had from the incident a strange sense of being protected, a mystical sense of sureness, as though this were a sign that her prayer had been heard.

  That evening before dinner, Ursula said good-by to the family. She had already informed them earlier in the day that her leave was ending and that she had to return to London. Her brother would take her to the station. They didn't have to worry about her.

  She packed her little valise, shook hands all around, promised to write, and thanked them. They told her they would come to see her in France after the war; they would bring Vicky.

  Ursula left, clutching her valise. She checked it at the station and then went back into town. Philippe was already waiting in front of the church. He was the same: polite, well mannered, nice, although perhaps a little constrained.

  They went to dinner in a different restaurant, just the two of them, and Philippe danced with her during dinner, and taught her some new steps.

  Ursula forced herself to eat in order not to offend him, but each mouthful was a torture. The food simply stuck in her throat. Happily, there was a dessert of strawberries and cream, and that went better. Philippe seemed not to know what to do with her. He prolonged their stay at the table after dinner, ordering liqueurs, and finally he asked her if she would like to go to the movies.

  Taking her courage in both hands, Ursula said clearly, "No, I'd rather go to your place."

  Philippe seemed astonished. He looked at her hesitatingly, and then he took her hand without saying anything.

  They rose and went out.

  Chapter 24

  They entered the living room as they had the night before, but this time, as soon as the door was closed, Ursula asked Philippe to wait a moment, and went into the bathroom. She had no notion of preparatory caresses, of love play, of delays. Since she had decided to make love tonight, then it might as well be done, and quickly.

  Alone, she undressed hastily, took off her medallion, folded her clothes, and placed the medallion on top. Although she had been raised without religion, it seemed to her that she could not wear the medallion—which one of her governesses had given her long ago—under these circumstances. Then, altogether nude, she returned to the living room.

  Philippe had certainly not expected this. He was still standing there, in uniform, smoking. He saw the door open, and the girl enter and remain standing silently before him with her head lowered and her straight hair veiling her cheeks. He saw her childish little body, her tiny breasts, her thin arms, her round knees, and the demarcations of her bathing suit, leaving her breasts and her hips all white in the midst of her bronzed body.

  He approached, taking her face in his hands, and he raised her head and said, "Don't be ashamed, Ursula. Look at me. You are beautiful."

  The radio was playing. It must have been the BBC's French program, for a solemn voice was discussing Alphonse Daudet's Moulin.

  Philippe undressed and put on a woolen robe with green squares. He had not yet recovered from his astonishment, and seemed to be asking himself if he were dreaming. He picked Ursula up in his arms and carried her into his bedroom, placing her on the bed. Then in the dimness Ursula felt the naked
body of a man touching her body. And now the terrible fear returned. The child began to tremble like a leaf; she trembled in all her limbs. Her teeth chattered, and she trembled and shivered without being able to control herself. Philippe kissed her and pressed her in his arms, but he felt the fear and resistance in her.

  A sob of utter sorrow broke from the girl. Philippe began to rock her as one rocks tiny, frightened children. "My dear little girl, don't cry. Don't be afraid of anything. I won't touch you any more. You see that I can't touch you when you tremble like that. It stops everything in me. Look, little one, my baby, don't be afraid of anything. You are too small, you're still just a little girl. I don't want to hurt you. Now you're going to sleep with me, just nicely, without anything. Do you want to?"

  Little by little Ursula calmed herself. She pressed herself against him. Philippe hugged her in his arms and talked to her soothingly, like a big brother, and she fell asleep.

  In the middle of the night she awoke. Philippe was not asleep. He got up, turned on the bed lamp, and put on his dressing gown. He went to the kitchen and brought back a glass of milk for Ursula, and for himself a large glass of whisky.

  Philippe watched her drink, sitting altogether naked in his bed, holding the glass in her two hands with her hair falling over her eyes. He got back into bed; they talked a little and fell asleep.

  The morning found them pressed innocently against one another. Philippe awoke, gay and playful. He licked Ursula's brown shoulder and told her that she was all salty. They took their bath together, and Philippe prepared their breakfast of boiled eggs, buttered toast, and coffee. Then he dressed and went off, leaving her in the apartment with some books and magazines.