Why?
‘I know perfectly well, I have one failing: I’m perceptive.’
Lætitia seems suddenly distraught, leaning back in the cushions. She should console her (for what?), pat her soufflé of chestnut hair, or try to distract her, put a pillow on her head and pretend to be Napoleon like Jacques Dutronc in The Most Important Thing: Love that she secretly watched on TV without Bihotz knowing.
She leans towards the hair that is still as fluffy as ever and buries her nose in it, there is no end to this marvellous cloud of hair.
Lætitia lowers her eyes to her straw. A thin black streak outlines the length of her eyelids (how does she manage not to go over the edges?). Her face is right up close, large and flat like an object. Then it comes alive and turns towards Solange; the eyes open and the gaze radiant; Lætitia, Lætitia’s mouth finds her mouth.
She leans in from her side, the taste is sparkling fresh, her elbow slides, their teeth smash, the Coke glasses clink together—they both pull back.
(Is Lætitia a lesbian?)
(At one point in The Most Important Thing: Love you see a woman who is disguised as a man with an actual false dick tied on with a sort of harness, and a completely naked girl who looks mad or on drugs, and we’re supposed to interpret that, well, the whole thing seems impossible but it’s nevertheless strongly hinted at.)
She has to say something.
(Does Lætitia have hairs on her breasts?)
That’s the first time I’ve done it with a girl.
Which makes it clear that, on the other hand, she’s done it with boys.
‘Me too,’ whispers Lætitia.
It’ll be our secret. We won’t tell anyone. Promise me? Promise.
‘I promise,’ says Lætitia solemnly. She shakes her legs and wiggles her hips to rearrange her clothes.
We won’t tell anyone but I’m happy if we talk about it together.
Lætitia lights a cigarette and doesn’t say anything.
I mean I’m happy if we talk about it, so that we don’t end up embarrassed or whatever—as if that could even be embarrassing, and as if we’d never talk about it.
It feels like she’s split in half and she can see herself talking, serious and apprehensive, sitting on the edge of the bed with Solange and Lætitia—where’s the first Lætitia gone, the one who wanted to kiss her?
I’m sure we’ll remember this moment for the rest of our lives, she perseveres. The rest of our lives. I’m absolutely certain.
Lætitia is also absolutely certain. With the tips of her fingernails she plays with a ladder in her stay-up stockings. On the other hand (says the young baroness), it’s not as if you can decide what you’ll remember; she manages to forget far more important things, and also to have moments when she’s struck by the certainty that what she (Lætitia) is experiencing right then she will remember forever, and yet afterwards she forgets. Or else, oddly, she remembers tiny details. For example, a flash of landscape out of the window of the Audi, something completely outside herself and which, God knows why, is imprinted on her memory forever. At the time it seems like nothing at all, and in fact it’s an intense moment embedded in her brain like, she doesn’t know, a diamond.
Solange agrees completely.
That leaves them both musing.
Apparently Delphine is a nympho. Not exactly a whore or a slut. Nor a loose girl. She’s more verging on the pathological side (explains Nathalie). That means she can’t help herself, not to harm anyone but simply because she can’t think of anything else. Even worse than Slurp. And she’s itching to do it so much that she does it with anyone. She’s even dyed her hair purple. She’s deflowered half the boys at school, apparently. Including Arnaud, apparently (and recently).
And she’s the daughter of a single mother.
‘I don’t see the connection,’ Rose interrupts.
For a few months now Rose has been making threatening comments in a super-responsible tone but with a really open mind. Like her parents. She’d probably get on well with Lætitia (except they can’t stand each other).
‘If her mother had had the right to have an abortion’—Rose continues—‘Delphine wouldn’t even be here to be called a nympho.’
Concepción makes the sign of the cross discreetly.
(Apparently if you make the sign of the cross upside down you go to Hell.)
‘Do you think it was out of pleasure’—Rose is adamant—‘that her mother fell pregnant at our age?’
A world without Delphine. In that world, she’s certain that she, Solange, would be the one doing what Delphine’s doing. Sleeping with all the boys. Not in a superior, stylish way like Lætitia, or cool and liberated like Nathalie, but in a grubby I-can’t-help-myself way. That’s her problem. She’s a nympho. That’s her disease.
The others (Rose, Nathalie, Concepción) have got their heads bent over their history-geography books. They’re all at Concé’s for a study session. The Yalta Agreement. There are only men in the photo.
Is she really the only one to be seeing this—only seeing dicks under those thick overcoats? All those dicks surrounded by pubic hair (brown, blond, grey, white), flopped onto the bellies of those seated men, hanging in the boxer shorts of the ones standing behind? The crotch is all creased on the one in the middle, the only one whose pants you can see. Can you really manage to concentrate when you have a dick? Weren’t they thinking about their dicks when they were signing those agreements? Wouldn’t their dicks have started going hard inadvertently right when they were in the middle of dividing up the world? Dicks living their dick lives in all those pairs of pants, little gnome dicks on each of those men, dicks doing their dick business. The Yalta dicks, washed or unwashed, limp or erect, stinky or clean-smelling, chafing or still, dicks that no one bothers about or, on the contrary, dicks that are the focus of each of those men’s thoughts.
That’s what she wants to learn, the History of the Dick, what you do and how you live when you have that instead of this.
She tips back and forth on the hard wood of her chair, the seam of her jeans gently rubs the flesh between her legs, she wiggles her hips discreetly. Solange has an unbridled sensuality.
This afternoon of history-geography is so boring (she’s got to stop using so). She’ll get them to focus on her. Make it all a bit more exciting, this scene, those heads bent over those books, those fannies stuck on those chairs.
Lætitia wanted to sleep with me.
An atomic bomb. Nathalie looks so stunned, it was worth it just to see that. Rose giggles and Concepción crosses herself again, it’s a tic, like some people twist their hair or bite their fingernails or say ‘Oh my God’. Nathalie and Rose want all the details, of course (Concé as well, even though she stays mute).
She asked me when I went to see her at the chateau.
She waits for a moment. For effect, but also because she’s hesitating. What should she tell them? What’s the best thing to tell them?
She made out with me, it was divine, better than with all the boys I’ve kissed.
Nathalie’s mouth is wide open, her eyes are rolling and she topples off her chair and falls on the ground, miming groans of agony.
Seriously, only girls know how to kiss. When I think how we waste our time with boys.
Rose decides to be self-possessed. While Nathalie is yelping on the carpet demanding to know, did you smoke or what, she says that when she, Rose, did it with girls, it was not quite as good as with boys. Because, come on, there’s penetration. You can say what you like.
But what sort of a moron are you, of course she wanted to penetrate me, I was the one who didn’t want it. I’m not going to let myself be raped by a dyke.
Lætitia had a sort of plastic dick that she wanted to put in Solange’s bottom, well, in her cunt.
Concepción has her hand over her mouth.
‘There’s no such thing as a plastic dick,’ Nathalie declares.
Yes there is, you tie it on around your waist, like this.
As usual, when the conversation gets serious, Rose launches into a speech with several points she wants to make, like how, firstly, her mother actually has a plastic dick too, Rose found it in the drawer of her bedside table; and that, secondly, it’s not right to make fun of dykes, firstly (thirdly) it’s a rude word, and that, fourthly, everyone does what they want, we live in a democracy, after all we’re in France under a socialist president.
(‘My parents voted for Mitterand to help people like you,’ she told Solange when half the village wanted to flee the country. ‘Personally, I would have voted Workers’ Struggle. The socialists are hypocrites; at the end of the day they’re just helping big business.’ She seemed so intelligent, mature, sexy, when she said that. It’s horrible that Rose’s vote is charity for Solange’s parents who are being screwed by voting for the right.)
‘It’s cool to be bisexual,’ chimes in Nathalie belatedly (she is now wearing her Super-Nathalie costume). ‘Anyway, everyone is bisexual. Boys are bisexual too.’
Protests all round.
‘Bisexual means two girls at the same time,’ explains Nathalie.
Concepción confirms this: her female cousin from Saragossa did it with her girlfriend’s boyfriend and her girlfriend. ‘The girlfriend was getting laid and my cousin gave him blowjob.’
Gave him A blowjob, corrects Solange. It’s like Jane Birkin saying she’ll sing ‘UN chanson’ instead of ‘UNE chanson’ when she’s been living in France for two hundred years.
‘But was there only one penis?’ Rose says, surprised. Her rapid logic—or her practical mind—makes everyone laugh (or maybe it was the word penis).
‘Do you know how you say vagina in Spanish?’ says Nathalie. ‘Esclusa, a canal lock. Because that’s where the peniche boats go through, get it—penis-peniche.’
Concé is too engrossed in the conversation to be insulted (or to understand).
Did the boy take it in turns? A go in the mouth, a go in the cunt? Everything seems possible.
Her three friends focus on the incident, which has captured their imaginations, mesmerised them. In the centre of the room their bodies vanish, leaving behind their schoolgirl shells. They look like the pale children in The Village of the Damned.
‘He was forty,’ Concepción explains. ‘The girlfriend’s boyfriend.’
It all adds up. But the images flickering there—naked bodies in the trembling space—are still tricky to hold steady in their minds, a bit like stubborn Playmobil pieces, they don’t fit into what the girls have glimpsed of the world so far: a certain elasticity that is attractive, disturbing—or perhaps (Solange’s great fear) just as limited as Clèves.
Concepción goes and finds her mother’s shopping catalogue, Trois Chuiches. She flips through the lingerie pages. It’s not there. They grab the catalogue from her. You have to look in the bathroom section, feminine health and hygiene and all that. Between breast pumps, shower caps and back-scratchers, there is a portable face massager—in an odd, pointed shape—that firms features and smoothes out nasolabial folds. Home delivery with two batteries.
‘That’s it!’ exclaims Rose. ‘See, I’m not making it up.’ It’s like she’s completely forgotten that she, Solange, was raped by Lætitia.
A little shrapnel shell, longer than it is wide, like a suppository but bigger. The girl in the photo, some bimbo in white cotton, is holding it against her cheek, looking like she’s just seen the Virgin Mary. She looks like her. She’s struck by it. The same angle of the head, the same melancholic gaze, the same blank stare as in the photo of her when she was five or six. Against her cheek she’s holding the cloth nappy that used to be her security blanket. So soft and fluffy, it was as light as a feather: a scrap of towelling, a relic from an extinct species.
‘Is that what d’Urbide wanted to put inside you?’ Concepción is checking to make sure.
Suddenly she feels very tired. She’s been tied down or drugged, like the young girl in The Most Important Thing: Love. Lætitia—an older Lætitia, or perhaps Rose’s mother (with her red boots)—is leaning above her (or behind her?) (she’s on all fours?) and is going to put it in, put it in her. She’d like to be in her bed, falling asleep with her hand in her underpants. She’s sick. She must be sick.
‘She’s just a big dyke.’ Nathalie winds up the conversation despite calls for tolerance from Rose. ‘A dirty fucking lesbian, carrying on like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.’
‘Arnaud calls her Cheap Carpet.’ Concepción bursts out laughing. (Concepción knows Arnaud?)
(She’s sliding on the surface of a planet that is spinning too fast. In the end, the only thing that is certain, the only thing to hold on to [besides the ballast of the dead, but that weight doesn’t count] is the fleshy mass of the creature between her legs, alive and thick, pulsing, getting hairier and more and more autonomous, huge, intense, unknown, opening its moist, puckered and discerning maw to gobble up the history-geography textbook.)
(If she hangs back, frightened, studying in a bedroom with her wretched lifelong girlfriends, this creature will end up breaking away from her, crawling out on its belly with those hairy legs, hungry to devour the world. It will end up running around by itself, living its voracious bestial life, and return home to the den between her legs, to make her come, alone and miserable in her bed.)
‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ Arnaud says to her on the phone. ‘You absolutely mustn’t fall in love with me, that’s the worst thing that could happen to you, monogamy just isn’t my thing, life’s too short to be monogamous—what musician only plays one scale? Ah, my little Angie, you’re sweet, you’re good enough to eat, but the thing is you have to think of yourself, I’m about to leave for Bordeaux, didn’t I tell you? I got into Philosophy, you should come and visit me, but my girlfriend might get angry, there’s no way you can stay with me at the uni dorm, I’ll come and visit you in your village, in your little village, in your bedroom with your dolls, I’ve got a feeling that will turn me on big time, what, you don’t have dolls anymore? I’m joking, I’ve got a car now, I’ll come by and pick you up, and you’ll do things to me that I like, you know, with your tongue, you don’t do it as well as my girlfriend but you get much more turned on, I adore how you let yourself go, do you like letting yourself go? You’re a bit masochistic, I adore that. What are you wearing right now? Tell me what you’re wearing. You mustn’t wait for me, find yourself someone good, a reliable guy, a big bloke from your village. Kiss me, kiss me better, on the cock, come on, on my dick okay, I’m holding it hard here, go on suck me, quickly, I’ve gotta hang up, touch your breasts, touch yourself I’m telling you, put your finger in your arsehole—Ar Ar Arnooooo—go on, yes, go on, I’ve gotta hang up, think about me and wiggle your little arse, bitch oh oh—Arnoooooooo—think of me in your little arse Ar Ar…’
‘That guy’s pretty classy.’ Nathalie is impressed when she tells her about the rather unexpected phone call—his first phone call, the first time he’s called her off his own bat—that he even thought of calling her before he left for Bordeaux, already at uni, already in a relationship—a phone call that made her so happy and left her consumed with desire and filled with questions. ‘He’s right about monogamy, you can’t really expect a guy like that to stay celibate, come back to earth, my girl, you have to be more liberated, but doing it on the phone must be really really exciting, I’m not kidding, I’m so jealous.’
She ignored the bit about being masochistic, she didn’t really understand it anyway and also the bit about her finger in her arsehole, that’s a bit embarrassing (even though she normally tells Nathalie everything). In the end, when she thinks about it, maybe she is a little bit uptight.
Her mother gets dressed to go out, in her Liberty-print harem-pants jumpsuit. Won’t Solange put hers on too? They have a job to do. Both of them. Women’s business. It’s important. Solange is old enough to understand now. It feels like they’re wearing flowers to
go and kill someone.
It’s one of the mornings when the shop is shut, when it seems like her mother has some scores to settle. She doesn’t have her customers to deal with, and it’s like she’s on the wrong setting, as if she wanted to persuade Solange to buy the stock from her—she’s using proper grammar and a northern accent, Parisian, a threatening accent, her shop accent.
It’s the first of November, All Saints Day, but it’s as hot as a summer’s day. The sky is deep blue. The plane trees have red leaves. The American oaks are an overstated red (everything is overstated in America). It’s like a trick of the light: the sharply defined lobes on the leaves, embossed by the scorching wind. And she feels excluded from the scenery, as if the world was inaccessible to her beneath its froth of colours.
Her mother has bought huge pots of flowers to match the trees. Red, brown and golden. Every year Solange sees these pots in the garage. They rattle around in the back of the Renault 5. Papa’s Alpine wasn’t in the garage. It wasn’t in front of the pharmacy either (you never know).
They go past the Cheap Carpet outlet and Milord’s and the silos. They even go past the marina, but they don’t take the road to the sea. They drive through all the vineyards on the d’Urbide estate. After that there are still kilometres of corn.
‘Corn is so ugly. Right at eye level like that. At least wheat can wave. And the sea has a horizon. But because of your father, we had to be next to the airport. Trapped in corn country. We’re not chickens!’ Her mother clucks, hoping to make her laugh.
All of a sudden they go downhill, and it’s the beginning of another country, on another contour line, as if her mother had found the entrance to another dimension, science-fiction style. It’s a land of pine trees, with sand dunes. She listens distractedly while her mother explains to her that this forest was planted by hand. Every now and then a yellow clearing appears, with heather and red ferns, and it’s like witnessing a moment without mankind, a glimpse into an earlier time: seeing the earth pared of all thought, of any human gaze. She breathes deeply through her mouth, trying to get in touch with this, with Nature from a time before homo sapiens. As soon as she sees a clearing, she concentrates and it passes into her body, matter from the beginning, the original atoms.
All the Way Page 14
