Bourdouxhe La Femme de Gilles

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-907970-54-2
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 168 Seiten

Elisa is Gilles' wife and her devotion to him is passionate and all-consuming. Her daily life is permeated by thoughts of him - thoughts of his return from the factory, thoughts of his footsteps on the path as he arrives home each evening, when, in the minutes before his return, she is overcome with paralysing anticipation. But when Gilles suddenly finds himself powerfully and helplessly attracted to Elisa's younger sister, Victorine, Elisa's world is overturned. The joys of home and family are destroyed and her desperation is so profound that it begins to threaten her every sense of reality and the core of her existence. Set among the dusty lanes and rolling valleys of rural Belgium in the 1930s, La Femme de Gilles is a sensual and shattering novel about infidelity, lust, and the loneliness of losing the one thing that matters most. 'One of the more remarkable literary discoveries of the last few years.' - Jonathan Coe, Guardian 'A marvellous, rediscovered novel about selfless love.' - Kate Kellaway, Observer 'A haunting, slim novel which has the mesmeric inevitability of classical tragedy.' - Independent on Sunday 'La Femme de Gilles is about physical passion, its etasies, aberrations and ruthlessness . . . quiet, compassionate and unsparing.' - Times Literary Supplement

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bourdouxhe, Madeleine

Leseproben

3

‘I’m sure there’s nothing wrong – it’s me who’s changed, not him – he does the shopping as usual, goes to union meetings, takes the coffee over to Mother – it’s me, it’s my condition.’

Elisa was on the fourth concrete step. She scraped the snow off this one just as she had the others, throwing it into a little heap on the left, and swept until the concrete was clear. Then she knelt down on the clean step ready to attack the fifth. ‘There, just a tiny bit higher …’

Straining hard she plunged her left hand into the snow and saw the imprint of Gilles’ studded shoe. The muscles of her face tensed, as if she were short of breath. ‘Dear little heart …’ She had not pronounced the words, but her lips quivered to their rhythm.

Up one more step, and there, the most satisfying task of all – a great slab of snow to push off all in one go. She brushed the step clear, moved on to another heap: ‘All these little heaps … I’ll ask Gilles to shovel them up with the spade. The trouble is, as soon as I ask him to do it I know he’ll get that new expression on his face …’

She turned round, sat down on a step still covered in snow, and stayed there for a moment, brush in hand. She could picture Gilles so clearly, sitting in front of the fire, legs stretched out, feet resting on the door of the open stove, with that new look of drowsy satiation. His head would move forward and backward in little jerky movements as if drawn by a will that was only semi-conscious; then he’d pull himself up abruptly, sharply, as though he’d been snorting, his attractive face looking somehow crumpled, the veins on his forehead standing out. If she said to him, ‘Would you mind clearing up the snow with the spade?’ he’d answer, ‘I don’t give a damn about those heaps of snow,’ and that new look would come over him. He’d sit down and make himself comfortable, sniffing, spitting noisily into his handkerchief, smiling greedily, fixedly, into the stove. Those heaps of snow, what a lot of fuss about nothing.

‘No, it’s me,’ she said to herself, ‘Everything seems funny to me at the moment, it’s my condition. Was I like this with the twins? Ouch! Another little kick, right in the middle of his mother’s belly: he’s going to be a strong one, all right. Oh yes, it must be me, surely. I ought to just get on with it.’

She attacked the next-to-last step.

Then she descended gingerly, keeping close to the wall, so as not to slip, in her over-large clogs. When she came to the door of the house she took them off and, holding them in her hands, walked silently in on her wet-stockinged feet, her eyes fixed on her swollen belly. Proudly she carried forward the new weight which had come to her from Gilles’ body.

Today he was a little late coming in, and he had Victorine with him.

‘I’ve brought the kid with me,’ he said. ‘She seemed bored at home, and since you go out so rarely now, I thought I might take her for a walk later.’

‘Good idea,’ Elisa said.

She looked proudly at her little sister, so pretty and so fresh; thinking of her own increasingly heavy and misshapen body, she said to herself, ‘I’m glad he’s going to take her out, it’ll make a change for him.’

She was ashamed to have felt that vague sense of unease in the afternoon, and to reassure herself she asked him, ‘Would you like to shovel up the heaps of snow with the spade? I’ve left them on the steps.’

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘I’ll do it right away.’

She looked at him with a big, happy smile.

Whistling, Gilles went out and slid the spade under the first heap, thinking to himself, ‘Can’t see any reason not to clear up the snow if that’s what she wants – means damn all to me.’

Elisa had served supper early so they could get off.

‘I don’t have much money on me,’ Gilles said as they were leaving.

‘I’ll give you some,’ Elisa said. ‘Where are you going, anyway?’

‘Not sure – the cinema probably.’

Victorine, in gloves and hat, was all ready to go, leaning on the table with both hands. He was very close to her.

Turning her back on the room, Elisa stood by the wardrobe and rummaged in her handbag. Money in hand, she was about to snap it shut when, at precisely that moment, anxiety again took hold of her. It was no longer a vague feeling of unease that disappeared almost as soon as she had abandoned herself to it; this time the anguish was heavier, more acute. One by one she fixed her gaze on some of the objects around her, the things that made up her familiar world, then her eyes lit on her own hands as they closed the bag, and she saw they were trembling. Precisely at that moment Elisa knew that behind her back there was another world, a world that was complicated, threatening, unknown. She felt it to be so and she was certain she was not mistaken; she was also certain that it was absolutely essential not to turn round suddenly and confront it.

Disturbed by this mysterious insight, which seemed suddenly to have seized her by the throat, she waited a moment before slowly turning, at first only halfway, looking straight in front of her with faraway eyes, then three-quarters, then at last full face. She looked at them both. They seemed not to have moved: they were in exactly the same position they had been in a few minutes earlier, before she had had her insight.

Elisa walked up to them quite normally and gave Gilles the money, as though nothing had happened. She knew she was going to speak. She didn’t know what she would say, but she knew it wouldn’t be a sentence that dropped carelessly from her lips, but rather an essential sentence, a sentence of which she would be the perfect mistress.

Gilles put the money in his purse, picked up his hat.

‘Shall we go?’ he said, looking at Victorine.

Then Elisa said:

‘I’ve been thinking – it’s not tiring, going to the cinema … I think I’ll come with you after all, I’ll ask Marthe to look after the children. Wait for me a minute.’

She slipped on her coat and went to warn her neighbour, not stopping for a moment to see their astonished faces. When she got back all three walked down the slippery, muddy road in silence. The air was bitter, and Gilles pushed up his collar. Both women put one arm through his, their other hands keeping their furs tightly pressed against their mouths. They walked fast. In spite of the weight of her belly Elisa had no difficulty in placing her feet steadily on the stones of the road, and she let her eyes range brightly over the houses as they passed them, looking first right then left, keenly registering everything that came into her vision. She noticed every dirty little icicle that shone in the rivulets against the pavement; she marked the exact point at which the halo round the street-lamps disappeared into the sky. Passing in front of a lit window she saw a woman leaning over a half-cleared table; she had time to observe her face, her hair, her mouth, her gestures, her life. In that one look, which had lasted merely the few seconds that it takes three walking figures to cross a rectangle of light, Elisa came to know that woman. And she knew that the two people who walked beside her – at the same rhythm and on the same road, who saw as she did the icicles, the luminous fog of the street-lamps and the closed doors or lit windows that tinged women’s lives with a sad light – they had no real knowledge of such things at all. Elisa felt a deep sense of pride, untouched by scorn, rising within her and comforting her soul.

They reached the stop and waited for the tram that would take them into town. No one had uttered a word.

Sitting in the dark cinema, Elisa had the vague sensation that she was now in her place: between Gilles and Victorine, in a shadowy unknown that was a part of the threatening world she had recently glimpsed. She didn’t know why she felt this but it provided comfort and succour, released her from the need to delve or understand. She was still in that state of euphoria with which our hearts protect us in the midst of danger.

But later, when they had taken Victorine home and greeted her parents, when Elisa had gone to bed and heard Gilles’ first snores, she felt she was breathing in a world that had returned to normal. Deprived of the feeling that she must act – for reasons both compelling and obscure – she gained the shattering liberty of looking things in the face. Now she could give careful thought to the disturbing sense of malaise that had weighed on her for several weeks; she could strip it right down until it delivered up its secret.

Searching her memory she peered slowly backward in time. Instead of articulating her thoughts she simply allowed the images to file past: Victorine, then Gilles, then Victorine again, then Gilles and Victorine. Sometimes, as if working faithfully and mechanically to a prearranged command, her memory would stop at a gesture, an attitude, or the end of a smile which, taken unawares by an unexpected glance, had lingered stupidly on. And again the images filed past, fast and irrelevant or heavy, confidential and suddenly arrested, to be submitted to the close scrutiny of the investigator. Victorine, Gilles and Victorine … And always there would come into her mind, like a leitmotif, that new face of Gilles’, the face upon which Elisa’s anxious eyes, searching for the familiar, had recently seen cruel, illegible signs.

From every image there came a new fragment of information, a painful little abstraction. None of these fragments was expressed in words, they...