caught a glimpse.
Another flash from the past was the woman – the one in a padded jacket and a broad
I told myself that now, four years later, the double hawkmoth no longer held any mystery for me: quite simply two moths coupling. I thought of people coupling, and tried to imagine the movement of their bodies… And suddenly I understood that for months already, possibly years, I had been thinking of nothing but these bodies, entwined, merging. I had been thinking about this without realizing it, at every moment of the day, while speaking of other things. As if the feverish caress of the hawkmoth had been burning my palm the whole time.
Questioning Charlotte to find out who that woman in the padded jacket was now seemed an absolute impossibility. An impenetrable barrier was arising between my grandmother and myself: the female body, dreamed of, desired, possessed a thousand times in my thoughts.
That evening, pouring me a cup of tea, Charlotte said in a preoccupied voice, 'It's funny, the Kukushka hasn't been past yet…'
Emerging from my reverie, I looked up at her. Our eyes met… We said nothing else to each other until the end of the meal.
The three women changed my outlook, my life…
I had discovered them by chance on the back of a press cutting in the depths of the Siberian suitcase. I was reading yet again the article about the first 'Peking-Paris via Moscow' car race, as if to prove to myself that there was nothing new to learn, that Charlotte's France was well and truly exhausted. Absentmindedly I had let the page slip onto the carpet. I had been looking through the balcony's open door. It was a special kind of day at the end of the month of August, cool and sunny, when the chill wind blowing across the Urals brought the first breath of autumn to our steppes. Everything shone in this limpid light. The trees of the Stalinka stood out with fragile clarity against a sky of revitalized blue. The line of the horizon was pure and incisive. With bitter relief I told myself that the end of the holidays was approaching. The end also of a stage in my life, an end marked by this extraordinary discovery: that all my knowledge ensured neither happiness nor privileged access to what was essential… Another revelation also: the whole time I was thinking about the female body, about women's bodies. All other thoughts were complementary, accidental, derivative. Yes, I was facing the fact that being a man meant thinking constantly of women, that a man was nothing but a dreamer about women! And that was what I was turning into…
By a whimsical caprice, the page of the magazine had turned over as it slipped onto the carpet. I picked it up, and as I did so I saw them on the back, these three women from the turn of the century. I had never seen them before, having regarded the reverse side of this press cutting as nonexistent. This unexpected encounter intrigued me. I took the photo closer to the light coming from the balcony…
And suddenly I fell in love with them. With their bodies and with their tender and attentive eyes, which allowed one to guess only too well at the presence of a photographer crouched under a black cloth, behind a tripod.
Their femininity was such as would inevitably touch the heart of a solitary and shy adolescent like myself. It was, in a way, a normative femininity. All three wore long black dresses that enhanced the ample roundness of their bosoms and hugged their hips; but notably, before embracing their legs and spreading into graceful folds around their feet, the fabric sketched the discreet curve of their stomachs. The chaste sensuality of this gently rounded triangle fascinated me!
Yes, their beauty was just what a young, still physically innocent dreamer could endlessly call to mind in his erotic fantasies. It was the image of a 'classical' woman. The embodiment of femininity. The vision of the ideal mistress. It was in this light, at any rate, that I contemplated the elegant trio, their great eyes shaded in black; their voluminous hats sporting dark velvet ribbons; their old-fashioned air, which in the portraits of previous generations always seems to us to betoken a certain naivete, a candid spontaneity lacking in our own contemporaries that both touches us and inspires our confidence.
And I marveled at the neatness of this correspondence: what my lack of experience in love called for was precisely this generic Woman, a woman still devoid of all those sensual particulars that a mature desire would detect in her body.
I contemplated them with a growing uneasiness. Their bodies were inaccessible to me. Oh, the problem was not the physical impossibility of being with them. For a long time my erotic imagination had learned how to thwart this obstacle. I closed my eyes and saw my fair strollers naked. Like a chemist I could reconstruct their flesh by a skillful synthesis, taking the most banal elements: the heaviness of the thigh of that woman who had brushed against me one day in a crowded bus; the curves of sunburned bodies on beaches; all the nudes in paintings. And even my own body! Yes, despite the taboo imposed on nudity in my native land and, with greater reason, on female nudity, I would have known how to reconstitute the elasticity of a breast beneath my fingers and the suppleness of a thigh.
No, the elegant trio were inaccessible to me in quite a different way… When I sought to recreate their era my memory immediately went into action. I remembered Bleriot, who around that time was crossing the Channel with his monoplane; Picasso, who was painting the
So I had to resign myself to a museum peopled with mummies, with waxworks bearing their labels: 'Three elegant ladies,' 'President Faure and his mistress,' 'Old soldier in a village in the north.'… I closed the suitcase.
Leaning on the handrail of the balcony, I let my gaze lose itself in the transparent evening gold above the steppe.
What was the point of their beauty after all? I thought, with a sudden clarity ascendant as the light from this sunset. Yes, what was the point of their fine breasts, their hips, their dresses that hugged their young bodies so prettily? To be so beautiful and to end up thrust into an old suitcase, in a sleepy, dusty town, lost in the middle of an endless plain! In this Saranza, of which, during their lifetime, they hadn't the slightest notion… All that was left of them was this photo, which had survived an unbelievable series of hazards great and small and was only preserved as the back of the page reporting the Peking- Paris car rally. Even Charlotte had no memory of these three feminine figures. I was the only one on this earth to preserve the last thread linking them to the world of the living! My memory was their last refuge, their ultimate abode before final and total oblivion. I was in some sense the god of their trembling universe, of this bit of the Champs-Elysees where their beauty still shone…
I could only offer them the life of puppets. I wound up the spring of my memory, and the elegant trio began their jerky promenade; the president of the Republic embraced Marguerite Steinheil; the duc d'Orleans fell, pierced by perfidious daggers; the old warrior grasped his long pike and stuck out his chest…
'How can it be,' I asked with anguish, 'that all these passions, griefs, loves, leave so little trace? What an absurdity are the laws of this world in which the lives of such beautiful and desirable women depend on the flutter of a page! For had that page not turned over, I would not have saved them from oblivion, which would have been eternal. What a cosmic blunder is the disappearance of a beautiful woman! Disappearance forever. Complete annihilation. Without shadow. Without reflection, without appeal…'
