It is true that Woman, during those summer months, had imposed herself on all my senses like a ceaseless oppression. Without knowing it, I was living through that painful transition that lies between the very first experience of physical love, often barely sketched in, and those that will follow. This is often a more delicate path to travel than the one that leads from innocence to the first knowledge of a woman's body.
Even in the marooned town that was Saranza, this multifarious woman, elusive, innumerable, was strangely present. More insinuating, more discreet than in the big cities, but all the more provocative. Like, for example, the girl whom I passed one day in an empty street, dusty and scorched by the sun. She was tall, well built, with that healthy physical robustness that one finds in the provinces. Her blouse clung to powerful rounded breasts. Her miniskirt hugged the very full tops of her thighs. The pointed heels of her glossy white shoes made her gait a little strained. Her fashionable clothes, her makeup, and this stilted gait lent an almost surrealist air to her appearance in the empty street. But above all there was this almost brutish physical superabundance of her body, of her movements! On this afternoon of silent heat. In this sleepy little town. Why? To what end? I could not prevent myself glancing furtively behind me: yes, her strong calves, polished by sunburn, her thighs, the two hemispheres of her buttocks moving with suppleness at each step. Bewildered, I told myself that somewhere in this dead Saranza there must be a room, a bed, where this body would stretch out and, parting its legs, welcome another body into its groin. This obvious thought plunged me into boundless amazement. How simultaneously natural and improbable it all was!
Or again the plump, bare woman's arm that appeared at a window one evening. A little winding street, overhung with still, heavy foliage – and this very white, very rounded arm, uncovered to the shoulder, which had swayed for a few seconds, the time it took to draw a muslin curtain over the darkness of the room. And I do not know by what intuition I had recognized the somewhat excited impatience of this gesture, and had understood on what interior this naked woman's arm was drawing the curtain… I even felt the smooth coolness of the arm on my lips.
At each of these encounters, an insistent summons rang out in my head: I must seduce them at once, these unknown women, make them mine, fit their flesh into my rosary of dreamed-of bodies. For each missed opportunity was a defeat, an irremediable loss, an emptiness that other bodies would only partially be able to fill. At such moments my fever became unbearable!
I had never dared to embark on this subject with Charlotte. Still less to talk to her about the woman cut in two on the barge, or my night with the young drunken dancer. Did she guess at my turmoil herself? Certainly. Without actually picturing that prostitute seen through the portholes, or the young redhead on the old ferry, it seems to me that she identified with great precision 'where I was at' in my experience of love. Unconsciously, through my questions, my evasions, my feigned indifference over certain delicate subjects – my silences, even – I was painting my own portrait as apprentice lover. But I was not aware of it, like someone who forgets that his shadow is projecting onto a wall the gestures he is trying to hide.
Thus, hearing Charlotte speak of Baudelaire, I thought it was mere coincidence when in the first stanza of his sonnet, this feminine presence was sketched:
When, with closed eyes, on some warm autumn night, I breathe your bosom's sultry fragrances, Enchanted shores unfold their promontories, Dazed by a sun monotonously bright.
'You see,' my grandmother continued, in a mixture of Russian and French, for she had to quote the texts of the translations, 'In Bryussov the first line is rendered as: 'On an autumn evening, with eyes closed…'
'In Balmont: 'When, closing my eyes, on a stifling summer's night…'
'In my opinion both of them are simplifying Baudelaire. In his sonnet, you see, the 'warm autumn night' is a very particular moment, yes, in mid-autumn, suddenly, like a blessing, this warm night, unique, a parenthesis of light amid the rains and miseries of life. In their translations they have traduced Baudelaire's idea: 'an autumn evening,' 'a summer's night,' is flat. It has no soul. While in his text this moment makes magic possible, you know, a bit like those warm days just before the winter.'
Charlotte elaborated her commentary at every stage with the hghtly assumed dilettantism that disguised her often very broad knowledge, which she was afraid to flaunt. But now all I was hearing was the melody of her voice, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in French.
In place of my obsession with female flesh, with that omnipresent womanhood whose inexhaustible multiplicity harassed me, I had a feeling of great relief. This had the transparency of that 'warm autumn night.' And the serenity of a slow, almost melancholy contemplation of a woman's beautiful body, stretched out in the blissful lassitude of love. A body whose physical reality is reflected in a series of reminiscences, scents, lights…
Before the storm reached us, the river became swollen. We shook ourselves, hearing the stream already lapping among the roots of the willows. The sky became purple, black. The steppe, bristling, froze into blinding, livid scenes. A piquant, acid smell assailed us with the chill of the first showers. And Charlotte, as she folded the napkin on which we had taken our lunch, rounded off her exposition: 'But in the end, in the last line, there is a real paradox of translation. Bryussov excels Baudelaire! Yes, Baudelaire talks of 'the song of mariners' on that island that is born of 'your bosom's sultry fragrances.' And Bryussov, in translating him, gives 'the voices of sailors calling in several tongues.' What is wonderful is that the Russian can convey that with a single adjective. These cries in different languages are much more alive than the'song of mariners,' which is rather mawkishly romantic, you have to admit. It's what we were saying the other day, you see: the translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival. Besides, in this sonnet…'
She did not have the time to finish her sentence. The water streamed under our feet, carrying away my clothes, several sheets of paper, and one of Charlotte's espadrilles. The sky, gorged with rain, burst upon the steppe. We rushed to rescue what we still could. I seized my trousers and my shirt, which had happily caught on the branches of the willows as they floated along, and I just managed to fish out Charlotte's espadrille. Then the sheets of paper – they were the recopied translations. The downpour quickly turned them into little balls spotted with ink.
We did not notice our fear – the violence of the thunder's deafening clatter drove out all thought. The cloudburst isolated us inside the shivering confines of our bodies. With a thrilling keenness we felt our hearts laid bare, drowned in this deluge that merged heaven and earth.
A few minutes later the sun shone. From the top of the bank we contemplated the steppe. Shining, quivering with a thousand iridescent sparks, it seemed to be breathing. We exchanged smiling looks. Charlotte had lost her white headscarf; her wet hair was streaming in swarthy braids on her shoulders. Raindrops glittered on her eyelashes. Her dress, quite soaked, clung to her body. 'She is young. And very beautiful. In spite of everything,' declared that involuntary voice within me that disobeys and embarrasses us with its uncompromising frankness, but which reveals what is censored by considered speech.
We stopped at the railway embankment. In the distance we could see a long freight train approaching. Often a panting train would stop at this point, barring our path for a brief moment. This obstruction, due no doubt to some points or a signal, would amuse us. The cars rose up in a gigantic wall, covered in dust. A dense wave of heat was given off by their sides exposed to the sun. And the silence of the steppe was only broken by the distant hooting of the locomotive. Each time I was tempted not to wait for it to move off, and to cross the track by slipping under a car, Charlotte would restrain me, saying she had just heard the whistle. Sometimes when our wait was really becoming too long, we climbed onto the open deck, which freight cars had at that time, and got off on the other side of the track. These few seconds were filled with gleeful nervousness: what if the train set off and took us to an unknown and fabulous destination?
This time we could not wait. Soaked as we were, we needed to reach home before nightfall. I climbed up first and held out my hand to Charlotte, who stepped up onto the footboard. Just at that moment the train moved off. We ran across the deck. I could still have jumped. But not Charlotte… We stood facing the embrasure, which was filling with an increasingly biting draft. The line of our footpath vanished in the immensity of the steppe.
We were not at all worried. We knew that one station or another would halt the progress of our train. It seemed to me that Charlotte was in some ways quite pleased with our unexpected adventure. She gazed at the plain, revived by the storm. Her hair, blowing in the wind, spread across her face. She flung it aside from time to time with a rapid gesture. Despite the sun, a little fine rain began to fall at intervals.
