Lovers (9781609459192) Read Online Free PDF Page B

boy, but he will not teach her what love is composed of. He is reluctant to describe its changes, its highs and lows, its very matter.
    Every evening she joins him in his room, sits down in the space between the bed and the wall.
    Tell me in detail about this love, make an effort, come, love me a little.
    He will never go any farther than an account of their meeting.
    There are evenings when she is confronted with an empty room, and feels as though she is falling through a trapdoor.
    The next day she asks: Where were you?
    Nowhere, here and there. Or he does not reply.
    He has no hesitation in being rude to her.
    There are nights when he lurks outside the prison. He calls out his lover’s name, one of those stifled, inaudible cries that rend only the heart. He is almost destroyed by this cry that cannot free itself from his flesh, this cry that is in him, that harrows him, torments him, breaks him. From the vicinity of the prison he heads for a tavern, any tavern. When some strapping lad possesses him, the pain eases, it grows silent, but does not disappear, it cannot disappear, it goes to ground in him, very deep, it is like the sleep of pain, and its silence makes the pleasure incredibly strong. But in the morning the pain is resurgent, and unbearable.
    And Anne de Créon is always waiting for him.
    She needs him so much, can’t he understand that, needs him so much, needs him totally, and at the same time there grows in her a spiraling revulsion, a resentment that overwhelms her: It was Sébastien who brought this anathema down on our heads. He alone is responsible.
    Immortal little swine.

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    A man’s bedroom is not a woman’s bedroom, obviously.
The smell is different.
A man’s smell is more acrid, more external, less intimate, less secretive, emanating less from within, than a woman’s. A smell of sweat and semen, basically.
    He deserts his room, he is reluctant to have any more private conversations with Anne de Créon. He hates her, but in him hate is only fleeting, it comes and goes. It is not stable, not binding. A small hate, a hate that does not make a man, some would say.
    His smell is everywhere, hovering in the air, impregnating the sheets, and Anne de Créon, in Sébastien’s absence, breathes it in deeply. The smell is like her son’s, strong and bitter and unforgettable. She lies down on Sébastien’s bed, and the illusion is even stronger: her son has slept here, this is his smell. But as soon as she moves away from the bed, she thinks of her child’s inevitable death.

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    W here are you? What are you doing? What am I to you at this moment? The one who must be saved? The one who is loved? The one who is nothing but memory now?
    He eats little, drinks a few mouthfuls of briny water. He is vegetating. Here, there is no day or night, only shadows. Let there be light! Stuff and nonsense! The hope of the simple-minded. He will leave his cell only for the final torment. It is so dark, he cannot distinguish shadows between himself and the table, himself and the door, himself and the floor. They belong to the outside world. Sébastien clothes them in colors. Indigo, like the evening sky sometimes, fern-green—a dull, almost dusty green—purple, like the rouge on his mother’s cheeks, yellow, like straw, or an oriole, or a country path in the summer light.
    I think of you.

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    H e is suffocating.
Here on earth, one always suffocates a little, for one reason or another, even at moments of great happiness.
    He can only live on this earth, even if he is alone. He is of this world and no other.
    To die, yes, sometimes he thinks of interrupting the course of his life with poison or a knife, but not before Balthazar has been tied to the stake.
    A drastic, suspended, repressed decision.
    It is considered good form to hide such a desire. You may think about it, of course, but not commit the act. Suicides are not worthy of a mass.
    A man without God.
    An