Petite Mort Read Online Free PDF Page B

without workers? Loneliness hung on the air; from the corridors outside I heardnothing. I went first to the racks of old costumes behind our desks, and buried my face in their mothy scent.
It doesn’t matter
, I told the clothes,
I still love you
; their arms waved helplessly in reply.
    Let’s be clear: it was not the word ‘love’ which summoned him; but there he was anyway, lounging in the doorway.
    ‘Evidently you are enjoying your first day.’
    I dropped the dress which I had been holding up to my cheek in an asinine fashion.
    ‘You are an unusual person, Mlle Roux.’
    ‘Why is that?’ I asked.
    ‘Beautiful people do not usually feel the pain of inanimate objects.’
    It was all I needed him to say. I surprised myself with my boldness in stepping up to him, and raising my chin so that it almost met his, asking for a kiss. He looked at me – eyes grey as the Pas de Calais – and we stood for a while. I placed hot palms on his chest; he laughed again, and then he did kiss me.
    The kiss said,
look at you, a snake with your prey
. It said,
do you suppose this will secure you an acting role?
    And mine said,
yes
.
    I went home. Agathe, sensing a change, turned in her chair and looked at me for ten seconds or so. She rolled me a cigarette and we smoked it together. Far off, the pinnacle of the Bastille was pointing at the moon; that evening, the weight of her arm next to mine was not an intrusion but a comfort.
    One other thing: I leant back after the act, gasping as women are supposed to gasp, and asked that hackneyed question: ‘Where did you come from?’
    And to my very great surprise, he told me. Not all in one go – and not everything – only a fool would suppose André Durand ever bared his soul to anyone – but a little each night, piece by piece. Just enough to keep me wanting more.
    André, i.
    Grosse Tete, Louisiana, July 1886, population 245: a few tin huts, eternally catching their balance on the crust of mud separating settlement from bayou. Beyond the Grosse Tete Convenience Store and the Grosse Tete Laughing Woman bar, a signpost extends its white finger –
NEW ORLEANS 85 MILES
    – but that is 85 miles away; here, every log is a potential crocodile. The heat cracks wood and peels paint from doors.
    The town has just one permanent fixture. The Orphanage stands at the Grosse Tete’s edge, its windows gazing northwards: two storeys of incongruously imported marble, dotted with mica which dances in the ever-present sunshine. It is run by nuns, stern and secretive, virtuously hiding their faces from strangers; the building has been there for as long as the town’s oldest inhabitant can remember.
    Today is the first Sunday of the month, around midday, and shutters are slamming closed all around the village. Everyone knows it is Adoption Sunday: a monthly event when wealthy gentlemen seeking a new child visit the Orphanage, to take tea with the nuns and make their selection. There are few inhabitants who haven’t at some time or other, when passing the Orphanage, seen a child’s fingers spidered against an upstairs window – and in Grosse Tete, where superstitions outnumber residents, it is considered bad luck to witness the children being taken away.
    Strange
, thinks Auguste Durand,
to find the place so deserted.
He peers from the curtained windows of his carriage, which rattles down Grosse Tete Main Street. His only audience are cats, sunning themselves, who leap to their feet in offence as the wheels spin gravel over them.
It is as though all the inhabitants have been spirited into the swamp overnight
, Auguste thinks – and it seems to him a plausible explanation. Don’t they say that is what happened to Thibodaux, thirty years ago? That the town vanished, leaving only the spars of foundations sticking up out of the bayou?
    A part of Auguste’s fifty-four-year-old brain knows this cannot be true: Auguste has been a sugar-cane man, a plantation owner, all his life and his younger self would