I’m reminded of my grandfather, who always insisted I go with him on his daily constitutional, even when it rained— not through the woods, as on other days, but around by way of the meadows. When we got to the place where the cows were, he would take my hand and say to them in a polite voice, “Hello! You’re so clean today!” To which I would reply, merrily, “That’s because of the rain!”
I’m not a little girl anymore. I don’t talk on behalf of animals, and nobody holds my hand. I can go out whenever and wherever I like. Today, I’ve taken a shower, I’m as clean and fresh as a cow in the rain, my lips are moist and my cheeks smooth, I’m wearing a very short skirt under a big black overcoat, and under my panties, there’s a moist dew oozing from a very soft patch of hair, that’s where I keep my animals now.
I walk quickly, toward the ritzy part of town. When I reach the building, I ring the bell, and without waiting for a reply, I push open the windowed door, cross the small lobby, and climb the stairs two by two to the top floor.
Every time I tell myself: Maybe he’s not in, maybe I got the wrong evening, maybe he changed his mind, or he’s not alone and won’t open the door. But suddenly there he is in front of me, in the doorway of his luxury garret, with the sky eating at the glass roof, the branches of the tree knocking against the panes, and tonight, the rain beating down with rapid little blows.
“You’re so solid, so strong, there’s such a strength about you,” he says.
I hold him tight against me, and think about her, the woman with slender wrists and ankles. Her wrists, her ankles, her very long neck, her hips—you can see through the dress how narrow they are—are all on the photo stuck to the refrigerator door in the kitchen. And there’s another photo on the table in the living room. “Paso doble!” he says, drawing me in.
There’s always music at his place. As soon as I’ve entered, I’m free to sway, to go with the rhythm. He moves in step, he’s a good mover, and I follow, trying my best to be sexy, that’s what I always have to be, sexy, to please him, otherwise I’d be straight back out in the cold and the rain with no one to hold my hand.
“Let yourself go,” he says, “we’re in Spain, the Gypsy girls dance like goddesses, they have big breasts and they arch their backs so you can see their pubes, and when they fuck, it’s seven orgasms an hour, one explosion after another, like a witch’s cauldron. Paso doble, dance!”
He clings to me though I’m no dancer, and the living room is transformed into a Spanish bar where beautiful Gypsy girls watch me and laugh. He goes off with three of them, and I stay there in the rain, the rain of a season that will pass like every other season.
Later, in the kitchen, I watch him eating by himself. “Don’t worry about me,” I told him, “I’m not hungry.” That’s what I always say, and he obeys me, never makes me anything to eat. I sit opposite him and drink a glass of wine. He’s wearing one of the twenty-five beautiful shirts the woman with the slender wrists and ankles has bought him. He has broad shoulders, a neat waist, and long legs that clasp mine. I tell myself that we’re married, even if it isn’t true. Because I watch him eat, because his legs hold mine like a padlock, I’m his wife, forever. We’ll have children together and lead them through the meadows to see the cows in the rain.
He’s just finishing his meal when the telephone rings. It doesn’t always rain, the wind doesn’t always push the branches of the tree up against the windowpane, but the phone always rings. I’m allowed to stay where I am, I’m not in the way. I leave the table, take a book from the library, and go and lie down on the carpet. I peer over the top of the book and see his feet pacing the carpet, his shoes, well polished as always, his English socks—he doesn’t buy them himself, the woman owns a men’s clothing store. I imagine him sitting in a closed cubicle, barefoot, and her on her knees, with her skirt lifted as far as her navel and her transparent groin exposed, slipping an English sock on his foot, a sock as soft as a vagina.
He’s talking to her on the phone. I can’t hear what he’s saying because of the storm inside my head, I can only see his lips moving, imploring, and his eyes searching for me. “Stay with us,” his eyes say when they meet mine. “Stay, you’re so strong.”
Afterwards, he hangs up the receiver and lies down next to me.
“Did you hear how I comforted her, how I told her to be brave?”
He snuggles up in my arms. He’s like a child with a fever, unable to keep still.
“Is she going to leave her husband soon?” I ask him gently. “Will she be able to live here with you?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s so hard, it’s been such a long time, we’re so alone, she and I, alone against the whole world.”
He begins to cry, desperately.
I stroke his face, and in the same insistent rhythm as the rain, I say these few words:
“I’m with the two of you, against the whole world.”
* * *
The tree rubs against the window, the rain lubricates the glass.
He has stretched me on the bed. He takes off my shoes, then strokes my hair, pulling it back.
“Your forehead is like a little girl’s.”
His fingers brush against my wrist and loosen my watch. It slides off and falls to the floor.
There’s a lamp beside the bed. And under the lamp, always something of hers.
The first time, a letter, written in a fine hand, that began “My love …”
I didn’t read the rest.
The second time, a tuft of very black pubic hair on a sheet of white paper. It had been cut with scissors.
Sometimes it’s a wristwatch. Left by accident.
And today?
Today, there’s nothing under the lamp.
But when I’m lying down and he’s taking off my skirt, skinning me like a freshly killed rabbit, I notice a diagonal shadow on the ceiling, shaped almost like a snout.
I sit up. There’s a pair of women’s panties on the lampshade.
I say nothing. I lie down again and wait.
He bends over me.
“Take that away!” I shout.
He raises himself on his elbows, reaches out his arm, and grabs the panties. They’re white with little garnet flowers and a little flat garnet knot at the front. He places the panties over his face and shakes his head slowly, so as not to drop them.
He laughs. “I haven’t washed them.”
I change my mind. “Leave them,” I say, at my most charming, “it doesn’t matter.” Then, imploring: “Promise me there’ll always be something of hers when I come here.”
“I promise,” he says, placing the trophy under the lamp. “You see, I forgot all about it today. It’s lucky you reminded me.”
He lies down on top of me. His voice is soft now, as soft as his skin. “I know you by heart, you’re as tense as a little girl, you don’t move, you don’t cry out, you never will. She cries out, if you only knew how she cries out!”
He sits up and looks at me, then changes my position. My left arm extended, my right arm over my eyes, my legs separated but bent, my feet placed flat on the carpet. He has plenty of room. He sits down cross-legged, naked now, a yogi meditating. He takes a deep breath, like a diver getting ready.
He takes the plunge. His fingers are inside me. Without looking at me, he concentrates on his hand as it opens me and searches around and is swallowed, with a squelchy octopus sound, and then comes out again, shining and wet like my grandfather’s hand when he stroked the muzzle of his favorite cow. The other cows would breathe loudly, then move away with worried looks in their eyes, but that one would let herself be approached without flinching and put out a humid tongue and swallow his fingers thoughtfully.
“She …” he says, stretching me beneath him.
He rolls his beautiful shirt under me, one of the twenty-five.
“You.”
His voice has changed, it’s like a knife cutting into a piece of meat, cutting quickly before the meat gets cold and loses all its blood.
“You,” he says, “you.”
He talks like that sometimes, strongly, urgently, like a hungry ogre, a surgeon preventing a hemorrhage, a vampire who has to be finished before sunrise.
He enters me, fucks me hard and deep. My head bangs against the wall.
“She,” he says, slowly withdrawing.
“And you,” he says, thrusting in again so violently I feel as if I’m going to die.
He is silent now, plowing his way in like a stranger, his despair focused on them, him and her, two people united— thanks to me—against the whole world.
“Don’t cry out!” his voice commands.
I lock up my cry, I kill it, in homage to the woman with the slender wrists and ankles, who dances better and fucks better than me.
Then, all at once, because I’ve been silent so long, a great passive silent body letting itself be moved, I come at last into a boundless light, and my limbs catch fire and fly off with a great beating of wings while he cries out and falls.
He drifts off to sleep, a heavy sleep like a child’s, with my leg trapped beneath his. When it hurts too much, I move a little, but he feels it, and half awake, he presses harder until I’m still again. I turn to look at the window. It’s pouring down, rivulets are forming, all the waters are joining together, the branches rub against the panes, cows are looking at us and mooing dully. How clean they are today, Grandpa.
That’s because of the rain.