Chaconne. Diana BlackwoodЧитать онлайн книгу.
said Eleanor.
He turned to look at her, his brown eyes lightening. She thought of kelp in the moment that sunlight strikes it.
“Merci.” He held out his hand and smiled. His teeth were not perfect, which gladdened her; his skin had a golden glaze. “Julien Foucher.”
She clasped his cool hand and pronounced her name as if she were the Queen of Aquitaine, she who brought the troubadours to Northern France. For a dizzy moment she thought he might raise her hand to his lips.
“Anyway,” said the Trot, scowling at Eleanor and shuffling his feet, “have a think about what I said.” He had apparently concluded that female interference had brought the discussion to an end.
“I will do zat.”
French emboldened her, like fancy dress. She was going to the cafeteria. Would he like to come?
In the cafeteria Eleanor apologised for the coffee, scalding and insipid, and for the poor choice of food. Julien said there was no need to apologise; Australians were always apologising. He had just been to Alice Springs and back on a bus, so he knew.
She did not remove the mantle of French. No negotiations took place over language, even though Julien had come to Sydney to practise English. He was staying with a married cousin, a geologist who was employed by a mining subsidiary of a French giant with an interest in Australian uranium. The cousin and his wife referred to Australians as les australos, short for les australopithèques. As Eleanor struggled to keep up with his words, her feelings fell behind in a fog. She barely reacted to the australopithecines because she was still stuck in her dismay about the uranium.
Some weeks earlier, marching behind an Aboriginal land rights banner in an anti-nuclear demonstration, she and Ruth had chanted, with thousands of others, “Leave uranium in the ground!” (“Men can’t be trusted!” the group of lesbians in front of them had added.) But then Julien launched into a tirade against multinationals and bourgeois hegemony and the exploitation of the third world. He described the arguments he had over dinner with the cousin and his reactionary wife; he removed his PCF membership card from his wallet and held it up for her to admire. Yet he was unlike any communist she had ever come across: nothing like the scruffy Maoists who would wave their newspaper under your nose when you were having coffee with a friend; nothing like the shambling Trot outside the library or even the charismatic trade unionist she and Ruth so admired for having led his union in a campaign to save historic buildings. Julien was European, and that made all the difference.
He spun for her a cocoon of French, a private Paris of the mind without exhaust fumes or dog turds or sneers clothed in formules de politesse. He had just completed the second year, with the strange name of khâgne, of a gruelling two-year preparatory course for the École Normale Supérieure. Having recently sat the philosophy entrance exam, he was waiting to hear if he had been accepted. Oh, like Sartre, she said, indifferent to the sleazy old gnome but anxious to show Julien that she knew something. The Marxist-Leninist demigod leaned across the table towards her: indeed, but it had taken him two attempts to get in.
Eleanor had a vague notion that it was the agrégation that Sartre had failed and then repeated a year later, but she didn’t say so. Why set so much store by exams and elite institutions? She wondered how philosophical Julien would be if it turned out he was not among the chosen.
That evening she had to babysit for the Greek family in her street. On Saturday night she had intended to go to a party with the history student she’d been seeing in a desultory way. She could back out of the party easily enough, but what could she offer Julien? Her life held more cups of tea with Ruth and jobs fit for teenagers than bohemian mystique. But there was always the potentiality of lunch. If the cousin could spare him tomorrow, she asked, would he like to come to Dartmoor Street at midday? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
Usually she scurried across the footbridge over Parramatta Road, holding her breath against the fumes that rose from the highway below and humming a melody to divert her ears from the roar of traffic. Julien seemed oblivious to the noise or to how much lead he was inhaling. He dawdled as if they were strolling in the Luxembourg Gardens, and she forced herself to match her step to his. She said she had never cooked for a Frenchman before. (Frenchman! He must, she had calculated, be at least a year younger than she was.) Were French communists as demanding as the rest of the country? He laughed and said some national characteristics were worth hanging on to. Would she like him to bring a tart from a French bakery he had discovered? She said that would be lovely and then began to worry about what meatless creation of hers could match it. They had crossed the footbridge, and it was time to part.
As a child she had endlessly rehearsed the return of her father: where it would occur, what he would say, how saintly and forgiving Mavis would prove to be. Usually Eleanor was in the middle of playing the piano in a concert or dancing a ballet solo when he walked right in. She had therefore been forced to conclude, somewhere around puberty, that nothing ever happened quite as you imagined it would, if indeed it happened at all. That hypothesis had yet to fail her, though she had not let it dampen her daydreams or douse the pleasures of anticipation. For such pleasures she envied the French the convention of the double kiss – the restraint of form, the risk of lip brushing lip on the transit between cheeks. She parted slowly, adhesively, from Julien, and he from her. Her belly lurched with hunger for him as he ran down the steps into the hellish cutting to catch his bus.
The following morning there could be no flopping about in armchairs drinking tea. Eleanor and Ruth bustled about the house, tidying and cleaning, and Ruth even vacuumed Eleanor’s room while Eleanor made pumpkin soup and cheesy eggplant bake. Back in the kitchen to report on her efforts, Ruth slouched against the door jamb and declared that she’d had no idea that seducing strangers was such hard work, and since when were communists so damned fussy, anyway?
“Try to be more Zen about it,” Eleanor suggested, nervously breaking up a lump of ricotta with her fingers. Although she had a yen for some Schubert piano music – the impromptus and Moments Musicaux – she invited Ruth to put on any record she liked, which these days could mean a neither-one-thing-nor-the-other black female singer.
“Too busy.” Ruth began to goosestep through the kitchen towards the bathroom.
“That really is quite uncalled for. No one’s making you do the bathroom.” Cleaning the bathroom was a job they both hated. No matter how selflessly you struggled or how mindfully you focused on the rhythm and circularity of the scrubbing motion, it never looked as if you had lifted a finger.
“Relax,” said Ruth, “it’s just a silly walk.”
Two minutes after the appointed hour Julien knocked on the front door. Eleanor fussed in the kitchen while Ruth let him in. They had agreed on such a stratagem beforehand because Ruth thought he might turn tail and run when confronted by the voracious female spider that was Eleanor. Ruth also wanted to get a good look at him in case she needed to give a description to the cops. His voice in the front room was explaining that he had taken a taxi from Rose Bay, a luxury Eleanor could not have permitted herself. For a moment she felt like hiding in the backyard, afraid that she had been too eager the day before, too cringingly, colonially obvious. Yet they had so little time. Ahead of her now were two weeks of mid-winter break, and ten days after that he would be half a world away. Julien, carrying a cardboard cake box, preceded Ruth into the kitchen. His eyes sought Eleanor’s and held her gaze longer than was comfortable, as French men tended to do. Did that make him unexceptional, no different from the men who lurked in the Louvre on Sundays to try their luck with foreign girls? Was that look, which should have been about her, no more than a mannerism? But then the shy twist to his smile and the measured double kiss of greeting expelled any irritation. Behind him, Ruth waggled her eyebrows, amused by something – the air of bonne famille, the music-hall accent, or perhaps the unlikelihood of having to report to the police after all.
After she had left to spend the rest of the weekend with her family – “for you, ma chère, I make zis sacrifice!” – Eleanor and Julien fell into French. He was curious about the house, its customs and objects. He plonked himself down in the beanbag with a theatrical sigh