Marie Read Online Free

Marie whose eyes are closed to the world, who only reveres a universe inhabited by those two lively, expressive eyes, that fair, springy hair, those two broad shoulders, those two strong hands; a Marie who is painfully tense, who builds up, constructs, protects.
    ‘Mecum inter salices lenta sub vite jaceret …’
    The pupil’s voice stops abruptly. Seeing that Marie is far away he looks at the hands, the arms, the shoulders of the young woman, letting his gaze come to rest upon her dress, at the point where her breasts lift the material upwards. Marie intercepts his look and, in a firm voice that is intended to reintroduce a strict working atmosphere, urges her pupil to translate. But since she hasn’t been following the text, all she has in her head are the last words she has heard him say.
    ‘Come on, translate! What is the subject of the verb “ jaceret ”?’
    The adolescent hesitates; he is at a loss.
    ‘Well? What would have been lying under the flexible vine?’
    ‘The object of my love,’ replies the schoolboy, blushing.
    As men develop, their veils drop one by one, laying their lives bare; they have so many paths to choose from. Marie is moved as she looks at the child. She’d like to hold out her hand to him, to say something like: ‘Don’t trust your heart …’
    But the boy’s hoarse voice resumes, by turns deep and shrill: ‘Serta mihi Phyllis legeret …’
    When the lesson is over Marie claims some homework from him. ‘That essay your school friends did while you were away – I’d like you to do it for me. Bring it with you next Thursday.’
    ‘All right,’ the boy says feebly, already seeing his week ruined by the task.
    ‘What was the subject?’
    He reels off a sentence in a tone of disgust that amusesher. She looks at his shoulders, already a man’s, at his pale face, at his ink-stained fingers, at his clumsy way of standing – still very much a child’s. Again she sees herself, with startling clarity, in her tartan dress.
    ‘Tell me, is it boring for you to have to write that essay?’
    ‘Oh yes!’ the child replies openly.
    ‘And do you find Virgil boring, too?’
    ‘No, I don’t find Virgil boring.’
    ‘All right, you needn’t write the essay, I’ll find you another subject. But for the next lesson, I want you to translate the following twenty verses of the tenth Bucolic.’
    When the child leaves the apartment Marie half leans over the banisters to watch him go. As happy children do, he skips down the stairs hitting each step in a crazy rhythm, and soon his voice tunes in with his feet in a silly song: ‘Knock, knock, who’s there? MOSCOW! No ess-ay, only some Vir-gil to translate … Wow, that’s a teacher and a half! What a terrific woman! Wom-an, wom-an … Mos-cow what? Mos-n’t let her shake me like a plum tree …’
    Marie goes back in, laughing at the top of her voice. She’s laughing at everything: at the peculiar song, at the child’s happiness, at ‘ jaceret ’, at herself.
    The moment she’s inside the room she hears the phone ring. She listens, replies, and replaces the receiver, her happiness abruptly shattered: Jean will not be home for dinner tonight. She’ll spend a long, miserable evening sitting huddled in an armchair, feeling tired and anxious, her features drawn, waiting for him to get back. She’ll cry because Jean isn’tthere, right next to her, because she can neither see his face nor feel the warmth of his body with her hands. How she weeps, secretly, when Jean spends entire evenings with vain, flirtatious girls like Simone and Alice. She weeps the strange, bitter tears of an exhausted woman who is gradually letting herself be worn out by a symbol.
     
    SHE WILL BE ALL ALONE , the whole long evening. Yet she likes solitude, so why is she feeling like this? She will eat in the kitchen, feet on the bar of the stool, knees up to her chin. One plate, and a chunk of bread that she will cut into little pieces with her knife, in the way