Travesty Read Online Free

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     connecting rooms with high ceilings, marble fireplaces, wallpaper the elegant color
     of dry bone, had walked into a moonlit street filled suddenly with the warmth of
     summer and the smell of flowers. A moving shadow, an open window, a few notes of
     music, and then we understood that we had stumbled into the very center of the
     honeyed hive of a city already acclaimed for its women. Down the narrow street we
     went arm in arm, laughing, Chantal and Honorine both claiming to be well-known
     residents of that gentle quarter. And I was in the middle, walking between Chantal
     and Honorine, and somewhere a caged bird was singing and even out there in the
     street I could smell fat bolsters, feather beds, nude flesh.
    It was a night of wine. And the woman, when we found her, was much
     older than Honorine and might have come fresh from some turn-of-the-century stagewhere whiteness of skin and heaviness of flesh and limb were
     especially admired. Chantal and Honorine exclaimed their enchantment; I hesitated;
     the woman raised her chin and smiled. And do you know that Honorine proposed with so
     much good spirit that I enjoy this woman that I became aroused and agreed to leave
     Chantal and Honorine eating chocolates in a little empty parlor while, several
     ornate rooms away, I contributed three quarters of an hour of sexual authenticity to
     their delightful game? In taking that tall and heavy woman, who filled her maturity
     with the exact same elegance with which she lived in her skin, it was as if I had
     only found my way again to Chantal and Honorine, and as if I had accepted from
     mother and daughter the same unimaginable gift. So I prepared the way for you.
     Don’t you agree? And with my two women, who are yours as well, have I not
     created a family small in size but rich in sentiment?
    The next day we were a close and smiling triad as we continued driving
     through the sterile marshlands and past the great brown windmills with their sad
     faces and broken arms.
    But I must tell you that this little romantic story about the
     complicity between my wife, my daughter, and the older woman of luxury reminds me
     more strongly than ever of a curious emotional reaction of mine—a reaction I
     rarely recall and never felt except upon one of those innumerable occasions of
     Chantal’s childhood happiness. That is, Chantal had only toreveal the slightest sign of personal enjoyment, had only to pick some leaf or
     kiss Honorine or show me with evident pleasure some faintly colored illustration in
     one of her books, to send me sliding off into the oddest kind of depression. I was a
     perfect companion to her gloom, her anger, her hours of fear, her childhood
     pantomimes of adult frustration, her little floods of helplessness in the face of
     some easy problem. But let Chantal throw her arms around my neck or grow warm of
     cheek or simply give me a clue that she was momentarily alive in one of those
     private moments of beatitude all children experience and I was hopelessly alien from
     her and depressed, inexplicably downcast. Throughout all of Chantal’s
     childhood I was sorry for her whenever I should have been glad. Yes, I was actually
     sorry for my own child, but sorry only when she was in one of her states of
     well-being. And when she was herself unhappy, why then I was busily content.
    I hear your impatience. And in the circumstances my perhaps
     sentimental recollections must touch you with profound irritation, especially since
     you have imagined so much more life than I myself have lived. And perhaps you have
     already analyzed my darker, nearly forgotten parental emotions as fear of mortality,
     and have thus dismissed them. But I must ask you again to indulge my nostalgia, if
     only because its source is gone, quite gone, and I am now capable of loving Chantal
     without putting myself perversely at the center of our relationship, like the fat
     raisin that becomes the eye andheart of the cookie. No,