The Dreamers (9 page)

Isabelle was a subtle voyeur. She liked to spy on voyeurs. Behind her dark glasses, while Théo
masturbated
, her eyes had nervously darted to and fro, from her brother to Matthew and back again. Now, the
performance
over, those eyes had become indecipherable. Only a flutter of eyelashes could be discerned behind their shades, as of moths in the night.

As for Matthew, who had watched the scene without saying a word, his body could no more lie about his
feelings
than he himself could. His cheeks were inflamed, his hands shook, his crotch felt like a clenched fist between his thighs. He wondered how he could ever face Théo again.

Most unexpectedly, though, from this raising of the stakes there followed a truce, an armistice, one that was to see them through the following two days. Whether because nothing that any of them said or did would
conjure
up a matching gesture in some classic film or, more likely, because it impressed them all as equally
unimaginable
either to advance or retreat, the cry of ‘What film?’ or ‘Name a film’ ceased for a while to echo through the flat.

Matthew knew that the matter hadn’t ended, couldn’t end, there. To be sure, Théo had clothed himself again without fuss and afterwards acted as though nothing had occurred to occasion any change of policy. But it was precisely because, for Matthew, something
had
changed, permanently changed, that his friend’s
supernatural
composure struck him as so suspect.

Clouds drifted across the ceiling. In this new
atmosphere
of vigilance and expectancy, the
quartier des enfants
swayed to and fro, suspended in a cage. And yet, as before, and at the same hour, on that night and the one after it, Matthew would tiptoe out of his bedroom and along the corridor to Théo’s. There, on cue, as though also on purpose, the door had been left ajar, the bedside lamp left on. There he would silently take in the
spectacle of brother and sister, their limbs intertwined, one leg visible above the covers, the other’s outline just discernible beneath them, like a swan and its reflection on the surface of a lake.

The game was resumed on the second afternoon after that on which Théo had paid his forfeit in kind. They were as usual in the
quartier des enfants
, where Théo, standing at the window, was dreamily following the progress of a tall vertical shadow that slowly traversed it.

Suddenly, just as it formed an X with the pane’s crossbar, he clutched at his breast and collapsed on to the carpet.

‘Ahhhhh!’ he cried. ‘They got me!’

Writhing, he tore at his clothes.

‘The pain! The agony! Oh Jesus, I’m done for!’

Isabelle finally looked up from her novel.

‘What’s eating you?’ she asked, but incuriously, for form’s sake.

Théo immediately sat up again with a grin.

‘What film?’

For two days Isabelle had been waiting for him to turn the tables on her. The question still took her by
surprise. She could only, stupidly, oblige him to repeat it.

‘Name a film, please, in which a cross marks the spot of a murder.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Why not?’

‘There must be lots of films.’

‘Then it shouldn’t be hard to name one. You too, Matthew.’

Matthew blanched. Here it was.

‘Me?’

‘There’s no rule says I can’t challenge both of you at once.’

‘But, Théo, I had nothing to do with what happened.’

‘Name a film,’ was Théo’s answer. ‘Or pay the forfeit.’

Vengeance, says a French proverb, is a dish best eaten cold. It was clear that Théo preferred his piping hot.
A chacun son goût
, as the French also say.

Matthew’s mind turned over and over to no purpose. If a hope remained to him of deliverance from the
consequences
of Théo’s challenge, consequences on which he dared not dwell, it lay simply in his citing a title. Isabelle, surely, was right. There must exist dozens of
films in which a cross is shown to mark the spot of a murder; if not dozens, then a dozen, a half-dozen, three or four; there must at least be three or four.

But because of his fear of what would befall him in this accursed flat, it was no longer possible for him to pull his wits together. Had Théo merely asked him to name a film, any film at all, there too he might have drawn a blank.

Isabelle, meanwhile, had regained her composure. She offered no answer to the question posed her. Nor did she plead, as Théo had done, for some clue or hint. It was she, after all, who had introduced a new
dimension
into the game and she knew her brother, and she knew herself, too well to be deluded into supposing that either of them could revert to the childish stakes which had once satisfied them.

‘Time’s up,’ Théo finally said in a matter-of-fact tone.

‘The film?’ enquired Isabelle. It was a mere formality, but one that ought to be respected.

‘The film?
Scarface
. Howard Hawks. 1932.’

‘And the forfeit?’

‘Well now,’ declared Théo, sitting up straight. ‘I’m not a sadist, Isa, as you know. I’m not even a Sadian. I just want to see everyone happy, no one left out. So I’d like
you and Matthew, my two dearest companions, to make love together in front of me.’

Isabelle closed her novel, though not before inserting a bookmark between the pages at which she’d been interrupted.

‘As you wish.’

‘Not in here, though. I don’t fancy sleeping in
someone
else’s revolting spunk. No offence, Matthew.’

While Matthew felt incapable of moving, Isabelle went on asking simple, practical questions as to what was expected of her.

‘Where then?’

‘In the spare room. In front of the Delacroix. Who knows,’ Théo proposed with a smile, ‘one reproduction may lead to another.’

‘You don’t mind if I undress here?’

‘Wherever you like.’

She stubbed out her cigarette in a brass ashtray, then walked over to the record-player and started to play the Trenet record yet again. Since the melody had become the game’s theme tune, it would have been unthinkable to pay a forfeit without its accompaniment.

She disrobed with no undue haste, as though for sleep. She neither stared ahead flauntingly at Théo and
Matthew nor demurely averted her gaze from them. The one and only vestige of perversity in her
performance
was that she kept her dark glasses on
throughout
, removing them only at the end, as though only then displaying her eyes full frontally.

This young woman, who contrived to wear her grandmother’s outmoded garments as persuasively as a bird of paradise its improbable plumage, now appeared disembodied, detached from her own torso, which she exposed as dispassionately as though she were holding up for auction a painting of herself in the nude.

It was a fine, slender torso, all of whose folds, dips and hollows were irresistibly tempting to the finger’s inquisitive drill – the concavities of the shoulders,
buttocks
and knees, the shady indentations of the abdomen, the two paths that converge at that magic well deep in the fairy-tale forest of the pubis.

Standing in the puddle of her own clothes, she waited for Matthew to undress in his turn.

For him the moment had come at last, the moment so long dreaded, when he was to be hustled aboard the roller-coaster.

The desire he felt for both Théo and Isabelle struggled
in vain against memories exploding inside his brain with the power of depth-charges, childhood tableaux of schoolboys dragged screaming behind playground lavatories, their testicles smeared with boot polish, their pubic hair shaved. Ridiculous as it would render him in the eyes of his friends, there was but one possibility to be entertained: flight.

He dashed edgeways to the door. But Théo, who until that instant had seemed as indolent as an odalisque, at once leapt to his feet and headed him off. Cornered, Matthew backed away.

A spell had been broken. Théo and Isabelle relaxed. Giggling, they began to close in on him.

‘Come, come, my little Matthew,’ cooed Isabelle, ‘you aren’t being very
galant
, you know. Is the prospect of making love to me so hateful?’

‘I’ve seen you!’ cried Matthew. ‘I’ve watched you, both of you!’

Théo started back.

‘What’s that you say?’

‘In bed together!’

‘Oho,’ said Théo, ‘our guest has been spying on us. Now that wasn’t a friendly thing to do. Especially when we’ve been so hospitable.’

‘What is it you’re afraid of?’ said Isabelle to Matthew. ‘That you haven’t any crack? I’ve always fancied that someone as nice and neat and clean as you might have no crack in his backside, just a smooth full moon of pink, baby-soft flesh. Is that it, Matthew? Is that what you don’t want us to see?’

‘No, no, no, please, Isabelle, please.’

They pounced on him. Taller, more muscular than he, Théo soon had him on the carpet. They pulled off his sneakers, his socks, his UCLA sweatshirt. In a frenzy he attempted to wriggle from their grasp. Tears sprang into his eyes. A helpless movement of his arm caused it to brush against Isabelle’s breasts. Yet, as patiently as though they were peeling the cheeks of an artichoke, as methodically as though they were subjecting him to the torture of a thousand cuts, they went about their
executioners
’ business, baring his hairless, slightly concave chest, his arms frosted with snow-white down, his slim, suntanned legs.

By now Matthew had ceased to offer resistance. Isabelle sitting astride his legs, his arms pinioned to the floor by Théo, he lay there weeping as young children weep, in a welter of tears and snot. He was naked save for a pair of pale blue jockey shorts, which, with a flick
of her wrists, Isabelle pulled to his feet and flung in a ball on the floor.

The first surprise was the whiteness of his crotch. Compared to his arms, his legs, his chest, to the
perennially
bronzed chest of the kind of American adolescent for whom the sun is as simple, daily and nourishing a source of energy as a glass of warm milk, his abdomen made them think of the patch on a wall where a painting has once hung.

His pubic hair was dark, silky and unfrizzy, like that of an Oriental. His testicles were two grey gooseberries. His penis, which was circumcised, was small, almost but not quite abnormally small, and so plump and round as to resemble, rather, a third testicle. Acharming thing which, no sooner had one set eyes on it, one felt like tenderly cupping between one’s palms like a
throbbing
little sparrow.

Which is just what Isabelle did. Before Matthew had time to voice a final appeal, she began moulding that penis with skilful hands, a potter’s hands, moulding it, sculpting it, glazing it, smoothing its wrinkles.

To Matthew, who had never known the sensation of an alien hand on his sexual organs, it felt as though he had just discovered an unexplored limb of his own. He
drew in his breath. Something hard and tight within him, something that had long crucified his soul inside his body, had at last been set free.

When Théo released his arms, they instinctively wrapped themselves round Isabelle’s naked shoulders. She eased her body along his, squashing the penis that was now drolly curved like the arm of an Empire sofa and drawing from him another sharp intake of breath.

Their mouths edged closer, then their sexes.

There were still obstacles to be overcome. They were both virgins, Isabelle because she had never made love except to her brother, Matthew because he had never made love except to himself. Eventually, though, mouths and sexes clicked together at the same time, like adjacent buttons simultaneously buttoned on a shirt front.

While outside, below the bedroom window, could have been heard, had anyone been listening, an
inexplicable
patter of footfalls and a fanfare of police sirens, Matthew and Isabelle gave themselves up to the adorable gaucheries of love. Under Théo’s eyes, all at once opaque with self-awareness, they paid the forfeit.

That evening no one tiptoed along the corridor of the
quartier
des enfants
. If someone had, if Théo’s bedroom door had been left ajar and the bedside lamp left lit, this is what he would have seen: Théo, Isabelle and Matthew asleep together, the beast with three backs.

Yet, for all that that first night together constituted a turning point in the equilibrium of the flat, it didn’t bring Home Movies to an end. On the contrary, it
inaugurated
a whole new period of the game. They were now to play it as obsessively, as monotonously, as a shipwrecked mariner plays noughts-and-crosses on the sand, as a convict devises chess end-games with
shadows
and breadcrumbs. Except that, unknown to them, they were not players at all but pawns, pawns moved from square to square by the real player of the game, who loomed over the board like Fantômas over Paris.

During the two weeks that followed, the sky released sheets of such stinging rain that the trio were obliged to remain almost permanently indoors.

At first Théo continued to make his regular
excursions
to the sixteenth arrondissement, circling the Palais de Chaillot without dismounting from his mobylette then returning to the flat with the baguette of bread or
carton of milk he had purportedly gone to fetch. Before too long, however, even these trips were phased out. The mobylette rusted in the damp hallway.

Clocks wound down and were never rewound. Beds remained unmade, crockery unwashed, curtains drawn. Gradually, the hour of the day, then the day of the week, then the very month of the year, lost its meaning.
Weekends
came and went unobserved. Saturdays and
Sundays
– which are, in the well-ordered lives of average, upright citizens, the shining face cards of the social
calendar
’s deck – became harder to tell apart from the
faceless
number cards of the working week, until the only marker of passing time was a visit to a luxury
supermarket
in the neighbourhood.

These raids – for such, in essence, they were – left Matthew as panic-stricken as when he’d had to race through the Louvre. While he would fill his trolley with staples, his companions breezily stuffed the pockets and linings of their coats with lobsters, truffles and caviar, mangoes, foie gras, peaches and, on one memorable occasion, a jeroboam of champagne which Théo tucked down the roomy front of his corduroy jeans. The
supermarket
’s exits became for Matthew as nerve-racking as an airport customs hall.

Meanwhile, the cheques which the poet had left for his children lay uncashed on the mantelpiece.

Marooned on this island not two hundred yards from the church of Saint-Sulpice and the Théâtre de l’Odéon, the three young people behaved as any shipwrecked mariners might have done. Once past the initial stage of frantically scanning the horizon for signs of civilisation, of reconnoitring the Palais de Chaillot and even
deigning
to attend a class or two, they started to resign
themselves
to what they could all see was destined to be a lengthy sojourn.

When not pilfering delicacies from the supermarket, they would cook and eat whatever foodstuffs were still to be found in the refrigerator. These eccentric decoctions, indiscriminate blendings of sweet and sour, cold and hot, meat and fish, Isabelle served up at table from the saucepans in which she had prepared them. And if either of the men of the house shied from a lukewarm fondue accompanied by an ice-cold compote of broccoli and prunes or an inexplicably mustardy ratatouille, she would declare with a flourish, ‘Just eat it as if you’re in some exotic country you’ve never visited before and this is the national dish.’

It was Isabelle who held the outside world at bay. It
was she who, forging her mother’s handwriting, wrote a letter to the headmaster of the school she and Théo attended, announcing that both of them were bedridden with viral hepatitis. It was she, too, who accepted to be interviewed by the aunt commissioned by their parents to occupy herself in their absence with their children’s welfare.

This excellent lady, who assumed her function of chaperone no more than dutifully, had astounded her family nearly twenty years before by exchanging a
violin
for a nightclub – which is to say, she had sold the Stradivarius she had inherited from her grandfather, a celebrated Polish virtuoso, in order to purchase a
half-share
in
Le Nègre Bleu
, a smoky cabaret off the
Champs-Elysées
. Overwhelmed by invoices, Department of Health regulations and a squabbling staff of hysterical young men, she was delighted to learn from her niece that she and her brother were eating healthily, doing well at school and in bed by eleven.

Little by little, Matthew was granted access to the intimate secrets of his friends. A yellowing photograph, for example, torn from an old
Paris-Match
and squirrelled away by Isabelle inside a tattered copy of the novel by Gide that is titled, precisely,
Isabelle
, of one of
the Kennedy sons, in profile, aged fourteen, just after he had been gored in the neck by a bull at Pamplona, and who was blessed, according to her, blood and all, with ‘the handsomest face in the world’.

‘We hide our blood,’ she said, ‘when we ought to flaunt it. Blood is beautiful, as beautiful as a precious stone.’

Théo let him examine a page of manuscript that he had stolen from his father’s desk and seriously hoped to sell one day for a small fortune. Of the two-hundred-odd words in the poet’s handwriting only seven hadn’t been crossed out. They were seven words, moreover, that had served as the foundation stone of one of his most frequently anthologised poems.

Isabelle showed Matthew a phial of sleeping pills that she had stockpiled over several months on the
pretext
of one feigned insomnia or another. These were intended for her eventual suicide, should it ever come to that.

‘They’re my return ticket,’ she said. ‘There are born suicides and born non-suicides. The former don’t
necessarily
kill themselves, the latter sometimes do. I belong to the first category, you to the second.’

‘I will never kill myself,’ Matthew said bluntly. ‘I
believe, I truly believe, that if you kill yourself you go to Hell.’

Matthew, too, had betrayed his ultimate secret, the avenue Hoche.

‘It’s because you’re already in Hell that you kill
yourself
,’ said Isabelle.

‘That’s witty,’ replied Matthew, ‘but Jesus was wittier. Let me put it this way. I’ll never kill myself because I love you.’

‘You say that but you may not always love me.’

‘I will always love you.’

‘I wonder. If
amour
didn’t rhyme with
toujours
, maybe we’d never have thought of equating love with eternity.’

Matthew and Isabelle often spoke of incest, of physical love between a brother and sister.

He asked her one day how Théo and she had come to be together the way they were.

‘Théo and me? It was,’ she replied simply, ‘love at first sight.’

‘What would you do if your parents found out?’

‘It must never happen.’

‘Yeah, I know. But what if it did happen?’

‘It must never happen.’

‘But just let’s suppose, for the sake of the argument, that your parents really did find out. What would you do then?’

Isabelle reflected for a moment.

‘It must never, never happen.’

There was a pause before Matthew spoke again.

‘I suppose, when a mother and father sleep together, you could call that a kind of incest.’

Isabelle burst out laughing.

‘Matthew, darling, you’re one of a kind!’