From Suzanne and Louise, which will be published this month by Magic Hour Press. Translated from the French by Christine Pichini.
Louise and Suzanne, old ladies, sisters: short, gray-haired, stooped, unremarkable to any who might pass them in the street. Women who’ve lived some forty years in a hôtel particulier in the fifteenth arrondissement, a garden overgrown in summer, miserable in winter, fenced in. Women guarded by a dog, a fat German shepherd, Whysky, bought to guard the money of these two women, a guard dog.
Suzanne, the elder, is the one with money. Louise, a former anchoress, is her humble, tyrannical maid. Suzanne tells tales of stinginess, remembrance, suffering. She says: “I’ve never loved anyone but myself.” She says she’s never cried, never known how to smile, never danced. Louise tells tales of drunkenness, asceticism, death. They don’t speak to each other, except when their grandnephew comes to see them, every Sunday. They perform, for him, a dramatization of their relationship.
Their life is ordered by a terrible, calculated precision. Nothing must upset their routine, a ritual of waking up, breakfast, bath, exercise, dressing Suzanne, Louise’s shopping, lunch, a walk in the park if the weather is nice, dinner, then bed. Every night, around six, Louise leaves for mass. She returns around seven-thirty to prepare dinner (soup and a compote for Suzanne, Camembert and chocolate for herself). It’s the only time she escapes, save for time devoted to errands each morning.
On Saturdays at noon, it’s time for horse steak. Louise eats it raw, not ground, covered in powdered sugar. They drink champagne at every meal. They say champagne, but really it’s sparkling wine. Louise is in a state of perpetual drunkenness, imperceptible because constant. Religious intoxication: Louise attributes a healing episode from childhood to the ingestion of champagne, miraculous potion.
Louise hasn’t cut her hair since she left the Carmelite order, in 1945. Her body, which has never been touched, and which she does not look at, but immerses in boiling-hot bathwater (“Burning herself is her vice,” Suzanne says), will be offered up for disembowelment and dismemberment. Suzanne has followed her lead, has also bequeathed her body to the Faculté de Médecine. They tell each other what will happen to their bodies. They do not know, but they imagine.
