Free Sphinx by Anne Garréta Page A

if I had said “my love.” We remained face-to-face, our bodies as if petrified. A terror silted up in my throat; the desire I had felt welling up in me at the sight of those distant movements on the stage had been suspended. I could do nothing but adore. Those eyes, so black, fixed on me, subjected me to an unbearable torture.

The following winter we planned a trip to New York to visit A***’s family, including A***’s mother, uncles, aunts, and cousins. We thought of it as a break, an interpolated parenthesis in the delirious lifestyle caused by our jobs. We wanted a rest from the excitement—and the resulting comedown—of our nights of partying, to flee the invasive rumble of the social scene. We also wanted to repair the damage done by A***’s inability to remain faithful to me, by those passing flings that always led to remorse and then a sudden resurgence of desire and a whirlwind week of all kinds of debaucheries. We were hoping that through a month of intimacy, of living free from constraint, we could erase the hurts that a year of voracious and nocturnal passion had inflicted on us.
    We left right at the beginning of January, not long after the New Year. The day we arrived we visited A***’s mother, whom I was meeting for the first time. She was living alone in a studio, on the twelfth floor of a building on Second Avenue. Behind her apparent reserve upon their reunion, which contrasted starkly with the effusive demonstration of affection deployed by A***, I perceived the joy, or rather the painful relief, brought on by this homecoming. The insidious pain inflicted on her by A***’s long absence seeped through her happiness. I sensed the misery, the despair caused by the distance from the sole person she loved. She wouldn’t even allow herself to show this sadness, so deep was the wound. She considered me attentively without asking any questionsand, it seemed, accepted me without need for discussion. I was there with A***, who seemed to be attached to me and to whom I seemed to be attached. What did she suspect our relationship to be? What did she think of it? I never knew. All I learned, which I heard through A***, was that she appreciated my attentiveness and my lack of histrionics. Of all the people she had had the occasion to see in A***’s company, it was for me, apparently, that she had the most esteem. She was astonished by how young I was (ten years younger than A***). She thought it was a good omen that I wasn’t particularly extroverted. I think she feared for A***, not knowing anything about her child’s life, and what she imagined or heard of it did not reassure her in the least. And, though she never regarded A*** with disapproval, she did not manage to conceal her anxiety. She was as apprehensive of meeting me as she was excited: she was no doubt dreading that she would not care for me as much as A*** was counting on it.
    We stayed in a hotel for three nights, waiting for one of my former fellow university students to hand over his apartment in the city, which we would stay in during his upcoming absence. Our room, on the 25 th floor of a modern building, opened onto East 42 nd Street. We had agreed to spend our first nights in luxury: the room was big, the bathroom adorned with marble, and the bed immense. Despite the long trip and despite being awake for more than 24 hours, we weren’t tired at all, nor did we want to sleep. Through the taxi window, I had avidly observed all that passed before my eyes: the graffiti on the palisades and walls; the waves of oversized cars; the baroque decay of certain neighborhoods; the diversity of the people walking on the sidewalks. I felt intoxicated; the dreams I had suppressed in my state of prolonged wakefulness were turning everything I saw into visions: eyes open, I was dreaming this newly discovered city. The almost electric atmosphere of this place, completelynew to me, was as exciting for me as it was