Aubépine

04/12/2024

I’ve been hard at work, in the ample free hours of the partially employed, on a translation of my grandad’s novel. He wrote it in French; it was published by a very reputable house, and sunk pretty quickly without a trace. I’ve seen some of his fan mail; one woman from Nice sent him pressed flowers, which were still preserved intact and whisper-thin in the envelope. I never met my grandad so translating the novel has provided me a little familiarity with the way he thought, and with his sense of humour. 

This excerpt sees his hero, Alcandre, seducing a girl from a family of junk dealers who live down the road from his house in the country. Alcandre’s family has been feuding with their neighbours the Lafleurs for a few chapters; Alcandre’s mum is a snob and the Lafleur children enjoy throwing stones at her when she’s on her morning constitutional. Alcandre’s mother has just employed Aubépine Lafleur (whose name means Hawthorn The Flower…) to clean their house, and Alcandre is powerless before her earthy charms… It’s the classic literary vibe of a young man in love with a seemingly unattainable skinny posh girl (Méroè) and lusting simultaneously after a more attainable, breasty girl outside of his social class. 

Like a branch heavy with sap and buds which, through an open window, announces to the salon furniture inside that spring has arrived, so entered Aubépine Lafleur into the Villa, the little junk merchant, with her ruddy cheeks, with the glittering grey eyes she’d cast down when she got confused or snorted with laughter (which happened every time someone called her ‘Mademoiselle,’ and soon enough at the sight alone of the Senator’s wife), with her plump breasts and the joyful bloom of the red spots on her rounded arms. More than the skill, in which she surpassed even her mother, of hiding dust balls under hastily remade beds, more than the rustic odour of rancid lard and rabbit skin which followed, from room to room, the indolent roaming of Aubépine and her broom, it was the stupid little giggles, that brusque way she had of turning her head and shrugging her shoulders, it was her merriment apropos of nothing, always ready to burst forth, which provoked in the Senator’s wife a perpetual exasperation translated, in her conversations with the little ragpicker, by the most ceremonious politesse. 

But it provoked in Alcandre a different kind of irritation; and, having ignored it for a time by absorbing himself in his books and equations, having, mocking himself all the while, checked the more flattering aspects of his appearance in various mirrors and decided that his brown, slightly unruly hair, the dreamy melancholy of his eyes, and his powerful shoulders perhaps offered him a few assets, he resolved himself to respond to the giggles Aubépine tried to repress in his presence, and, to tell the truth, did not even have time for a well-deliberated plan of action because as soon as he snaked an arm around her waist, Aubépine fastened herself to his chest and unleashed a flurry of greedy kisses on his lips and behind his earlobes, and Alcandre had only to turn the key to prevent the Senator’s wife coming in before he pushed his hereditary enemy onto the unmade bed whose sheets Aubépine had been in the middle of changing. 

Alcandre’s words were answered now by giggles muffled in the pillow; he abandoned conversation without regret, enveloped in that wordless music, in that crude playfulness that freed him from thought, or at least transported him, as Aubépine herself was transported, into the familiar solitude of his own intimacy. And it was with a shared tenderness that they invented, laughing, the only form of dialogue that suited their rendezvous: the aeroplane game, which consisted, stretched out on top of one another, their arms crossed, in making a ‘brrrrrrr’ sound and looking into each others eyes, happy to have lightened through this childish device what might have been a solemn silent union. Yet, when it was time to part, when, looking away, Alcandre hung over the footboard the faded mauve knickers his friend had abandoned on the carpet, he felt rising in him, from the depths of his sensual satisfaction, and somehow reified by Aubépine’s animal odour, a stifling wave of sadness; and, his eyes closed for a moment, he let float before him, as it floated formerly in the Fortress, in the dark and the stink of the bathrooms, the blurry and insistent image of Méroè. Then he opened his eyes, and his gaze moved slowly up the length of the little enemy’s body, calm too now, and gracefully curved in half-sleep, up to the splotches of red on her cheeks and the small quantity of sebum that sullied the roots of her hair. 

It’s very beautiful and sexy, no!? Nabokov was his favourite author, which shows. It’s amazing to think that French was not his first language. The way the French construct their syntax – whereby it’s much smoother and easier than in English to take your sentences on long tangential adventures before depositing the object at the end – in other words, to delay pleasure, means things can be drawn out, elaborated, sustained for much longer than in English. The striptease lasts much longer; it’s difficult to be faithful to it without sounding weird. Sexy French!