#<- i mean...

[norriszn]

lando: soy lago

[feignedremote]

When Luce said that he was weird, for some reason I felt like he was my little brother again. “Weird.” Nicolas danced in my head above that word, aged with all the ages that he had been in succession; he spun around it, escaped it, returned to it endlessly, sometimes as small as Noël, sometimes sweating and trembling from his fight with Jérôme. I saw him there that night standing on the wave of that vague word, slender, dreamy, like a dancer. From one minute to the next, he would succumb to happiness. I wished he would remember me, look at me. Simply take my hand and kiss it, remind himself for example that I had been there when he killed Jérôme. I wished we could speak one last time of that morning as of a thing born of our love, for the two of us alone. But he avoided my gaze. Of that, he would speak from now on only to Luce. And that’s why, in the distance, beyond my joy, I felt like a sad corpse, brotherless. We spoke mainly of Nicolas. Of Nicolas before his marriage, of his childhood, and I was mixed into the stories we made of it. [...] Papa and Maman flanked me at the table. They spoke little. They listened to us; they answered the questions they were asked. They had hardly any memories of our childhood in Les Bugues because they were working a lot at the time and hadn’t taken much care of us. I remember the Nicolas stories better than they do, I remember our past better than anyone. That’s why I talked so much. Tiène mixed into our conversation. He laughed with us. We almost forgot that he hadn’t grown up in Les Bugues. He was probably laughing at his own memories. But he said nothing about them, out of discretion, so that everything that night was about my brother. As we spoke, I noticed Nicolas was listening to me avidly while feigning a superior indifference. He was sitting next to Luce. Through his open shirt, I saw his smooth chest, golden in the light. His arms no longer withdrew as sharply when they touched Luce’s arms. Watching them, you couldn’t help but think of their naked bodies. Next to Luce’s black hair, Nicolas’s hair seemed a light chestnut, striped with near-blond streaks, lightened by the sun. They had likely drunk too much wine. At the end of the meal, their heads sometimes drew near and touched. They looked like two young animals playing. When they laughed, their lips and teeth gleamed under their laughter, like sunny things. Nicolas spoke sometimes but only to mention that Luce had played with us, that she had been there on such and such an occasion.

Marguerite Duras, The Easy Life, trans. Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes