“In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.” – Vladimir Nabokov

Loving someone whom you know you cannot even feel the flesh of, let alone possess the soul, is something which not only gives you insomnia, but has your heart captured in its own turf only to unleash torture with every passing breath.

So it happened to me when I met my music instructress, Raphaële La Cornauld, a romantic interest of my father, jealousy of my mother, a paragon of femininity for my sister, a lust of my cousin, and the wife of Colonel La Cornauld. And as with so many wives of Colonel la Cornauld, who have come and gone like seasons of year, she never looked with indifference to anything exotic. A Greek costume party, an Egyptian dinner, enacting like Henryk’s Phryne – nothing seemed to bring her in a state of reluctance, an affirmer of life.

And since Colonel La Cornauld has been directed to the management of that lovely wartime effort, she had been living with us. When she sleeps and she sleeps so little I used to go into the guest room, in which she had a piano placed, for she says she cannot dream without the smell of that musical wood, and used to capture her naked self into my eyes, only time in the twenty-four hours when I felt connected to the stars of the universe.

On nights when she and my family used to go out for dinner, she used to dress in those dark-colored V neckline that seemed to march towards where it may be inappropriate, but just retracing in time, so as not to have those eyes plunge into obscenity. And on the back, a parabolic shape having its crest at the waist – in all, the way she dressed not only attracted admiration from men, respect from the aged, but from women, who it was not hard to see were ready to go home and break their mirrors, none more than my mother.

“One could learn about all there is to life through music,” she used to say.

“But, Raphaële, if music was everything there to be happy, Rachmaninoff wouldn’t have been so sad,” my mother used to cut through disguising her envy.

“Eh bien, what Monsieur Démat thinks?” then she used to put her hands gently on my father’s arm, quickly moving it to mine, with those inquisitive and seductive eyes, “What does Alain think?”

She didn’t use any perfume, for I had gone through every single smell in the woman’s perfumery – you could discern Jenna, Lucy, Helena; you couldn’t discern her. It was her flesh that intoxicated, that scent which only heaven must possess.

Then as the night grew thick, she would open her hair which would come to rest on her shoulders and would use their magnetism to turn the heads, which were so desperately trying to avoid the gaze so as not to be blinded, as if they stretched invisibly and froze them where they were for seconds.

Then walking up to our house she always exclaimed that the silence was a tragedy of Démat family, and she would try to spin my mother who used to resist it, providing her with the push needed to spin on my father’s and would end up holding my hand and sloping towards the ground. If my grip had had failed, she knew she would’ve fallen, and she did it with such assuredness as if she were to fall on a bed of flowers. But in her eyes, lit with the charm and adroitness, it was written all over in ciphers that they knew I would never let this disaster to manifest on the earth.

It happened on just such an evening that my father brought a painter friend of his, or maybe he was no friend of his, with the intention of having our portraits done; but my mother, as myself, knew whose portrait he actually desired.

She at first at the request and suggestion of my father stood as Madame Gautreau. The painter having seen the complexity of her physique proportioned her carefully, going close to see the texture which God had granted her, not haphazardly, but with due consideration, as if having a purpose in mind, and then using pinks and greens and yellows and whites and blues, he captured her into the canvas, neatly that he had done his job and with no less effort but all the same he failed to have the divinity that her flesh so simply possessed.

Having the dark clouds of doubt rage through his mind, and, completing our portraits, which just took only flashes of time, he asked my father in agitation:

“Do I have the permission to leave Monsieur?”

Just as my father were to nod, she spoke in her cheerful, but calculated and elegant voice:

“I was thinking of having one more made of me, if you will Monsieur Démat, as of a tribute to that great Titian, of his Urbino’s Venus?”

“Can you do it? A painter of your land…” my father said using all his knowledge of deception to hide the proclivity of his tone, which to a man who had done it before would have been fairly visible.

The painter agreed, and my father called for the servants to create the setting required as the painter directed. With every brush stroke he created something which not only made her beauty come alive through dead palette, but also brought the era of Titian to merge with the clocks on our walls.

Having seen herself and feeling satisfied, not from the impression the painting brought, but from the expression which took hold of the painter, she thanked him, and the painter having kissed her hand, and gazing intensely for a moment at her body, as if not to part from it, while she stood smiling, took permission from my family, and left.

“It looks like this evening will drag itself to the brink of doom,” remarked my mother.

“Nothing so lovely had ever lasted to see her face, Julie,” she said smiling. And my sister taking note of the grace of Madame la Cornauld took my mother to her room.

Later, on the cusp of morning when I went for my pilgrimage to see the goddess which adorned her in sleep, my eyes caught her right hand which lay so lightly and delicately at the juncture of her legs, I had never witnessed her like that, then following her curved body my eyes went on her left arm which was pressing something to her. I took two steps forward, bringing my candle a little closer, which illuminated a portrait, the portrait of me on which her hands had such firm a grip.

I left the house, boarded the bus to my uncle’s. As the sun came shining fiercely, I found myself on the streets of Paris, while the image of the sunlight through the slit in the curtains feeling her breasts drummed in my mind.