Français
Español
Italiano
Deutsch
Português
I
A heavy sun beat straight down on the washhouse;
The torpid ducks were falling asleep in the mud,
And the air burned so fiercely one expected to see
The trees catch fire from top to bottom.
I lay on the grass beside the old boat
Where women were washing their linen. Greasy waters,
Soap bubbles that soon burst
Went off with the current, leaving long trails.
And I was dozing off when I saw coming,
Under the great light and the torrid heat,
A girl walking with a firm and rapid step,
With her arms raised in the air, to hold up
A heavy bundle of linen above her head.
Wide hips with a slender waist, made
Like a marble Venus, she advanced
Very straight, and on her loins, slightly, swayed.
I followed her, taking the narrow footbridge
To the threshold of the washhouse, where I entered behind her.
She chose her place, and into a tub of water,
With a supple and strong gesture she dropped her burden.
She had at most the clothing permitted;
She was washing her linen; and each movement
Of arms and hip clearly showed,
Under the clinging petticoat and the thin chemise,
The roundness of the rump and the roundness of the breasts.
She worked hard; then, when she was tired,
She raised her arms, and, superb in grace,
Stretched her flexible body, arching her back.
But the powerful sun was cracking the planks;
The boat was opening as if to breathe.
The women were panting; one could see under their sleeves
The moisture of their arms sweating in places.
A redness rose to her sanguine throat.
She fixed on me her bold gaze,
Unbuttoned her chemise, and her round breast
Emerged, double and glistening, in full freedom,
Set apart at the tips and of solid fullness.
She was then beating her linen, and each stroke
Shook at times with a rapid jolt
The rosy flowers of flesh that stand at the end.
A hot air struck me, like a breath from a forge,
With each sigh that lifted her breast.
The blows of her beater fell on my heart!
She looked at me with a slightly mocking air;
I approached, my eye fixed on her breast moist
With drops of water, so white and tempting to kiss.
She took pity on me, seeing me very timid,
Came up to me first and began to chat.
Like lost sounds her words reached me.
I did not hear her, so much was I watching her.
Through her half-open dress, in the distance, I lost myself,
Guessing what lay beneath and burned with mad ardors;
Then, as she left, she said to me softly
To meet her in the evening at the end of the meadow.
All that filled me departed with her steps;
My past vanished like a dried-up stream:
Yet I was joyful, for within me I heard
The intoxications singing with their sonorous voice.
Toward the darkened sky I kept looking,
And the night that fell seemed to me a dawn!
II
She was the first at the meeting place.
I ran to her and knelt down,
And running my hands all around her waist
I drew her to me. But she, at once, stood up
And through the meadows bathed in moonlight fled.
At last I caught her, for in a thicket
That she did not see her foot was stopped.
Then, closing my arms on her rounded hip,
Near a tree, by the water’s edge, I carried her.
She, whom I had seen impudent and bold,
Was pale and troubled and wept slowly,
While I felt like an intoxication
Of strength rising from her moved weakness.
What then is it, and whence comes this ferment that stirs
The entrails of man at the hour of love?
The moon lit the fields as in broad day.
Swarming in the reeds, the noisy populace
Of frogs made a great charivari;
A quail far off threw its double cry,
And, as if preluding some serenade,
Awakened birds began their songs.
The wind seemed to me laden with distant loves,
Heavy with kisses, full of warm breaths
That one hears coming with long shivers,
And that pass rolling ardors of conflagrations.
A powerful rut fell from the tepid breezes.
And I thought: “How many, under the infinite sky,
On this sweet summer night, how many we are
Whom an anguish lifts and whom instinct unites
Among animals as among men.”
And I would have wanted, alone, to be all of them!
I took and kissed her fingers; she trembled.
Her cool hands smelled of lavender
And thyme, with which her linen was all perfumed.
Under my mouth her breasts tasted of almond
Like a wild laurel or the perfumed milk
One drinks in the mountains from the teats of goats.
She struggled; but I found her lips:
It was a kiss long as an eternity
That stretched our two bodies into immobility.
She fell back, gasping under my caress;
Her oppressed breast, hard with tenderness,
Panted strongly with long sobs;
Her cheek was burning and her eyes half-closed,
And our mouths, our senses, our sighs mingled.
Then, in the tranquil night where the countryside sleeps,
A cry of love rose, so terrible and so strong
That birds in the shadow, startled, flew away.
The frogs, the quail, and the noises and the voices
Fell silent; an enormous silence filled the space.
Suddenly, casting to the winds its lugubrious threat,
Very far behind us a dog howled three times.
But when day appeared, as she had remained,
She fled. I wandered in the fields at random.
The scent of her skin haunted me; her gaze
Fastened me like an anchor cast to the bottom of the heart.
Like two convicts riveted to the same irons,
A bond held us, the affinity of flesh.
III
For five whole months, every evening, on the bank,
Full of a passion that never weakened,
I caressed on the grass as in a bed
This superb girl, ignorant and lascivious.
And in the morning, still bitten by memory,
Though all languid from the kisses of the day before,
From the hour when, in the plain, a bird’s song awakens,
We found that night was slow in coming.
Sometimes, forgetting that day must dawn,
We let ourselves be surprised, embracing, by the dawn.
Quickly, we returned along the bright paths,
My two eyes in her eyes, her two hands in my hands.
I saw gleams kindle in the hedges,
Tree trunks suddenly redden like wounds,
Without thinking that a sun was rising somewhere,
And I believed, feeling my brow bathed in flames,
That all these lights fell from her gaze.
She went to the washhouse with the other women;
I followed her, filled with waiting and desire.
To watch her endlessly was my only pleasure,
And I remained standing in the same posture,
Walled in my love as in a prison.
The lines of her body closed my horizon;
My hope was bounded by the knots of her belt.
I stayed near her, watching for the moment
When some other attracted her ever-ready gaiety;
I leaned quickly, she turned her head,
Our mouths touched, then fled abruptly.
Sometimes she went out calling me with a sign;
I went to find her in some field of vines
Or under some bush that hid us from eyes.
We watched the coupled beasts love each other,
Four wings that carried two joyful butterflies,
A double black insect that passed the paths.
Grave, she picked up these little lovers
And kissed them. Often birds above our heads
Billed each other without fear, and the couples of beasts
Did not fear us, for we did as they did.
Then, heart full of her, at that late hour
When I waited, watching the bends of the bank,
When she appeared under the tall poplars,
Desire alight in her brown pupil,
Her skirt sweeping all the rays of the Moon
Lying between each tree across the paths,
I thought of the love of those biblical girls,
So beautiful that in those distant times one could see,
Lost and following their impudent forms,
Angels passing in the shadows of evening.
IV
One day when the boss was sleeping before the door,
Around noon, the washhouse found itself depopulated.
The burning ground smoked like a breathless ox
Laboring in full sun; but I found less strong
This heat of the sky than that of my senses.
No sound came but shreds of songs
And drunken laughter, far off, coming from the dives,
Then sometimes the fall of some drop of water
Falling who knows whence, sweat of the old boat.
Now her lips shone like red coals
From which suddenly burst crises of kisses,
As from a brazier sparks fly,
Until the collapse of our two broken bodies.
Nothing was heard anymore except the grasshoppers,
That people of the sun with eternal chirps
Crackling like a fire among the withered meadows.
And we looked at each other, astonished, motionless,
So pale both of us that we frightened ourselves;
Reading in the hollow, black lines under our feverish eyes,
That we were struck by the love of which one dies,
And that through all our senses our life was flowing away.
We parted telling each other softly
That by the water, in the evening, we would not come.
But, at the usual hour, an invincible desire
Took me to go alone to the accustomed tree
To dream of the voluptuousness of this body so loved,
To walk my mind through all our caresses,
To lie on this grass and on its memory.
When I approached, intoxicated with old raptures,
She was there, standing, watching me come.
Since then, invaded by a strange fever,
We hasten without respite this love that devours us
Although death wins us, a more powerful need
Works us and forces us to mingle our blood.
Our ardors are not prudent nor fearful;
Fear does not trouble our burning glances;
We die one by the other, and our hollow chests
Change our future days into so many kisses.
We never speak. Beside this woman
There is only one cry of love, that of the stag that bellows.
My skin endlessly keeps the shiver of her skin
That fills me with a desire always sharp and new,
And if my mouth is thirsty, it is only for her mouth!
My ardor exasperates itself and my strength falls
In this coupling mortal as a combat.
The grass is burned that served us as a bed,
And designating the place of continuous return,
The mark of our bodies has entered the bare soil.
Some morning, under the tree where we met,
They will pick us up both by the water.
We will be carried to the bottom of a heavy boat,
Still embracing at the jolts of the oars.
Then, we will be thrown into some hidden hole,
As is done to people dead in a state of sin.
But then, if it is true that shadows return,
We will return, in the evening, under the tall poplars,
And the people of the country, who long remember,
Seeing us pass, linked to one another,
Will say, crossing themselves, and their minds in prayer:
“There goes the dead of love with his washerwoman.”
Guy de Maupassant
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-beside-the-water-guy-de-maupassant/