At night, the fever rose; I shivered on my bed above Thomas’s, hunched under the blankets, devoured by lice, dominated by these distant images. When school began again, after the summer, almost nothing changed. Separated, we dreamed of each other, waiting for the moment we’d be together again. We had our public lives, lived openly like those of all children, and our private lives, which belonged to us alone, a space vaster than the world, limited only by the possibilities of our united minds. As time went by, the settings changed, but the pavane of our love continued to mark its own rhythm, elegant or furious. For the winter vacation, Moreau took us to the mountains; at the time, that was much rarer than it is now. He rented a chalet that had belonged to a Russian nobleman: this Muscovite had transformed an annex into a sauna, something none of us had ever seen; but the owner showed us how to work it, and Moreau, especially, developed a passion for this invention. At the end of the afternoon, after we had returned from skiing or sledding or hiking, he spent a good hour there sweating; he didn’t have the courage to go out and roll in the snow, though, as we did, clothed, alas, in swimming trunks, which our mother forced us to wear. She, for her part, did not like this sauna and avoided it. But when we were alone in the house, either during the day, when they went out for a walk in the town, or at night, when they were sleeping, we reoccupied the room after it had grown cold and finally shed our clothes, and our little bodies became a mirror for each other. We also nestled in the long empty closets built beneath the large sloping roof of the chalet, tall enough to stand up in, but where we stayed sitting or lying down, slithering, snuggled against each other, skin against skin, slaves of each other and masters of everything.
