And we smiled at one another like that for quite a long time, long enough for the audience from the cinema to invade the café during the interval and to leave again when the bell called them back.
Then with her eyes, only with her eyes, she seemed to ask me a question, to ask me why I didn’t come and sit beside her. I hesitated. I called the waiter, paid for my drink. Awkwardly I crossed over to her table.
‘May I sit down?’
A yes from her eyes — always her eyes.
‘You looked so bored,’ she said at last when I was seated on the bench.
What we said to each other after that I have forgotten. But I know that I spent one of the happiest, friendliest hours of my life. The orchestra played Viennese waltzes. Outside it was still raining. We knew nothing about one another and I didn’t dare to hope for anything.
The movies were over next door. Some people came in and began eating at the table next to ours.
‘Let’s go …’ she said simply.
And we left. And outside in the fine rain, which did not seem to bother her, she took my arm in the most natural way in the world.
‘Are you staying at a hotel?’
I had told her that I was from the Vendée but was studying at Nantes.
‘No, at my aunt’s, Rue Saint-Jean …’
And then: ‘I live quite near the Rue Saint-Jean. Only we must not make a noise. My landlady would put us out.’
We passed in front of my uncle’s china shop with its closed shutters, where one sensed a faint glimmer through the glass part of the door, for the room behind the shop was their living-room. My uncle and aunt were waiting up for me. I had no latchkey.
We passed in front of the fishing-tackle shop and I drew my companion down the quiet dark street as far as the first doorstep. You understand why? But when we got there she said: ‘Wait till we get to my place …’
That is all, your Honour, and telling it I notice that it is ridiculous. She took a key out of her bag. She put a finger on her lips. She whispered in my ear: ‘Careful on the stairs …’
She led me by the hand along a dark hall. We went up a flight of stairs with creaking boards, and on the first landing we saw a light round the crack of the door.
‘Sh …’
It was the landlady’s room. Sylvia’s was next to it. A sordid and rather unsavoury smell floated through the house. There was no electricity and she lit a gas lamp whose light hurt my eyes.
Still whispering, she said before going behind a flowered chintz curtain: ‘I’ll be back at once …’
And I can still see the combs on the stand she used as a dressing-table, the cheap mirror, the bed with a couch cover spread over it.
That’s all and it’s not all, your Honour. It is all because nothing happened that was not perfectly commonplace. It is not all, because for the first time I was hungry for a life other than my own.
I had no idea who she was or where she came from. I imagined vaguely what kind of a life she led, and felt sure that I was not the first to climb the creaking stairs on tiptoe.
But what difference did it make. She was a woman and I was a man. We were two human beings whispering in that room, in that bed, with the landlady asleep on the other side of the thin wall. Outside it was raining. Outside, from time to time, there were footsteps on the wet pavement, nocturnal voices in the watery air.
My aunt and uncle were waiting for me in the room behind the shop and must have been getting worried.
There was a moment, your Honour, when, with my head between her breasts, I began to cry.
I didn’t know why. Do I know today? I began to cry from happiness and from despair, both at the same time.
I held her, simple and relaxed, there in my arms. I remember that she stroked my forehead absently as she stared at the ceiling. I should have liked …
And that is what I could not express, what I still cannot express now. Caen, at that moment, represented the whole world. It was there behind the window-panes, behind the wall that hid the sleeping landlady.
All that was the mystery, was the enemy.
But we were two. Two people who didn’t know each other. Who had no common interests. Two people whom chance had hastily brought together for a moment.
She was perhaps the first woman I ever loved. For a few hours she gave me the sensation of infinity.
She was commonplace, simple and kind. At the Brasserie Chandivert, I had taken her for a young girl waiting for her parents; then for a young wife waiting for her husband.
But, there we were in the same bed, flesh to flesh, doors and windows closed, and there was no one else in the world but the two of us.
I fell asleep. I awoke at dawn and she was breathing peacefully, confidingly, her two breasts uncovered. I was seized with panic on account of my aunt and uncle. I got out of bed without making a sound and I didn’t know what I should do, whether to leave money on the dressing-table or not.
I did it shamefacedly. I had my back to her. When I turned round, she was looking at me, and she said softly: ‘You’ll come back?’
Then: ‘Be careful not to wake my landlady …’
Stupid, isn’t it? It took place in your city. Has it happened to you too? As we are about the same age, perhaps you have known Sylvia, perhaps you have …
As for me, your Honour, she was my first love. But it is only now, after all these years, that I realize it.
And there is something even more serious, you see: I also realize that for twenty years I had been looking for a Sylvia without knowing it.
And that it is after all because of her …
Excuse me. My bull is furious because they have brought us our dinner and he doesn’t dare serve himself before me.
I shall explain all this later, your Honour.
*This letter is addressed to an examining magistrate, whose title in France is Judge. In French judicial procedure, before the trial, he extracts from the accused and the witnesses testimony and evidence which he reports to the magistrate who presides at the trial, but he does not appear at the trial to prosecute or defend.
Chapter Two
My mother appeared before the court, for she had been summoned as a witness. Although it seems incredible, I still don’t know whether this was done by the prosecution or the defence. Of my two lawyers one of them, Maître Oger, came from La Roche-sur-Yon only to assist his Parisian colleague, and, as it were, to represent my native province. As for Maître Gabriel, he ferociously forbade me to concern myself in any way with my case.
‘Is it my job or yours?’ he would exclaim in his great gruff voice. ‘Just remember, my friend, there isn’t a cell in this prison from which I have not extricated at least one client!’
They sent for my mother — perhaps he, perhaps the other side. As soon as the judge pronounced her name, there was a stir in the courtroom; people in the last row and those who were standing behind them stood on tip-toe, and from where I sat I could see them craning their necks.
They reproached me for not having shed a tear, they spoke of my insensibility.
The imbeciles! And what dishonesty, what a lack of understanding, of humanity, to talk in such a way about something they could not possibly know!
Poor Mama. She was dressed in black. For over thirty years she has worn nothing but black from head to foot, like most of our peasant women at home. Knowing her as I do, she must have worried about what she should wear, must have asked my wife’s advice. I’d be willing to swear that she repeated at least a dozen times: ‘I am so afraid of disgracing him!’
It was certainly my wife who suggested the thin lace collar, so that her clothes would look less like mourning, so that she would not seem to be trying to play on the jury’s sympathy.
She was not crying when she came in; you saw that yourself, since you were in the fourth row near the witnesses’ entrance. Everything that has been said and written on the subject is false. For years now she has been treated for her eyes, which are always watering. She sees
very badly, but refuses to wear glasses, maintaining that you get used to them and keep needing stronger and stronger lenses until finally you go blind. She bumped into a group of young law students who were blocking her passage, and because of this accident it was said that she came in ‘staggering with shame and sorrow’.
It was the others who were playing to the gallery, and first of all the judge himself, who half rose from the bench to bow to her with an air of boundless commiseration before turning to the court attendant with the traditional: ‘Bring a chair for the witness.’
That crowd holding its breath, those craning necks, those tense faces — all for what? Just to contemplate an unhappy woman, to ask her questions that had not the slightest importance, not even the slightest utility!
‘The court, Madam, apologizes for having to inflict such an ordeal upon you, and earnestly requests that you make every effort to remain calm.’
She did not look in my direction. She did not know where I was. She was ashamed. Not ashamed of me, as the reporters wrote, but ashamed of being the target of all those eyes, ashamed of disturbing such important persons, she who had always felt herself of so little account.
For in her mind, you see, and I know my mother well, it was she who was disturbing them. She was afraid to cry. She was afraid to look at anything.
I do not even know what questions they first asked her.
I must insist on this point. I don’t know whether other defendants are like me. But for me, I often found it difficult to take an interest in my own trial. Is this due to the fact that the whole farce has so little to do with reality?
Many times during the cross-examination of a witness, or during the frequent verbal clashes between Maître Gabriel and the prosecuting counsel (Maître Gabriel always announced these recurring incidents to the reporters by a premonitory wink), many times, as I say, I suffered lapses which lasted as long as half an hour, during which I watched the faces of the crowd or simply stared at the shadows on the wall in front of me.
Once I started counting the spectators. That took me almost an entire session because I made a mistake and had to begin all over again. There were four hundred and twenty-two persons, including the policemen at the back of the courtroom. Four hundred and twenty-two persons that morning, too, no doubt, staring at my mother whom the judge, at the instigation of Maître Gabriel, asked:
‘Your son had meningitis as a child, did he not?’
As though it had been necessary to bring her all the way from the Vendée for that! And from the tone of the question one might have supposed that here was the crux of the whole trial, the key to the enigma. I understood the trick, your Honour. For it was a trick. The two adversaries, the prosecutor and the counsel for the defence, were always asking the witnesses the most asinine questions with an insistence suggesting mysterious designs.
From my bench I could see the jurors scowling and wrinkling up their foreheads, sometimes jotting down notes like detective story readers whom an author, without seeming to do so, has switched on to a new track.
‘Yes, sir. He was very sick and I was afraid I was going to lose him.’
‘Will you kindly address the gentlemen of the jury. I do not think they heard you.’
And my mother repeating docilely, in exactly the same tone of voice:
‘Yes, sir. He was very sick and I was afraid I was going to lose him.’
‘Didn’t you notice that after his illness your son’s character had changed?’
She didn’t understand.
‘No, sir.’
‘Kindly address the gentlemen of the jury.’
It was as great a mystery as that of the Mass, why she should be asked questions in one quarter and have to answer them in another.
‘He did not become more violent?’
‘He has always been as gentle as a lamb, sir …’
‘Your Honour …’
‘…Your Honour. At school he would let boys beat him because he was stronger than they were and he didn’t want to hurt them.’
Why the smiles in the courtroom and even among the reporters who hastened to jot down her words?
‘He was just like a big dog we used to have, who …’
Abruptly she fell silent, frightened and confused.
‘Dear God,’ she must have prayed to herself, ‘don’t let me shame him …’
And still her back was turned towards me.
‘After your son’s first marriage, you lived with the young couple, did you not?’
‘Naturally, your Honour.’
‘Face the gentlemen of the jury, they can’t hear you very well.’
‘Naturally, gentlemen of the jury.’
‘Were they happy together?’
‘Why shouldn’t they have been?’
‘You continued to live with your son when he remarried, and you actually still live with his second wife. It would be interesting for the gentlemen of the jury to know whether the relations of the defendant with the latter were the same as those which he enjoyed with his first wife.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Poor Mama who wasn’t used to complicated phraseology and who was afraid to admit that she was a little deaf.
‘Did your son, if you prefer, behave in the same way with his second wife as with his first?’
The cowards! She was crying now. Not because of me, not because of my crime, but for reasons that were no concern of theirs. And they thought themselves so clever! To look at them, their eyes all glued on a weeping old woman, one would have thought they were about to wrest from her the key of the mystery.
Yet it is perfectly simple, your Honour. With my first wife, who was not a very good housekeeper, who was what they call at home a ‘lump of dough’, my mother remained the mistress of the house.
With Armande things changed, that was all, because Armande has a stronger personality and very decided tastes of her own. When a woman of sixty is suddenly deprived of her occupations, can no longer give orders to the servants, can no longer fuss over the meals and the children, it is exceedingly painful for her.
That is all. That is why my mother cried. Because she was nothing but a stranger in her daughter-in-law’s house.
‘Was your son, in your opinion, happy with his second wife?’
‘Certainly, sir — excuse me — your Honour.’
‘In that case, why did he leave her?’
I did not shed tears, no. I clenched my fists behind my bench, I gritted my teeth. If I hadn’t controlled myself I would have jumped up and shouted insults at them.
‘If you feel too fatigued to answer any more questions now, we can put them off until the afternoon session.’
‘No, your Honour,’ Mama stammered. ‘I’d rather answer now.’
Then, as the judge turned towards my lawyer, she followed his glance and she saw me. She said nothing. From the movement of her throat I could see that she had swallowed hard. And I know very well what she would have said if she could have spoken to me. She would have asked my forgiveness for bungling so, for being so flustered, so ridiculous. For, she felt ridiculous or, if you prefer, not in her proper place, and that, for her, is the worst of all humiliations. She would have asked my pardon for not knowing how to reply and also, perhaps, for shaming me in public.
Maître Oger whom I regarded as a friend, Maître Oger whom my wife had sent up from La Roche to help in my defence so that my city might be associated with it to a certain extent, was guilty of a scurrilous trick. He leaned over and whispered something to Maître Gabriel, who immediately approved with a nod of his head and, like a schoolboy, raised his hand to indicate that he had something he wished to say.
‘Your Honour, we, my colleague and I, would like you to ask the witness how her husband met his death.’
‘You heard the question, Madam?’
The swine! She had grown so pale that her face looked blue. This and her sudden trembling all over made the court attendant hurry over to her in case she should fain
t or become hysterical.
‘In an accident,’ she managed to articulate almost in a whisper.
They made her repeat it.
‘What kind of an accident?’
‘He was cleaning his gun in the shed behind the house. The gun went off …’
‘Maître Gabriel?’
‘I beg leave to insist, however cruel my question may be. Can the witness affirm to the court that her husband did not commit suicide?’
Indignant, she made an effort to pull herself up proudly.
‘My husband’s death was accidental.’
All that, you see, your Honour, just to bring one tiny little phrase into the defence, a play for the gallery, for forensic effect. So that Maître Gabriel might exclaim a little later on, pointing to me with a pathetic gesture:
‘…this man who bears the burden of a cruel heredity …’
Cruel heredity! So be it! And yours, your Honour? And that of Maître Gabriel, and of those two rows of jurors whose features I had plenty of time to examine? A cruel heredity, mine, to be sure, like that of every son of Adam.
The truth, that is what I am going to tell you. Not as it is told in families, for they are ashamed of what they think are taints, but simply as a man, as a doctor, and it will surprise me very much if you don’t find points of resemblance with your own family.
I was born in one of those houses over which people begin to grow sentimental even today, and which later, when there are only a few left scattered through the French provinces, will no doubt be turned into museums. An old stone house with vast cool rooms, with unexpected corridors, broken here and there by steps whose raison d’être has been forgotten, smelling of wax and the country, of ripening fruit, new-mown hay, and things simmering on the kitchen stove.
This house was formerly, in the time of my grand-parents, a manor house, which some people called the château, and it constituted the centre of four farms of over a hundred acres each.
In my father’s day there were only two farms. Then later, but long before I was born, only one, and the manor house, in its turn, became a farm; my father began to till the soil himself and to breed animals.
Act of Passion Page 3