Act of Passion

by Georges Simenon

  Why did her neck move me? It was, in a way, the first human thing I discovered about her. It had nothing to do with a magazine cover, with a young woman who thought herself very smart. It was the nape of a sickly girl and, as I danced, I began brushing it with my lips.

  When we sat down at our table again, I looked at her face with different eyes. She had dark circles under her eyes. The lipstick no longer covered her lips evenly. She was tired, but refused to give in. She wanted, at any cost, to enjoy herself.

  ‘Ask them if they have any whisky …’

  We began drinking whisky. Somewhat unsteadily she went over to the musicians to ask for some song I didn’t know, and I could see her gesticulating.

  Another time, she left to go to the Ladies’ Room. She was gone a long time. I wondered if she were sick. I didn’t like to go to find out.

  I realized now that she was simply a woman and nothing else, a girl, about twenty-five probably, who was bent on showing off. It was at least a quarter of an hour before she returned. For a second time, as she came into the room, I saw her face in repose and it was tired and lined; then immediately she began to smile again. She had hardly sat down when she lighted a cigarette and emptied her glass, but not without a slight retch which she tried to cover up.

  ‘Feel sick?’

  ‘I’m better … It’s all right now … I’m not used to dinners like that any more … Won’t you order something to drink?’

  She was nervous, on edge.

  ‘These last few weeks in Paris have been difficult … I quit my job, stupidly …’

  She had got rid of her dinner. And now she was drinking again. She wanted to dance. And, as she danced, her body kept pressing against mine.

  There was something sad, something forced, about her excitation which somehow moved me. Little by little, I could feel desire growing in me, and it was a kind of desire I had never met before.

  You see, your Honour, she was exciting herself. Do you understand?

  It wasn’t I, it wasn’t even the male that counted. I understood later. But, at the moment, I was troubled and baffled. Her desire, in spite of my presence, was a solitary desire.

  And her sexual excitement was a laboured excitement. She clung to it as though to escape a void.

  At the same time, paradoxical though it may seem, it mortified her, made her suffer.

  Once, I remember, just after we had returned to our table and the orchestra was playing the haunting music she had asked for, she suddenly dug her nails into my thigh.

  We had drunk a great deal, I don’t know how many drinks. We were finally the only customers left in the place and the staff were waiting for us to go so that they could close up. In the end they politely put us out.

  It was after two o’clock in the morning. I didn’t like to take her to the Duc de Bretagne, where I was known and where I had stayed with Armande and the children.

  ‘Are you sure there’s no other place open?’

  ‘Nothing but a few little dumps round the harbour.’

  ‘Let’s go …’

  We took a taxi which we were a long time finding at that hour. And this time, in the darkness of the taxi, brusquely she glued her lips to mine in a kind of spasm, without tenderness, without love. She did not repulse my hand which was on her hip, and I could feel her body so thin, so burning hot, through her wet garments.

  What happened was what always happens in such cases. Most of the places were closed or closing as we arrived. We went into a cheap dance hall, and I saw Martine’s nostrils quiver because all the men stared at her and she probably sensed danger.

  ‘You want to dance?’

  She challenged them with her glance, with her half-open mouth, pressing her thigh harder and harder against mine as she imagined their lust for her.

  We were served some horrible brandy that nauseated us. I was anxious to leave. But I was afraid to insist too much, because I knew what she would think.

  In the end we went to a second-class hotel, or more exactly, a fairly good hotel, banally dull, where there was still a light showing and where the night porter, fumbling with the keys hanging on a board, murmured:

  ‘A room with two beds?’

  She said nothing. Nor did I. I simply asked to be called at quarter to six. I had no baggage. Martine’s suitcases were still in the baggage room at the station and we had not bothered to go for them.

  As soon as the door closed, she said:

  ‘We’ll each sleep in our own bed, won’t we?’

  I promised. I was firmly decided on that. There was a tiny bathroom and she went in at once, admonishing me:

  ‘You go on to bed …’ We were saying vous again.

  Hearing her moving about, opening and closing the taps, suddenly, your Honour, I had a strange sensation of intimacy. A sensation of intimacy, believe it or not, that I have never had with Armande.

  I wonder if I was still drunk. I don’t think so. I got undressed and slid under the covers. As she seemed to be taking a long time and I thought she might be sick again, I called out:

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Are you in bed?’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘I’m coming …’

  I had discreetly turned out the light in the room, so that when she opened the bathroom door she was lighted only from behind.

  She seemed to me smaller and even thinner. She was naked and was holding a towel up in front of her, without, I must admit, the least ostentation, even with genuine simplicity.

  She turned to switch off the light in the bathroom and I saw her naked back with each vertebra sticking out and her tiny waist, but hips much larger than I had imagined. It was only a matter of seconds. But that image has never left me. I thought something to this effect:

  ‘A poor little girl …’

  I heard her groping in the dark for her bed. She murmured gently:

  ‘Good night …’

  Then remarked:

  ‘It’s true we haven’t much time to sleep. What time is it now?’

  ‘I don’t know … Wait, I’ll turn on the light …’

  I had only to stretch out my bare arm. My watch was on the bedside table.

  ‘Half-past three …’

  I saw her hair spread out against the stark whiteness of the pillow. I saw the outline of her body lying with her knees curled up. I even noticed, in spite of the covers, that, like so many little girls, she slept with her hands clasped between the intimate warmth of her thighs. I repeated:

  ‘Good night …’

  ‘Good night …’

  I turned out the light, and yet we did not sleep. Two or three times within a quarter of an hour she turned over in her bed with a sigh.

  I swear, your Honour, there was nothing premeditated about it. At one moment I even thought I was falling asleep, I began to feel drowsy.

  And it was then that, suddenly, I leaped out of bed and crossed over to hers. My face, my lips, sought her dark hair and I stammered:

  ‘Martine …’

  Perhaps her first reaction was to push me away! We could not see each other. We were blind, both of us.

  I threw back the covers. As in a dream, without pausing, without thinking, hardly knowing what I was doing, with an irresistible movement and without warning, I penetrated her.

  At the same instant, I had the sensation of a revelation. It seemed to me that for the first time in my life I possessed a woman.

  I loved her furiously. I have told you that. I loved her entire body, feeling its slightest tremors. Our mouths became one, and in a kind of rage I tried to assimilate this flesh which, only a short time before, had meant nothing to me.

  Once more, as at the night club of the red lights, I felt those tremors of her body, only more violent now. I almost shared her mysterious anguish, which I was trying to understand.

  If we were alone together, your Honour, I would like to give you a few details, only to you, and I should not consider it a profanation.
In a letter, I would seem to be taking pleasure in evoking more or less erotic images.

  How far I am from all that! Have you ever had the sensation that you were on the point of attaining something superhuman?

  That sensation — I tell you, I had it that night. It seemed that I could, if I tried, pierce I know not what ceiling, leap suddenly into unknown regions of space.

  And that anguish growing in her … that anguish which, even as a doctor, I could only explain as a desire similar to mine …

  I am a prudent man, what people call an honest man. I have a wife and children. If sometimes I sought love or pleasure away from home, I had never until that moment risked anything that might, in any way, complicate my family life. You do understand me, don’t you?

  But with this woman, whom I didn’t even know a few hours before, I behaved, in spite of myself, in every respect like a consummate lover — like an animal.

  Suddenly, because I didn’t understand, my hand groped for the electric switch. I saw her in the yellow glare and I don’t know if she realized that from then on her face was in the light.

  Throughout her entire being, your Honour, in her staring eyes, in her open mouth, in her pinched nostrils, there was an intolerable anguish, but at the same time — try to understand — a will, no less desperate, to escape, to burst the bubble, to pierce the ceiling — in a word, to be delivered.

  I saw this anguish growing towards such a paroxysm that my doctor’s conscience took fright, and I felt relieved when suddenly after a final tension of every nerve, she fell back as though empty and discouraged, with her heart throbbing so hard under her little breast that I had no need of touching her to count the beats.

  I did so nevertheless, a doctor’s obsession. Fear perhaps of the responsibility? Her pulse was a hundred and forty, her colourless lips were parted over her white teeth, as white as the teeth of a corpse.

  She murmured something that sounded like:

  ‘I can’t …’

  And she tried to smile. She seized my great paw. She clung to it.

  We remained like that for a long time in the stillness of the hotel, waiting for the pulsations to become more normal.

  ‘Get me a glass of water, veux-tu?’

  She didn’t think of pulling the covers over her and you don’t know how grateful I am to her for that. While I was holding up her head for her to drink, I noticed a scar, still fresh, on her belly, an angry pick scar running vertically.

  You see, for me, a doctor, the scar was rather what an extract from a criminal record would be for you.

  She made no attempt to hide it from me. She half stammered:

  ‘Oh God, but I’m tired …’

  And two great hot tears rolled down my cheeks.

  Chapter Six

  Are those things that I have told in court, that I could have told you in the silence of your office, in the presence of your redheaded clerk and of Maître Gabriel, for whom life is so simple?

  I don’t know whether my love for her began that night, but what I am certain of is that when a little before seven o’clock next morning we took a train, clammy with dampness and cold, I could no longer face the prospect of life without her, and that this woman sitting opposite me, pale and blurred in the cruel light of the compartment, near the window on which the raindrops showed lighter than the night — that this stranger, with a hat rendered ridiculous by yesterday’s rain, was closer to me than any human being had ever been before.

  It would be difficult to be emptier than we were then, both of us, and we must have seemed like phantoms to people who saw us. When the night porter, the same one who had given us our key, came to wake us, a light still shone under the door, for our bedlight had not been turned off since I had gropingly switched it on. Martine was in her bath. I opened the door, wearing only my trousers, with my chest bare and hair tousled, to ask:

  ‘Could you get us some coffee?’

  The porter too looked like a phantom.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, not before seven o’clock.’

  ‘Could you make some for us yourself?’

  ‘I haven’t the keys, I’m sorry.’

  Was he perhaps a little afraid of me? Outside we couldn’t find a taxi. Martine clung to my arm and I probably looked just as spectral in the cold grey mist. And it was lucky for us that our nocturnal peregrinations had landed us not too far from the station.

  ‘Perhaps the buffet will be open.’

  It was. Early morning customers were served black coffee or coffee with hot milk in great ashy-white bowls. Just to look at those bowls made my stomach turn over. Martine had insisted on drinking hers and an instant later, without having time to run to the lavatories, lost it right there on the platform.

  We did not talk. We sat waiting apprehensively for the effect of the jolting of the train on our aching temples, on all our ailing flesh. Like many morning trains on branch lines, ours kept executing all sorts of manoeuvres before starting, each time hammering our poor heads with violent blows.

  Yet she managed to look at me with a smile as we crossed the bridge over the Loire. My little packages were scattered on the seat beside me. We were alone in the compartment. I was still holding my pipe in my mouth, probably with an air of disgust, for I’d had to let it go out.

  She murmured:

  ‘I wonder what Armande will say …’

  I was hardly shocked. A little bit, just the same. But, after all, hadn’t I been the one to start it?

  ‘And you? Is any one expecting you?’

  ‘M. Boquet promised to find me a furnished apartment where I could cook …’

  ‘Did you sleep with him?’

  It was appalling, your Honour. It hadn’t been twelve hours since I’d met her. The same reddish-faced clock that had witnessed our meeting was still there behind us, overlooking a network of tracks, and its little hand had not yet completed its course round the dial. And I knew, by her scar, not only that this seedy-looking young woman had had lovers but that she had been shamefully marked.

  In spite of that, as I asked the question, suddenly there was a frightful pain in my chest. I remained as though petrified. I had never known anything like it before, but after that, it happened often enough for me to feel a fraternal sympathy for all cardiac sufferers.

  ‘I told you I didn’t even have time to speak to him about that …’

  I had taken it for granted at one time that once in the train on neutral ground, we would resume the formal vous, together with our normal personalities, but, to my astonishment, the tu continued to seem perfectly natural.

  ‘If you knew how funny it was the way we met …’

  ‘Was he drunk?’

  If I asked that right away, it was because I knew Raoul Boquet so well. I have described the American bar at Nantes. We have recently acquired one like it at La Roche-sur-Yon. I haven’t set foot in it more than once or twice. You’ll find mostly snobs there, who think the city’s cafés not smart enough and who go there to show off, perching on the high stools and watching the cocktails being mixed, just the way Martine did the day before. You’ll see a few women too, not prostitutes but more probably respectable housewives who want to appear modern. Boquet is something else again. He is my age, perhaps a year or two younger. His father was the founder of the Galleries and he, together with his brother and sister, inherited it five years ago.

  Raoul Boquet drinks for the sake of drinking, is rude for the sake of being rude because everything, as he says, is such a goddamn bore — everything and everybody bores him. Because his wife is a goddamn bore he sometimes stays away for four or five days at a time. He will leave the house to be gone an hour, without an overcoat, and turn up two days later in La Rochelle or Bordeaux with a whole bunch of people he has picked up God knows where.

  Business too is a goddamn bore, except in spurts, at which times, almost sober for two or three weeks, he begins to turn everything topsy-turvy in the store.

  He drives like a madman. On purpose. After mid
night he will suddenly dash up on the pavement for the pleasure of scaring the wits out of some worthy citizen on his way home. He’s had I don’t know how many accidents. They’ve taken his licence away twice.

  I knew him better than anyone else did, since he was my patient, and suddenly he entered my life in an entirely new capacity, and I was even reduced to being afraid of him.

  ‘He drinks a lot, doesn’t he? I thought right away that that interests him more than women …’

  Except women in certain houses where he goes periodically and raises hell.

  ‘I was with a girl I knew at a bar in Paris, Rue Washington … Perhaps you know it? … On the left, near the Champs-Elysées. He had been drinking and talked in a loud voice to the man next to him, a friend perhaps, perhaps a stranger …’

  Her words flowed on monotonously, like the raindrops trickling down the train windows.

  ‘ “I’ll tell you something,” he was saying, “my brother-in-law gives me a pain in the neck. He’s a snake, my brother-in-law, but the trouble is, he must be good because my bitch of a sister can’t get along without him, swears by him … Only the day before yesterday he took advantage of my absence to sack my secretary on some pretext or other … The minute he sees a secretary’s devoted to me, he sacks her or manages to win her over to his side — easy enough since they all come from around there …

  ‘ “I ask you, do the Galleries belong to the Boquets or don’t they? And is he a Boquet when he’s called Machoul? I’m telling you, barman, Machoul, that’s his name, if you have no objection … My brother-in-law’s name is Machoul, and the only thing he thinks about is how he can kick me out too …

  ‘ “And do you know what I’m going to do, old man? I’m going to get my next secretary from Paris, a girl who doesn’t know Oscar Machoul and who won’t be impressed by him.” ’

  The sky was beginning to get lighter. Silhouetted against the uniform greyness of the flat countryside, farms began to come out of the shadows, with lights in the stables.

  Martine went on talking, without hurrying.

  ‘I had come to the end of my tether, you know. I was drinking cocktails with my friend because she was paying for them, but for eight days I’d been living on nothing but rolls and coffee. All at once, I went over to him, and I said: