‘To be happy …’
In reality, I never asked myself the question. I was lucid enough, in spite of everything, to foresee all the complications, the endless difficulties.
Don’t talk to me of the primrose path of vice, as some imbecile did at my trial. There was no primrose path. There was no vice.
There was a man who did what he did because he could not do otherwise and that’s that. He did it because what was suddenly at stake, after forty years, was his own happiness, which nobody had ever bothered about before, not even himself — a happiness he had not sought, which had been given him gratuitously and which he had not the right to throw away.
Forgive me, your Honour, if I shock you. But, after all, I too have the right to talk. And I have this advantage over the others, that I know what I’m talking about. I have paid the price. They have never paid anything, and therefore I do not admit their right to meddle in what they know nothing about.
It can’t be helped if you, like the others, pronounce the word cynicism. At the point I’ve reached it is of no importance. Cynicism, so be it, if you like. Since that morning, in fact, perhaps since some moment, I don’t know just when, of that night, I accepted in advance everything that might happen.
Everything, your Honour. Do you hear?
Everything except losing her. Everything, except to have her go away, to live without her, to feel again that appalling pain in my chest.
I had no preconceived plan. It is false to say that that morning when I introduced her to my mother I was bringing my concubine — God, how certain words give away the people who use them — under the conjugal roof.
I had to find a shelter for her at once. For the rest, it could be decided later. The important thing was to keep her from having any contact with Boquet, or with any other man.
I continued seeing patients, my soul at peace. When I entered the drawing-room, the three women were sitting there like ladies paying calls, and Martine was holding my youngest daughter on her lap.
‘I have had the pleasure of meeting your wife,’ she said without the least irony, without any kind of intention, simply because she had to say something.
There were three little glasses of port on the table and, in the centre, our beautiful cut-glass carafe. The drawing-room was really pretty that morning with the tulle curtains hiding the dreary greyness that enveloped the city.
‘Mlle Englebert has been telling us all about her family …’
Armande gave me a little sign I knew very well, which meant that she wanted to speak to me privately.
‘I must go down to the cellar and pick out a special bottle of wine,’ I said.
And then, without the least hypocrisy I assure you, gaily, because suddenly I felt gay:
‘Tell me, Mademoiselle, what wines do you prefer, white or red, dry or sweet?’
‘Dry, that is if Mme Alavoine …’
I left the room. Armande followed me.
‘Do you think we can leave her at the hotel until she finds an apartment? She went to the Europe this morning. If Artari recommended her to you … What does he say in his letter?’
I hadn’t thought of that. I should have a letter.
‘He asks me to have an eye on her for a while … He doesn’t like the position offered her at Boquet’s, but we can look into that later …’
‘If I knew that it would only be for a few days, I would ask her to stay … She could have the green room …’
There you are, your Honour! The green room! Next to Mama’s, separated from mine by my daughters’.
‘Do as you think best.’
Poor Martine, who must have heard us whispering in the hall, not knowing, never dreaming of the turn things were taking. Mama was talking and she pretended to be listening while straining her ears to hear what we were saying, more dead than alive.
She would not see Boquet, she would not work for him, that was decided. I didn’t lose any time, you see. It was destiny, your Honour, it was a force that was beyond us.
I was so grateful to Armande that I looked at her during luncheon as I had probably never looked at her before, with real affection. A perfect luncheon which Mama had been allowed to superintend. We weren’t hungry, Martine and I, and ate without paying much attention. Our eyes laughed. We were gay. Everybody was gay, your Honour, as by a miracle.
‘Presently, my husband will go to the hotel to pick up your baggage. But I insist … I don’t think it will be difficult to find a furnished apartment. After lunch I’ll do a little telephoning …’
We wanted to go to the hotel together. We already felt the need of being alone. We dared not go about it too precipitately. The suggestion could not come from me.
It was then I saw how artful Martine was — I almost said, what a hussy she was. The ladies were finishing their coffee. I was about to leave.
‘Would you mind, Mme Alavoine, if I went to the hotel too?’
Then lowering her voice, as though in confidence:
‘There are a few little things lying round the room and …’
Armande had understood. Little feminine secrets, by Jove! Little modesties! It wasn’t for a great brute like me to be going into a young girl’s room, handling her lingerie, her personal possessions.
I can still hear Armande, lowering her voice to advise me, while Martine was putting on her funny little hat in front of the mirror in the hall:
‘Let her go up alone … It’s more tactful … You would embarrass her …’
The car, my car. The two of us inside, I at the wheel, Martine beside me, and my city, the streets I walked along every day.
‘It’s marvellous …’ I said.
‘Doesn’t it frighten you a little bit? … Do you think we should accept?’
She did not make fun of Armande now. She felt ashamed in front of her.
But no one in the world could have stopped me now. I went up with her. Even before closing the door I took her in my arms, almost smothering her in my embrace and I literally devoured her mouth. The bed had not been made. But the idea of possessing her at that moment never occurred to me. Granted, it was important. It was while I was hugging her like an animal that I understood. But this was not the moment.
There were other things to accomplish immediately.
I had to take her home again, your Honour, and never more triumphantly has bridegroom taken home his bride.
I had to moderate the light in my eyes, the radiance of my whole being.
‘I have telephoned already,’ Armande announced, ‘and I have an address.’
Then, taking me aside:
‘It would be better if I went with her …’
How I agreed with her! Just so there was someone to guard her! And it seemed perfectly natural to me that it should be either my mother or Armande.
Duplicity, hypocrisy?
No, your Honour, no, no, no! You can let those who do not know say that, you who may soon know, you who, unless I am very much mistaken, will know one day.
The irresistible force of life, that’s all of life which had been given to me at last, given to me who, for so long, had been only a man without a shadow.
Chapter Seven
There isn’t an incident, a word, a gesture of those days that I have forgotten and yet it would be impossible for me to reconstruct the events in their chronological order. It’s more of a tangle of memories, each with its own life, each forming a whole, and it is often the more meaningless ones that stand out in the sharpest outlines.
For instance, I see myself that afternoon, about six o’clock, opening the door into the Poker-Bar. In the morning I still had a ghost of a reason for going there. But now that I had decided that Martine, no matter what happened, should not become Raoul Boquet’s secretary …
And, you see, I may even be mistaken: all at once, I wonder if it wasn’t the following day. I can still feel the icy wind rushing up under my overcoat when I got out of the car, and see, in a row and slanting gently down-hill, the few lights along the st
reet, shop lights powerless to snare a single customer in such a squall.
Right beside me, the creamy and slightly rosy light of the bar and, as soon as I opened the door, an atmosphere of pleasant warmth and cordiality. There were so many people in the smoke of the pipes and cigarettes that the newcomer had the impression of being snubbed, of not having been taken into the secret. If the streets were deserted, if only a few wretches roamed them aimlessly, it was because everybody had met everybody else at the Poker-Bar and at other places of the sort, behind closed doors where they couldn’t be seen.
What had I come for? Nothing. I was there simply to look at Boquet. Not even to defy him, for what had I to say to him? Just to look at a man who, one night, when he was drunk, had met Martine, had spoken to her — before me — bought her a drink and had almost become her boss. Would he have become her lover into the bargain?
I didn’t speak to him. He was too drunk for that and he didn’t even notice I was there.
It is here in prison, a perfect place for thinking, that this fact has struck me: almost all my memories of the holiday season in the Vendée, as far back as I can remember, are memories of clear weather, a somewhat greenish-yellow light, glossy, like certain coloured postcards, rarely with snow, almost always a dry cold. But that year — last year, your Honour — I see only dark days where, in most offices, the lights were turned on, the pavements black under the rain, black windy nights that began too early, and those scattered lights in the city which give to the provinces a character at once so intimate and so sad.
That is what reminded me of Caen. But I had no time to dwell on the past. I lived in such a continual tension that I wonder how, if only physically, I was able to stand it. Above all, I wonder how those who saw me failed to understand what was happening to me.
How could certain persons have seen me coming and going without suspecting that I was living through an extraordinary moment? Was I really the only one to be conscious of it? Several times Armande looked at me with anxious curiosity. Not anxious for me. Anxious because she could not bear not to understand, because instinctively she resisted anything that threatened the order she herself had established around her.
Luck was with me. At that time we were having, almost simultaneously, an epidemic of grippe and of scarlatina, which kept me breathless from morning to night and sometimes from night to morning. The waiting-room was never empty. Under the glass porch there were always a dozen or more open umbrellas dripping along the wall, and the floors were constantly streaked with water and mud from all the wet feet. The telephone never stopped ringing. My more astute patients and my friends would come to the front door and would be circumspectly shown into my office between two ordinary patients. I joyously welcomed all this work, I needed this feverish activity to excuse my own feverish excitement.
It was almost impossible for Martine and me to see each other alone. But she was in my house and that was enough for me. I would often make noises just so that she would hear me, so that she would never cease to be conscious of my presence. In the morning, I adopted the habit of humming while I shaved and she understood so well that a few moments later I would hear her singing in her room.
Mama, I’d be willing to swear, understood this too. She said nothing. She let nothing appear. It is true that she had no reason to love Armande. Quite the contrary. Is it indecent of me to speculate still further and to imagine a certain inner jubilation in my mother as, little by little, she made these discoveries which she kept strictly to herself?
At all events, as I learned later, in fact she herself has admitted it, she had guessed everything after the second or third day, and it disturbs me a little now to think that things which I thought so secret, which love alone rendered acceptable, have had a lucid and silent witness.
It was in the morning of the third day, during my office hours, that Armande, ordering a taxi so as not to bother me, took Martine to Mme Debeurre’s, where she had found a room with a kitchen. The second, the third day — it all seemed so long to me then. And although it hasn’t been even a year yet, how long ago it seems! So much longer, for instance, than my daughter’s diphtheria or my marriage to Armande ten years ago, because during those ten years nothing vital happened.
For Martine and me, on the contrary, the world was changing from hour to hour, things were happening so rapidly that we did not always have time to keep each other informed of events or of our own evolution.
I had said to her hurriedly in passing:
‘You’re not going to Boquet’s. I’ve found something else. Just leave it to me …’
In spite of my assurance, I did not really feel certain, and, in any case, I thought it would take weeks if not months. I was certain of it without being certain, I wanted it without knowing how I should go about it, there were so many obstacles in the way of such a project.
What could be done in the meantime? I couldn’t even keep Martine, who was down to her last franc, and would not have let me anyway.
Forty, fifty patients a day, your Honour, and not only in my office but in town, in the suburbs, some in the country, so that because of our bad roads in the Vendée I practically lived in riding breeches and boots.
Add to all this, preparations for Christmas, presents for the children and for the grown-ups, the Christmas tree and ornaments to be bought, and the crèche, used in former years, which I had not yet had time to have repaired.
Is it any wonder that I am confused about the exact order of events? But I remember clearly that it was ten o’clock in the morning and that I had a patient in my office wearing a black shawl, when I gave myself a deadline of a few weeks — three weeks, I think — to bring Armande around to my way of thinking.
But that very day at noon Babette knocked on the door of my office, which meant that my bouillon was waiting for me. For in times of unusual stress I was in the habit of interrupting my consultations for a few moments to drink a bowl of hot bouillon in the kitchen. Armande’s idea, as a matter of fact. When I think back, I perceive that everything I did was regulated by Armande, and so naturally that I did not even realize it.
I was really exhausted. My hand shook a little from nervousness as I picked up the bowl. My wife happened to be in the kitchen making a cake at the time.
‘Things can’t go on like this,’ I said, taking advantage of the fact that it would be impossible to engage in a long discussion and that she would hardly have time to reply. ‘If I were sure that young girl was dependable, I think I’d engage her as an assistant …’
But all this, all these preoccupations I have just told you about, were, your Honour, what counted the least. The real cause of my feverish state lay elsewhere.
You see I was at the painful, the important stage of the discovery.
I did not know Martine. I was hungry to know her. It was not curiosity, but an almost physical need. And every hour lost was painful, physically painful too. So many things can happen in an hour! In spite of my dearth of imagination I thought of all the possible catastrophes.
And the worst one of all was that from one moment to the next she would not be the same.
I was conscious of the miracle that had occurred, and there was no reason for the miracle to continue.
We simply had to learn to know one another at once, no matter what the cost, to complete our total knowledge, go to the end of what, without wanting to, we had started at Nantes.
Only then, I said to myself, would I be happy. Only then would I be able to look at her with calm and confident eyes. Would I then, perhaps, be able to leave her for a few hours without trembling with suspense?
I had a thousand questions to ask her, a thousand things to tell her. I could only talk to her on rare occasions during the day and always in the presence of my mother or Armande.
We had begun at the end. It was urgent, it was indispensable to fill the voids which gave me a sort of vertigo.
For example, just to hold her hand without saying a word …
If I
slept at all during this period I have no recollection of it, and I am sure it must have been very little. I lived like a sleep-walker. My eyes were glassy, my eyelids tingled, my skin was too tender — the signs that one has reached the end of one’s endurance. I can see myself in the middle of the night, biting my pillow in a rage, thinking of her sleeping only a few feet away from me.
At night she would cough a few times before going to sleep, which was her way of sending me a final message. I would cough in answer, and I’d be willing to swear that my mother understood this coughing language too.
I don’t know what would have happened if things had dragged on much longer, if they had taken place as I had envisaged. One is apt to imagine that nerves can snag like violin strings which are too tightly stretched. This is absurd, of course. But I think one fine day I would have been capable, at table or in the drawing-room, in the street or no matter where, of suddenly starting to yell for no apparent reason.
Armande said, without making any of the objections I had expected:
‘Wait at least until after Christmas before speaking to her. We’ll have to discuss it first, you and I …’
I am obliged to give you a few more professional details. You know that in the provinces we doctors are still in the habit, for our most important patients, of waiting until the end of the year before sending our bill. It is a doctor’s nightmare. It was mine. Naturally we do not always keep an exact account of our visits. It is necessary to go over our appointment book, page by page, make an approximate estimate that won’t startle our patient too much.
Up to that time Armande had always undertaken this task. I had never had to ask her, for she liked such minute and orderly exercises and, moreover, ever since our marriage she had quite naturally taken charge of my financial affairs, to such an extent that I was reduced to asking her for money when I wanted to buy anything.
At night, as I was undressing, she would collect the money I took out of my pockets, the amount I had received in cash for my visits during the day, and would even frown sometimes and ask for an explanation. I would have to go over again my round of visits, remember all the patients I had seen, those who had paid and those who had not paid.
Act of Passion Page 12