This year, nevertheless, Armande complained of being overwhelmed with work, and I took advantage of a moment when I saw her plunged in her accounts to say:
‘She could also help you — little by little, getting the hang of it …’
Who knows if it wasn’t a trait of Armande’s character which so hastened matters that I was the first to be surprised? She has always liked to manage things, whether the house or anything else. If she really loved her first husband, if, as I was always being told, she was wonderful to him, wasn’t it because he was ill, because he was at her mercy, could count on nobody but her, and because she could treat him like a child?
To dominate was a need of her nature, and I don’t believe it was through petty vanity or even pride. It was, I think, rather to preserve and increase the feeling that she had about herself and that she needed to keep her equilibrium.
She had not been able to live with her father, for the very reason that her father was not impressed by her and continued to treat her as a little girl, to live his own life just as though she were not in the same house. As time went on, I wonder if she would not have fallen ill or become neurasthenic.
For ten years she had under her thumb, first of all, me, who had not tried to resist and who always yielded for the sake of peace, to the point of asking her opinion even about buying a necktie or the smallest instrument of my profession — to the point of accounting to her for all my movements. There was also my mother who had yielded in her own way, who had retired to the place assigned her by Armande while still safeguarding her personality, who, it is true, obeyed because she felt that she was not at home, but remained impermeable to her daughter-in-law’s influence.
Then there were my daughters, naturally more pliable. The maid. A servant who had a ‘character of her own’ did not last long in our house, no more than one who did not admire my wife. Finally there were all our friends, or practically all of them, all the young women of our circle who came to ask her advice. This had happened so often that Armande no longer waited to be asked, but offered her advice of her own accord on every occasion; and people had told her so often that she was never wrong, and it had become accepted as such a foregone conclusion in certain milieus of La Roche, that she could no longer conceive of a contradiction being possible.
You see why it was a stroke of genius, mentioning those end-of-the-year bills. It was putting Martine under her thumb, it was one more human being coming under her domination.
‘The girl seems quite intelligent,’ she murmured, ‘but I wonder if she is methodical enough? …’
Because of this, your Honour, the evening I went to see Martine for the first time in her new apartment at Mme Debeurre’s, I had two pieces of good news to announce. First that my wife invited her to spend Christmas Eve with us, something I should never have dared hope. And second, that before the end of the year, in less than ten days, she would, in all likelihood, be my assistant.
In spite of this, all afternoon I had the sensation of being at a loose end. Martine was no longer in the house. At luncheon she was not at the table, and I almost began to doubt my memories, to ask myself if the day before she had really been seated there opposite me, between Armande and my mother.
She was alone in a house which I didn’t know, except from the outside. She was beyond my control. She was seeing other people. She spoke to them no doubt, smiled at them.
And I couldn’t rush right over to her. I had to make my round of visits, come back to my office twice for urgent cases.
One more professional detail, your Honour. Forgive me, but it is necessary. When I had to go to see patients in town, I was supposed, before leaving, like most doctors, to list the names of the patients I was about to visit, so that in case of an emergency I could be reached by telephone at one house or another. In this way every moment of my time could be checked. This was one of the established rules Armande insisted upon above all others. If, as I was leaving, I forgot to write down all the addresses in the notebook, kept in the hall for the purpose, she was quick to notice it and I would not have started my car before she was knocking on the window to call me back.
How many times in my life have I been called back like that! I couldn’t say anything. She was right.
I am still not sure today if it was through jealousy she acted in this way, and I believe, without believing, that it was. Do you want me to explain what I think, once for all?
There was never any question of love between us. You know what happened before our marriage. Love for her, if love there was, and I am willing to accord her that, was in the past; it was for her first husband who had died.
Our marriage was a marriage of reason. She liked my house. She liked a certain kind of life I could give her. As for me, I had my two daughters and no one but my old Mama to look after them, which did not seem to me desirable.
Did she come to love me later on? This question has bothered me in the last few months and especially lately. Formerly I should have replied no, without hesitation. I was convinced that she loved no one but herself, that she had never loved anyone but herself.
If she was jealous, it was of her influence over me, you understand. She was afraid of seeing me break the leash she held in her hands.
I used to think all this and many other things, for, even before Martine, I had my hours of revolt.
Now that I am on the other side and that I feel so detached from everything, I am much more indulgent, or understanding.
Take, for example, when she was on the witness-stand: she might very well have made me bristle by her attitude, by her calm, by her self-assurance. You felt — and she wanted you to feel — that she harboured no resentment towards me, that she was ready, if I should be acquitted, to take me back and to nurse me as a sick man.
That too can be explained by her need of dominating, her need of having a more and more exalted idea of herself, of her character.
Well, I no longer think so. Without speaking of love, for now I know what the word means, I am convinced that, in a sense, she really loved me a little, the way she loves my daughters.
And she has always been perfect towards my daughters. Everybody at La Roche will tell you that she has acted, and still does act, just like their own mother. She has adopted them to such an extent that I have gradually and unconsciously lost interest in them.
I ask their pardon. I am their father. How can I explain to them that it is just because, as a father, I was left too little place?
Armande has loved me as she loved them, calmly and with an indulgent severity. I have never been her husband, much less her lover. I was someone she had taken under her charge, for whom she had assumed the responsibility, in whom, consequently, she felt she had proprietary rights.
Including that of regulating all my comings and goings. That I believe is the secret of her jealousy.
Mine, damn it all, when I knew Martine, was of a different sort, and I wouldn’t want anyone to know jealousy like that. I don’t know why that day, more than any other, remains in my mind as a day of lights and darkness. I had the impression of spending my time going from the cold obscurity of the street into the warm luminosity of interiors. From outside I saw soft lighted windows, golden shades. I covered a few yards of darkness, I removed my wet coat, and for a moment I participated in the life of a strange fireside, conscious all the time of the darkness on the other side of the window panes …
God, what a state I was in!
‘She is alone in her apartment. Fat Mme Debeurre will surely go up to see her …’
I clung to this reassuring thought. Mme Debeurre is a woman of uncertain age who has had misfortunes. Her husband was a tax collector. She lived not far from the station in a rather pretty red brick house of two stories, with three steps leading up to a front door of polished oak overloaded with brasses. During her whole married life she wanted to have children, and had consulted me on the subject; she had seen all my colleagues, she had gone to Nantes, even to Paris, receiving al
ways the same reply.
Her husband had got himself killed by a train in the station of La Roche not two hundred yards from their house, and since then, dreading the loneliness, she had rented her second-floor apartment furnished.
To think of my being content at the thought that a Mme Debeurre, after my mother and Armande, was with Martine!
A dozen times I was on the point of going to see her between two calls. I also passed in front of the Poker-Bar. I had even less reason for going in now, and yet I almost did.
We dined to the accompaniment of forks and plates. I still had a few calls to make in town.
‘Perhaps I’ll drop in to see if that young girl has everything she needs. I have to write to Artari tomorrow and tell him how she’s getting on.’
I feared some opposition, some objection. Armande, although she must have heard, said nothing, and my mother alone gave a rather too insistent look.
It is a wide avenue. It runs along the old ramparts. A neighbourhood of barracks. There aren’t more than two or three shops to throw a rectangle of light on the sidewalk.
I was feverish, my heart pounded. I saw the house with a light on the ground floor and another light upstairs. I rang the bell. I heard Mme Debeurre’s slippers flip-flapping down the hall.
‘Oh, it’s you, Doctor … The young lady has just come in …’
I went upstairs four steps at a time. I knocked. While I stared at the line of light under the door, a placid voice bade me come in.
There was a blue silk shade over the lamp, and under the shade smoke was curling.
Why did I scowl? Why did I have that empty feeling? No doubt I was expecting immediately to have Martine standing there, her body pressed against mine. I had to look all around the room before I saw her lying on the bed in her clothes, smiling, a cigarette in her mouth.
Then, instead of rushing over to embrace her, instead of announcing my two pieces of good news, which I had kept repeating to myself all the way, brutally I asked:
‘What are you doing there?’
Never in my life had I spoken like that. I have never been domineering. I have always been afraid of shocking, of wounding. My voice surprised me.
Smiling, she replied, but perhaps already with a shade of anxiety in her eyes:
‘I was taking a rest while waiting for you to come …’
‘You didn’t know that I was coming …’
‘But I did …’
What irritated me, I think, was to find her looking exactly as I had seen her at the American bar in Nantes, with her cover-girl smile, which I was beginning to hate.
‘You went out?’
‘I had to eat. Here, there was nothing ready …’
I felt like being cruel to her, I, who had been so patient with Armande, whom I did not love.
It was so simple to go over to her, to kiss her, to fold her in my arms. I had been thinking about it all day. I had lived that moment a hundred times in advance and everything was happening differently. I remained standing, without even taking off my overcoat, with my boots dripping on the carpet.
‘Where did you have dinner?’
‘In a little restaurant, called the Green Oak, somebody told me about …’
‘Not Mme Debeurre at any rate …’
I knew the Green Oak. It is not a restaurant for strangers, who would have difficulty finding it, tucked away at the back of a courtyard which looks like the courtyard of a farm. It is practically a pension, frequented by bachelor functionaries of the city, habitués, and a few travelling salesmen who pass through La Roche periodically.
‘You had a cocktail, I’ll bet …’
She was no longer smiling. She was sitting on the edge of the bed and was looking at me with an anxious hurt expression, like a little girl who wonders why she is being scolded.
After all, she didn’t know me yet. She had no idea what my true character was, what our love would be.
And yet, your Honour, that love, whatever it would be, she accepted. Do you understand what that means? I myself understood it only much later.
I was tense, and haunted by a fixed idea, like a man who has drunk too much.
‘You went to the Poker-Bar …’
I had no idea she had. But I had been so afraid of it that I made the statement feeling almost certain that I was not wrong.
‘I think that is what it’s called … I couldn’t stay shut up all day … I had to have some air … I took a little walk …’
‘And you wanted a drink …’
Damn it all! Wasn’t everything I knew about her mixed up with bars?
‘You couldn’t wait, could you, to wallow in your filthy atmosphere again?’
Because, suddenly, that atmosphere was what I hated most in the whole world. Those high stools where she perched with her legs crossed so naturally! And the cigarette-case she took out of her bag, the cigarette — the cigarette stained with lipstick which she couldn’t do without any more than she could do without cocktails which she would watch being mixed … and after that letting her eyes wander from one man to another, seeking attention — hungry for attention …
I seized her wrists, not even knowing what I was doing. I jerked her to her feet.
‘Admit that you were missing it already … Admit that you wanted to see Bouquet … Go on, admit it …’
I was gripping her wrists hard enough to hurt her. I no longer knew if I loved her or if I hated her.
‘Admit it! … I’m so sure I’m right … You just had to go and start something with him …’
She could have denied it. That is what I expected. I think I should have been satisfied. She hung her head. She stammered:
‘I wonder … Perhaps …’
‘You wanted to play around with him, didn’t you?’
I gave her wrists several hard jerks and I saw that I was hurting her, that she was frightened, that automatically her eyes sought the door.
I think from that day, from that moment, I was ready to strike her. And yet I was moved. I was filled with pity for her, she was so pale, her face drawn with anguish and fatigue. Her cigarette had fallen on the carpet and she was trying to put it out with her foot, for fear of fire. I noticed her movement and it increased my rage to think that she could, at a moment like this, bother about such a trifle.
‘You had to have a man, didn’t you?’
She shook her head.
‘Admit it …’
‘No …’
‘You had to have a drink …’
‘Perhaps …’
‘You had to have attention … You have to have men paying attention to you all the time and you are capable of stopping a policeman on the street with any old excuse, just so he’ll make love to you.’
‘You’re hurting me …’
‘You’re nothing but a whore …’
As I uttered the word, I jerked her wrists even harder than before and sent her rolling on the floor. She did not make a sound. She remained there with one arm crooked in front of her face in fear of the blows she was expecting.
‘Get up …’
She obeyed me slowly, staring at me as though terror-stricken, but there was no trace of hate or resentment in her eyes.
Little by little I realized all this and I was stupefied. I had just behaved like a beast and she accepted it. I had just insulted her and she did not resent it.
She stammered something like:
‘Don’t hurt me …’
At that I stood motionless, I said in a voice which must have sounded much the same as before:
‘Come here …’
She hesitated an instant. Finally she came towards me, still protecting her face with her arm. She was sure that I was going to strike her. But she came, your Honour. That is the point, she came!
And we had met each other for the first time three days before.
I had no idea of beating her. I wanted her to come of her own accord. When she was close to me, I opened my arms and I pressed her to my breast so
hard she could scarcely breathe, while tears filled my eyes.
I stammered in her ear, all warm against my cheek:
‘Forgive me …’
We were standing in a close embrace a few steps from the bed.
‘Did you see him?’
‘Who?’
All this was no more than a whisper.
‘You know perfectly well …’
‘No … he wasn’t there …’
‘And if he had been there?’
‘I would have told him that I was not going to be his secretary …’
‘But you would have had a drink with him …’
‘Perhaps …’
She was speaking low as at confession. I could not see her eyes, which must have been looking over my shoulder.
‘Who was it you talked to?’
‘No one …’
‘You’re lying … Someone must have told you about the Green Oak …’
‘That’s so. But I don’t know his name …’
‘He asked you to have a drink, didn’t he?’
‘I think so … Yes …’
Suddenly I was sad, your Honour. A tender sadness. I had the impression that I was holding a sick child in my arms. She was a liar. She was depraved.
But just the same, she had come to me when she thought I was going to hurt her. She in turn stammered:
‘Forgive me …’
Then these words, which I shall never forget, these words which more than anything else came like an echo from her childhood:
‘I won’t do it again …’
She too wanted to cry, but she did not cry. She kept very still for fear of unleashing my demons again, and then I drew her gently towards the bed which still held the imprint of her body.
Again she stammered, perhaps with a certain astonishment:
‘You want to?’
I wanted to, yes. But not as at Nantes. I wanted to feel that she was mine. I wanted her flesh to mingle intimately with mine, and it was slowly, with full consciousness, my throat tight with emotion, that I took possession of her.
I understood right away what was worrying her, the reason for that look of anxiety in her eyes. She was afraid of offending me. She was baffled by the calmness of my caress which seemed free from voluptuous pleasure.
Act of Passion Page 13