That round of warm light which is the common need of all of us, where is it to be found when one lives alone in a big city?
She discovered bars. She discovered cocktails. And for a few hours drink gave her that self-confidence she so much needed. And the men she met in such places were ready to help her believe in herself.
Didn’t I confess that I might have become a pillar of the Poker-Bar, that I felt the temptation? I too would have found that easy appreciation I failed to find at home; I too would have found women who would have given me the illusion of love.
But she was humbler than I, in fact. I could still manage to withdraw into my shell, while she could not.
And a few drinks, your Honour, a few compliments, a vague semblance of admiration and tenderness would sweep away the last shreds of her resistance.
Haven’t we all done the same thing, you and I, every man, even the most intelligent and the most virtuous? Haven’t we all, at one time or another, sought in the vilest places, in the most mercenary caresses, a little solace, a little self-confidence?
She went with strangers, or practically. She went with them into hotel rooms. Men pawed her in their cars, in taxis.
As I told you, I have counted them. I know exactly every one of their gestures.
Do you see why it was that we had such an imperious need to talk to each other and that all the empty hours, the hours that were stolen from us, were torture?
Not only did she fail to find the desired relief, not only did she look in vain for that confidence in herself which would have restored to her a semblance of equilibrium, but she retained enough clear-headedness to be conscious of her progressive degradation.
When she came to La Roche, your Honour, when I met her at Nantes in the rain on the platform of a station after we had both missed our train, she was at the end of her resistance, she had given up the struggle, she was resigned to anything, including disgust for herself.
She was like — forgive the blasphemy, Martine, but you do understand — she was like a woman who, to feel secure at last, enters a brothel.
The miracle is that I met her, that double tardiness which brought us face to face. The miracle is, above all else, that I, who am not particularly intelligent, who have never, like certain of my colleagues, spent much time over problems of this kind — that I, Charles Alavoine, in the course of a night when I was drunk, when she too was drunk, and during which we had dragged our disgust through all the sordid rain-drenched streets of Nantes, suddenly understood.
Not even understood. I didn’t understand at once. To be exact, let’s say that I glimpsed, through all the darkness in which we were struggling, a tiny far-off ray of light.
The true miracle is, after all, that I had the desire to understand, God knows why — perhaps because I, too, felt alone, because I had sometimes longed to sink down on a bench and never to get up again, perhaps because there was still that little glow-worm, because everything had not gone out in me — the real miracle is that I wanted to draw nearer to that fraternal light and understand, and that this desire, of which I was not conscious, was enough to make me overcome all obstacles.
I didn’t even know then that it was love.
Chapter Nine
A little while ago they came for my cell-mate to take him to the visitors’ waiting-room. He is the one I told you about who looks like a young bull. For a long time I didn’t know or care what his name was. It is Antoine Belhomme, I’ve since found out, and he was born in the Loiret.
I finally learned why he was so grim, his mouth bitter, his eyes sullen. They’d played him for a sucker, your Honour, to use his own expression. The fact was they didn’t have sufficient evidence against him to take him before a jury. He didn’t know this. He thought he was done for, and if he kept on denying his guilt it was only on principle, not to knuckle under. And that was when his examining magistrate, one of your colleagues, proposed a kind of bargain.
I suppose it wasn’t discussed in any such frank terms. But I believe what Belhomme told me. They began by talking to him about the penitentiary and the guillotine. They had the young animal so terrified that cold sweat stood out on his forehead. Then the magistrate, when he thought him sufficiently softened up, gently hinted at the possibility of a compromise.
If he would confess, that would be taken into account, premeditation would be officially ruled out, since the murder weapon was a bottle he had picked up off the bar. His conduct during the preliminary hearings, as well as his good behaviour at the trial, would also be taken into consideration, and they promised him, at least they let him hope, that he would get off with not more than ten years.
He fell for it. He was so confident that, when he used to see his lawyer sweating blood trying to defend him, he himself would reassure him:
‘Take it easy. I tell you it’s in the bag.’
Just the same they double-crossed him. They slapped him with twenty years, the maximum … All because, between the preliminary hearings and the trial, chance would have it that two other crimes of the same nature were committed in the outskirts of the city, and as a final stroke of bad luck, both of them by boys about his own age, giving rise to a furious press campaign. The papers talked of a wave of terror, a grave social danger, the necessity for drastic measures.
And my young bull was the goat. Forgive me if I am beginning to talk like him. At any rate, there’s someone to whom it would be just as well not to make speeches about Society with a capital S, or Justice! You stink in his nostrils, the whole lot of you.
This is the first time he’s had a visitor since we’ve been living together. He left like a meteorite, head first.
When he returned a moment ago, he was another man. His eyes shone with a pride I have rarely seen before.
‘It was the girl …’ he flung at me, not able to find other words. But he understood what he meant and so did I.
I knew that he was living with a girl barely fifteen years old who worked in a radio factory near the Puteaux Bridge. He had something else to tell me, but it was seething with such force in his throat, it was surging up from such depths that the words failed to come out right away:
‘She’s going to have a baby!’
As a doctor, your Honour, how many times have I been the first to announce this news to a young woman, often in the presence of her husband. I know all the various reactions of all kinds of people.
But such total happiness, a pride like that, I have never seen before. And he added simply:
‘Now, as she says, she won’t have to worry!’
Don’t ask me why I have told you this story. I have no idea. I’m not trying to prove anything. It has nothing in common with ours. And yet, perhaps, it might serve to explain what I mean by absolute love, and even what I mean by purity.
What purer, tell me, than this child, so proud, so happy to be coming to announce to her lover condemned to twenty years hard labour that she is going to have a child by him?
‘Now, I won’t have to worry!’
And he did not look worried when he came back to his cell.
In a certain sense there was something of the same purity in our love. It was just as total, if this word can make you understand how we accepted it beforehand, without our understanding it, without knowing just what was happening to us, with no idea of the extreme consequences.
It is because Martine loved me like that that I loved her. It is perhaps because I loved her with the same innocence — you may smile if you like — that she gave me her love.
A vicious circle? I can’t help it. We here enter into a domain, your Honour, where it is difficult to explain what one means, especially to those who do not know.
How much simpler it would be to tell our story to Antoine Belhomme, who would need no commentaries.
Before the thing happened, in my wife’s house, as I willingly call it from now on, we had already, Martine and, I, learned to know suffering.
I wanted to find out everything about her (I have
already told you that) and, docilely, after a few attempts at lying — for she was trying not to hurt me — she told me everything, she even told me too much, feeling so culpable she even overcharged herself with sins, as I perceived later on.
Her arrival at La Roche-sur-Yon, in that rainy December, after a detour by way of Nantes to borrow a little money, was after all a sort of suicide. She had given up. When one reaches a certain degree of disgust for oneself, one degrades oneself even further so as to reach the end, the bottom, more quickly, because after that nothing worse can happen to one.
But, instead of that, a man offered her life.
In doing so I took on, and I fully realized it, a heavy responsibility. I felt that she had to be delivered from herself, from her past, from those few years, those very few years in which she had lost everything.
And that past, I thought, in order to accomplish this, I would have to take in hand myself.
I receive many of the journals on psycho-analysis. And although I have not always read them, I do know something about the subject. Certain of my colleagues in the provinces have taken it up, and have always terrified me.
Wasn’t it necessary that I should purge her of her memories? I sincerely believed it. I have not, I think, the least predisposition to sadism or to masochism.
If not to deliver her, why should I have spent hours on end confessing her, relentlessly poking into all the most sordid, the most humiliating corners?
I was jealous, your Honour, ferociously jealous. I am going to confess a ridiculous detail on this subject. When I met Raoul Boquet a little later on, about the fifteenth of January, I wouldn’t greet him. I frankly stared at him without bowing.
Because he had known her before me! Because he had offered her a drink and she had accepted. Because he had known the other Martine.
The Martine before me, the Martine I hated, whom I had hated at first sight and whom she herself also hated.
I did not create the new Martine. I have no such pretension. I don’t take myself for God the Father. The new Martine, you see, was the oldest; it was the little girl of the past who had never ceased to exist altogether, and my sole merit, if merit there is, was to have discovered her under a litter of false pretences of which she was the first dupe.
I undertook at all costs to restore her confidence in herself, her confidence in life, and it was with this end in view that, together, with dogged perseverance, we ventured upon the great cleansing.
When I say that I know everything about her past, be assured that I mean literally everything, including those gestures, thoughts, reactions which one human being so rarely confides to another.
I have known appalling nights. But the bad Martine was gradually disappearing and that was all that mattered. I watched another Martine being born little by little, one who every day grew more and more to resemble a snapshot she had given me, taken when she was sixteen.
I no longer fear ridicule. Here, one no longer fears anything except oneself. Every human being, even if his whole fortune consists of only two suitcases, drags around with him through the years a certain number of objects.
We sort them all out. A sorting so implacable, with such a determination to kill certain things once and for all, that a pair of shoes, for instance — I can still see them, they were almost new — which she had worn one evening when she had picked up a strange man, were burned in the fireplace.
Practically nothing remained of the clothes she had brought with her and I, who could never spend my money without first going to Armande, was unable to replace them.
Her suitcases were empty, her wardrobe reduced to the bare necessities.
It was January. Think of the wind, the cold, the short days, the shadows and the lights of the little city, of the two of us struggling to extricate our love from everything that threatened to stifle it. Think of my office-hours, of the anguish of our separations, and finally of Mme Debeurre’s little house, which was our only haven, and to which I came panting with emotion.
Think of all the agonizing problems we had to solve, of the other problems presented by our life in Armande’s house and still further complicated by our constant solicitude for her peace of mind.
Of course we lied. And it is gratitude we deserve, if not admiration, for we had something better to do than to worry about other people’s tranquillity.
We had to discover each other. We had to get used to living with our love, we had to — if I may be allowed the word — transplant our love into our daily life and domesticate it.
And I saw thirty patients every morning! And I lunched without Martine, between Mama and Armande, opposite my daughters! I talked with them. I must have succeeded in talking to them like an ordinary person, since Armande — the subtle, the intelligent Armande — saw nothing.
Duplicity, you say, your Honour? Good heavens! Do you know that sometimes, when I was at table with my family — that’s right, with my family, and Martine wasn’t there! — suddenly there, on the retina of my eye, would be the image of a man and the brutal memory of a gesture she had made, as distinct as a pornographic photograph.
Your Honour, I don’t wish anybody anything like that! The pain of absence is horrible, but that is one pain which makes you believe in hell.
Yet I still sat there, and I suppose I ate. They told me of all the little happenings of the day and I replied.
I had to see her at once — that, for God’s sake, you must understand! — to be sure that a new Martine really existed, that she was not the one in the obscene photograph. I watched for her. I counted the minutes, the seconds. She opened the gate, I heard her footsteps on the gravel path, she was walking towards the house with that uncertain smile which she always offered me in advance in case I stood in need of reassurance.
Once when she came into my office I stared at her without seeing her. The Other had remained glued to my retina and suddenly, in spite of myself, for the first time in my life, I struck someone.
I couldn’t stand it any longer. I couldn’t stand the pain. I was at the end of my endurance. I did not strike with my open hand, but with my fist, and I felt the impact of bone against bone.
Immediately afterwards I collapsed. The reaction. I fell on my knees, I’m not ashamed to admit it. And she, your Honour, she smiled, looking at me tenderly through her tears.
She was not crying. There were tears in her eyes, the tears of a little girl who has been deeply hurt, but she did not cry. She smiled, and I assure you that, though sad, she was happy.
She stroked my forehead, my hair, my eyes, my cheeks, my mouth. She murmured:
‘My poor Charles …’
I thought it would never happen again, that never again would the beast be aroused in me. I loved her, your Honour, I’d like to shout that word till I’m hoarse.
Yet, I did it again. Once, at her place, our place, one evening when we were lying together in the bed, when I was caressing her, my fingers touched the scar and all my phantoms returned.
Because I had begun to love her body in an almost insane way that made her smile, but smile with a secret uneasiness beneath her amusement.
‘It isn’t Christian, Charles. It isn’t right …’
I loved everything about her, her skin, her saliva, her sweat, and above all — oh, above all — her early morning face, which at that time I hardly ever saw, for it took the miracle of an urgent call to give me the chance to go to her early in the morning and to awaken her.
What Mme Debeurre thought of us, I don’t give a damn. Does a thing like that count, when one is living an experience like ours?
Once when I wakened her like that, she was pale, with her hair spread out on the pillow, and in her sleep she wore a childlike expression that took my breath away, murmuring, her eyelids still closed:
‘Papa …’
Because her father too loved her early morning face, because her father used to tiptoe over to her bed in those days, not so very long ago, when he was still alive and she was still a litt
le girl.
She was not beautiful like that, your Honour. There was no resemblance to a cover girl, let me tell you, and I did not want her to be beautiful ever again with that sort of beauty. The red had disappeared from her lips, the black from her lashes, the powder from her cheeks, and she was just simply a woman again, and little by little she became for the whole day what she was early in the morning in her sleep.
Sometimes I was under the impression that I had gone over her face with an eraser. In the beginning she seemed indistinct, like a drawing half rubbed out. It was only gradually that her true face appeared, that the fusion with what she had been before was accomplished.
If you don’t understand that, your Honour, it is useless for me to continue, but I have chosen you just because I felt that you would understand.
I haven’t created anything. I have never had the presumption to try to fashion a woman in the image of woman as I conceived her.
It was Martine, the real Martine before the bastards had sullied her, that I persisted in trying to extricate. She was the one I loved and whom I love, who is mine, who is so much a part of my own body that I can no longer distinguish between them.
Mme Debeurre probably heard everything, our murmurs, my shouting, my rages, my blows. And what of it? Was it our fault?
Armande said later on:
‘What must that woman have thought?’
No, really, your Honour, just weigh the evidence, I beg you! On the one hand my house — our house, Armande’s house — with its armchairs, its red carpet on the stairs and its brass rods, the bridge parties and the dress-maker, Mme Debeurre and her misfortunes — her husband killed by a train and her cyst, for she had a cyst — and on the other, the exploration we had undertaken, gambling everything we had in this game to the limit, without mental reservations of any kind, at the risk of our life.
Yes, at the risk of our life.
That, Martine understood before I did. She said nothing then. It is the only thing she kept from me. And that is why at certain moments she would look at me with dilated pupils as if she didn’t see me.
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