‘You see, Charles, I’ll never be like other women.’
I comforted her, but I often doubted it myself. And so it was that we often feared this act which separated our days from our nights and by which we sought to mingle our blood.
‘Some day when you least expect it, you’ll see, the miracle will happen …’
And the miracle did happen. I remember the astonishment I read in her eyes, in which apprehension still lingered. Feeling the thread still too tenuous, I did not yet dare risk a word of encouragement, and I pretended that I did not notice what was happening.
‘Charles …’
I hugged her tighter in my arms and, at the same time, more tenderly, and it was really a little girl’s voice that asked:
‘May I?’
She could, indeed. It was really her flesh this time that was quickened, my eyes could not leave her eyes. Then she uttered a great cry, a cry such as I have never heard, an animal cry and at the same time a cry of triumph. She smiled a new smile in which both pride and confusion mingled — for she was a little embarrassed — and, when her head fell back on the pillow, when her body limply relaxed, she stammered:
‘At last!’
At last, yes, your Honour, at last she was mine in all plenitude. At last she was a woman. At last, too, besides her love, I possessed something the others had never had. They suspected nothing, they had never noticed, but what of it!
We had just passed an important stage. This victory, if I can put it that way, had to be consolidated; we had to make sure that it should not be merely an isolated accident.
Don’t smile, if you would be so kind. Won’t you try to understand? Don’t act like the others who have pored over my case, like that Justice, one of whose servants you are, who refused to see what was really important in my crime.
It was a few nights later, just when we were at our happiest, just when she was falling asleep in my arms, saturated with my love, while my hand was unconsciously stroking her soft skin, that, almost without realizing it, I said to myself:
‘And to think that I shall have to kill her one day.’
Those are exactly the words which formed in my brain. I did not, to be sure, believe it, but neither was I horrified. I continued to caress her thigh in my favourite spot, her hair tickled my cheek, I felt her regular breath on my neck and I spelled out in the dark of my consciousness:
‘I shall have to kill her …’
I was not asleep. I had not yet reached that state which is not altogether waking but is not sleep either, and in which one enjoys a terrifying clarity of mind.
I did not push her away. I kept on caressing her. She was dearer to me than ever. She was my whole life.
But at the same time, in spite of anything she could do, in spite of her love, her humble love — mind that word, your Honour, her love was humble — she was at the same time the Other, and she knew it.
We both knew it. We both suffered from the knowledge. We lived, acted, spoke as if the Other had never existed. Sometimes Martine would open her mouth to say something and suddenly stop, embarrassed.
‘What were you going to say?’
‘Nothing …’
Because she suddenly realized that the words she was on the point of uttering were the kind that would risk awakening my phantoms. And they might be the most innocent words in the world, such as, for instance, the name of a street, the Rue de Berry, where it seems there is a certain kind of hotel. I’ve never taken that street again. Like the theatre in Paris we dared not mention because of what had happened there one evening in a box, a few weeks before she left for Nantes and La Roche.
There were certain taxis of a particular colour, more numerous, alas, than any others, the very sight of which evoked the most loathsome images.
Now do you understand why our conversations sometimes resembled the gait of certain sick people, who know that a sudden movement may prove fatal? It is said that they are walking on eggs. We too were walking on eggs.
Not always, for in that case our life would not have been what it was. We had long carefree periods of pure joy. Martine, like many people who have learned to fear life, was superstitious and, if the day began too gaily, I could feel her uneasiness no matter how hard she tried to hide it.
I spent my time wrestling with her fear, annihilating her fear. I succeeded in delivering her from most of her nightmares. I made her happy. I know it. I insist on that. I forbid anyone, anyone at all, to contradict me on that score.
She was happy with me, is that clear?
And because she was happy and because she was not used to being happy she sometimes trembled.
At La Roche-sur-Yon she was afraid of Armande, of my mother and my daughters, of my friends, of everything that had made up my life until then.
At Issy-les-Moulineaux she was afraid at first of a kind of life which she thought might very well discourage me.
Of these fears, and others besides, I cured her.
But there still remained our phantoms, the ones I had taken from her, of which I had relieved her, and against which she watched me struggling.
There remained my suffering which would suddenly pierce me with so sharp a pain that I was completely disfigured by it, and just when we least expected it, when we thought ourselves out of danger, would in a matter of seconds drive me completely out of my mind.
She knew very well, you may rest assured, that it wasn’t she whom I hated, that it wasn’t against her that my fists were raised. She humbled herself, a humility I could never have imagined.
One detail, your Honour. The first time, instinctively, she had put her arm up in front of her face to ward off the blows. That gesture, God knows, why, redoubled my rage. And because she was aware of this, she would now wait motionless, without a quiver of her face, keeping her lips from trembling, though all her flesh recoiled in horror.
I beat her. I don’t apologize. I ask no one’s pardon. The only one whose pardon I might ask is Martine. And Martine doesn’t need it because she knows.
I beat her in our little car, one afternoon, as we were going along the Seine … Another time, at the cinema, and we had to leave, for otherwise I should have been massacred by our indignant neighbours …
I have often tried to analyse what took place in me at such moments. Today I think that I am lucid enough to answer. You see, it didn’t matter how much she had changed — I mean physically changed — for she had been completely transformed in a few months, there were still moments when nothing could keep me from recognizing a trait, a mannerism, an expression of the other Martine.
It would only happen when I looked at her in a certain way. And I only looked at her like that when, because of an unexpected incident, because of a word, an image, I thought of her past.
Wait! It’s the word ‘image’ which is, undoubtedly, the key. I was able, alas, to call up without wanting to an image as distinct as a photograph, and that image would quite naturally superimpose itself on the Martine before me.
From that instant, I believed in nothing any longer. I believed in nothing, your Honour, not even in her. Not even in myself. I was submerged by an immeasurable disgust. It wasn’t possible. We’d been fooled. We’d been robbed. I didn’t want to. I …
Then I’d strike her. It was the only way. She knew it so well that she desired it, she almost invited me to do it, so that I might be more quickly delivered.
I am not mad, I am not ill. We were not ill, either of us. Were we aiming too high, were we aspiring to a love forbidden to men?
But then why, can you tell me, if it is forbidden on pain of death, why has this desire been planted in the very depth of our being?
We were honest. We did our best. We never tried to cheat.
‘I am going to kill her …’
I did not believe it when these words kept coming back like a refrain, they didn’t frighten me.
I can guess what you are thinking. It is ridiculous. Some day, you will perhaps learn that it is more difficul
t to kill than to get oneself killed. And even more difficult to live for months with the idea that you are going to kill the only person in the world you love.
But that’s what I did. In the beginning it was vague, like the premonitory signs of a disease which begins with random discomforts, pains one cannot quite locate. I have seen patients who, speaking of a pain they felt in their chests at certain moments, indicate the wrong side.
Night after night in our bedroom at Issy-les-Moulineaux I would unconsciously attempt a treatment. I questioned her on the child Martine, whom the Martine I loved was growing to resemble more and more each day.
We had not had time to change the wallpapers, which were covered with fantastic flowers in the worst modernistic taste. The armchair I used to sit in after putting on my dressing-gown was modernistic too and upholstered in a poisonous green velvet. The standing lamp, as well, was hideous, but we never noticed. We made no attempt to modify the frame of our daily life, so little did such things count for us.
She talked. There are names, first names which have become as familiar to me as those of the famous men of history. One of her childhood friends, for example, a certain Olga, returned to the stage every evening and played the role of villainess.
I know all Olga’s perfidies, at the convent, then in society when the little girls, grown up, were taken to parties. I know all my Martine’s humiliations and all her most outlandish dreams. I know her uncles, aunts, cousins, but what I know best of all is her own face becoming transformed as she spoke.
‘Listen, my darling …’
She always gave a start when she felt that I was going to announce any news, like my mother who could never open a telegram without trembling. She was not afraid of blows, but the unknown terrified her because for her the unknown had always been translated into some evil. She would look at me with an anxiety she did her best to conceal. She knew that fear was forbidden her. It was one of our taboos.
‘We are going to take a few day’s vacation …’
She grew pale. She thought of Armande, of my daughters. She was always dreading, from the very first day, the nostalgia I might feel for La Roche and my family.
But I was smiling, proud of my idea.
‘We’ll spend them in your native city, in Liège …’
We went. A pilgrimage. And I had, moreover, the hope of leaving behind me when I left some of my phantoms for ever.
All right, I’ll be even more frank and more blunt. I felt that I had to get possession of her childhood, for I was jealous of her childhood too.
This trip made her even dearer to me because more human.
People say:
‘I was born in such and such a city, my parents did so and so …’
All that she had told me was like a novel for young girls, and I went there to get at the truth, which turned out to be not so very different. I saw the big house, Rue Hors-Château, which she had so often described, and its famous porch with the forged iron hand-rail. I listened to people telling me about her family in just the same terms she herself employed, an old family, almost patrician, which had been gradually going downhill.
I even went to see the office of her father, who at the time of his death was secretary of the provincial government.
I saw her mother, her two married sisters, the children of one of them.
I saw the streets where she used to walk with a school bag in her hand, the shop windows against which she had glued her little red nose, nipped by the frost, the motion picture theatre where she had seen her first film and the pastry shop where the Sunday cakes were purchased. I saw her classroom and the nuns who remembered her.
I understood her better. Above all I found out that I had not been mistaken, that she had not lied, that the miracle of Nantes — there’s no other word — had given me an insight into all those things in her which made her my wife today.
Yet, even at Liège, your Honour, my phantoms followed me. A young man, somewhere in a café in the centre of the city where we were listening to the music, came gaily up to our table and called her by her first name.
That was enough.
The more she was mine, the more I felt that she was mine, the more I judged her worthy to be mine — I do hope that you will not see conceit in this word, which in my mind has no such connotation, for I too am humble, and I loved her as humbly as she loved me — as I say, the more she was mine the more I felt the need of absorbing her in even greater measure.
To absorb her. As I, for my part, would have liked to be wholly melted into her.
I was jealous of her mother, jealous of her little nephew who is nine years old, jealous of an old man we went to see in his little sweet shop, who had known her as a youngster, and who still remembered her tastes. He did, however, give me a tiny thrill of pleasure when, after a short hesitation, he called her:
‘Mme Martine …’
You see, I would have to take you through all the stages, one by one, that we ourselves passed through. Spring went. Summer came. The flowers in the Paris squares changed many times, our sombre suburb brightened, urchins and men in bathing trunks swarmed along the banks of the Seine, while we, at every turn of the road, found still another stage to be travelled.
Her flesh had soon become as obedient as her mind. We reached and ventured on the stage of silence. We could now read side by side in our bed.
We were able, with due precaution and with a show of courage, to cross certain forbidden neighbourhoods.
‘You’ll see, Martine, the day will come when there won’t be a single phantom left.’
They came less and less often. We went together to see my daughters at Sables d’Olonne, where Armande had taken a villa. Martine waited for me in the car.
Looking out of the open window, Armande said:
‘You didn’t come alone?’
‘No.’
Quite simply, your Honour, because it was simple.
‘Your daughters are on the beach.’
‘I’ll go and see them there.’
‘With her?’
‘Yes.’
And, as I declined her invitation to lunch:
‘Is she jealous?’
It was better to say nothing. I remained silent.
‘Are you happy?’
She shook her head gloomily, with a touch of sadness, and sighed:
‘Ah, well …’
How could I make her understand that one can be happy and still suffer? Are they not two words which go quite naturally together, and had I ever suffered, really suffered, until Martine gave me the revelation of happiness?
As I left, I very nearly said aloud:
‘I am going to kill her.’
So that she would understand even less! As though I had wanted my little vengeance!
We chattered with my daughters on the beach, Martine and I. I saw Mama, who was sitting on the sand knitting. She behaved very well, she offered no criticism, and when we left, holding out her hand she said very nicely:
‘Goodbye, Mademoiselle …’
I could swear that she too was on the point of saying Madame. But did not dare.
There was no reproach, only a slight apprehension, in the glances she gave me, surreptitiously as was her wont.
And yet I was happy, I have never been so happy in my life, Martine and I were happy enough to shout it from the house tops.
It was the third of September, a Sunday. I know the effect of that date on you. Don’t worry, I am calm.
The weather was soft and muggy, if you remember. It was no longer summer and it was not yet winter. For days the sky was grey, that grey which is both dull and luminous and that has always depressed me. Many people, especially in the poorer suburbs like ours, had already returned from vacation or had never gone away.
We had a maid now, for the last three days, a young girl from Picardy, who came to us direct from the country. She was sixteen and her figure was still shapeless, and she looked like a big rag doll. Her skin was always red and
shiny and, in her pink dress, comically bulging, with her bare legs, her bare feet in felt slippers, her hair always dishevelled, she looked, in our little apartment where she kept bumping into the furniture, as if she were just going to milk the cows.
I am never able to stay in bed after a certain hour. I got up quietly and Martine, just as she used to with her father, held out her arms and demanded, without opening her eyes:
‘A big hug …’
That meant I was to hold her tight against my breast until I squeezed all the breath out of her; then she was satisfied.
All our Sunday mornings were exactly alike. They were not mine, they were Martine’s. She was a little city girl, while I, peasant that I am, had always risen with the dawn.
In her eyes the worst instrument of torture ever invented was the alarm clock, with its brutal, piercing bell.
‘Even when I was a little girl and had to get up to go to school …’
Later, she had to get up to go to work. She would employ little stratagems. She would set the clock ten minutes fast intentionally, so she could linger a little longer in bed.
And yet, for all those last months, every morning she would get up before me in order to bring me my first cup of coffee in bed because I had once told her that that is what my mother had always done.
She was not, after all, a girl for the morning. It took her a long time after she was up to return to the waking world. It used to amuse me to see her coming and going in her pyjamas, her walk a little unsteady, her face still puffed up with sleep. Sometimes I would burst out laughing.
‘What’s the weather today?’
‘Nothing …’
Every Sunday I offered her what she called the ideal morning. She would sleep late, until about ten o’clock, and it was my turn then to bring her her coffee. Drinking it in bed, she would light her first cigarette, for that was the only thing I had not had the heart to make her give up. She had suggested it. She would have done it. But at least it was no longer that constant necessity it had once been. Nor a pose.
She would turn on the radio and much later she would finally inquire:
Act of Passion Page 18