Blood Dark

by Louis Guilloux

  It was also true that Madame de Villaplane’s rigorous judgment of her lodgers enabled her ambition to only rent to guests who were distinguished enough that she could entertain them for tea at least once a week in her parlor. The boardinghouse would then become a sort of country estate, where she could receive visitors, as she had in better days. Then she could forget that she had fallen on hard times, she would find a way out of herself by telling her story, which she was only able to do in bits and pieces, when she got the chance. Unfortunately these timid soirées never added up to much, and had occasionally even resulted in painful scenes and evictions.

  Madame de Villaplane had succeeded in creating such a reputation for herself in town that these days her boardinghouse was nearly deserted. The only lodger who could manage to stay was Otto Kaminsky. But didn’t they say she was in love with him?

  Of course, Madame de Villaplane’s secrets were not protected from what one might call harmless indiscretions, for lack of a better phrase. Just as everyone in town knew the smallest details of Cripure’s most private (or what he thought was his most private) life, so too did everyone know that for a year now, this crazy old lady had thought of no one but this soldier, so un-martial it was true, still such a man of the world under his uniform. For once, Madame de Villaplane had the chance to fall for a distinguished guest, a boarder who was young, rich, well educated, curious about art, rather well built—in short, the person she had been dreaming of all these years—and he even spoke multiple languages. It was because of his language skills that he’d been appointed to the prefecture as an interpreter. It was his job to read the correspondence of enemy aliens. A trusted position, you could say.

  All these features made Kaminsky extremely attractive to Madame de Villaplane. In such circumstances, who could be surprised she’d fallen in love? He was an excellent fellow, so Parisian, and who also had the advantage of being foreign, exotic. He was Jewish, but to Madame de Villaplane, who hated Jews without knowing exactly why, he was just Polish, which meant: Slavic.

  And here was one who, from the first day, she could entertain for tea! She had explained to him that her grandfather, who had earned a title after Austerlitz, had pursued a career quite parallel to the Baron General Marbot, who had been his friend. “Since you’re such a great reader and intellectual, it can’t have escaped your notice that the Baron General Marbot wrote at length about my grandfather in his Memoirs. He gives a long account of his soldier’s skill and his courage, etc.”

  They were sitting together by the lamp, he smoking oriental tobacco and she crocheting an aviator’s face mask. An intimate little evening, with a good fire in the grate. Even if it was true that the emperor himself had, from the depths of his exile, encouraged the memoirist to write up his accounts for the glory of the French army, Kaminsky must realize that the baron hadn’t always spared his old army buddies. Quite the opposite. The tales he told about the campaigns in Spain and Portugal, which had failed due to petty squabbles, celebrated the courage and fortitude of the imperial army, admirable as always, but cast a bad light on the worthiness of certain leaders and their ability to make decisions. According to Madame de Villaplane, her grandfather had saved the day countless times during those campaigns. “God’s honest truth . . .”

  Afterward, she talked about her father, the prefect. And, of course, she didn’t care to leave out her issues with her children. Madame de Villaplane loved to be pitied, and she went on at length about the saddest part of the story—the deceptions of motherly love. Kaminsky had lent a more than attentive ear to these tales—he was taken in from the start, by the character of the storyteller much more than by the stories themselves. Certain traits of hers had really struck him. Hadn’t she made him swear his soldiers’ oath not to repeat what he heard before telling him the most banal details from a lawsuit? He had given the easiest oath in the world, without cracking a smile. Then she had told him, with much ceremony, the story of Turnier, explaining how the very same house where they were sitting had once belonged to the philosopher, and how he had left it one day to throw himself in the sea. Kaminsky had wanted to hear about it in more detail, but he’d run into Madame de Villaplane’s curious reserve, and she’d begged him not to ask her about that painful story. He hadn’t pressed her, and the evening had come to a close.

  The next day, Kaminsky brought Madame de Villaplane a beautiful bouquet of flowers, a gesture that, since her youth, had become so unfamiliar that she was moved to the point of almost fainting with joy.

  From then on, Madame de Villaplane’s life had taken a new turn. As psychologists have it, a fixation is a conviction that goes unexamined, and so they define madness. By that reckoning, Madame de Villaplane wasn’t at all crazy, since she was totally aware of the obsessive desire that took hold of her: to run away with Kaminsky. To leave everything behind. She didn’t know which she wanted more—to be with Kaminsky or to leave town, but she knew that one was unthinkable without the other.

  In the person of Kaminsky, she had created a whole kingdom that appeared like a promised land where they would be reunited one day. That she’d be an old woman didn’t occur to her. She didn’t ask herself whether Kaminsky would consent to take her away—she was convinced she could compel him.

  Since Kaminsky had arrived in her household and prompted this dream, Madame de Villaplane had become more conscious of her past. She was horrified to contemplate what her life had been, and something like a demand for justice mixed with her love for Otto. It wasn’t possible that a woman’s existence could consist only of what hers had been. The idea of dying like that, with her hands empty, terrified her so much that she trembled, alone in her room. He had to take her away, she had to live with him for her last years, or else something would be wrong in the universe. Every being had to love, to be loved, or else . . . To love and be loved sooner or later. The sharp pinch of a wasted life, of lost time, gave her desire a pathetic force.

  Kaminsky, for his part, had suspected nothing. He saw nothing in her but an old woman who was a bit loony, and for a long time he continued to be an attentive guest, a man of the world, well-read, an art enthusiast—what he’d been from day one. But the day of Madame de Villaplane’s first scene he’d begun to open his eyes.

  One evening, without any justification for such treatment, Madame de Villaplane had burst into his room all of a sudden to ask him point-blank if he thought he was living in occupied territory and did he mean to bring all the worst of barracks behavior under her roof?

  It was so unexpected that he hadn’t known what to say, but he started to watch her closely. After the deluge of reproach she heaped upon him, he finally understood that she found him guilty of a serious breach in her house rules—because he had gone down to the kitchen in the middle of the night to scrounge a crust of bread. He admitted that he’d developed a craving right before bed. What could be more natural, more innocent in those circumstances than to go down to the kitchen? Madame de Villaplane didn’t want to hear it. In response to these explanations, she only yelled louder. Did he want to complain about her usual provisions? Did he, by any chance, think she starved her guests? And so on and so forth. And in the end she’d fallen into his arms for the first time, in a dead faint. He had to carry her all the way to her bed.

  Anyone else in Kaminsky’s place would have been in a hurry to leave the boardinghouse, but the fascination sparked by the scene kept him there. In any case, all had been forgiven the day after. But something fundamental had shifted in their relationship, and at the bottom of her heart Madame de Villaplane believed she had gained an advantage.

  It wasn’t until later, much later, when everything had become clear to Kaminsky—for the simple reason that she had told him everything—that he’d understood the reason for her curious outburst. The snacking incident had nothing to do with it. What mattered—after certain calculations he was sure of it—was that Madame de Villaplane had just learned about the affair he was having with Simone Point, the notary’s daughter,
and about his rental cottage, by the sea, where he went almost every day with Bacchiochi, the surgeon general, in the prefect’s very own car, driven by his chauffeur, Léo. And so it was a fit of jealousy, no doubt about it.

  Since then, there had been ups and downs. The scenes continued, and they took a new character, often leading to periods of sulking that lasted entire weeks.

  Nothing was more comical than the way they worked around each other. It was silently understood that they wouldn’t meet, wouldn’t even see or perceive each other’s presence in the house they shared.

  Madame de Villaplane therefore arranged to eat her meals alone, and sometimes she even had them carried to her room. But in the morning, when he left his room to go to the prefecture, Kaminsky would stand at the top of the stairs and call out: “Watch out! I’m coming through.”

  And for all the money in the world, as funny as he thought it was, he wouldn’t take another step before hearing Madame de Villaplane say, “The coast is clear!”

  For the moment, they were in a relatively calm period. It had been more than fifteen days since her last big scene, though it had to be said that this one had ended with a complete confession. She had, with an expression he was surprised to hear come out of her mouth, “let the cat out of the bag.”

  He’d listened to it all without protest. Afterward, he had given her a chaste kiss. Then he’d started to explain his view of love to her. It was exactly the same as Madame de Villaplane’s view. How intelligent Kaminsky was, how well he understood people! What an open mind, what a free spirit! Not for a second had he considered it ridiculous for an old woman to fall in love. He’d understood her, that was undeniable. On the question of running away together, he hadn’t said yes or no. “We’ll see . . .”

  They’d left it at that. Since then, they hadn’t spoken more about it. “Just a little patience.”

  But patience wasn’t Madame de Villaplane’s principle virtue. Wasn’t patience the same as watching the days go by without doing anything, like watching blood flow from a wound without even thinking of stanching it? She had no more time to lose.

  Since the day before, an anxiety had crept up on her, an inkling that everything wasn’t going as well as she’d thought for the past two weeks, that there was a threat. From certain surprising signs, she guessed Kaminsky was hiding things from her. The previous day, he had a funny smile when they parted after lunch. And he hadn’t come to dinner. He hadn’t come back from his cottage until very late that night, driven home by Léo, as always; she’d heard the car. What orgiastic scenes must take place in that cottage! If Kaminsky went there to meet his mistress, the others—that Léo and Surgeon General Bacchiochi—must also bring their girls. And not always the same ones. It was said that the good little bourgeoises of the town took turns going to assignations there. And wasn’t it also said that a certain Basquin, who had God knows what role at the camp for enemy aliens, furnished them with women chosen from the youngest and prettiest of the prisoners? And all this while she wasted away in her deserted boardinghouse, the devil take it. What time had he come home last night? Two a.m.

  Usually, when he was out, he stayed out all night, slept over in the arms of that little slut Simone Point. Why last night? And she couldn’t say anything about this breach of her rules. Hadn’t she, in a moment of folly, lifted, for him, the particular rule that required boarders to be home at nine—and even worse—hadn’t she given him a key?

  •

  He was still sleeping, no doubt. In any case, he hadn’t come down yet, even though it was late, and Madame de Villaplane wandered, sighing, around her house. What could she do? She had her breakfast served, the breakfast she had wanted to share with Kaminsky.

  The maid came in, brought the coffee, checked that everything was in order—the bread, the butter, the sugar, the jams—and went out.

  Madame de Villaplane ate with a ravishing grace. Her little porcelain hand lifted the toast with the delicacy of a cat. But her chest was tight and it seemed hard for her to swallow.

  The sky darkened, and everything in the dining room became even more somber, more boring. In their gold frames, the portraits of the colonel and the prefect seemed to scowl, as if in the depths of their deaths the father and grandfather had been dreaming and finally understood what life should have been. Madame de Villaplane discovered that the coffee was bad, too weak, and that the toast was not grilled, but burned. “God! Will I have to go on like this for much longer?”

  She went up to her room.

  Madame de Villaplane carefully closed her door. Then, pulling back the carpet, she stretched out on the floor and put her eye to a convenient hole. Kaminsky’s room was just below.

  In Madame de Villaplane’s defense, she hadn’t made the hole, or had anyone else make it for her. She’d simply taken advantage of the sorry state of the floor. One day, when Kaminsky was at the prefecture, she’d stuck her umbrella in the hole and poked away the thin film of plaster that plugged it. This was the extent of her guilt. To Kaminsky, who complained the next day about finding rubble in his bed and sarcastically asked if he should be expecting the whole ceiling to cave in on his face one day, she replied that he could move out if he wasn’t happy. It wasn’t her fault that the house was so old, that it had previously belonged to a man who’d never cared to pay for even one sou’s worth of repairs, that, after his suicide, it had been empty for years. Which was to say it had been in a state of total dilapidation when she’d acquired it, and to get it into some sort of shape had taken the very last sous that her children had seen fit to leave her. Voilà. If he wasn’t satisfied with that, he had only to say so.

  He was careful to keep quiet. Not for a second would he dream of finding a room elsewhere, even if he’d understood what it meant that this little hole had suddenly been poked in his ceiling. But he hadn’t figured it out, and Madame de Villaplane was the only one who knew about this vantage point. Even the maid was ignorant, since Madame de Villaplane cleaned her own room, and the maid only entered to bring meals or groom her mistress.

  Madame de Villaplane hadn’t thought for a second that it was dishonest and horrible to spy on Kaminsky. This habit became one of the costs of privation. She didn’t have an ounce of remorse. Spying was her vice. It bears noting that she surrounded herself with luxuries when she kept watch, as she put it, through the crack. Her watches went on for a long time, for hours. She’d even taken the care to arrange a whole assembly of blankets and cushions on the floor next to the peephole, so that she could stretch out there almost as comfortably as she did on her bed.

  Perhaps to a watching stranger, or to an abler spy, surveilling her in turn from a perch on the roof, this nice old lady would have provided quite a spectacle—stretched on her stomach in a nest of cushions, not moving a muscle! What a shiver would have passed through that stranger, if he could have seen the astonishing smile that sometimes crossed Madame de Villaplane’s face. But there were times when even the most talented spy wouldn’t have been able to see anything—when Madame de Villaplane darkened her own room and stayed at her lookout, still and scarcely breathing, her eye pressed to the bright pastille the hole made in the darkness, a clot of shadows in shadow. Then the watcher would be left to come to terms with his own suffering.

  That morning, Madame de Villaplane was in a rush. She threw herself down on the floor without thinking of her usual comforters and cushions. It wasn’t just for pleasure—not a job for an amateur—this was about knowing.

  She didn’t immediately understand what he was doing. When her gaze plunged straight down into his room, he was right below her, Kaminsky’s skull like the weight at the end of a plumb line, his handsome black head like the plumage of a crow. His hair combed, shiny with brilliantine, and parted down the middle like two wings. He didn’t move. Standing in the middle of the room, he was thinking, rubbing his hands together softly as if lathering them. And he was crooning. She hated it when he sang. She found it vulgar, and she grimaced. She was annoyed she coul
dn’t yell at him to be quiet. She shifted her position and pressed her ear to the hole.

  “To see it again, Pana-me

  Pana-me

  Pana-me . . .

  The Eiffel Tower, the place Blanche

  Notre Da-me

  The boulevards and the pretty Mada-mes . . .”

  So he was singing that, was he! She quickly looked in again. Standing now in front of the open doors of his wardrobe, he was singing loudly enough that Madame de Villaplane could hear him without turning her ear to the hole. She thought he must be looking for something like a hat, since he was dressed to go out, wearing his uniform, with only the jacket off. To her great astonishment, it wasn’t a hat he took out of the wardrobe, but its entire contents. And still singing. That vulgar song about Paname gave a rhythm to Kaminsky’s gestures as he threw all his linens onto the bed along with his clothes, his books, magazines and newspapers. What had got into him? Had he decided to undertake an inventory of all his possessions? Did he think someone had robbed him and that the boardinghouse was a den of cutthroats? Madame de Villaplane didn’t understand at all what he was planning, and when she saw him bend down and pull his suitcase from the bottom of the wardrobe, she couldn’t bear to realize. But she felt herself stiffen and die at her lookout. She even stopped watching for a moment, closing her eyes, filling herself up with shadows. He’s leaving. This was what had been looming for the last two weeks! This was why he’d had such a funny smile the night before. Now the carefully kept secret was revealed—the cruel executioner! Since when had he been planning this blow? From the very beginning no doubt, the very first bouquet he’d given her—poison under the roses. Oh the traitor, the liar, the two-faced man! Crazed with rage she rolled over, contorting on the floor like an epileptic in a seizure, her hands clenched in the rug. Then she glued her eye to the crack and didn’t move.