And then you remembered the flashlight in the forest—the beam of yellow light on your face, and his voice, expressionless, saying, “It’s you, all right.”
Okay, so it was you.
II
The Poison
1
Richard Lafargue rose early that Monday morning. His day would be busy. He went straight to the pool and swam a few laps, then took his breakfast on the lawn, enjoying the early morning sunshine as he absently scanned the headlines of the daily papers.
Roger was waiting for him at the wheel of the Mercedes. Before leaving, though, he paid a visit to Eve, who was still asleep. He slapped her gently awake. She sat straight up, startled. The sheet slipped aside, and Richard noticed the graceful curve of her breasts. With the tip of his forefinger he caressed her, tracing a path from her ribcage to the point of her nipple.
She could not help laughing; she seized his hand and drew it to her belly. Richard flinched. Straightening up, he started for the door. Once there, he turned. Eve had tossed the sheet off altogether and held out welcoming arms. It was his turn to laugh.
“Bastard!” she hissed. “You’re dying for it!”
He shrugged, turned on his heel, and disappeared.
Half an hour later, he was at the hospital in the center of Paris where he ran an internationally renowned plastic surgery department. But he spent only his mornings there and devoted his afternoons to a private clinic he owned in Boulogne.
He shut himself in his office to study the file on an operation scheduled for that day. His assistants waited impatiently. After taking the time he needed to think the case over, he donned scrubs and headed for the operating room.
The room was surmounted by a glassed-in gallery with tiered seating. Today there was a goodly number of spectators, doctors and students. They listened attentively to Lafargue’s voice, distorted by the loudspeakers, as he expounded the procedure.
“Well, what we have here, on forehead and cheeks, are large keloid plaques, the result of burns from the explosion of volatile chemicals. The nasal pyramid is virtually nonexistent, the eyelids have been destroyed. You are looking at perfect indications for treatment by means of tubular skin flaps. We shall be drawing for this purpose upon both the arm and the abdomen.”
With the help of a scalpel, Lafargue was already cutting large rectangles of skin from the patient’s stomach. Above him, the spectators’ faces pressed against the glass. An hour later he was able to show a first result: skin flaps sown into tubes had left the subject’s arm and abdomen and been grafted to his burn-ravaged face. Doubly anchored, they would serve to rebuild the completely ruinous facial integument.
The patient was wheeled out. Lafargue removed his surgical mask and finished his commentary.
“In this case, the plan of action was determined by what needed the most urgent attention. It goes without saying that this sort of intervention will have to be repeated a number of times before a fully satisfactory outcome can be achieved.”
He thanked his audience for their attention and left the operating room. It was past noon. Lafargue set off for a nearby restaurant. On the way, he happened to pass a perfumery. He went in and bought a bottle of scent, intending to present it to Eve that evening.
After lunch, Roger drove him to Boulogne. His visiting hours began at two. Lafargue hurried his patients along: a young mother and her son and his harelip, and a whole raft of noses—Monday was the day for noses: broken noses, overlarge noses, deviated noses … Lafargue palpated faces to left and right of the septum and showed before-and-after photographs. Most of his patients were women, but he saw a few men, too.
When the consultations were over, he worked on his own, catching up on the latest American journals. Roger came for him at six.
Once back at Le Vésinet, he knocked on Eve’s door and slid back the bolts. She was seated at the piano naked, playing a sonata, and she seemed not to register Richard’s presence. At the piano stool, she kept her back to him. Locks of her curly black hair bounced on her shoulders, her head bobbing as her fingers struck the keyboard. He admired the flesh and the muscles of her back, the dimples at its base, her buttocks … Without warning, she abandoned the light, fluid sonata and launched into the tune Richard so hated. She hummed along in a throaty voice, stressing the low notes: “Some day, he’ll come along, the man I love…” Then she deliberately hit a wrong note, stopped playing, and span the stool around with a twist of her hips. She sat facing Richard, her thighs apart, her fists on her knees, in an attitude of obscene defiance.
For a few moments he was unable to take his eyes off the dark fleece that covered her pubis. She frowned, and then with deliberation spread her legs even wider and slid a finger into the fissure of her sex, separating the labia and moaning.
“Stop it!” Richard shouted.
Gauchely, he proffered the bottle of perfume he had bought that morning. She looked him over sardonically. He placed the gift on the piano and tossed her a robe, demanding that she cover herself.
Batting it aside, she leaped to her feet and ran to him all smiles, pressing herself against him. She wrapped her arms around Richard’s neck and rubbed her breasts against his torso. He was forced to twist her wrists to get free.
“Get ready!” he ordered her. “It’s been a magnificent day. We’re going out.”
“Should I dress like a whore?”
He went for her, taking her by the throat with one hand and holding her away from him. He repeated his order. But she was in pain and suffocating, and he had to release her immediately.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “But please, please, get dressed.”
He went back down to the ground floor, anxious. To calm himself, he decided to look at his mail. He hated having to deal with the material details of household management, but after Eve’s arrival he had been obliged to discharge the person he had previously relied on to handle the minor paperwork.
He worked on the overtime due Roger and on Lise’s upcoming paid days off, but he got the hourly wage wrong and had to start over again. He was still poring over his papers when Eve appeared in the drawing room.
She was stunning in a low-necked black lamé dress, a string of pearls about her throat. When she leaned over him, her pallid skin was redolent with the perfume he had just given her.
She smiled at him and took his arm. He got behind the wheel of the Mercedes, and a few minutes later they were walking side by side in the forest of Saint-Germain, which was full of strollers attracted by the mildness of the evening.
She had her head on his shoulder. They didn’t speak for a time, and then he told her about his operation of that morning.
“You’re boring the shit out of me!” She spoke in a singsong voice.
He fell silent, a little vexed. She had taken his hand and was watching him in apparent amusement. She made for a bench.
“Richard?”
He seemed distracted. She had to call his name again. He came and sat next to her.
“I’d like to see the sea. It’s been such a long time. I used to love swimming, you know. A day—just one. Let’s go and see the sea. I’ll do whatever you want, after…”
He shrugged, explaining that that wasn’t the problem.
“I promise you I won’t run off.”
“Your promises are worthless! Anyway, you already do whatever I want.”
With a gesture of irritation, he asked her to be quiet. They walked a little more, as far as the water’s edge. Young people were windsurfing on the Seine.
“I’m hungry!” she announced, and waited for Richard’s response. He offered to take her to supper at a restaurant not far away.
They chose a table on a leafy terrace. A waiter came and took their order. Eve ate heartily; Richard barely touched his food. She had the greatest difficulty getting a spiny lobster tail out of its shell and in frustration produced a little-girl tantrum. He could not help laughing at her. She joined in, and Richard’s features froze. My God, he thought
, there are moments when she seems almost happy! It’s incredible—and unfair!
Perceiving the change in Lafargue’s attitude, she decided to put the situation to good use. She gestured for him to lean over to her, then whispered in his ear.
“Richard, listen. That waiter, over there, he hasn’t been able to take his eyes off me since the beginning of the meal. I could arrange things for later…”
“Shut up!”
“But I’m serious. I can go to the toilet, make a rendezvous with him, and have him screw me later, in the bushes.”
He had drawn away from her, but she went on whispering, more loudly now, and laughing derisively.
“So you don’t want to? If you hide, you can watch everything. I’ll make sure to get us close to you. Look at him—he’s positively drooling!”
He blew cigarette smoke full into her face. But she didn’t stop.
“No? Really? Not like that, the quick in-and-out. I’d just lift up my dress … You used to like that, though, at the beginning, didn’t you?”
And it was true: “at the beginning,” Richard would take Eve into the park, the Bois de Vincennes or the Bois de Boulogne, and make her offer herself to men on the prowl. Then he would observe her humiliation from the cover of a hedge. But later, for fear of getting caught in a police sweep, which would have been catastrophic, he had rented the studio apartment in Rue Godot-de-Mauroy. There he prostituted Eve on a regular basis two or three times a month. This sufficed to assuage his loathing.
“You’re determined to be insufferable today, aren’t you, my dear? I’m almost sorry for you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She is provoking me, he thought. She would have me believe she is quite happy to be in the slime where I force her to live. She wants me to think she gets pleasure from degrading herself.
Eve kept up her act, even risking a wink at the waiter, who turned as red as a turkey cock.
“Come on, we’re going now. We’ve had quite enough of that. If you are so keen to ‘please me,’ we can go tomorrow for your appointments, or maybe I’ll even ask you to do a little streetwalking…”
Eve smiled and took his hand so as not to lose face; but he knew perfectly well how mortifying all those metered encounters were for her and how much she suffered every time he made her sell herself: sometimes, through the one-way mirror in the studio apartment, he saw her eyes welling with tears and her face contorted as she strove to contain her distress. At such moments he reveled in this suffering, which was his only comfort.
They returned to the house at Le Vésinet. Eve ran across the grounds, undressed swiftly, and dived into the pool with a cry of joy. She splashed about in the water, disappearing beneath the surface for quick breath-holding bursts.
When she climbed out of the pool, Lafargue wrapped her in a large Turkish towel and vigorously rubbed her dry. She let him do it, staring up at the stars. Then he walked her up to her flat, where, as on every other evening, she stretched out on the rush mat. He busied himself with the pipe and the balls of opium, and brought the drug to her.
“Richard,” she murmured, “you really are the biggest bastard I have ever met…”
He made sure that she finished her daily dose. He need not have bothered: she had been missing it sorely for some time already.
After thirst came hunger. To the dryness of your throat, to the feeling that sharp-edged stones were ripping at your mouth, were added deep, diffuse pains in your belly, like hands wrenching at your stomach, filling it with bile and making it cramp horribly.
For days now (and the pain was so bad, it must surely be days), you had been crouching in your hole. But it was more than a hole, in fact, for it seemed to you, though you had no way of being certain, that the place where you were held captive was vast. The echo of your cries off the walls and eyes now accustomed to the dark almost convinced you that you could see the boundaries of your prison.
You raved continually, hour after interminable hour. Slumped on your litter, you no longer sat up. From time to time you raged against your shackles, biting at the metal and producing little growls, like some wild animal.
Once, long ago, you had seen a film, a documentary on hunting, with pitiful images of a fox, its paw in a trap, tearing at its own flesh, ripping it off in shreds, until the trap’s grip was loose enough for the beast to free itself and make off, mutilated.
But you could not bite at your wrists or ankles. They were bloody, nevertheless, from the incessant chafing between skin and metal. The flesh was hot, swollen. Had you still been rational, you would have feared gangrene, infection, the decay that, starting from your extremities, could invade your entire body.
But you dreamed only of water, rushing torrents, pouring rain—anything at all that could be drunk. You urinated with the greatest difficulty, and each time the pain in your back would be more violent. There would be a burning sensation running down through your penis, but only a few drops of hot piss would dribble forth. You sprawled in your own excrement; dried plaques of shit stuck to your skin.
Oddly, your sleep was untroubled. You slept profoundly, felled by fatigue, but your awakenings were atrocious and accompanied by hallucinations. Monstrous creatures lay in wait for you in the dark, ready to pounce and sink their teeth into you. You thought you heard claws scratching at the cement; you thought you saw the yellow eyes of rats in the shadows, watching you.
You called out for Alex, but your cry emerged as a scraping sound in your throat. If only Alex were there, he would have freed you from your chains. Alex would have known what to do. He would have come up with a solution, employed some peasant ruse. Alex! He should have been looking for you since you disappeared. Which was how long ago now? HOW LONG?
And then HE came. One day—or one night, for there was no way of telling. A door—right across from you—was opened: a rectangle of light that blinded you at first.
The door closed once more, but HE had entered. His presence filled your prison.
You held your breath, listened for the merest sound, and crouched motionless against the wall like a terrified cockroach caught in a sudden glare. You might as well have been an insect captured by a bloated spider and kept on hand for an eventual meal, when she would savor you at her leisure, whenever the whim arose to taste your blood. You pictured her furry legs, her great bulbous merciless eyes, her soft belly gorged with meat, throbbing, spongy, and her venomous jaws, her black maw preparing to suck the life out of you.
All at once you were dazzled by a powerful spotlight. There you lay, sole actor in the drama of your imminent death, ready for the last act. You made out a figure, a silhouette seated in an armchair ten or twelve feet in front of you. But you could not discern the monster’s features, lost in the blackness behind the light. He had crossed his legs and clasped his hands under his chin; he was contemplating you motionlessly.
You made a superhuman effort to get up and, on your knees, your hands palm to palm as though in prayer, you pleaded for something to drink. The words became jumbled on their way out of your mouth. Stretching your arms out toward him, you begged.
He did not respond. You stammered your name: Vincent Moreau, monsieur. There’s been a mistake, monsieur. I am Vincent Moreau. You passed out.
When you came around, he was gone. Then the true meaning of despair was borne in upon you. The spotlight was still on you. You saw your body, the pus-filled boils, the streaked dirt, the skin rubbed raw by the shackles, the crusted shit on your thighs, the long fingernails.
The violent white light made you weep. Another good stretch of time passed before he came back. Once again he sat down in the armchair facing you. At his feet he had placed an object that you identified instantly. A pitcher! Water? You were on your knees, on all fours, head bowed. He approached you. He poured the water in the pitcher over your head, all at once. You lapped at the puddle forming on the floor. You stroked your hair with trembling hands to squeeze out the moisture, which you licked from your palms.
He laughed. The little childish laugh you had heard before, in the forest.
He came back often with water. His figure still seemed immense to you behind the spotlight. His enormous menacing shadow filled the room. But you were no longer afraid, for he gave you water, and you read this as a sign that he meant to keep you alive.
Later, he brought you a tin bowl containing a reddish broth with meatballs floating in it. He plunged one hand into the bowl, grabbing your hair and pulling your head back with the other. You ate from his hand, sucked on his sauce-slick fingers. It was good. He left you to finish the food by yourself, flat on your belly, your face plunged into the bowl. Soon not a trace of the swill that your master had brought you was to be seen.
Day after day, the soup was always the same. Your jailer would come in, give you the bowl and the pitcher, and watch you guzzle. Then he would leave, always with the little laugh.
You regained your strength by degrees. You set a little water aside to wash with and always eased yourself at the same place, beyond the edge of the oilcloth.
Insidiously, hope was returning: your master wanted you…
Alex started violently. The sound of a car engine had intruded upon the silence of the garrigue. He consulted his watch: seven in the morning. He yawned. His mouth was dry, his tongue thick from the alcohol—beer followed by gin—that he had imbibed during the night before getting to sleep.
Tarantula Page 3