He grabbed the binoculars and focused on the road. The Dutch tourist family at full complement had packed themselves into a Land Rover, the kids clutching buckets and spades. A day at the seaside in prospect. The young mother wore a bikini, and her heavy breasts strained at the thin material of the swimsuit. Alex was suffering from a morning erection. How long was it since he had been with a woman? Six weeks or more? Yes, the last time had been a farm girl. A distant memory now.
Her name was Annie, a friend from childhood. He could see her still, her red hair in braids, playing in the schoolyard. In another life, almost forgotten: the life of Alex the klutz, Alex the hayseed. Just before the bank hold-up, he had paid a visit to his parents. No doubt about their still being hicks!
He had driven into their farmyard one rainy afternoon in his car, a Ford with a roaring engine. His father stood waiting for him on the front steps. Alex felt proud of his clothes, his shoes, his new-man appearance with every last whiff of the soil gone.
He made a bit of a face at first, the father. Playing the village bullyboy as a nightclub bouncer did not seem to him like much of a trade. Still, it must pay well—you only had to look at the kid’s outfit! Alex’s manicured hands and fingernails were not lost on the older man, either, and he broke into a smile of welcome.
The two of them had sat facing each other in the main room. The father had brought out the customary bread, the salami, the pâté, and the liter of red and started eating. Alex merely lit a cigarette, ignoring the mustard glass of wine that had been poured for him. The mother contemplated them in silence without taking a seat. Louis and René, the farm boys, were there, too. What could they talk about? The weather they were having? The weather they were about to have? Before long, Alex got up, gave his father an affectionate punch on the shoulder, and went out onto the village’s main street. Window curtains were discreetly pulled aside as the locals took a furtive look at the Barnys’ boy, the bad one, as he went by.
Alex went into the Café des Sports and, just showing off, bought everyone a round. A few old men were playing cards, thumping loudly on the table as they laid out their hands, and two or three youngsters pushed and shoved one another at a pinball machine. Alex was delighted with the impression he made. He shook hands with everyone and drank to the health of one and all.
Back in the street, he passed Madame Moreau, Vincent’s mother. She was a good-looking woman, tall, graceful, and well turned out. Or rather, she had been—for right after her son’s disappearance she had fallen apart, withered, and taken to dressing sloppily at all times. She slouched and dragged her feet as she made her way to the minimarket to do her shopping.
Every week, as regular as clockwork, Madame Moreau paid a ritual visit to the police station in Meaux in search of news of her missing son. All hope of finding him had been abandoned four years ago now. She had placed notices in all the papers, with Vincent’s photo, to no avail. The police had told her that there were thousands of disappearances in France every year, and most of the time no trace of the missing person was ever found. Vincent’s bike was in the garage; the police had returned it to her after a thorough examination. The fingerprints on it were Vincent’s. The machine had been found lying on an embankment with its front wheel buckled and no gas in the tank. A search of the forest around had turned up nothing.
Alex spent that night in the village. It was Saturday, and there was a dance. Annie was there, her hair as red as ever, her limbs a little thicker. She worked at the bean cannery in the next village over. Alex danced a slow number with her, then took her walking in the woods nearby. They made love in his car, lying uncomfortably on its reclining seats.
The next day, after kissing his folks goodbye, Alex left. Eight days later, he held up the Crédit Agricole branch and killed the cop. Everyone in the village must have clipped the front page of the paper with Alex’s picture on it, along with the picture of the cop and his family.
Alex unrolled his bandage: his wound was inflamed, its edges bright red. He sprinkled his thigh with the powder his friend had given him, then bound himself up again, pulling the bandage good and tight over the fresh dressing.
His hard-on was still there, almost painful itself. He masturbated furiously, thinking about Annie. He had never had a lot of girls. He usually had to pay them. It had been much better when Vincent was around. Vincent had chicks falling all over him in droves. They often went to dances, the two of them. Vincent would dance; he would get every cool girl from miles around to dance with him. Alex used to sit at the bar and drink beer. Watching Vincent doing his number. Vincent smiled at the girls with his great smile. It had them eating out of his hand. There was a motion of the head he had, cute, a sort of come-on, and then his hands would be roving up and down his partner’s back, from her thighs to her shoulders, caressing her. He would bring girls over to the bar and introduce them to Alex.
If things worked out, Alex would go with the girl after Vincent, but things didn’t always work out. Some of them simply couldn’t help putting on airs and graces. And they didn’t always like Alex, who was muscular, hairy as an ape, and very solidly built. No, they would rather have Vincent—puny, hairless, delicate Vincent with his oh-so-pretty face!
Lost in thoughts of an earlier time, Alex jerked off. Laboriously mobilizing his shaky memory, he tried to pass all the girls he had shared with Vincent in rapid review. And to think that Vincent had abandoned him! The bastard! He was probably in America by now, getting laid by starlets!
A naked calendar girl adorned the whitewashed wall next to Alex’s bed. He closed his eyes as warm creamy sperm flowed into his hand. He wiped himself off with a spare dressing and went down to the kitchen to make coffee. He made it very strong. As the water was heating, he thrust his head under the tap, pushing aside the piles of dirty dishes that cluttered the sink.
He sipped from his steaming bowl of coffee and chewed on the remains of a sandwich. Outside, it was already stifling, the sun now high in the sky. Alex turned the radio on and listened to a quiz show on Radio Luxembourg called The Suitcase. He didn’t give a shit about the show, but he enjoyed hearing the losers getting the answers wrong and failing to collect the money they wanted so much.
He didn’t give a shit because he had not lost the money. In his suitcase—which wasn’t so much a suitcase, more a bag—were four million francs. A fortune. He had counted the wads of bills, over and over. New, crackling bills. He had looked in the dictionary to see who these people were whose likenesses were printed on the notes: Voltaire, Pascal, Berlioz. How weird, to have your photo on a banknote—rather like being turned into a bit of money yourself.
He stretched out on the couch and returned to his pastime, a jigsaw with more than two thousand pieces. A château in the Valley of the Loire: Langeais. He was close to getting it done. In the attic, the first day, he had come across several Heller model kits, complete with glue, paint, and decals. So he had built Stukas and Spitfires, as well as a car—a 1935 Hispano-Suiza. They all stood on the floor now, mounted on their plastic bases and carefully painted. When he ran out of kits, Alex built a model of his parents’ farm: the two main buildings, the outbuildings, the fences. By gluing matches together he achieved a clumsy, naive, touching replica. All that was missing was the tractor, so he cut one out of a piece of cardboard. Later, on a return visit to the attic, he turned up the jigsaw puzzle…
The farmhouse where he was hiding out belonged to a friend of his, a guy he had met working as a nightclub bouncer. You could spend a few weeks there without fear of unannounced visits from curious neighbors. The friend had also supplied him with a phony identity card, but Alex’s now notorious face was liable to be displayed in every police station in France, and in the “most wanted” section, to boot. The cops hate it when one of their own gets killed.
The pieces of the puzzle obstinately refused to fit together. Alex was working on part of the sky. It was all blue, very hard to do. The château’s turrets, the drawbridge—all that had been easy, but
the sky was another matter. Cloudless and empty, it was very tricky. Alex got irritated, which made him try even more unlikely joins; he was continually assembling patches of sky only to pull them apart again.
On the floor, just near the board on which he had laid out the jigsaw, crawled a spider. A squat and repulsive spider. She picked a corner of the wall and set about spinning a web. The thread flowed continually from her rounded abdomen. She came and went carefully and laboriously. With a match, Alex set fire to the just-completed portion of her web. The spider panicked, checking her surroundings, looking out for the advent of some enemy; but since the concept of matches was not inscribed in her genes, she soon went back to work.
She spun tirelessly, joining up her thread, anchoring it to rough spots on the wall, making use of every splinter of wood in the floor. Alex found a dead mosquito and tossed it into the newly constructed web. The spider rushed over, circled this carrion, but disdained it. Alex divined the reason for her lack of interest: the mosquito was already dead. Hobbling, he went out to the front steps, delicately gathered up a moth hiding under a tile, and placed it in the web.
The moth struggled to escape the viscous toils. The spider promptly reappeared, turning the prey this way and that before weaving a cocoon for it and storing the insect in a crack in the wall, safe for a future feast.
Eve was sitting at her dressing table, examining her face in the mirror. A childish face, with great sad almond-shaped eyes. Touching her index finger softly to the skin of her jaw, she felt the hardness of the bone, the sharpness of the chin, the relief of the teeth through the fleshy mass of the lips. Her cheekbones were prominent and her nose turned up; it was a delicately shaped, perfectly rounded nose.
She turned her head slightly, tipped the mirror, and was herself surprised by the strange expression that her reflection had elicited. There was almost too much perfection, and such radiant charm created a sort of malaise in her. She had never known a man who could resist her attraction or remain indifferent to her glance. No man could pierce her aura of mystery or pin down the quality that invested her every gesture with an enrapturing ambiguity. She drew them all to her, piquing their interest, arousing their desire, playing on the tension they felt once in her presence.
The outward signs of this seductiveness filled her with an ambivalent calm: she would have liked to repel them, put them to flight, free herself of them, provoke repugnance in them; and yet the fascination she exercised without wanting it was her only revenge, paltry in its very infallibility.
She made herself up, then took the easel from its case and spread out the paints and brushes and resumed work on a canvas that she had in hand. It was a portrait of Richard, vulgar and crudely executed. She showed him seated on a bar stool with legs apart, cross-dressed as a woman, a cigarette-holder in his mouth, wearing a pink dress and black stockings held up by a garter-belt; his feet were crammed into high-heeled shoes.
He was smiling beatifically, even idiotically. Grotesque falsies made of old rags hung pathetically over his flaccid belly. Painted with obsessive precision, the face was covered with red blotches. No viewer of the picture could have failed to supply a voice for this pathetic, monstrous caricature: the rasping croak of a broken-down fishwife.
No, your master had not killed you. Later, you came to regret it. For the moment, he was treating you better. He would come and give you showers, spraying you with tepid water from a garden hose, even letting you have a piece of soap.
The spotlight stayed on all the time. The darkness had given way to its blinding light, artificial, cold, and incessant.
For hours at a time your master would stay with you, sitting in an armchair opposite you, scrutinizing your slightest movement.
At the start of these “observation” sessions, you dared say nothing, for fear of arousing his ire, for fear that at night thirst and hunger would return to punish you for this crime whose nature was still a mystery to you but which you were apparently doomed to expiate.
But then you got your courage up. Timidly, you asked him what the date was, to find out how long you had been locked up here. He replied immediately, smiling: the twenty-third of October. So, he had been holding you captive for over two months. Two months of being hungry and thirsty—and how long eating from his hand, licking that tin plate, lying prostrate at his feet, being washed with a hose?
You wept then, asked why he was doing all this to you. This time he said nothing. You could see his face, which was impenetrable, crowned by white hair: a face with a certain nobility about it—a face that, possibly, you had seen somewhere before.
He kept coming into your prison and staying there, sitting before you, impassive. He would disappear only to return a little later. The nightmares of your early days of incarceration were gone. Could he be slipping tranquilizers into your rations? True, your anxiety was still there, but its object had changed. You were sure of staying alive, for otherwise, you reasoned, he would have killed you already. His intent was not to let you slowly agonize, shrivel up, and die. It was, therefore, something else…
A little later, your meal routine was changed. Your master set up a folding table and a stool for you. He gave you a plastic knife and fork like the ones they give you on airplanes. A plate replaced the tin bowl. And real meals soon followed: fruit, vegetables, cheese. You took enormous pleasure in eating as you mulled over your memories of the first days.
You were still chained up, but your master cared for the abrasions on your wrists caused by the shackles. You would spread cream on the sores, and he would wind an elastic bandage round your wrist beneath the steel cuffs.
Everything was going better, but still he said nothing. You told your life story. He listened with the greatest interest. His silence was intolerable to you. You had to talk, to tell and retell your stories, to recount your childhood, to stupefy yourself with words, merely to prove to him that you were not an animal!
Later still, your diet was suddenly improved once more. Now you were entitled to wine, to refined dishes that he must have had delivered by a caterer. The tableware was luxurious. Chained to your wall, naked as ever, you stuffed yourself with caviar, salmon, sorbets, and fancy pastries.
He sat beside you, serving you the food. He brought in a cassette player, and you listened to Chopin and Liszt.
As for the humiliating issue of the calls of nature, there too he became more humane, providing a conveniently placed waste bucket.
A time came at last when he allowed you to leave the wall at certain times. He released you from your fetters and led you around the cellar on a leash. You wandered slowly in a circle, round and round the spotlight.
To make the time pass more quickly, your master brought books. Classics: Balzac, Stendhal…In high school you had hated such works, but now, alone in your hole, sitting cross-legged on your patch of oilcloth or leaning your elbows on the folding table, you devoured them.
Little by little, your leisure took on substance. Your master took care to vary its pleasures. A stereo system appeared, complete with records; even an electronic chess set. Soon the time began to fly by. He had adjusted the brightness of the spotlight so that it no longer dazzled you, hanging a rag over the bulb to subdue the glare. The cellar filled with shadows, including your own, multiplied.
By virtue of all these changes, the absence of any brutality from your master, and the increasing luxury that gradually offset your solitude, you began to forget or at least to repress your fear. Your nakedness and the chains that still held you became an incongruity.
The walks around on the leash continued. You were a cultivated, intelligent beast. You suffered from memory lapses; at times you became acutely aware of the unreality, even the absurdity of your predicament. Of course, you had a burning desire for answers from your master, but he discouraged all questions, concerning himself exclusively with your material comfort. What would you like for supper? Did you enjoy the recording? And so on.
What about your village? Your mother? Were
n’t people searching for you? The faces of your friends were fading from your memory, melding into a thick fog. You could no longer recall Alex’s features or the color of his hair. You talked to yourself a lot; you would catch yourself humming children’s songs. Your distant past returned in violent and chaotic waves; images from your long-forgotten childhood would reemerge unannounced in startling clarity, only to dissipate in their turn into a vague mist. Time itself expanded and contracted alarmingly. A minute, two hours, ten years?—you no longer knew the difference.
Your master noticed how this troubled you and gave you an alarm clock. You began to count the hours, avidly watching the progress of the hands on the clock. Time itself was a fiction: what did it matter if it was ten in the morning or ten at night? No, the important thing was that now you could once again regulate your life: at noon I am hungry, at midnight I am tired. A rhythm: something to hang on to.
Several more weeks had gone by. Among your master’s gifts, you had found a pad of paper, pencils, and an eraser. You had begun to draw, clumsily at first, until your old facility returned. You sketched faceless portraits, mouths, confused landscapes, the ocean, immense cliffs, a giant hand creating waves. You scotch-taped these drawings to the wall; they helped you forget the bare concrete beneath.
In your head you had given your master a name. You dared not pronounce it in his presence, needless to say. You called him “Mygale,” in memory of your past terrors. “Mygale”—a feminine-sounding name, the name of a repulsive animal that corresponded neither to his sex nor to the great refinement he displayed when choosing gifts for you.
But “Mygale,” nevertheless, because he was just like a spider, slow and secretive, cruel and ferocious, obsessed yet impenetrable in his designs, hidden somewhere in this dwelling where he had held you captive for months: this luxury web, this gilded cage where he was the jailer and you the prisoner.
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