Tarantula

by Thierry Jonquet

  After a time, you stopped weeping. To forget, you painted or spent long hours at the piano. Nothing changed. Mygale visited you more and more frequently. It was ridiculous. You had known each other for two years; he had destroyed all shame in you: at the beginning of your imprisonment, you used to relieve yourself in front of him. But now, you would hide your breasts from him. You were continually pulling your dressing gown closed in front. Mygale had had you try on a bra. It served no good purpose, because your tits were hard and firm. But you felt better with it: in bra and blouse you were far more at ease.

  As earlier with the chains, the cellar, or the injections, you gradually got used to your new body; in the end, it felt perfectly familiar. And, after all, what good did thinking do?

  There was your hair, too. In the early days, Mygale used to cut it. Then he let it grow. Whether or not because of the shots, the capsules, and the vials, it became fluffier. Mygale gave you shampoos, even a blow-dryer. You took pleasure in taking care of it. You tried various styles, a chignon, a ponytail, then you adopted curls and stuck with them.

  He is going to kill you. It is hot in the cellar; the old thirst is coming back. Not long ago, he hosed you down with icy water, but you weren’t allowed to drink.

  You are waiting for death. Nothing matters anymore. You remember high school, the village, the girls—yes, the girls. And your pal Alex. You will never see any of them again; you will never see anything again. You had grown used to solitude; your only company was Mygale. At times you felt waves of nostalgia, attacks of depression. He gave you tranquilizers, swamped you with presents…The bastard! All that, and you end up like this!

  What is he waiting for? Is he devising refinements of cruelty, planning the mise-en-scène of your demise? Will he kill you with his own hands or hand you over to some Varneroy?

  No! The fact is he can no longer stand anyone else touching you, even approaching you. You could see that by the way he struck that nutty Varneroy. He had really been hurting you with his whip.

  Could it be your own fault? You had been mocking him recently. No sooner did he enter your room, if you were at the piano, than you would play him “The Man I Love,” a tune you knew he loathed. Or else—and this was more perverse—you would be outrageously provocative. He has lived alone for many years. Did he once have a mistress? No—he is incapable of love.

  You noticed how uncomfortable he was when he saw you naked. You were certain he wanted you, but was repelled by the idea of touching you—which was, of course, understandable enough. Still, he desired you. You were always walking around naked in your room. Once, you pivoted round to face him on your piano stool, spread your thighs, and opened your vulva in front of him. You saw his Adam’s apple shift; you saw him redden. That was what made him even more furious: to want you, after everything he had done to you; to want you, despite what you were!

  How long is he going to let you rot in this cellar? The first time, after the chase in the forest, he had left you for eight days there in the darkness. Eight days! He had admitted it to you later.

  If only you had not toyed with his desires, perhaps he would not be taking his revenge on you like this now?

  And yet, it is silly to think about it like that: the problem is Viviane—Viviane, crazy as a cuckoo for the last four years. The more the time goes by, the more obvious it is that she is incurable. And he just can’t accept that. He just can’t admit that that wreck is his own daughter. How old is she now? She was sixteen, so now she’s twenty. And you? You were twenty, and now you’re twenty-four…

  It’s not fair, to die at twenty-four. Die? You’ve been dead for two years already! Vincent died two years ago. What does it matter about the ghost he left behind?

  Just a ghost—but a ghost that can still feel pain, infinite pain. True, you don’t want him to go on pawing you, and pawing is the word—you have had a bellyful of his tricks, his sick manipulations. But now you are going to suffer more—God knows what he is capable of thinking up. He is an expert when it comes to torture; he has already proved that to you.

  You are trembling. You want to smoke. You miss the opium: yesterday he gave you some, and you took it. That moment, always in the evening, when he comes to see you and fills the pipe for you, is one of your greatest delights. The first time, you were nauseated, you threw up. But he persisted. It was the day you could no longer deny the evidence of your eyes: your breasts were getting larger! He caught you by surprise in your cellar, weeping. To console you, he offered you a new record. But you showed him your breasts: your throat was tight; you could not utter a word. He left and came back a few minutes later with the necessaries: the pipe and the greasy little balls. A poisoned gift. Mygale is a spider with more poisons than one. You let yourself be talked into it, and thereafter it was you who asked for the drug if he ever forgot the daily ritual. The disgust for opium you felt in the first days is long gone. One day, after smoking, you fell asleep in his arms. You exhaled the last puffs from the pipe; he sat close up against you on the sofa. Mechanically, he caressed your cheek, stroking the smooth skin. Unwittingly, you had helped him transform you, for your beard had never developed. As kids, you and Alex had watched eagerly for the first whiskers to appear, the first down on the upper lip. It was not long before Alex had grown a moustache, sparse at first but soon quite thick. As for you, not a hair manifested itself. For Mygale, this was simply one less thing to worry about. Of course—and he told you this himself—it wouldn’t have made any difference: the estrogen injections would have made you smooth-cheeked, anyway. Still, you hated yourself for corresponding so well to his intent, with your beautiful girlish face, as Alex used to say once upon a time…

  As for your delicate, finely jointed body, it had driven Mygale wild. He had asked you, one evening, if you were homosexual too. You did not understand this “too.” No, you were not queer. The temptation might have entered your mind now and then, but no, there had never really been anything like that. And Mygale was not that way, as you had suspected at first. You thought of the time he had approached you, to feel you. You had mistaken his examination for a caress. You were still chained up, remember, it was right at the beginning. Timidly, you had reached out to touch him. And he had struck you!

  You had been shattered. Why was he holding you captive if not to put you to use as a sexual plaything? That was the only explanation you had been able to find for the treatment he had meted out to you. He had to be a vile homosexual maniac in need of a tame boy-toy. This thought filled you with rage at first, but then you told yourself: to hell with it, I’ll play the game, let him do what he wants to me. But one day I’ll get away, and I’ll come back with Alex, and we’ll blow his head off!

  But it was a different game you ended up playing, drawn in gradually, unknowingly. A board game whose rules were set by Mygale: a game of snakes and ladders you were bound to lose. One square for torture, another for a gift; one square for injections, another for the piano. One square for Vincent—another for Eve!

  Lafargue had had an exhausting afternoon, operating for hours on a child with a badly burned face. The skin of the neck had retracted, obliging him to perform a laborious series of small grafts.

  He dismissed Roger upon leaving the hospital and returned alone to Le Vésinet, stopping on the way at a florist and having him put together a magnificent bouquet.

  When he saw the door to Eve’s upstairs rooms unbolted and wide open, he dropped his flowers and flew up the stairs in great alarm. The piano stool had been knocked over and a vase broken. A dress and underclothes were strewn across the floor. The bedspread was nowhere to be seen. A pair of high-heeled shoes, one half-mangled, lay forlornly by the bed.

  Richard recalled his mild surprise at discovering the gate to the property open, though Roger had closed it behind them that morning. Could a delivery person have left it like that? Lise would certainly have placed some orders before leaving on her vacation. But what of Eve’s disappearance? Had she run off? Had she talked some delivery
man, when he found himself in an empty house, into unbolting her door?

  Richard cast about vainly for answers, his panic mounting. Why had she never put on the clothes she had obviously laid out in readiness on the bed? Why was the bedspread missing? No, the delivery-man hypothesis was clearly nonsense. Admittedly, something of the sort had happened a year earlier—and it had happened, indeed, while Lise was off. By chance, Richard had got home just in time to overhear Eve, from behind her barred door, begging a delivery man to open it for her. He had been able to reassure the man that everything was as it should be, that his wife was severely depressed, hence the bolts on the door.

  Whatever doubts Roger and Lise might have formed had likewise been dispelled by the invoking of Eve’s supposed “mental illness.” Besides, Richard was affectionate toward the young woman, and over the last year had allowed her out more and more often. On occasion, she even took dinner downstairs. The madwoman spent her days playing the piano and painting, and Lise did the housework in her rooms without thinking twice about it. In fact, everything seemed normal. Eve was continually showered with gifts. One day, Lise had lifted the white cloth covering Eve’s easel, and the sight of Richard portrayed as a transvestite sitting at the bar of a night club merely strengthened her belief that all was decidedly not quite right with her mistress’s head. Monsieur Lafargue was more than decent to put up with her the way he did. Most people would have had her put away. Of course, it wouldn’t look so good, would it, for a big noise like Professor Lafargue to have a wife in the loony bin. Especially when his daughter was already there…

  Richard let himself fall back onto the bed. Clutching Eve’s dress, he shook his head in desperation.

  The telephone rang. He dashed downstairs and grabbed the receiver.

  “Lafargue?” The voice was unfamiliar. “I’ve got your wife.”

  “How much do you want? Tell me right now. I’ll pay it.” Lafargue was shouting, but his voice cracked.

  “Take it easy. That’s not it. I don’t give a shit about money. At least, we’ll see if you can give me some money, too.”

  “For God’s sake, tell me! Is she alive?”

  “Of course she is.”

  “Don’t you hurt her!”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t mess her up.”

  “Well, then?”

  “I have to see you. Have a little chat.”

  Alex told Lafargue to meet him at ten o’clock that night in front of the Opéra Drugstore.

  “How will I recognize you?”

  “Forget about it. Believe me, I know you. Come on your own. No funny business, either, or she’ll know about it, I guarantee you that.”

  Richard agreed. His caller had already hung up.

  His reaction echoed Alex’s just a few hours before: he reached for a bottle of scotch and took a long slug straight from it. Then Richard went to the cellar to make sure that nothing had been disturbed down there. The doors were all locked, so all was well from that angle.

  Who was this guy? A criminal, obviously. But he wasn’t interested in a ransom, or not for now, anyway. He wanted something else, but what could it be?

  The man had said nothing about Eve. In the early days of Vincent’s captivity, Richard had been at pains to conceal every trace of his presence. He had even laid off the predecessors of Lise and Roger, these two having been taken on only once the situation with Eve was somewhat “normalized.” At first, he had been afraid lest the police pick up his trail. That Vincent’s parents had not given up hope in the investigation he knew from the local papers. True, everything had gone smoothly: he had cornered Vincent in the middle of the night and in the middle of nowhere, and he had studiously covered his tracks. But one could never be quite sure. He had, after all, lodged a complaint concerning the attack on Viviane, and the possibility of a connection being made through some fortuitous circumstance could not be dismissed.

  But then time had passed: six months, a year, soon two years—and now it was four years. The matter was surely dead and buried.

  Besides, had this fellow known who Eve was, he would not have talked as he had, not have said “your wife.” He thought he and Eve were married. On those occasions when Lafargue went out in public with Eve, people tended to assume that he had taken a young lover. For the last four years he had had no contact at all with his old friends, who attributed this sudden withdrawal to Viviane’s collapse into insanity. Poor Richard, they thought, this second blow was too much: first his wife dies in that plane crash ten years ago, then his daughter ends up in the mental hospital.

  The only people Lafargue allowed to see Eve were acquaintances or colleagues from work who saw nothing odd about his appearing now and again at a social function with a woman on his arm. The admiring murmurs elicited on these rare occasions by his “mistress” nevertheless filled Lafargue with a certain, as it were, professional pride.

  So this thug could know nothing at all about Vincent. That much was obvious. But then what did he want?

  Lafargue was early for the rendezvous with Alex. He paced up and down the sidewalk, jostled by the customers going in and out of the drugstore. He glanced at his watch every twenty seconds or so. At last, Alex came up to him, having first made sure that the surgeon was really on his own.

  Richard appraised Alex’s face: it was square and brutish.

  “Did you come in your car?”

  Richard pointed to the Mercedes, which was parked nearby.

  “Let’s go.”

  Alex signaled Richard to get behind the wheel and start the engine. He had taken his Colt from his pocket and placed it in his lap. Richard looked at the guy out of the corner of his eye, hoping to detect some weak spot from his demeanor. To begin with, Alex said nothing but “Straight ahead,” “Turn left,” and “Turn right.” The Mercedes left the Opéra district behind and took a meandering route through Paris, from Place de la Concorde to the Seine embankment and then from Place de la Bastille to Place Gambetta. Alex’s eyes were fastened on the rearview mirror, and he didn’t engage Richard in conversation until he was absolutely certain that Lafargue had not alerted the cops.

  “You’re a surgeon, right?”

  “Yes, I run the reconstructive surgery department at—”

  “I know that. You have a clinic in Boulogne as well. Your daughter is in the crazy house in Normandy. You see, I know a lot about you. And your wife. She’s not in bad shape right now—she’s chained to a radiator in a cellar. You’d better listen good, or you’ll never see her again. I saw you the other day on the tube.”

  “I gave an interview a month ago.”

  “You were going on about how you fix people’s noses, how you can make old women’s wrinkled faces all smooth again, stuff like that.”

  Richard understood now. He sighed. This jerk had no interest in Eve; all he was interested in was himself.

  “I’m wanted by the police. I did a cop. I’m screwed, unless I get my mug changed. And you are going to change it for me. On the box, you said it didn’t take long. I’m on my own: there’s nobody in this thing with me. I’ve got nothing to lose. If you try and tell the cops, your wife is going to starve to death in that cellar. Don’t try to pull anything—I tell you I’ve got nothing to lose. I’ll take it out of her hide. If you get me busted, I’ll never tell the cops where I’ve put her, and she’ll die of hunger. Not a nice death, either.”

  “All right. I agree.”

  “Are you sure that—”

  “Naturally, you must promise not to harm her.”

  “You love her, don’t you?”

  Richard’s voice was toneless. He heard himself answer “yes.”

  “How do we do it? You take me into your hospital—no, I figure your private clinic would be the best.”

  Richard’s hands were clamped to the steering wheel. Somehow he had to talk the guy into going to Le Vésinet. Plainly, he was no mental giant. The naïveté of his plan was proof enough of that. The idea that once under anesthesia he would be utterl
y at Richard’s mercy had not even crossed his mind! He was an imbecile who really thought that he could pull his scheme off simply because he was holding Eve captive. It was ridiculous! All the same, he had to agree to going to Le Vésinet. At the clinic, Lafargue’s hands would be tied, and the guy’s stupid plan might just succeed, because Richard would never, ever go to the police.

  “Listen. We’ll need to save time. Any operation has to be planned way in advance. You have to be examined, as I’m sure you realize.”

  “Don’t take me for a fool.”

  “No, no, but if you come to the clinic you’ll be asked questions. Surgery has to be scheduled, there’s a procedure that has to be followed…”

  “You mean you’re not the big boss?” Alex was taken aback.

  “Of course I am. But, I mean, if you are wanted, you surely want to be seen by as few people as possible?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So let’s go to my home. I’ll show you what I can do, design a new nose for you. You also have a double chin, which we can eliminate—all that sort of thing.”

  Alex was suspicious, but he went along. He told himself everything was going just fine. The doctor was obviously scared shitless about his woman.

  Back at Le Vésinet, Lafargue motioned Alex to a comfortable chair. They were in his study. Richard went through one file of photographs after another until he found pictures of a man not unlike Alex in appearance. With a white marker he carefully erased the nose, then limned a new one in black. Alex watched fascinated. Lafargue moved on to the double chin. Then he rapidly produced a freehand sketch of Alex as he was now, full face and in profile, and another of the Alex that was to be.

  “Great! Make me look like that and you won’t have to worry about your wife.”