Quite the opposite. I was enchanted by the fire, and to see that, like me, she was anticipating roasting herself on one side and then turning over to do the other. Her grave, tranquil face had never been so beautiful as in this primitive light. By not spreading across the whole room, it retained its strength. The moment you moved away from it, all was darkness, and you stumbled over the furniture.
Marthe didn’t know what it was to be in revolt. In her cheerfulness she was still serious.
Lying beside her, my mind gradually grew numb, she seemed to have changed. It was only now when I was certain that I no longer loved her that I began to love her. I felt incapable of manipulation and self-interest, of everything that up till then, and even at that moment, I had believed were vital to love’s existence. Suddenly I felt better. In anyone else, this abrupt change would have opened their eyes, but I didn’t see that I was in love with Marthe. On the contrary, I saw evidence that my love was dead, that its place had been taken by a beautiful friendship. The objectivity of friendship suddenly made me realize just how criminal any other emotion would have been, wronging the man who did love her, to whom she rightly belonged, and who couldn’t see what she was doing.
And yet something else should have told me what my true feelings were. When I had met Marthe several months before, this so-called love of mine didn’t prevent me from judging her, from thinking that most of the things she found beautiful were ugly, that most of what she said was childish. But now if I didn’t think the same as her, I blamed myself. After the crudeness of my earlier desires, I was duped by the sweetness of a more profound emotion. I no longer felt able to embark on anything I had resolved to do. I began to respect Marthe, because I had begun to love her.
I came back every evening; I didn’t think of asking her to show me her bedroom, still less of what Jacques thought of our furniture. I wished for nothing except this everlasting betrothal, our bodies lying barely touching in front of the fire, me not daring to move for fear that a single gesture might be enough to dispel the happiness.
Yet Marthe, who was savouring the same enchantment, imagined she was alone in doing so. In my happy idleness she saw indifference. Believing that I didn’t love her, she thought I would soon tire of this silent drawing room if she didn’t do something to bind me to her.
We said nothing. In this I saw a sign of happiness.
I felt so close to Marthe, so convinced that we were both thinking the same thing at the same time, that the idea of talking to her seemed absurd, like talking to yourself when you are alone. But this silence overwhelmed the poor girl. The wisest thing would have been for me to use crude methods of communication, such as words or gestures, while lamenting the lack of anything more subtle.
Seeing me sink further into this delightful silence each day, Marthe believed I was becoming more and more bored. So she was prepared to do anything to keep me amused.
Hair untied, she liked to sleep by the fire. Or rather I thought she was asleep. This slumber was an excuse to put her arms round my neck, and then, waking with tear-moistened eyes, to tell me that she had been having a sad dream. She never wanted to say what it was. I took advantage of this feigned sleep to inhale the scent of her hair, her neck, her burning cheeks, barely brushing them so as not to wake her; caresses which, despite what people believe, are not love’s loose change, but on the contrary are of the very rarest, and of which only passion may avail itself. I believed they were mine by virtue of my friendship. Yet I began to despair that only love gives us rights over a woman. I can easily go without love, I thought, but I can’t not have any rights over Marthe. And in order to have them I had actually chosen love, while believing that I despised it. I desired Marthe without realising.
While she was asleep like this, her head resting on my arm, I would lean over and look at her face, surrounded by flames. This was playing with fire. Once, as I brought my face closer, although without touching hers, I was like the needle that strays a mere fraction into the forbidden zone and is drawn to the magnet. Is this the fault of the magnet or the needle? This was how I felt my lips touch hers. Her eyes were still closed, but in the obvious way of someone who isn’t asleep. I kissed her, astonished at my temerity, when it was actually her who enticed me to her mouth as I came closer to her face. Her hands clung fiercely round my neck; they couldn’t have held me more tightly in a shipwreck. I wasn’t sure whether she wanted me to save her, or to drown alongside her.
Once she was sitting up again, she held my head in her lap, stroking my hair and saying to me over and over softly: “You must go, you must never come back.” I daren’t call her ‘tu’ as she did me, and when I was unable to stay silent any longer, I struggled to find the right words, framing my sentences so as not to speak to her directly, because if I couldn’t call her ‘tu’, I was conscious how much more impossible it was to call her ‘vous’. My tears scalded me. If one of them fell onto Marthe’s hand, I expected to hear her cry out. I blamed myself for breaking the spell, thinking I had been mad to put my lips to hers, forgetting that it was her who had kissed me. “You must go, don’t ever come back.” I shed tears of rage, tears of grief. In the same way, the anger of the wolf caught in the trap hurts him as much as the snare itself. Had I said anything, it would have been to insult Marthe. My silence worried her; in it she saw resignation. In my unfairness, which might have actually been clear-sightedness, I was causing her to think: “After all, since it’s too late now, I’m just as happy for him to suffer.” The heat of this fire made me shiver, my teeth chattered. To the real grief that dragged me out of childhood were added childish emotions. I was the onlooker who doesn’t want to leave because he doesn’t like the outcome. I told her: “I won’t go. You’ve been making fun of me. I don’t want to see you any more.”
Because if I didn’t want to go home, I didn’t want to see Marthe again either. I would have sooner turned her out of her own house!
“You’re just a child,” she sobbed. “You don’t understand that if I’m asking you to go it’s because I love you.”
Hatefully I said that I was perfectly aware that she had obligations, that her husband was away at the War.
She shook her head: “I was happy before I met you, I thought I loved my fiancé. I forgave him for not really understanding me. But you’ve proved to me that I didn’t love him. My obligation isn’t what you think it is. It isn’t to not lie to my husband, it’s to not lie to you. Go now and don’t think ill of me; you’ll soon forget me. I don’t want to make your life miserable. I’m crying because I’m too old for you!”
These loving words of hers were a superb piece of childishness. And whatever passions I may have experienced later, there could never be a sweeter feeling than that of seeing a girl of nineteen in tears because she thinks she is too old.
The flavour of that first kiss disappointed me, like fruit you taste for the first time. It’s not in new things that we experience the greatest pleasure, but in habit. Within moments, not only had I become accustomed to Marthe’s lips, I was unable to live without them. And it was then that she spoke of depriving me of them for ever.
That evening, Marthe saw me all the way home. To feel closer, I huddled up against her surreptitiously, put my arm round her waist. She didn’t repeat what she had said, that we ought not to see each other again; on the contrary, she was sad to think that we would have to part at any moment. She made me swear a million wild extravagances.
When we got to my house, I didn’t want her to go back on her own, so I took her home. This childishness might have gone on for ever, because she then wanted to walk back with me again. I agreed, on condition that she only come half-way.
I arrived half-an-hour late for dinner. It was the first time. I blamed it on the train. My father pretended to believe me.
Nothing weighed on me now. I walked along the street with the same light tread as in my dreams.
Up till then I had always had to resign myself to losing the things I had yearned for as a child
. Not only that, any toys I was given were spoilt by the obligation to be grateful. But in a child’s eyes, how much prestige there would be in a toy that made a present of itself! I was drunk with desire. Marthe belonged to me, and it wasn’t me who had said it, but her. I could touch her face, kiss her eyes, her arms, dress her, damage her in whatever way I liked. In my frenzy I bit her where her skin was uncovered, so her mother would suspect her of having a lover. I would have liked to carve my initials there. This childish brutality was a reminder of the original meaning of tattoos. Marthe would say: “Yes, bite me, mark me, I want the whole world to know.”
I would have liked to kiss her breasts. But I daren’t ask, believing that she would offer them by herself, like she had her lips. After a few days, having grown used to her lips, I couldn’t conceive of anything more delightful.
VIII
WE WERE READING IN THE FIRELIGHT TOGETHER. She often threw on the fire letters that her husband wrote to her from the front every day. You could tell that Marthe’s replies to his anxieties were becoming less and less affectionate and more and more infrequent. I couldn’t see his letters go up in flames without feeling uneasy. They made the fire burn brighter for a moment, and if the truth be known, I was afraid of seeing too clearly.
Marthe, who now often asked me if it was true that I’d loved her the first time we met, chided me for not having told her before her wedding. She claimed that she wouldn’t have got married; because if she had felt a form of love for Jacques at the beginning of their engagement, then that itself, which had been drawn out for too long because of the War, had gradually emptied her heart of love. She had already stopped loving Jacques by the time she married him. She had hoped that the two weeks’ leave that he had been given might change her feelings.
But he was inept. The one who loves always annoys the one who doesn’t. And Jacques loved her more and more every day. His letters were those of someone in pain, but who held his Marthe in too high esteem to think her capable of betraying him. So he just blamed himself, begged her to tell him what he had done to hurt her: “I feel so uncouth when I’m with you, I have the feeling that everything I say upsets you.” Marthe simply replied that he was mistaken, that she didn’t blame him for anything.
It was now the beginning of March. Spring came early. On days when she didn’t come into Paris with me, Marthe, naked beneath her dressing gown, would wait for me to get back from my art class, lying in front of the fire, where there was always some of her parents-in-law’s olive wood burning. She had asked them to send her some more. I don’t know what kind of shyness it was that held me back, if not the one you experience when confronted with something you haven’t done before. It reminded me of Daphnis. Only in our case it was Chloe who had had a few lessons, but Daphnis didn’t dare ask her to teach him. Although didn’t I regard Marthe as a virgin, who for the first two weeks of her marriage had been delivered up to a stranger to be taken forcibly.
In bed at night I called out to her, angry with myself—me who considered myself a man—for not being enough of one to make her my mistress. Every day when I went to her house I resolved not to leave until I had done so.
On my sixteenth birthday in March 1918, begging me not to get cross, she gave me a dressing gown like hers, and which she wanted to see me wear at her house. In my delight I almost made a pun, something I never did. It was my toga praetextata—my pretext! Because it seemed that what had been impeding my desires so far was the fear of looking foolish, of feeling dressed while she was not. At first I thought of putting it on that same day. But then I blushed, realising how much of a rebuke this gift of hers represented.
IX
FROM THE VERY START OF OUR RELATIONSHIP, Marthe had let me have a key to her apartment, so if she happened to have gone into town I wouldn’t have to wait for her in the garden. I could have made more innocent use of this key. It was a Saturday. I left her, promising to come for lunch the following day. But I had actually decided to come back as soon as I could that night.
During dinner I told my parents that the next day I was going on a long walk in the forest of Sénart with René. So I would have to leave at five in the morning. As the whole house would still be asleep, no one would know what time I had left, or whether I had spent the night away from home.
No sooner had I announced my intentions than my mother offered to make up a basket of food for my journey. I was filled with dismay; a basket wrecked all that was lofty and romantic about what I was planning to do. Having been looking forward to seeing the shock on Marthe’s face when I walked into her bedroom, I now imagined her shrieks of laughter when Prince Charming arrived with a shopping basket over his arm. However much I told my mother that René was bringing everything, she wouldn’t listen. To protest further would have aroused her suspicions.
It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. As my mother was packing the basket that ruined my first night of love before it had even started, I saw the envious looks in my brothers’ eyes. I thought of secretly offering it to them, but once everything had been eaten, at the risk of getting a thrashing, and for the pleasure of landing me in trouble, they might have let the cat out of the bag.
So I had to put up with it, since I couldn’t think of any safe hiding places.
I had vowed not to leave before midnight so as to make sure my parents were asleep. I tried to read. But when the town-hall clock struck ten, my parents having been in bed for a while already, I couldn’t wait. Their room was upstairs, mine downstairs. I didn’t put my boots on, so I would make as little noise as possible when I climbed over the wall. With them in one hand and the basket, so fragile with all the bottles, in the other, I carefully opened the small service door. It was raining. All the better! It would muffle any noise. Seeing that the light was still on in my parents’ room, I nearly went back to bed. But I was already on my way. I couldn’t take precautions with the boots now; I had to put them on because of the rain. Then I had to climb the wall to avoid making the bell ring on the gate. I walked over to the wall, where I had made a point of putting a garden chair after dinner, to aid my escape. The wall had tiles along the top. The rain made them slippery. As I was hanging there, one of them fell off. In my nervousness the noise sounded ten times louder. Now I had to jump down into the street. I held the basket in my teeth; I landed in a puddle. For an endless minute I just stood there, looking at my parents’ window to see if they had got up, having heard something. No one appeared at the window. I was safe!
To get to Marthe’s house I went along by the Marne. I was planning to hide the basket under a bush and come back for it the next day. But wartime made this risky. Standing at the only spot where there were bushes where I could have hidden the basket was a sentry, guarding the bridge at J.… For a long time I wavered, paler than someone trying to plant dynamite. Nonetheless I found a place to hide my food.
Marthe’s gate was shut. I got the key that was always left in the letter box. I tiptoed through the small garden, then up the front steps. Before going upstairs, I took my boots off.
Marthe was so nervous! She might faint when I appeared in her bedroom. I was shaking; I couldn’t find the keyhole. But at last I turned the key, slowly, so as not to wake anyone. In the hall I bumped into the umbrella stand. I was afraid of pressing a bell, thinking it was a light switch. I groped my way to her room. Then I stopped, again feeling a desire to run away. Marthe might never forgive me. Or maybe I was about to discover that she was cheating on me, and find her with another man!
“Marthe?” I whispered.
She replied:
“Instead of giving me such a fright, you might just as well have come in the morning. So you got leave a week early then?”
She thought I was Jacques!
If I had now seen the way she would have greeted him, at the same time I discovered that she was concealing something from me. Jacques was due back in a week’s time!
I switched on the light. She was still facing the wall. The simplest thing wo
uld have been to say: “It’s me,” and yet I didn’t. I just kissed her on the neck.
“Your face is wet. Do dry it.”
Then she turned round and gave a cry.
In the space of a second her whole manner changed and, not bothering to ask what I was doing there in the middle of the night, she said:
“But my poor darling, you’ll catch your death of cold! Quick, take your clothes off.”
She hurried off to rekindle the fire in the drawing room. When she came back to the bedroom, seeing me still standing there, she asked:
“Do you want me to help you?”
As someone who dreaded more than anything the moment when I would have to undress, and could visualize how ridiculous I would look, I was eternally grateful to the rain, thanks to which getting undressed now took on a motherly aspect. Meanwhile Marthe went back and forth to the kitchen to see if the water for my hot toddy had boiled. Finally she found me lying naked on the bed, half-hidden by the quilt. She told me off—it was crazy not to wear any clothes; I ought to rub myself down with eau de cologne.
Then she opened a wardrobe and tossed me some pyjamas. They ought to be ‘my size’. A pair of Jacques’s! And I remembered that it was quite likely the soldier would arrive, since Marthe had thought it was him.
I got into bed. Marthe joined me. I asked her to put the light out. For even in her arms I was still wary of my shyness. Darkness made me feel brave. Marthe replied softly:
“No. I want to watch you fall asleep.”
These words, so charming, made me feel self-conscious. In them I found the touching sweetness of a woman who was risking everything to be my mistress, and, unable to imagine my pathological shyness, accepted that I should go to sleep beside her. For four months I had been saying I loved her, yet didn’t give her that proof which men are so lavish with, and which for them often takes the place of love. I switched the light out myself.
The Devil in the Flesh Page 4