I experienced the same agitation that I had felt earlier, before I came into the apartment. But like my wait outside the door, the one outside the doors of love couldn’t possibly last for long. Besides, my imagination had been promising itself such exquisite sensual delights that it was no longer able to picture them. And for the first time I was afraid of being like her husband, leaving her with bad memories of our first moments of love.
So her happiness was greater than mine. But as soon as we were unentwined, the look in her wonderful eyes made all my discomfort seem worthwhile.
Her face was transfigured. I was amazed not to be able to even touch the halo that surrounded it, like in religious paintings.
My fears were allayed, but there were more to come.
Finally comprehending the power of acts that shyness hadn’t dared allow me to perform until now, I was terrified that Marthe might belong to her husband in more ways than she cared to admit.
But since I’m not capable of understanding things that I’m trying for the first time, I had to get acquainted with the delights of love day-by-day.
In the meantime this counterfeit pleasure caused me real pain—the one that men feel—jealousy.
I resented Marthe, because from the grateful expression on her face I realised what fleshly ties really mean. I cursed the man who had roused her body before I had. I reflected on how foolish I’d been to see her as a virgin. At any other time, to wish her husband dead would have been a childish fantasy, but in the present one my craving was almost as much of a crime as if I had actually killed him. I owed my burgeoning happiness to the War; I was also expecting it to bring it to its zenith. I hoped it would do my hatred’s work for it, in the way an anonymous person commits a crime on our behalf.
We are crying together now; the fault lies with happiness. Marthe blames me for not preventing her from getting married. “But then would I be in this bed that I chose? She would be living with her parents; we wouldn’t be able to see each other. She would never have belonged to Jacques, but she wouldn’t belong to me either. Without him, and without any point of comparison, she might still have regrets, hope for something better. I feel no hatred for Jacques. I hate the knowledge that I owe everything to the man we are betraying. Yet I love Marthe too much to regard our happiness a crime.”
We are crying because we are only children, with little to call our own. Take Marthe away! Since she doesn’t belong to anyone except me, it would be the same as taking me away, because we would be parted. We are already anticipating the end of the War, which will be the end of our love. We know this, and however much Marthe promises me that she will leave everything, that she will go with me, it’s not in my nature to be so rebellious and, putting myself in her place, I can’t imagine such an insane breach. Marthe tells me why she thinks she’s too old. In fifteen years’ time, life will have only just begun for me, women her age will fall in love with me. “All it will bring me is pain,” she adds. “If you leave me, I’ll die. If you stay, it will only be out of weakness, and it’ll make me suffer to see you sacrifice your happiness.”
Despite my protests I was angry with myself for not producing any convincing counter-argument. But all Marthe asked was to be this herself, and to her my bad reasons seemed like good ones. She would reply: “Oh yes, I hadn’t thought of that. I can tell you’re not lying.” Yet faced with these fears of hers, I felt my confidence waver. So my consolations were meagre ones. I gave the impression that it was only out of politeness that I didn’t disillusion her. “No, no,” I said, “you’re crazy.” Yet sadly I was too conscious of my youth not to foresee that I would turn my back on Marthe the moment her youth wilted and mine came into bloom.
Although I thought my love was fully formed, it was still in its early stages. It gave way at the slightest difficulty.
So the extravagances our hearts committed that night exhausted us far more than those of the flesh. One seemed to help us relax from the other; yet in fact they both brought us to the same end. Cocks were crowing, there were more of them now. They had been crowing all night. I noticed the poetic lie here: cocks crow at sunrise. There was nothing extraordinary about that. Insomnia was unknown to someone my age. Yet Marthe noticed them too, and it surprised her so much that it must have been the first time. She didn’t understand why I held her so tight, because her surprise proved that she had never spent all night awake with Jacques.
My hypnotic state made me believe that ours was an exceptional love. We imagined we were the first to experience particular anxieties, not realising that love is like poetry, and that all lovers, even the most unremarkable, think they are breaking new ground. So when I told Marthe (without actually believing it), but just to make her think I shared her concerns: “You’ll abandon me, you’ll find other men that you prefer,” she assured me she knew her own mind. As for me, I gradually convinced myself that I would stay with her even when her youth was gone, and in my laziness I simply trusted our immortal happiness to her physical energy.
Sleep had stolen up on us in our nakedness. When I woke, seeing she was uncovered, I was afraid she might be cold. I touched her. Her body was burning. To see her asleep gave me exquisite sensual pleasure. After ten minutes I found it unbearable. I kissed her on the shoulder. She didn’t stir. A second, less demure kiss had the effect of an alarm clock. She gave a start and, rubbing her eyes, she smothered me with kisses, like someone you love who you find in bed after dreaming they have died. Except that Marthe thought that what she had been dreaming about was true, and found me there when she woke up.
It was eleven o’clock already. We were drinking our chocolate when we heard the doorbell. I thought of Jacques: “Let’s hope he’s got a gun.” For someone so afraid of death, I wasn’t shaking. On the contrary, I would have been happy for it to be Jacques, as long as he killed us. To me any other outcome seemed absurd.
To contemplate death calmly only makes sense if we do it alone. Death as a couple isn’t death, not even for unbelievers. What distresses us is not losing life, but losing what gives it meaning. When a loved one is our life, what difference is there between living together and dying together?
There wasn’t time for me to see myself as a hero, because thinking that Jacques might just kill Marthe, or only me, I was busy calculating how self-centred I was. Of these two tragedies did I even know which was the worst?
Since Marthe didn’t get up, I thought I’d made a mistake, and that someone had rung the owners’ bell. But then the doorbell went again.
“Be quiet!” she whispered. “Don’t move, it must be my mother. I’d completely forgotten that she was going to drop by after mass.”
I was glad to witness one of her sacrifices. If a mistress or a friend is a few minutes late in coming to meet me, I straightway imagine they have died. Assuming that her mother was experiencing a similar anxiety, I enjoyed it to the full, as well as the knowledge that I was responsible for her fears.
After the sound of a short conversation (Madame Grangier had obviously asked the people downstairs if they had seen her daughter that morning), we heard the garden gate closing. Marthe looked through the shutters. “Yes, it was her,” she said. At the sight of Madame Grangier departing, missal in hand, worrying about her daughter’s unaccountable absence, I couldn’t help being pleased too. She turned round and took another look at the closed shutters.
X
NOW THAT I HAD NOTHING LEFT TO WISH FOR, I sensed I was beginning to be unfair. I put on a show of being upset that Marthe could deceive her mother without a qualm, and in my dishonesty I rebuked her for being able to lie. And yet love, which is selfishness in duplicate, sacrifices everything for itself, exists on lies. Driven by the same demon, I chastised her for not telling me that her husband was due back. Up till now I had kept my tyranny in check, not believing I had any right to rule Marthe. My harshness occasionally abated. “It won’t be long before you loathe me,” I groaned. “I’m like your husband, just as cruel.” “He’s not cruel,” she s
aid. I started up again with renewed force: “So you’re cheating on both of us, tell me which one you love the most—but don’t worry—in a week’s time you’ll be able to cheat on me with him.”
In tears, she bit her lip: “What have I done to make you so unkind? Don’t spoil our first day of happiness, I beg of you.”
“You can’t love me very much if today is your first day of happiness.”
Blows like this injure the one who strikes them. I wasn’t thinking about what I was saying, yet still felt the need to say it. I found it impossible to explain to Marthe that my love was growing. It had undoubtedly reached the age of ingratitude, and my vicious taunts were love maturing into passion. I was in pain. I implored her to forget my tirade.
XI
THE OWNERS’ MAID SLIPPED SOME LETTERS UNDER the door. Marthe picked them up. There were two from Jacques. As if in reply to my doubts, she said: “Here, do what you like with them.” I felt ashamed. I asked her to read them, although to keep them to herself. With one of those instincts that drive us to the worst acts of bravado, Marthe tore up one of the envelopes. It must have been a long letter, because it didn’t tear easily. Her gesture gave me another opportunity to rebuke her. I deplored her bravado, the regrets that she would surely feel about it. Despite everything I made an effort and, not wishing her to tear up the second letter, I kept it, because judging from this performance it wasn’t out of the question that she might become unpleasant. At my request she read it. It might have been instinct that made her tear up the first letter, but not which made her say, after glancing through the second: “This is our reward from Heaven for not tearing up the letter. Jacques says that all leave has been cancelled in his sector, he won’t be coming for at least a month.”
Only love can forgive such lapses of taste.
This husband was beginning to get in my way, more so than if he had been there and we had had to be on our guard. His letter suddenly assumed the proportions of a ghost. We had lunch late. At about five o’clock we went for a walk by the river. Marthe was astonished when I pulled out my basket from a clump of grass in full view of the sentry. She found the story about the basket very funny. I was no longer afraid of ridicule. We walked along, oblivious to the unseemly way we were dressed, clinging to each other. Our fingers intertwined. This first warm, sunny Sunday had brought the walkers out in their straw hats, like the rain does mushrooms. People who knew Marthe didn’t dare say hello to her, but she greeted them quite guilessly, unmindful of anything. They must have viewed it as preening. She questioned me about how I had escaped from the house. She laughed, but then her face clouded; squeezing my hand as tightly as she could, she thanked me for taking so many risks. We went back to her apartment to drop off the basket. In actual fact I had a role in mind for this basket, by shipping it off to our troops as a food parcel in order to give these adventures a fitting conclusion. But the idea was so appalling that I saved it for myself alone.
Marthe wanted to go along by the Marne as far as La Varenne. We had dinner opposite the Île d’Amour. I promised to take her to the Museum of the Écu de France, the first museum I’d ever visited when I was a little boy, and which had left me spellbound. I told her about it as if it were something interesting. Yet when we came to the conclusion that the museum was a hoax, I didn’t want to admit how much I had been taken in by it. Fulbert’s scissors! Everything! I had believed everything. I claimed I was just having a harmless little joke with her. Marthe didn’t understand, as making jokes wasn’t something I normally did. To be honest the disappointment left me depressed. I thought: “As certain of Marthe’s love as I am at the moment, maybe I’ll find it’s just a sham like the Museum of the Écu de France!”
For I did often doubt her love. I sometimes wondered if I wasn’t a hobby for her, a passing fancy that she could give up overnight, when peacetime summoned her back to her responsibilities. And yet, I thought, there are times when lips, eyes, can’t lie. Undoubtedly. When they are drunk, even the least generous of men will get angry if you refuse to accept their watch, their wallet. In this respect they are behaving as candidly as when they are sober. The times at which we can’t lie are precisely those when we lie the most, especially to ourselves. To believe a woman ‘at a time when she can’t lie’ is like believing in the feigned generosity of a miser.
This clear-sightedness of mine was merely a more dangerous form of my naivety. I saw myself as not very naive, and yet I was, in another way, because no age can avoid naivety—old age perhaps least of all. This so-called perceptiveness cast a cloud over everything, caused me to doubt Marthe. Or rather I doubted myself, believing myself unworthy of her. Even if I had had endless proof of her love, I would have been no less miserable.
I was all too aware of the treasures we never discuss with those we love, for fear of seeming immature, to not suspect Marthe of this regrettable sense of modesty, and it pained me not to be able to get inside her mind.
I got home at half-past nine that night. My parents quizzed me about my walk. Enthusiastically I described the forest of Sénart, the ferns twice as tall as me. I talked about Brunoy, a delightful village where we had had lunch. Then my mother suddenly interrupted mockingly:
“By the way, René came round at four o’clock, he was most surprised to hear that he was on a long walk with you.”
I blushed in angry confusion. Like so many others, this experience taught me that, certain inclinations aside, I’m not made for telling lies. People always catch me out. My parents didn’t pursue it. They had had their little victory.
XII
MY FATHER, I HAVE TO SAY, WAS AN UNWITTING accomplice to my first affair. In fact he rather encouraged it, delighted that my precocious talents should find an outlet somewhere. He had always been afraid I would fall in with a woman of ill repute. So he was pleased that I had won the love of a decent girl. He only got on his high horse when he found out that Marthe wanted a divorce.
My mother didn’t view our romance quite so favourably, however. She was jealous. She saw Marthe as a rival. She took a dislike to her, not understanding that it would have been the same with any woman I loved. Besides, she was more concerned than my father was about what people might say. She was surprised that Marthe could get mixed up with a boy of my age. But then she had been brought up in F …—in all those small suburban towns, as soon as you get away from the working-class suburbs, the same passions, the same cravings for tittle-tattle are as rife as out in the country. Not only that, being close to Paris makes the gossip, the speculation even more barefaced. Everyone should keep to their place. So as a result of having a mistress whose husband was a soldier, on instructions from their parents I watched my friends gradually melt away. They withdrew according to the social order: first the notary’s son and then the rest, all the way down to the gardener’s boy. My mother was wounded by this process, which to me seemed like an accolade. In her view my life had been ruined by a madwoman. She probably blamed my father for having introduced me to her, and for then turning a blind eye. But since she considered that it was up to my father to do something about it, and my father said nothing, she kept quiet.
XIII
I SPENT EVERY NIGHT AT MARTHE’S HOUSE. I arrived at half-past ten and left at five or six the next morning. I didn’t jump over walls now. I just opened the door with my key; yet this openness required forward planning. So that the chime of the clock didn’t wake us, I wrapped the pendulum in cotton wool at night. When I left in the morning, I took it off again.
At home no one questioned my absences; it wasn’t the same at J.… For quite some time the owners and the elderly couple had viewed me in an unfavourable light, and hardly ever returned my greetings.
At five in the morning, so as to make as little noise as possible, I would carry my shoes on my way out. I put them on when I got downstairs. One morning I met the milkman on the stairs. He had a crate of milk in his hand; I had my shoes in mine. He said good morning with a horrible smile. It was Marthe’s downfall.
He would tell the whole of J.… But what tormented me even more was that it made a laughing stock of me. I could have paid the milkman to keep quiet, but I didn’t, because I had no idea how to go about it.
That afternoon I didn’t dare tell Marthe. Besides, this one incident on its own wouldn’t have compromised her reputation. That had long been a given. Well before it actually happened, rumours were already circulating that she was my mistress. We hadn’t been aware of anything. But all was about to be revealed. One day I arrived to find her utterly drained. The landlord had just told her that for the last four days he had been watching out for me as I left at dawn. He had refused to believe it at first, but was no longer in any doubt. The elderly couple whose room was below Marthe’s were complaining about the noise we made night and day. Marthe was shaken; she wanted to leave. It didn’t occur to us to behave more discreetly when we were together. It was something we didn’t feel capable of doing—anyway we had already been found out. It was then that Marthe began to understand a number of things that had surprised her. Her only real female friend, a young Swedish girl, wasn’t replying to her letters. I found out that the girl’s guardian had seen us embracing on the train, and had advised her not to have anything more to do with Marthe.
I made her promise that if a dramatic row or something similar were to blow up, whether with her parents or her husband, then she wouldn’t back down. The landlord’s threats, a few rumours, gave me every reason to both fear and hope that there would be a confrontation between Marthe and Jacques.
Marthe begged me to come and see her often while Jacques was home on leave, having already talked to him about me. I refused, afraid of not playing my part well enough, as well as of seeing another man fussing around her. His leave was for eleven days. He might cheat the system and find a way of staying an extra two. I made her promise to write to me every day. I waited for three days before going to the poste restante, to be certain of there being a letter. There were already four. But I couldn’t take them—I didn’t have one of the required proofs of identity. I was all the more nervous, having forged my birth certificate, because you had to be eighteen to use the poste restante. In an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the young woman behind the counter, I insisted on having the letters that she was keeping back and wouldn’t give me. In the end, since they knew me at the post office, I persuaded them to at least send them on to my home address.
The Devil in the Flesh Page 5