A policeman grabbed me by the arm. ‘She isn’t here. Her body’s been taken to the village.’
What was he talking about?
‘She’s been murdered. Jérôme the milkman found her dead in the drawing room this morning.’
A sudden deafness struck me with full force. I could see the policeman’s lips moving, but no sound reached me. My head started spinning and I couldn’t breathe. I leant against the wall in order not to collapse, but my legs gave way under the shock. I fell on my backside, in a daze, repeating to myself: I’m going to wake up, I’m going to wake up …
A policeman took my place at the wheel of the car. I was incapable of starting the engine, incapable of driving. My legs had stopped working properly.
In the village, the police took us to a clinic where Irène’s body lay. I was unaware of sounds or movements; everything appeared blurred, confused, surreal.
The sergeant wouldn’t let me go in with Alarcon to see his daughter’s body, but ordered me to stay in the car and told a subordinate to keep an eye on me.
A crowd had gathered outside the clinic. It was moving in slow motion, silent, wild-eyed. Supported by policemen, Alarcon let himself be dragged towards his grief. When he came out again, he was pale and broken, but was trying to appear dignified.
He hadn’t said a word since we’d left the farm.
The sergeant took us to the station and ordered me to sit on a bench in a narrow room, watched closely by four officers, while he went with Alarcon into an office, leaving the door open. Their voices reached me intermittently.
‘It can’t be him,’ Alarcon sighed. ‘He spent the night by my bedside in the hospital. The doctor and the nurses can confirm it.’
‘Are you sure, Monsieur Ventabren?’
‘I tell you it isn’t him.’
‘Jérôme the milkman saw a black car leaving the farm just as he was arriving this morning for his delivery. It was exactly nine o’clock. Jérôme is categorical: your daughter’s body was still warm when he touched it …’
A black car!
This revelation sobered me abruptly. There was an explosion in my head. He did it! … As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t a shadow of doubt. I knew immediately who had taken from me the person I cared most about in the world.
I heaved with nausea, but nothing came out. I felt like I was breaking into a thousand pieces.
I drove Alarcon home. A terrible stiffness had come over me and my gestures were like those of an automaton. I couldn’t think. I was wandering in a fog, guided only by my instinct. Alarcon was holding up. He was breathing through his mouth, eyes fixed, his face inscrutable. But as soon as he was settled in his wheelchair in the house, all the composure he had shown so far, all the almost martial dignity he had displayed in the village crumbled and he burst into sobs, bent double over his lower limbs.
Night fell. In the flickering light of the oil lamp, the shadows had the shape of misfortune. Outside, the rain started again, heavier than ever. I could hear the wind howling in the folds of the hill. I was cold, locked in a trance-like state. I don’t think I yet realised the destruction that was about to overwhelm the rest of my days. A sepulchral voice went round and round in my head: He did it! He did it!
We were too devastated to think of eating. I helped Alarcon to get into bed and watched over him until he fell asleep. In the kitchen, I found a hunting knife and put it in my pocket. The mirror on the wall reflected back a spectral effigy. I looked like nothing on earth. An automaton driven by a supernatural force, I got in my car and sped back to Oran.
Boulevard Mascara was deserted and the haberdasher’s was closed. The light was on in Gino’s window. I climbed the stairs four steps at a time … ‘Gino!’ It wasn’t a cry, it was no longer anything but a scream, a geyser of hatred and rage that shook the walls. Gino wasn’t in his room. His bed was unmade, but warm. The gramophone I had given him was on; a record was going round and round on the turntable with a monotonous scraping that bored into my brain. On a low table, an ashtray overflowed with stubbed-out cigarette ends next to a half-eaten plateful of cooked meat and a dirty glass. A bottle of wine had smashed on the ground, sending broken glass in all directions. A strong smell of alcohol pervaded the room. On a chair by the bed hung a pair of trousers and a shirt. An overcoat lay on the eiderdown, along with a pair of shoes. With a bitter gesture, I swept away the gramophone, which broke on the floor; the horn bounced off the wall, turned over and lay still. Gino couldn’t be far away. He must be hiding somewhere. I looked for him in the toilet, on the terrace, in the other rooms; he must have gone to buy something to get drunk on, hoping to drown his bad conscience. That likelihood stoked my hatred. My whole body shook. I sat down on a step in the middle of the dark staircase and waited, fire in my belly, the knife in my fist.
The thunder belched like a hydra in a trance, pouring torrential rain on the city. The howling of the wind filled the night with an apocalyptic fury. Struggling with the rage that was eating me up, I refused to think of anything, to ask myself what I was doing there. I was merely an extension of the knife gripped in my hand.
And Gino arrived. Dead drunk. A litre bottle under his arm. His pyjamas soaked through. His slippers saturated with rainwater. The lightning cast his wretched shadow on the walls. I didn’t give him time to say a word. I didn’t want to hear anything, forgive anything. If he’d thrown himself at my feet, begged me in tears, sworn it was an accident, that it wasn’t his fault, that the Duke had made him do it; if he had reminded me of our finest memories, the vow made to his mother, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Gino gave a start when the knife sank into his side. I felt his hot blood on my wrist. His breath, reeking of wine, almost made me feel drunk.
He clutched at the collar of my coat, made a gurgling sound and sagged slightly.
Another flash of lightning illuminated us.
‘It’s me, Gino,’ he said, recognising me in the dark.
‘Maybe,’ I retorted, ‘but not the one I knew.’
His grip weakened. He slid slowly down my body and lay at my feet. I stepped over him and went out into the street. The rain fell on me like a spell.
I went to Saint-Eugène to wait for the Duke. I was hoping he’d come back from a party or an evening meeting. His villa lay in wait behind its gardens, all its lights off. A servant in a hood was keeping guard near the gate, with a big dog at the end of a leash. Hours passed. Numb with cold in my car, I kept watch on the surrounding area. Not a single night owl appeared, not a single car. The torrents of water, reinforced by the gusts of wind, blurred my view.
I went back to the farm. In the beating rain. Dazzled by the lightning.
Alarcon was asleep.
Shivering with cold, I wrapped myself in a blanket and lay down on the padded bench seat in the drawing room without taking my shoes off.
A rattling sound woke me. Dawn had come. A woman was bustling in the kitchen. She told me she was the wife of a neighbour, who had sent her to Alarcon’s house to see if she could help in any way. She was making us something to eat. At about one, her husband and other locals came to console the grieving father. Alarcon didn’t have the strength to see them. He preferred to stay in bed and deal with his grief alone. The neighbours were poorly dressed peasants with rough hands, rugged swarthy faces and rumpled clothes, simple people who looked at their land in the same way they looked at their wives and felt nothing but contempt for wealth and show. They didn’t know much about boxing or about what went on in the city. They asked me who I was and I replied, ‘Irène’s fiancé.’
Late in the afternoon, a police car pulled up. An officer told us that the sergeant wanted to see Monsieur Ventabren and that it was urgent. ‘It seems there’s been a development.’ He didn’t say any more, ignorant himself of what it was about.
At the station in Lourmel, the sergeant led Alarcon and me to a cell with bars. An unkempt man was there, squashed behind a refectory table, his face flabby, his shoulders hunched. It w
as Jérôme the milkman, wearing a mud-stained coat with worn elbows. He was sobbing and wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, his wrists handcuffed, his face as shrivelled as an over-ripe quince.
‘The inconsistencies in his testimony set us thinking,’ the sergeant said. ‘He kept contradicting himself and going back on his previous statements. Then he cracked.’
A terrible silence filled the police station.
Alarcon and I were transfixed with amazement. He was the first to break the silence. Getting his breath back from somewhere deep inside him, he asked in a shaky voice, ‘Why did you do it, Jérôme?’
‘It wasn’t me, Monsieur Ventabren,’ the milkman said, kneeling in front of him imploringly. ‘It was the devil. He possessed me. There was nobody in the house. I went in to deliver the milk. I put the jug on the table in the kitchen as usual. I was about to leave when I saw Irène washing herself. I didn’t do it on purpose. The bathroom door was ajar, I swear it; it wasn’t me who opened it. I said, Jérôme go home, what you’re doing isn’t right. But it wasn’t me. I would have gone home, as you can imagine, Alarcon. You know me. I’m no angel, but I have a sense of modesty, I have principles. In my head, I said to myself, What’s happening to you, Jérôme? Have you gone mad or what? Go away, don’t look, get out of here fast, except that the devil doesn’t listen to that kind of thing; he doesn’t ask himself questions, not the devil.’
‘You raped her, then strangled her,’ the sergeant cried.
‘It was the devil, not me. Why else would I have given myself up as soon as I came to my senses?’
‘You didn’t give yourself up, you confessed. There’s a difference, you piece of shit.’
I don’t know if it was my cry or the thunder that shook the station from top to bottom, if I threw myself on Jérôme or if I only imagined myself tearing him to pieces with my bare hands. I don’t know if the policemen tore me off him, hitting me with their truncheons, or if I hurt myself falling. I only remember the blackness that followed. Nothing in front of me, nothing behind, nothing to right or left. The sky, the whole sky had fallen on my head with its billions of stars, its millions of prayers and its armies of demons. I cursed myself as no damned soul has ever been cursed. I had killed Gino for nothing, and killed the whole world with him. I could no longer hear myself breathe. My breath was denying me. I had aged several millennia. I was a mummy deprived of its rotten bandages, I was Cain emerged from the ashes of hell, his murder more stupid than the destiny of men. What have you done? cried a voice going round and round inside me. How are you going to live now? On what? Who for? Your sleep will be made of black holes, your days of funeral pyres. You can pray until your voice gives out, recite the incantations of all the magicians on earth, deck yourself with talismans or disappear in a wreath of incense; you can read the holy verses all day long, put thorns on your head and walk on water, you won’t change the fate awaiting you one iota.
I can’t remember if I took my leave of Ventabren or if the cops threw me out. It seemed to me I had gone through time in a single stride, my own cries following me like a hostile crowd. I drove, drove without knowing where I was heading. I stopped under a tree to weep. Not a sob emerged. Not a hiccup. Evening was coming; I saw nothing but my own night, that cold milky darkness taking root in my being like a slow death. I don’t know how I ended up at Camélia’s. I drank like a fish, I who had never lifted a glass of wine to my lips. Aïda was embarrassed. She was expecting someone. While waiting, she plunged me in a bathtub and rubbed my body as if trying to erase me. Wrapped in a towel, I sat down in the armchair and continued drinking. Shadowy figures moved in slow motion around me. I heard voices without understanding them. Camélia was asking Aïda to get rid of me. My mind was elsewhere; it was still at the station at Lourmel, leaning over Jérôme as he wept. I should have finished that lecher off, thrown myself on him and not let go until I’d crushed him. I was angry with myself for listening to his confession without reacting, even though he had thrown my life into an abyss. Aïda went to fetch more wine. An ocean wouldn’t have been enough to extinguish the inferno engulfing me. The more I drank, the lighter I felt; I swam above a sea of vapours and dizziness, my heart in an eagle’s talon, my eyes like spinning tops. My teeth chattered as I sat in my towel, unable to make a move without knocking something over. Aïda ignored me. Sitting on a wing chair at her dressing table, she was making herself beautiful for the evening. I saw her back as a rampart excluding me from the world of the living. ‘You have to go home now,’ she said when the time came. ‘My client’s waiting in the parlour.’ ‘He can go to hell!’ I heard myself grunt. ‘My money’s as good as his.’ She protested. I threatened to blow up the whole place. Camélia didn’t want a rumpus or a scandal in her establishment. She offered me a room. I refused to leave my armchair. Aïda had to see her client in another room. I waited for her to come back. The walls started swaying around me. I dozed off, or maybe I’d fainted. When I woke up, dawn was filtering through the blinds. Aïda wasn’t in her bed. I got up and went out to call her in the corridor. ‘Aïda! Aïda!’ My cries were meant as explosions. I was choking with anger, a storm of drunkenness. Obtaining no reply, I started hammering at the doors, from one end of the corridor to the other, then kicking them down. Prostitutes ran out into the corridor, terrified, some completely naked; clients appeared here and there, also woken up and furious. One of them tried to stop me. Others lent him a hand. I hit out violently to push them away, continuing to call Aïda. Arms seized me round the waist, fingers caught me round the throat, fists rained down on me. I hit out in a tornado of curses, wild, stark raving mad … Something smashed on my skull. I just had time to see Aïda go down with me as I fell, the handle of a jug in her hand.
Coming to, I realised that I was tied up at the foot of the stairs, with blood on my body and one black eye. The prostitutes and their clients formed a circle around me in stony silence. Uniformed police officers surrounded me, truncheons at the ready. A motionless body was being laid on a stretcher. In the scuffle, I had killed a man.
I didn’t remember a thing.
I didn’t know my victim. Had I hit him in the wrong place, thrown him down the stairs by accident? Had he slipped on a step during the fight? What did it matter? The unknown man lay there, glassy-eyed, a streak of blood on his chin.
When a misfortune happens, there’s no way out.
It was written somewhere that it had to finish this way.
Wedged between two policemen in the back seat of the car, I felt myself slipping into a parallel world from which there was no turning back. The handcuffs chafed my wrists. The rancid smell of the two policemen choked me – or maybe it was my own smell. What did it matter? I had killed a man, and that had sobered me up.
‘Do you know who you killed? A national hero, one of the most decorated officers in the Great War. It’s the guillotine for you, boy …’
My body shook.
‘Go on, laugh,’ one of the policemen said, elbowing me in the side. ‘We’ll see how long you laugh when your head rolls into the basket.’
I wasn’t laughing: I was sobbing.
It was fully daylight now, dazzling white. A limpid sky rolled out the carpet for the rising sun. Early risers hurried along the streets, dazed with sleep. A shopkeeper raised the iron shutter of his shop with a din that shatterd the morning silence. He adjusted his smock before hanging his pole on a hook. A traffic policeman whistled at a carter whose horse was refusing to move out of the way. A group of nuns crossed the road quickly. For all of them, it would be a day like any other. For me, nothing would ever be the same again. Life was going on, supreme in its banality. Mine was escaping from me in a puff of smoke. I thought of my mother. What was she doing right now? I imagined her sitting on a mat, watching my father sink into madness. My father! Would he ever see off his ghosts? Would the noise of machine guns and bombs die down at last and allow him to listen to the furtive course of time passing? In front of me, the flabby, wrinkled neck of the drive
r reminded me of a broken accordion. It was as if the weight of his thoughts was pressing on his neck. The police car drove past a market, past the Douniazed cinema, which was showing a comedy film. A vendor of torraicos was lining up his cones on his makeshift stall. Soon, urchins would start prowling around his little cart, looking for an opportunity to rob him. The driver hooted his horn to clear a path through the pedestrians; a pointless gesture because the way was already clear. Through the windscreen, I could see the prison waiting for me, implacable; I could smell the stench of the damp gloom where cries would have no echoes, where remorse would be nothing more than a cellmate or a pet, my Siamese twin.
I thought of Edmond Bourg, the author of The Miracle Man, the savage way he had killed his wife and her lover, the blade that had jammed on the day of his execution, the revered priest the murderer had become … Would I too be entitled to a miracle? I would so much like to wake up to a future washed clean of my sins. I probably wouldn’t be a priest or an imam, but I would never again raise my hand to my fellow man. I would pay a lot of attention to my friends and I wouldn’t respond to the provocations of my enemies. I would live without anger, generous, holding on to what was essential, and I would be able to find peace everywhere I went. Of Irène, I would have a tender memory, of Gino a fervent repentance; I promised to submit to test after test without complaint if such was the price for deserving to survive with the people who were dear to me, the people I wasn’t able to keep.
Almighty God, You who are said to be merciful, make the blade jam. I wouldn’t like to die as brainless as I’ve lived.
The car drove around Place d’Armes, and I bade farewell to everything that had mattered to me. The two lions guarding the entrance to the town hall struck me as bigger than usual; stiff in their bronze costumes, they looked down on their world. And they were right. Only creatures of flesh and blood end up rotting in the sun.
The Angels Die Page 33