Act of Passion (12 page)

And it was then that, suddenly, I leaped out of bed and crossed over to hers. My face, my lips, sought her dark hair and I stammered:

'Martine .. .'

Perhaps her first reaction was to push me away! We could not see each other. We were blind, both of us.

I threw back the covers. As in a dream, without pausing, without thinking, hardly knowing what I was doing, with an irresistible movement and without warning, I penetrated her.

At the same instant, I had the sensation of a revelation. It seemed to me that for the first time in my life I possessed a woman.

I loved her furiously. I have-told you that. I loved her entire body, feeling its slightest tremors. Our mouths became one, and in a kind of rage I tried to assimilate this flesh which, only a short time before, had meant nothing to me.

Once more, as at the night club of the red lights, I felt those tremors of her body, only more violent now. I almost shared her mysterious anguish, which I was trying to understand.

If we were alone together, your Honour, I would like to give you a few details, only to you, and I should not consider it a profanation. In a letter, I would seem to be taking pleasure in evoking more or less erotic images.

How far I am from all that! Have you ever had the sensation that you were on the point of attaining something superhuman?

That sensation - I tell you, I had it that night. It seemed that I could, if I tried, pierce I know not what ceiling, leap suddenly into unknown regions of space.

And that anguish growing in her ... that anguish which, even as a doctor, I could only explain as a desire similar to mine ...

I am a prudent man, what people call an honest man. I have a wife and children. If sometimes I sought love or pleasure away from home, I had never until that moment risked anything that might, in any way, complicate my family life. You do understand me, don't you?

But with this woman, whom I didn't even know a few hours before, I behaved, in spite of myself, in every respect like a consummate lover - like an animal.

Suddenly, because I didn't understand, my hand groped for the electric switch. I saw her in the yellow glare and I don't know if she realized that from then on her face was in the light.

Throughout her entire being, your Honour, in her staring eyes, in her open mouth, in her pinched nostrils, there was an intolerable anguish, but at the same time - try to understand - a will, no less desperate, to escape, to burst the bubble, to pierce the ceiling - in a word, to be delivered.

I saw this anguish growing towards such a paroxysm that my doctor's conscience took fright, and I felt relieved when suddenly after a final tension of every nerve, she fell back as though empty and discouraged, with her heart throbbing so hard under her little breast that I had no need of touching her to count the beats.

I did so nevertheless, a doctor's obsession. Fear perhaps of the responsibility? Her pulse was a hundred and forty, her colourless lips were parted over her white teeth, as white as the teeth of a corpse.

She murmured something that sounded like:

'I can't...'

And she tried to smile. She seized my great paw. She clung to it.

We remained like that for a long time in the stillness of the hotel, waiting for the pulsations to become more normal.

'Get me a glass of water,
veux-tu
?'

She didn't think of pulling the covers over her and you don't know how grateful I am to her for that. While I was holding up her head for her to drink, I noticed a scar, still fresh, on her belly, an angry pick scar running vertically.

You see, for me, a doctor, the scar was rather what an extract from a criminal record would be for you.

She made no attempt to hide it from me. She half stammered:

'Oh God, but I'm tired...'

And two great hot tears rolled down my cheeks.

Chapter
Six

Are those things that I have told in court, that I could have told you in the silence of your office, in the presence of your redheaded clerk and of Maître Gabriel, for whom life is so simple?

I don't know whether my love for her began that night, but what I am certain of is that when a little before seven o'clock next morning we took a train, clammy with dampness and cold, I could no longer face the prospect of life without her, and that this woman sitting opposite me, pale and blurred in the cruel light of the compartment, near the window on which the raindrops showed lighter than the night - that this stranger, with a hat rendered ridiculous by yesterday's rain, was closer to me than any human being had ever been before.

It would be difficult to be emptier than we were then, both of us, and we must have seemed like phantoms to people who saw us. When the night porter, the same one who had given us our key, came to wake us, a light still shone under the door, for our bedlight had not been turned off since I had gropingly switched it On. Martine was in her bath. I opened the door, wearing only my trousers, with my chest bare and hair tousled, to ask:

'Could you get us some coffee?'

The porter too looked like a phantom.

'I'm sorry, sir, not before seven o'clock.'

'Could you make some for us yourself?'

'I haven't the keys, I'm sorry.'

Was he perhaps a little afraid of me? Outside we couldn't find a taxi. Martine clung to my arm and I probably looked just as spectral in the cold grey mist. And it was lucky for us that our nocturnal peregrinations had landed us not too far from the station.

'Perhaps the buffet will be open.'

It was. Early morning customers were served black coffee or coffee with hot milk in great ashy-white bowls. Just to look at those bowls made my stomach turn over. Martine had insisted on drinking hers and an instant later, without having time to run to the lavatories, lost it right there on the platform.

We did not talk. We sat waiting apprehensively for the effect of the jolting of the train on our aching temples, on all our ailing flesh. Like many morning trains on branch lines, ours kept executing all sorts of manoeuvres before starting, each time hammering our poor heads with violent blows.

Yet she managed to look at me with a smile as we crossed the bridge over the Loire. My little packages were scattered on the seat beside me. We were alone in the compartment. I was still holding my pipe in my mouth, probably with an air of disgust, for I'd had to let it go out.

She murmured:

'I wonder what Armande will say.. .'

I was hardly shocked. A little bit, just the same. But, after all, hadn't I been the one to start it?

'And you? Is any one expecting you?'

'M. Boquet promised to find me a furnished apartment where I could cook ...'

'Did you sleep with him?'

It was appalling, your Honour. It hadn't been twelve hours since I'd met her. The same reddish-faced clock that had witnessed our meeting was still there behind us, overlooking a network of tracks, and its little hand had not yet completed its course round the dial. And I knew, by her scar, not only that this seedy-looking young woman had had lovers but that she had been shamefully marked.

In spite of that, as I asked the question, suddenly there was a frightful pain in my chest. I remained as though petrified. I had never known anything like it before, but after that, it happened often enough for me to feel a fraternal sympathy for all cardiac sufferers.

'I told you I didn't even have time to speak to him about that...'

I had taken it for granted at one time that once in the train on neutral ground, we would resume the formal
vous
, together with our normal personalities, but, to my astonishment, the
tu
continued to seem perfectly natural.

'If you knew how funny it was the way we met...'

'Was he drunk?'

If I asked that right away, it was because I knew Raoul Boquet so well. I have described the American bar at Nantes. We have recently acquired one like it at La Roche-sur-Yon. I haven't set foot in it more than once or twice. You'll find mostly snobs there, who think the city's cafés not smart enough and who go there to show off, perching on the high stools and watching the cocktails being mixed, just the way Martine did the day before. You'll see a few women too, not prostitutes but more probably respectable housewives who want to appear modern. Boquet is something else again. He is my age, perhaps a year or two younger. His father was the founder of the Galleries and he, together with his brother and sister, inherited it five years ago.

Raoul Boquet drinks for the sake of drinking, is rude for the sake of being rude because everything, as he says, is such a goddamn bore - everything and everybody bores him. Because his wife is a goddamn bore he sometimes stays away for four or five days at a time. He will leave the house to be gone an hour, without an overcoat, and turn up two days later in La Rochelle or Bordeaux with a whole bunch of people he has picked up God knows where.

Business too is a goddamn bore, except in spurts, at which times, almost sober for two or three weeks, he begins to turn everything topsy-turvy in the store.

He drives like a madman. On purpose. After midnight he will suddenly dash up on the pavement for the pleasure of scaring the wits out of some worthy citizen on his way home. He's had I don't know how many accidents. They've taken his licence away twice.

I knew him better than anyone else did, since he was my patient, and suddenly he entered my life in an entirely new capacity, and I was even reduced to being afraid of him.

'He drinks a lot, doesn't he? I thought right away that that interests him more than women ...'

Except women in certain houses where he goes periodically and raises hell.

'I was with a girl I knew at a bar in Paris, Rue Washington ... Perhaps you know it? ... On the left, near the Champs-Elysées. He had been drinking and talked in a loud voice to the man next to him, a friend perhaps, perhaps a stranger ...'

Her words flowed on monotonously, like the raindrops trickling down the train windows.

' "I'll tell you something," he was saying, "my brother-in-law gives me a pain in the neck. He's a snake, my brother-in-law, but the trouble is, he must be good because my bitch of a sister can't get along without him, swears by him ... Only the day before yesterday he took advantage of my absence to sack my secretary on some pretext or other ... The minute he sees a secretary's devoted to me, he sacks her or manages to win her over to his side - easy enough since they all come from around there...

' "I ask you, do the Galleries belong to the Boquets or don't they? And is he a Boquet when he's called Machoul? I'm telling you, barman, Machoul, that's his name, if you have no objection ... My brother-in-law's name is Machoul, and the only thing he thinks about is how he can kick me out too ...

' "And do you know what I'm going to do, old man? I'm going to get my next secretary from Paris, a girl who doesn't know Oscar Machoul and who won't be impressed by him." '

The sky was beginning to get lighter. Silhouetted against the uniform greyness of the flat countryside, farms began to come out of the shadows, with lights in the stables.

Martine went on talking, without hurrying.

'I had come to the end of my tether, you know. I was drinking cocktails with my friend because she was paying for them, but for eight days I'd been living on nothing but rolls and coffee. All at once, I went over to him, and I said:

'If you want a secretary who doesn't know Machoul, take me .. .'

I understood a lot of things, your Honour, I can tell you. And first of all, knowing Boquet as I do, I could picture the scene. He must have talked as crudely as possible, on principle.

'You're broke, I suppose.'

And he undoubtedly asked her with a false air of innocence if she'd been working in an office or
en
maison.

'Well, come along to La Roche if you like, we can always try it.'

He made her drink, that is certain. One of the reasons I always keep away from the bar where he hangs out is that he gets furious if anyone has the misfortune to refuse to drink with him.

Anyhow, she came to La Roche, your Honour. She started out, with her two suitcases, for a little city entirely unknown to her.

'Why did you come by way of Nantes and why did you break your journey there?'

'Because I knew a girl who works at the Belgian Consulate, a friend of mine. I had just enough money left to pay for my railway ticket and I didn't want to ask my new boss for money the minute I arrived.'

Our train stopped at every little station along the line. Each time the brakes were put on we would both give a little start at the same time and then wait in anguish for more jolts as the train moved again. The windows grew pale
r
Men shouted the names of the stations, rushed up and down, opened and closed the train doors, piled up the mail bags and express packages on hand-carts.

A funny atmosphere, your Honour, in which to say shamefacedly, after hesitating for I don't know how many kilometres:

'You're not going to sleep with him?'

'Of course not.'

'Even if he asks you to? Even if he insists?'

'Of course not.'

'Not with him or anyone else?'

Again that agonizing pain which my patients who suffer from angina pectoris have so often tried to describe to me. You think you are dying. You feel death at hand. You are as though suspended to life by a thread. And yet, I do not have angina pectoris.

'Not with him or anybody else?'

'I promise,' she replied, smiling at me.

We had not mentioned love. We did not mention it then. We were two miserable bedraggled dogs in the unrelieved greyness of that second-class compartment in December, while the day, for want of sun, was slow in rising.

Yet, I believed her, and she believed me.

We were not sitting on the same bench, but opposite each other, for we had to be very careful of our movements to avoid being sick and, at each jolt of the train, bells clanged inside our skulls.

We looked at each other as if we had known each other all our lives. Without coquetry, thank God. It was only shortly before we reached La Roche when she saw me gather my packages together, that she began powdering and putting on lipstick; then she tried lighting a cigarette.