Act of Passion (19 page)

I think, your Honour, it was the discovery I made of her true personality. Call it intuition, if you like. And what I discovered was almost in spite of her, because, you see, she was ashamed of it.

I worked for weeks, and I mean literally worked, to deliver her from shame. And to do that I was forced to pry into the darkest corners.

At the beginning she lied. She lied like a little girl who tells her friends stories about the maid in her house, when her family has no maid.

She lied, and patiently I would untangle all the lies. I would force her to admit them one after the other. I had a complicated skein to unravel, but I held the end of the thread and never let go of it.

Because of her rich and depraved little friends, because of her own parents who persisted in sending her to play with them (their families being the most considerable in the city), she got into the habit, certain evenings, of stretching out on her stomach in the solitude of her bed. and of lying there rigid for hours straining fiercely for a spasm that never came.

Physiologically she was precocious, since at eleven she was a woman. For years she continued this desperate search for an impossible relief and that mouth, open as when I saw her at Nantes, your Honour, those eyes rolled back in her head, that pulse at a hundred and forty - these were her heritage from the little girl.

Men had merely taken the place of that solitary rigidity. And it was still for the sake of being like other people of feeling like other people at last, that she had sought them.

Twenty-two. For at twenty-two she was still a virgin She was still hoping.

What was she hoping for? Just what we have been taught, what she had been taught to hope for - marriage, children, a peaceful house, everything that people call happiness. But in Paris, far from home, she was a little girl from a good family, without money.

And then one day, your Honour, a day of lassitude, of uneasiness, the little girl wanted to do what the others were doing, make sure she was made like the others. Without love, without poetry true or false, without any real desire! And for my part, I find that tragic.

With a stranger, with a body she did not know against her own, she began again the same attempts as the little girl in her solitary bed and because with all her might she wanted to succeed, because her whole being was straining for relief, the man was convinced that she was a passionate lover.

The others too, your Honour, who followed in succession - not one of them — not one, I tell you - understood that what she was looking for in their arms was a sort of deliverance. Not one suspected that she left their embrace with the same bitterness, the same nausea she had felt after her solitary experiments.

Is it because I was the first to have this revelation that I loved her and that she loved me?

Many other things, one after the other, I understood later on. It was like a rosary one tells slowly, bead by bead.

That round of warm light which is the common need of all of us, where is it to be found when one lives alone in a big city?

She discovered bars. She discovered cocktails. And for a few hours drink gave her that self-confidence she so much needed. And the men she met in such places were ready to help her believe in herself.

Didn't I confess that I might have become a pillar of the Poker-Bar, that I felt the temptation? I too would have found that easy appreciation I failed to find at home; I too would have found women who would have given me the illusion of love.

But she was humbler than I, in fact. I could still manage to withdraw into my shell, while she could not.

And a few drinks, your Honour, a few compliments, a vague semblance of admiration and tenderness would sweep away the last shreds of her resistance.

Haven't we all done the same thing, you and I, every man, even the most intelligent and the most virtuous? Haven't we all, at one time or another, sought in the vilest places, in the most mercenary caresses, a little solace, a little self-confidence?

She went with strangers, or practically. She went with them into hotel rooms. Men pawed her in their cars, in taxis.

As I told you, I have counted them. I know exactly every one of their gestures.

Do you see why it was that we had such an imperious need to talk to each other and that all the empty hours, the hours that were stolen from us, were torture?

Not only did she fail to find the desired relief, not only did she look in vain for that confidence in herself which would have restored to her a semblance of equilibrium, but she retained enough clear-headedness to be conscious of her progressive degradation.

When she came to La Roche, your Honour, when I met her at Nantes in the rain on the platform of a station after we had both missed our train, she was at the end of her resistance, she had given up the struggle, she was resigned to anything, including disgust for herself.

She was like - forgive the blasphemy, Martine, but you do understand - she was like a woman who, to feel secure at last, enters a brothel.

The miracle is that I met her, that double tardiness which brought us face to face. The miracle is, above all else, that I, who am not particularly intelligent, who have never, like certain of my colleagues, spent much time over problems of this kind - that I, Charles Alavoine, in the course of a night when I was drunk, when she too was drunk, and during which we had dragged our disgust through all the sordid rain-drenched streets of Nantes, suddenly understood.

Not even understood. I didn't understand at once. To be exact, let's say that I glimpsed, through all the darkness in which we were struggling, a tiny far-off ray of light.

The true miracle is, after all, that I had the desire to understand, God knows why - perhaps because I, too, felt alone, because I had sometimes longed to sink down on a bench and never to get up again, perhaps because there was still that little glow-worm, because everything had not gone out in me - the real miracle is that I wanted to draw nearer to that fraternal light and understand, and that this desire, of which I was not conscious, was enough to make me overcome all obstacles.

I didn't even know then that it was love.

Chapter Nine

A little while ago they came for my cell-mate to take him to the visitors' waiting-room. He is the one I told you about who looks like a young bull. For a long time I didn't know or care what his name was. It is Antoine Belhomme, I've since found out, and he was born in the Loiret.

I finally learned why he was so grim, his mouth bitter, his eyes sullen. They'd played him for a sucker, your Honour, to use his own expression. The fact was they didn't have sufficient evidence against him to take him before a jury. He didn't know this. He thought he was done for, and if he kept on denying his guilt it was only on principle, not to knuckle under. And that was when his examining magistrate, one of your colleagues, proposed a kind of bargain.

I suppose it wasn't discussed in any such frank terms. But I believe what Belhomme told me. They began by talking to him about the penitentiary and the guillotine. They had the young animal so terrified that cold sweat stood out on his forehead. Then the magistrate, when he thought him sufficiently softened up, gently hinted at the possibility of a compromise.

If he would confess, that would be taken into account, premeditation would be officially ruled out, since the murder weapon was a bottle he had picked up off the bar. His conduct during the preliminary hearings, as well as his good behaviour at the trial, would also be taken into consideration, and they promised him, at least they let him hope, that he would get off with not more than ten years.

He fell for it. He was so confident that, when he used to see his lawyer sweating blood trying to defend him, he himself would reassure him:

'Take it easy. I tell you it's in the bag.'

Just the same they double-crossed him. They slapped him with twenty years, the maximum ... All because, between the preliminary hearings and the trial, chance would have it that two other crimes of the same nature were committed in the outskirts of the city, and as a final stroke of bad luck, both of them by boys about his own age, giving rise to a furious press campaign. The papers talked of a wave of terror, a grave social danger, the necessity for drastic measures.

And my young bull was the goat. Forgive me if I am beginning to talk like him. At any rate, there's someone to whom it would be just as well not to make speeches about Society with a capital S, or Justice! You stink in his nostrils, the whole lot of you.

This is the first time he's had a visitor since we've been living together. He left like a meteorite, head first.

When he returned a moment ago, he was another man. His eyes shone with a pride I have rarely seen before.

'It was the girl ...' he flung at me, not able to find other words. But he understood what he meant and so did I.

I knew that he was living with a girl barely fifteen years old who worked in a radio factory near the Puteaux Bridge. He had something else to tell me, but it was seething with such force in his throat, it was surging up from such depths that the words failed to come out right away:

'She's going to have a baby!'

As a doctor, your Honour, how many times have I been the first to announce this news to a young woman, often in the presence of her husband. I know all the various reactions of all kinds of people.

But such total happiness, a pride like that, I have never seen before. And he added simply:

'Now, as she says, she won't have to worry!'

Don't ask me why I have told you this story. I have no idea. I'm not trying to prove anything. It has nothing in common with ours. And yet, perhaps, it might serve to explain what I mean by absolute love, and even what I mean by purity.

What purer, tell me, than this child, so proud, so happy to be coming to announce to her lover condemned to twenty years hard labour that she is going to have a child by him?

'Now, I won't have to worry!'

And
he
did not look worried when he came back to his cell.

In a certain sense there was something of the same purity in our love. It was just as total, if this word can make you understand how we accepted it beforehand, without our understanding it, without knowing just what was happening to us, with no idea of the extreme consequences.

It is because Martine loved me like that that I loved her. It is perhaps because I loved her with the same innocence - you may smile if you like — that she gave me her love.

A vicious circle? I can't help it. We here enter into a domain, your Honour, where it is difficult to explain what one means, especially to those who do not know.

How much simpler it would be to tell our story to Antoine Belhomme, who would need no commentaries.

Before the thing happened, in my wife's house, as I willingly call it from now on, we had already, Martine and I, learned to know suffering.

I wanted to find out everything about her (I have already told you that) and, docilely, after a few attempts at lying - for she was trying not to hurt me - she told me everything, she even told me too much, feeling so culpable she even overcharged herself with sins, as I perceived later on.

Her arrival at La Roche-sur-Yon, in that rainy December, after a detour by way of Nantes to borrow a little money, was after all a sort of suicide. She had given up. When one reaches a certain degree of disgust for oneself, one degrades oneself even further so as to reach the end, the bottom, more quickly, because after that nothing worse can happen to one.

But, instead of that, a man offered her life.

In doing so I took on, and I fully realized it, a heavy responsibility. I felt that she had to be delivered from herself, from her past, from those few years, those very few years in which she had lost everything.

And that past, I thought, in order to accomplish this, I would have to take in hand myself.

I receive many of the journals on psycho-analysis. And although I have not always read them, I do know something about the subject. Certain of my colleagues in the provinces have taken it up, and have always terrified me.

Wasn't it necessary that I should purge her of her memories? I sincerely believed it. I have not, I think, the least predisposition to sadism or to masochism.

If not to deliver her, why should I have spent hours on end confessing her, relentlessly poking into all the most sordid, the most humiliating corners?

I was jealous, your Honour, ferociously jealous. I am going to confess a ridiculous detail on this subject. When I met Raoul Boquet a little later on, about the fifteenth of January, I wouldn't greet him. I frankly stared at him without bowing.

Because he had known her before me! Because he had offered her a drink and she had accepted. Because he had known the other Martine.

The Martine
before
me, the Martine I hated, whom I had hated at first sight and whom she herself also hated.

I did not create the new Martine. I have no such pretension. I don't take myself for God the Father. The new Martine, you see, was the oldest; it was the little girl of the past who had never ceased to exist altogether, and my sole merit, if merit there is, was to have discovered her under a litter of false pretences of which she was the first dupe.

I undertook at all costs to restore her confidence in herself, her confidence in life, and it was with this end in view that, together, with dogged perseverance, we ventured upon the great cleansing.

When I say that I know everything about her past, be assured that I mean literally everything, including those gestures, thoughts, reactions which one human being so rarely confides to another.

I have known appalling nights. But the bad Martine was gradually disappearing and that was all that mattered. I watched another Martine being born little by little, one who every day grew more and more to resemble a snapshot she had given me, taken when she was sixteen.

I no longer fear ridicule. Here, one no longer fears anything except oneself. Every human being, even if his whole fortune consists of only two suitcases, drags around with him through the years a certain number of objects.