Act of Passion (2 page)

With the bare hands! Isn't that magnificent? Isn't that enough to make you want to go over to the other side?

My cell-mate is watching me as I write, without concealing an admiration tinged with annoyance. He is a great strapping boy of twenty-one, a kind of young bull, with a ruddy complexion and candid eyes. He hasn't been in my cell more than a week. Before him there was a poor melancholic fellow who spent all day cracking his finger joints.

My young bull killed an old woman in her little wine shop, hitting her over the head with a bottle, having gone in, as he artlessly put it, to clean up the place.

The judge, it seems, was indignant.

'With a bottle! ... Aren't you ashamed of yourself?'

And he: 'How could I know she'd be dumb enough to yell? I had to make her stop, and there was the bottle on the counter. I didn't even know if it was full or empty.'

Now he is convinced that I am preparing my appeal, or soliciting some special favour.

What he can't understand, although he too has killed, but accidentally (he's almost right - it was, in a way, the old woman's fault) - what he can't understand is that I myself should insist on proving that I acted with premeditation, in full consciousness of my act.

Do you understand, your Honour?
With premeditation.
Until someone has admitted that, I shall be alone in the world.

In full consciousness of my act!

And, in the end, I'm sure you
'll
understand, unless, like certain of my colleagues who feel humiliated at seeing a doctor in the prisoner's dock at a murder trial, you prefer to pretend that I am mad, altogether mad, or a little mad - in any case
irresponsible
or not fully responsible.

They got nothing for their pains, thank God. But even today, when one might suppose that everything had been done, that everything was over, they are still hammering away at it, egged on, I suspect, by my friends, my colleagues, my wife, and my mother.

However that may be, after a month I have not yet been sent to Fontevrault, where I should, theoretically, serve my sentence. They are watching me, I am always being taken to the hospital. They ask a lot of obvious questions that make me smile with pity. The director himself has come several times, spying on me through the peep-hole, and I wonder if they didn't put the young bull in my cell in place of my former melancholy cellmate to keep me from committing suicide.

It is my calmness that worries them, what the papers called my want of conscience, my cynicism.

I am calm, that's a fact, and this letter should convince you of it. Although I am only a simple family doctor, I have studied, enough psychiatry to recognize the letter of a madman.

Too bad, your Honour, if you think the contrary. It would be a great disillusionment to me.

For I still enjoy the illusion of possessing one friend, and that friend, strange as it may seem, is you.

What a lot of things I have to tell you now that I cannot be accused of trying to save my neck and that Maître Gabriel is not there any longer to step on my toes every time I express a truth too simple for him to understand!

We both of us belong to what is called, at home, the liberal professions and what, in certain less advanced milieus, is designated more pretentiously by the term
intelligentsia.
Doesn't the word make you want to laugh? No matter. We belong then to a good middle class, more or less cultivated, the class which furnishes the country with officials, doctors, lawyers, magistrates, quite a few deputies, senators and ministers.

However, from what I have gathered, you are a generation ahead of me. Your father was already a magistrate while mine was still tilling the soil.

Don't tell me that it is of no importance. You would be wrong. You would make me think of the rich who are always saying that money doesn't count in life.

Naturally! Because they have it. But if you don't have any, what then? Have you too ever suffered from the lack of it?

Now take my 'toad's head,' as the witty reporter said. Supposing you had been in my place in the prisoner's dock, he wouldn't have mentioned toads' heads.

One generation more or less makes a difference. You yourself are the proof. Already your face is longer, your skin does not shine, you have the easy manners which my daughters are only now acquiring. Even your glasses, your myopia ... Even your calm, precise way of wiping the lenses with your little chamois skin ...

If you had been named magistrate at La Roche-sur-Yon instead of obtaining an appointment in Paris, we should in all probability have become, if not friends, at least friendly acquaintances, as I said before. By the force of circumstances. You would have, I am sure, in all sincerity considered me an equal, but I, deep down, would always have been a little envious of you.

Don't deny it. You have only to look around you. Think of those of your friends who, like me, belong to the first
rising
generation.

Rising where, I wonder. But let that pass.

You were born at Caen and I was born at Bourgneuf-en-Vendée, a village several miles from a little town called La Châtaigneraie.

Of Caen I shall have more to say later, for it holds a memory which only recently - since my crime, to use that word — I consider one of the most important of my life.

Why not tell you right away, since it takes us to surroundings you know so well?

I have gone to Caen a dozen times or more, for I have an aunt there, a sister of my father's, who married a man in the china business. You must certainly know his shop on the Rue Saint-Jean, a hundred yards from the Hôtel de France, just where the tram runs so close to the pavement that the pedestrians have to glue themselves against the houses.

Every time I went to Caen it rained. And I liked the rain of your city. I like it for being fine, gentle and silent; I like it for the halo it throws around the landscape, for the mystery with which, in the twilight, it surrounds everybody you meet, especially the women.

Now that I think of it, I remember it was on my first visit to my aunt's. It had just grown dark and everything was shining in the rain. I must have been a little over sixteen. At the corner of the Rue Saint-Jean and another street whose name I've forgotten and which, not having any shops, was completely dark, a girl in a beige raincoat stood waiting, and there were raindrops on the fair hair escaping from under her black beret.

The tram passed, its great yellow eye streaming with water and rows of heads behind the clouded windows. A man, a young man, who was standing on the step, jumped off just in front of the shop with fishing tackle in the window.

After that it was like a dream. At the precise moment he landed on the pavement, the girl's hand caught his arm. And both of them, in a single movement, walked together towards the dark street with such ease that it made one think of the figure of a ballet, and suddenly without a word, on the first doorstep, they glued their bodies together with their wet clothes and their wet skin - and I, too, watching them from a distance, had the taste of a strange saliva in my mouth.

Perhaps because of this memory, three or four years later, when I was already a medical student, I wanted to do exactly the same thing, and in Caen too. As exactly as possible, in any case. But there was no tram and no one was waiting for me.

Naturally, you know the Brasserie Chandivert. For me it's the finest beer-restaurant in France, along with one other in Épinal, where I used to go when I was doing my military service.

There is the illuminated entrance of the cinema to the left. Then the enormous room divided into different parts, the part where you eat, with white tablecloths and silver on the tables, the part where you drink and play cards, and then, at the back, the bottle-green billiard tables under their reflectors, and the almost hieratic poses of the players.

There is also, on the platform, the orchestra, with the musicians in shabby dinner jackets, with long hair and pale faces.

There is the warm light inside and the rain trickling down the window-panes, people who come in shaking their wet clothes, cars stopping outside whose headlights can be seen for an instant.

There are the families dressed in their Sunday best for the occasion, and the habitués, with blotchy red faces, having their game of dominoes or cards, always at the same table, and calling the waiter by his first name.

It is a world, you understand, an almost complete world, a world sufficient to itself, a world into which I plunged with delight and dreamed of never leaving.

You see how far away I was, at twenty, from any criminal court.

I remember that I smoked an enormous pipe which gave me the illusion of being a man and that I looked at all the women with equal avidity.

And then, one evening, what I had always hoped for, without daring to believe it possible, happened. Alone at a table opposite me was a girl, or perhaps a woman, who was wearing a blue tailored suit and a little red hat.

If I knew how to draw I could still make a sketch of her face, her figure. She had a few freckles across her nose and her nose wrinkled when she smiled. And she smiled at me. A sweet friendly smile. Not at all one of those provocative smiles I was more accustomed to.

And we smiled at one another like that for quite a long time, long enough for the audience from the cinema to invade the café during the interval and to leave again when the bell called them back.

Then with her eyes, only with her eyes, she seemed to ask me a question, to ask me why I didn't come and sit beside her. I hesitated. I called the waiter, paid for my drink. Awkwardly I crossed over to her table.

'May I sit down?'

A yes from her eyes - always her eyes.

'You looked so bored,' she said at last when I was seated on the bench.

What we said to each other after that I have forgotten. But I know that I spent one of the happiest, friendliest hours of my life. The orchestra played Viennese waltzes. Outside it was still raining. We knew nothing about one another and I didn't dare to hope for anything.

The movies were over next door. Some people came in and began eating at the table next to ours.

'Let's go .. .' she said simply.

And we left. And outside in the fine rain, which did not seem to bother her, she took my arm in the most natural way in the world.

'Are you staying at a hotel?'

I had told her that I was from the Vendee but was studying at Nantes.

'No, at my aunt's, Rue Saint-Jean ...'

And then: 'I live quite near the Rue Saint-Jean. Only we must not make a noise. My landlady would put us out.'

We passed in front of my uncle's china shop with its closed shutters, where one sensed a faint glimmer through the glass part of the door, for the room behind the shop was their living-room. My uncle and aunt were waiting up for me. I had no latchkey.

We passed in front of the fishing-tackle shop and I drew my companion down the quiet dark street as far as the first doorstep. You understand why? But when we got there she said: 'Wait till we get to my place ...'

That is all, your Honour, and telling it I notice that it is ridiculous. She took a key out of her bag. She put a finger on her lips. She whispered in my ear: 'Careful on the stairs...'

She led me by the hand along a dark hall. We went up a flight of stairs with creaking boards, and on the first landing we saw a light round the crack of the door.

'Sh ...'

It was the landlady's room. Sylvia's was next to it. A sordid and rather unsavoury smell floated through the house. There was no electricity and she lit a gas lamp whose light hurt my eyes.

Still whispering, she said before going behind a flowered chintz curtain: I'll be back at once...'

And I can still see the combs on the stand she used as a dressing-table, the cheap mirror, the bed with a couch cover spread over it.

That's all and it's not all, your Honour. It is all because nothing happened that was not perfectly commonplace. It is not all, because for the first time I was hungry for a life other than my own.

I had no idea who she was or where she came from. I imagined vaguely what kind of a life she led, and felt sure that I was not the first to climb the creaking stairs on tiptoe.

But what difference did it make. She was a woman and I was a man. We were two human beings whispering in that room, in that bed, with the landlady asleep on the other side of the thin wall. Outside it was raining. Outside, from time to time, there were footsteps on the wet pavement, nocturnal voices in the watery air.

My aunt and uncle were waiting for me in the room behind the shop and must have been getting worried.

There was a moment, your Honour, when, with my head between her breasts, I began to cry.

I didn't know why. Do I know today? I began to cry from happiness and from despair, both at the same time.

I held her, simple and relaxed, there in my arms. I remember that she stroked my forehead absently as she stared at the ceiling. I should have liked...

And that is what I could not express, what I still cannot express now. Caen, at that moment, represented the whole world. It was there behind the window-panes, behind the wall that hid the sleeping landlady.

All that was the mystery, was the enemy.

But we were two. Two people who didn't know each other. Who had no common interests. Two people whom chance had hastily brought together for a moment.

She was perhaps the first woman I ever loved. For a few hours she gave me the sensation of infinity.

She was commonplace, simple and kind. At the Brasserie Chandivert, I had taken her for a young girl waiting for her parents; then for a young wife waiting for her husband.

But, there we were in the same bed, flesh to flesh, doors and windows closed, and there was no one else in the world but the two of us.

I fell asleep. I awoke at dawn and she was breathing peacefully, confidingly, her two breasts uncovered. I was seized with panic on account of my aunt and uncle. I got out of bed without making a sound and I didn't know what I should do, whether to leave money on the dressing-table or not.