Act of Passion (20 page)

We sort them all out. A sorting so implacable, with such a determination to kill certain things once and for all, that a pair of shoes, for instance - I can still see them, they were almost new - which she had worn one evening when she had picked up a strange man, were burned in the fireplace.

Practically nothing remained of the clothes she had brought with her and I, who could never spend my money without first going to Armande, was unable to replace them.

Her suitcases were empty, her wardrobe reduced to the bare necessities.

It was January. Think of the wind, the cold, the short days, the shadows and the lights of the little city, of the two of us struggling to extricate our love from everything that threatened to stifle it. Think of my office-hours, of the anguish of our separations, and finally of Mme Debeurre's little house, which was our only haven, and to which I came panting with emotion.

Think of all the agonizing problems we had to solve, of the other problems presented by our life in Armande's house and still further complicated by our constant solicitude for her peace of mind.

Of course we lied. And it is gratitude we deserve, if not admiration, for we had something better to do than to worry about other people's tranquillity.

We had to discover each other. We had to get used to living with our love, we had to - if I may be allowed the word - transplant our love into our daily life and domesticate it.

And I saw thirty patients every morning! And I lunched without Martine, between Mama and Armande, opposite my daughters! I talked with them. I must have succeeded in talking to them like an ordinary person, since Armande — the subtle, the intelligent Armande - saw nothing.

Duplicity, you say, your Honour? Good heavens! Do you know that sometimes, when I was at table with my family - that's right, with my family, and Martine wasn't there! - suddenly there, on the retina of my eye, would be the image of a man and the brutal memory of a gesture she had made, as distinct as a pornographic photograph.

Your Honour, I don't wish anybody anything like that! The pain of absence is horrible, but that is one pain which makes you believe in hell.

Yet I still sat there, and I suppose I ate. They told me of all the little happenings of the day and I replied.

I had to see her at once - that, for God's sake, you must understand! - to be sure that a new Martine really existed, that she was not the one in the obscene photograph. I watched for her. I counted the minutes, the seconds. She opened the gate, I heard her footsteps on the gravel path, she was walking towards the house with that uncertain smile which she always offered me in advance in case I stood in need of reassurance.

Once when she came into my office I stared at her without seeing her. The Other had remained glued to my retina and suddenly, in spite of myself,
for the first time in my life
, I struck someone.

I couldn't stand it any longer. I couldn't stand the pain. I was at the end of my endurance. I did not strike with my open hand, but with my fist, and I felt the impact of bone against bone.

Immediately afterwards I collapsed. The reaction. I fell on my knees, I'm not ashamed to admit it. And she, your Honour, she smiled, looking at me tenderly through her tears.

She was not crying. There were tears in her eyes, the tears of a little girl who has been deeply hurt, but she did not cry. She smiled, and I assure you that, though sad, she was happy.

She stroked my forehead, my hair, my eyes, my cheeks, my mouth. She murmured:

'My poor Charles.. .'

I thought it would never happen again, that never again would the beast be aroused in me. I loved her, your Honour, I'd like to shout that word till I'm hoarse.

Yet, I did it again. Once, at her place,
our
place, one evening when we were lying together in the bed, when I was caressing her, my fingers touched the scar and all my phantoms returned.

Because I had begun to love her body in an almost insane way that made her smile, but smile with a secret uneasiness beneath her amusement.

'It isn't Christian, Charles. It isn't right.. .'

I loved everything about her, her skin, her saliva, her sweat, and above all - oh, above all — her early morning face, which at that time I hardly ever saw, for it took the miracle of an urgent call to give me the chance to go to her early in the morning and to awaken her.

What Mme Debeurre thought of us, I don't give a damn. Does a thing like that count, when one is living an experience like ours?

Once when I wakened her like that, she was pale, with her hair spread out on the pillow, and in her sleep she wore a childlike expression that took my breath away, murmuring, her eyelids still closed:

'Papa...'

Because her father too loved her early morning face, because her father used to tiptoe over to her bed in those days, not so very long ago, when he was still alive and she was still a little girl.

She was not beautiful like that, your Honour. There was no resemblance to a cover girl, let me tell you, and I did not want her to be beautiful ever again with that sort of beauty. The red had disappeared from her lips, the black from her lashes, the powder from her cheeks, and she was just simply a woman again, and little by little she became for the whole day what she was early in the morning in her sleep.

Sometimes I was under the impression that I had gone over her face with an eraser. In the beginning she seemed indistinct, like a drawing half rubbed out. It was only gradually that her true face appeared, that the fusion with what she had been
before
was accomplished.

If you don't understand that, your Honour, it is useless for me to continue, but I have chosen you just because I felt that you would understand.

I haven't created anything. I have never had the presumption to try to fashion a woman in the image of woman as I conceived her.

It was
Martine,
the real
Martine
before the bastards had sullied her, that I persisted in trying to extricate. She was the one I loved and whom I love, who is mine, who is so much a part of my own body that I can no longer distinguish between them.

Mme
Debeurre probably heard everything, our murmurs, my shouting, my rages, my blows. And what of it? Was it our fault?

Armande
said later on:

'What must that woman have thought?'

No, really, your Honour, just weigh the evidence, I beg you! On the one hand my house
—
our house, Armande's house
—
with its armchairs, its red carpet on the stairs and its brass rods, the bridge parties and the dress
maker, Mme Debeurre and her misfortunes - her husband killed by a train and her cyst, for she had a cyst - and on the other, the exploration we had undertaken, gambling everything we had in this game to the limit, without mental reservations of any kind, at the risk of our life.

Yes, at the risk of our life.

That, Martine understood before I did. She said nothing then. It is the only thing she kept from me. And that is why at certain moments she would look at me with dilated pupils as if she didn't see me.

She was looking farther ahead, she was seeing another me, the future me, as I saw in her the little Martine of the past.

She did not draw back, your Honour. She did not hesitate an instant. And yet, if you only knew how afraid she was of dying, a childish fear of everything connected with death!

It was the day following a day when I had been battling with the past, with the other Martine and with my phantoms - the day following a day when I had struck her with even greater violence - that we were caught.

It was eight o'clock. My wife was, or should have been, upstairs with my youngest daughter who was not going to school that day. Patients were waiting in a line on the benches in the waiting-room. I hadn't the heart to open the door for them right away.

One of Martine's eyes was badly bruised. She smiled, and her smile was all the more touching because of that. I was overflowing with shame and tenderness. After my fit of rage I had spent an almost sleepless night.

I took her in my arms. With infinite gentleness - I mean it - with infinite gentleness. I was capable of that, and I felt that I was both her father and her lover. I understood that from now on, no matter what happened, we were alone in the world, just the two of us, that her flesh was my flesh, that a day would come very soon when we would no longer need to question each other and when my phantoms would vanish.

I stammered in her ear, still cold with the cold of the street:

'Forgive me .. .'

I was not ashamed. I was no longer ashamed of my outbursts, my fits of violence, because I knew now that they were a part of our love, that our love, just as it was, just as we wanted it to be, could not have existed without them.

We didn't move. She leaned her head on my shoulder. At that moment, I remember, I was looking far away, both into the past and into the future. I was beginning to measure with terror the road that remained to be travelled.

I am not making this up after the event. It would be unworthy of me and of her. I had no premonition, I tell you that at once. Nothing but the vision of that road along which we walked alone.

I sought her lips to give me courage, and then the door to the front hall opened. We didn't jump apart, it didn't even occur to us, when we saw Armande standing in the doorway. We remained with our arms around each other. She looked at us and said - I can still hear the sound of her voice:

'Excuse me ...'

Then she went out and the door slammed.

Martine did not understand why I started to smile, why my face showed a positive joy.

My feeling was one of relief. At last!

'Don't worry, darling. And don't cry. Please, don't cry.'

I didn't want any tears. None were needed. Someone knocked at the door. It was Babette.

'Mme Alavoine would like to see you, sir. She is in her bedroom.'

Of course, my good Babette! Of course, Armande! It was time. I couldn't stand any more. I was suffocating.

Be calm, Martine. I know that you are trembling, that the little girl you are expects another beating. Haven't you always been beaten?

Trust me, darling. I'm going upstairs. And the reason I'm going up there, you see, is to find freedom for our love.

There are words, your Honour, which never should be spoken, which size up one person while they liberate another.

'I suppose you'll send her packing now?'

No, Armande. Of course not. No question of that.

'In any case I will not allow her to remain another hour under my roof...'

Well, well, my lady, since it is your roof... pardon me. I am wrong. And all day long I was wrong. I spat out all my venom. Ah, yes, I spat it out for an hour without stopping, pacing up and down like a wild animal in a cage, between the bed and the door, while Armande, keeping a dignified attitude, stood by the window clutching the curtain with one hand.

I ask your pardon, too, Armande, surprising as it may seem to you. For it was all so useless, so superfluous.

I vomited all the rancour in my heart, all my humiliations, all my cowardice, my suppressed desires. I even added to them, and the whole load I flung on to your shoulders, yours alone, as though henceforth you and you alone were to bear the full responsibility.

You, who have never been lacking in sang-froid, I saw you lose your poise and there was even an expression of fear in your eyes as you looked at me, because, in the man who had slept in your bed for ten years, you were discovering another man whose existence you had never suspected.

I yelled at you, and they must have heard me downstairs:

'I love her, do you understand?
I lo-ve
her!'

And then, baffled, you said to me:

'If only .. .'

I can't remember your exact words. I was feverish. The night before I had viciously struck another woman, another woman whom I loved.

'If only you had been satisfied with seeing her outside .. .'

I burst into a rage, your Honour. Not only against Armande. Against all of you, against life as you understand it, against the idea you have of the union of two beings and the heights of passion they can attain.

I was wrong. I regret it. She could not understand. She was no more responsible than the district attorney or Maître Gabriel.

Unsteadily she kept repeating:

'Your patients are waiting for you ...'

And what about Martine! Wasn't Martine waiting for me?

'We'll discuss this later when you are calmer.'

Not at all. Right away, like an emergency operation.

'If you need her so much...'

Because, you see, I had blurted out the whole truth.

Everything. Including Martine's bruised face, the work of my fists, and even my biting the sheets during my sleepless nights.

So then I was offered a compromise. I could go to see her, like a Boquet - I could, in fact, if I would be discreet about it, go, from time to time, to satisfy the demands of nature!

The house must have trembled. I became violent, brutal - I, whom my mother had always compared to a great gentle dog, even too gentle.

I was malicious, wilfully cruel. I needed to be. I couldn't have found relief otherwise.

'Think of your mother...'

'To hell with her.'

'Think of your daughters...'

'To hell with them.'

To hell with everything! It was over, all that, with one stroke, just when I least expected it, and I had no desire to begin all over again.

Babette knocked at the door. Babette announced timorously:

'Mademoiselle says you're wanted on the phone, sir.'

'I'm coming.'

It was Martine, Martine holding out the telephone without a word, resigned to the worst, Martine who had already given up.

'Hello! Who is speaking?'

A real case. A real 'emergency'.