Act of Passion (23 page)

In her eyes the worst instrument of torture ever invented was the alarm clock, with its brutal, piercing bell.

'Even when I was a little girl and had to get up to go to school...'

Later, she had to get up to go to work. She would employ little stratagems. She would set the clock ten minutes fast intentionally, so she could linger a little longer in bed.

And yet, for all those last months, every morning she would get up before me in order to bring me my first cup of coffee in bed because I had once told her that that is what my mother had always done.

She was not, after all, a girl for the morning. It took her a long time after she was up to return to the waking world. It used to amuse me to see her coming and going in her pyjamas, her walk a little unsteady, her face still puffed up with sleep. Sometimes I would burst out laughing.

'What's the weather today?'

'Nothing…'

Every Sunday I offered her what she called the ideal morning. She would sleep late, until about ten o'clock, and it was my turn then to bring her her coffee. Drinking it in bed, she would light her first cigarette, for that was the only thing I had not had the heart to make her give up. She had suggested it. She would have done it. But at least it was no longer that constant necessity it had once been. Nor a pose.

She would turn on the radio and much later she would finally inquire:

'What's the weather today?'

We would plan not to have any plans so that this day of rest should be free for improvisation. And often, indeed, we did nothing at all.

I remember on that particular Sunday, I stayed for a long time looking out of the living-room window. I still see a family waiting for the bus, each one of its members - there were seven of them, mother, father, boys, and girls - carrying a fishing-rod.

A band went by, brass instruments following behind a banner resplendent with gold fringe, a music club of some sort, with young men wearing arm bands making a great hullabaloo as they marched along the pavements. People in the houses across the street were leaning out of the windows and I could hear the muffled sound of their radios.

When I went downstairs, a little before ten o'clock, she was still in bed. As an exception, I had given an appointment to a patient who required a treatment I had not time to give him during the week, since it took almost an hour. He was a foreman about fifty years old, an excellent fellow, conscientious in the extreme.

He was waiting for me at the door. We went into my office, and he began undressing at once. I washed my hands again, put on my hospital coat. Everything was so calm it was as though life was suspended in the world.

Did the colour of the sky have something to do with it? It was one of those days, your Honour - they are always Sundays - when one is capable of thinking of nothing.

I was thinking of nothing. My patient kept talking in a monotonous voice to keep up his courage, for the treatment was rather painful. Then he would stop, try to suppress a groan and hasten to say:

'Go on, Doctor... it's nothing...'

He got dressed again and held out his hand when he was ready to leave. We went out together and I locked up my shop-like office. I looked up, thinking that Martine might, by chance, be at the window. I walked to the corner to buy a paper. They were sold in a little bar. I had a medicinal after-taste in my mouth and drank a vermouth at the bar.

I went slowly upstairs to the apartment. I opened the door. Did I make less noise than usual? Martine and the maid, who was called Elise, were together in the kitchen and they were laughing at the top of their lungs.

I smiled. I was happy. I went towards the kitchen and saw them. Elise was standing at the sink preparing vegetables, and Martine, in her dressing-gown, was seated with her elbows on the table, her hair dishevelled, a cigarette in her mouth.

I have rarely felt such tenderness for her. You see, I had just stumbled on another side of her nature I didn't know and which delighted me.

I like people who can enjoy themselves with their maids, especially with little peasant girls like Elise. And I knew that is was not out of condescension that she was there, like so many ladies of the house. I could tell that from their voices and their laughter.

While I was downstairs there they were, two youngsters who had met one lazy Sunday morning and started chattering.

About what? I didn't try find out. They were laughing over nonsensical nothings, I am sure, things that can't be explained, that a man can never understand.

She was disconcerted, seeing me appear.

'You were there? Elise and I were telling each other stories.... What is it?'

'Nothing ...'

'Yes... There's something... Come...'

She rose, uneasy, and led me into our bedroom.

'You are angry?'

'Of course not.'

'You are sad?'

'I swear ...'

I was neither the one nor the other. I was moved, idiotically perhaps, I was much more moved than I cared to appear or to admit to myself.

Even today it would be difficult for me to say just why. Perhaps because that morning, involuntarily, without any precise reason, I felt that I was reaching the maximum of my love, the maximum of understanding that one human being can have of another.

You see, I felt so sure that I understood her! She was so fresh, so pure, this child who was laughing in the kitchen with our little peasant girl...

Then, perfidiously, another sentiment insinuated itself - a vague distress, alas, familiar to me, and against which I should have reacted at once.

She had understood. That is why she had taken me into the bedroom. That is why she was waiting.

Why she was waiting for me to strike. It would have been better. But several weeks before I had sworn to myself that I would never give way to my loathsome rages again.

A few days earlier, on Wednesday, coming home arm in arm from our local cinema, I had pointed out to her, not without pride:

'You see... It is already three weeks...'

'Yes ...'

She knew what I meant. She was not as optimistic as I was.

'At first it was four or five days... Then once a week or every two weeks...'

Then jokingly:

'When it is only every six months...'

She had pressed her thigh tighter against mine. It was one of our pleasures to walk that way, thigh to thigh, in the evenings, when the pavements were deserted, as though we were a single moving body.

I did not strike her that Sunday morning because I was too deeply moved, because the phantoms were too vague, because, at first and for many a long hour afterwards, no brutal images appeared.

'Are you annoyed because I am not dressed yet?'

'Of course not...'

There was nothing. Why then was she so uneasy? She continued to be uneasy all the rest of the day. We had luncheon together near the open window.

'What would you like to do?'

'I don't know. Anything you like.'

'How about going to the Vincennes Zoo?'

She had never been there. She knew animals only from having seen a few in passing circuses.

We went. The same luminous veil was still stretched across the sky and it just happened to be the sort of light that does not cast shadows. The place was crowded. Cakes, ice cream cones, peanuts were being sold everywhere. We lingered for a long time in front of the cages, the bears' pit, the monkey house. 'Look, Charles ...'

And I can still see them, two chimpanzees, the male and the female, standing there in an embrace, looking at the crowd, looking, your Honour, the way I looked at all of you in the courtroom during the trial.

It was the male who, in a gesture both gentle and
protective, had put his long arm round the female.

 'Charles...'

Yes, I know. It is in just about the same position, isn't it, Martine, that we fall asleep every night? We were not in a cage but we were perhaps just as frightened of what lay beyond our invisible bars, and to reassure you I drew you closer.

I was suddenly sad. It seemed to me ... I can still see the swarming crowd in the Zoo, those thousands of families, those children, whose parents were buying them chocolates and red balloons, those bands of boisterous young men, those lovers filching flowers from the flower borders; I still hear that muffled tramping of a crowd, and I see the two of us, I feel the two of us, my throat tight for no apparent reason, while she murmurs: 'Let's go back to see them, shall we?'

The two monkeys, our two monkeys.

Then we walked around for a while longer in the dust until its taste was in our mouths. We went back to our car and I thought: 'If...'

If she had been only herself, your Honour, if she had never been other than the one I had come upon in the kitchen that morning, if she had been only, if we had both been only like that male and female whom we had, each of us, without any prompting from the other, at the same moment, suddenly envied!...

'Do you want to have dinner at home?'

'Just as you like. Elise is out, but there is plenty of food in the house.'

I preferred to eat in a restaurant. I was on edge, uneasy. I felt that the phantoms were there, close by, waiting for a chance to leap at my throat.

Abruptly I asked:

'What did you used to do Sundays?'

She couldn't possibly misunderstand. She knew what period of her life I meant. She couldn't answer. She stammered:

'I was bored...'

It wasn't true. She was perhaps bored deep down in herself, but she craved pleasure and would go anywhere to find it...

I rose from the table before the end of the meal. Night was falling lazily, too slowly to suit me.

'Let's go home...'

I wanted to drive. I never opened my mouth the whole way. I kept repeating to myself :

'You mustn't...'

And I was still only thinking of the blows.

'She hasn't deserved that... She's a poor little girl...'

Of course! Of course! I know! Who could know it better than I? Who? Tell me that!

I put my hand on her hand just as we were coming to Issy.

'Don't be afraid.. .'

'I'm not afraid.. .'

I should have struck her. There was still time. We were still connected, more or less, with the outside world. There were streets, pavements, people walking, others sitting on chairs in front of their doors. There were lights struggling against the false daylight of evening. There was the Seine with its drowsing barges.

Just as I was putting the key in the lock I almost said:

'Let's not go in ...'

And yet I knew nothing. I had no premonition. I had never loved her so much. It wasn't possible - for God's sake, won't you understand - that she ... she ...

I opened the door and she went in. And everything was settled at that moment. I had a few seconds to turn back. She, too, had had time to elude her destiny, to elude me.

I see once more the nape of her neck as I turned on the light switch, the nape of her neck as I had seen it that first day in front of the ticket office of the station at Nantes, with those little curling tendrils of hair.

'Do you want to go to bed right away?'

I said yes.

What was wrong with us that evening and why did so many things catch us in the throat?

I went to get her glass of milk. Every night in bed, after we had loved each other, she would always drink a glass of milk.

And she drank it that night, the night of Sunday, the third of September. That means we had possessed each other, that she had had time afterwards slowly to sip her milk, sitting up in bed.

I had not struck her. I had driven away the phantoms.

'Good night, Charles.. .'

'Good night, Martine.. .'

We would always repeat those words two or three times in a particular tone of voice, like an incantation:

'Good night, Charles...'

'Good night, Martine...'

Her head sought its place in the hollow of my shoulder and she gave a little sigh, her little nightly sigh, she stammered, as she did every evening before falling asleep:

'It really isn't Christian...'

Then the phantoms came, the most hideous, the most loathsome ones, and it was too late — and they knew it - for me to defend myself.

Martine was asleep. Or else she pretended to be asleep to quiet me.

Slowly, my hand 'crept up along her thigh, caressing her smooth skin, her smooth, smooth skin, followed the curve of her waist and stopped as it passed over the firm softness of a breast.

Images, more images, other hands, other caresses ...

The roundness of a shoulder where the skin is smoothest, then a warm hollow, the neck ...

I knew very well, yes, I knew it was too late. All the phantoms were there, the other Martine was there, the one they had sullied, all of them, the one who had let herself be sullied with a sort of frenzy ...

And must my own Martine, the one who was still laughing so innocently that morning with our little maid, must she suffer for it eternally? Must we, both of us, suffer to the end of our days?

Wasn't it necessary to deliver us, to deliver her from all her fears, from all her shame?

It was not dark. It was never completely dark in our room at Issy, because there were only ecru linen curtains at the windows and because a street-lamp stood directly opposite.

I could see her. I did see her, I could see my hand about her neck, and I pressed, your Honour, brutally. I saw her eyes open, I saw her first look, which was a look of terror; then immediately another, a look ,of resignation and deliverance, a look of love.

I pressed. These were my fingers that were choking her. I couldn't do otherwise. I kept crying to her:

'Forgive me, Martine...'

And I felt that she was encouraging me, that she wished it, that she had always foreseen this moment,
that it was the only way out
.

I had to kill the Other, once and for all, so that my Martine could live at last.

I killed the Other. Fully conscious of what I was doing. You see now that there was premeditation, that there had to be premeditation, otherwise the act would have been absurd.