Belle De Jour (17 page)

He went to her. She was sleeping so freshly, so innocently.
Was this the woman he’d seen stretched out on a red coverlet in the house to which, one sunny morning, he himself had sent her? But could he say that he was now the same man who’d answered Belle de Jour’s wretched pleading with a perversely evasive gesture? It was, in fact, that gesture which had pierced Pierre’s forehead. Séverine’s chaste face was full of its own mystery, that quality he’d observed so often, with such keen hopeless avidity. Tenderly he touched her hair; then he went and got the softest blanket he could find and put it gently over this exhausted younger sister.

Séverine selpt soundly till nine in the morning. She woke feeling a purely physical sense of recuperation. But almost instantly she regretted the sleep she’d had. It set her up for her anguish again, for her only agony now: how Pierre was. Everything that had led her to visit Husson seemed hopelessly miserable today. Coming had been a weakness on her part, she’d been neurotic. She was ashamed, now, of their conversation, which had seemed to make such sense the night before.

Husson came in. He too felt embarrassed. He’d slept well also; his shadows had fled, life had taken another step forward. And his view of things had thereby been changed. His words and gestures of the previous evening, prompted by a vision of the great fatal laws, were now no more than embarrassing symptoms of hypersensitivity.

“I have news,” he said. “His life’s no longer in danger, he’s even come to, but.…”

Séverine didn’t wait to listen to anything else. Pierre had recovered consciousness and she hadn’t been there
to welcome his first moments of light. How badly he must be needing her.

Throughout the ride she imagined what Pierre’s smile would be like when he saw her, how he would move towards her, feebly, to be sure, maybe even imperceptibly, but enough for her to be able to amplify, and reconstruct, the impulse. Her tormented journey was nearing its end. He’d get well again, she’d take him away somewhere. Once again they’d know days in the shade of great trees, games on the sand, mountain songs on the smooth snow. He’d smile at her again, hold his hands out toward her.

Pierre’s eyes were indeed open, but he didn’t recognize his wife. At least so she thought. How else could she explain the lack not only of any movement, but also of any expression at all, of that faint flicker which stirs even a dying man approached by his beloved. Pierre didn’t recognize her. It was an unspeakable shock for Séverine.

Less dreadful, perhaps, than the one that made her flinch a moment later. She bent over Pierre, and in the depths of his eyes she detected a quiver, a trembling flame, a cry, an endless lament. It could only be addressed to her; then why, if he did know who she was, such terrifying silence and rigidity? She drew back quickly, stared at the nurse, the intern. They lowered their eyes.

“Pierre, Pierre, my dear darling,” she half-screamed, “give me a word, just a sound, something, anything, I.…”

“I beg you to keep calm for his sake,” the intern got
out with difficulty. “We think he can hear all right.”

“But what’s wrong with him?” she moaned. “No, don’t tell me.”

What could even the most learned of all these people know? She alone knew every plane of that face. She alone could penetrate its frightful secret. Controlling her terror Séverine went back to the bed, took hold of her husband’s head and drew it passionately to her. But her numbed hands laid it back on the pillow again. His features hadn’t stirred. They were just as slack as the night before.

Still, Pierre’s stare sustained her. Those clear eyes which she’d known smiling and solemn, thoughtful and loving, were alive. What was she afraid of? He was too weak to move, or make a sound. She’d been absurd to be surprised by that, and cowardly to torture him with her cries and pleas.

“My darling, you’ll get better,” she said. “Your friends have told you so, haven’t they, and your director. You’ll see how quickly it’ll happen.”

She stopped and couldn’t keep from asking in an agonized voice, “Pierre, do you hear me? Just a sign so I’ll know … the smallest sign, darling.…”

A superhuman effort darkened the wounded man’s eyes, but nothing rose to the surface of his face. And Séverine began to suspect what the constraint of the old surgeon and his students meant. Without that change of light in Pierre’s eyes she might have deluded herself. But it was only too plain—Pierre wanted to speak and move, but there were bonds on his flesh.

For a long time Séverine bent over those eyes, the
sole remaining voice of a deep and loving intelligence. She talked to them, asked questions and tried to read a reply in their wavering light. Finally, to avoid bursting into tears, she left the room.

The intern followed her. In the corridor he said:

“You mustn’t give up hope, madame. Only time can tell for sure what was affected.

“But don’t tell me he’s going to stay like this for ever. It’s impossible. It’s worse than.…”

Suddenly she remembered Husson’s words—there
was something worse in the
air—and was silent.

“During the war,” the young intern was saying without much conviction, “there were cases of total recovery from paralysis.”

“Paralysis,” Séverine repeated dully.

As long as she hadn’t known the medical word for Pierre’s immobility, it had seemed somehow less disastrous. The affliction belonged to him, all by himself; it was in his power. Once labeled, however, he entered an anonymous category, subject to the dreary laws of all.

“Now that you know the truth,” went on the intern, “may I offer a word of advice. Don’t talk to him too much. Make him realize as little as possible.…”

“Pierre!”

“I agree. With Sérizy it will be doubly difficult, but all the same we ought to be able to numb his intellect a bit. We’ve done it with others, I assure you. In sickness even the liveliest minds.…”

“No, I don’t want to,” Séverine interrupted nearly savagely. “He isn’t impaired at all. He’s still Pierre. If you don’t think so, give him to me. I’ll be able to do it.”

There was such absolute determination, such overpowering love in Séverine’s face that the intern felt like shaking her hand, as he might that of a gallant fighter.

She never left his room. Day and night she belonged to those eyes that glowed like lost lanterns. Her own life was abolished. For what could equal the drama of the closed, desperate struggle that was going on within the immobile body powerless to transmit its will? And what a matchless victory Séverine felt she had won on the morning she thought she saw Pierre’s lips tremble. A scarcely visible vibration, but she was certain she had seen it. Later in the day the trembling recurred, grew stronger. Professor Henri stroked his patient’s forehead more warmly than he had the night before.

The next morning Pierre could form syllables, his weak fingers were able to make folds in the sheets. A boundless song poured through Séverine’s soul. She was now convinced that a complete cure would come about, and the doctors’ cautious attitude only irritated her. At the end of a week she had wrung from them an authorization to take Pierre home. The wound had closed. She’d answer for the rest. For even if the lower part of his body so far remained paralyzed, he could move his arms and torso—in an uncontrolled way, true, but enough to satisfy Séverine. Moreover, Pierre had begun to be able to speak relatively well, and two experiments had proved that he could read.

Never would Séverine have suspected that the simple act of bringing home a crippled man could have given her so much unadulterated joy. She had hated to see
Pierre’s lips making effort after effort to formulate a single word; had hated to see him make a spasmodic gesture whenever he wanted to move his hand. Everything would get better now that he was back in his own room, now that he had smiled at the sight of his books —a smile the more touching for being incomplete. All that was needed now was patience. Séverine felt warmly and infinitely patient, and ready to triumph over everything.

She’d completely forgotten that the woman who planned to nurse Pierre back to health had a double within her, who was a prostitute and murderess. She was abruptly reminded the following day.

The gentle young maid who had worked for the Sérizys since their marriage came to her, obviously embarrassed.

“I didn’t want to disturb you, madame, so long as you were at the hospital, and I didn’t want to the first day Monsieur came back, but—you’ve seen the papers?”

Séverine answered truthfully, “No.”

“I see,” the maid continued with evident relief. “If you’d seen the photos of the murderer.…”

Séverine let her continue, but she heard nothing more. She had no need to. Her maid had recognized Marcel from the photographs in the papers.

The room and its furnishings, and the still-speaking maid (Séverine heard vaguely “gold mouth”), all started to sway heavily and steadily. She felt herself swaying. She had to sit down.

“I see you’re just as much amazed as I was, madame,” concluded the maid. “I didn’t want to say anything to
anyone about it before talking to you, but now I must tell the police.”

Séverine was sorry she had come home at all. Cut off from the outside world as well as from her own past, she’d had the right of sanctuary at the hospital. How utterly mad she had been to imagine the invisible ten-tacles around her severed forever. They were entangling her again. Oh, hadn’t she suffered enough? What further ransom did they want of her?

“It’s true, isn’t it,” the maid asked, “I ought to, oughtn’t I?”

“Naturally,” Séverine got out without knowing what she was saying.

At once she realized the results of her reply—she’d be subjected to an interrogation, accused of complicity, imprisoned. And Pierre, barely free of his fleshly coffin, would learn the story—for not knowing which she’d made him pay so dearly. It was too absurd.

“Wait … no, you mustn’t,” Séverine exclaimed.

The maid looked surprised. Her suspicion helped Séverine calm down a little.

“Yes, of course … testimony like that of yours, of ours,” she corrected herself forcibly, “it won’t lose anything by waiting two or three days now. But for the moment I can’t get away, you can see that for yourself.”

“As you say, madame, but I feel badly for having delayed so long already.”

Once more that sensation she’d hoped to feel no more, the despair of a hunted animal, filled Séverine. Once more she felt herself driven, cornered, at bay. And now it was no longer a man after her, but a mob society
had trained for hunting her. Who would there be to take care of Pierre, to smile at him, amuse him, feed him, put him to sleep? All she asked was to be allowed this humble duty. And it was going to be refused her.

The idea of death entered her mind; at this point she would have welcomed the icy deliverer with all her exhausted soul. But, thinking she heard a sound in Pierre’s room, her whole being was suddenly prepared to struggle—threatened love, dark anger, a furious defiance.

“I’ll go on to the very end,” she murmured, “but they mustn’t hurt him.”

She called Husson and asked him to come over.

My accomplice, she thought. He knows. He’ll help me out.

Husson became extremely attentive from the moment Séverine began to speak.

“It’s worse than you think,” he said. “I see you haven’t been reading the papers. The police are on the right track.”

“They’re after me?”

“In a sense. That young man has a rather conspicuous lower jaw. The Anaïs household talked. It was easily established that your Marcel went to the rue Virène daily, and for the same person. Likewise Anaïs and the other two recognized me from those photographs I couldn’t avoid. A connection was established between my visit and your disappearance. In short, they deduce that Marcel hurled himself on me because of a girl in the whore-house. Next, several spectators, including a cop, said they saw a woman getting away in a car
at the moment of the attempt. Other passers-by say they noticed the car parked at the gate, engine kept running, between twelve and twelve-thirty … The press is full of it. The story was cut out for them—an attack like that in plain daylight … Marcel and his various and sundry pseudonyms … the mysterious car, and above all this woman … There isn’t a tabloid in town that hasn’t used Belle de Jour in its headlines.”

“Faster,” Séverine said, “tell me all of it.”

“So much for what’s against you. There’s one fact in your favor, namely that in spite of all inquiries neither the car nor the driver have been picked up, and—most important—Marcel won’t talk. Which is pretty heroic on his part since if he did he’d be let off lightly. But he’s going to keep quiet, that’s clear enough. In other words, though the material facts they’ve got hold of are correct, their moral theories are hopelessly mistaken. At present the police, the press, the law, all believe Belle de Jour to be … if you’ll forgive my.…”

“Say it. What do you think it matters to me?”

Husson admired the way she’d given up all thought of herself in her love for Pierre (but the other man, the pimp, wasn’t he risking imprisonment for love of her?). He went on:

Everyone thinks Belle de Jour is a whore. And since you left no trace of your real identity in the rue Virène, there’s no foreseeable chance that any connection will be established between Belle de Jour and you. But you understand that if your maid breathes a single word, if the faintest thread leads here, you’re lost.”

“But I’d deny … I’d say she was lying … she was trying to hit back at me … I’d.…”

“Please,” said Husson, taking her hands. “We’ve reached a point at which you simply have to keep hold of all your common sense. Your maid wouldn’t be credited alone, true, but if Anaïs recognized you, and the others.…”

“Charlotte … Mathilde,” Séverine murmured, “and then … all those men.”

She started to list their names as if some dread clamor of wind, of which she was only the echo, were conducting them up to her: Adolphe … Léon … André … Louis … others, so many, many others.

“And it’ll all be in the papers,” she said slowly, “and Pierre will read it, because he can read now, you know, I was so happy he could read.”