Concerto to the Memory of an Angel (3 page)

The moment Gabriel, sparkling in his green silk scarf, opened the door to the sacristy and said, “Good morning, my children, I am delighted to see you,” she took the words for herself. She complied with his orders: “Let us kneel,” “Let us stand,” “And now we shall sing,” “Let us pray,” in obedience to the man as much as to the liturgy. With great piety she drank in his every word. How very different her behavior was now from in the old days, when during the sermon she used to memorize the names and dates listed on the marble plaques along the aisle that were devoted to the great figures who had lived and died here! Thanks to Gabriel, the force and subtlety of the Gospels had been revealed to her, for not only did he tell them in a singular way, she could also see him in the role of Jesus—handsome, fragile, consumed by his love for humankind. She often imagined herself in the role of Mary Magdalene, and when she looked at Jesus-Gabriel she quivered with tenderness, nurturing him, then washing his feet and letting down her hair to dry them; the sacred stories took on meaning because they had become flesh.

What she found more difficult to bear was the sight of so many people showing up at church on Sundays, people who ordinarily never attended. One morning when she was alone with Gabriel she was compelled to criticize them.

“You know, Father, the Dubreuils, Morins, Desprairies and Isidores never used to come to mass before.”

“So much the better, it's never too late. Remember the parable of the eleventh-hour workers.”

“I wonder whether Jesus took into consideration what the others might think, those who came early, only to see the latecomers so generously rewarded.”

“He did think about it: he knew that those believers who had come early had all the time to nurture their own goodness.”

Failing to grasp that his reply was aimed at her, enjoining her to show more kindness, she concluded huffily, “Yes, well . . . These sightseers have been coming to mass because it's something new for them. ‘A new broom sweeps clean,' as my grandmother used to say.”

“If they are coming out of curiosity, then it is up to me to keep them coming, my child. I hope I shall succeed.”

She observed him—passionate, good, not an ounce of pettiness. She blushed, and was sorry she had been so negative. So it was in all sincerity that she proclaimed, “You will succeed, Father. You will make believers of them, of that I am sure.”

In fact, what she really wanted was to obtain preferential treatment; she could put up with the priest taking care of everyone, provoking conversions, even miracles, so long as he continued to reserve a special regard for her. It would never have occurred to her to qualify her complicated feelings with the simple word jealousy.

Thus, she took a very dim view when Yvette suddenly burst into the chapel.

Yvette was a pair of thighs. While there are women who are noticed first and foremost for their eyes, mouth, or face, with Yvette it was her thighs. No matter how hard you tried to concentrate on her features when she was talking, the moment you could decently look away, you would stare at her thighs. Two warm, milky columns of flesh, the grain of her skin so fine that you would have liked to touch them, to ascertain their softness with your hand. No matter what Yvette was wearing, her thighs came first; when she wore a short dress you got the impression it had been cut in order to reveal her thighs, and her skirt would blow to one side so that her thighs could live; shorts were mere sleeves for her thighs, and even trousers became molds for her thighs. Marie was so convinced that Yvette was nothing more than a pair of thighs that when Yvette spoke to her she did not even respond to the woman who was grafted upon them.

Still more pertinent was the fact that Yvette was the village whore. An occasional whore. When she didn't manage to make ends meet—which was every month—Yvette, with six mouths to feed, sold her body. And that was the whole problem: everyone considered her a whore, and accepted the fact—because you have to have one, as Marie's grandmother would have said—except Yvette herself. Consequently, the moment she overheard snide remarks or was met with a concupiscent gaze, she was hurt. She would act indignant, and cloak herself in her wounded pride, wearing the latest outrage she'd suffered on her lapel like a martyr's medal.

Marie thought she was ridiculous, but grew alarmed when she saw the obscene pair of thighs lurking around the priest.

“Filthy sow!”

Marie could not stand to see the young priest greeting Yvette attentively, or shaking her hand, or smiling at her the way he smiled at everyone.

“The poor man is so innocent that he doesn't even notice her little game. And yet he is still a man. She'll get there eventually . . . ”

For Marie there could be no doubt: Yvette wanted to get the priest in the sack.

One afternoon when she came to change the flowers on the altar she saw Yvette burst out of the confession box, her thighs exposed, her eyelids swollen with tears, her face crimson with the flush of pleasure, and Marie thought the worst had occurred. It was all she could do not to run over and slap her. Fortunately Abbé Gabriel emerged in turn, looking peaceful, fresh, and pure. Marie let the young woman, visibly upset, leave the church with a slam of the door, then she went over to the vase with its withered bouquet.

The priest has just rejected her, thought Marie, and that's why the pair of thighs is furious.

Her heartbeat returned to normal as she replaced the rotting lilies with some she had just cut from her garden.

The priest came up to her, looking sad. She stared hard at him. He did not like being caught red-handed in a state of anxiety, and he turned away.

Marie decided to take advantage of this moment alone with him: “Yvette is pretty, isn't she?”

Astonished, he mumbled something. Marie insisted, “No? You don't think she's pretty?”

“I don't look at my flock in that way.”

His voice was firmer. His sincerity reassured Marie, although her bad mood stayed with her, like a soup that continues to boil even after the flame beneath the pot has been put out.

“Father, I suppose you do know who Yvette is?”

“What do you mean?”

“She's the local prostitute. She didn't hide it from you, I hope?”

“She hid nothing from me: she is a great sinner. Why do you think I am devoting so much time to her?”

“You take a passionate interest in her sin?”

“Not at all. Am I not here to heal souls in distress? It's a paradox, in the end: I must devote more time to the dark souls than to the transparent ones.”

His phrase was a moment of illumination. So was this the explanation? Abbé Gabriel devoted more care to vice than to virtue? Why had she not thought of this earlier?

“Father, would you hear my confession?”

They went into the waxed wooden box. Only a very thin latticework partition separated Marie from the young priest; it was as if she were touching him.

“Do you know, Father, that some years ago I was accused of having murdered several men?”

“Yes, I know, my child.”

“They claimed that I poisoned my three husbands and bumped off a fourth man who was supposed to have been my lover!”

“Yes, I have heard tell of your ordeal. I also know that human justice has cleansed you.”

“And so you will understand why I have very little respect for human justice.”

“I don't understand . . . ”

“I fear only God's justice.”

“And so you should.”

“For while I may be free of sin before man, before God I remain a grave sinner.”

“Naturally. As do we all.”

“Yes, but not to such a degree . . . ”

She leaned closer and whispered, “I killed them.”

“Who?”

“My three husbands.”

“Oh, my God!”

“And my lover Rudy, too.”

“Wretched woman!”

She added, with gleeful malice, “And his mistress, too, Olga, a Russian woman. And, just think, they never accused me because they never even noticed she had disappeared. Not a soul missed that cockroach.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, come to our aid as quickly as you can!”

The young priest crossed himself more in superstitious entreaty than out of elevated spirituality: the revelation of her crimes threw him into a panic.

Marie Maurestier relished his fright. And Yvette had been consigned to oblivion! Henceforth Marie would come first!

That day, she told him about the first of her murders. Not to shock him too greatly, or disgust him, she portrayed the poisoning as an act of compassion: her poor husband had been suffering so greatly that she acted more as a nurse than a homicide. To hear her speak, she hadn't murdered him so much as euthanized him, her Raoul.

The young priest listened, pale, reproachful, horrified.

He left without a word, merely making the sign of the cross over her.

The next morning, at the seven o'clock service, she could tell from the purple shadows under his eyes that he had slept poorly, or hardly at all.

After lunch, when he came to the confession box, he confirmed that he hadn't had enough sleep.

She was delighted by his admission: he was in her grip, he had tossed and turned in his bed, thinking about her. Since she had done the same, you might even say they had spent the night together.

That afternoon she again returned to her inaugural crime, Raoul, and instinctively, without really knowing why, she poured out the whole story in an entirely different way: darker, more realistic, accentuating her disgust for the old and senile Raoul, all her hatred for the way he forced her to touch him. Portraying herself as a young woman who was the victim of a libidinous fossil, she revealed her darkest feelings, her calculations, her criminal urges; she described in detail how she had poisoned him with arsenic over a period of nine months so that the dose would be fatal yet untraceable; her relief when he died, her role as the tearful widow at the funeral, her delight at receiving the money and the house without having to account to anyone ever again.

Every day she came to the church to unveil her crimes. Every night, the young man, obsessed by the tale of horrors, lost a few hours' sleep.

As she told her story, Marie reveled in being able to express herself at last, to free her memories and above all discover all her unsuspected motives. For while there was no changing the fact of the murders, her reasons for committing them varied from one day to the next. Which was the actual reason? The one on Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Friday, or Saturday? All of them. She relished every nuance; for years she had always had to stick to the “not guilty” version, so now exploring the “guilty” version enabled her to grasp the complexity of her behavior, the infinite varieties of her intentions; Marie was jubilant over the rich, diverse, profound character of her inner self . . . And she had been granted an additional faculty: while she may have had the power of life or death over a man in the past, she now exerted control over the truth of her acts, as she scrounged and interpreted and reexamined, destroying clichés and becoming the author of her own story.

She established her ascendancy over the young priest. He no longer slept. Incapable of taking an interest in anything else, he anticipated as much as he dreaded their meetings at the confession box. His freshness faded. It was as if Marie were taking him away, into her world, her age, her fatigue, her ugliness . . . Naturally she did not realize this, and continued to see him just as she always had.

The most intense moment for the priest and the sinner was when she spoke of her lover, Rudy the surfer, who had given her the only sensual pleasure of her entire life, a pleasure that was all the more vigorous for its total unexpectedness, for Marie had not enjoyed sex at all until Rudy. Surprised to find herself thinking about a man from morning to night, she had initially believed that she loved him for love's sake until she realized it was above all his caresses that she wanted, his body against hers, the blond duvet on his skin, the smell of him. There was something about Rudy that annoyed her, attracted her, titillated her; he knew how to create a sensual atmosphere around him, which was powerful in his presence, then exasperating the moment he left. As she told Gabriel about this man she had desired to distraction, she was overcome by a confused, torrid feverishness, where the past contaminated the present; she left the confession box consumed by an urge to kiss the young man's lips, to tear off his cassock and explore the texture of his skin with her fingers. Her passion for Gabriel intensified by a notch.

In the rising warmth of springtime, their daily tête-à-tête in the cramped confession box became suffocating. By the time they parted, they were both exhausted, drained, but they had regained their strength by the time of their next meeting.

She took a bawdy pleasure in shocking Gabriel, almost as if they were in bed together and she was finding ways to make him relax by sharing episodes of sensual refinement—bold, unexpected, taboo. For example, she insisted upon the brutality with which she had drowned her lover: it had been pure impulse. It is true that Rudy had drunk so much that night that he no longer had the vigor nor the necessary wisdom to resist her in the bathtub. She then emphasized the sangfroid with which she concealed her crime; she loved to tell of how she and her sister Blanche rolled the corpse up in a carpet, dumped it in the back of a stolen car, drove seven hundred kilometers, boarded a boat in Brittany in the pitch of night, tossed the corpse with its weight of stones into the dark water, returned in the early hours of the day, scrubbed the car inside out, and finally abandoned it with all its keys in the middle of a parking lot known to be the hangout of gangs who, they hoped, would leave their prints all over it. This all happened far from Saint-Sorlin, in Biarritz, where she had rented a house with the inheritance from her three husbands.

For the first time in her life she revealed the episode with Olga, Rudy's mistress, the one he saw regularly between his liaisons with women of a certain age. Olga had begun to fret over the absence of her man, and she burst into Marie's house screaming that she suspected her of bumping him off and that she would denounce her to the police. Betraying neither emotion nor fear, Marie had assured her that Rudy had gone abroad and had entrusted Marie with a sum of money to give to Olga. With the lure of gain, the lie became credible: the Russian woman now thought better of going to the police. Marie arranged to meet her that night on the terrace of a bar popular with all the local young people. There she handed her an envelope containing a few bank notes, and promised her the rest of the money the next day; she slipped poison into the young woman's cocktail and left her in the company of the revelers.