The Devil in the Flesh (13 page)

I asked the driver to stop a short way away from the Grangier’s house. We got out after he had turned round for the third time. The man thought he was catching us in the middle of our third kiss, but it was still the first. I left Marthe without making any arrangements about writing to each other, almost without saying goodbye, like someone you are going to be seeing in an hour’s time. Inquistive neighbours were already at their windows.

My mother commented that my eyes were red. My sisters laughed because I dropped my soup spoon twice. The floor was reeling under me. I didn’t have the sea legs for suffering. Seasickness was the closest equivalent I could find to describe the dizzy fever in my heart and soul. Life without Marthe was an ocean crossing. Would I make it to the other side? Like when you first feel seasickness coming
on, and you don’t care whether you reach dry land, but just wish you could die then and there, I hardly spared a thought for the future. But after a few days the sickness relaxed its grip, which gave me time to think about the port that lay ahead.

Marthe’s parents were no longer under any illusions. Not content with spiriting my letters away, they burnt them in front of her, on the fire in her room. Hers were written in pencil, barely legible. Her brother posted them for her.

I didn’t have to endure any more family scenes. I started having serious conversations with my father by the fire in the evening again. Over the last twelve months I had become a stranger to my sisters. They were easier to live with now, and began to get used to me again. I would sit the youngest one on my lap and, taking advantage of the half-light, squeeze her so tightly that she struggled, half-laughing half-crying. I thought of my own child, but with sadness. I thought it wasn’t possible to feel greater affection for it than I did. Yet was I mature enough for a baby to be anything more than a brother or sister to me?

My father suggested I find myself some form of distraction. His advice sprung from him being calm again. Only what was there for me to do, except what I wouldn’t be doing any longer? At the sound of the doorbell, a car driving past, I would give a start. In my prison I watched out for the slightest sign that liberation was at hand.

As a result of listening for sounds that might be the forerunner of news of some kind, one day I heard ringing in my ears. It was the armistice bells.

For me, the armistice meant that Jacques would be coming back. I saw him at Marthe’s bedside already, without being able to do anything about it. I was distraught.

My father went back into Paris. He wanted me to come with him: “You can’t miss a celebration like this.” I didn’t dare refuse. I was afraid of seeming like a brute. And besides, in my frenzy of misery the idea of seeing other people rejoicing wasn’t so unappealing.

I admit that it didn’t fill me with any great enthusiasm. I thought I was the only one capable of feeling the sort of emotions that we associate with crowds. In my unfairness perhaps all I saw was jubilation at the unexpected day off—cafés open until later, soldiers entitled to kiss all the girls. But this spectacle, which I had thought would upset me, make me jealous or even entertain me with its infectious and lofty emotions, bored me like a Saint Catherine’s Day ball.

FOR SEVERAL DAYS I HADN’T HAD A SINGLE letter. Then on a rare snowy afternoon my brothers brought me a message from the Grangier boy. It was an icy letter from Madame Grangier. She asked me to come as soon as possible. What could she want from me? But the opportunity to have contact with Marthe, however indirectly, quelled my anxieties. I pictured Madame Grangier forbidding me to see her daughter again, to correspond with her, and me standing there hanging my head like a naughty schoolboy. Incapable of flying into a rage, I would give no outward sign of my hatred. I would say goodbye politely, and the door would close behind me for ever. Well then, I would come up with some answers, some disingenuous excuses, scathing remarks which might leave Madame Grangier with a less pitiable impression of her daughter’s lover than that of a schoolboy caught in the act. I anticipated the scene in minute detail.

When I walked into the small drawing room, it brought back memories of the first time I had been here. Perhaps this visit was a sign that I would never see Marthe again.

Madame Grangier came in. I felt for her for being so short, because she was trying hard to look superior. She
apologised for putting me to all this trouble for nothing. She explained that she had sent for me in order to ask something that was too complicated to put in writing, but in the meantime her question had been answered. This ludicrous air of secrecy was more agonising than any disaster.

Along by the Marne I bumped into the Grangier boy, leaning against some railings. Someone had hit him in the face with a snowball. He was snivelling. I made a fuss of him, questioned him about Marthe. His sister had been calling for me, he said. Their mother had refused to listen, but their father had told her: “Marthe’s condition is very serious, I insist we do what she asks.”

I immediately saw the reason for Madame Grangier’s behaviour, so bizarre, so bourgeois. She had summoned me out of respect for her husband and the wishes of a dying girl. But the moment the crisis was past and Marthe out of danger, they reimposed the regime. I ought to have been delighted. But I was only sorry the scare hadn’t lasted long enough for me to be allowed to see the patient.

Two days later Marthe wrote to me. She didn’t mention my visit. No doubt they had concealed it from her. She spoke about the future in a peculiar way, dispassionate, ethereal, which rather troubled me. Could it be it true that love is the most brutal form of selfishness, because in trying to find the reason for my inner turmoil I told myself that I was jealous of our child, which Marthe now talked about more than she did me.

We were expecting it some time during March. One Friday in January my brothers breathlessly announced that
the Grangier boy had a nephew. I couldn’t understand their jubilant expressions, or why they had run home so fast. Admittedly they had no idea how surprising the news would be for me. But to my brothers an uncle was an older person. For the Grangier boy to be an uncle was thus something sensational, and they had rushed back to share their amazement with us.

It is always the things that stare us in the face that we find hardest to recognise, if someone moves them slightly. So in the Grangier boy’s nephew I didn’t immediately see Marthe’s child—my child.

The panic that is caused by all the lights fusing in a public place now broke out in me. It was suddenly pitch black inside me. My emotions jostled into each other in the darkness; I searched for myself, groped around for dates, details. I counted on my fingers like I had sometimes seen Marthe do, although without suspecting her of cheating on me. Not that this process served any purpose. I no longer knew how to count. So what was this child that we were expecting in March, but which had been born in January? Every explanation I found for this irregularity was inspired by jealousy. Instantly I knew. The child belonged to Jacques. Hadn’t he been home on leave nine months ago? And so ever since then Marthe had been lying to me. And in any case, hadn’t she already lied about that period of leave! Hadn’t she sworn to me at first that she had turned Jacques down during those two confounded weeks, only to tell me much later that he had had her several times!

I had never really given serious thought to the
possibility that the child might belong to Jacques. But if when Marthe was first pregnant I had been cowardly enough to wish that it did, I was now forced to admit that I thought I was faced with the irrevocable truth that, having spent months with the soothing certainty that I was the father, I now loved this child, a child that wasn’t mine. Why was it that I only felt like a father deep down inside me at the very moment I discovered I wasn’t!

Clearly I was in utter turmoil, as if I had been thrown into the sea in the middle of the night without being able to swim. I couldn’t understand anything any more. There was one thing in particular that puzzled me, which was Marthe’s brazenness in naming her legitimate son after me. There were times when I saw it as a challenge to fate, a fate which didn’t want the child to be mine, while at others all I saw was tactlessness, one of those errors of taste on Marthe’s part which had shocked me more than once before, but which sprung simply from her abundance of love.

I started to write her an abusive letter. I felt I owed it to her, as well as to my self-esteem! But because my mind was elsewhere, in more exalted places, the words wouldn’t come.

I tore up the letter. I wrote another, in which I gave voice to my true feelings. I asked Marthe to forgive me. Forgive me for what? Probably for it being Jacques’s son. I begged her to love me all the same.

A very young man is a creature who rebels against pain. I was already rearranging my future to suit me. I had all but accepted this other man’s child. But before I finished my letter I got one from Marthe, brimming over with joy. The son was ours, born two months premature.
He would have to be put in an incubator. “I nearly died,” she said. The words amused me with their childishness.

Because in my heart there was room for nothing but rejoicing. I would have liked to announce the birth to the whole world, tell my brothers they were uncles too. I took delight in despising myself—how could I have doubted Marthe? Mingled with happiness, this remorse made me love my son more than ever. In my delirium I thanked God for my contempt. In fact I was glad to have had this brief aquaintanceship with pain. At least that was what I thought. But nothing is further from reality than the things that are right in front of us. A man who has almost died imagines he is acquainted with death. Yet when he finally meets it he doesn’t recognise it: “That’s not death,” he says with his dying breath.

In her letter Marthe also told me: “He looks like you.” I had seen newborn children, my brothers and sisters, and knew that only a woman’s love can find the resemblance that she wishes to see in them. “He has my eyes,” she went on. This too, a desire for the two of us to be united in a single human being, made her see her own eyes.

There was no longer any doubt in the Grangier household. They cursed Marthe, while conspiring to make sure the scandal didn’t ‘rebound’. The doctor, another member of this conspiracy of good order, concealed the fact that it was a premature birth, and took it on himself to invent something to explain to the husband why the child had to be in an incubator.

Over the next few days I found Marthe’s silence normal. It was Jacques’s place to be with her. None of his
periods of leave had bothered me less than this one, which the poor devil had been granted for the birth of
his
son. In a final fit of infantile behaviour, I smiled to think that he owed his holiday to me.

OUR HOUSE EXUDED TRANQUILLITY.

True premonitions grow in depths where our thoughts never go. And sometimes they make us do things whose meaning we totally misunderstand.

I thought I was feeling more affectionate because I was happy, and I was glad that Marthe was living in a house that my happy memories transformed into the focus of a cult.

A disorderly man who suddenly discovers that he is about to die puts his affairs in order. His life changes. He tidies away his personal papers. He rises and goes to bed early. He gives up his bad habits. His friends and family are delighted. Thus his sudden death seems even more unfair.
He would have led a happy life
.

In the same way, this new-found peace in my life was like the washing of the condemned man before his execution. I believed I was a better son because I had a son myself. My affection brought me closer to my mother and father, because something inside me knew that before long I was going to have need of theirs.

One day at lunchtime my brothers came home from school, shouting to everyone that Marthe was dead.

Lightning strikes a man so quickly that he doesn’t feel any pain. But for the people around him he is a sorry sight. Whilst I felt nothing, my father’s face contorted. He pushed my brothers towards the door: “Out!” he stammered. “You’re lunatics, lunatics.” As for me, I felt as if I were going cold, hard, turning to stone. And then, in the way a dying man’s life flashes in front of him in the space of a second, this fact exposed everything that was grotesque about my love. Because my father was crying, I began to sob. Then my mother took charge of me. She comforted me, dry-eyed, coldly, affectionately, as if I had scarlet fever.

At first, my having fainted was the reason my brothers were given to explain why it was so quiet in the house. But as the days went by they couldn’t understand it any more. They had never been stopped from playing noisy games before. They kept quiet. But every lunchtime the sound of their footsteps on the stone floor in the hall made me pass out, as if they were coming to tell me that Marthe was dead.

Marthe! My jealousy followed her to the grave, I wanted there to be nothing after death. In the same way, we can’t bear to think that the one we love is with a crowd of people at a party to which we haven’t been invited. I was still at the age where my heart didn’t think about the future. Yes, it was oblivion that I desired for Marthe, rather than a new world where I would eventually join her.

THE ONLY TIME I EVER SAW JACQUES WAS A few months later. Knowing that my father had some of Marthe’s watercolours, he wanted to see what they were like. We are always eager to discover things that are connected with those we love. And I wanted to see the man to whom Marthe had given her hand.

Holding my breath, I tiptoed towards the half-open door. I got there in time to hear:

“My wife called out to him as she died. Poor boy! He’s my only reason for living.”

Seeing this widower, so dignified, overcoming his despair, I realised that order eventually re-establishes itself around us. Hadn’t I just discovered that Marthe died calling out to me, and that my son would have a decent life?