The Devil in the Flesh (5 page)

Marthe lived at J …; her street lead down to the Marne. There were at most a dozen houses on each side. I was surprised that hers was so large. In fact she only lived on the first floor, while the owners and an elderly couple shared the ground floor.

When I arrived for tea, it was already dark. The only sign of life was firelight at one window. Seeing it lit up by flickering flames like waves, I thought a fire was breaking out. The iron garden gate was half-open. Such carelessness surprised me. I looked for the doorbell; I couldn’t find it.
Eventually, going up the three steps of the front entrance, I decided to tap on the ground-floor window on the right-hand side, where I could hear voices. An elderly woman came to the door; I asked where Madame Lacombe (this was Marthe’s new name) lived: “It’s upstairs.” I stumbled up the stairs in the dark, bumped into things, terrified that something dreadful had happened. I knocked on the door. Marthe opened it. I almost threw my arms round her neck, like virtual strangers do after surviving a shipwreck. But she wouldn’t have understood. She probably found me rather distraught, because my first words were to ask “Why is there a fire?”

“While I was waiting for you, I lit a fire of olive wood in the salon, that’s all, and I’ve been reading by it.”

As I walked into the small room that she used as a salon—in which there wasn’t much furniture and where the drapes and the carpet, which was as soft and thick as an animal’s coat, made the room so shrunken that it looked like the inside of a box—I felt happy and sad all at once, like a playwright who sees a performance of his play and realizes too late all its flaws.

Marthe lay down in front of the fire again and started raking the embers, being careful not to mix the pieces of black wood with the ashes.

“Maybe you don’t like the smell of olive wood? My parents-in-law sent me a supply from their place down in the Midi.”

She seemed to be apologising for a minor element of her own invention in a room that was my creation. Perhaps this tiny detail ruined a whole that she didn’t quite understand.

Quite the opposite. I was enchanted by the fire, and
to see that, like me, she was anticipating roasting herself on one side and then turning over to do the other. Her grave, tranquil face had never been so beautiful as in this primitive light. By not spreading across the whole room, it retained its strength. The moment you moved away from it, all was darkness, and you stumbled over the furniture.

Marthe didn’t know what it was to be in revolt. In her cheerfulness she was still serious.

Lying beside her, my mind gradually grew numb, she seemed to have changed. It was only now when I was certain that I no longer loved her that I began to love her. I felt incapable of manipulation and self-interest, of everything that up till then, and even at that moment, I had believed were vital to love’s existence. Suddenly I felt better. In anyone else, this abrupt change would have opened their eyes, but I didn’t see that I was in love with Marthe. On the contrary, I saw evidence that my love was dead, that its place had been taken by a beautiful friendship. The objectivity of friendship suddenly made me realize just how criminal any other emotion would have been, wronging the man who did love her, to whom she rightly belonged, and who couldn’t see what she was doing.

And yet something else should have told me what my true feelings were. When I had met Marthe several months before, this so-called love of mine didn’t prevent me from judging her, from thinking that most of the things she found beautiful were ugly, that most of what she said was childish. But now if I didn’t think the same as her, I blamed
myself. After the crudeness of my earlier desires, I was duped by the sweetness of a more profound emotion. I no longer felt able to embark on anything I had resolved to do. I began to respect Marthe, because I had begun to love her.

I came back every evening; I didn’t think of asking her to show me her bedroom, still less of what Jacques thought of our furniture. I wished for nothing except this everlasting betrothal, our bodies lying barely touching in front of the fire, me not daring to move for fear that a single gesture might be enough to dispel the happiness.

Yet Marthe, who was savouring the same enchantment, imagined she was alone in doing so. In my happy idleness she saw indifference. Believing that I didn’t love her, she thought I would soon tire of this silent drawing room if she didn’t do something to bind me to her.

We said nothing. In this I saw a sign of happiness.

I felt so close to Marthe, so convinced that we were both thinking the same thing at the same time, that the idea of talking to her seemed absurd, like talking to yourself when you are alone. But this silence overwhelmed the poor girl. The wisest thing would have been for me to use crude methods of communication, such as words or gestures, while lamenting the lack of anything more subtle.

Seeing me sink further into this delightful silence each day, Marthe believed I was becoming more and more bored. So she was prepared to do anything to keep me amused.

Hair untied, she liked to sleep by the fire. Or rather I thought she was asleep. This slumber was an excuse to put her arms round my neck, and then, waking with
tear-moistened eyes, to tell me that she had been having a sad dream. She never wanted to say what it was. I took advantage of this feigned sleep to inhale the scent of her hair, her neck, her burning cheeks, barely brushing them so as not to wake her; caresses which, despite what people believe, are not love’s loose change, but on the contrary are of the very rarest, and of which only passion may avail itself. I believed they were mine by virtue of my friendship. Yet I began to despair that only love gives us rights over a woman. I can easily go without love, I thought, but I can’t not have any rights over Marthe. And in order to have them I had actually chosen love, while believing that I despised it. I desired Marthe without realising.

While she was asleep like this, her head resting on my arm, I would lean over and look at her face, surrounded by flames. This was playing with fire. Once, as I brought my face closer, although without touching hers, I was like the needle that strays a mere fraction into the forbidden zone and is drawn to the magnet. Is this the fault of the magnet or the needle? This was how I felt my lips touch hers. Her eyes were still closed, but in the obvious way of someone who isn’t asleep. I kissed her, astonished at my temerity, when it was actually her who enticed me to her mouth as I came closer to her face. Her hands clung fiercely round my neck; they couldn’t have held me more tightly in a shipwreck. I wasn’t sure whether she wanted me to save her, or to drown alongside her.

Once she was sitting up again, she held my head in her lap, stroking my hair and saying to me over and over softly: “You must go, you must never come back.” I daren’t
call her
‘tu’
as she did me, and when I was unable to stay silent any longer, I struggled to find the right words, framing my sentences so as not to speak to her directly, because if I couldn’t call her
‘tu’
, I was conscious how much more impossible it was to call her
‘vous’
. My tears scalded me. If one of them fell onto Marthe’s hand, I expected to hear her cry out. I blamed myself for breaking the spell, thinking I had been mad to put my lips to hers, forgetting that it was her who had kissed me. “You must go, don’t ever come back.” I shed tears of rage, tears of grief. In the same way, the anger of the wolf caught in the trap hurts him as much as the snare itself. Had I said anything, it would have been to insult Marthe. My silence worried her; in it she saw resignation. In my unfairness, which might have actually been clear-sightedness, I was causing her to think: “After all, since it’s too late now, I’m just as happy for him to suffer.” The heat of this fire made me shiver, my teeth chattered. To the real grief that dragged me out of childhood were added childish emotions. I was the onlooker who doesn’t want to leave because he doesn’t like the outcome. I told her: “I won’t go. You’ve been making fun of me. I don’t want to see you any more.”

Because if I didn’t want to go home, I didn’t want to see Marthe again either. I would have sooner turned her out of her own house!

“You’re just a child,” she sobbed. “You don’t understand that if I’m asking you to go it’s because I love you.”

Hatefully I said that I was perfectly aware that she had obligations, that her husband was away at the War.

She shook her head: “I was happy before I met you, I thought I loved my fiancé. I forgave him for not really understanding me. But you’ve proved to me that I didn’t
love him. My obligation isn’t what you think it is. It isn’t to not lie to my husband, it’s to not lie to you. Go now and don’t think ill of me; you’ll soon forget me. I don’t want to make your life miserable. I’m crying because I’m too old for you!”

These loving words of hers were a superb piece of childishness. And whatever passions I may have experienced later, there could never be a sweeter feeling than that of seeing a girl of nineteen in tears because she thinks she is too old.

The flavour of that first kiss disappointed me, like fruit you taste for the first time. It’s not in new things that we experience the greatest pleasure, but in habit. Within moments, not only had I become accustomed to Marthe’s lips, I was unable to live without them. And it was then that she spoke of depriving me of them for ever.

That evening, Marthe saw me all the way home. To feel closer, I huddled up against her surreptitiously, put my arm round her waist. She didn’t repeat what she had said, that we ought not to see each other again; on the contrary, she was sad to think that we would have to part at any moment. She made me swear a million wild extravagances.

When we got to my house, I didn’t want her to go back on her own, so I took her home. This childishness might have gone on for ever, because she then wanted to walk back with me again. I agreed, on condition that she only come half-way.

I arrived half-an-hour late for dinner. It was the first time. I blamed it on the train. My father pretended to believe me.

Nothing weighed on me now. I walked along the street with the same light tread as in my dreams.

Up till then I had always had to resign myself to losing the things I had yearned for as a child. Not only that, any toys I was given were spoilt by the obligation to be grateful. But in a child’s eyes, how much prestige there would be in a toy that made a present of itself! I was drunk with desire. Marthe belonged to me, and it wasn’t me who had said it, but her. I could touch her face, kiss her eyes, her arms, dress her, damage her in whatever way I liked. In my frenzy I bit her where her skin was uncovered, so her mother would suspect her of having a lover. I would have liked to carve my initials there. This childish brutality was a reminder of the original meaning of tattoos. Marthe would say: “Yes, bite me, mark me, I want the whole world to know.”

I would have liked to kiss her breasts. But I daren’t ask, believing that she would offer them by herself, like she had her lips. After a few days, having grown used to her lips, I couldn’t conceive of anything more delightful.

WE WERE READING IN THE FIRELIGHT TOGETHER. She often threw on the fire letters that her husband wrote to her from the front every day. You could tell that Marthe’s replies to his anxieties were becoming less and less affectionate and more and more infrequent. I couldn’t see his letters go up in flames without feeling uneasy. They made the fire burn brighter for a moment, and if the truth be known, I was afraid of seeing too clearly.

Marthe, who now often asked me if it was true that I’d loved her the first time we met, chided me for not having told her before her wedding. She claimed that she wouldn’t have got married; because if she had felt a form of love for Jacques at the beginning of their engagement, then that itself, which had been drawn out for too long because of the War, had gradually emptied her heart of love. She had already stopped loving Jacques by the time she married him. She had hoped that the two weeks’ leave that he had been given might change her feelings.

But he was inept. The one who loves always annoys the one who doesn’t. And Jacques loved her more and more every day. His letters were those of someone in pain, but who held his Marthe in too high esteem to think her capable of betraying him. So he just blamed himself, begged
her to tell him what he had done to hurt her: “I feel so uncouth when I’m with you, I have the feeling that everything I say upsets you.” Marthe simply replied that he was mistaken, that she didn’t blame him for anything.

It was now the beginning of March. Spring came early. On days when she didn’t come into Paris with me, Marthe, naked beneath her dressing gown, would wait for me to get back from my art class, lying in front of the fire, where there was always some of her parents-in-law’s olive wood burning. She had asked them to send her some more. I don’t know what kind of shyness it was that held me back, if not the one you experience when confronted with something you haven’t done before. It reminded me of Daphnis. Only in our case it was Chloe who had had a few lessons, but Daphnis didn’t dare ask her to teach him. Although didn’t I regard Marthe as a virgin, who for the first two weeks of her marriage had been delivered up to a stranger to be taken forcibly.

In bed at night I called out to her, angry with myself—me who considered myself a man—for not being enough of one to make her my mistress. Every day when I went to her house I resolved not to leave until I had done so.

On my sixteenth birthday in March 1918, begging me not to get cross, she gave me a dressing gown like hers, and which she wanted to see me wear at her house. In my delight I almost made a pun, something I never did. It was my
toga praetextata
—my pretext! Because it seemed that what had been impeding my desires so far was the fear of looking foolish, of feeling dressed while she was not. At first I thought of putting it on that same day. But then I blushed, realising how much of a rebuke this gift of hers represented.