The Devil in the Flesh (6 page)

FROM THE VERY START OF OUR RELATIONSHIP, Marthe had let me have a key to her apartment, so if she happened to have gone into town I wouldn’t have to wait for her in the garden. I could have made more innocent use of this key. It was a Saturday. I left her, promising to come for lunch the following day. But I had actually decided to come back as soon as I could that night.

During dinner I told my parents that the next day I was going on a long walk in the forest of Sénart with René. So I would have to leave at five in the morning. As the whole house would still be asleep, no one would know what time I had left, or whether I had spent the night away from home.

No sooner had I announced my intentions than my mother offered to make up a basket of food for my journey. I was filled with dismay; a basket wrecked all that was lofty and romantic about what I was planning to do. Having been looking forward to seeing the shock on Marthe’s face when I walked into her bedroom, I now imagined her shrieks of laughter when Prince Charming arrived with a shopping basket over his arm. However much I told my mother that René was bringing everything, she wouldn’t listen. To protest further would have aroused her suspicions.

It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. As my
mother was packing the basket that ruined my first night of love before it had even started, I saw the envious looks in my brothers’ eyes. I thought of secretly offering it to them, but once everything had been eaten, at the risk of getting a thrashing, and for the pleasure of landing me in trouble, they might have let the cat out of the bag.

So I had to put up with it, since I couldn’t think of any safe hiding places.

I had vowed not to leave before midnight so as to make sure my parents were asleep. I tried to read. But when the town-hall clock struck ten, my parents having been in bed for a while already, I couldn’t wait. Their room was upstairs, mine downstairs. I didn’t put my boots on, so I would make as little noise as possible when I climbed over the wall. With them in one hand and the basket, so fragile with all the bottles, in the other, I carefully opened the small service door. It was raining. All the better! It would muffle any noise. Seeing that the light was still on in my parents’ room, I nearly went back to bed. But I was already on my way. I couldn’t take precautions with the boots now; I had to put them on because of the rain. Then I had to climb the wall to avoid making the bell ring on the gate. I walked over to the wall, where I had made a point of putting a garden chair after dinner, to aid my escape. The wall had tiles along the top. The rain made them slippery. As I was hanging there, one of them fell off. In my nervousness the noise sounded ten times louder. Now I had to jump down into the street. I held the basket in my teeth; I landed in a puddle. For an endless minute I just stood there, looking at my parents’ window to see if they had got up, having
heard something. No one appeared at the window. I was safe!

To get to Marthe’s house I went along by the Marne. I was planning to hide the basket under a bush and come back for it the next day. But wartime made this risky. Standing at the only spot where there were bushes where I could have hidden the basket was a sentry, guarding the bridge at J.… For a long time I wavered, paler than someone trying to plant dynamite. Nonetheless I found a place to hide my food.

Marthe’s gate was shut. I got the key that was always left in the letter box. I tiptoed through the small garden, then up the front steps. Before going upstairs, I took my boots off.

Marthe was so nervous! She might faint when I appeared in her bedroom. I was shaking; I couldn’t find the keyhole. But at last I turned the key, slowly, so as not to wake anyone. In the hall I bumped into the umbrella stand. I was afraid of pressing a bell, thinking it was a light switch. I groped my way to her room. Then I stopped, again feeling a desire to run away. Marthe might never forgive me. Or maybe I was about to discover that she was cheating on me, and find her with another man!

“Marthe?” I whispered.

She replied:

“Instead of giving me such a fright, you might just as well have come in the morning. So you got leave a week early then?”

She thought I was Jacques!

If I had now seen the way she would have greeted him, at the same time I discovered that she was concealing something from me. Jacques was due back in a week’s time!

I switched on the light. She was still facing the wall. The simplest thing would have been to say: “It’s me,” and yet I didn’t. I just kissed her on the neck.

“Your face is wet. Do dry it.”

Then she turned round and gave a cry.

In the space of a second her whole manner changed and, not bothering to ask what I was doing there in the middle of the night, she said:

“But my poor darling, you’ll catch your death of cold! Quick, take your clothes off.”

She hurried off to rekindle the fire in the drawing room. When she came back to the bedroom, seeing me still standing there, she asked:

“Do you want me to help you?”

As someone who dreaded more than anything the moment when I would have to undress, and could visualize how ridiculous I would look, I was eternally grateful to the rain, thanks to which getting undressed now took on a motherly aspect. Meanwhile Marthe went back and forth to the kitchen to see if the water for my hot toddy had boiled. Finally she found me lying naked on the bed, half-hidden by the quilt. She told me off—it was crazy not to wear any clothes; I ought to rub myself down with eau de cologne.

Then she opened a wardrobe and tossed me some pyjamas. They ought to be ‘my size’. A pair of Jacques’s! And I remembered that it was quite likely the soldier would arrive, since Marthe had thought it was him.

I got into bed. Marthe joined me. I asked her to put the light out. For even in her arms I was still wary of my shyness. Darkness made me feel brave. Marthe replied softly:

“No. I want to watch you fall asleep.”

These words, so charming, made me feel self-conscious. In them I found the touching sweetness of a woman who was risking everything to be my mistress, and, unable to imagine my pathological shyness, accepted that I should go to sleep beside her. For four months I had been saying I loved her, yet didn’t give her that proof which men are so lavish with, and which for them often takes the place of love. I switched the light out myself.

I experienced the same agitation that I had felt earlier, before I came into the apartment. But like my wait outside the door, the one outside the doors of love couldn’t possibly last for long. Besides, my imagination had been promising itself such exquisite sensual delights that it was no longer able to picture them. And for the first time I was afraid of being like her husband, leaving her with bad memories of our first moments of love.

So her happiness was greater than mine. But as soon as we were unentwined, the look in her wonderful eyes made all my discomfort seem worthwhile.

Her face was transfigured. I was amazed not to be able to even touch the halo that surrounded it, like in religious paintings.

My fears were allayed, but there were more to come.

Finally comprehending the power of acts that shyness hadn’t dared allow me to perform until now, I was terrified that Marthe might belong to her husband in more ways than she cared to admit.

But since I’m not capable of understanding things that I’m trying for the first time, I had to get acquainted with the delights of love day-by-day.

In the meantime this counterfeit pleasure caused me real pain—the one that men feel—jealousy.

I resented Marthe, because from the grateful expression on her face I realised what fleshly ties really mean. I cursed the man who had roused her body before I had. I reflected on how foolish I’d been to see her as a virgin. At any other time, to wish her husband dead would have been a childish fantasy, but in the present one my craving was almost as much of a crime as if I had actually killed him. I owed my burgeoning happiness to the War; I was also expecting it to bring it to its zenith. I hoped it would do my hatred’s work for it, in the way an anonymous person commits a crime on our behalf.

We are crying together now; the fault lies with happiness. Marthe blames me for not preventing her from getting married. “But then would I be in this bed that I chose? She would be living with her parents; we wouldn’t be able to see each other. She would never have belonged to Jacques, but she wouldn’t belong to me either. Without him, and without any point of comparison, she might still have regrets, hope for something better. I feel no hatred for Jacques. I hate the knowledge that I owe everything to the man we are betraying. Yet I love Marthe too much to regard our happiness a crime.”

We are crying because we are only children, with little to call our own. Take Marthe away! Since she doesn’t belong to anyone except me, it would be the same as taking me away, because we would be parted. We are already anticipating the end of the War, which will be the end of our love. We know this, and however much Marthe promises me that she will leave everything, that she will go with me, it’s not in my nature to be so rebellious and, putting myself in her place, I can’t imagine such an insane breach. Marthe tells me why she thinks she’s too old. In fifteen years’ time,
life will have only just begun for me, women her age will fall in love with me. “All it will bring me is pain,” she adds. “If you leave me, I’ll die. If you stay, it will only be out of weakness, and it’ll make me suffer to see you sacrifice your happiness.”

Despite my protests I was angry with myself for not producing any convincing counter-argument. But all Marthe asked was to be this herself, and to her my bad reasons seemed like good ones. She would reply: “Oh yes, I hadn’t thought of that. I can tell you’re not lying.” Yet faced with these fears of hers, I felt my confidence waver. So my consolations were meagre ones. I gave the impression that it was only out of politeness that I didn’t disillusion her. “No, no,” I said, “you’re crazy.” Yet sadly I was too conscious of my youth not to foresee that I would turn my back on Marthe the moment her youth wilted and mine came into bloom.

Although I thought my love was fully formed, it was still in its early stages. It gave way at the slightest difficulty.

So the extravagances our hearts committed that night exhausted us far more than those of the flesh. One seemed to help us relax from the other; yet in fact they both brought us to the same end. Cocks were crowing, there were more of them now. They had been crowing all night. I noticed the poetic lie here: cocks crow at sunrise. There was nothing extraordinary about that. Insomnia was unknown to someone my age. Yet Marthe noticed them too, and it surprised her so much that it must have been the first time. She didn’t understand why I held her so tight, because her surprise proved that she had never spent all night awake with Jacques.

My hypnotic state made me believe that ours was an exceptional love. We imagined we were the first to experience particular anxieties, not realising that love is like poetry, and that all lovers, even the most unremarkable, think they are breaking new ground. So when I told Marthe (without actually believing it), but just to make her think I shared her concerns: “You’ll abandon me, you’ll find other men that you prefer,” she assured me she knew her own mind. As for me, I gradually convinced myself that I would stay with her even when her youth was gone, and in my laziness I simply trusted our immortal happiness to her physical energy.

Sleep had stolen up on us in our nakedness. When I woke, seeing she was uncovered, I was afraid she might be cold. I touched her. Her body was burning. To see her asleep gave me exquisite sensual pleasure. After ten minutes I found it unbearable. I kissed her on the shoulder. She didn’t stir. A second, less demure kiss had the effect of an alarm clock. She gave a start and, rubbing her eyes, she smothered me with kisses, like someone you love who you find in bed after dreaming they have died. Except that Marthe thought that what she had been dreaming about was true, and found me there when she woke up.

It was eleven o’clock already. We were drinking our chocolate when we heard the doorbell. I thought of Jacques: “Let’s hope he’s got a gun.” For someone so afraid of death, I wasn’t shaking. On the contrary, I would have been happy for it to be Jacques, as long as he killed us. To me any other outcome seemed absurd.

To contemplate death calmly only makes sense if we do it alone. Death as a couple isn’t death, not even for unbelievers. What distresses us is not losing life, but losing what
gives it meaning. When a loved one is our life, what difference is there between living together and dying together?

There wasn’t time for me to see myself as a hero, because thinking that Jacques might just kill Marthe, or only me, I was busy calculating how self-centred I was. Of these two tragedies did I even know which was the worst?

Since Marthe didn’t get up, I thought I’d made a mistake, and that someone had rung the owners’ bell. But then the doorbell went again.

“Be quiet!” she whispered. “Don’t move, it must be my mother. I’d completely forgotten that she was going to drop by after mass.”

I was glad to witness one of her sacrifices. If a mistress or a friend is a few minutes late in coming to meet me, I straightway imagine they have died. Assuming that her mother was experiencing a similar anxiety, I enjoyed it to the full, as well as the knowledge that I was responsible for her fears.

After the sound of a short conversation (Madame Grangier had obviously asked the people downstairs if they had seen her daughter that morning), we heard the garden gate closing. Marthe looked through the shutters. “Yes, it was her,” she said. At the sight of Madame Grangier departing, missal in hand, worrying about her daughter’s unaccountable absence, I couldn’t help being pleased too. She turned round and took another look at the closed shutters.

NOW THAT I HAD NOTHING LEFT TO WISH FOR, I sensed I was beginning to be unfair. I put on a show of being upset that Marthe could deceive her mother without a qualm, and in my dishonesty I rebuked her for being able to lie. And yet love, which is selfishness in duplicate, sacrifices everything for itself, exists on lies. Driven by the same demon, I chastised her for not telling me that her husband was due back. Up till now I had kept my tyranny in check, not believing I had any right to rule Marthe. My harshness occasionally abated. “It won’t be long before you loathe me,” I groaned. “I’m like your husband, just as cruel.” “He’s not cruel,” she said. I started up again with renewed force: “So you’re cheating on both of us, tell me which one you love the most—but don’t worry—in a week’s time you’ll be able to cheat on me with him.”