‘So are you glad to be going into the army?’
‘No, of course not. But I’m singing ’cos everyone else is.’
‘And why is everyone else singing?’
‘Dunno. ’Cos you do when you join the army.’
‘Do you know what your “Country” is?’
He stares at me in astonishment. Clearly he has never considered the question.
‘Well, lad, your “Country” is a few rogues who have taken it upon themselves to make you into something less than a man, less than an animal or a plant: a number.’
To emphasise what I’m saying, I rip off the number and rub the lad’s nose on it.
‘In other words, for reasons of which you know nothing and which are nothing to do with you, they’ll take away your job, your love, your freedom, your whole life. Do you understand?’
But he’s not listening, he’s anxiously following with his eyes the bit of card I’m waving in the air. In the end, he says timidly:
‘Can I have my number back now, Monsieur Sébastien?’
‘So you really want it, do you?’
‘Too right I do. I’ll put it on the mantelpiece next to the picture of my first communion.’
He pins it to his cap, rejoins his group and starts singing again.
I saw him once more later that evening. He was drunk and carrying a flag which trailed in the mud.
Sometimes I envy drunks.
CHAPTER III
After his illness, Sébastien managed to devise ways of avoiding those meetings in the avenue. First, he claimed that he was still weak and that his health was still poor; then that his father gave him little freedom. Marguerite had not insisted when offered the first excuse, but she was offended by the second. Did her mother give her any more freedom? Did she not find the means of escaping from the house, braving danger and surmounting all obstacles? Though he managed never to be alone with her, Marguerite proved astonishingly skilful at taking advantage of a moment’s opportunity, a second when her mother’s head was turned, in order to say something to Sébastien, usually a request, sometimes a threat. But he pretended not to hear. She was excitable, feverish; her dilated pupils burned with a dark energy.
‘I really don’t know what’s the matter with Marguerite,’ sighed Madame Lecautel. ‘I find her so odd. Oh dear, I do hope that doesn’t all start again.’ One afternoon, Marguerite was sitting silent, motionless, her brow furrowed, a piece of tapestry work idle on her lap, when she suddenly got up from her chair, pinched Sébastien on the arm and slapped his face. Then she started yelling, stamping her feet and, finally, burst into tears. Madame Lecautel carried her daughter away, put her to bed and fussed over her.
‘Marguerite, dear Marguerite, please, don’t be like this. You’re breaking my heart.’
All day, Marguerite said nothing but:
‘I hate him. I hate him. I hate him.’
Sébastien wondered whether he should admit everything, not out of remorse, nor for Marguerite’s sake, but purely in order to rid himself of her obsession, which was a torture to him. From one week to the next he put off the moment of confession. Then, finally, one day, he made up his mind and said:
‘Madame Lecautel, I have to tell you something very serious, something that has been tormenting me for a long while.’
‘Tell me, child, tell me. What is this very serious matter?’
‘It’s … it’s …’
He stopped, suddenly terrified by what he was about to reveal and realising that it would be cruel to make a mother suffer so much.
‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘It can wait.’
Madame Lecautel was used to Sébastien’s ways. She knew how disjointed his feelings were, how he leaped from one idea to another. She showed no surprise and merely smiled sadly:
‘I see that this serious matter is not so serious after all. What a funny fellow you are …’
He kept his visits to a minimum. But Marguerite wrote him letters, in a disguised, unrecognisable hand, brief, imperious letters, which he neither replied to nor acknowledged with a look or gesture when next they met. Once she asked him:
‘Did you get my letters? Why don’t you reply?’
Sébastien feigned astonishment and said:
‘What letters? Did you write to me? No, I haven’t received any letters.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘Honestly. My father must be intercepting them.’
‘Your father! That’s just not true.’
‘He’ll hand them over to your mother, Marguerite, you’ll see. It’s madness.’
‘Well, let him. So much the better.’
The letters had indeed intrigued Monsieur Roch, who waited for the postman every morning out on the street. He handed them to his son and remarked slyly:
‘Ha, ha, my lad! Here’s another of those letters if I’m not mistaken.’
Often he would add maliciously:
‘Yesterday, I met the Champiers. Yes, Madame Champier spoke about you. Yes, indeed …’
Despite Monsieur Roch’s high moral stance he would have been flattered to think that his son had some secret, guilty relationship with Madame Champier, the most elegant lady amongst the Pervenchères bourgeoisie and the most admired.
Sébastien was alarmed by Marguerite’s boldness. He changed tactics towards her and decided to appease her by pretending affection. He tried to appear more involved, looked at her more tenderly, sometimes took her hand on the sly, embraced her in the corridor when he left her house. Marguerite abandoned herself to him instantly, moved, overcome, weak. She would say:
‘Can I meet you soon?’
‘Yes, yes, soon. Tomorrow. I’ll tell you tomorrow.’
‘Hurry then. It’s been so long …’
‘Yes, yes, too long …’ Sébastien would say in a caressing voice.
She became more relaxed, happy, confident and outgoing. Her mother was glad to see the colour come back to her cheeks and her childish antics return. She said to Sébastien:
‘Thank God, I think the crisis is past. She’s much better, isn’t she?’
So it went on, in Marguerite revolt alternated with submission, and in Sébastien the anguish of ideal love alternated with physical disgust, until that day in July when they both found themselves face to face in the wheatfield. That day, Marguerite spoke in an abrupt, imperious tone which brooked no discussion. She said:
‘I want you to.’ He realised that, from now on, she would not be content with the bait of promises constantly withdrawn, nor with the deceitful charity of his dilatory caresses. He would have to take a definitive stance: either finally break away from an unacceptable situation full of rancour or resume the gloomy nocturnal meetings in the avenue. There was still a remnant of pity behind even the most painful of his feelings, as well as fear of the possibly complicated and difficult consequences of rejection, and because of that he had not dared take on the responsibility of breaking it off. Again he had resigned himself to the demands of this small, mad, insatiable creature. He had gone home after the walk unhappy, telling himself he was a coward, in the grip of a great depression. As he always did when assailed by unusual or particularly irksome problems, he stretched out on his bed, his legs apart, arms crossed behind his head. But even though it normally calmed him, he could not stay long in that position. The need for motion soon made him get up. Like a beast in a cage, he paced up and down in his cramped room, bumping into furniture, kicking chairs. Suddenly he remembered that the nights were bright and full of moonlight and that lovers walked arm-in-arm and made love in the fields, the woods and on the dusty roads and grassy pathways. Something horrible shifted in him and he shouted:
‘Bitch! Bitch!’
Night came sooner than he would have wished. He felt that the minutes, usually so slow to pass, now devoured the hours.
When he went to the avenue, the moon was shining in a very clear, pale sky, cold and milky. Huge blue shadows billowed across the white road; the trees were sharpl
y etched in the moonlight, their green colours still evident, but darker and sprinkled with silvery sequins. The fields and hills and the scattered houses were lightly robed in mystery, but looked almost as they did during the day.
In the avenue stood Marguerite, leaning against an aspen tree, watching the road. She was wearing her cream-coloured frock with a red sash again; over her head and shoulders she wore a kind of shawl in white silk which gleamed in the moonlight. The trunks of the aspens, clear and white, formed a high white barrier leading away into the distance, with shadow between them, a transparent shadow full of occasional starry pockets of brightness. As soon as Marguerite spotted Sébastien, she ran towards him and wordlessly embraced him, pressing her body against his, her lips against his. He pushed her away.
‘Soon, soon,’ he said. And then, harshly.
‘I suppose you kept that dress on just so you could be seen all the better, and that shawl which shines out like a beacon …’
‘It was just so that I could get here sooner, Sébastien,’ replied Marguerite, whose passion had been frozen and abruptly reined in by that brutal welcome. ‘Anyway, who’s going to see us here, this late?’
‘Who? Everyone, damn you, everyone. Let’s not stay here.’
They walked to the bench and sat down. Marguerite could feel tears mounting, tears which never quite escaped but seemed to fill her veins, her heart, her throat and her brain; her ears hummed with the sound of rushing water. Nevertheless she had the strength to ask:
‘Have I done something to hurt you, Sébastien?’
Brutally he replied:
‘No, you haven’t hurt me. Just tell me, what do you actually want?’
She leaned her head on his shoulder.
‘Why do you use that tone with me? What do you mean, what do I want? I want you. I want to touch you, to be able to hold your hand without anyone else here to see us and disturb us. I just want to be here like we are now, Sébastien. My Sébastien …’
Her voice died away, blurred by tears.
‘What do I want?’ she managed to go on. ‘I am burning with desire for you, suffocating. I can’t sleep at night. I am going mad. If you only knew. But you don’t understand, you don’t understand anything. Often when my mother has gone to sleep, I leave my room and leave the house, where I feel I’m dying, and I run as if I were going to meet you. Sometimes I roam around outside your house. There was always a light on in your room whenever I looked up. What were you doing? I called you, I threw sand and pebbles against your window. If the gate had been open I would have gone in. I came and sat here for hours. Sébastien, say something to me, take me in your arms, Sébastien, I beg you, why won’t you talk to me?’
Sébastien kept quiet, his face dark.
She spoke of her gestures of affection, always rejected, of her hopes, never realised, her pain, her anger, her dreams, her impulse to go to him, often so strong that she could barely repress the need to clasp him to her, kiss him, even in front of her mother. But as he listened, and as he felt the warmth of her woman’s flesh against his skin, permeating his body, he felt ever more horrified by that voice and wished he could stifle it, horrified at this unbearable physical contact with her, which he would have given anything to end. Everything she had meant to him, the ideas, thoughts, feelings which she had inspired, he forgot in his disgust at this sexual urge which seemed to pursue him and cover his skin like the stings of a thousand voracious bloodsuckers. He stared coldly at Marguerite, pale beneath the moon, pale with the pallor of the dead, her head on his shoulder, and he trembled. He trembled because, from the depths of his being, dark and unknown even to himself, an instinct had been awakened, had risen up, swelled and conquered him, a wild, powerful instinct, whose terrifying suggestions he was obeying for the first time. He no longer felt merely physical repulsion, at that moment, he felt hatred, not just hatred, more a sort of monstrous, deadly vindictiveness, amplified to the point of violence, which was driving him into the abyss with this frail child, not into the abyss of love, but into the abyss of murder. He, so sweet-natured, for whom the death of a bird was a source of sorrow, who could not, without feeling faint, bear the sight of a wound, a spot of blood, instantly admitted the possibility of Marguerite lying beneath him, her bones crushed, her face bloodied, gasping for breath. His dizziness increased; a red fury filled his brain, spurred his limbs to violent action. Suddenly he drew back sharply. His fists opened and closed in sinister, nervous movements. The moon continued its astral progress. A light breeze had arisen, shaking the leaves of the aspens, whose silvery undersides gleamed.
‘Please, please speak to me,’ begged Marguerite, who had eagerly crept closer to Sébastien. ‘Take me in your arms. Are you leaving?’
‘Shut up.’
‘I’m being nice to you, aren’t I? I’d like to be so nice that you would never want to leave me. I dream of us running away together. Say that you’d like us to do that.’
‘Shut up! Shut up!’
He gripped her hands, her wrists and arms, and squeezed them hard enough to crush them, to draw blood. His hand flew to her shoulders, then he stopped, trembling, mesmerised by her throat.
‘Yes, yes, I feel that urge too sometimes, as if I were suffocating. Touch me.’
Marguerite abandoned herself to him, delivered up her entire body to that murderous embrace she mistook for love, and whose pain she could not recognise, lost in the lust which had taken possession of her.
‘Yes, touch me again. Then kiss me. Everyone kisses, I’m the only one …’
‘Be quiet!’
But she would not keep quiet. She came closer, pressed her whole body against his, wrapped her arms round him and said:
‘Take me, the way Jean takes his wife. I often see them from my room at night when they go to bed. They kiss, they caress. If you only knew … if you could see … Oh it’s wonderful …’
Suddenly, at the idea of that sight, Sébastien’s fingers released their grip and the terrible embrace turned into a caress. His voice still hoarse, but weaker, he said:
‘You really see them when they go to bed?’
‘Yes, I can see them.’
‘And what do they do? Tell me, tell me everything.’
Whilst Marguerite spoke, he listened, his breath coming in quick gasps; he recalled all his own memories of lust, depraved desires, perverted fantasies. He summoned them from far, far off: ancient ghosts, from the depths of that room in the school, where the Jesuit had taken him, at the end of that corridor where the deed had been done, in the silence of the night and beneath the trembling light of the lamps. He recalled the act of corruption which had brought him to this point, poised between the abysses of blood and degradation.
‘And what effect does it have on you to see all that?’
‘Me? It makes me want it too.’
He heaped filth on himself and her, forcing her to defile herself with her own words. The violent desire for that flesh he had condemned mounted in him, burning and biting; it was a desire in which violence still lurked, but a violence that no longer demanded death, only possession, the way the assassin’s knife rushes at the throat of the victim. He kept questioning her, demanding more precise details, a clearer picture of them and of her reactions as she watched. Marguerite told of clothes thrown aside, nakedness, limbs entwined on the bed; he drew her to him, pressed her against his chest. Her hands ran over his whole body, she uttered abominable words, pulled clothing aside to reveal bare flesh, over which she lingered.
‘Is that what they do?’
‘Yes … isn’t it wonderful?’
Their caresses grew bolder. Clumsily, roughly, he took her.
At first, it felt like surprise, like the brief fear one feels on awakening from a bad dream. For a few seconds, he felt afraid of the milky sky above him and the white trunks of the aspens piercing the pale night of the avenue like ghosts. Then he felt broken and terribly sad. Marguerite was beside him, on him, her two arms around his neck, speaking to him sweetl
y, idly, happily:
‘Sébastien, dear, sweet Sébastien.’
He no longer felt anger or disgust, merely distress. The madness that had thrown a lurid light on the unhealthy depths of his psyche had receded. He was almost surprised to see Marguerite still there, and she was saying something. His thoughts were elsewhere, far off. His thoughts wandered the paths of memory: the window seat in the dormitory, the seashore, the pine forests, the seductive beauty of the voice mingling with the whisper of the sea and the wind. His thoughts were in that room, fixed on the small, capricious glow of a cigarette end, and he missed it. Did he really? He took pleasure in it and no longer cursed the thought. Was the fact that he no longer cursed it the same as missing it? He gently removed Marguerite’s arms from round his neck and delicately pushed her away.
‘Oh, why won’t you let me stay like that?’ she sighed. ‘Am I tiring you?’
‘No, Marguerite, you don’t tire me.’
‘Well, then, why? I love being with you like this.’
Her voice was as clear as morning birdsong. It was as if no evil had ever crossed her path. That child-like voice, like the ripple of water, touched Sébastien’s heart. Overwhelmed by a vast sense of pity for her, for himself, condemned as they were to suffering of such opposite but similarly shameful kinds, he suddenly broke down and wept.
‘You’re crying,’ exclaimed Marguerite. ‘Do you think I don’t love you any more?’
‘No, no, it’s not that. You poor little thing, you wouldn’t understand.’
‘So you don’t love me, then?’
He threw his arms round her and held her in a chaste embrace.
‘Of course I love you,’ he said. ‘I should always have loved you like this. I’m sorry, I’m just miserable because I can see how unhappy you are inside and, at this moment, I love you for your pain.’
He leaned his head on the girl’s shoulder, gripped her hands and murmured:
‘Don’t speak, say nothing … your heart’s beating so fast …’
Marguerite was a little afraid and started to stammer:
‘Dear Sébastien …’
Sebastien Roch (Dedalus European Classics) Page 26
