Love, Anger, Madness

by Marie Vieux-Chauvet

The man in uniform had taken a sip of liquor and seemed to reflect for a moment.

  “I’ve gotten quite attached to her,” he confided to Louis Normil, who clutched his glass tight enough to break it. “I’ve been moved by how sweet and gentle she is. I find myself getting so impatient whenever I’m expecting her. Perhaps I’ll marry her someday. I’m not promising anything, but perhaps I’ll marry her someday.”

  “I would be flattered,” he responded, unflappable.

  His voice was low, almost hoarse. He lowered his eyes, afraid to give himself away, and fought off the desire to leap at the Gorilla and strangle him. His clenched jaw jutted out and he grew nauseous from the effort to remain calm. As sure as my name is Louis Normil, he thought, you will die by my hand.

  “But,” the Gorilla added as if suddenly himself again, a mean and cunning rabid dog, “was it to talk about your daughter that you wanted to speak to me alone?”

  “My son would like to wear the uniform,” Louis Normil replied very quickly, “and I was counting on you to recommend him to your people so he receives special consideration.”

  “Now there’s a wise decision!” the Gorilla exclaimed. “I admit I was a little suspicious of him. He’s distant and avoids greeting me. I’m always wary of malcontents since there are so many around me. Our organization has set things up to satisfy everyone, but they’re insatiable. You look to me, such as I am, but I am only a cog in an immense machine. The one who gives us our orders is like God, invisible and all-powerful. We get our orders and we carry them out. That’s all. We often know nothing about the reasons for the things he asks of us and we just blindly obey. Your son holds me personally responsible and quite imprudently swells the ranks of the group of malcontents.”

  “Maybe he thought you wouldn’t let him join,” Louis Normil added very quickly.

  “Don’t try to play me,” the Gorilla protested. “He has reasons to be unhappy after we took his land and his sister. You were the first to be struck. Soon, all those who’ve been resisting will feel our heavy hand on their heads.”

  He looked intently at Louis Normil as he spoke but was unable to decode his enigmatic face. Normil answered with aplomb:

  “I know your reputation, you are feared and respected. Under your protection, my son will go far quickly.”

  “Hey, hey, you’re laying it on a bit thick now, aren’t you…”

  The Gorilla leaned over to him as he glanced at the uniformed men who had formed a circle around him, and whispered:

  “They’re always pestering me and I can’t make them all happy at the same time. I have a tough job: that’s the price I pay for my position. Go tell them that your land still belongs to you, and you and I will figure an arrangement. You seem reasonable and you do what you’re told. Your daughter cares about you. I like people who do what they’re told. You know what, why don’t you handle these sales for me? Rid me of these birds of prey and you’ll get a nice cut.”

  “All I want is to help,” Louis Normil affirmed, astonished by this turn of events.

  “But remember, don’t double-cross me, eh, or you’ll regret it. I promised your daughter that I’d return the papers you signed, and I will keep my word. If you keep yours, everything will be fine and you’ll make good money. But the important thing is to make sure these people leave me alone.”

  “You mean you’re authorizing me to sell these properties on your behalf and mine?”

  “That’s exactly right. I would never dream of giving away free land to these vultures and ending up looking like a Simple Simon.” [36]

  “I understand,” Louis Normil said and got up to leave.

  Seeing this, the Gorilla hung on to him and insisted that he eat with him. When he was able to free himself two hours later, he felt so weak and in such pain that he dragged his feet all the way home. With a bitter taste in his mouth, he went up to his room and got in bed, refusing all food, and buried his face in the sheets as he brooded over his conversation with the Gorilla. He couldn’t help being haunted by obscene images of this runt fornicating with his daughter, and he was filled with cold rage. He kept furtively looking over at Rose, listening to her conversation with rapt and morbid attention as if hoping that she’d suddenly shout that she had played a dirty trick on the Gorilla, that he had never touched her. He let her kiss his forehead and watched her leave for her date and waited up for her late into the night, listening, agitated and appalled.

  Nevertheless, as soon as the next day, under the authority granted by a powerful figure, he began advertising and selling the properties. Stone-faced and resolute, he avoided M. Zura and set up a meeting with the potential buyers, all of them Blackshirts, at the notary’s office selected by the Gorilla.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The next morning, a sharp altercation erupted among the uniformed men posted on the land. Their voices became violent and threatening and soon there was gunfire followed by yelling and screaming.

  “The birds of prey are devouring each other!” the grandfather exclaimed. “God predicted that ambition and greed would lead to their demise and now his prophecy is coming true.”

  “I want to see!” cried the invalid. “Someone take me to the window.”

  Three bodies in black uniform lay on the ground, where they were being examined by other men in black with rifles on their shoulders.

  “This is just the beginning,” the father sniggered.

  And all of them looked at him like they didn’t recognize him.

  He went up to his room and stayed there by himself, standing at the window where he kept staring at the three bodies. In the course of that night, his wife saw him suddenly sit up in bed and start struggling with some invisible being. “I’ll kill you, you bandit, I’ll kill you,” he mumbled. She put her hand on his forehead, which was burning; she made him to go back to bed with a few comforting words.

  The next day, he got up very early, got dressed and went to the lawyer’s.

  This time Louis Normil was the one who refused to shake the hand of the lawyer, who was smiling hypocritically. He listened as the man delivered a bogus summary of his latest efforts.

  “Success is certain,” he concluded. “Your daughter has followed my advice and managed things so intelligently that I believe the matter is settled…”

  “You’re lying!” Louis Normil declared in a loud voice. “And I have the authority to say this. You’re lying! You gave advice to no one. It was all settled without your help. Don’t try to play me. That’s not going to work anymore.”

  The lawyer went from black to ash gray. Louis Normil thought the man was going to pass out when he lowered his head and closed his eyes. At last he was able to vent his rage at one of them. He had a sadistic desire to see this man, who had so frightened him only a few days before, tremble. A wolf among wolves, that’s what you have to become to defend yourself these days, he told himself.

  “Forgive me,” the lawyer mumbled humbly.

  “In any case,” Louis Normil continued in the same tone, “I’m not here to talk about my daughter but about the five hundred dollars you were paid. What are you waiting for before you give me a receipt?”

  “But of course, of course, what was I thinking?”

  Trembling, the lawyer looked for a piece of paper on his desk and obligingly wrote up the receipt.

  “Here you are, dear friend, and I apologize for not having thought of it sooner.”

  Louis Normil gave the lawyer a savage look, and left him without another word.

  In the evening, he returned to Maud’s and gave her the receipt:

  “You see,” he said, “I wasn’t lying to you.”

  She looked at him with hooded eyes through a thick cloud of smoke from her cigarette.

  “Don’t get yourself in a bind just to pay me back,” she advised with an odd smile.

  “No,” he cried, “I’m telling you you’ll soon be reimbursed.”

  His troubles had exhausted him and their embraces suffered. I’m the one w
ho can’t stand marriage, she told herself, and now he’s become a regular husband! She gave him a colder and colder reception, not going out of her way as she once did to please him, and barely made an effort to persuade him to stay. This change had not escaped his notice, and he wondered about it anxiously, going so far as to accuse himself of having neglected her. He had no idea that the echoes of Rose’s ordeal had already reached her and that she was angry with him for accepting such a dishonorable situation without a fight. He should have killed him, she thought, unforgiving, he should have killed him. He confided his troubles strictly to her, told her about the Gorilla, about how they met at the restaurant.

  “I’m using him to get what I want, so what do I care what other people think,” he concluded, trying to absolve himself in her eyes.

  “Are you not aware that your daughter has sold herself to this man?” she asked him bluntly.

  He lurched as if she’d stabbed him.

  “Don’t talk about her,” he said, choking on his words.

  “Ah! So you’re aware of it but look the other away. I can’t bear the thought of it.”

  “I said be quiet.”

  “Who’s going to help you face the truth if not me?” she cried.

  “I won’t allow anyone, anyone to…”

  “I judge you, I do,” she continued pitilessly.

  “Oh, no, you can’t do that. You have no right. Do you know what it’s like to deal with them? Have you ever seen them up close? Have you heard how they talk, how they threaten?”

  She shrugged.

  “I’ve had to drink from this chalice to its bitter dregs,” he confided in her. “Pity me instead of pointing the finger.”

  He took his hat and she went to get the car from the garage. Neither of them said a word during the entire ride. Before going their separate ways, she offered him her lips but he refused to kiss her.

  “I didn’t think you ever could insult me like that,” he reproached her. “I may not be the bravest man, but I am not so lacking in character that I don’t see what’s behind your harshness. I will only return to your house to pay you back. Farewell, Maud.”

  “So I tell you the truth and you hold it against me?” she asked, astonished by this almost violent reaction that had suddenly revealed another man.

  “What I hold against you is that you don’t love me enough to understand me. We can’t control others, Maud. What can a father do against his own daughter?” he replied sadly. “And what can we do against the people who’ve taken our land and persecute us?”

  He went home to find his wife in bed. He stood at the window for a long time, facing the sky, his eyes on the indifferent, twinkling stars so far away. And beneath the sublime majesty of that night, the weight of his misfortune, their misfortune, filled him with rebellion. “Why? Why?” he heard himself murmur just as he had when he was eight and his mother died. Maybe for too long we lived tranquil and carefree lives in the midst of others’ tears and lamentations. To accept crime even if you don’t participate in it is still criminal. In that case, I’ve been a coward and a criminal my entire life. Now I am being punished for thinking that because the flames of hell didn’t reach me, I could warm my hands over them. I looked at the others writhing and twisting their faces in pain without losing my peace of mind, and today, here I am deep in the midst of the flames along with all those I love! My entire life, all I could do was keep my head down and resign myself. And now they’ve come to teach me hatred and rebellion. Their presence is nothing but calculation on the part of fate. Their numbers are swelling and others will bear what we have borne. Misfortune has fallen upon us and will soon spread everywhere. Once all of us feel its heavy hand, maybe then we’ll understand what solidarity and courage mean. In the old days, my mother would start crying whenever my father yelled. She did nothing but tremble and weep before him. Maybe I get it from her. And me, do I know who I am? I’m fifty and still asking myself such a question. I can strut, stand up to the Gorilla, play the cynic, but I know that deep down I am dreadfully afraid. Ah! The pain of it! They forced me to kneel, held me by the hair and rubbed my face in the mud. And hatred found its way into me. I play their game. I play my role to perfection. Accolades for me! I wallow with them in immorality, without shame or remorse. And for that too, I will have to answer. But what should I do? I am alone against them all. It’s an unequal struggle.

  He reached the bed and lay down carefully. When the memory of Maud suddenly came rushing back, he realized with some surprise that he had forgotten her, as if she had been submerged in his painful daydreaming. For before she came along, there had been children and this woman lying by his side.

  He closed his eyes and the silence of the night immediately took hold of him. There was a slight moaning in the mother’s breath. A kind of whimper to the rhythm of a mute, irregular beat. He leaned over her and listened to her heart. Was it possible that he had been sleeping all this time next to this poor woman without suspecting she was ill! This crumbling heart accused him. He was responsible for this. He called out to her softly and she breathed a deep and painful sigh as she turned around and mechanically curled up away from him on the part of the bed that had been hers for the last six years.

  The next day, upon waking, he looked at her as he had not done in a long time. In the last six years, he had only noticed the morsels of her flesh that were still tempting, expressions and movements that would start up the machine of memory without really moving him. And he would leave to bring to another the tenderness he didn’t offer her. How was it that he began to detach himself from her? He had no serious grievance against her. On the contrary. Was it, in fact, precisely because he knew she was so easygoing that he cheated on her? He had chosen her because she was the quiet girl, distant and serene: would he now reproach her for these very qualities?

  “We’ll go see Dr. Valois together,” he promised her. “You look thin and worn-out. We need to take care of you.”

  She looked at him astonished.

  “What’s gotten into you? Do I really look like I’m at death’s door?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Dr. Valois examined me recently.”

  “What was the matter?” he asked with real anxiety.

  “Oh, I wasn’t feeling well, that’s all. Happens to everybody, doesn’t it?”

  “And Dr. Valois was sure there’s nothing wrong with you?”

  “Nothing physical. It’s all these worries, these awful worries eating away at me.”

  He looked at her and realized she was lying They were two steps away from each other and he could see her nostrils quivering. She closed her eyes and he tenderly put a hand on her shoulder.

  “We have to remain hopeful, Laura. We have to.”

  “All I know how to do is lie to myself.”

  “Without hope, what will become of us?”

  “Yes,” she said, “what will become of us?”

  She shook herself free and went down to the dining room. Rose was still in bed and they had breakfast without her. Louis Normil caught Paul’s insistent gaze, full of contempt and insolence, and it made him shudder.

  “How many parcels of land have you already sold for the Gorilla at a handsome profit?” the young man burst out, the words hissing in his teeth like insults.

  “Son, let’s hope I will be able to sell them,” he answered, trying to sound natural, “since at least then I’ll make some money out of it. I just told your mother that only hope can help us. There’s a horde of vultures circling these properties. I am simply trying not to lose everything, that’s all.”

  “And in the meantime, you’re making deals with them too,” Paul continued. “One way or another, they’ll manage to buy off each and every one of us.”

  He laughed so horribly that the invalid looked at him with open-mouthed curiosity.

  “You just laughed like a demon when he catches a condemned soul in his claws,” the grandfather added softly in a voice so gentle it didn’t seem like his
own.

  “My father has become friends with our persecutor,” Paul cried.

  Louis Normil turned pale and his shoulders sagged with utter exhaustion. The grandfather dropped his fork, his beard trembled.

  “If this is true, my son, leave my house, don’t impose your presence upon me, I’m not dead yet,” he said.

  The father lowered his head in guilt.

  “Paul!” the mother called out in painful reproach, and shut her eyes.

  “Paul misunderstood me,” the father articulated in a soft and measured voice. “He is very young and he misunderstood.”

  At that moment, Rose bounded down the stairs and sat down in her chair. Pushing out his chair, Paul got up from the table, his brows glowering over hardened eyes.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  He watched the Gorilla for two days, walking the streets with the cold blade of his knife caressing his skin through his shirt. He walked a formidable distance in vain, watching cars, searching buildings and public places. He went home seething with rage, refused to sit at the dining room table and told his mother to get out of his room. In the evening, he got up, waited for the father to leave, and asked his mother for money. He rented a car and parked it along a dark section of the driveway to the house. As soon as he saw Rose leaving, he threw on a jacket, carefully brushed his hair and went into the street. Standing at the gate, he watched her walk away then, once she was far enough, he got in the car and started it. He had followed her from a distance for five minutes when she suddenly stopped. He braked and waited. Five more minutes went by, then ten. Suddenly he recognized the Gorilla at the wheel of his car. The door opened and closed behind Rose. For half an hour, the two cars drove a short distance through town, then along a deserted road where the houses, sunk deep at the end of long driveways, became more and more rare. The place was so dark he could barely see what was in front of him. He carefully drove down the driveway and arrived in front of the house. A bright light was shining through the window of one of the rooms framed by a wrought-iron balcony where he could make out two silhouettes in profile. The dogs began to bark furiously, breaking the silence, and the light suddenly became brighter as if another, more powerful bulb had been turned on. The two shadows vanished as if suddenly snatched by some unseen force, and shortly thereafter he saw the Gorilla at the window. Paul touched his knife through his shirt. “Blast it all,” he heard himself whisper, “if I only had a gun!” He hunched down and crept to the garden, right across from the window. He crouched and poked his head up. In the middle of the room there was a bed where Rose lay naked. Two bulbs hung bright as daylight above her. He saw her with her legs spread open, arms out in a cross, head turned to the side, motionless as a corpse, and he nearly screamed. He felt the knife, unbuttoned his shirt and held the blade between three fingers. He got up slowly, his left hand breaking a small tree branch that was in his way. He saw the man’s body slowly sit up and then start to retreat. He threw the knife, gleaming quick as lightning. He heard it hit something hard and fall below the window with a metallic sound.