And my mother? Well, let’s just crudely admit that mamas are not always saints, and that mine was jubilant at the idea that at last there was someone on this earth to shake off, if only secretly, the yoke of her daughter-in-law.
There remains Armande and her ten years. I know.
Now, let’s put the question differently. I loved someone else. That was a fact. It was too late to retrace my steps. I was no longer able to get that love out of my system.
Even supposing that I once loved Armande, I did not love her any longer.
That is another fact. That’s plain, isn’t it?
So the blow, if blow there was, had already fallen. For, after all, when one loves a person the pain comes first from not being loved and then from knowing that the person one loves loves another.
All that, your Honour, had already happened.
Note that, for the moment, I accept the extreme hypothesis, that I concede for the sake of argument that Armande had really loved me in every sense of the word and still loved me.
In that case, her attitude to my mind, on my soul and honour, becomes one of incredible ferocity. Always, of course, in the name of love.
‘You don’t love me any longer. You love someone else. Her presence is necessary to you. Nevertheless, because I still love you, I insist that you give her up and that you stay with me.’
To continue to live with someone you no longer love and who inflicts on you the most atrocious suffering, can you understand that? Think of evenings alone together beside the lamp, not forgetting the moment when these two people I’m talking about slip into bed and wish each other good night!
And yet, as I write these words, because of certain images they evoke for me, I have just conceded it. But on the condition that I accept Armande’s love as an incontrovertible fact, a total love equal to mine for Martine.
But I do not believe that. A woman who loves does not say:
‘…in my house … under my roof …’
A woman who truly loves does not speak of sacrificing ten years of her life.
She may have thought she loved me, your Honour, but I, you see, I know what love is.
Could she, had it been so, have said to me:
‘If only you had been satisfied to see her outside …’
Would she have spoken of humiliation?
I swear to you, your Honour, that I am studying the question honestly, painfully, and strange as it may seem, it is especially since I am here that I study it without bias.
Because now other questions so much more important have been answered, because I am far, very far, from all those bridling or gesticulating little men.
Isn’t it true, my own Martine, isn’t it true that we have gone a long way, both of us, that we have travelled, almost always thigh to thigh, the longest of all roads, the road where at the end one at last finds deliverance?
God knows that we embarked on that road without knowing it, innocently, yes, your Honour, like children, for we still were children.
We had no idea where we were going, but we could go in no other direction, and I remember, Martine, that, on certain days, just when we felt happiest, you would suddenly look at me with your eyes full of fear.
You were no more lucid than I, but life had dealt with you more roughly. Youth and its childish nightmares were closer to you and those nightmares still pursued you, even in my arms. How many times at night have you cried out, your forehead covered with sweat, clinging to my shoulder as though it alone could keep you from sliding down into the void, and I remember your voice on certain nights when your terror was at its height, as you kept repeating:
‘Wake me, Charles. Quick! Wake me …’
Forgive me, Martine, for devoting as much attention to others as to you, but, you see, it is for you that I force myself to do it. You yourself used to murmur with regret:
‘No one will ever know …’
And it is for her, your Honour, so that someone, so that one man will know, that I am writing all this to you.
Will you admit now that for me there is no question of lying, nor of disguising the truth the least bit in the world? At the point I have reached — we have reached, Martine and I — for we are together, your Honour — one no longer lies. And if you cannot always follow my thought, cannot understand certain ideas which shock you, don’t say to yourself that I am mad; think simply, humbly, that I have cleared a wall which perhaps you will one day clear yourself, on the other side of which one sees things differently.
Writing this, I am thinking of your telephone calls, of the anxious look you sometimes turned on me, waiting for my reply to certain questions. I think, above all, of other questions you were itching to ask me and which you never asked.
I said very little about Martine in your office. Because there are subjects one doesn’t mention before a Maître Gabriel or before a poor honest fellow like your clerk.
I didn’t speak of her at all at the trial, and that was variously interpreted. I couldn’t very well say to them:
‘But can’t you understand that I delivered her …’
I couldn’t shout these words that are truer still, words which rose in my throat, lacerated my throat:
‘It was not she whom I killed. It was the other …’
Not counting that I would have been playing into their hands, giving them what they were trying to obtain for their peace of mind, even more than for their consciences’ sake, for the honour of the whole bourgeois world to which they belonged, all of them.
Like a shot, and with both hands, my colleagues would have signed that certificate of insanity which, even at this late date, they are still bending all their efforts to justify, for it would settle so many things.
We didn’t know, Martine and I, where we were going, and for weeks, out of pity, not to hurt anyone, and also because we did not yet know the all-devouring force of our love and its demands, we lived two lives, or more exactly, we lived a hallucinated existence.
I watched her arrive in the morning at eight o’clock in the raw January cold. I would be taking my breakfast in the kitchen while Armande was lingering upstairs.
Martine was not well at this time. She was paying. She was paying for many things. She was paying without complaining, without a thought of injustice. As she came through the gate and her feet crunched along the gravel walk, her eyes sought the kitchen window, knowing I was there, and she would smile without seeing me, a little uncertainly because someone might be observing her from a window upstairs, smile vaguely, tenderly at a curtain.
She never entered by the front door but by the door of the waiting-room. That was Armande’s arrangement. I don’t know the reason, I’d rather not know it. I never protested. She was to have the air of an employee since that was her status in our house. I am not blaming anyone, I assure you.
Did Babette notice our little stratagem? I never worried about it. I would swallow the rest of my coffee, go round through the front hall into my office, where she had had time to put on her white coat, and for a moment we would just stand looking at each other before falling into each other’s arms.
We didn’t dare speak, your Honour. Our eyes alone had that right. Don’t think I have a mania of persecution. My mother was in the habit of creeping silently about the house and one was always bumping into her in places where one least expected to find her.
With Armande, it was not, I think, a mania, but a principle. Or better still, a right which she exercised without shame, the right of the mistress of the house to know everything that happened under her roof. The many times I have caught her listening behind a door she never blushed or showed the slightest embarrassment. No more than if I had come upon her giving orders to the maid or paying a tradesman’s bill.
It was her right, her duty. No use dwelling on it. We accepted that too. Like hurrying to open the door for the first patient, because it has always squeaked a little and could, with a little attention, be heard from upstairs.
Throughout the morning the most we could e
xpect were a few stolen glances, or the touch of her finger which I would brush with my hand when she held out the telephone to me, helped me take out some stitches, wash a wound, or hold a child still.
You are familiar with criminals but not with patients. If it is hard to make the former talk, it is equally hard to keep the latter from talking, and you can’t imagine what it is like to see them file in, one after the other, for hours, all of them obsessed by their particular case, their aches and pains, their heart, their urine, their stools. And there we were, the two of us, only a step or two away from each other, everlastingly listening to the same complaints, while we ourselves had so many essential truths to tell each other.
If I were asked today how one can recognize love, if I had to make a diagnostic of love, I should say:
‘First of all the need of nearness.’
I say advisedly a need as necessary, as absolute, as vital as a physical need.
‘After that, the thirst to explain.’
A thirst to explain oneself, to explain the other, for, you see, one is so filled with wonder, or so conscious of a miracle, one is so afraid of losing this thing which one had never hoped for, which fate did not owe you and perhaps gave to you in a moment of distraction, that at every hour of the day one feels the need of being reassured and, in order to be reassured, of understanding.
A phrase spoken yesterday just before leaving, in Mme Debeurre’s house. All night I am haunted by it. For hours on end I have turned it over and over in my mind to extract its quintessence. I have suddenly had the impression that it opened new horizons, threw new light on the two of us, on our incredible adventure.
And in the morning there was Martine. But instead of being able to compare my thoughts with hers at once I would be forced to live for hours in uncertainty, in agony.
This did not escape her. She would find a way of whispering between the patients or behind a patient’s back.
‘Is something wrong?’
And in spite of her anxious glance I would answer out of the corner of my mouth:
‘Nothing … Later …’
We were devoured by the same impatience and the glances we exchanged over the heads of the patients were charged with questions.
‘In just one word …’
Just one word to give her some inkling, because she was afraid, because we spent our whole time being afraid, of ourselves and of others. But how express such things in a word?
‘It’s nothing serious, I assure you …’
All right! Bring in the next one, a cyst or a sore throat, a boil or measles. That’s all that counts, isn’t it?
All the hours of the day, from one end to the other, would not have been enough, and yet everyone was bent on stealing from us even our tiniest crumbs of time, until, when finally, by force of scheming and lying, we were alone together, when I would arrive at her apartment after inventing God knows what to explain my going out in the evening, we were so hungry for one another that we found nothing more to say.
The great problem, the principal problem, was to discover why we loved each other, and it kept haunting us for a long time, for on its solution depended just how much confidence we could have in our love.
Did we find it, that solution?
I don’t know, your Honour. No one will ever know. But why, ever since that first night at Nantes, after the first few hours which I freely qualify as sordid, when there was nothing to draw us together, why did we feel that sudden hunger for each other?
To begin with, you see, there was that rigid body, that open mouth, those distracted eyes which for me were first a mystery, then a revelation.
I had detested this little bar habitué, all her mannerisms and her assurance, and that come-hither look in the glances she cast at every man.
But when I held her in my arms that night, when, intrigued by what I did not understand, I suddenly turned on the light, I saw that I was embracing a little girl.
A little girl with a scar, it is true, from the pelvis to the navel, a little girl who had slept with men. I could even tell you now exactly how many men, and just how it occurred, under what circumstances, in what surroundings. A little girl, just the same, who was hungry for life and at the same time, to use one of my mother’s expressions, scared blue of life.
Of life? Of her own, at any rate — afraid of herself, of what she thought was herself, and I assure you she judged herself with terrible humility.
Even as a tiny little girl she was afraid, thought of herself as differently made from others, as not up to others, and that was why, you see, little by little, she invented a personality in the image of girls in magazines and novels.
To be like other people. To reassure herself.
As I, your Honour, might have taken up billiards or belote.
Including the cigarettes, the bars, the high stools and the crossed legs, including that aggressive familiarity with the barmen, that flirtatiousness with men, no matter what men.
‘I’m not such a mess, after all …’
That was her expression in the beginning. She would repeat it everlastingly, she would keep asking at the slightest provocation:
‘Am I really such a mess as all that?’
Not to feel a mess in her native city of Liège, where her parents’ fortune was not such as to give her a sense of equality with the other girls she knew, she left home alone, put up a brave front, and succeeded in finding a small job in Paris.
Not to feel a mess, she began smoking and drinking. And, in another domain, more difficult to discuss, even in this letter which is for you alone, your Honour, she felt herself a mess.
When she was still a little girl, not more than ten years old, invited by little girls richer than herself whom her parents were very proud to have her visit, she would be a witness of their games which were not always entirely innocent.
I said girls richer than herself and I repeat it. Families whom she heard her parents speak of with admiration not exempt from envy, and also with the respect that in certain classes of society is paid to the classes above them. And when she wept, without knowing why, when she refused the following week to go back to their homes, she was treated as a big ninny and was forced to bow to parental authority.
All that is absolutely true, your Honour. There is an accent of truth that is unmistakable. But I was not satisfied with that truth. I went to see for myself. There is nothing related to her that I did not persist in knowing, including the most casual surroundings in which she had lived.
I went to Liège. I saw the convent of the Daughters of the Cross, where she had been one of the boarders in a blue pleated skirt, and a round hat with a broad brim. I saw her classroom, her desk and, still hanging on the wall and signed in her childish hand, some of the complicated pieces of embroidery that little girls are taught to make.
I saw her exercise books, I read her compositions, I know by heart the comments written by her teachers in red ink. I saw photographs of her at every age, photographs of commencements at school with the other pupils whose names I knew, photographs of the family in the country — uncles, aunts and cousins, who became more familiar to me than my own family.
What was it gave me the desire, what was it created in me the need of knowing all this, whereas, for example, I had never had the least curiosity about things connected with Armande?
I think, your Honour, it was the discovery I made of her true personality. Call it intuition, if you like. And what I discovered was almost in spite of her, because, you see, she was ashamed of it.
I worked for weeks, and I mean literally worked, to deliver her from shame. And to do that I was forced to pry into the darkest corners.
At the beginning she lied. She lied like a little girl who tells her friends stories about the maid in her house, when her family has no maid.
She lied, and patiently I would untangle all the lies. I would force her to admit them one after the other. I had a complicated skein to unravel, but I held the end of the thread and
never let go of it.
Because of her rich and depraved little friends, because of her own parents who persisted in sending her to play with them (their families being the most considerable in the city), she got into the habit, certain evenings, of stretching out on her stomach in the solitude of her bed, and of lying there rigid for hours straining fiercely for a spasm that never came.
Physiologically she was precocious, since at eleven she was a woman. For years she continued this desperate search for an impossible relief and that mouth, open as when I saw her at Nantes, your Honour, those eyes rolled back in her head, that pulse at a hundred and forty — these were her heritage from the little girl.
Men had merely taken the place of that solitary rigidity. And it was still for the sake of being like other people, of feeling like other people at last, that she had sought them.
Twenty-two. For at twenty-two she was still a virgin. She was still hoping.
What was she hoping for? Just what we have been taught, what she had been taught to hope for — marriage, children, a peaceful house, everything that people call happiness. But in Paris, far from home, she was a little girl from a good family, without money.
And then one day, your Honour, a day of lassitude, of uneasiness, the little girl wanted to do what the others were doing, make sure she was made like the others. Without love, without poetry true or false, without any real desire! And for my part, I find that tragic.
With a stranger, with a body she did not know against her own, she began again the same attempts as the little girl in her solitary bed and because with all her might she wanted to succeed, because her whole being was straining for relief, the man was convinced that she was a passionate lover.
The others too, your Honour, who followed in succession — not one of them — not one, I tell you — understood that what she was looking for in their arms was a sort of deliverance. Not one suspected that she left their embrace with the same bitterness, the same nausea she had felt after her solitary experiments.
Is it because I was the first to have this revelation that I loved her and that she loved me?
Many other things, one after the other, I understood later on. It was like a rosary one tells slowly, bead by bead.
Act of Passion Page 15
