She was looking farther ahead, she was seeing another me, the future me, as I saw in her the little Martine of the past.
She did not draw back, your Honour. She did not hesitate an instant. And yet, if you only knew how afraid she was of dying, a childish fear of everything connected with death!
It was the day following a day when I had been battling with the past, with the other Martine and with my phantoms — the day following a day when I had struck her with even greater violence — that we were caught.
It was eight o’clock. My wife was, or should have been, upstairs with my youngest daughter who was not going to school that day. Patients were waiting in a line on the benches in the waiting-room. I hadn’t the heart to open the door for them right away.
One of Martine’s eyes was badly bruised. She smiled, and her smile was all the more touching because of that. I was overflowing with shame and tenderness. After my fit of rage I had spent an almost sleepless night.
I took her in my arms. With infinite gentleness — I mean it — with infinite gentleness. I was capable of that, and I felt that I was both her father and her lover. I understood that from now on, no matter what happened, we were alone in the world, just the two of us, that her flesh was my flesh, that a day would come very soon when we would no longer need to question each other and when my phantoms would vanish.
I stammered in her ear, still cold with the cold of the street:
‘Forgive me …’
I was not ashamed. I was no longer ashamed of my outbursts, my fits of violence, because I knew now that they were a part of our love, that our love, just as it was, just as we wanted it to be, could not have existed without them.
We didn’t move. She leaned her head on my shoulder. At that moment, I remember, I was looking far away, both into the past and into the future. I was beginning to measure with terror the road that remained to be travelled.
I am not making this up after the event. It would be unworthy of me and of her. I had no premonition, I tell you that at once. Nothing but the vision of that road along which we walked alone.
I sought her lips to give me courage, and then the door to the front hall opened. We didn’t jump apart, it didn’t even occur to us, when we saw Armande standing in the doorway. We remained with our arms around each other. She looked at us and said — I can still hear the sound of her voice:
‘Excuse me …’
Then she went out and the door slammed.
Martine did not understand why I started to smile, why my face showed a positive joy.
My feeling was one of relief. At last!
‘Don’t worry, darling. And don’t cry. Please, don’t cry.’
I didn’t want any tears. None were needed. Someone knocked at the door. It was Babette.
‘Mme Alavoine would like to see you, sir. She is in her bedroom.’
Of course, my good Babette! Of course, Armande! It was time. I couldn’t stand any more. I was suffocating.
Be calm, Martine. I know that you are trembling, that the little girl you are expects another beating. Haven’t you always been beaten?
Trust me, darling. I’m going upstairs. And the reason I’m going up there, you see, is to find freedom for our love.
There are words, your Honour, which never should be spoken, which size up one person while they liberate another.
‘I suppose you’ll send her packing now?’
No, Armande. Of course not. No question of that.
‘In any case I will not allow her to remain another hour under my roof …’
Well, well, my lady, since it is your roof … pardon me. I am wrong. And all day long I was wrong. I spat out all my venom. Ah, yes, I spat it out for an hour without stopping, pacing up and down like a wild animal in a cage, between the bed and the door, while Armande, keeping a dignified attitude, stood by the window clutching the curtain with one hand.
I ask your pardon, too, Armande, surprising as it may seem to you. For it was all so useless, so superfluous.
I vomited all the rancour in my heart, all my humiliations, all my cowardice, my suppressed desires. I even added to them, and the whole load I flung on to your shoulders, yours alone, as though henceforth you and you alone were to bear the full responsibility.
You, who have never been lacking in sang-froid, I saw you lose your poise and there was even an expression of fear in your eyes as you looked at me, because, in the man who had slept in your bed for ten years, you were discovering another man whose existence you had never suspected.
I yelled at you, and they must have heard me downstairs:
‘I love her, do you understand? I lo-ve her!’
And then, baffled, you said to me:
‘If only …’
I can’t remember your exact words. I was feverish. The night before I had viciously struck another woman, another woman whom I loved.
‘If only you had been satisfied with seeing her outside …’
I burst into a rage, your Honour. Not only against Armande. Against all of you, against life as you understand it, against the idea you have of the union of two beings and the heights of passion they can attain.
I was wrong. I regret it. She could not understand. She was no more responsible than the district attorney or Maître Gabriel.
Unsteadily she kept repeating:
‘Your patients are waiting for you …’
And what about Martine! Wasn’t Martine waiting for me?
‘We’ll discuss this later when you are calmer.’
Not at all. Right away, like an emergency operation.
‘If you need her so much …’
Because, you see, I had blurted out the whole truth. Everything. Including Martine’s bruised face, the work of my fists, and even my biting the sheets during my sleepless nights.
So then I was offered a compromise. I could go to see her, like a Boquet — I could, in fact, if I would be discreet about it, go, from time to time, to satisfy the demands of nature!
The house must have trembled. I became violent, brutal — I, whom my mother had always compared to a great gentle dog, even too gentle.
I was malicious, wilfully cruel. I needed to be. I couldn’t have found relief otherwise.
‘Think of your mother …’
‘To hell with her.’
‘Think of your daughters …’
‘To hell with them.’
To hell with everything! It was over, all that, with one stroke, just when I least expected it, and I had no desire to begin all over again.
Babette knocked at the door. Babette announced timorously:
‘Mademoiselle says you’re wanted on the phone, sir.’
‘I’m coming.’
It was Martine, Martine holding out the telephone without a word, resigned to the worst, Martine who had already given up.
‘Hello! Who is speaking?’
A real case. A real ‘emergency’.
‘I’ll be there in a few minutes.’
I turned and said:
‘Tell the people who are waiting …’
In the most natural way in the world, your Honour. For me, everything was settled. I saw how pale she was, standing there in front of me, her lips colourless. And I almost got angry.
I had already picked up my bag. I took down my coat which was hanging on the back of the door.
It never occurred to me to kiss her.
‘We are leaving, both of us …’
It was that evening, about nine o’clock. I had chosen a night train on purpose, so that my daughters would be asleep. I went up to kiss them in their beds. I insisted on going alone. I stayed upstairs for several minutes, and only my elder daughter half opened her eyes.
I went down again, very calm. The taxi was waiting outside the gate and the driver was taking out my baggage.
Mama had stayed in the drawing-room. Her eyes were red, and her handkerchief was a little wet ball in her hand. I thought it would go off all right after all, but at the last mome
nt, as I disengaged myself from her arms, she stammered before bursting into sobs:
‘You are leaving me alone with her …’
Armande was standing in the front hall. It was she who had packed my bags. She continued to think of everything, sent Babette to look for a travelling-case which had been forgotten.
The light was on in the hall. We could hear Mama’s muffled sobs and, outside, the purring of the motor the driver had started.
‘Goodbye, Charles …’
‘Goodbye, Armande …’
And then we both opened our mouths and spoke exactly the same words at the same moment:
‘No hard feelings …’
We smiled in spite of ourselves. I took her in my arms and kissed her on both cheeks; she imprinted a kiss on my forehead. As she pushed me towards the door, she breathed:
‘Go …’
I went to get Martine and once again we found ourselves together on a station platform. This time it was not raining and I have never seen so many stars in the sky. Poor Martine, who was frightened again, who asked me just as we were getting into our compartment:
‘You’re sure you won’t regret it?’
We were alone. We turned out the lights immediately and I held her close, so close that we must have looked like one of those emigrant couples you see embracing on the steerage deck of ocean liners.
We too, we were leaving for the unknown.
What could we have said to each other that night? Even when I felt the warmth of a tear on my cheek, I did not try to find words to reassure her and was content simply to stroke her eyelids.
She finally fell asleep and I counted all the stations with their lights filing by on the other side of the curtain. At Tours some people, loaded down with baggage, opened our door. Their eyes peered into the darkness, saw our bodies lying in a close embrace.
They went away on tiptoe, after softly closing the door again.
This was not a flight, you know. Before leaving we had settled everything very decently, Armande and I. We even considered for hours certain details of our future.
More than that! Armande gave me her advice in a somewhat hesitating voice and with an air of apology. Not advice with regard to Martine, naturally, but about my business.
What greatly facilitated the adjustment of our affairs was that, by a miracle, young Braille was available. He is a young doctor from a very poor family — his mother is a cleaning woman in the neighbourhood of the Austerliz Station — who for lack of money could not hope to go into practice for himself for years.
In the meantime, he takes over other doctors’ practices when he is needed. I knew him because he had been my substitute during my last vacation, and had done very well.
Armande having agreed, I telephoned him in Paris. Because of the winter sports, I was afraid he would have been engaged by some colleague who was going to spend a few weeks at Chamonix or Mégève.
He was free. He agreed to come at once and to take over my practice for an indeterminate period. I don’t know if he understood. For my part, I tried to intimate that he could stay for ever if he wanted to.
He was given a room in the house, the one Martine had occupied for two nights. He is a young redhead, a little too tense, too impatient for my taste — you are too conscious that some day he intends to get even with life — but most people like him.
Thus, there is hardly any change in the house at La Roche. I left them the car. Armande, my mother and my daughters will be able to live on exactly the same scale as before; young Braille being satisfied with a fixed salary, there will be a large margin of profit.
‘Don’t take just anything that comes along,’ Armande advised me,’ ‘and don’t accept the first price that is proposed …’
For I was, of course, to keep on with my work. I first thought of looking for a place in one of the large laboratories in Paris, but that would force me to leave Martine for a part of the day. I frankly admitted this to Armande and she murmered, with a smile which was not as ironic as I might have feared:
‘You are as afraid as all that?’
I am jealous, but I am not afraid. It is not because I am afraid that I am unhappy, lost, on edge, as soon as I leave her for a moment.
What’s the use of explaining that to Armande, who, moreover, I would swear, understood very well.
By drawing on only a part of our savings I could buy a practice in the Paris suburbs. The rest, almost everything we possess, I left for Armande and the children. I didn’t even have to sign a power of attorney because I had given her one long ago. So that is how things were settled. And, I repeat, we were able to discuss it all calmly. Everything was slightly veiled, you understand? Instinctively we spoke in a low tone.
‘Do you plan to come back to see your daughters from time to time?’
‘I plan to come often …’
‘Without her?’
I did not reply.
‘You won’t inflict that on me, Charles?’
I promised nothing.
We left, Martine and I, and we spent the night in each other’s arms on the bench of the compartment, without saying a word.
The sun was shining over the Paris suburbs when we arrived. We stopped at a decent, commonplace hotel near the station, and I registered:
‘M. and Mme Charles Alavoine …’
We were serving our apprenticeship in our new-found freedom and were still a little clumsy. A dozen times a day we would eye each other, and the one who was caught, if I can put it that way, would quickly smile.
Whole neighbourhoods in Paris frightened me because they were peopled with phantoms — that is, with flesh and blood men we were in danger of meeting.
And so, your Honour, as though by common consent, we avoided them. Sometimes, at a corner of a street or avenue, we would turn aside to the right or the left without having to say a word, and I would hasten to squeeze Martine’s arm affectionately, feeling her lapse into sadness.
She was also afraid of seeing me depressed by the necessity of starting my career all over again, while I, on the contrary, was filled with joy. I was doing my best to begin from scratch.
We went together to the agencies which specialize in doctors’ offices and we visited many such offices scattered all over the city, in poor neighbourhoods and in prosperous neighbourhoods.
Why was it that the poor neighbourhoods tempted me more than the others? I felt the need of getting away from a certain milieu which reminded me of my other life and it seemed that the more completely we could get away from it, the more completely Martine would be mine.
We finally fixed our choice, after only four days of hunting, on an office situated in Issy-les-Moulineaux, in the drabbest, the most teeming part of the working-class suburb.
My predecessor was a Roumanian who had made a fortune and was going back to his own country. Naturally he exaggerated the merits of his office.
It was practically a factory and my office hours were more like an assembly line. The waiting-room, with whitewashed walls covered with scribblings, made one think of a public building. Patients smoked and spat. And there would certainly have been a fight if I had ever had the notion of taking any patient out of turn.
It was on the ground floor. It faced the street and you entered directly as into a shop, without a bell or a maid to answer it. You took your place at the end of the line and you waited.
My consulting-room, where we spent most of our day, Martine and I, opened on to a courtyard, and in this courtyard was a blacksmith who pounded iron from morning to night.
As for our apartment on the fourth floor, it was quite new but with such tiny rooms that it seemed like a doll’s house. We had been obliged to take over the Roumanian’s furniture, factory-made furniture, like the sets one sees in the windows of department stores.
I bought a little second-hand car, a five cylinder, since Issy-les-Moulineaux is as large as a provincial city and I had patients from one end of it to the other. Besides I admit that at the beginnin
g what humiliated me most was having to wait interminable minutes for the tram at the corner.
Martine learned to drive and obtained her licence. She served as my chauffeur.
Was there any way in which she did not serve me? We had difficulty finding a regular maid. We were waiting for answers to the advertisements we had put in provincial newspapers and we got along meantime with a cleaning woman, as dirty as a pig and mean as hell, who consented to come in for two or three hours a day.
Nevertheless, Martine always came down with me at half-past seven for my office hours, donned her white coat and cap and got everything ready. We would go out for lunch together, generally to a little chauffeurs’ restaurant, and sometimes she would lift anxious eyes to mine.
I had to keep repeating:
‘But I swear, I am very happy …’
It was true, it was really life beginning again for me, almost from zero. I should have liked to be still poorer, to start from the very bottom.
Then she would drive me through the crowded streets, wait for me in front of my patient’s house and in the evening, whenever it was possible, we would go marketing together so that we could have dinner in our toy apartment.
We went out very little. We had involuntarily adopted the habits of our neighbourhood: once a week in the evening we would go to the same films as my patients, a theatre that smelt of oranges, chocolate ice cream and synthetic fruit drops, and where you walked on peanut shells.
We made no plans for the future. Isn’t that the proof that we were happy?
Chapter Ten
There wasn’t a night, your Honour, that we fell asleep — her head nestled in the hollow of my shoulder, and often the next morning we would wake in the same position — as I say, there wasn’t a night that we closed our eyes without my having permeated her flesh.
It was almost a solemn, a ritualistic act. For her, it was an agonizing moment, knowing as she did what a price I would pay, would make her pay, for the least reappearance of the Other. What had to be prevented at any cost was the sudden collapse of her nerves, that rigidity which was so painful to me, that desperate breathless tension towards a relief that never came and for which she used to struggle until strength failed her.
Act of Passion Page 17
