The Wretches

by Frédéric Dard

  “Jess, my dear.”

  He took me by the shoulders and pushed me away firmly, murmuring: “No, Louise, sorry!”

  “But Jess!”

  “No, it’s quite out of the question. I’m extremely sorry about last night. I’m afraid I lost my head.”

  So, that was all our night was to him. He’d lost his head!

  “But I love you, Jess. I’ve always loved you, since the first day I saw you. That’s why I came to ask you to take me on, you know that!”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re a little girl, Louise.”

  “Not any more!” I shouted. “Not any more, you American pig!”

  “Don’t say that, Louise, you remind me of…”

  “Of who?…”

  “No…”

  “Say it!”

  “Of your mother!”

  “Oh! Jess…”

  I’d pulled away from him, and this time it was Jess who put his arms around me. I was allowed to rest my head on his chest again. His sweat ran down my cheek. I could hear his heart thumping.

  “You don’t love me?”

  “No, Louise.”

  “You prefer that girl from last night?”

  “No, not her either!”

  “Why did you bring her here?”

  “Oh! To take my mind off things… Men are like that, Louise. Lots of adventures, but only one love.”

  “And who is your love? Thelma?”

  “Yes.”

  I would never have believed such a thing. Jess in love with his wife! But he seemed to have taken her death so easily. I didn’t know what else to say. I could see that he was telling the truth, that he felt sorry for me and that this scene was painful for him.

  “What will I do?” I sobbed.

  Everything was finished. The desert island was sinking under the Léopoldville soot. I saw Ridel’s factory, Arthur’s telly, our grimy lampshade, and Mum with her bloody harelip, counting out lumps of sugar to see how many there were in a kilo.

  The day I came here for the first time Jess had told me that my seventeen years were worth four hundred million dollars; I was ready to give them up for much less than that, ready to let them go for free if I had to.

  “So, Monsieur Rooland, what am I going to do now?”

  “You’re young!”

  Well, there you go! I’d certainly heard that one before.

  So I was young. All right, but so what? Wasn’t that exactly my problem? Having a youth that I didn’t know what to do with. A youth that was withering away under dirty grey skies. A youth that the man I love took advantage of one evening when he… when he lost his head, and then rejected me the next morning.

  That burning dressing gown and trampled record player summed it up—a disaster.

  “You can shove my youth in the furnace while you’re at it, Monsieur Rooland!”

  “Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

  The fire crackled softly, already beginning to die down. I followed Jess up to the ground floor. The sun had risen while we were in the cellar, and was beginning to shine through the gaps in the blinds. The living room, where I had been so madly happy the previous evening, was now bathed in violet shadow.

  I looked at it incredulously. I couldn’t believe that I had been Jess’s mistress the previous evening, and that everything was over already. I told myself that if I’d only spent the night in his arms, he’d never have dared to act like that in the morning. It all would have played out differently. Now, though, it was too late. Too late!

  “Explain it to me, Monsieur Rooland.”

  “Explain what?”

  “This love for your wife. I still don’t understand!”

  He poured himself a glass of Scotch. The bottle was lying on the threadbare carpet.

  “You won’t ever understand, Louise.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “We never understand other people’s loves…”

  “Madame explained some things to me, though.”

  “What things?”

  “The child you wanted and that she couldn’t give you. She said that your life together was like a walk in the woods in winter.”

  “She said that?”

  “Yes. You see, what I still don’t get is why you cared for her so much: a drunk! A tart!”

  He threw himself on me and shook me so violently that my head hit the wall.

  “I forbid you! I forbid you, Louise!”

  And he carried on saying things in English that he was too angry to translate.

  “Let me go, Monsieur Rooland! You’re hurting me,” I cried. That proved that everything was really over between us. He was “Monsieur Rooland” to me now, not Jess any more.

  “I’ll go,” I stammered. “That is what you want now, isn’t it?”

  He shook his head, defeated by my reasonable tone.

  “No. Stay… I just want it to be like it was before.”

  “Your servant? Just your servant, right?”

  “OK!”

  He went upstairs to take his bath. When he left an hour later, without saying goodbye, I wondered whether I’d ever see him again.

  SEVENTEEN

  He stayed away for forty-eight hours. I couldn’t possibly describe to you what it was like: that night I spent all alone on the island, waiting for the sound of his step on the sand driveway.

  As the hours passed, all the anger I’d felt towards him faded away. Little by little I was forgetting that morning’s scene, and thinking instead about the endless love he had given me the night before. He’d regretted “losing his head” afterwards, but, in the moment, I knew he’d been as completely happy as me. Thinking it over, I began to tell myself that his fury in the cellar could almost be taken as a sign of his love for me. If he’d spent the night with that Jennifer there wouldn’t have been any fit of anger afterwards. He wouldn’t have destroyed the turntable or the dressing gown, because her embraces would have meant nothing to him. So, with me, it had been different. I had to console myself with that thought.

  The next day, at nine o’clock, I called NATO headquarters to get some news. They passed me from department to department until I reached his, and I recognized his voice. His dear, dear voice.

  His accent sounded stronger on the telephone.

  “Yes, hello.”

  “Is that you, Monsieur?”

  “Oh! Louise…”

  “I’m sorry, I just wanted to know…”

  I hung up. He was alive, what did the rest matter? I couldn’t care less if he’d spent the night with his fake blonde. Actually that girl was worth a night, two maybe, but no more.

  And in the end, Jess came back alone that evening… came home. It was as if he was returning from a long journey. We spent an emotional moment looking each other up and down, closely, as if each of us was trying to see how the other had changed.

  “Hello, Louise.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you hang up the phone this morning? Were you angry?”

  “No, happy. I was so afraid that…”

  “That what?”

  “I don’t know. When you’re properly afraid it’s hard to put into words. What do you want for dinner?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  We opened the tins. The Thelma method. I had to admit, it had its merits. I’d been chipping away at the stocks in the cupboard for some time myself. Grubby towels had started to reappear on the shower head, there were hairs in the soap and the furniture was getting dusty too. It’s not so bad when all’s said and done, dust. Time’s notebook. You can write all sorts of silly things in it with your fingertip—things like, “I love you, Jess”. You can draw hearts, like lovers carve on tree trunks… Or intertwined initials. J.-L. Jess-Louise. Monsieur Rooland didn’t notice this slide into mess and uncleanliness. There are lots of things men don’t notice. It’s as if their eyes can only see the big picture. The details pass them by.

  We ate our meal at the kitchen table because a bad wi
nd was blowing factory soot into the garden. Everything this side of the Seine gets covered in black grime; on the other side it’s a dirty white, thanks to all the cement works and quarries.

  We ate facing each other. Monsieur Rooland hadn’t changed for dinner. He was wearing his brown linen suit with a white shirt, open to show his tanned chest, and black-and-tan-coloured shoes. We had nothing to say to each other, but funnily enough the silence didn’t weigh heavily. It didn’t bother me, anyway.

  After dinner, Jess listened to the radio in the living room while I half-heartedly soaped the dishes in the kitchen. He was listening to an English station, I think. Unusually for him, he didn’t drink any whisky. When I’d finished I found him sitting on a chair the wrong way round, his arms resting on the back, a cigarette in his lips. He stared at the radio, squinting through the smoke; I didn’t dare talk to him. Sitting like that, it was obvious Jess was mulling over an important decision. That might be a good thing for me, I thought.

  I lay down on the sofa and gazed at him tenderly. If you only knew how handsome he was there, motionless, his cleft chin resting on the back of his hand. He might have been a painting. I could have happily spent the rest of my days admiring him. But, after a while, the music cut out and an announcer’s voice started jabbering away, reading the news. I caught the names of politicians and countries. Jess didn’t give a toss about current affairs. He got up and switched the radio off. The sudden silence shocked me out of my dreamy state.

  “Good night, Louise.”

  “Monsieur.”

  Without even looking at me, he stubbed his cigarette out in a marble ashtray and went up the stairs. I waited a while, telling myself that he’d change his mind. I’d been waiting in hope for the night. Men think differently once the shadows fall; they listen to the secret voices that whisper inside them. But I heard him taking a shower, and then the squeaking of his bed springs as he climbed between the sheets. I was afraid in the living room now. I felt even more alone than I had when Monsieur Rooland wasn’t in the house. Quickly sliding the bolt on the front door and turning the gas off, I went upstairs too. I felt a strange sickness in my bones.

  It was as if I had the flu coming on, but that wasn’t it really. Once I was undressed, my nightgown in my hand, I saw my body in the wardrobe mirror and I understood. This was Thelma’s sickness. Wasn’t it to cure herself of it that she came up here and stripped off in the evenings, that she purred and rubbed herself up against Jess like a cat in heat?

  My nightgown fell to my feet. Mechanically, I opened my door and rushed the two metres across the landing to his. Jess hadn’t locked it.

  He was reading an American tabloid newspaper. It fell to the floor when I burst into the room. He glanced anxiously at my naked body and I panicked. I flung my hand desperately at the light switch. Then the dark cured me of my sudden shyness and everything was simple again.

  I didn’t leave him that evening. I stayed pressed up against him, savouring his manly body heat. At one point, long after the lovemaking, I thought I heard a stifled laugh. I put my hand up to his lips to check: I was right, he was laughing.

  “What is it?”

  “Do you know what I’m thinking about, Louise? About your mother. She guessed this would happen. Quite something, isn’t it?”

  “Not really. She saw from the beginning that I was in love with you.”

  “Is that true?”

  “She told me.”

  “When you’re back at her place, will you tell her about my ungentlemanly conduct?”

  When you’re back at her place!

  I leapt out of bed and rushed over to the light switch, fighting against the darkness as desperately as I’d fought against the light on coming into the room.

  “Why do you say that I’ll go back to her place?”

  He blinked, surprised by my reaction.

  “It’s inevitable, Louise!”

  “Inevitable?”

  “Of course. And I’ll go back to the USA.”

  I was impressed by my own calm. All of a sudden I was filled with a sort of detached acceptance. When they put men in front of a firing squad they must feel that same supreme indifference. That must be what allows them to die well.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “In a week, maybe two. It depends on my bosses, but I’ve submitted my request…”

  “When…”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Why are you leaving?”

  I could have been asking him to fill out a form. My voice was bland, almost bureaucratic.

  “Because I need her, Louise,” he sighed, turning his head away.

  He stared up at the ceiling, like on the night of the accident, when the old nun told him that Thelma was dead.

  “What’s waiting for you in America? A grave?”

  “Memories too. We met in New Orleans. There’s a road, down there, near the lake… A great big highway, lined with motels and gas stations, leading up to the state of Mississippi. It certainly isn’t beautiful, with its electricity pylons and its used-car lots. But it means more to me than the Champs-Elysées because that’s where I met Thelma. Do you see?”

  I saw, but I didn’t care. So, Thelma still wasn’t truly dead, even now!

  “Don’t you want to take me with you?”

  Not only had he never asked himself the question before—the idea seemed to shock him, like it was inappropriate even to suggest such a thing.

  “Oh! No, Louise.”

  “Please. I’m begging you!” I whispered.

  “There’s no way!”

  For him, that night was nothing like the first. I wasn’t a young girl any more, offering herself to him in all her innocence, and shamelessness too. I was just a piece of skirt to share his bed with now. A notch on the bedpost, nothing more than a Jennifer!

  I got up and let him have it, spitting venom, my hands clenched tightly on the bedstead. He could see me in the harsh glare of the light bulb now, but I didn’t give a damn. Monsieur Rooland could gawp all he wanted.

  “You’re nothing but a creep,” I hurled at him. “Do you think I’m going to buy all that romantic rubbish? All your happy memories of the good old days? I know what that’s all about.”

  He was caught off guard by my unexpected attack. He drew back, pulling his knees up under the sheets—afraid all of a sudden, like a naughty kid who’s just realized how far he’s overstepped the mark.

  “You aren’t going back there for love, Monsieur Rooland. Do you want me to tell you the real reason? Guilt! The guilt of having killed your wife!”

  It was incredible how old he seemed all of a sudden. Perhaps it was because he was hunched up in the bed like that, but whatever it was he looked ten years older.

  “Louise!”

  It was more of a plea for mercy than a reproach.

  “Because you killed Thelma, admit it!”

  “Louise!” he cried, the pitch of his voice rising. “Louise, that is an utterly appalling thing to say!”

  “And it’s utterly true too.”

  “No! No!”

  “Yes! You killed her because you caught her with that white-haired bloke in the car. Worse than the lowest tart, Monsieur Rooland. Do you know what a tart is, Monsieur Rooland? It’s another word for a whore. That’s what your wife was: a real whore. So you killed her. No wonder they couldn’t find whoever it was supposedly raised the barrier at the level crossing. You turned the crank yourself! Thelma was asleep in the passenger seat. You left your car on the rails and set yourself up on the embankment to enjoy the show!”

  I was picturing it all in my head, telling the story as if from memory, picking out all the details… Since that night, I’d been playing the film of the “accident” over and over in my head. I’d seen the truth of what happened in Thelma’s eyes when she’d woken up in the ambulance. That’s what she would have told me if death hadn’t stopped her.

  “I don’t know how you managed to hurt yourself. Perhaps you didn’t do it on p
urpose. Maybe you just got hit by a bit of debris or something. Anyway, it wasn’t an accident, it was murder. You killed your wife! You killed your wife!”

  I was screaming myself hoarse. I could taste blood in my mouth.

  Monsieur Rooland leapt out of the bed and grabbed me roughly round the waist. I kicked and struggled like a mad-woman, thinking he was about to kill me too. He threw me onto the bed and I fell awkwardly, my head hanging over the edge of the mattress. He would only have had to press down on my face to break my neck. I smiled:

  “Go on, then! Murder me too to shut me up.”

  He let me go, but didn’t move away from me. His tanned skin glowed, as if lit up by his inner fury.

  “You’re a horrible little liar.”

  “You killed her!”

  “If you say that once more I swear I will crush you like a disgusting spider.”

  “You killed her!”

  He buried his face in his hands. I could hear words escaping from between the fingers. English words. I felt sorry for him.

  “Jess… Listen, it doesn’t change my love for you. I understand why you did it. It’ll be our secret. We won’t tell a soul. Not a soul!”

  Was he even listening? I stopped. The sound of wind blowing in the trees rose up from the garden. The swing seat squeaked like a rusty weathervane. He let his hands fall.

  “Where did you get this shameful idea from, Louise?”

  I had to keep on going, all the way to the end, if I was going to get what I wanted.

  “It’s not just an idea, Monsieur Rooland. Madame told me the truth in the ambulance.”

  “No!”

  “Yes!”

  He went over to the chest of drawers and took something out of the bottom drawer. For a second I was worried, thinking it might be a revolver. But it was just a black book, with golden letters emblazoned on the spine: HOLY BIBLE.

  “This is my wedding Bible,” Jess said solemnly. “Do you swear, on this holy book, that my wife really made such an accusation against me before she died?”

  That sent a shiver down my spine. Could I really swear to that? Thelma hadn’t actually said anything to me, it was just her eyes…