BARON: You haven’t understood. I’m ready to end my life.
The Voice lets out a guffaw.
VOICE: I’ve understood perfectly. I think you’re the one who hasn’t understood.
BARON: I want to be with Martine.
VOICE: It’s incredible how, when things get tight, all of you, even the proudest of libertines, begin to believe in the angels of heaven.
BARON: It’s better than staying in this quagmire.
VOICE: Voilà! The same thing the count said to the baroness about the maid.
BARON: Martine. She’s their daughter.
VOICE: Martine, then! It’s all the same. It’s better to send her away from this quagmire, so she’ll not be defiled by this filth.
BARON: This is all getting ridiculous. I asked you to help me. You’re no longer being logical, master. All this is absurd. You want to convince me with a tawdry argument that the two of them killed their daughter to save her? How can you believe that? And that they got rid of the body to save her reputation, so that her honour would not be besmirched? Only so that the news that she had been killed during an orgy at château Lagrange shouldn’t get about?! Is that it?
VOICE: That’s not what I said. You’re interpreting. Whenever they interpret, people lose themselves down these shortcuts. Nobody ever said she’d been murdered.
BARON: What are you saying?! Then Martine’s alive?!
VOICE: That’s the way it looks.
BARON: God be praised!
VOICE: You disappoint me.
BARON: But didn’t they say, in the refectory? . . .
VOICE: That now she was a long way off.
BARON: Ah! . . .
VOICE: On the same night, after you’d swallowed the pastilles, they put her on board a ship going where no one would have any more news of her.
BARON: But of course! They made her disappear to incriminate me, and as the body hasn’t yet been found, there are no proofs, and the court decided to keep them in the asylum. We’re all saved!
VOICE: You’re an optimist, baron.
BARON: What you’ve just said is reason for a celebration.
VOICE: Is it?
BARON: Martine is alive and all we have to do is prove it for them to free me and get on a ship too and find her, wherever she is.
VOICE: No one gets out of here.
BARON: But there’s been no crime! There’s been no murder!
VOICE: No one’s said there hasn’t been.
BARON: It’s because they don’t know she’s alive. Because the count and the baroness did everything on purpose to incriminate me. They set up the whole imposture. They left me unconscious in the château and accused me, all the more with the count’s contacts and so many people wanting to get their revenge on a provincial nobleman like me. What they didn’t think was they’d be taken as suspects as well. And now they’re down a cul-de-sac. To save their own skin, they’ll have to confess they’ve hidden their daughter. And that way, without wanting to, they’ll free me too. It’s all a matter of time, the time they’ll manage to put up with being imprisoned here without saying anything. That’s it! That’s it! Just the time they manage to put up with it without saying anything.
VOICE: It’s incredible how you still refuse to see. The only problem, my dear man, is that there has in fact been a murder.
BARON: (silence) Master? . . . I must be going mad. Help me. I’m certain I’ve seen you, but I don’t want to believe.
VOICE: What in?
BARON: No. It must be a hallucination. It can only be a hallucination.
VOICE: Everyone sees what they want to – or what they can.
BARON: Why isn’t there even a chink of light anywhere?
VOICE: It’s better for you.
BARON: (shrinking back) When all’s said and done, who are you? Who’s there?! (silence) If it’s not the Marquis de Sade, then who is it? What do you want of me? (silence) Why since they arrested me have they been talking a language I don’t understand? Why are they calling me by another name? Why do I only understand what you say? What do you mean when you say there was a murder? Why can’t I get out if I didn’t kill anyone? (silence) I’m pouring with sweat. Look! My shirt’s soaking. Why is it so hot? And even so, I’m still shaking. Why am I having these hallucinations? I’m afraid. Why don’t you tell me who you are? What do you want to spare me from? (silence) If Martine wasn’t murdered, then . . . who was? (silence) Why don’t you answer? (silence) Master? Who died? Who’s the dead one? What is this place? Why isn’t there a chink of light anywhere?
A blinding white light. Two men dressed in white, a black man and a white man, are walking along a white-tiled corridor. They hear shouts at the far end, in another language. Someone, it seems, desperately wants to get out of there.
THE BLACK MAN IN WHITE TO THE WHITE MAN IN WHITE: Where are we? You can’t take anything with you from this world, so make the most of it. That’s what he keeps on saying. You remember the crime. Everyone does. It was some time ago. It was in all the papers. From the beginning, everyone knew who the murderer was. There wasn’t the least doubt. Even if it was never proved. You didn’t have to be very bright. But the world wants proof. He ended up confessing – within his own reasoning, of course, which they didn’t think at all reasonable. Because they didn’t manage to find the killers. There were no proofs. It was only the police who didn’t suspect the obvious right from the beginning; they nearly let him escape. If it hadn’t been for the newspaper article, at the airport. They had to give free rein to the investigation, to get where everyone had suspected anyhow, before they could make a decision. Fools. Their luck, or rather his downfall, was his going into that newspaper stall. He was already on his way back, in the airport, when he saw the news and lost his head. He told the whole story. They couldn’t let him go after the confession, even if he’d been taken for a madman. While they had no proof. And while they waited for it, he ended up being forgotten here. The important thing isn’t who was the murderer, but the paradox of the murder itself. He had his own wife killed so he could commit another crime that never was or will be committed. Because, with his wife’s death, and even before that, with the very thought of killing his wife, though he didn’t know or even suspect it, thinking that that way he made his plan possible, he was already committing suicide. They were a curious couple. Not that she was any better than him. They deserved each other. Neither of them was any good. But there was one extraordinary thing about that marriage. They married in a chapel on top of a hill, as simple as simple can be, in the south of France, in the town where he’d been born and where at the beginning of the nineteenth century, so it seems, a baron laid on orgies inspired by the Marquis de Sade. A libertine writer whose central philosophy was treachery. Six months after they were married, they found out she couldn’t have children. They realised that love doesn’t outlast time, love ends, and they made an explicit pact which, usually, in the general run of marriages, destroys them by remaining unsaid. They decided the best thing was to establish a relationship based on treachery and horror. Horror instead of love. A marriage based on a game of horrors, because, as he keeps saying during his attacks, horror doesn’t die, unlike love. Only horror can keep a marriage alive, on the principle of treachery, according to the philosophy of this libertine baron. Each of the spouses plays a joke on the other, successively and in turn. It’s what they learned to call, in a game restricted to the two of them, the ‘fear of Sade’. A reference to the famous marquis, of course; it seems plain that it was under Sade’s influence that the baron created his own peculiar philosophy. You know. The one who’s more afraid loses. That was the game. Whoever got afraid, lost. ‘Fear of Sade’. And when he ordered his wife to be killed, paradoxically, he lost. They went on playing tricks on one another, each one more horrible than the last, and that way they intended to stay together until death, as they’d promised in the eyes of the Church. They went on playing tricks on each other to keep, as far as possible, the oath they’d taken in
the little chapel on the top of the hill, in the south of France, as simple as simple can be. Only the business didn’t last long. Even treachery has its rules, and he cheated. He wanted to put the cart before the horse. He tried to bring death forward, to kill his wife before she killed him. He got scared. And in this game whoever gets scared, loses. It might seem paradoxical to you, and to me too, but when she died, she won. When she died, she terrified him. You can get an idea from his screams. Between one joke and another, she ended up saying something she shouldn’t have. She didn’t exactly say that she’d found out the crime he was planning. It was he who interpreted her that way. She was more ambiguous and enigmatic. It’s most likely she only wanted to provoke him, to exacerbate what she thought was an attack of jealousy. Maybe she was just trying him on. She only put into words what was already in his head. Or perhaps not even that. Maybe she didn’t know anything. But that was the way he understood it. He thought she’d discovered the crime he was planning. Not the crime against herself, of course – that came later, and because of what she said – but against the client. After those words, it was his turn to play a trick on her. And she knew she couldn’t escape when she agreed to the journey he proposed to her, just like that, with the lame excuse that they needed some peace, some holiday, just the two of them. She might not have known, but at least she suspected, if it was only because of his behaviour. That’s why she planned everything before she died. She planned to play a trick on her husband with her own death, since it was inevitable, a trick even more horrible than death itself. She would leave as her inheritance another motive for horror, and this time he would be inconsolable. She didn’t want to die without getting her own back. She didn’t want to take the ‘fear of Sade’ to the grave with her. She left her vengeance ready. And there’s no way of knowing at what point she realised and took the decision, to what degree she’d got everything set from the day she said those words to him, when he thought she’d found out what he was planning, and preferred to have her killed to having to live with the suspicion, however remote the chances of her really having found anything out. They deserved one another. It’s no accident they were married. They met in a firm in the north of France. She worked as an accountant and he was a legal consultant. They were a perfect pair. She was a wizard at numbers, which was just what he was no good at; he studied law because he couldn’t do anything else. She’d always done sums since she was little. And it would be a euphemism to say he’d never been any good at maths. He just hadn’t the gift for it. It’s not that he was stupid, but since childhood his capacity for abstraction had never been anything to write home about. He only understood the four basic algebraic operations on the day he translated them into everyday language and realised that multiplying two by two, for instance, simply meant twice two, a duplication of two. He understood algebra through semantics, which in its turn was not the woman’s strong point, so much so that she signed her own death warrant when she said those words without measuring the consequences. As long as it lasted, they were complementary. Numbers and meaning. They pulled off a hoax on the firm, a first-class swindle, a hoax based on confidence so they couldn’t be caught, and went to live in the south of France, where he’d been born. They were married right there, in a little country chapel, with the ruins of the libertine baron’s château in the background. A discreet ceremony, only for those closest to them, hardly anyone, and his family. She preferred not to invite her own family. Only her sister. She hadn’t been speaking to her parents for years. The idea of substituting horror for love wasn’t alien to her. She might well have been inspired by her own childhood, and her own family. It was putting hunger and the urge to eat together when he introduced her to the collected works of the baron. Because he was a fan of the libertine literature of the end of the eighteenth century. It was through him she discovered the baron and his philosophy of treachery. In one of his books, a moralising novel in dialogue form, the baron recounted how he had avenged himself on the wife who was betraying him: he deflowered the illegitimate daughter she’d had by his cousin. Because, according to the baron’s philosophy, only treachery liberates. Treachery is repaid with treachery. Nothing could be more appropriate, then, than betraying the conventions of a morality which attempts in its turn to be false to nature. And the baron could think of nothing more treacherous than depraving the illegitimate daughter of his own adulterous wife to avenge himself on her and her demure maternal hypocrisy. He’s a writer who proposes a world in which virtues and values are turned upside down, inside out, where evil is good, and treachery is honour. A world of anti-virtues, as the only way of escaping from the hypocrisy of religion and the limitations of human conventions in the name of the truth of the instincts. A world of anti-virtues for a philosophy. An anti-humanism at the beginning of the nineteenth century. And it’s no accident that she was delighted when her husband showed her the collected works of the baron and said to her: ‘We are here to prove God doesn’t exist. No effort should be spared, no means excluded in this undertaking. Our lives will prove God doesn’t exist, or we wouldn’t be what we are.’ They also came across a world of anti-virtues after they went up the hill on foot to the little chapel. The simplest thing in the world. The marriage was a way of sealing the alliance they made when they pulled off the first hoax, which left the boss with his hands tied when he wanted to give the police their names, since they were only able to act thanks to his complete confidence in them. They came out clean and with money in their pockets. The boss was completely to blame, for he had delegated all power to them, and any naming of them, as well as being useless from the criminal point of view – for there was no way of pinning the blame on them – would only be a complete, shameful revelation of the fraud and of his own naiveté. They were careful with the money from the hoax. They didn’t want to attract attention. They intended to pull off others, if only to prove God doesn’t exist. The world needs proof. They were a perfect pair of swindlers. They had their lives in front of them. She was a wizard with numbers. Straight after they were married, he opened an office in the small town. Six months before discovering she couldn’t have children, which was the sign, and also the beginning of the game and their downfall. They realised straight away only horror could keep them together. They realised they would only have a chance by indulging in horror. They ended up linking this horror to the libertine baron’s philosophy of treachery. Before horror and treachery could become established and control the relationship in spite of them – as happens in the general run of marriages, according to the baron – she proposed the game to him, inspired by the baron’s philosophy and by her own childhood. At the start it was fun. He let her go out in the car in the early morning after he’d emptied the brake fluid in the middle of the night, which she only noticed when she put her foot down on the pedal, and, avoiding a cart, lost control on a twisty but fortunately flat and near-empty road which went through a maize field, where she ended up in total chaos, though without any serious injury. She crashed against a tree and when they came to her assistance they found her laughing out loud to herself when she realised what had happened. She, in her turn, hired two lads, members of the party of the extreme right whose meeting the couple used to attend, to mug him when he came home alone one stifling night, after work, while she was in the supermarket. Two months later, he abandoned her in a small yacht they’d rented, out at sea, pretending he’d been drowned, while she, who could hardly swim or sail, adrift in the boat, was desperately trying to get help on a radio which had been purposely broken. Until another boat came to save her. She forged a summons from the Ministry of Finance, which he got in the mail, accusing him of tax evasion. And he went as far as to appear at the appointed day and time, terrified, after a good deal of hesitation, for fear that if they’d discovered the tip of the iceberg, they might find the submerged part; he only realised he’d been tricked when the receptionist told him she didn’t know of any employee with the name of the person who had signed the summons. And there, on the spot
, in front of the Ministry of Finance receptionist, he laughed out loud as she had done after the accident in the middle of the maize field. They knew how to enjoy themselves. The game was a school of fear. A never-ending test. And, in their own way, you could even say they were happy. Until she said those words and he broke the rules and brought her death forward. Not that they might not die, as a result of a trick with a greater risk of violence, for example, or by some mistake in the plans, that was part of it, but chance had always been a fundamental element. It wouldn’t have been right to get rid of chance. He had planned every detail of her death, so she couldn’t escape. It was the only way of being able to carry out the rest of his plan, so he thought, still completely unconsciously, without realising that all he had to do was eliminate her to ruin everything. In this game between them, she might create problems at any moment, and he didn’t want to risk anything, at least not this time. He couldn’t. He wanted to kill a client and didn’t need accomplices. He didn’t want to leave witnesses. The only thing he didn’t know was how she’d found out. If she really had found out, as those words made him think she had. Also, he couldn’t imagine what she might leave to be said only at the moment of death; she might avenge herself when she was murdered, and he’d be caught completely unprepared. One night, when he returned home after an untimely, unexplained crisis which to those who didn’t know them might even look like jealousy and maybe the wife had interpreted that way, she was waiting for him in the living-room, as usual. It was a stone house on top of a hill, like the little chapel, with a view over the valley and the ruins of the baron’s castle, a house they’d bought with the money from the first swindle, when they realised they were made for one another. A house she decorated ‘in the American style’, as she liked to say to please her husband, whose dream was to move one day to Chicago, the land of gangsters and limitless opportunity, at least that was what he proclaimed in the first months of the marriage; he was always consorting with the worst people in the town, before they discovered she couldn’t have children. It was when he realised that he’d stopped finding it funny, and it wasn’t just from what she said. He even slapped her in the house at the mere mention of the phrase ‘in the American style’ about the decoration, in the presence of a couple of guests they’d recently got to know at the meetings of the party of the extreme right, who left in a hurry, out of sheer embarrassment. And before the horror took over, she decided to take the initiative and propose to her husband this game, which to you and me might seem insane, inspired by what she had gone through in childhood, but also under the influence of the libertine baron, at first sight with the single aim of saving their marriage. If she was going to be hit, then it might as well be with her own consent, in a game. That way they would take turns in the roles of victim and torturer. If it would save the marriage. They even laughed at the pretext. But not for long. Only till the night when she was waiting for him in the living-room, after he’d had a crazy attack of jealousy, which made no sense at all at that stage of the proceedings, when he came home without saying a word. She said she had something to say to him. And she spoke in the same way she referred to the décor of the house in front of the guests: ‘in the American style’. She said just what he didn’t want to hear at that moment. Her eyes shining, and with a glass of whisky in her hand, she said: ‘For you, the best thing would be if he didn’t exist, he’s your weak point’. She didn’t say anyone’s name, as if she read her husband’s thoughts, and at that moment he could only imagine she’d found out. Though he couldn’t understand how. His whole brain was taken up with the plan to get rid of the client. He knew she might just be trying it on, to put him to the test and terrify him. She might be talking about something else. But he couldn’t live with the suspicion, now that everything was real. He couldn’t let her find out and get in the way of his plans. He couldn’t allow himself to get into her power, to be threatened by her. And what if, in any future reversal of the game, she decided to inform on him to the police to terrify him even more? That was the only thing the wife said, her eyes shining, and with a glass of whisky in her hand: ‘For you, the best thing would be if he didn’t exist, he’s your weak point’. And it was enough. It was only of secondary importance, whether she knew or not. It hardly mattered whether she knew about her husband’s plans to kill his client or not. He couldn’t go ahead, with that on his mind. With a single sentence, she’d brought about her own death. What he couldn’t suspect was that, in a certain sense, this was a form of suicide. He couldn’t know that perhaps there was nothing involuntary or unconscious about what his wife did. It’s possible she was tired, or that she had to put him in check, and check-mate him only with her own death. Perhaps she had no strength or imagination left in her. Because it was a game of the imagination. Perhaps she’d simply felt the moment of the final trick arrive; what’s certain is that she played like an actress in a gangster movie she saw on television while she was doing accounts, always doing accounts, ‘in the American style’: sitting on the living-room sofa with her eyes shining and a glass of whisky in her hand. He pretended he hadn’t heard and changed the subject. He didn’t ask ‘who d’you mean, he?’ He didn’t change expression. He changed the subject. He was imperturbable. She pretended to think he hadn’t heard, and replied to what he asked her now about something else nothing to do with what she’d said. He knew as well as she did that the next step would be his, it was his turn, the next trick was his. She knew he had heard the sentence and taken it in. He knew that she knew he had heard the sentence and taken it in. And that she was waiting for his reaction, for him to get even. But they acted as if they didn’t know, so that the game could go on. The next month, he came home with two air tickets, even though he had a fear of flying, and said the two of them were in need of a holiday. ‘But isn’t it a dangerous place?’, the wife asked, ‘in the American style’, sitting on the living-room sofa with her eyes shining and a glass of whisky in her hand, referring to the destination he’d deliberately chosen. ‘Isn’t it a city with a high crime index? Are you sure it isn’t risky?’ And he swore they would have a wonderful week, that, after a lot of thought, he’d chosen it among all the cities in the world. It seemed to him the most suitable. And she smiled, sitting on the sofa with her eyes shining and a glass of whisky in her hand. That was the way they played it. The best victim is the one who pleases the torturer, who enjoys the role of victim. And she deluded him so well. At no moment did she let him see that he would be the greatest victim of her death. Not for a moment. Only when it was already irreversible, when she was already dying and he couldn’t do anything else to save himself from the ‘fear of Sade’ she was leaving him with. She was going to die ‘in the American style’, with a glint in her eyes and a smile on her lips. She looked at the tickets and asked him what they were going to do there. She’d heard that the city was hell on earth, and terribly hot. And he, pretending he believed in her objections, played his role too and tried to convince her, affectionately, that they needed a week’s holiday, it was some time since they’d been together, just the two of them. And she pretended to give in. She’d already been persuaded a long time before he’d brought her the tickets. She already knew that if it wasn’t here, it would be in Bangkok, in Yemen or Istanbul, in some place or other she would have to disappear. She had to disappear ever since she said those words: ‘For you, the best thing would be if he didn’t exist, he’s your weak point’. He pretended not to hear it, because he didn’t even bother to ask ‘Who d’you mean, he?’ He knew that she might be trying it on or making a mistake, provoking him in connection with the apparent, unexpected attack of jealousy in the afternoon. He knew she might be talking about something else, or even someone else, and not the client. He knew she might not know anything about it. But he couldn’t expose his flank. He couldn’t even risk bothering to ask ‘Who d’you mean, he?’ She’d invited death with those words. The only thing he didn’t know was that, through her death, he was the one that would die. They boarded the plane
at night and got here in the morning. He was calm, or at least feigning calm, in spite of his fear of planes. He was very attentive to her the whole night through. And she was calling his bluff. Her life to prove God doesn’t exist. It’s very probable she was tired. Tired of thinking up new horror-games. She’d put all her cards on this last one. She knew it would be the last. He did too. Only that he thought the last throw of the dice would be his and not hers. That was why he was calm. They went through passport control, through customs, and when they got out with their luggage, a man speaking French and with a sheet of paper on which the couple’s surname was printed was waiting for them in the airport arrivals area. ‘See how easy it was? I’ve got everything organised. From now on, they look after everything,’ said the husband to the wife in a fatherly tone, which she returned with her smile ‘in the American style’. The man accompanied them to the car outside. She got in first, then her husband. The man who had met them and the driver looked after the cases. Then they too got into the car. The husband gave them the hotel address. But they went off in the opposite direction. She wasn’t the first to notice. She was tired, and she’d handed herself over. She knew what her destiny was. Or suspected, at least. She’d won. It was up to him to give the sign. And that was what he did at a certain moment. He pretended to be suspicious and apprehensive. And it was only when she noticed his false nervousness that she emerged from her sleepiness and asked him what the matter was. It was at that moment, when the husband told her he thought they weren’t going the right way, and while they were moving away from the centre of the city, going past shacks, filth and vacant lots, that she took on the role of victim and, getting suddenly nervous in her turn, asked the man who’d met them at the airport where they were going and got the fatal reply. He turned round and ordered the two of them to shut up, not ‘in the American style’, but in a sharp, brutal way which terrified her for the first time. That was the game, after all. This really was horror. However much everything was planned (as she had planned it, without her husband knowing, thinking he was in control of the situation), however much she might know where she was going, at bottom she never knew. There were always surprises, things that were unexpected. Like when the man who had met them at the airport raised his hand and clouted her in the face. And she, who had sat forward, on the edge of the seat to ask where they were going, flew back into the upholstery. The game was different here. She tried to open the door and fling herself out of the car. And then, when she saw she couldn’t get out, she began to cry. She wept her heart out. She remembered her childhood, boarding school, her brothers in silence as they were beaten with a belt, the time she spent in her grandparents’ house, her grandmother’s death, her certainty that hell was right here, her first job and the operation she did with the first money she got, the first time she mutilated herself, the first of many. Without telling anyone, she persuaded a doctor to take her womb out, so that she would never have the chance of getting pregnant and putting a child into this hell, not even by some unhappy accident or if she weakened in her determination, for love or some other lie, not wanting to be at the mercy of chance, of love, or of the possibility of conflicting wishes, human beings are complex, human beings will invent anything to justify what can’t be explained, they invent God and love, and with the first money she earned she put an end to the whole farce and the guilt of bringing someone else into the world to prove, like her, that God doesn’t exist. She ended the whole lie, but without anyone finding out, so she wouldn’t be called mad, so much so that she didn’t even tell her husband, not even him, when they met at the firm and planned the embezzlement together, so they couldn’t be caught, a plan based on the complete confidence of the boss, she doing the accounts and he the legal consultant, nor when they were partners in crime, nor when they were married in the chapel above the valley where he had been born, she didn’t even tell him at the altar – she said the scar was from a Caesarean, spoke about a dead foetus – and it was only when he discovered the truth, and she saw that the horror could slip from her hands, that she decided to propose the game, since everything dies except horror. The foundation of the baron’s philosophy. She wept for the marriage to which she’d decided only to invite her sister, the only one among the guests who understood what that marriage was, another act of self-mutilation, for life could only, could only be a series of self-mutilations to prove God doesn’t exist, she wanted at least one of the guests to understand what was happening, and to be moved and feel pity for her. She wept for that last act of self-mutilation, in the car, at her husband’s side, on the way to sacrifice and death. She wept for the expression on her sister’s face in the church, she was the only member of her family she invited, lost, like her, among his relatives and the members of the party of the extreme right whose meetings they attended, the expression of someone who knows what everything means, another step in her self-mutilation. She wept when she realised the victory she’d won when she said those words to her husband : ‘For you, the best thing would be if he didn’t exist, he’s your weak point’, as if she were Lady Macbeth, ‘in the American style’, sitting on the sofa with her eyes shining and a glass of whisky in her hand, the victory of her death after a life of mutilations. She wept for fear as well, for the fear she would leave her husband as an inheritance when he finally understood what he’d done when he killed her, the fear that now was only hers and that in a few minutes’ time, after she’d gone, would be his alone. The fear of everyone. The fear of those who are left. She wept bitterly over her thirty years and some. She wept for the look on her husband’s face when he discovered that she hadn’t had a womb since she was twenty. It was the doctor in the small town who called him into his surgery to tell him with embarrassment the reason why his wife hadn’t got pregnant after six months of marriage. The husband, dumbfounded, asked the doctor how that was possible, how it was she didn’t have a womb. And the doctor was forced to explain to him. ‘Is she mad, then?’, was the only thing he managed to ask the doctor, like a kind of answer. ‘Is she mad, then?’ before he went back home and found her sitting on the sofa, with her eyes shining and a glass of whisky in her hand. She wept for the look on her husband’s face when he got home with the expression of someone who’s just discovered the trick that’s been played on him. He might have got excited over that mutilation with its philosophical background, which fitted the baron’s ideas so well. He might have grasped everything from another point of view. But he was horrified. She wept for the slap she got, sitting on the sofa when she greeted him that night, when she saw that they only had horror left. She wept out of pity for him, that horrible man, and her, that horrible woman. She wept bitterly for the two of them. Until the man on the front seat turned round again and gave her another good clout right on her cheek, shouting at her to stop crying or else. Now she was near death, she was desperate. The stage-set had gone. Security was gone. Pretence was gone. The certainty she would end up as the victor was gone. She began to scream, to struggle, and it was only when her husband gripped her that she came back to her senses, looking him in the eyes and seeing what he didn’t see, that she was the winner – or could it be he was such a fool as to think she was going to accept everything he proposed to her without thinking of revenge? She saw all his self-satisfied lack of awareness in his eyes, but this didn’t calm her down – rather she went into a catatonic state that at least anaesthetised her for the shock and prevented any reaction, even stopped her screaming. She was dumbstruck. That was what he thought later, with hindsight. Retrospectively, when he’d understood the trap he’d fallen into, the husband remembered seeing in her eyes, on the brink of death, what she had seen in his eyes, his unawareness, and that had made her go quiet. He’d set everything up, thinking she’d not see anything. He’d thought he could flout the rules of the game and bring her death forward without her seeing. He thought she’d go on playing as on other occasions, that she’d willingly submit, ignorant that this was the last time. He didn’t see that, in a certain way, sh
e’d programmed everything with those words: ‘For you, the best thing would be if he didn’t exist, he’s your weak point’. What did she mean, he? But he didn’t ask. He fell right into the trap. What did she mean, he? That was the question he should have asked. But he didn’t. He deduced that she was talking about the client he was planning to rid himself of, as soon as he could, as soon as he had a chance. He thought she knew, that she’d read his thoughts. Because the only question hammering away in his head was how she’d found out. But it was the wrong question. What if she was talking about God? ‘For you, the best thing would be if he didn’t exist, he’s your weak point’. Impertinence. Daring to cast doubt on the baron’s philosophy. Or maybe she was talking about the baron himself. Do you understand? He understood with hindsight. He fell right into the trap of his mad wife’s self-mutilations; she’d already married without a womb so as not to run the risk of putting a child into the world, another one to prove that God doesn’t exist. That was the way the game had been going from the beginning, towards self-mutilation, how had he not seen that? He didn’t see it while he held her down in the car and the man in the front seat turned round and slapped her again on the face with the full force of his hand. She looked at her husband, looked at the man in the front seat, at the driver, and now said nothing further. After everything she’d done against herself, she’d come to the end, and on top of that she was still taking with her the man who thought he was an executioner when he was nothing more than a victim. She’d come to the end, after all her self-mutilations, as the winner. She was going to die to destroy the life of the man who thought he could destroy hers. For the first time, with her own death, she could contemplate in someone else the destruction she’d kept for herself throughout her life, which was an advance, so he understood with hindsight, when he remembered his wife looking silently out of the car window, after she’d been slapped, while he held her down in the car, as they went towards the place for the sacrifice and the last scene of the game of horrors. Her eyes were lost on the empty horizon, as if she were resigned to her own fate, which she’d finally understood. The car veered onto an unmade road, and after some ten minutes jolting through a more and more desolate landscape, it stopped alongside thick brushwood. The two in the front turned round and looked at the husband. The husband looked at the two in the front. He looked at his wife again. The man that met them at the airport nodded his head and the husband let go of his wife. The couple looked at one another once more in a kind of goodbye, before he told her to get out of the car and run. ‘Run!’ he said. She opened the door but, before she got out, with one foot already out of the car, she turned to him and managed to say, ‘in the American style’, which always rings false, as if she was in a gangster movie and this was not her own death, with her eyes shining and a smile on her lips: ‘Checkmate!’ He didn’t understand straight away. He thought she couldn’t have been so naïve as to think she could still escape now. She began to run. The man who had met them at the airport opened the door, got out of the car, and with one foot out of the car, pointed the revolver at the woman’s back, stumbling as she ran. The husband had lowered his head in the back seat. He didn’t even bother to get out of the car and run too, even if only as a hammed-up attempt to pretend till the last moment that they were still in the same boat, he and his wife, after having made it quite clear they weren’t, even if it was only so that she wouldn’t carry the worst possible image of him with her in death. He lowered his head and shut his eyes at his wife’s last word, which he couldn’t get out of his head: checkmate, checkmate, checkmate, and suddenly he understood and shouted ‘No!’, with all his strength and at the same time as he heard the two sharp bangs and the noise of a body falling like an animal, flying, cutting through the undergrowth. ‘No!’ He got out of the car and fell on his knees, his mouth open and terror in his eyes. The man with the revolver turned the car round, came towards him and looked down at him. When the man lifted his face, he got a kick in the thigh and fell to one side, groaning. ‘Chicken, huh?’ asked the man with the revolver. ‘At the last moment?’ The Frenchman said nothing more. He didn’t understand what the man was saying now, words in a strange language. He’d realised it was too late. He didn’t yet know what was waiting for him, but he could imagine. He’d underestimated her. The man with the revolver gave him a push with the toe of his shoe and told him to get up, in French. ‘Now it’s your turn to run. Or are you sorry? Give me all your documents, credit cards, money’. The Frenchman took what he had out of his pockets and said the rest was in the case, pointing at the car. And the payment they’d agreed on, too. ‘Get up!’ shouted the man with the revolver and kicked him again, before he could react properly. ‘So they won’t suspect anything’, said the man with the revolver, with a sarcastic smile. The Frenchman tried to get up, groaning. ‘Get going!’ ordered the man with the revolver, and he went, limping, in the opposite direction from his wife. Whatever happened, he didn’t want to see her. He couldn’t bear to see the body slumped on the ground. ‘Not that way, idiot! The other side!’, shouted the man, pointing the revolver in the direction where the woman had fallen. The Frenchman ran for some fifteen yards, groaning. Until he heard the shot and, at the same time, felt an awful pain in his leg, which made him fall to the ground, not very far from where his wife’s body had flown, cutting through the bushes. Still on the ground, he heard the car rev up and disappear along the same unmade road.
Fear of De Sade Page 5
