Fear of De Sade

by Bernardo Carvalho

  He was one of the first clients he took on at his office. Seven months after he’d moved in. He was a computer technician who lived in an isolated farmhouse somewhere in the area. A strange character, who lived alone and came to him asking advice about a matter he said was extremely confidential, though he never revealed what it was. In the first two meetings, he asked several questions and then left, still without saying exactly why he wanted a lawyer. From the usual kind of questions, though a little enigmatic (for example: if he would undertake to follow the honour code to the letter in the defence of a client, whatever might happen), to other, less common ones (if he would take this case on even if he knew he would be pestered by the police and by the most contradictory desires). He was a very strange character, who irritated him and whom in other circumstances he’d have ignored, but not there, seven months after getting married and opening his office, and less than a year — still insufficient time for them to spend the money — after the swindle they carried out, he and his wife, on the firm where they’d met, the perfect swindle, based on confidence, so they couldn’t be caught. This wasn’t the moment to spoil everything. He’d acted carefully: he’d only bought the house from where he could see, far off, the ruins of the castle of the baron he venerated, and set up his office in a back street in the small town, a little room where the client appeared for the first time on a hot spring afternoon, in a hat, overcoat and dark glasses. With the exception of an old magistrate who kept on putting off his retirement, he had no competition in a thirty-mile radius. All the same, he still had no clients. And the computer technician, however strange it might seem, was one of the first to appear in seven months. He was a suspicious man. And quite right too, considering he was hiding a goldmine. Finally, at their third meeting, almost a month after the first, he told the lawyer he was employing him as intermediary in a transaction that would overturn the country’s financial system. He was willing to pay a high price for his secret to be kept, for discretion. He wanted the lawyer to arrange a meeting with the board of the central bank, in Paris. For the first time, no longer able to control his irritation, he laughed at the client. ‘Here’s the number. Pick up the phone and ring. They’re waiting’, answered the computer technician, impassively. The lawyer stopped laughing and began looking at the client. He’s the one who tells the story, when an attack comes on. It’s always the same story: he took the number, lifted the phone off the hook and, when he was going to dial, he was interrupted once again by the client, who put his hand on the phone: ‘First it’s as well to know that from now on there’s no way back. And that in a few hours this office may well be surrounded by the police. You must be made aware that you will be tempted by contradictory desires’. The lawyer had already gathered that it was a very risky case, though he didn’t know its content. ‘It’s for your own good’, the client had explained to him, justifying the fact that he couldn’t reveal what it was about. Phone in hand, he dialled the number of the central bank in Paris, told the secretary who answered that he would like to have a meeting with the board of directors and was astonished when she said that the president would speak to him right away, he’d been awaiting his call. In an hour, the police had surrounded the office. But neither the lawyer nor his client were there any longer. The client went away in the same way he’d come, with his hat, overcoat and dark glasses, not without explaining to the lawyer that, from that moment on, they would not see each other again, and he would get all his instructions by phone or mail. The payment, as well. Before he went out, the client left the first instalment, in cash, and the envelope which the lawyer had to take personally to the meeting with the board of the central bank in Paris. When the police arrived, the lawyer was already at home, next to his wife sitting on the sofa with a glass of whisky in her hand. Since the client’s first visit, he hadn’t told her anything. Neither did he mention the business that night. When she asked him what he was going to do in Paris the next day, he answered: ‘Business meeting’, and that was that. It was already two months since the game of horrors had begun. The envelope the client had left him was sealed. The next day, as had been agreed, he handed it to the board of directors of the central bank. The president opened the envelope and took out a sheet of paper covered with numbers. The sheet passed from hand to hand around the table — except for the lawyer, of course — and returned to the president. The meeting lasted no more than five minutes. The president turned to the computer technician’s lawyer, and said he could inform his client that the council would make its position known in the next few days. Before leaving, the lawyer recounted what had happened on the previous day, when the police surrounded his office. He said he hoped disagreeable incidents like that would not be repeated. The president guaranteed it would not happen again. Some ten days later, and after telling the client in detail about the meeting in Paris, the lawyer got a call from the president of the central bank. The old man demanded the phone number of the computer technician, or his address, anything, anything, he shouted down the phone, while the lawyer tried to explain that, even if he wanted to hand his client over, he couldn’t, simply because he had not the least idea of his phone number, much less where he lived, for his client only phoned from public phone boxes, and at the most unexpected times, to prevent the police catching up with him. That was when the president asked for one more piece of proof: ‘I want one more piece of proof.’ ‘Proof of what?’ asked the lawyer, revealing his absolute ignorance, which in some sense proved his innocence, acted as his alibi. ‘Tell him I want one more piece of proof. He’ll understand’, replied the president, and hung up. The lawyer understood less and less. And the role of a mere messenger began to irritate him. He wanted to know what he was dealing with. What the secret shared by his client and the country’s banking system was. During the next call, he asked the client, who said again what he’d already said when he hired him: that it was better for his own safety for him not to know. ‘What I’ve discovered is huge. What I know could turn the whole financial system upside down.’ It was only then that the lawyer became certain that he was an intermediary in a blackmail of nationwide proportions, involving the country’s whole financial system. He realised, without knowing exactly what they were talking about, that the president of the central bank wanted that new piece of evidence as proof of the technician’s knowledge of a state secret. ‘More than that’, the client corrected him over the phone. ‘I’ve discovered something they didn’t know. They should thank me. It’s taken three years of my life to uncover a secret capable of turning the whole financial system upside down. I don’t mean to use it. I’m not threatening anything. I’m not blackmailing anyone. All I want is to be paid for my discovery. Like any inventor or scientist. I’ll sell my discovery and the subject will be closed. They buy my discovery and they’ll have my silence as a free gift. They should thank me, but they treat me like a criminal.’ That was when the lawyer began to glimpse what his wife would express so well in those words, sitting on the sofa, almost three months after the third and last appearance of the client in his office, with a glass of whisky in her hand, ‘in the American style’: ‘For you, the best thing would be if he didn’t exist, he’s your weak point’. What was she saying? Who was she talking about? How could she know exactly what had been taking over his mind in the last few months? How had she found out? The only time he’d mentioned the client to her was when he came back from the first meeting with the board of the central bank in Paris. He was frightened by it all and couldn’t stop himself. It’s human. He briefly commented, or, better, let slip a few words about the client and the numbers, the sheet covered with numbers, illegible even for someone who, like her, spent all their time doing accounts. But he said nothing more, because he soon saw the potential of the case and its possible developments, which didn’t exclude the elimination of the computer technician, which would be easy in a way, since no one had ever seen him, but only if he was silly enough to reappear. Because all he had to do was put his foot in his office for the poli
ce to swoop. The ideal thing would be for the lawyer to find out where he was hiding. But even then he couldn’t eliminate him before he knew his secret. His hands were tied. It would happen to him, with his mental block with numbers. Before he eliminated the client, he needed his secret to go on with the blackmail. It was an ideal plan. Instead of the honorariums the client had pledged himself to pay in monthly instalments, he would get all the money from the blackmail. He had understood the huge danger of the situation, but without the least idea of what it was about. He needed to discover the secret so he could go on negotiating as an intermediary, only now for a dead man, and then pocket all the money, with the advantage, on top of that, of coming out of it clean. He didn’t blink when he got the second sealed envelope, in the mail, a month and a half after the first, the confirmation of the proof the president demanded and that he had to take personally to Paris. He didn’t think twice before he opened it and came upon another sheet of paper covered with numbers. It was irritating. Why numbers? And why did it have to be him, who’d had problems with algebra since he was a child? He looked out a mathematician, with no success. The guy only confirmed the obvious, that there must be some kind of code there, because of the combination, frequency and alternation of the figures, but that you’d have to start from some kind of basic parameter to decipher it. You’d have to know what each number represented, and the place it occupied in the whole, and know the language it was written in and the formula, to be able to read it. The lawyer left in a state of irritation. He was so irritated he didn’t even think to put the sheet away when he got home in the middle of the night. He left it open on the table. What danger was there, if it was illegible? He only picked it up again in the morning. He left for Paris earlier than necessary, to consult other mathematicians before the second meeting with the bankers the following day. But he got the same reply. The sheet was illegible without the establishment of a set convention on which to base an interpretation, without some kind of semantics. ‘I could have told you that!’ shouted the lawyer at one of the mathematicians, the third he’d seen on the same afternoon in Paris, a little old man with white hair and a smock, who immediately threw him out of his room at the university shouting curses in Russian, his first language, which he hadn’t spoken since childhood, though it was still his favourite. Nobody had the least idea of what was written there, but when, at the meeting, the president of the central bank opened the envelope, before passing it on to the board of directors, he slumped into his chair with his hands on his head, desperately stammering: ‘This is the proof’. That sent the lawyer madder still. If these bankers could read the combination of numbers, how was it possible no one else could? He was so upset that, instead of waiting till night to go back home, on the train, he decided to get the first plane back in the early afternoon. He couldn’t lose any more time. He had to find the client before the police did. He had to eliminate him, not without first convincing him of the impossible, to tell him his secret, he needed to decipher what those figures said. When they came out of the airport, which was some thirty miles away from the ruins of the libertine baron’s château, and the hill where they lived, the wife said they needed to pick up a package in the town before they went back home. While she was paying for the package, he went into the chemist’s to buy some tranquillisers which he’d been increasingly taking in the last few weeks, and, when he came out, he came face to face with a most unexpected scene: the client, without dark glasses, hat or overcoat, talking very animatedly, on the other side of the street, with his wife, who already had the package in her hand. Everything went dark and he very nearly fell down in the middle of the street. It wasn’t just him. The client, too, couldn’t have imagined he would come across him there. It’s probable he thought the lawyer was still in Paris, as agreed, and decided to take advantage of the afternoon to do what he had to do in the town, thinking he was in safe territory. Neither could he have imagined that that was the man’s wife. The lawyer crossed the road and approached his wife. The client went pale. For a few seconds, the two looked at each other in mystified silence. The lawyer could see for the first time the expression of horror, and not the impassive face the computer technician had appeared with on the three occasions he’d been to the office. He was dressed in jeans, trainers and a white T-shirt. It’s difficult to imagine which of the two was the more astonished. But they managed to hide it, because she hardly saw. Luckily, the lawyer had not been followed by the police. The two pretended they didn’t know each other when the woman introduced them: ‘Monsieur . . . I am sorry! What was your name? This is my husband’. They shook hands. The client, suddenly very nervous, said he needed to leave, he was late, that it was a pleasure to see her again and meet her husband, and disappeared. As soon as he was gone, the lawyer turned round to his wife and asked, his eyes burning, where she knew that man from. She asked him if he remembered the day when, months ago, she had completely lost control of the car and crashed into a tree in the middle of a maize-field. ‘Well, that was the man who helped me. I think he lives somewhere around here.’ The lawyer still tried to follow him. He ran as far as the corner, but there was no sign of the client. He came back, grabbed the woman by the arms with all his strength and shook her right there in the street, trying to get more information out of her. He insisted on knowing where the accident had taken place. At first, she still laughed, said he was hurting her, that he was mad, and asked where so much jealousy had come from, so suddenly. But she soon saw that her husband was not in a joking mood; he was beside himself. He dragged her to the car and asked again where the accident had happened. He asked her a thousand times, yelling at her, while, shaking, she tried to remember where the maize-field was. He carried on shouting as he drove along the road, asking what else she was hiding, why she’d never said she knew that man. He left her in the house and went out in the car, at a furious speed, following her instructions. He was determined to discover where the client lived before nightfall. He only came back after dark. That was when she, sitting on the sofa with a glass of whisky in her hand, greeted him with those fateful words, mocking what seemed to her an unexpected attack of jealousy: ‘For you, the best thing would be if he didn’t exist, he’s your weak point’. She might have been talking about anyone they’d met in the street, and not specifically about the client, for she didn’t even know who he was. She might have talking about God. Or about the baron and his philosophy of treachery. But that wasn’t the way he understood it. His weakness was numbers. She must be talking about something else. She must know about something. But now he finally had a clue as to the whereabouts of the client, who only rang from telephones the police couldn’t track down, from public phone boxes, from a different place each time, from the most diverse areas of the country, hundreds of miles apart from each other, just like the post offices from which he posted his envelopes, without the least logic to them — now he finally had a clue he couldn’t miss the opportunity. For months, he’d tried to find the client. He was excited, as if he’d finally uncovered a bit of the secret, and violated his intimacy. But it was just an illusion. More than ever, he had to be careful he wasn’t being followed, hand the client over to the police and the bankers without meaning to, so to speak, now he had gone half way. All the way home, he didn’t stop thinking for a moment. He had to get rid of the client before the police or the bankers found him, but he couldn’t kill him without knowing his secret. He couldn’t open himself to the possibility of the bankers asking for a new piece of proof and having nothing to show them. He needed to discover the secret at all costs before he killed the client. It was probable that all this had been thought through from the beginning by the computer technician himself, who could trust no one. He wasn’t going to put his life in the hands of a provincial lawyer without some kind of guarantee. His trump card was his secret. It was the guarantee that the lawyer wouldn’t kill him. ‘You will be tempted by contradictory desires.’ Nobody could continue the blackmail without him, without knowing the secret. Because t
he secret was him, in person. Without him, the secret would disappear. The plan the lawyer drew up, on his way back home, was anything but perfect, but, in the circumstances, it was the best he could have found. He would ask the client for a new series of proofs, and would make out that it was the bankers’ demand. And, instead of sending them to Paris, he would keep them for any eventuality, after he’d got rid of the client. He would keep a stock of proofs for when he needed them, even though he hadn’t the least idea of what they meant. The plan was anything but perfect, but there was no other option. Now he had a clue as to where the client lived (there weren’t many houses in that area, near the maize-field), he had to hurry before he himself disappeared, for he was no fool, and of course he must be expecting the worst possible outcome after the unexpected encounter in the town. He got home with the whole plan in his head, and was received by his wife sitting on the sofa, 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’. Who did she mean, he? How could she have come out with that? But he couldn’t ask. With those words, she signed her own death warrant, as they say in gangster movies. The next week, while he was planning the client’s death, the lawyer planned hers too. He didn’t know what she was talking about, but he couldn’t risk losing everything because of a simple doubt. He discovered where the client lived and hired his wife’s killers. It was the time for her to take steps too, while the husband was making his international calls. She got suspicious. She put two and two together. She did her accounts and sketched out her revenge, while he was agreeing that they would shoot him in the leg. Everything to make it look convincing. It was the price to pay. The lawyer observed the client’s house more than once, from a distance, without being seen. On the day before the journey, she read to her husband, in bed, a chapter from the collected works of the baron. The part where the author explained vengeance as pleasure. She read sitting on his belly, leaning against his thighs. It was months since they’d slept together. The fact is that he felt his desire rekindled, excited that he was going to kill her in two days’ time, that this would be the last time: ‘You will be tempted by contradictory desires’. He was invaded by the morbid thrill of thinking that this body which was giving in to him would be dead in less than two days. That was why he hardly heard what she was reading aloud: ‘You who are still young and beautiful — and precisely because you are — have, amongst all of us, the greatest chance of breaking through the bars of the human prison in horror and in revenge. Just because they are young and beautiful, those who could get the greatest benefit from horror and revenge don’t take advantage of this potential while they still can, they are tricked first by their families and the Church, and then by their marriage, only to discover when they have been disarmed by years of dedication, reproduction and submission to the same logic which subjects us all, that they have missed the chance to free the human being from the prison in which he has locked himself, in the dark, unable to see further than his own nose, ignorant of his own condition, uselessly trying to contain his own instincts. I exhort you, my love, to make of me an instrument of your revenge and horror, my most sincere vocation, which can only be achieved through the hands of a beautiful young girl like you. I exhort you, my deflowered damsel, to make of your lost maidenhood an implacable arm against the logical illogicality of conventions which prevent us from revealing ourselves in all our natural splendour. Make this world in which we lived confined, as in a dark cell, as unbearable and incomprehensible for them as it already is for us’. She was reading aloud while he was getting a hard-on and coming, as if he were deaf, though nowadays he repeats the same passage, by heart, over and over. That baron is a terrible writer. At the time he didn’t see that that book had become her manual, her bible, that she’d learned the lesson, and was ready to put those teachings into practice. She made no real objections to the journey, after asking with that ‘American style’ smile if it wasn’t a very dangerous city. And she got the most barefaced guarantee: that nothing can abolish chance, that if it didn’t happen here, it would be in Bangkok or the Yemen or Istanbul or some other place. And she agreed, not knowing yet that he was talking about her death. She had to disappear, the moment she said those words, her eyes shining and a glass of whisky in her hand. She preferred not to realise that at bottom he was referring to her death, but subconsciously she already knew or guessed, because she wouldn’t have set up the theatrical reversal of fortunes if she hadn’t known. Everything was completely synchronised so he would only realise he’d lost at the last minute, when the collapse and the disappointment of the discovery would be too great for him, making him unable to bear the rest of his life. She calculated her revenge with an inhuman precision. She staged a horror capable of dragging along with it the logic of the dark cell they were confined in and, making him finally see, made the world so incomprehensible and unbearable to him, and as dark as hers would be when she was dead. Her revenge was to make the blind man see in the dark and the deaf man hear in the silence. He fell in the undergrowth with a leg-wound. His wife’s face was buried in the earth. She had flown forwards, cutting through the brushwood, to end up face-down in the earth, dead. Checkmate. He tried to pull himself together. He had to find someone who would take him to the police. In the station, he said they’d been victims of a robbery. He said they’d gone in the car of a man who’d approached them in the airport. They saw nothing unusual in that. They thought everything was fine until they saw they were going out of the city, passing by shacks, heaps of rubbish, vacant lots. That was when she’d objected and been slapped on the face for the first time. They took an unmade road in an area of wasteland; yes, he would recognise it, he could take them there. They stopped the car and after taking everything from them, money, jewellery, credit cards, they made the two of them get out and run, and while they were running he heard two shots and saw his wife fall, and then another shot and he felt an awful pain in his leg and flung himself on the ground, desperate, beside her, as if he were dead, dead like her, so they would go away, and leave him beside his only reason for living, the wife who had been with him at every moment, in all the worst crises of his life, even in the midst of horrors, and had never abandoned him; he lay beside her in the hope of being able to save her also. And when he was certain they’d gone away, he left walking as best he could, because all he could think of was how to save her, of finding someone to save her, bringing her back from death. That was how he told the story to the police. What had they come here for? To have a good time. They were on holiday. They wanted to enjoy the happiness of their marriage in peace, like in a dream. They couldn’t have expected that. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t right. The policemen took them back to the scene of the crime, guided by the unfortunate soul who’d found him lost in the middle of the piles of rubbish and the open sewers, limping along an unmade road. ‘The world stinks’. That was what the officer said to the interpreter they’d sent from the consulate. But no one said anything, while they were passing through the mud and the huts till they got the body of the Frenchwoman covered in flies. ‘It wasn’t exactly the way you thought your journey would end, right?’, the officer asked and the interpreter translated. But no one replied anything. They took him to a hospital to attend to his leg. He asked to be able to go back home. He said he would continue to collaborate in any way necessary to catch those responsible. ‘No one is responsible in this stinking world’, said the officer to the interpreter, who didn’t translate. ‘This is really bad for the image of the city. Really bad.’ Three days later, they took him to the airport. The interpreter and the policeman accompanied him. He said he wanted to buy French newspapers. He went into the shop on his own, while the interpreter and the policeman waited for him outside, and when he came out he’d already lost his head. He turned round to the policeman and said he insisted on being called baron, a demand the interpreter translated without realising the Frenchman had gone mad. The foreign newspapers always came late. He’d bought a French paper of
three days ago, of the day they’d got here, he and his wife, the day when she was murdered. He came out of the newspaper shop with the copy of the paper folded in his hand; on the front page was the news of the arrest of the computer technician: ‘Plan to destroy the country’s financial system uncovered and aborted’. The client had been arrested on the same night they boarded the plane. While they were boarding, he had been detained by forty armed police, who surrounded his house, twenty miles from Lagrange, in the south of France. Now he’d been arrested, no one would ever know the secret. He read the news when he was still in the shop, and when he came out he’d already lost his head. He’d had his wife killed for no reason. She worked it all out. She must have seen the sheet covered in numbers on the table. She was always doing sums. She was a wizard at numbers. She worked it all out. Just at the right moment. She’d sent a letter to the bankers. She revealed the computer technician’s whereabouts. And, while they were boarding, he had been arrested twenty miles from the baron’s château. The Frenchman was gripped by the horror she’d left him as an inheritance in the airport newspaper shop, with a three-day old paper in his hand. A horror cap-able of sweeping away all the logic of this stinking world, where no one is responsible for anything. We are all victims of the horror, even when we’re killing, we are innocent victims of the horror, we are what we are so as to prove God doesn’t exist, said the Frenchman to the policeman, when he came out of the newspaper shop, and that was when the interpreter realised there was no point in translating, for he was no longer making any sense. Horror is the only thing that doesn’t die. There’s no consolation for horror. They didn’t believe he had really ordered his wife’s murder. But neither could they let him go after the confession. They didn’t find the killers. They had no proof. They needed proof. Yet another robbery with murder. And the man had gone mad. They didn’t know what to do with him. He became violent. He couldn’t travel. He no longer knew where he was going. They interned him here, just in case, while they awaited proof. The family in France haven’t said anything. They didn’t want to know. The case was insoluble. The police didn’t want to let him leave. Because of the confession. Despite the story he’s been repeating for years, and that I’ve just told you, there’s nothing to prove he had his wife killed. The obvious doesn’t provide proof, though the world needs it. However much he insists, no one believes him. Officially, it was a robbery. No one thinks he’s not mad. And that’s what he repeats over and over again. That he killed his wife and that he’s not mad. I’m tired of hearing the same story. Every crisis he has, it’s the same litany. I know it all by heart. Sometimes he gets violent. The rest of his life waiting for proof, to prove God doesn’t exist. He came here saying he was the baron of whatever looking for the Marquis de Sade. Every now and then, as if he were confessing, he tells the story over again, in detail. This only lasts the time it takes to tell the whole story and then he says again that he’s baron so-and-so, and he’s looking for the Marquis de Sade. He thinks he’s in a French asylum at the beginning of the nineteenth century and that only the marquis can save him. Then another crisis comes on and he begins to howl that he wants out of here. He’s afraid. He has hallucinations. He sees things. He talks to himself as if he were hearing voices. He thinks he’s not alone. He hears voices and talks to them. We move him to another room and two days later he has the same hallucinations. He shouts for the light to be switched on in broad daylight; he’s afraid of being alone because he says there’s someone else there: ‘You will be tempted by contradictory desires’. And on top of that he’s a racist. The last time I tried to calm him down, he thought I was the devil. Because I’m black. He can’t stand the sight of me. Go on then, you go in, and when he yells at you that he’s a dead man, that he’s seen the devil in person, that we’re all dead, try to explain to him that this is not hell and he’s not dead, but tactfully, go on, try and convince the guy we’re in Rio de Janeiro.