Act of Passion (5 page)

Why Jeanne? She used to smile at me shyly every time I came to the house. And she it was who served the glass of white wine that is traditional with us. She always wore a discreet, self-effacing air. Everything about her was self-effacing, to such a point that after sixteen years I can scarcely remember what she looked like.

She was gentle, like my mother.

I had no friends in the village. I seldom went to La Roche-sur-Yon for, in my free moments, I preferred taking my motor-cycle and going off somewhere to fish or to hunt.

I might say that I never really courted her.

'It seems to me,' my mother said one evening as we were waiting for time to go to bed, 'that you're beginning to take quite a fancy to Jeanne.'

'You think so?'

'She's a very nice girl ... No one could say the contrary ...'

One of those young girls, you know, who dons her summer dress and her new hat for the first time Easter Sunday and her winter coat on All Saints' Day.

'Since you won't remain a bachelor all your life ..

Poor Mama. She would certainly have preferred my being a priest.

It was my mother who married us. We were engaged for almost a year because in the country if you marry too soon, people are sure to say it was a marriage of necessity.

I can still see the Marchandeaus' garden and, in winter, the living-room with its log fire, where the old doctor would promptly fall asleep in his armchair.

Jeanne worked on her trousseau. Then came the moment for deciding about the wedding dress and finally the period when we spent our evenings drawing up and revising the list of guests.

Is that the way you were married, your Honour? I think in the end I began to be a little impatient. When I would kiss her good night at the door I was troubled by the warmth that emanated from her body.

Old Marchandeau was happy to see his last daughter settled.

'Now, at last, I'll be able to live like an old fox .. .' he would say in his slightly cracked voice.

We spent three days in Nice, for I was not sufficiently affluent to pay a substitute, and I could not very well leave my patients for any longer than that.

My mother had gained a daughter, a daughter more docile than if she had been her own child. She continued to take charge of the house.

'What shall I do, Mama?' Jeanne would ask with angelic sweetness.

'You must rest, daughter. In your condition ..

For Jeanne became pregnant right away. I wanted to send her to the hospital at La Roche-sur-Yon for her confinement. I was a little frightened. My father-in-law laughed at me.

'Our midwife here will do the job just as well... She has brought a good third of the village into the world .. .'

It was, nevertheless, a difficult confinement. But my father-in-law continued to encourage me:

'With my wife, the first time, it was even worse. But, you'll see, with the second one ..

I had always talked about a son, I don't know why. The women - I mean my mother and Jeanne - had set their minds on this idea of a boy.

It turned out to be a girl, and my wife was laid up for three months after the baby was born.

Excuse me, your Honour, if I speak of her in what must seem a somewhat cavalier fashion. The truth is that I did not really know her, that I never knew her.

She was a part of the background of my daily life. A part of the conventions. I was a doctor. I had an office, a cheerful sunny house. I had married a sweet, well-bred young girl. She had just presented me with a child, and I was giving her the best possible care.

In retrospect this seems to me terrible. Because I never tried to know what she thought, to know what she really was.

We slept in the same bed for four years. We spent our evenings together with Mama, sometimes with her father, who would drop in for a nightcap before going to bed.

For me it is a photograph that has already faded. I would not have been in the least indignant if the Judge had pointed a menacing finger at me and said:

'You killed her...'

For it is true. Only, in her case, I didn't know it. If I had suddenly been asked:

'Do you love your wife?'

I should have answered with perfect candour:

'But, of course!'

Because it is understood that one loves one's wife. Because that is as far as I could see. It is understood also that one loves one's children. Everyone kept saying:

'The next one will be a fine big boy.'

And I let myself be beguiled by this idea of having a fine big boy. It pleased my mother too.

I killed her because of this idea of having a fine big boy which they had put into my head and which I finally came to believe was my own wish.

When Jeanne had a miscarriage after her first baby, I was a little worried.

'It happens to every woman ...' her father said. 'You'll see, after you've had a few more years practice ...'

'She isn't strong...'

'Don't you know that the women who seem the most delicate are usually the toughest. Look at your mama .. .'

So I went on. I said to myself that Dr Marchandeau was older than I, had more experience and that in consequence he must be right.

A fine big boy, very big, to the tune of at least twelve pounds, for I weighed twelve pounds when I was born.

Jeanne never said a word. She would follow in my mother's wake around the house.

'Can't I help you, Mama?'

I was out on my big motor-cycle all day, visiting patients, fishing. But I did not drink. I was just barely unfaithful to Jeanne.

We spent the evenings together, the three or the four of us. Then we would go upstairs to bed. I used to say to Jeanne jokingly:

'Shall we make that son tonight?'

She would smile shyly. She was very shy.

She became pregnant again. Everybody was enchanted and predicted the famous twelve-pound boy. As for me, I gave her tonics, hypodermics.

'The midwife is worth more than all those damn surgeons!' my father-in-law kept saying.

When it became necessary to resort to forceps, they sent for me. The sweat poured off my eyelids so that I could hardly see. My father-in-law was there, running back and forth like a little dog who has lost the scent.

'You'll see - everything will be all right ... ' he kept saying.

Well, I had the child. An enormous baby girl who weighed just under twelve pounds. But the mother died two hours later, without even a look of reproach, murmuring:

'How stupid that I'm not stronger.. .'

Chapter Three

During my wife's last pregnancy, I had intercourse with Laurette. If you count at least one drunkard to a village, a 'man who drinks' to every family, is there, I wonder, a single village at home that is without a girl like Laurette?

She worked as chambermaid at the mayor's. She was a good sort, really, and possessed the most amazing frankness, which many people would have called cynicism. Her mother was the priest's housekeeper, but that did not prevent Laurette from going to him to confess her sins.

Shortly after my installation at Ormois, she walked calmly into my office, like an old habitué.

'I
just came - I always do, from time to time - to make sure there's nothing the matter with me,' she explained, pulling up her skirts and removing her white drawers, which were stretched across a pair of plump round buttocks. 'Didn't the old doctor tell you about me?'

He had told me about most of his patients but had forgotten, or voluntarily neglected, to mention her. Yet she was one of his regular patients. Of her own accord, her skirt rolled up to her waist, she stretched out on the leather-covered couch I used for my examinations - and, with visible satisfaction, pulled up her knees and separated her large milk-white thighs. One felt that she woud have been perfectly happy to keep that pose all day.

Laurette never missed a chance of sleeping with a man.

She confessed that on certain days, when she foresaw this possibility, she went without drawers in order to save time.

I'm lucky, for it seems I can't have children. But I'm scared to death of catching some filthy disease so I come around regularly for an examination, just to play safe...'

I saw her once a month, sometimes oftener. She usually went to confession about the same time. A general house-cleaning, so to speak. Each time she would go through the same motions, would peel off her skin-tight drawers and stretch out on the couch.

I could have had intercourse with her on her very first visit. But instead I spent months desiring her. I would think about it at night in bed. And, with eyes closed, I would take my wife while conjuring up Laurette's broad white thighs. I thought of it so much that I began watching for her visits and once, passing her on the square, I could not help launching, with a nervous laugh:

'So, you don't come to see me any more?'

Why I resisted so long, I don't know. Perhaps because of the exalted idea I entertained of my profession. Perhaps because I was born in fear.

She came. She went through the ritual gestures, watching me with eyes full of curiosity which soon changed to amusement. She was only eighteen, scarcely more than a child herself, yet she looked upon me as a grown person looks upon a child whose thoughts she is able to read.

I was very red and clumsy. I joked nervously:

'Have you had a lot of them lately?'

And I imagined all the men, most of whom I knew, pushing the laughing girl down under them.

'I don't count them, you know. I take things as they come.'

Then, suddenly frowning, as if an idea had just occurred to her:

'Do I disgust you?'

With that, I made up my mind. A second later I was on top of her, like a great animal, and it was the first time that I ever made love to a woman in my office. The first time also that I ever made love to a woman who, although not a professional, was totally without a sense of shame, who was only mindful of her pleasure and of mine, increasing both by every possible means and using the very crudest words.

After Jeanne's death, Laurette continued to come to my office. Later on she came less often, for she became engaged, and to a very nice young fellow at that. But it didn't change her.

Was my mother aware of what was going on between the mayor's chambermaid and myself? Today, I wonder. There are many questions like this which I ask myself now that I am on the other side, not only about my mother, but about almost everybody I have known.

My mother has always moved about noiselessly, as though in church. Except when she went out, I can't remember ever seeing her in anything but bedroom slippers and I have never known any other woman able to come and go as she did, without a sound, without, so to speak, disturbing the air, so that as a small child I was often given a terrible fright when I ran into her, thinking her somewhere else.

'Have you been there all the time?'

How often I have pronounced those words, blushing as I did so!

I don't accuse her of curiosity. I think, however, that she listened at doors, that she has always listened at doors. I even think that, if I told her so, she would not be the least bit ashamed. It is the natural result of the idea she has of her role in life, which is to protect. And in order to protect, one has to know.

Did she know that I slept with Laurette before Jeanne's death? I am not sure. Afterwards, she could not have helped knowing. It is only now, after all this time, that I realize it. I can still hear her anxious voice saying:

'It seems that when she is married, Laurette will go to live at La Rochelle with her husband who intends to open a shop again ...'

There are so many things that I understand and among them some which frighten me, frighten me all the more because for years I lived without ever suspecting them! Have I really lived? I begin to wonder if I have, to think that I have spent my whole life in a waking dream.

Everything was easy. Everything was regulated. My days followed each other in a slow, even rhythm about which I did not need to bother my head.

Everything was regulated, as I say, everything, except my appetite for women. I don't say for love, but for women. As the doctor of the village, I thought I was bound to be more discreet than other men. I was haunted by the idea of a scandal that would make people point the finger of shame at me and that would create around me in the village a sort of invisible barrier. The sharper and the more painful my sexual desires, the greater the force of my fear, until it even translated itself into childish nightmares.

What frightens me, your Honour, is to think that a woman, my mother, guessed all this.

I began going to La Roche-sur-Yon more and more frequently, for it took no time on my big motor-cycle. I had a few friends there, doctors, lawyers, whom I would meet in a café where there were always two or three women sitting at the back near the bar, and for two years I was obsessed by a desire to sleep with them without ever being able to make up my mind to take them to the nearest hotel.

Coming back to Ormois, I would often ride through all the village streets and all the roads round the village in the hope of meeting Laurette in some unfrequented spot.

That was what I was reduced to, and my mother knew it. With my two little girls to take care of she had, it is true, her hands full. But I am sure it was entirely on my account, and in spite of her horror of having a stranger in her house, that one fine day she decided to take a maid.

I must ask you to forgive me, your Honour, for lingering over these details which very probably seem sordid to you, but, you see, I have the impression that they are extremely important.

Her name was Lucile and she came, of course, from the country. She was seventeen. She was thin and her black hair was always wild. She was so shy that she would drop the plates if I spoke to her unexpectedly.

She rose early, at six o'clock in the morning, and she was the first to go downstairs to light the fire so that my mother could look after my little daughters.

It was in the winter. I can still see the stove smoking, still smell the odour of damp wood which refuses to light, then the aroma of coffee. Almost every morning, inventing some excuse, I would go down to the kitchen - the excuse, for example, of going to gather mushrooms. How many times have I gone out to gather mushrooms in the wet meadows only that I might be alone for a moment with Lucile, who never dressed until later and had nothing on but a wrapper over her nightgown.