Fire in the Blood (10 page)

She looked at him with an air of bravado that infuriated Francois.

"Aren't you ashamed of yourself?"

"Ashamed? Why?"

"Because you've done something wrong," he replied coldly. "Your husband may have been old, but it was your duty to respect him. It is revolting to have been unfaithful to a man who took you in when you had nothing, who spoiled you and loved you, and who left you his fortune. You took his money and bought yourself a young lover ..."

"This has nothing to do with money."

"It always has to do with money, Madame. I'm an old man and you're a child. Of course, what you do is none of my business, but since you think it appropriate to confide in me, perhaps you will allow me to explain this hideous thing you can't see. You cheated on your husband in a vile manner. He leaves you a fortune. You and your fiance will live off that fortune. A fine pair! And you'll have the memory of a crime . . . since you're telling me that your miserable love
r k
illed our poor Jean. What a wonderful future you'll have together, Madame. You're young now. All you can see is what gives you pleasure. Think of what it will be like for the two of you when you're old."

"We'll be as happy as you are," she said quietly. "No, you won't."

"Are you sure of that?"

Her voice sounded so strange that Helene made a movement towards her and let out a sort of plaintive cry.

Brigitte seemed to hesitate, then continued, "Your morals are beyond reproach," she said. "Yet, wasn't Madame Erard a widow when you married her?"

"What are you getting at? How dare you compare yourself with my wife?"

"I mean no offence," she replied in the same quiet, steady tone, "I'm just asking ... Madame Erard was married before, like me, to an old, sick husband. She was faithful to him, but I'd like her to tell me whether it was always easy or pleasant to remain faithful."

"I didn't love my first husband, it's true," said Helene, "but I didn't marry him against my will. So I had no right to complain and neither do you ..."

"There are many things that influence our will," Brigitte said bitterly, "poverty, for example, or being abandoned ..." "Being abandoned, oh ..."

"Yes, exactly. Do you think I wasn't abandoned?" "But Mademoiselle Cecile ..."

"Mademoiselle Cecile did everything she could for me: she took the place of my mother. Still, my mother neve
r g
ave me a second thought. When I was left all alone she made no attempt to contact me. So the first man who came along . . . Do you really think that a young woman of twenty willingly marries an old farmer of sixty? A harsh, stingy old man? Willingly? You call that willingly? And your own daughter, your legitimate daughter" (she emphasised the word) "Colette really did marry Jean Dorin willingly, but that didn't stop her becoming Marc Ohnet's mistress. Ask her about it; she'll tell you how she allowed Marc to visit her at night, how her husband found out and how he died."

Then she told us what had happened. Francois and Helene listened in stunned silence. Tears were streaming down Helene 's face.

"Are you crying because of your daughter?" Brigitte asked. "No need to worry. She'll forget, things like this always get forgotten. It's easy to live with the memory of a bad deed, as you put it, or even a crime. You've had a good life," she added, turning towards Helene.

"A crime ..." the poor woman protested softly.

"I call it a crime to have a child and abandon it. At any rate that's worse than cheating on an old husband you don't love. What do you think, Monsieur Erard?"

"What do you mean?"

Helene was trembling but managed to compose herself. She gestured to Brigitte to be silent. Then she turned towards her husband. "Since you must know, I prefer you hear it from me. This child has the right to speak as sh
e d
oes: I had a lover before we were married" (her wrinkled face blushed) "an affair that lasted only a few weeks. I had a baby girl. I didn't want to tell you what had happened or force the child on you. But I didn't want to abandon her either. My half-sister, Cecile, was free and alone; she took care of Brigitte. I thought she was happy. Little by little ..."

She fell silent.

"Little by little, you forgot all about me," said Brigitte. "But I've always known . . . One day you came to Coudray with your husband and Colette, who was still very young. She was crying; she wanted a drink. You sat her on your lap; you kissed her. She had such a pretty little dress and a gold necklace ... And I ... I was so jealous. You didn't even look at me ..."

"I didn't dare. I was so afraid I'd give myself away ..."

"That's not true," said Brigitte. "You had simply forgotten all about me. But I always knew ... Cecile told me. She hated you, your sister Cecile. She hated you almost without realising it. You were younger, prettier, happier than she was. You have been happy. You know that's true. Well, let me live as you have done. Don't be too harsh toward Colette, who thinks you're a saint, who'd rather die than let you see her for who she really is. As for me, well, I'm not as particular. You won't go to the police, will you, Monsieur Erard? These are family matters and must be kept to ourselves."

She waited for a reply, but none came. She got up, carefully picked up her handbag and gloves, walked over to the mirror and adjusted her hat. Just then the maid came in to take away the coffee cups, full of attentiveness and curiosity. Helene accompanied the young woman through the garden to the gate.

"Since this doesn't concern me, I'll get going," I said. "Be careful not to say things you'll regret later."

Helene gave me a meaningful look. "Don't worry, Silvio."

Francois didn't reply when I said goodbye. He hadn't budged; he seemed suddenly very old and a certain fragility in his fearures stood out more than usual; he looked like a man who had been mortally wounded.

I left, but I didn't go home. My heart was beating faster than ever before. My entire past had come back to life. I felt as if I'd been asleep for twenty years and had woken to pick up my book at the very page I'd left off. Without thinking, I went and sat down on the bench beneath the study window, so I could hear every word they said.

For a very long time there was silence. Then he called out, "Helene ..."

I was half hidden by the large rose bush. But I could see right inside the room. I saw the husband and wife sitting next to one another, holding hands; they hadn't said a single word. A single kiss, a single look between them was enough to wipe away any sin. Nevertheless, he questioned her, very quietly, ashamed: "Who was he?"

"He's dead."

"Did I know him?"

"No."

"But you loved him?"

"No. You're the only man I've ever loved. It was before we were married."

"But we were already in love then. At least, I was already in love with you."

"How can I make you understand what it was like?" she cried. "It was over twenty years ago. For a short time I wasn't 'myself.' It was as if ... as if someone had burst into my life and taken it over. That poor unhappy child accuses me of having forgotten. And it's true, I did forget. Not the facts, of course. Not those terrible months before she was born, not her birth, not the affair ... But I did forget why I acted the way I did. I can't understand what made me do it any more. It's like a foreign language that you learn and then forget." She spoke passionately, very quickly and quietly.

I was straining to hear, but couldn't make everything out. Then I heard: "... To love each other the way we do ... and then discover the woman you love is someone else."

"But I'm not someone else, Francois. Francois, my darling . . . It was the other man who had someone else: a mask, a lie. You and you alone own the true woman. Look at me. I'm the same Helene who makes you so happy, who has slept in your arms for the past twenty years, who looks after your home, who feels when you're in pain even when you're far away and suffers more than you do, the sam
e w
oman who spent four years while you were away at war terrified for you, thinking only of you, waiting for you to come back."

She stopped and there was a long silence. Holding my breath, I slipped out of my hiding place and crossed the garden to the road. I was walking quickly. It felt as if some forgotten fire had been rekindled in my body. It was strange: I'd stopped looking at Helene as a woman such a long time ago. Sometimes I think about the little black woman who was my mistress in the Congo, and the English redhead whose skin was white as milk, who lived with me for two years in Canada . . . But Helene! Even yesterday it would have been quite an effort of will to think, "But, of course, yes, there was Helene." She was like those ancient parchments on which the Greeks and Romans wrote erotic stories and which, much later, the monks scraped away at in order to place over the top some illuminated life of a saint. The woman of twenty years ago had disappeared for ever beneath the Helene of today. The real woman, she'd said. I surprised myself by saying out loud, "No! She's lying."

Afterwards I laughed at myself for being so upset. After all, who knows the real woman? That's the question. The lover or the husband? Are they really so different? Or are they subtly interwoven and inseparable? Are they moulded from two substances that interact to form a third person who doesn't resemble either of them? It all comes down to the same thing: neither the husband nor the lover knows the real woman. Yet the real one is always the most uncomplicate
d o
ne. But I've lived long enough to know that there's no such thing as uncomplicated emotions.

Not far from my house I ran into a neighbour, old Jault, who was bringing his cows home. We walked together for a while. I could tell he wanted to ask me something but was hesitating. Just as I was about to leave and go inside, he decided to speak. He was absent-mindedly stroking one of his cows, a lovely reddish animal whose horns were in the shape of a lyre. "Is it true what people are saying, that Madame Declos is going to sell her land?"

"I haven't heard anyone say that."

He seemed disappointed. "But they can't go on living around here."

"Why not?" I asked.

"It'd just be better," he muttered vaguely. Then he added, "I heard Monsieur Erard's going to the police-is he? Seems there was something shady about Monsieur Dorin's death and that Marc Ohnet's mixed up in it."

"Certainly not," I replied. "Monsieur Erard is much too sensible to go to the police with no proof but the gossip of a young farmhand. I'm only talking to you now because you seem to know a lot about it, Monsieur Jault. Don't forget that if a man's unjustly accused of something without proof, he can also go to the police and complain about whoever's talking. Understand?"

He picked up his sack and rounded up his animals. "You can't stop people talking," he said bluntly. "Of course, no one around here wants to get mixed up with the police. If the family doesn't do anything, then no one else will do it fo
r t
hem, that's for sure. But since you know Madame Declos and that Marc Ohnet ..."

"I only know them a little ..."

"Well, tell them to sell up and go. It'd just be better." He touched his cap, gave a mumbled goodbye and left. It was getting dark.

I
GOT HOME SO LATE, having spent the evening in the village bar, that my housekeeper was worried. I'd bee
n d
rinking. I'm never normally drunk. Wine is my friend and companion in the wild, isolated place where I live; it satisfies me as a woman might. I belong to a long line of farmers from Burgundy who can knock back a bottle of wine with each meal as if it were baby's milk; alcohol never goes to my head. On this occasion, however, I wasn't my usual self. Instead of soothing me, the wine made me agitated, caused me to feel a kind of rage. It seemed as if my old housekeeper was being deliberately slow. I was desperate for her to leave, as if I were expecting someone. And, in fact, I was: I was expecting my youth. Memories of the past would return to us more often if only we sought them out, sought their intense sweetness. But we let them slumber within us and, worse, we let them die, rot, so much so that the generous impulses that sweep through our souls when we are twenty we later cal
l n
aive, foolish . . . Our purest, most passionate loves take on the depraved appearance of sordid pleasure.

This evening it wasn't only my memory that relived the past, it was my heart itself. This anger, impatience, this eager thirst for happiness, I remembered them all. Yet no real woman awaited me, just a phantom, created from the same fabric as my dreams. A memory. Intangible, cold. So you need warmth, do you, old man with a withered heart, you need a little fire? I look around at my house and am stunned. I, who used to be so full of energy, so ambitious, can I really be living like this, dragging myself from my bed to my table, then back to my bed again, day after day? How can I live this way? It's as if I no longer exist. I don't think about anything, don't love anything, don't desire anything. There are no newspapers, no books in my house. I fall asleep beside the fire, I smoke my pipe. I stroke my dog. I talk to the housekeeper. That's all, nothing more. I want my youth back. Come back to me, youth. Speak through me. Tell this Helene who is so sensible, so virtuous, tell her that she was lying. Tell her that the man who loved her isn't dead, that even though she quickly buried me, I'm still alive and I remember everything. She was lying. The real woman hidden inside her, the passionate, happy, daring woman who delighted in pleasure-I'm the only one who really knew her, no one else. Francois owns only a pale, cold imitation of that woman, as artificial as an epitaph on a tombstone, but I once possessed what is now dead and gone, I possessed her youth.