Fire in the Blood (11 page)

Come on now . . . that last glass of wine has left me strangely elated. I must get hold of myself. The housekeeper is looking at me in astonishment. The soup has been on the table for a long time, yet I've been sitting here in the kitchen, in the large wicker armchair, scrawling these words, smoking, kicking away the dog who's come over to be stroked. I need to be alone. I don't know why. I can't bear the presence of another human being tonight. All I want are ghosts .. . I'm not hungry. I tell Louise to clear up and go home. She shuts up the hens. All these familiar sounds . . . The shutter that creaks, the latch that squeaks, the sigh of the bucket as it is let down into the well with its bottle of white wine and slab of butter; it will keep them cool until tomorrow. I push away the bottle standing next to me. I push it away, then change my mind; I pick it up again, fill my glass. The wine gives my thoughts clarity. And now, Helene, now we're alone.

It's exactly what a virtuous woman would say to her husband: "What happened twenty years ago was nothing but a moment of madness." Really? A moment of madness! I say that it was the only time you were truly alive. Ever since then you've been pretending, you've gone through the motions of living, but that true passion for life, the kind you savour only once in a lifetime-remember the taste that young lips have: like ripe fruit-you experienced that with me and with me only. "Poor old Silvio, my dear friend, poor Silvio in his rat hole." Is it really true that you forgot me? I have to be fair. I forgo
t y
ou as well. It took hearing what that young woman said yesterday, and Colette 's despair and futile shame and, above all, drinking too much wine to bring you back to me. But the next time I see you I won't let you go so quickly, you can be sure of that. You will hear the truth, you will hear it from me, just as you did in the past when I was the first man to make you understand how beautiful your body was and what a marvellous source of pleasure to you. (You didn't want to, you were shy and innocent back then .. . Still, you gave in. And what a lover you became.) And how we loved each other ... For, you understand, it's very convenient to say, "I lost my head for a while, it was a few weeks of madness, I shudder to think of it." But you can't erase the truth, and the truth is we loved each other. You loved me so much that you forgot Francois even existed, so much that you did whatever I wanted in order not to lose me.

Oh, yes, just now you wore the face of an honest, ageing woman, the face of a good mother, shocked to find out that her daughter Colette let another man into her house when her husband was away, into that idyllic MoulinNeuf. But what did you do? She takes after you, your daughter. And the other one too, she takes after the two of us. They are both utterly alive, while we have been dead for twenty years; yes, dead, because we don't love anything any more and that's the truth. Because you're not going to try to tell me, are you, that you love Francois? Of course, he's your friend, your husband, you're used t
o b
eing together. You could live together as brother and sister. In fact, you surely have lived together as brother and sister since Loulou was born, but you never loved him, you loved me, me.

Come here, listen, sit down next to me, think back. Have you really become a hypocrite? Of course not, it's as I thought, you've simply become someone else. How did you put it . . . You were right: at twenty someone bursts into our life. Yes, some winged stranger, leaping, radiant, who sets ablaze our blood, ravages our lives, then disappears. Well, I want to bring that stranger back to life. Listen to him. Look at him. Do you recognise him? Do you remember that long, cold, white corridor and your elderly husband (not Francois, but your first husband, the one who died so long ago, the one who nobody ever talks about), your husband in his bed with the door left ajar, for he was jealous and suspicious, and how we kissed, you and I, and how the lamp cast that great shadow across the ceiling, the shadow that was you and me, or so we thought? In reality it was neither of us, it was the face of the stranger, like us but different from us, the stranger who disappeared so very long ago.

Helene, my darling, do you remember the day we met? You were merely a girl when Francois first saw you. He talked about your past that evening you all came to drink punch with me, when Colette got engaged. I'm not interested in that. You were no child when I met you. No, you were a woman, a woman tied to an old man, waiting for him to di
e s
o you could marry Francois. He was gone, living abroad. He had a job teaching French at a university in Bohemia. As for me, I'd just returned from a long journey. You . . . you were young and beautiful, and you were bored. But wait. Let's start from the beginning...

HELENE'S FIRST HUSBAND was a Montrifaut, one of my mother's cousins. I was living in Africa whe
n t
hey married. It was before the 1914 war. Helene had been a child when I left. Yet I remember that when my mother told me about her marriage-my dear mother wrote to me every week, a kind of diary in which she told me about everyone and everything in the region, in order, no doubt, to make me feel nostalgic so I'd want to come home-I remember that I thought for a long time about that young girl I barely knew. I remember the stifling hot night, the hut, the hurricane lamp in a corner, the lizards chasing flies up the white walls, my black mistress, Fife, with her green turban. I daydreamed as I read my letter; I pictured the ill-matched couple and found myself saying out loud, "What a shame."

It might be impossible to predict the future, but I believe that certain powerful emotions make themselves felt months, even years, in advance, through a strange quiver i
n t
he heart. For example, I only understood the gloomy sadness I had always felt in train stations at dusk when, years later during my time as a soldier in the war, I suddenly recognised it as I waited on a platform for the train that would take me back to the front. In the same way, years before love came into my life, it swept over my heart like a gentle breeze. That night in Africa I was hot, thirsty, feverish. At first I dozed, then I fell into a deep sleep where I dreamt I was with a woman, a Frenchwoman, a young girl from back home. But every time I got close to her she slipped away. I stretched out my arms and, for a second, I could feel her young cheeks, covered in tears. I remember thinking, "Why is this young woman crying? Why won't she let me hold her?" I wanted to pull her close to me but she disappeared. I looked for her through the crowd, the kind of crowd you find at a rural church on Sundays, a crowd of farmers dressed in big black smocks. I still remember one detail: an angry wind was blowing, from God knows where, swelling the farmers' smocks as if they were the sails of a boat. When I woke up I said to myself, "How odd-I just dreamt about that little Helene who has married Montrifaut," even though, in my dream, I couldn't see the young woman's face.

Two years later I finally returned to France.

I would have continued lodging with my mother if she'd let me live the way I wanted to: spending my days in the woods and my evenings with her. But naturally she wanted to see me married. In these parts marriages are arranged during long, dreary dinners to which all the young women of marriageable age are invited. The men arrive, weighing up in their minds how much the dowry is worth and what the expectations are, in the same way you go to an auction knowing what each item is valued at, but not knowing how high the bidding will go.

Country dinners! Soup thick enough for a spoon to stand up in, enormous pike from the lake on someone's estate, tasty, but so full of bones you feel as if you're eating a thornbush. And no one says a word. All those thick necks leaning forward and slowly chewing, like cattle in a shed. And after the fish there's the first meat course, preferably roast goose, then the second meat dish, this one cooked in a sauce that gives off an aroma of wine and herbs. Then comes the cheese, which everyone eats from the end of their knives; and to finish off, a pie-apple or cherry, depending on the time of year. Afterwards there's nothing to do but go into the sitting room and choose from among the throng of young women in their pink dresses (before the war all eligible young ladies wore pink dresses, from the candy pink of sugar-coated almonds to the shocking pink of sliced ham), choose from among this crowd of young women, with their little gold necklaces, their hair tied into a chignon at the backs of their necks, with their raw-silk gloves and rough hands, the person with whom you will spend the rest of your life. At that time Cecile Coudray was one such woman. She who was thirty-two or thirty-three but still paraded abou
t i
n the virginal pink dress by her family in the hope of finding her a husband. Poor, dried-up Cecile, with her thin lips, sitting not far from her younger half-sister, who was married and happy.

The first evening I saw Helene she was wearing a red velvet dress, which was considered rather daring at the time and in that place. She was a young woman with black hair . . . See, I want to describe her, but I can't. No doubt I looked at her too closely right from the start, the way you look at everything you covet. Do you not know the shape and colour of the fruit you bring to your lips? It seems that from the first moment you see the woman you love, she is as close as a kiss. And I loved her. Dark eyes, fair skin, a dress of red velvet, a look of passion, joy and apprehension all at once, that expression of defiance, anxiety and vibrancy, unique to the young . . . I remember ...

Her husband must have been about the same age as old Declos just before he died, but he wasn't a farmer. My cousin had been a lawyer in Dijon; he was rich; he'd left his post a few months before his marriage and bought the house that Helene inherited and where she now lives with her second husband and her children. He was a tall, pale old man, frail, with translucent skin; my mother told me he'd been remarkably handsome in the past and well known for his success with women. He barely allowed his young wife to leave his side; if she walked away he would say "Helene," his voice almost a whisper, and then she .. .

Oh, that gesture of annoyance, the way her slender shoulders would suddenly tremble, as a colt trembles when he feels the whip against his coat . . . I think he called her in that way solely for the pleasure of seeing that sign of anger and the satisfaction of feeling she was obeying him. I saw her and I remembered my dream.

I was young then. I wonder if the face of the young man I used to be still lives on in someone's memory? Helene, surely, has forgotten it. But perhaps one of those young women in pink who has grown old and has never seen me again, perhaps she might remember that thin young man, sunburned, with his little black moustache and sharp teeth. I told Colette about that moustache once, to make her laugh. No, I wasn't the typical young man of 191
0
: straight centre parting, hair slicked down like a wax head at the barber's. I was livelier, stronger, cheerful, more adventurous than even the young people of today. Marc Ohnet bears some resemblance to the man I was. Like him, I was never held back by being overly virtuous. I would have been capable of throwing a jealous husband into the river, capable of drinking, seducing my neighbour's wife, fighting, enduring utter fatigue, the harshest climates. I was young.

So that was our first meeting: a country sitting room with a grand piano, its lid open, so you could see the keys; a young woman dressed in salmon pink-Cecile Coudray-singing "More today than yesterday, but much less than tomorrow": all the local friends and relation
s d
ozing off as they digested, with difficulty, their roast goose and jugged hare; and a woman in a red dress sitting next to me, so close that all I had to do was reach out my hand to touch her, just as in my dream, so close that I could smell her delicate fresh skin, so close and yet so far . . .

As I MADE MY WAY back home that night long ago, I
was determined to see Helene again, with a plan t
o s
educe her firmly in mind: she was twenty, beautiful and had an old husband; it seemed impossible that she could resist me for long. I imagined innocent meetings at first, then more secret, illicit encounters, then an affair lasting a few months until the moment of my departure. Now that so many years have passed, it is strange to think that our relationship was indeed like that: the way I crudely created it from my dreams and desires. What I could not foresee was the flame that would be locked inside me, whose cinders would continue to glow for years to come, to burn in my heart. How strange it is when something that we have desired so much actually happens. When I was a boy, playing at the beach, I remember a game I loved, which was an omen of my future life. I would dig a channel with high sides in the sand for the sea to fill. But when the water flooded the path I had created for it with such violence that it destroyed everything in its way: my castle
s m
ade of pebbles, my dikes of sand. It swept away everything, destroying it all, then disappeared, leaving me with a heavy heart, yet not daring to ask for pity, since the sea had only responded to my call. It's the same with love. You call out for it, you plan its course. The wave crashes into your heart, but it's so different from how you imagined it, so bitter and icy.

I tried to see Helene at her husband's house. Needing an excuse, I remembered that she grew magnificent roses in her garden. They were crimson, full-bodied roses with long stems and sharp thorns as hard as steel. They gave off very little fragrance but had this familiar, sturdy look about them, something plump and bright, like the cheek of a beautiful country girl. I made up some story. I wanted to surprise my mother by ordering the same rose bushes for her in town. I used this as a pretext to go to Helene 's house in order to ask her the exact name of the flowers.