The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century (26 page)

I can assure you that life hasn’t always been much fun for my wife! Perhaps that’s why she decided to deceive me? Anyway, I won’t deny that I have my faults. It doesn’t much matter now in any case. I was jealous. I was too in love with her. She was extremely beautiful, I worshipped her body. I would like to have died from my relentless love of her. Whenever we had a quarrel – which was every week – and I was on the point of raising my fist to strike her, all she had to do was to laugh, show her white teeth set in their rosy gums, and my hands would unclench to grab her, twist her, pull her over; my kisses would press against her teeth, and my fury would dissolve into ecstasy.

I think that amused her.

Because she played with me, driving me frantic quite consciously, I believe, just for the fun of seeing me like that and putting herself in danger, for the perverse pleasure of being frightened and immersing herself in an electric atmosphere, to stimulate her own nerves by provoking mine, to feel more alive, experience stronger sensations, and to prepare that moment when my rage and her laughter would meet in kisses.

Then one day, she grew bored.

To tell the truth, we weren’t made for each other. We each loved in a different way. Because she did love me, I’m quite certain of that. What woman could resist the contagious intensity of such love? She loved me in her own way, which wasn’t mine, but which was no better than mine. What she loved in me was her own pride at being stronger than my rage, she loved the certainty of victory, the all-powerfulness of her laugh, her continual superiority; what she admired in my love was herself, proud to give so much, and vaguely annoyed at receiving so little in return. For no other purpose except to laugh and to dominate, she gave herself gaily, passionately: once round the dance floor, once round the heart.

One evening, she changed partner.

Did she intend to destroy me or herself? That’s the rub! Like every woman, she thought that I hadn’t suspected anything. For a long while she was right perhaps, and I didn’t suspect. But the day it dawned on me, the day my suspicions were aroused, the dance changed pace! Think of a waltz ending with
The Race to the Abyss
…

First, I realised from her appearance that something new had happened. But what? Berthe had changed, my love for her no longer even amused her. Why? She suddenly seemed to fall into a state of depression. How come? I’m no dummy, but I am jealous. I probably discovered the truth straight away. I’m exaggerating a bit when I say that I discovered it: I just guessed it. I wasn’t really certain and I didn’t have any proof, just a feeling verging on a conviction which became stronger every day.

You might imagine that Berthe was totally unaware of my suspicions. But someone like me doesn’t hide anything, isn’t capable of it, and I didn’t even try to cover it up; you can read my thoughts from my face: she knew I was spying on her, but she still went on enjoying herself as before. My touchiness, my searching looks, those unexpected returns home, my silences, the interrogations which made me turn pale, so pale that I could feel it, and made my heart nearly burst, all acted as a continual warning, but she treated it all as just a game.

‘You’ll never catch me out, Nicolas …’

A new game, an entertaining novelty! She played her role of childish innocence; and I played mine of tragic lover. She didn’t understand the danger, or rather, she understood just enough to know what was needed to liven up the game. She never guessed that the stakes were life and death because she was never afraid, never flinched when I stared her straight in the eye.

How many times did I try to read into the back of her eyes, but it was like stirring up the mud at the bottom of a pond with a stick, and I saw only cloudy water. I crushed her body under my own, and with my hands behind her neck, I squeezed her bony little head covered in hair between my fingers, as if to make the truth spurt forth, from the sockets of her eyeballs. Ah! The black holes revealing nothing! The bony little envelope guards its secret: you hold the truth, there in the palm of your hand, you can weigh it and press it against yourself, or crack the fragile casket which encloses it simply by squeezing; but the truth itself, that you will never set eyes on.

Berthe would laugh:

‘How funny you are …’

Her laugh coursed through me, cooling my mouth, and clouding my eyes and, while I sobbed under her kisses, they were mocking me.

Of course, she was playing on my suspicions and gained a pleasure from them that my simple ignorance would never have provided. My love no longer bored her now she was aware of my anguish at her sharing her body with another, and the shame I felt. When, with tremulous lips and hands, I explored her for signs of another’s mouth and hands, she seemed to divine my thoughts, and she would lie outstretched, offering to my gaze the perfect whiteness of her body as if to say: ‘Go on! Search as much as you please! Cuckoo … But you won’t find anything!’

She would laugh at my trembling caresses.

She never objected, never defended herself, and anyone else would have believed that this careless impregnability hid only innocence; towards the end, I could even have believed it myself, so great was my need to love and to keep her! But no sooner did she see my trust begin to assuage my doubts than she would revive them all with her dripping laugh, as if mockingly to repeat:

‘Perhaps, yes; perhaps, no. What’s the good of looking, you’ll never find the answer.’

Or again:

‘What’s the good of looking? Even if you found the answer, you’d never be capable of leaving me!’

She would kiss me delectably, driving me wilder and wilder, and her burnt almond breath would taunt me:

‘Tell me, could you give all this up? Tell me, could you?’

Not while I was still alive, and that’s a fact; and I knew it as well as her. But Berthe never considered the fact that you can die, and that once you are dead you don’t care about anything. She should have thought of that, rather than reassuring herself that while I might still be able to bear the torture of not being sure, a man such as myself would never be able to put up with the certainty, and that we would both of us have to die: her, so that no-one would ever touch her flesh again; me, so that I wouldn’t have to live without possessing her body.

She didn’t think of that! That’s why she’s dead!

The day of reckoning came, and brought death in its wake. The knowledge that death was unavoidable, indispensable even, came to me in a second. I never hesitated. There was no choice left to make: when it’s impossible to go on living, you die.

What a strange animal man is, though: a sort of calmness came over me as soon as I had realized. For a moment, it was a shock, a bit like being hit on your skull by a rock, with all the accompanying dizziness and flashing blue, orange, green and pink lights surrounded by black nothingness. Then, almost immediately, a profound feeling of serenity invaded my whole being. Perhaps I can make myself clearer if I compare this state to that of a bulb of mercury? Body and soul: I was a round, opaque mass, and with every step or thought the flat level rose and fell with scarcely …

This sense of calmness, you see, resembled a deliverance, a conviction that I had done with everything and that we were already dead. All the arrangements for our suicide took care of themselves and, apart from a few gestures on my part, everything organized, prepared and decided itself without me having to reach any decisions of my own.

Exceptions? For example, not to say anything to Berthe, to possess her one last time and, in the middle of the consummation, to explain everything to her and see that laugh disappear from her lips once and for all! Then, to die together painlessly in one last embrace. There are vegetal poisons which can induce such a death: they have the effect of immediately paralysing all muscular movements; the muscles, the heart along with the rest, seize up; life stops; the circuit is broken: and you go out like an electric light.

I shan’t bore you with all the ruses that were needed to get hold of the poison: just to say that the drop of death was encased in a tiny, fragile glass phial.

Nor shall I linger over the other preparations. So as to die in peace, I took Berthe to our holiday villa, which was sure to be deserted at this time of year and where I knew nobody would intrude on our final hour.

As the hour approached, my courage nearly failed. It was evening: my beloved was already undressing, with all the graceful movements I knew so well, and held so dear, beside the bed in which she would stretch out her beautiful body in that last repose: she smiled wickedly towards her tomb. My anger evaporated in a flash, and an overwhelming sense of pity held me in its sway before all this beauty which would in a moment cease to exist.

I had to go out and breathe in a little fresh night air to regain my composure.

At last, I went in again and up to the bedroom.

Berthe was in bed. On seeing how pallid and serious I looked, her pretty white teeth broke out into a laugh:

‘What a long face, darling!’

How she laughed – for the last time! Her lovely head, on the pillow, was framed by dishevelled hair tumbling toward her naked shoulders: my absence had been put to good purpose, to arrange the scene to her advantage, and she called to me flirtatiously:

‘That’s right … Laugh at me, darling … Look at me … Come here!’

She held out two plump arms to me and wiggled her fingers with an air of impatience, coaxing and voluptuous, as if to overwhelm my senses with her body. But I resisted, so as to let her live a while longer and to contemplate her for a few moments before …

At last, I went to sit on the edge of the bed and she drew me down by the neck; but I turned my lips away and struggled against my desire; she always welcomed a challenge to her ability at overcoming my will: her laughing mouth sought mine; her last laugh, warm and damp …

I couldn’t have resisted much longer. As soon as our lips touched, the thought came flooding back to me of the other man who had partaken of that kiss! A kiss which could exist no longer now that it wasn’t mine alone: Angrily, I threw back the sheets so as to contemplate the adorable monument to my former love, my defunct happiness, to feast my eyes on it as I left this world.

I remember muttering at one point: ‘Berthe … I know …’

Her eyelids were closed and she didn’t bother to open them, but she smiled, and I went on almost immediately: I whispered the name of the other man, and the street in which they met.

Then she did open her eyes and, suddenly alarmed, probed mine as if to read in turn the extent of my knowledge …

She was staring into my eyes so fixedly that she didn’t see me slip the glass phial into my mouth.

Perhaps she didn’t even hear me as I screamed:

‘Die!’

All I remember was this: her pupils under mine, next to mine, two fierce pupils trying desperately to understand, two frightened holes against a blue night. And this: my mouth glued against hers, and the frantic crunching of the phial breaking against our teeth.

That was all.

***

And after that, immediately after that, the painless night, nothingness …

And then, with no perceptible beginning, the half suggestion of a dream, a colourless dream however, as empty of images as of ideas; a sense of existence, but a murky, ill-defined sense, as if far away; pain, yet a pain hovering as if in mid-air, not unlike, I suppose, the experience of patients who have been operated on under chloroform.

Then, time passing …

While in this comatose state, the perception of life began to return: I still couldn’t feel anything, but I was aware of myself. My growing self-awareness was uniquely, through the medium of pain, which in some way seemed to be a stage of my own pre-existence, a point of focus.

And the pain, while yet confused, became more distinct. It became more and more defined. It was still general, and impossible to localise. But as time went by, it too became more specific until, all over and at the very same moment, I could feel each of my individual tortured muscles. Imagine a dissection lesson on a living animal, and all the innumerable fasciculi of flesh being manipulated by pincers, by thousands of automated pincers, all working in concert to tear, expose, detach and compress every fibre of every muscle simultaneously, without neglecting a single one!

From their agony, I could identify each and every cell; they groaned; competing to signal their presence. Instead of diminishing in intensity, the longer this torture continued, the more it gained in acuteness.

It was during this period that I completely regained consciousness.

My flesh was being twisted and pulled, but only in my imagination; for my whole body remained unaltered and, despite writhing in agony, it seemed to me that I never actually moved. My whole being was immersed in pain, but only my inner being was reeling. Not a single reflex action ran through my inert mass. Under a mask of impassiveness, I was a raw lump of suffering, a sleeping statue of convulsive molecules, a block of aching marble, hardly alive, but so, so sensitive.

Then the moment came when I could see.

My faculties of perception, as if shedding their scales, imperceptibly returned: I began by being able to distinguish shapes close at hand; but what I saw failed to register itself on me immediately because of the pain, the pain occupied all my attention; images entered my brain and lodged there, waiting for me to acknowledge them, which I did, by and by.

The first sense to completely reawaken was that of my pale epidermis, and I no doubt noticed it before the others because my sufferings had initially directed my renascent thoughts towards myself.

The only part of my body that I could see was my left hand and arm which lay in my direct line of vision; the sight of the rest was out of the question because I couldn’t move my eyes.

The second image, occurring almost simultaneously, was that of a black, swollen face in front of, but slightly below, my own, and which my gaze had stumbled on at the same time as I had noticed my own arm.

They were both wreathed in fog however.