“Since this doesn't concern me, I'll get going,” I said. “Be careful not to say things you'll regret later.”
Hélène gave me a meaningful look. “Don't worry, Silvio.”
François didn't reply when I said goodbye. He hadn't budged; he seemed suddenly very old and a certain fragility in his features 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, “Hélène …”
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, François. François, 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 Hélène 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 same woman 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 Hélène 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 Hélène! Even yesterday it would have been quite an effort of will to think, “But, of course, yes, there was Hélène.” 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 Hélène 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 uncomplicated one. 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 for them, 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 been drinking. 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 call naive, 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 Hélène 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. François 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.
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, Hélène, 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 forgot you 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 François 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 Moulin-Neuf. 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 François? Of course, he 's your friend, your husband, you're used to being 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 François, 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.
Hélène, my darling, do you remember the day we met? You were merely a girl when François 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 die so you could marry François. 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 …
HÉLÉNE'S FIRST HUSBAND was a Montrifaut, one of my mother's cousins. I was living in Africa when they married. It was before the 1914 war. Hélène 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, Fifé, 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 in the 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 Hélène 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 Cécile Coudray was one such woman. She who was thirty-two or thirty-three but still paraded about in the virginal pink dress by her family in the hope of finding her a husband. Poor, dried-up Cécile, with her thin lips, sitting not far from her younger half-sister, who was married and happy.
The first evening I saw Hélène 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 Hélène 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 “Hélène,” 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.