She needed Mathilde’s assistance precisely because she wanted to redress an injustice. If her husband had spoken to him as he had threatened to do (and his absence seemed to confirm that this might be the case) she wanted to go out into the town this morning, accompanied by Mathilde, in the hope that they might meet him. She never wished to see him again, but she wanted to give him her assurance that however unsuitable, imprudent and mistaken his pursuit of her had been, she had never for one moment considered it base.
She foresaw that Mathilde would dismiss this plan as quixotic and childish. But she knew that Mathilde would do what she asked: partly out of friendship, even more out of her fear of boredom.
What are we waiting for in this horrid little provincial town? Mathilde had said yesterday morning, I believe we are waiting, my dear, for the hero to die.
As the local train drew into Domodossola station, Monsieur Hennequin opened the carriage door, ready to jump down on the platform. He was not impatient and he knew he had time to kill, but the more briskly he acted, the more certain he was of the correctness of his decision. A number of workers got out of the same train, but instead of making for the exit they crossed the lines towards the shunting yards. There were no cabs waiting outside the station and he could only see one other person at the far end of the Corso.
He passed his hand over his side pocket to satisfy himself once again that the automatic pistol, to obtain which he had made the tedious night journey, was solidly there. Its solidity, like the briskness of his actions, acted as a confirmation; it was like hearing an acquaintance say of him: Maurice acted calmly and firmly.
Passing the hotel, he looked up at his own bedroom window and remembered Camille’s taunt about fighting a duel. It was the traditional time of day for duels and for executions. He told himself that after a night without sleep, in the early morning, before the day for most people had begun, you might have an unusual sense of your own destiny.
He walked into the old centre of the town where there is an irregularly shaped piazza and the pavement in front of the shops is arcaded. The blackboard on which was written last night’s medical bulletin concerning Chavez had been placed under the arcades in case it rained during the night. The writing was smudged at one corner. The instability and irregularity of the patient’s cardiac functions give rise to continuing anxiety …
The shop windows under the arcades had large wooden shutters folded across them. They were painted green, but because they had been painted on different occasions, each had its own distinctive shade. Above the shutters were the shop signs. Several family names occurred more than once over different shops. When the shops were open, it was obvious from what was displayed in their windows that they were little more than poorly stocked stalls in a remote provincial town. But with their shutters up they looked different. It was possible to imagine that they were shops full of rare articles. Monsieur Hennequin walked several times round the arcade.
He would have liked Camille to witness the forthcoming encounter. She would see the young man shown up for what he was—a cynical philanderer with the mentality of a petty criminal. And she would also learn how far he, her husband, was prepared to go in order to protect her.
He no longer blamed Camille. Last night be had glimpsed in her the tart who, according to Monsieur Hennequin, is found in every woman but who only makes herself evident if the woman is denied the controls which her nature requires. He had ignored the warning contained in her infatuation with Mallarmé’s poetry: this poetry had stimulated and irritated her taste for the limitless, the boundless. But finally, he convinced himself she was not to blame: she was innocent. Her weakness was the weakness of her sex.
In protecting her from this weakness, in putting a stop to the leering young man’s felonies, he was acting on behalf of all husbands for the sake of all wives. Women who were far more cunning than Camille, far more capable of pursuing their own interests, suffered from the same weakness: the weakness of succumbing to their own false first impressions. Women, able to twist men round their little fingers as soon as they knew them, could be rendered as impressionable as an eleven-year-old before a stranger whom they did not yet know. Women could calculate, they could make elaborate strategic and tactical plans, they could be patient and persistent, they could be merciless and generous—but their first impressions were invariably faulty. They could not see what was in front of them. This was why philanderers, so long as they were dealing with women, had need of so little diguise or distinction.
Monsieur Hennequin came to believe that what he intended to do was a duty placed upon him as a consequence of the weakness and inferiority of others. He was in no way aware of having to defend his own interests, or of having to try to escape from the solitude being imposed upon him. He left the arcade and the shuttered shops.
Monsieur Hennequin stood in the doorway of the bedroom. I don’t imagine you are surprised to see me, he said and shut the door behind him. We men are not the fools you take us for, he continued, and we know exactly how to deal with your type.
The bedroom was a modest one with a wooden plank floor. On the bed, instead of blankets, there was a large eiderdown in a white coverlet. The pillows were stuffed, not with feathers, but with grain. It was the hotel where the drivers of the Simplon mail coach used to stay. G. was still in bed but had raised himself up on one elbow.
As soon as he had shut the door behind him, Monsieur Hennequin pointed the pistol at the man in bed. Either you stop or I will kill you.
The man in bed stared at the pistol. (Is it the mere sight of gun metal which reminds him so strongly of the smell in the gun room of his childhood?) He heard Monsieur Hennequin’s voice continue as though in the room next door.
If I see you in my wife’s company again, here or anywhere else, I swear that I will shoot you on the spot.
Monsieur Hennequin was perfectly well aware of which way the gun in his hand was pointing—it was not his life that was in jeopardy. Further, he had reckoned since his first discovery of the note that it supplied him with evidence which would assure his receiving a purely nominal sentence even if he killed the man lying in the bed. Very little in his own life was menaced and he was now putting a stop to what might later have become a serious danger. Yet the invocation, the use of the threat of death may sometimes have a wider effect than the intended one. When once death is invoked, the choice of who must die may seem oddly arbitrary. In any case Monsieur Hennequin began to tremble.
He was not frightened, but he sensed that at this moment he was justifying his whole life. It was as if he was now prepared to choose death for himself rather than compromise or deny the meaning of his life. The important thing was the choice of death; whether for himself or another—always with the gun in his hand pointing at the man in the bed in front of him—seemed unimportant. It no longer mattered whether or not Camille witnessed the scene. To threaten or take the life of an avowed enemy was to enhance his own. He was discovering with excitement a new power.
If I have the slightest reason to suspect that you have seen her, I will shoot you like a dog whilst you sleep.
G. began to laugh. The pretences had been dropped and the truth which was revealed was absurdly familiar. The truth was Monsieur Hennequin, visibly trembling, the words coming out of his mouth with strange cries of pleasure, a pistol in his hand.
If I see you approaching the wife of any colleague or acquaintance of mine I shall shoot you as you leave the gathering.
Often he had been asked: why do you laugh, love?
After days of intrigue and hope and calculations, after doubts and heart-searchings, after boldness and timidity and further boldness, what truth is disclosed? His trousers flung across a chair, her wrap put aside or the coverlet of the bed pulled back, two rough triangles of darkish hair are disclosed and within them the parts whose exact forms first-year medical students are taught to recognize as typical of the entire human species. There is no mistaking any of it, and in this total lack of ambigu
ity there is a truly comic banality. The longer the mask has been worn, the longer the familiar has been hidden, the more comic the revelation becomes, for the more the pair of them are meant to be astounded at what they have always known.
You tried to take advantage of the innocence of my wife—as I’m sure you have taken advantage of God knows how many other unfortunate women. But this time, thank God, it is not too late.
When Beatrice fell back on the bed laughing, she was no longer laughing at the absurd man in black in the trap, but at what she knew would now become obvious on her bed, beneath the portrait of her father, according to a freedom apparently granted by a wasp sting.
Keep quiet. Stop laughing. Or you will get a bullet in your chest now.
He continued to laugh because at last he was face to face with the unexceptional. It was partly a laugh of relief, as though, against all reason, he had feared that the other might, in this, be exceptional. And partly he laughed at the great first joke of the commonplace becoming inexorable, like a penis becoming erect.
Monsieur Hennequin considered that his laughter was like that of a madman alone in his cell. And this idea that the leering man in the bed might be mad disturbed and discouraged him, for he believed that, although the mad must be forcibly restrained and in certain cases exterminated, madness itself was nevertheless self-defeating, and so his avowed enemy appeared to represent a less substantial menace than the one he had resolved, without hesitation or compromise, to put a stop to.
You are mad, he said. But mad or not you will have no second warning.
Monsieur Hennequin walked backwards out of the door, prolonging to the last possible moment the excitement (which the mad laughter had done so much to diminish) of pointing the gun at the man who had tried to seduce his wife.
Madame Hennequin and Mathilde Le Diraison are riding in a dilapidated carriage with a hood with holes in it and a driver with a straw hat, along the Via al Calvario, towards the church of San Quirico, which lies to the south, ten minutes from the centre of Domodossola.
They met G. in the Piazza Mercato. He greeted them quickly and, looking at Camille, said: Your husband with a pistol in his hand has just threatened to shoot me if I speak to you again. I must speak to you again. I will wait for you both at the church of San Quirico. We cannot talk here. Come as soon as you can. Then, without allowing them time to reply, he stepped back into the arcade and was gone.
Your friend is nothing if not dramatic, remarks Mathilde.
Do you think it is true?
That Maurice threatened him, yes.
He didn’t have a gun.
Every man has some friend who has a pistol.
Do you think Maurice is capable of killing him?
For you, my dear, men will do anything! Mathilde laughs.
Please be serious.
Do you feel serious?
When Camille heard that her husband had threatened him with a gun, she was reminded of her wedding day. Her anger at the injustice of her husband’s action, her shame on her husband’s behalf, her resentment at the fact that her husband had ignored her protestations and appeals, made her acutely aware that she was his wife, or, more accurately, that she had become his wife according to her own choice. Up to this moment being Madame Hennequin had seemed to be part of her natural life; her marriage was part of the same continuity which led from her childhood through young womanhood to the present. There had been misunderstandings and disagreements between her and her husband, but never before had she felt that the course of her life was out of her control, that what was happening was unnatural to her. She remembered how, at their wedding, Maurice and she had knelt, isolated, alone, in front of the entire congregation, but side by side so that she could feel his warmth, in order to receive communion. He had knelt shyly and with what she then believed to be true humility. Now she imagined him getting to his feet with a pistol in his hand and a look of blank unfeeling on his face.
Suddenly amazement overcame her anger with a thought which restored to her a little of her natural identity, which suggested that she was not entirely helpless and which confirmed her sense of being blindly wronged by her husband. This thought was: Under the threat of being shot, he still wants to speak to me because he can see me as I am.
No, I do not feel serious, says Camille.
You should persuade them to fight a duel for you.
That is what I told Maurice. He said it wasn’t modern.
I don’t see what being modern or not has to do with it. Men don’t change in that respect.
Do you think we do? asks Camille.
You are changing. You are transformed. You are a different person from what you were two days ago. If you could see yourself now—
What would I see?
A woman with two men in love with her!
Mathilde, please promise me one thing—do not, on any account, leave me alone with him.
Not if you both insist?
I am serious now. I cannot see him unless you promise me this.
Fortunately Harry is not jealous. Well, he is jealous, but not to the point of shooting or threatening. Afterwards he may make a scene in private with me, but I can put a stop to that quite quickly.
It would be as much as his life is worth, says Camille, please promise me.
I think Harry is the type of man who might under certain conditions shoot himself, but he would never shoot anybody else. What do you think he would do—Mathilde nods in the direction they are going—if he had reason to be jealous?
Jealous of me? asks Camille.
Yes, says Mathilde smiling.
When she thought: Under the threat of being shot, he still wants to speak to me, her vision of his appearance altered. The alteration was also retrospective. What she had noticed but not remembered came to light. Hundreds of details assembled to form the whole man before her. He attracted everything she had seen him do. Her impressions rushed towards him, attached themselves to him, as though magnetized, and, covering him, became his characteristics. His head addressed her. She saw into it. The head was larger than average. It lunged forward when he spoke. Thick curls fell over the back of his neck. The tops of his ears entered other thickets. His hands with which he gesticulated were smaller than average. The veins on them were rather pronounced. The missing teeth, when his mouth was open, made it seem wider than it was. The gaze of his eyes was insistent. His feet, like his hands, were small. His walk was light and fastidious and in contrast to the heavy thrust of his head and shoulders. She found each physical characteristic eloquent of an aspect of his nature, as a mother may find the characteristics of her infant before it can talk or sit up.
I think he would kill me and then himself, says Camille, laughing.
Where does he live? It would be fortunate if it were Paris.
I don’t know. He says he is half English and half Italian.
That might explain a lot, remarks Mathilde.
Please promise me, says Camille.
Has he told you how he lost his teeth?
Mathilde, listen to me, this could be a matter of life and death.
He has an expression that I’ve only seen on one other man.
Who? asks Camille.
He was a friend of my husband’s, an Armenian who fell in love with me.
Exasperation wells up with tears in Camille’s eyes. Mathilde lowers her voice and whispers: Camille, you can trust me. But you are naive about such situations. The danger is Maurice, and there you can depend on me.
Camille rests her head back against the dusty leather upholstery and lays her gloved white hand on Mathilde’s arm.
How hot it is today! says Mathilde. There are days when grand passion is just not possible. The weather is a woman’s best friend!
We shall be there too soon. I don’t want to have to wait for him. Mathilde, ask him to drive more slowly.
Camille touches the fringe of her hair and stares at her own hand. It looks to her extremely small and delicate, likewise her wris
ts and forearms. She wants to appear as fresh and as intricate as white lace (she remembers a painting she once saw of a girl on a swing in a garden in Montpellier whose petticoats were bordered with white lace). She wants to appear like that in this green, overgrown, remote landscape for a few minutes before her enforced return to Paris where there are more clothes than trees and the streets are like rooms.
The carriage stops by the church. The same Fiat car in which they made the trip to Santa Maria Maggiore is parked in the shade of a plane tree. There is nobody to be seen. They ask the driver to wait. He nods, gets down and lies on the grass by the side of the road. One of the brass lamps on the Fiat is dazzling in the sun. Camille lowers her head and, pointing her parasol towards the ground, opens it; Mathilde points hers at the sky to open it. They walk together round the church.
He is on the north side sitting on a stone bench. He kisses Camille’s hand and then immediately takes Mathilde’s arm and saying: You are her friend, she confesses to you and so I need not explain what has happened to us. He leads her away towards a path bordered by gravestones. Camille makes as though to follow them. He turns. No, he says, please wait. Sit where I was sitting.
It is very quiet. The doors of the church are locked. There is nobody on the road. It is hard to believe that they have driven no further than the outskirts of the town. To Camille the silence sounds abnormal. She believes that on ordinary mornings carts pass along the road, children play near by, the priest prays in his church, peasants work in the fields. In the silence she can hear the beating of her own heart and his voice, but she cannot distinguish his words.