“What does it matter, godmother,” she responds, “as long as I am married?” And she exchanges a complicit little smile with her husband that would have made a saint green with envy.
Audier has reassured us. The baby will make it. He finally took him out of his cotton cocoon. Jean Luze calmed down a bit. My nerves loosened, otherwise they might have snapped.
Unfortunately, that’s when Annette decided to try to commit suicide.
That evening, when I opened her door, I found her deep in sleep, moaning as if she was in pain. I called Jean Luze and without saying anything, pointed to the empty bottle of sleeping pills. He frowned and bent over her, taking Annette’s head in his hands. Her magnificent black hair ran through his fingers unnoticed.
“What have you done? What have you done now, for God’s sake,” he cried out.
He patted her face clumsily, and then turned to me:
“I’m going to get Dr. Audier,” he told me.
He let her head fall just as clumsily and left running.
Upon his return, he stopped briefly in the living room to talk to Audier. He whispered something I didn’t hear. I then heard the doctor’s voice very clearly.
“These kinds of girls, you know, take nothing seriously; life is all theater for them.”
“Yes, but I can’t stand these cracked-up women living only by their feelings,” Jean Luze replied. “Isn’t there a way to calm them down, to fix them? Surely there must be an appropriate treatment…”
“As long as they accept treatment, yes, one can help them: nymphomania can be treated. All you need is the patient’s cooperation.”
The tone with which Dr. Audier uttered his last words was worse than an insult. He followed us into Annette’s room, took the empty bottle that Jean Luze handed to him, looked at it for a moment and then put it on the table:
“I’m going to pump her stomach,” he said.
He roughly pried her teeth open with a spoon, opened her mouth and pushed a long tube down her throat. She hiccuped, coughed up blood and then vomit.
“Help me, Claire,” he ordered.
I shook with rage and apprehension. She’s solid as a rock, I said to myself. I was looking at Jean Luze’s unhappy face and felt as if I had climbed to the blazing peaks only to crash to the ground, every bone broken.
An icy wind dried the sweat on my brow. If Annette left him cold, how can I hope to move him? I told myself. He’s strong, and the strong are without pity even toward themselves.
A man shapes his desire according to his woman, and thus loves her only as much as he respects her, I told myself in consolation. So reasoning, I quickly realized then that Annette could never have inspired anything lasting in him.
“Is she better?” he asked Dr. Audier.
“Yes, she will sleep a day or two and then she will wake up.”
The ash from his cigarette fell on Annette’s face and Jean Luze, bending over her, blew it away.
I am watching and waiting for Annette to wake up. I am sitting by her side, arms folded. My eyes don’t leave her. It’s over. Let her live her own life. I failed to reach my goal with her. I am going to play my next card. No third party this time. Unexpected confidence fills me. Slowly I feel it emerge. Is this maturity? I run my hand over my face to feel the first transformations in my features. Yes, I have changed. My moist lips are parted on a tentative decision still unclear to me. I realize my worth. Everything that has fermented in my mind over forty years-my unappeased desires, my unheard pleas, the oblivion of solitary pleasure-is rising up within me. A revolution. I feel ready to answer to the demands of my being.
Jean is anxious again. He’s got two sick women on his hands. He knows full well that he is partly responsible for Annette’s suicide attempt. What’s going on inside him? And what’s going on inside me-I who am fully responsible? For the second time in my life and the first time in the last twenty years, I don’t want to know what’s inside me.
Annette opened her eyes two days later. She didn’t cry didn’t say a word. She took the milk on Dr. Audier’s orders and swallowed it with a grimace. Legs shaky she went to the bathroom and then got back in the bed I had remade for her.
“I don’t want anyone else but you in the room, you hear me, Claire? No one else…”
Her mournful stare inspires no remorse in me.
“Not even Jean?”
“Not even him.”
“And Dr. Audier?”
“Well, he is my doctor.”
She too has taken a decision. Maybe we took it together.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she adds with a sort of dignity, “and I took too many sleeping pills… How many days was I unconscious?”
“Two days.”
I stop Jean Luze at her door with malicious glee.
“She doesn’t want to see anyone.”
“Not even me?”
“Not even you.”
He lights a cigarette.
“Naturally, I haven’t told Félicia anything,” he tells me, “and I’m relying on your discretion. Whatever Annette’s reasons, there is no excuse for what she did. She only thinks of herself. She’s only a dirty little egoist, you hear me? The dirtiest little egoist I have ever known.”
An emptiness in me. Graves, ravines, chasms, aren’t deep enough to bury me. I lie beneath the last geological layer, at once dead and alive. No, dead, truly dead. A kind of automaton. I no longer have a soul. Is this what despair is? I can’t fool myself anymore. If I were to throw myself at him, I now know what to expect. He has made up his mind about us.
“Dirty little egoist,” he said. “Cracked-up women”… And we are indeed that, me and Annette, I know.
I’m alone in the dark cradling my doll. Her little artificial body is cold in my hands. Cold, this hair the wind has never tangled, cold, every part of her is cold, like death, like Jean Luze.
There was such wealth in my impoverishment! Back then anything that came from him was bliss. What possessed me to be demanding? Look how I am being punished! I angrily swallow my hopes and my love. There is nothing but hatred in me. Its roots spread, I feel them take hold of every part of my being. In every human being there is a blessed soul made miserable by the pursuit of happiness. All those who pray demand favor from God. But He’s tired of it all and He gets His revenge by botching His work. We are merely the rough drafts Nature cynically employs in its quest for Perfection. Tormented creatures, a frightful mixture of the monstrous and divine, thrown pell-mell into an inhospitable world to wait for death! What choice do we have? But love must protect me from myself. I am afraid of finding myself alone with all this hatred. What would happen to me if I looked it straight in the face, if I gave in to it?…
The heat of desire scalds my soulless body, all the same. A new condition for me, but little by little I will become accustomed to it. I’m burying the sentimental old maid, her dreams of love, her false and overwrought ideas about life: love is nothing but two pieces of flesh rubbing together, I conclude cynically. Is this realist definition trying to retaliate against me? That very night, for the first time I saw another man’s face over me. I felt his hands caressing me and I heard his voice begging me, crying out with love, weeping with despair. I closed my eyes and drew him to me, a naked, big, and black athletic body I did not want to recognize.
Jean Luze is cheerful again. He’s watching Félicia breastfeed his child.
I rummage around their room, under the pretext of tidying up. I open drawers, explore their trunks, out of morbid curiosity. Hatred and jealousy have made me so vigilant that I want to penetrate into their most intimate spaces. In a fury I break the lock on one of Jean Luze’s suitcases while Félicia sleeps. I find the picture of a very young woman with big, sad, dreamy eyes who looks strikingly like Félicia. A relative of his, no doubt. Not a terribly revealing clue. Nothing. Look at me now, spying on their life in earnest.