As he was talking, he slowly opened my legs and splayed out my arms in a cross. He leaned over me for a moment, moaning slowly, his breath short, oppressed. He stared at me like this for some time, and then I saw his horrible hand approach my body and touch it ever so lightly with a kind of unbearable, sick curiosity.
“That’s it, don’t move, stay like that.”
Leaning over me, he caressed me, sniffing me like an animal, and a little later, popped the buttons off his uniform and stood naked before me.
“You’re a virgin, right? You didn’t lie to me, did you? This is going to hurt, hurt a lot, but I don’t want to hear a word, got it? Not one word.”
He was dripping with sweat and I felt defiled.
He rammed himself into me in one rough terrible thrust, and immediately groaned with pleasure. I bit my fist in pain and disgust. He got back up.
“You have the prettiest martyr’s face I have ever had. I have a feeling I’m going to like you. If you let me have it my way, we’re going to become good friends, great friends.”
He gave me my clothes without another word. Then he showed me the door, saying:
“I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll see you every night for a month. If you’re faithful, I will personally give you back the papers your father signed.”
It hurt so much I could barely walk. I took a car and went home. I saw him again the next day, but not at the lawyer’s. He drove me out of town to a grotesquely and richly furnished house where the only bedroom had wall-to-wall mirrors. Once I was naked, he threw himself on me so brutally that I cried out. He immediately let me go.
“I’ll open you up until my entire fist goes in,” he shouted.
I could see his reflection in every mirror, unsightly and frightening.
What’s it to me? I would have brought dishonor on myself only if I enjoyed it as he did, but he slept with a corpse. A corpse, and he has no idea. That’s my revenge. “Feels good, no?” he asked me anxiously. And with my closed eyes I seemed to acquiesce. What’s it to me! A month will go by quickly. I won’t tell a soul, I’ll do whatever he wants. He’s made me bleed five times and I haven’t cried out. My cooperation knows no bounds. I have come to tolerate the horrible things without which he can’t feel like a man. “I’ve killed ten men point-blank,” he confessed to me, “and here I am trembling with desire before your little saint’s face. But women who turn me on are hard to come by.” His awful hands on my body! Inside my body, shamelessly probing my flesh. What do I care! I am dead. I could laugh, watching him moan over a dead body. “Your idiotic father,” he informed me, “came to beg me to spare you. He was crying and crying. You get your martyr’s face from him. And your brother? What’s he waiting for before signing up? He’s not against us, is he? No, no, calm down, I know very well he wouldn’t dare. Do you know what I was before I became this figure of authority protecting you with his powerful hand? No, I won’t tell you. You might run out of here and you mean a great deal to me. Wait. I’m going to lock the door… A flea-ridden beggar, that’s what I was. Yes, my beauty, a beggar, despised, shunned by haughty little saint’s faces like yours. And now, spread your legs. Wait, I’ll undo your hair. It makes you look even more like a saint. I love the saints. A long time ago, when I was little, I would go sit in church for long hours and gaze at them. Put out your arms in a cross. You’re pale. You look like you’re suffering. You’re perfect. That’s it, suffer in silence.”
You’re going to get out of here, Paul. My brother, my friend, so proud, so studious, so noble! The smell of death is upon me. Our baby brother knows it. I am dead. Has my mother realized it? It must be awful to bury your child, but even more awful to see your child die little by little without being able to do a thing to save her. We’re caught in a vicious circle. Everything’s changed, everything’s suddenly upside down since they took over our land. They are a blight upon us. Cursed, we’re cursed and Grandfather knows it. That’s why he prays, that’s why he steps out at night with Claude. I won’t say a word. At least let everyone be free to do what they need to do. As for me, I’ve tasted hell and it no longer frightens me. I’ll get somewhere, and Paul will leave. A few more days, just a few more days and this ordeal will end. My stomach hurts. I should go see Dr. Valois but I’m afraid of what he’ll think of me. And to think I once slapped Fred Morin for kissing me! I knew I would come to this, I knew it. To make sure he wouldn’t be the first, I had offered myself to Dr. Valois, but he pushed me away.
“You are too young, you have no idea what you’re doing,” he cried.
He wanted to run away, but I grabbed him.
“Don’t be ashamed that you love me,” I said to him. “Don’t be ashamed of that.”
“But I am ashamed,” he replied.
And he’d taken me in his arms, pulled me against him.
“Go now, Rose, go.”
“You have to do it, you have to.”
“No, Rose, never.”
“Don’t you get it?”
And I had stayed with him until dawn, crying, pleading, but he wouldn’t touch me.
That night, when my mother found me on the landing, she feared the worst. And yet, I felt almost purified. Once this torture is over, I’ll have even more innocence and chastity to offer him. The soul, not the flesh, is the true seat of virginity, so I don’t know what lovemaking feels like. I have erected a wall between my body and my soul, a granite wall. When our property is returned, Paul will be out of danger. As for me, I no longer fear danger. I’ve come through the straits. Not only do I face danger, I swim in it with abandon, fully Paul doesn’t yet know where he’s heading, what awaits him, the forces watching him and perhaps already circling round him. And truly, I’ve convinced myself that I’m dead. He knows nothing about being an actor. I’ll put the same amount of talent into my resurrection act. He’s helpless in the face of this tragic unfolding of events, and I’ve foolishly convinced myself I’m pulling the strings. In the face of the element unleashed, I will be a force of nature. Should I fail, I’ll tell myself I was tempted by this role, that if I gave in, it was because I had a taste for it or out of weariness. Look how I’ve moved a killer with my sweetness and submission. Can it be that easy for me to draw on my own strength, and are my resources really infinite? When death comes, will I be able to welcome it with indifference, playing my role until the bitter end? Thirty days is a long time! But what can time do to me, since I’m already dead! I was about to kiss Claude and he said to me: “No, don’t come close, you don’t smell like flowers anymore.” I had put on perfume in vain. How could he know? Once upon a time, he loved me. He stroked my hair, undid my ponytail and buried his face in my tresses, saying: “They smell like wet oak blossoms.”
The hoarseness of his voice makes him only sound older, and sometimes his precociousness frightens me. The final stretch of his life. Soon, the final stretch of all of our lives, I’m sure of it. He has returned in this crippled form to fulfill his destiny. Going from rough draft to hero. So many messy rough drafts around me! And what a messy rough draft I am! Only the hope that I will return to this earth gives me comfort for having to die one day. God owes it to Himself to finish His work, even if He has to redo it a hundred times. I am messing up this life with my obvious bad faith. It’s because I’m sure I’ll die soon. I’ll die and then I’ll come back. Is this my first life? I’m often overcome by fuzzy and mysterious memories, as if the gestures and actions of a past life weighed on my present one. Although I was a virgin, nothing about sex astonished me. I succumbed to indecency like a loose woman. If it had been another man in my arms instead, Dr. Valois for example, I would have been frightened. Far beyond the city, walking down a shady, tree-lined and deserted road with a river flowing beside it, I stopped, eyes on the luminous water, feeling its familiar and comforting coolness on my hands. Sweet nostalgia welled up in my heart as a mist of memories rose from the depths, slowly becoming clearer: I had been to this place before; that house, those trees, that river, I knew them. I had taken a walk under those trees and lived in this house. I was breathless with anguish as if a piece of myself still lived there, forever separated from me. Mutilated, but all the same walking the hard road to perfection. I can’t wait to die. Dead! I forgot, I already am. Murdered, martyred and canonized. I won’t have suffered in vain. Grandfather’s sterile rebellion, Paul’s mute despair, my mother’s terror, my father’s horrible, humiliating situation, are all reasons to fight. Of all of us, my father suffers the most. Head of the family, the man still responsible for the honor and the future of his children, forced to bow and scrape and kiss the feet of his torturers. I can see how he bears all this and how he suffers! I would never have thought he had the courage to face the Gorilla. Slapped a hundred times a day. Tortured a hundred times a day. Face stained with spit and yet always calm. Such shame! What shame! Not on us but on them, our persecutors. Every one of us suffers like Christ, but none martyred as spectacularly. “You with the martyr’s face, the saint’s face.” Me! That’s what he likes, that monster, that fleabag I have felt the very depths of horror. Thanks to him I have hit rock bottom. Submissive, too submissive for a virgin. Was I a virgin? An accomplice? Aren’t I getting used to it, aren’t I trying to enjoy it too? Damning thoughts hunting me down night and day. Not once have I missed a meeting, not once have I been late.