What is it that’s bothering her? Is she afraid for him? It’s true that he’s become too involved, that he opens his heart too much to his friends. They came back last night and stayed up until eleven, whispering in the living room. Now Jean Luze is infected. He’s become as much an armchair politician as we are. He, too, had better watch out that his words are not repeated lest Caledu take offense! Pierrilus never leaves Jane’s door. Could I be mistaken? I believe I saw Joel and Jean Luze speaking to him through the picket fence.
I have too much free time and my imagination wanders out of bounds. I explore every nook and cranny of my mind. What a terrible swarm of shapeless larvae! When the larvae become thoughts, they are born monstrous. My head is bursting. I am looking for a thousand pretexts to sneak into their quarters. I seek suffering. It alone can wrest me from this act I have not yet dared to commit. And yet I am in something close to a paroxysm of suffering. Can it get any worse without crushing me?
“Go to your godmother for a minute,” Felicia says, handing me her son.
I carry him under the trees, my eyes fixed and mortified, refusing to kiss him, surprised at my hostility toward him. I struggle against terrible temptation, but I feel like I am moving under the whip into the incandescent flames of a diabolical world. I am prey to insomnia again. I feel lost, as if stranded in the center of the earth. I toss in bed, blood rushing to my temples, throat dry. My life goes by as uselessly as ever. The thankless chores of an old maid disgust me. Supporting roles are no longer enough for me. The taste of victory has left its mark on me. I have held happiness. I know every line in its face. I cry rolled up in a ball. I feel tiny, shriveled up by pain. I cling to the crime as if it were a buoy. It alone can save me. I struggle, but it has me in its claws. I know I will yield in the end; I am caught in a spiral, committed body and soul in a merciless contest. I mask the struggle. I am like an animal on a leash with its head turned away from the route it must follow.
There is a knock at my door and Jean Luze comes in.
“Don’t stay in the dark,” he tells me. “It will make you more depressed. I realize that you are worried about Jane and her son. I realize this…”
I turn on the light without responding.
“You know, Claire, I have made a decision,” he continues. “We are leaving soon and I’m taking Joel with me. I haven’t been able to do much for all of you until now, unfortunately. But I will at least save this young man by getting him out of here. What about you, do you want to come with us? I mean it.”
“No, thank you,” I answer.
He nervously dug his fingers through his hair and lit a cigarette:
“You really don’t want to?”
“No, thank you,” I repeated.
“I am sorry to hear that, Claire. We’ll think of you often and your godson will learn to love you from afar. I’m really sorry you don’t want to come along…”
To hear that conventional little sentence in his mouth! Anger, resentment, outrage, rumble within me. He gives my arm a friendly squeeze and leaves.
I see the Audiers’ cat prowling around our house. He brushes against the wall with his tail in the air, his hypocritical gaze half concealed by his blinking eyelids. He has gray fur like an old man. His meowing has often woken me up at night. He is Augustine’s worst enemy, often stealing food whenever she is the least bit careless. I have an idea. I will use him as practice. I will kill him to see what happens, to know what it feels like, how much strength one needs to get it right.
Joel is alone with Jean Luze.
They are listening to music in the living room. I hear them talking in hushed voices. There is a quiet knocking at the door of the dining room and I see Joel run to it. He invites Pierrilus, the one-armed beggar, to come in, and takes a package from him that he conceals when he notices me.
“Careful!” Jean Luze cries.
Doesn’t he trust me anymore? I feel so humiliated it seems to me I no longer exist. He looks through us. He doesn’t see us anymore, except when we interrupt his interminable discussions. He looks at us in a cold, impenetrable, and disconcerting way. With utmost silence, I put down the bottle of rum and glasses he asked for. Felicia never dares to interrupt him. Finally, she suffers, she too! She has become a harmless rival. As affectionate as he is with her, as solicitous as he is, I know now that he never loved her.
In any case, her death will push him to me. I can only master him through grief. With her gone, I will once again be mother to his son. There will be intimacy between us again.
Here I am sitting in bed, dagger in hand. I contemplate and caress it. Its tip is sharp and its finely chiseled handle is slightly curved. Where does this weapon come from? What is its history? The main thing is whether or not it can kill someone with a single blow. Will I have to witness some drawn-out agony if I miss? Will I have the courage to strike several times to make sure the deed is done? I have considered everything. I will leave nothing to chance. The Audiers’ cat will be my guinea pig. I will plunge the dagger in his back as practice. I don’t want Jean Luze to have to worry about anything. Suspicion will initially fall on him. I will stage things so that the police shift their investigation and conclude that it was suicide. Invoking her upcoming departure, I will ask Felicia to inscribe a moving note on the bottom of that family photo taken on the day of Jean-Claude’s baptism, something along these lines: “Adieu, Claire, I leave you here with everything I love.” The police will not see through this because their plate is full: the police only care about politics.
After killing Felicia, I will put the dagger in her hand. They will say: “She committed suicide because she couldn’t bear to leave the country, poor Madame Luze!”
The cat is dead. I followed it, lured it with fresh fish, raised my hand high and struck. From my window, I look upon its dead body. It collapsed in the yard beneath my window. Its legs are already stiff. Its lips, curled in an awful grin, reveal sharp white teeth. “Good riddance!” Augustine will exclaim when she sees it. And Mme Audier will mourn it in good form, lamenting the demise of this sly and deceitful animal she never thought to feed in its lifetime.
Before it dropped dead, the cat looked at me. This is what I can’t forget: its eyes. Pathetic! A cat! Nothing but a cat! And yet I’m gnawed by remorse. Is it because in my eyes it was innocent?
The thought of crime haunts me. It is eating away at me. I feel as weak as a convalescent. What am I waiting for? Sleep has fled from me. I think of Jane. I think about her little one and I want to scream.
I am ready; Felicia is alone in her room. I am going to go in. In the meantime, I practice killing her in my head.
My teeth chatter. I bite my fist. I’m nauseous, sick to my stomach. My mind is blank. No, no! I mustn’t admit that I will never have the courage to kill Felicia. I will die instead of her. It is time for me to put an end to these desperate struggles. I’m burning up. Is it fever? So much the better! Come, delirium. It will give me a taste of death in life. I am used to burying myself all on my own. These plunges into the void are comforting. I hope they will spare me from reality’s torments. Thanks to them, I’ve become familiar with the idea of death. It doesn’t frighten me. I have my very own coat of mail, my own shell and insulation: my imagination.
Blood hammers my temples. Hammer blows raining on metal, my head bursts, blood runs down my face. There is some on my sheets, my shirt, on the floor, everywhere. No, it’s not true. I’m the one seeing red. From anger. I’m angry with myself. I overestimated myself and seeing my cowardice makes me sick.
I am nothing but a heap of mutilated flesh. I’m the one dying, murdered. The dagger buried somewhere in my body. I don’t know where exactly. Ah! The hemorrhage of despair! Oh, to disappear! If only I could disappear without leaving a trace. It’s impossible. One doesn’t disappear that way. I exist. I am free, face-to-face with myself. I must act and this time I must not fail. Will I be up to it? Yes. My pride is intact. It will back me. The moon smiling in the sky scoffs at me. Its serenity reminds me of Felicia’s. Flashes from the past! The long and tedious unreeling of the sad film of my life…
Contradictory feelings claw at each other within me. I am seething with them. My heart is in shreds. What can be done without passion? The lukewarm are like reptiles: they crawl on all fours or drag themselves about. I don’t envy them. I’d rather croak standing. Who says suicide is an act of cowardice? That’s just an easy excuse to resign ourselves to living with our disgust, filthy puppets that we are with a hole in our stomachs to be filled three times a day! At last, like some vigilante, I’ve accosted life. I imagine grabbing it by the collar. I am deciding my own fate. I juggle my own existence! I’m drunk! I clench my fist tightly. And there it is, life, trapped in there. How easy it was to vanquish! I was the stronger one. Oh, I feel like laughing! Life is nothing. We can deal with it as one power deals with another. It’s just that our weapons are not comparable. Life dug a gaping hole beneath our feet to frighten us. Life bent us under a degrading dictatorship. With every step we bump up against the points of its bayonets. Life
