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.
And yet I feel a burning pain when I try to move after these ordeals, and I have to make an effort to walk. I continue to rush downstairs so as not to worry my parents. Not a single day did he spare me. Tonight, he was crazy. He screamed, he sniffed and licked me like a beast. Then he thrust his fist into my body and watched in ecstasy as the blood poured out of me. Vampire! Vampire! I saw him sipping and getting drunk on my blood like wine.
From the beginning, I knew what to expect. Since these men showed up on our land, I knew it would come to this. A sixth sense? No matter how far away things are, I can recognize their scent. I have been able to detect the tenacious and intoxicating perfume on engravings of oriental flowers; and I’ve sneezed from the dust raised by the hoofs of a ranch horse stamping in a movie. My mother would say: “Have you caught cold?” “No,” I would say, “it’s all that dust.” “What dust?” my mother would ask. And I would point to the screen with my finger. But I have also dilated my nostrils at the majestic sight of the heavy falls at Niagara: they smelled of rainwater along with something else I can’t quite put my finger on. I scrape and scrape, deep into the very entrails of the earth. I dig and dig, and already know the warm humid flavor of its grayest roots, the musty stench of everything that crawls upon the buried bodies.
It was six years ago that my mother first put her hand on her heart. And that day, I heard it beat more heavily, more irregularly, as if performing hard labor. The day her heart stops beating, I’ll know before she does. “My God! My God!” she sighs, her fingers gripping her dress above her stomach. If Grandfather weren’t so old, if he weren’t so preoccupied with the little one, he’d realize a great many things. But he sees only Claude. Actually, we’re all alike, but each of us plays at hiding from one another in different ways. The little one has detected an indecent smell on me. There must be something unsettling and innocently perverse in me, and only the fact that I’ve been forced stops me from climaxing in this man’s arms. If I could free myself from this, I would probably make a partner worthy of him. Yesterday, he knelt in front of the bed and gently wiped the sweat on my brow. “I would like to please you,” he said to me. “I’m very ugly, but I would like you to at least enjoy it when I caress you.” He closes his eyes halfway and cries out: “You’re so beautiful, my saint!” He has a strange look that then becomes transformed and softens in pleasure. He gave me a tour of his house. I could smell the dogs before I saw them. I drew back and he grabbed my wrist and dragged me over to the huge cage where he locks them up as if they were wild animals. “I had them brought here from overseas,” he told me, “see how fierce they are?” They were foaming with rage: “You see, there’s only one way to get respect in this world: be like them,” he added. He doesn’t realize these are the affectations of a despot, surrounding himself in such luxury.
“Do you like making love, my saint, do you like luxury and jewelry?”
I said nothing. I don’t think I have ever opened my mouth after what I’ve seen except to moan or sigh in pain. I think that’s what he prefers from me; according to him it makes me look even more like a martyr. But am I the martyr I say I am, that I’ve convinced myself I am? I anticipate his desires. My submissiveness is nauseating. I undress and lie there with my legs spread, arms splayed in a cross, and wait. Torture! What torture! He has said to me: “If you wish, I will keep you till death do us part.” He’s learned to read my eyes and he anxiously monitors my every expression. “You like that, huh?” he cried out, although I was moaning in pain, “you like that too!” Still no response from me. “Rose, my little sister!” Paul used to call me. And he would carry me on his back so I wouldn’t have to walk on thorns. Once he was offended when a peasant surprised me as I was taking off my rain-drenched dress to wring it out. “Quick, hide, Rose!” he said to me. His eyes were full of tears. What does it matter if I give my body to the eyes and kisses of a monster, as long as I can save him. He’ll get out of here. Alone. As for me, I will slip down the slope of easy affairs, discreetly of course, very discreetly, with my saintly face. I’m full of self-pity. Is my fate so appalling? More than a few husbands probably behave just like this man. Vices sanctified by the
