8. They butchered him but good

When I go back to the bedroom, Ange is still asleep. Darkness fills the apartment—only the little lamp on the bedside table is lit. In the living room, in the kitchen, I can just make out the forms of the familiar furniture, but I feel as if I were entering an unknown domain where some tragic event has occurred, set off by a misstep on my part.

I feel a sort of tension with the apartment I’ve kept up so lovingly and with such care. A fear stops me just when I’m about to turn on the lights in this room or that. Suppose all the furniture, all the ornaments turned out to be different from the things I picked out and knew, suppose I discovered the loveless smile of creatures mysteriously endowed with a life in some unknowable way at odds with my own, with our own? How do I know that’s not how it will be?

The wind begins to moan again. The windows are rattling quietly. I go and close the drapes, then pull them open again. If anything happens, I want the people across the street to at least be able to see, to observe that I did nothing deliberate to provoke it.

But the street is completely dark, no light shining at any window. Every few yards the pale, silvery gleam of the streetlights illuminates the falling rain, so fine it can only be seen inside that halo.

Does such a silence usually reign in this building at nine o’clock, I ask myself, and is the silence usually so fraught and so breathless, as if, I tell myself, almost outraged, the very silence were plotting some sort of treachery?

And those two girls, really, how underhanded. Oh, that’s the only reason they came, to prod us into clearing out.

My voice is low and quiet, but the sound of it makes me start.

I hear a tiny noise, a sort of scratching at the front door. I hurry over, turn the lock (I didn’t even do that, I reflect, aghast, shivering), then press myself full length to the door, both palms and one ear against the wood. At first I hear only a muffled, distant beating, the pulsations of my own terrified heart, and then, finally, his voice—cajoling, insistent, friendly, but friendly in a false, smarmy way. Has he been standing there outside the door all this time? Or did he come creeping back up to spy on me?

“Let me in,” he says. “I still have so much to tell you.”

“You heard what I said. I have to rest.”

I do my best to sound neutral and confident.

“You’ve got to go home,” I say. “What’s the point of standing there in the cold?”

My hands are wet with fear. Suddenly light-headed, I close my eyes. I’m afraid I’m going to fall, end up slumped against the door, and then, I’m not quite sure how, he’d try to get in.

Little by little pushing the door to shift my insensible body, then finally walking in, triumphant and sinister, straight to the bedroom, lying down beside Ange, and then, perhaps, on the pretense of tending to him, opening the wound and infecting it with his filthy hands, all the while flattering what he believes to be Ange’s vanity with florid sentences… Oh, I can’t weaken now, no matter what.

“Open the door, just for a moment, and I’ll tell you what you need to know, and then I’ll leave you in peace and be off. I am,” he says (honeyed, almost loving), “a former teacher, as you know, and that alone should ease any mistrust you may feel when I assure you I only want to protect you. Come on now, open the door,” he says, more firmly.

“No…please…”

“Monsieur Noget,” he says.

“Please, Monsieur Noget, we can see about all this tomorrow,” I say, faltering in spite of myself at the insinuating gentleness of his voice, now singsong, almost like a lullaby.

“Shall I come back tomorrow? And then you’ll be so kind as to open the door?”

“Listen…”

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” he says. “I’m so glad to hear you call me by my name. Speak that name in front of your husband and he’ll be deeply moved, you’ll see, deeply moved.”

And then silence again, that dense, heavy silence unbroken by any clinking dish, any mumbling television, not even Monsieur Noget’s shambling steps, I note, headed downstairs to his apartment. I feel as if I’d gone deaf all at once.

Unless he’s still there behind the door, intent on giving me the most literal illustration of his promise to be there for us always, from this day forward, and nothing and no one will ever drive him away, and we’ll simply have to endure that intimacy, as odious as a boil you have no choice but to live with.

I back away into the dark living room, self-conscious, convinced I’m being watched. I tug the curtains closed. I’m sweating. I think I saw the rain coming harder now, pounding the windows—I saw it, but I can’t hear it, my mind associates it with a familiar sound, but I can’t make out that sound, as if the apartment had suddenly been fitted with some sort of impregnable insulation. And I still don’t dare turn on the lamps or spell out the frightening but indistinct thought floating to the surface of my consciousness, pressing me to concede that I have no idea what would happen, what I would see, if I let light fill the living room, where my furniture, my cherished, handsome, expensive furniture, delighted to be deceiving me, might be hiding worrisome strangers, bloodthirsty guardians. That neighbor, I tell myself, might have been sent solely to distract me from what is in fact being fomented right here in my living room, the last place I’d ever suspect.

I stand frozen in place. My ear vigilant despite the feeling I’ve been wrapped up in cotton, I think I hear breathing. Mine? No, someone else’s, it’s coming from further away. I firmly cross my arms to keep my hands from clasping my cheeks and heightening my fear. I very slowly back away toward the bedroom. I then distinctly hear Ange’s breathing—was that him I was hearing? Was it both of us together?

Inside the bedroom, I close the door and pull the little latch. Then, beleaguered, I sit down on the bed as gently as I can, taking care not to wake Ange. But shouldn’t he be stirring anyway? Is it normal, is it healthy to sleep so much? Deep down, I realize, I don’t want to wake him just yet, because I’m not sure I’ll recognize him, I’m afraid he might say strange things to me, I don’t want him seeing me in the near terror the ambiguities of my living room have plunged me into. Little by little I get hold of myself, begin to fight back at my imagination. Stand up, go into the other room, turn on all the lights, I whisper, and see for yourself that nothing has changed.

But I don’t. The heavy darkness surrounds me. Even Ange’s presence seems charged with danger, with unknowable perils. As long as he’s asleep, the menace is quiet. And so, taking pains not to look at him, my own husband, the man I once felt so at one with, I stay perfectly still. I stare at the little latch on the door. I would certainly feel a heartfelt horror if I were to see that little latch move and burst open, succumbing to a mighty force applied from the living room, but I’ve so thoroughly convinced myself it’s going to happen that I’m almost exasperated to see it not happening. At least, I say to myself, at least let me know what or who I’m facing. But even if the door did suddenly burst open, would I know? Would I be capable of understanding what I saw before me? And would I see anything before me at all? Those questions torment me.

The wind is howling in the back courtyard, outside the bedroom’s only window. I bend over the bed to peer through the glass. Below me I see Noget, bareheaded in the rain, emptying his trash into the dumpster. Suddenly he looks up and our gazes meet. He gives me a faint smile, licking his lips back and forth. Nothing is left of his humility, his repellent desire for conciliation at all costs—nothing is left of all that, only the brazenly unveiled expression of a precise, confident intention. I’ll get you. Just you wait. I’ll get you, and we’ll be…friends?

I quickly turn away from the window, my heart full of hatred and spite. What’s the next step in his plans for Ange and me? And what, I ask myself, is Ange’s two daughters’ role in it? And even Ange’s, in his possibly simulated sleep? No, wounded as he is, Ange couldn’t possibly be feigning anything at all, and besides it’s not in his nature. But what exactly is his nature now? In such an aberrant situation, so deeply contrary in its brutality to the man he is? I have no idea, I tell myself, disheartened. I have no idea.

A desire then comes over me, a desire I would immediately struggle to choke back had I not spotted Noget’s voracious gaze a moment before, a desire I’d do all I could to choke back had I not half decided that Ange is only pretending to sleep—oh no, I say to myself, he’s asleep, like a poor tortured animal slipping into semi-unconsciousness between two beatings. I do nothing to quell that desire, and neither does it disturb me, at least not enough to keep my fingers still and my body stiff and slumped on the mattress.

I kneel on the bed. With one hand I grasp the little bedside lamp, and with the other I turn back the sheet that covers Ange up to his chin. What I then see rips a moan of horror from my throat.

Ange hasn’t woken. The lamp wobbles in my hand. The little chain of the switch tinkles against the base. Oh God oh God oh God. I try to hold it more firmly, but in vain, and the little chain tinkles in time with my trembling. Oh God, oh almighty God. I want to put the sheet back, but my fingers are clutching the blood-stained fabric, creasing and crumpling it, powerless to lift it.

Ange begins to shake his head this way and that on the pillow, as if gravely tormented by the little pings of the chain against the lamp base. See, then, see then if you love me, and don’t ever forget what you see.

I murmur, “Oh, my poor, poor darling.”

And I wish Ange would open his eyes to give me a serene, nonchalant gaze, and so show me he’s not troubled in the least by his wound, that it is indeed his body the wound has punctured, but only temporarily, and only because it pleased him to give it a home. But Ange’s eyes remain closed, his lids squeezed tight. He merely shakes his head on the pink-sweat-drenched pillow (is there blood in his hair?), and I think I detect, in his suffering, in his obstinate sleep, a stubborn resentment toward me.

Ange has never shown any trace of rancor at anything I do. Our marriage has always been marked not by passion or exaltation but by concord, and our harmony is sometimes of the sort that defines indestructible friendship, the kind we read about in books, since neither Ange nor I have ever had friends we didn’t end up parting ways with. And so I cannot understand the silent, outraged animosity seeping from Ange’s clenched body. I immediately blame it on his two daughters. What they might have done, what they may have said, I have no idea. I remember the oddly fixed gaze of their children, the few times I met them, something very cold, cynical, and sardonic in their pale little faces—that’s how those two women’s children are. But doesn’t Ange feel only the deepest affection for those children? What his daughters might have transformed while I was away, might have transformed in this apartment, around Ange, inside him, I don’t know.

Ange’s loyalty has been corrupted. They weren’t trying to treat him; they were aggravating the injury, poking at the wound, opening it beyond repair, and then injecting it with the poison of mistrust aimed against me—but why?

Situated just over his appendix, the wound has stopped bleeding. All the same, no one seems to have cleaned it. There’s a brown crust of dried blood all around the gaping crater dug by some tool I don’t dare imagine, something both broad and sharp, something, I tell myself, like a stout wood chisel or a gouge, which someone took the time to wiggle back and forth in Ange’s flesh after thrusting it deep inside.

Ange is still wearing his checked shirt. I’m angry to see that his daughters didn’t even cut or tear it away where the weapon ripped through it, and now the fabric has fused with the congealed blood. Ange’s two daughters did nothing, they didn’t stanch the blood, they didn’t disinfect the wound, they didn’t even try to close it.

So in what vile way did the daughters their father so cherished fill all that time?

A thick, dull-yellow liquid is oozing from the tattered tissue deep inside the wound. I think I smell a foul odor coming from that discharge, but surely the wound isn’t rotting already.

Suddenly Ange raises one arm. His gesture is so abrupt and unexpected that his hand collides with the lamp, dashing it to the floor. The bulb goes out.

“I said no one could look at that,” Ange shouts hoarsely.

He rips the sheet from my fingers and furiously covers himself up again.

“How many times do I have to say it?” Ange says, in that same dull, hollow voice, now tinged with a desperate sadness.

And I’m horrified by that new voice in the dark.

“Ange, it’s me,” I say.

“I want to be left in peace. I want,” says Ange, “to be left alone.”

“Ange, are you in pain?”

“Let me be, all of you.”

I awkwardly stand up again, shivering in grief and anxiety. I feel around for the lamp and set it back on the bedside table. I go to the door, clap my ear to the wood to hear anything that might be going on in the living room. Then I come back and sit down on the bed, as far from Ange as I can, not wanting to upset him but unwilling to abandon him, even though that’s exactly what he demanded, in that furious, plaintive way so unlike him, that amnesic and, I tell myself, selfish, ungrateful way, as if deliberately forgetting any bond that unites us.

But shouldn’t I be making him undress (because under the sheets he’s still wearing his pants, belt, and socks), shouldn’t I be cleaning the wound, putting on a bandage, forcing him to swallow two pain pills? How to imagine struggling with your own weakened husband, and then, once that battle’s behind you, setting out to rebuild your honor to whatever degree you can? How to conceive of such a sad, ugly situation?

And most of all, how to imagine walking through the darkness of the living room to the bathroom, where we keep our medicine, and then walking through it again in the other direction, the living room alive with rustlings and pantings whose source I can’t locate and whose meaning I can’t find, though the first image that comes to my mind is Monsieur Noget vigorously fornicating and taking pains to be heard by both Ange and me, but particularly by Ange, who’s lying there petrified in his misery, motionless on his bed of sorrow and pain, and what does he want from us, what do we still have that he wants, what is he trying to make us understand?

I get up again, again I listen at the bedroom door and check that the latch is closed—and again those rubbing sounds, those moans from the living room. My neck and forehead are dripping with a sweat that stinks powerfully of fear. So what is it? Is it the storm, the wild wind? But just now, I remember, in that very living room, I couldn’t hear a sound from outside.

“Monsieur Noget?” I whisper, my lips pressed to the door. Then, louder: “Monsieur Noget, is that you?”

Oh, I immediately tell myself, he couldn’t possibly have come in, since I chained the door. It’s impossible—so? And with that, knowing Noget couldn’t have come into the apartment, knowing that and at the same time having to accept that these rumbles and hisses can only fall within the domain of the impossible, I feel I no longer have to think about them or torment myself over them, I have only to maintain a safe distance between them and me.

Crushed by exhaustion, I lie down on the bed, keeping well away from Ange. I can see his eyes in the darkness, wide open now, staring at the ceiling, as still and watchful as his whole body seems, silent, stiff, and suffering. I don’t dare say a word. And how sad, I say to myself, how sad is my fear, and my silence. Because I’m used to telling Ange my every thought, because he’s the one person in this world whose judgment I’ve never feared, the one person who never, at any moment of our life together, wore me down with recriminations or questions about my attachment to my work, the one person, finally, who was never ignobly tempted to hold up my son to me, for example, and my school, and accuse me of caring more for the latter than the former. And this evening I avoid even reaching out to lightly stroke Ange’s forehead—why am I suddenly his enemy?