Sunday October 6, 1996
Between five and six in the morning, while that bastard pretended to sleep, there, right beside her, in their bed, she had been thinking.
After she had hurled insults at him, with her heart pounding harder than it ever had, even on the day she’d delivered the twins, Eugénie had considered firing a bullet into both his knees while he slept, so he’d be stuck in a wheelchair forever. But that wasn’t painful enough. He’d have carried on eating, drinking, sleeping like before. And he’d be taken for a victim. No, nothing should remain as it was before. And anyhow, she couldn’t have tolerated going to prison. No one would force her to leave her house, and definitely not him, that scum who was having it off with his daughter-in-law, that scum for whom she’d sacrificed her life. That scum who’d humiliated her in the worst way possible, by sleeping with the wife of his son, of their son.
She had to find a way of making him have nightmares in this bed, until his very last breath. And that’s when she decided to eliminate him from the surface of the earth. Not physically. No, not in one go: he had to suffer. Dying straight away would have been too easy; he had to be tortured until it killed him. She had to find a way for him to die slowly but surely, an agony that would go on and on. To find a hell for him. A hell that was personal to him. To trap him alive, behind invisible walls, the walls of shame, of guilt.
She had read that the Nazis had done experiments, in both physical and mental pain, on prisoners by torturing a relative or other loved one. She had read that, to do harm to someone, terrible harm, unbearable harm, you shouldn’t lay into that person directly, but rather lay into the person they loved most in the world. That’s how the idea for the harm entered her head. The source of the harm.
Harming Annette to destroy him.
The alarm clock showed 6:00 A.M. She had to move fast.
Eugénie went out into the street. It was cold and dark. She had on the mohair dressing gown that that scum had given her last Christmas. Armand’s car was parked on the sidewalk opposite, as usual.
She took off a wheel in a few minutes. She knew her stuff in mechanics. At the farm, it was she who always changed the tractor’s oil. Her brothers were even jealous. No vehicle held any secrets for her. Her father had taught her everything. Even Armand didn’t know that, and she’d liked the fact that no one knew she’d been a tomboy. She started to scrape the brake cables with a paring knife, that little vegetable peeler she’d used all through the twins’ childhood to peel the potatoes. She’d never given them frozen fries. Always Charlotte potatoes that she selected carefully, peeled, and then sliced into long, fine pieces. As she scraped away the top layer of rubber, she thought of Armand’s body when he had come back to bed, his body with the smell of another woman’s cunt on it.
That body that had deflowered her. That body to which she’d given her life and two children. That body that had scared her, hurt her, and that she’d ended up adoring. That body that had crushed her, rubbed itself, shuddering, against her for more than thirty years. The scent of it that clung to his shirts and that she’d secretly breathe in before washing them. She’d tended to its blisters, put Band-Aids on its grazes, buffed its fingernails, shaved its nape, applied heat treatment to its aches and pains, given it cough syrup.
While she was tampering with the brakes, she was sweating, hatred welling up with every hot flash. Her hands weren’t shaking. Her life had had it. Like the washing machine. She’d known that machine had had it well before Marcel checked “one last thing.” And when life’s had it, you don’t shake anymore, you don’t cry anymore, you hate.
She screwed the nuts back onto the second wheel and removed the jack, which she returned to its place in the garden shed with all the other tools and products. Weed killer, wood glue, drill, screwing machine, hammer, sander, monkey wrench, screwdriver. Those tools she’d pretended to be unfamiliar with, while, on the quiet, she’d repaired everything in the house, even the toilets, forever getting blocked because the evacuation pipe was too narrow.
“That one” had never asked himself any questions when he breezed in from his factory. Never a blocked U-bend, never a creaking door hinge, never a nail to hammer in, never a strip of wallpaper peeling off, never any furniture to assemble, never any mold, never a lick of paint needed, never a light bulb to change, never a broken-down boiler, never a plank to be nailed, never a screw coming loose, never any cracks in the walls, never a spot of rust appearing.
She went into her kitchen. It had taken her just fifteen minutes. She washed the peeler, the water scalding her fingers. She put it away with the other cutlery.
As she went back upstairs to bed, she gave thanks to Armand: at last she felt something strongly. At last she was moved by a powerful emotion, even if it was hatred. She had read that there’s but one step between hatred and love.