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 sacrament of marriage. In any case, I have lost my innocence. Was I ever innocent? I understood the ugliness of life too early and it aged me. Jaded without experience, I’ve been like this since childhood. Like Claude. He can guess too many things as well. The day Anna began hating me because of the sewing box her father gave me, I felt it; just as I knew she’d torn my dress on purpose despite the innocent look on her face. I was only fifteen when I was already toying with Dr. Valois. That sensuous Normil force! Hits hard! Hell had its eye on us for some time and now we’re deep in it. The stakes have traced the infernal vicious circle, and maybe the hands that planted them are less guilty than ours. We are reaping what we sowed, the curse of our ancestors will disappear with our line. We must be hated and loved to the same extreme. I admire my father’s moderation, he’s the only one who stands out among us. How could Grandfather love him? Keep the sheep far away from us, for we would devour them. We, too, belong to a race of wildcats and raptors, that’s why we struggle so fiercely against those who’ve taken our lands. And the history of our property is quite murky. I heard my mother and father talking about it when I was six years old.
My mother was saying: “Grandfather insults me, he calls my father a drunk and a good-for-nothing; if I were mean I’d throw in his face what people say about his father.” “And what do people say?” my father asked. “They say he murdered a man to secure ownership of the land.” “Oh Laura, repeating such wild rumors?” my father replied. And my mother lowered her head.
One day, I had fallen asleep under the oaks. A man came to me in a dream wearing a bloody shirt that he took off to show me two gaping wounds on his back, and he said to me: “Look, he stabbed me with his knife to make his own justice. I will get my revenge when I put a weapon in the hand of one of his descendants, who will kill a man just as he did.” As he was talking, I detected his dull, atrocious stench. The smell of death, of clotted blood and rotting flesh. The memory of him has never made me feel uncomfortable, but I know he’s waiting there, two stones away from the ancestor’s grave. If Paul doesn’t leave, he will kill someone and I don’t want that. None of us will ever kill again. Grandfather must think that we deserved to be punished, that our tormentors were guided by a divine hand. The curse weighs on us and he knows it, but he rebels out of pride. It’s up to me to pay for this so that my children and Paul’s children can be free of it. Acquit myself without balking and be done with it. I’ve lived long enough with the superstitious fear of this curse falling on my brother’s head. He doesn’t deserve that. I struggle with the conviction that justice is not on our side. What right do we have to property? What gives us the right to such privilege while others wallow in poverty? The poverty of the people my peasant ancestor must have exploited, the misery of the poor who looted his garden and whom he had whipped without mercy, the poverty of the beggars taking on the uniform, the poverty