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By Root 538 0

eyes on my prayer book and rosary in hand. My mind was elsewhere. Where are they? What are they doing? I was saying to myself. Jean Luze and Annette were still in bed when I left. I imagined them eating together. I could hear Annette’s laughter. I imagined Jean Luze’s eyes on her. On my knees, as the priest raised the wafer, I tried in vain to chase such thoughts away. It did not escape me that for some time now I’d been faking piety. I had lost my faith when I saw the children’s bodies piled high before my eyes after the last hurricane. Many of the oldest and meanest had been spared. Why? was the first unanswered question that gave me the courage to make my point. How many of these women kneeling to receive the body and blood of our Lord had never helped their fellow man? I asked myself that Sunday. All those around me were great sinners—usurers, exploiters, sadists, corrupters of virtue. I had known them from tender childhood. Not a soul you could praise to the skies. Not one who spared either Jane Bavière, or Agnès Grandupré, who died of consumption thanks to them, not one among them who failed to condemn the only just man among us, an old man named Tonton Mathurin, before whom my father learned to tremble.

They look so angelic in church! What were they thinking as they grimaced through their prayers? Were they trying to cheat God Himself, our overly tolerant God who calls all lost sheep to His bosom?

It was probably about seven in the evening.

I was on the landing and about to go downstairs when I looked up and caught Annette and Jean Luze exchanging glances. Annette took his hand first and pushed him into her bedroom. I pretended to go downstairs only to double back and put my ear to the door and my eye to the keyhole: they were still dressed and Jean Luze, his hands on her shoulders, stone-faced, unrecognizable, appeared to be fighting temptation. He threw her on the bed. Her skirt was tucked up, and he looked at her with a kind of hateful and appreciative curiosity. She moaned and brutally pulled him against her, eyes closed, nails biting into his back.

I suddenly stood up, overcome by some sort of prudishness, but I stayed a moment behind the door, heart racing, cheeks flushed. Then, agitated and dizzy from waves of feelings crashing together in me, I ran and threw myself flat on my stomach in bed. I left this position only when I heard Félicia calling me. I washed my face in a frenzy and went to her. She wanted some soup and she asked where her husband was.

“He is in the living room,” I answered calmly.

“And what is he doing?”

“He’s reading.”

“Ask him to come give me a kiss. He’s always afraid to wake me.”

To gain time, I suggested that she freshen up a little.

When I left her room a few minutes later, I found Jean Luze in the living room where he was indeed reading. No doubt he was trying to seem calm, quite prudently. He stood up and chose a record, the same one as always. But in his distracted state he made a mistake and the second movement of Beethoven’s Concerto no. 5 rose in a flutter, discreet, melodious, before rushing headlong into an incredibly violent chord.

He gave me an infinitely sweet look.

“You like this concerto too, don’t you? You come in each time I play it. The first movement is just as beautiful but I made a mistake … Ah! I couldn’t live without music … I think I’ve brought a record player with me my whole life. I was hardly twenty when I gave up everything else and bought one for the first time. My parents had just died and I was trying to scrape together a living …”

Just then, Annette appeared. I searched her face, looking for traces of victory that I could enjoy. She lit up a cigarette with quivering hands and threw Jean Luze a sidelong glance devoid of the misty-eyed gratitude I thought I would find there. He stared at her like an enemy. Their attitude surprised and disappointed me. I was willing to live this love through Annette only if she could measure up to it. It was essential that she outdo herself. Had she profaned this act that was so important in my eyes? What did