• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 876 0

be enduring such misery. He would have liked to oblige himself to be happy. He would prove to himself that he had no reason to suffer, that he had just achieved the height of happiness, which consists in folding one’s arms, and that he was an idiot not to indulge tranquilly in such bliss. But his arguments collapsed in the face of reality. Inside, he was forced to admit that idleness made his sufferings even worse, leaving him every moment of his life to think about his despair and experience its incurable bitterness. Laziness, the animal existence that he had dreamed of, was his punishment. There were times when he eagerly longed for some occupation that would take him out of himself. Then he would let himself go and abandon himself to the dull fate that bound his limbs, all the better to crush him.

In truth, he felt some release only when he was beating Thérèse in the evenings. This gave him relief from the dull ache inside.

His worst suffering, one that was both mental and physical, came from the bite that Camille had inflicted on his neck. There were times when he imagined that this scar covered his whole body. If he did manage to forget the past, he would seem to feel a sharp pricking, which brought the murder back to his flesh and into his mind. He could not stand in front of a mirror without seeing the phenomenon that he had so often noticed, one that never failed to terrify him: the emotion that he felt would have the effect of bringing the blood up to his neck, making the scar purple and causing it to eat into his flesh. This sort of living wound that he had on him, which would awake, redden and gnaw at the slightest hint of anxiety, terrified and tortured him. He came to believe that the drowned man’s teeth had buried some creature there that was devouring him. He felt that the piece of his neck with the scar on it no longer belonged to his body; it was like some alien flesh that had been stuck on in that place, like poisoned meat rotting his own muscles away. In this way he carried the living, devouring memory of his crime everywhere with him. When he used to beat Thérèse, she would try to scratch him on that spot; sometimes her nails would dig into it, making him scream with pain. Usually, she would sob when she saw the bite, to make it even more unbearable for Laurent. Her whole revenge for his brutality towards her was to torment him with the help of that bite.

Often when he was shaving he had been tempted to cut into his neck in order to remove the marks of the drowned man’s teeth. Looking into the mirror, when he lifted up his chin and saw the red mark under the white shaving soap, he would be seized with sudden fury and bring the razor quickly across, ready to cut into the living flesh. But the cold of the instrument on his neck1 always brought him back to his senses. He would feel faint and have to sit down and wait until his cowardice had been appeased enough for him to continue shaving.

In the evening, he would emerge from his lethargy only to launch into an outburst of blind, puerile anger. When he was tired of quarrelling with Thérèse and beating her, he would kick out at the wall, like a child, looking for something to break. This would relieve his feelings. He had a particular loathing of François, the tabby cat, who as soon as he came in would take refuge on the paralysed woman’s lap. If Laurent had not yet killed it, this was only because he did not dare to pick it up. The cat would look at him with large, round eyes, staring diabolically. It was these eyes, constantly settled on him, that drove the young man mad: he wondered what they meant, these eyes, forever looking in his direction, and in the end he really got the wind up and imagined some ridiculous things. When he was sitting at the table he would abruptly turn round at any time, in the midst of a quarrel or a long silence, to see François’s look examining him in this serious, implacable manner, then he would go pale and lose his head. He was on the point of yelling: ‘Hey! Say something! Tell me what you want, for once.’ When he managed