Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [47]
One morning, he got a real fright. For some minutes, he had been looking at a drowned man, short in stature and horribly disfigured. The flesh of this body was so soft and decayed that the water running over it was taking it away bit by bit. The stream pouring on the face was making a hole to the left of the nose. Then, suddenly, the nose collapsed and the lips fell off, revealing white teeth. The drowned man’s head broke into a laugh.
Every time he thought he recognized Camille, Laurent felt a burning sensation in his heart. He desperately wanted to find his victim’s body, yet he was overcome with cowardice when he thought that he saw it in front of him. His visits to the Morgue filled him with nightmares and shudders that left him panting. He shook off his fears, called himself a child and tried to be strong, but in spite of that his flesh rebelled, and feelings of disgust and horror seized him as soon as he came into the humidity and the stale smell of the hall.
When there were no drowned men on the last row of slabs, he breathed more easily and felt less disgust. Then he became a simple, curious onlooker, taking a strange pleasure in staring violent death in the face, in its dolefully peculiar and grotesque shapes. He enjoyed the spectacle, especially when there were women showing their naked busts. These brutal, outstretched naked bodies, spotted with blood, pierced in places, attracted him and held his gaze. Once, he saw a young woman of twenty, a working-class girl, strong, heavily built, who seemed to be sleeping on the stone. Her fresh, plump body was paling with very delicate variations of tint; she was half smiling, her head slightly to one side, offering her bosom in a provocative manner. You would have taken her for a courtesan lying on a bed if there had not been a black stripe on her neck, like a necklace of shadow:2 the girl had just hanged herself because of a disappointment in love. Laurent looked at her for a long time, studying her flesh, absorbed in a kind of fearful lust.
Every morning, while he was there, he heard people coming and going behind him as they entered and left.
The Morgue is a show that anyone can afford, which poor and rich passers-by get for free. The door is open, anyone can come in. There are connoisseurs who go out of their way not to miss one of these spectacles of death. When the slabs are empty, people go out disappointed, robbed, muttering under their breath. When the slabs are well filled, and when there is a fine display of human flesh, the visitors crowd in, getting a cheap thrill, horrified, joking, applauding or whistling, as in the theatre, and go away contented, announcing that the Morgue has been a success that day.
Laurent soon came to know the regulars who attended the place, a mixed, diverse group of people who came to sympathize with one another or snigger together. Some workmen would come in on their way to their jobs, with a loaf of bread and some tools under their arms; they found death amusing. Among them were jokers who would play to the gallery by making a facetious remark about the expression on each body’s face. They nicknamed the victims of fires ‘coalmen’, while those who had been hanged, murdered or drowned, and bodies that had been wounded or crushed, excited their ridicule; and their voices, which trembled a little, stammered out comic remarks in the shivering silence of the hall. Then came the lower-middle classes, thin, dry old men, and casual passers-by who came in here because they had nothing better to do, looking at the bodies with the blank eyes and distasteful expressions of men of sensitive feelings and placid natures. Women came in