Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [58]
He went over to his mirror, stretched his neck and looked. The scar was light pink. As Laurent was making out his victim’s tooth marks, he felt quite moved by it and the blood rushed to his head. It was then that he noticed something odd. The scar was turned purple by the rising flow; it became bright and blood-filled, standing out red against the plump white neck. At the same time, Laurent felt sharp pricks, as though someone were sticking pins into the wound. He quickly turned up his shirt collar.
‘Pooh!’ he said. ‘Thérèse will cure that ... A few kisses will be all it takes. How stupid I am to think about such things!’
He put on his hat and went downstairs. He needed to get some fresh air, to walk around. As he went past the cellar door, he smiled; but at the same time he tested the strength of the hook that kept the door shut. Outside, he walked slowly in the fresh morning air on the empty pavements. It was about five o’clock.
Laurent spent a dreadful day. He had to fight against an overwhelming urge to sleep that overtook him in the afternoon in his office. His head was aching and heavy. He could not stop it falling forward, so that he had to jerk it upright when he heard one of his bosses coming along the corridor. The struggle with these sudden movements left his body completely exhausted and caused him a lot of anxiety.
That evening, tired as he was, he wanted to go and see Thérèse. He found her as feverish, as dejected and as weary as he was.
‘Poor Thérèse had a bad night,’ said Mme Raquin, when he had sat down. ‘It appears that she had nightmares and frightful insomnia. I heard her cry out several times and this morning she was quite ill.’
While her aunt was speaking, Thérèse was staring at Laurent. Each of them doubtless guessed the terror they had shared, because the same nervous shudder passed across both their faces. They stayed looking at each other until ten o’clock, exchanging commonplaces, but understanding one another and both conspiring through their looks to hasten the moment when they could unite against the drowned man.
XVIII
Thérèse, too, had been visited by the ghost of Camille in that night of fever.
She had been suddenly aroused by Laurent’s ardent plea for them to meet, after more than a year of indifference. Her flesh began to ache when, lying in bed alone, she considered that the wedding was soon to take place. And then, struggling in the throes of insomnia, she saw the drowned man rise up in front of her. Like Laurent, she had twisted around in a frenzy of desire and horror and, like him, told herself that she would no longer be afraid, no longer experience such suffering, when she held her lover between her arms.
At the same moment, this man and this woman had felt a kind of failing of the nerves, which brought them back, gasping and terrified, to their terrible love. An affinity of blood and lust had been established between them. They shuddered the same shudders, and their hearts, in a sort of agonizing fellowship, ached with the same terror. From then on, they had only one body and one soul to feel pleasure and pain. This community, this mutual interpenetration, is a psychological and physiological fact that often occurs between those who are thrown violently together by great nervous shocks.
For more than a year, Thérèse and Laurent carried the chain lightly that was clamped to their limbs, binding them together. In the mental collapse that followed the acute crisis of the murder, in the feelings of disgust and the need for calm and forgetting that came after that, the two prisoners could imagine that they were free and that no iron link bound them together. The chain lay slack on the ground, while they rested, stricken with a kind of happy stupor, and tried to find love elsewhere, to lead sensibly balanced lives. But on the day when circumstances drove them once more to exchange words of desire, the chain suddenly tightened and they experienced such a shock that they felt attached to one another for ever.
The very next day, Thér