Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [59]
The play-acting involved was long and delicate. Both Thérèse and Laurent had taken on the role that suited them and they went forward with extreme caution, weighing every little word and gesture. Underneath, they were consumed by an impatience that wore and stretched their nerves. They lived in a state of continual irritation; only their terror of the consequences kept them smiling and calm.
They were in a hurry to get it over with, because they could no longer remain alone and separate. Every night, the drowned man came to them, while insomnia kept them lying on a bed of burning coals, and turned them over and over with iron pincers. Every evening, the state of nervous agony in which they lived drove up the fever in their blood, raising frightful spectres before them. When evening came, Thérèse no longer dared go up to her room. She experienced strong waves of terror at the idea of locking herself up until morning in that great room which was filled with strange glimmerings and peopled by ghosts as soon as the light went out. Eventually, she would leave her candle alight, not even wanting to go to sleep, so that it kept her eyes wide open. And when tiredness made her eyelids close, she saw Camille in the darkness and would reopen them with a start. In the morning, she would drag herself around in the daylight, shattered, after only a few hours’ sleep. As for Laurent, he had become quite timorous since the evening when he had been afraid while walking in front of the cellar door. Before that, he had lived with the self-confidence of an animal, but now he shook and went pale at the slightest noise, like a little boy. A shudder of fear had suddenly run through him and it had not left him since. At night, he suffered even more than Thérèse did: fear profoundly ravaged this great, soft, cowardly body, and he watched the close of day with a cruel sense of unease. Quite often he found that he did not want to go home and would spend whole nights walking through the deserted streets. Once, he remained until morning under a bridge in the pouring rain, and there, crouching down, freezing cold, not daring to get up and return to the embankment, he watched the dirty water flowing past in the pale shadows for almost six hours, during which his terrors would sometimes flatten him against the damp ground. He imagined he could see long lines of drowned people carried along with the current under the arch of the bridge. When exhaustion finally drove him home, he double-locked the door, and tossed and turned until dawn, a prey to frightful attacks of fever. The same nightmare would persistently return: he thought he was falling out of the hot, passionate arms of Thérèse into the cold and slimy arms of Camille. He dreamed that his mistress was stifling him in her warm embrace and then that the drowned man was pressing him to his rotting chest in an icy hug. These sudden, alternating sensations of desire and disgust, the successive touch of flesh burning with love and of cold flesh softened by the mud, made him pant and shudder, gasping in horror.
And, every day, the two lovers’ panic grew, every day their nightmares crushed and appalled them more. Each now believed that nothing but the other’s kisses would ever kill their insomnia. Out of prudence, they did not dare to meet, but waited for the day when they got married as a day of salvation that would