Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [77]
The young woman kissed him, icy cold and frantic, and he was shivering as much as she was.
For more than a fortnight, Laurent wondered what he could do to kill Camille off again. He had thrown the man in the water and still he was not sufficiently dead, but came back every night to lie at Thérèse’s side. Even when the murderers thought they had completed the killing and could indulge the sweet pleasures of their love, the victim would return to chill their marriage bed. Thérèse was not a widow: Laurent found himself married to a wife who already had a drowned man as her husband.
XXIII
Little by little, Laurent lapsed into raging madness. He determined to drive Camille out of his bed. At first, he had gone to sleep fully clothed, then he avoided touching Thérèse. Finally, in a desperate fury, he tried to clasp his wife to his breast and crush her rather than abandon her to his victim’s ghost. It was a supreme gesture of brutal defiance.
In short, only the hope that Thérèse’s kisses would cure his insomnia had induced him to share a bed with the young woman. And when he found himself in her bedroom, as the master, his flesh, rent by still more frightful agonies, did not even consider trying the cure. For three weeks, he remained in a state of apparent devastation, forgetting that he had done everything to possess Thérèse and, now that he did possess her, being unable to touch her without increasing his agony.
The excess of his suffering brought him out of this numbness. In the first moment of stupor, in the strange desperation of the wedding night, he had managed to overlook the reasons that had driven him to marry. But with the repeated attacks of his bad dreams, he was invaded by a dull irritation that overcame his cowardice and restored his memory. He recalled that he had married to drive away his nightmares by clasping his wife tightly to him. So he seized Thérèse in his arms, one night, taking the risk of crossing over the drowned man’s corpse, and dragged her violently towards him.
The young woman, too, was at the end of her tether. She would have flung herself into the flames if she had thought that the flames would purify her flesh and deliver her from her distress. She responded to Laurent’s grasp, deciding to burn in the caresses of this man or else to find solace in them.
They locked into a frightful embrace. Pain and terror took the place of desire. When their limbs touched, it seemed to them that they had fallen against burning coals. They gave a cry and pressed more tightly together, so as to leave no place between their bodies for the drowned man. Yet they could still feel Camille’s shredded flesh, foully squeezed between them, freezing their skin in places, even while the rest of their bodies was burning.
Their kisses were fearfully cruel. Thérèse’s lips sought out Camille’s bite on Laurent’s stiff, swollen neck and she fixed her mouth on it with savage passion. Here was the open wound; once this was healed, the murderers could sleep easy. The young woman knew this, trying to cauterize the place with the fire of her kisses. But her lips burned and Laurent pushed her away harshly, with a dull moan: it felt to him as though a red-hot iron had been placed on his neck. Crazed, Thérèse persisted: she wanted to kiss the scar again, feeling a bitter pleasure in putting her mouth against this skin in which Camille’s teeth had sunk. For a moment, she thought of biting her husband on the spot, removing a large piece of flesh and making a new, deeper wound which would take away the mark of the old one. Then, she thought, she would no longer go pale if she saw the mark of her own teeth. But Laurent protected his neck against her kisses. The wound smarted too much; he pushed her back each time as she reached out her lips. And so they fought, groaning and struggling in the horror of their embrace.
They realized that they were only increasing their own suffering. However much they exhausted themselves, frightfully grasping one another, they cried