Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [80]
shop and the flat. She felt an urge to tidy up. The truth was that she needed to walk around, to do something, to exhaust her stiffened limbs. She bustled around all morning, sweeping, dusting and cleaning the bedrooms, washing the dishes and carrying out tasks that would previously have disgusted her. These domestic duties kept her on her feet until noon, active and silent, leaving her no time to think of anything except the cobwebs on the ceiling and the grease on the plates. Then she went into the kitchen and prepared lunch. While they were eating, it grieved Mme Raquin to see her constantly getting up to go and fetch the courses. She was touched and annoyed by her niece’s constant activity; she would scold her and Thérèse answered that they had to save money. After the meal, the young woman would get dressed and finally resign herself to joining her aunt behind the counter. There, she would become drowsy. Exhausted by her sleepless nights, she would nod off, abandoning herself to the delicious lethargy that overcame her as soon as she sat down. They were only light snoozes, imbued with a kind of delight, which calmed her nerves. The thought of Camille vanished and she experienced the deep rest of sick people whose pain is suddenly taken away. Her body felt relaxed and her mind free: she lapsed into a sort of warm, healing oblivion. Without these few moments of peace, her organism would have broken down under the pressure from her nervous system, but she drew enough strength from them to suffer yet again and feel terror on the following night. In any case, she did not fall asleep, hardly lowering her eyelids, lost in a dream of peace. When a customer came in she would open her eyes and produce the few sous’ worth of goods requested, then drift back into her vague reverie. She would spend three or four hours in this way, perfectly happy, replying to her aunt in monosyllables and taking a real delight in letting herself lapse into this state of unconsciousness that took away thought and drew her back into herself. She would only very occasionally cast a glance into the arcade, feeling most at ease when the weather was overcast, when it was dark and when she hid her weariness in the shadows. The damp, mean arcade, traversed by a population of poor, wet devils whose umbrellas dripped on the paving, seemed to her like the passage into some place of ill-repute, a kind of sinister, dirty corridor where no one would come and look for her or bother her. At times, seeing the murky glows around her and smelling the acrid scent of damp, she imagined that she had been buried alive and thought she was in the earth at the bottom of a communal grave, with the dead milling around her. The idea calmed her and consoled her. She told herself that she was safe now, that she would die and not suffer any longer. At other times, she had to keep her eyes open: Suzanne would visit and stay sewing beside the counter all afternoon. Thérèse now liked the company of Olivier’s wife, with her soft face and slow gestures; she felt a strange sense of relief looking at this poor, disconnected creature. She had made a friend of her and liked having her by her side, smiling a pale smile and only half alive, bringing a faint graveyard odour into the shop. When Suzanne’s blue eyes, with their glassy transparency, stared into hers, Thérèse felt a beneficial chill in the marrow of her bones. She would stay like that for four hours. Then she would go back to the kitchen and try to tire herself out again, making Laurent his dinner with feverish haste. And when her husband appeared in the doorway, her throat tightened and a feeling of anxiety once more wrenched her whole being.
Every day, the couple experienced more or less the same feelings. In the daytime, when they were not face to face with one another, they enjoyed delightful hours of rest, but in the evening, when they were together again, a piercing sense of disquiet swept through them.
Their evenings, however, were quiet. Thérèse and Laurent, who shuddered at the idea of going back to their room, delayed