Cruelties, page 11
The investigator who had received the denunciation was smiling behind his fine eyeglasses, he was a bit of a sissy, he was the same age as the boys who wore earrings, he had listened politely to the insurance man but hadn’t taken many notes. He should have, the justice system let the guilty man go free and now the young man is at large though the proof was clear, the trail fresh.
It was the first day of the school holidays, so beautiful they might have picnicked in the graveyard where the sun had risen like a caress, in the place where stillborn infants were buried. Then the sun had enveloped the whole village without touching it, the stones were as warm as the flowers, the river had woken up blue. Everything was ruined after the first coffee, of course, with the death rattle of the motorbike followed by that of a lawnmower, as if the boy couldn’t wait for a more appropriate day to clean the small stretch of grass along the driveway, which disappeared at the road, which was in any case weakened by the dust. He was working bare-chested again, despite the weak sun. The goldfinch had appeared because of the noise and it stayed with them for the noon meal. The three of them talked together, whistling, warbling, speaking urgent words that sometimes seemed grave. It was then, from as far away as his own front stoop, where he sat reading the paper, that the neighbour clearly saw the bird light on the boy’s shoulder, savouring some crumbs that were stuck to his sweaty neck; but it wasn’t sweat, that long mauve weal running down his back, it was a groove that only a woman being raped would dig, all the way down to the small of his back. The sun was at its zenith, the light perfect, the wound brand-new. And the woman next door was in collusion. Before he went back to work, she had rubbed his back for a long time, her hand, coated with balm, followed the trace, penetrated there, sometimes seemed to get lost in the line of his buttocks. The boy had shuddered, straining like a cat, in fact that was how he looked at the bird, he knew how to attract quarry. Then he left at five p.m. and the next day, in the paper that arrived from the city at dawn, there was an account of how a teenage girl had been found dead in her isolated bedroom, her nails broken and her fingers covered with blood; the discovery had been made the night before, at the very moment when the guilty man was chatting about it under the willow with his two lovers.
To calm him, while suggesting that he not read so many novels, though he never read novels, the policeman had gone to the schoolteacher’s house that same evening. She was quite astonished, the boy was her cousin and her childhood friend, he had a pretty girlfriend in town and he’d hurt himself helping her move, some sharp object had scraped him. That’s what today’s newspaper claims that she said, even though the boy never came back and there’s no answer at the number she gave the police and virgins, suddenly, are no longer dying in the vicinity.
The sun comes up grey where they will bury the priest, around the middle of the summer. The goldfinch has lost his appetite, he began to chirp rather than sing, then he died as no bird before him has died. He perched high in the tree, on a branch bathed in light, he straightened up as if to take flight, he left the branch, his black-streaked wings held close to his thin body. His head struck the pavement, it was suicide. When she picked him up in one hand, she stroked the tiny round head for a long time, as if there were a brain inside that had been capable of loving. She went inside, she could have buried him under her bed. She doesn’t go out any more.
Now the village comes alive. The distributor leaves twice as many copies of the tabloid newspaper, the parents are stirred all the same by a school principal who might have helped a murderer escape, they come to the corner store to get the news — business is booming — and they intend to place it on the agenda for the next school board meeting. A young reporter, summer help, determined to show his mettle, devotes his evenings to spying on the street. He’s spent hours listening to the former insurance man, he passes on the man’s theories, cautiously; his newspaper likes blood but fears libel suits. More daring, the host of a radio phone-in show has had the witness on three times, to inveigh with him against young men who sport earrings, who are either queers or murderers, in any case, perverts of one kind or another, and protected by charters.
Lured to the village, which he’s seen on television, a major builder intends to build there a dozen townhouses in the New France style at affordable prices for the young families thanks to whom the school will never again be threatened with closing. In the meantime, the teacher has asked a local contractor to triple the height of the wall and to block her windows on the east side. Requests for permits in the village have multiplied, construction is flourishing, and everything else.
THE SCAFFOLD
Naked beneath her robe
she demanded the scaffold
for the handsome thief who stands there
“Her lips are honey
and my sting is innocent,”
he declared to the faltering judge
He impregnated her before the jury’s eyes
The child was sentenced to life
Sixteen years ago I was teaching in the small town of X, one hundred and twenty kilometres from the village of Y, which I knew only by name, I’m rather sedentary and I prefer the mountains to the seashore that, through the river, ends up in this place, now peaceful but troubled at the time.
Because I had a reputation for sound judgement, like most history teachers, and particularly because I knew practically nothing about what had happened in Y and so could not have devised an opinion in advance, I was named a member of the jury by the two parties in a trial that looked as though it would be brief.
I didn’t try to withdraw. The summer had been rather rainy after a strange heat wave in the spring. I had missed my annual trip to Provence because of a sprain I’d suffered when I slipped in the tub, a stupid accident from which I thought I was protected because I abstain from sports. I was feeling gloomy; the students who were arriving for their fifth year of secondary school seemed to me bigger ignoramuses than usual and, contrary to what people think, history cannot be taught to those who have no prior notion of the subject. Most of them didn’t even know why they, in America, spoke French.
The distraction was welcome. It was a trial for a series of murders, a case rich in sensation, and I needed some in order to take up again with life, which I sensed slipping away from me a little more every year as I approached my thirties. I read a newspaper that doesn’t cover trivia and the only stories I remembered had to do with my two fields of interest, la question nationale and union matters, vast historical muddles in such a small country where one mutation has been chasing away another for twenty years now. I was busy, I was writing and rewriting the outline for a book that I’d finally complete when I had the time that teaching doesn’t allow. But I suspected that life also went on elsewhere; I had loved two women who had left me, one for an Italian and Italy, the other to smoke and drink as she pleased in comfort, activities I abstained from even while admitting that they must offer some pleasure with which I’d have to get acquainted.
In short, I was ripe for a break and the one the trial offered was ideal. I would have a ringside view of life without having to experience any drama myself, and through this temporary change of course, I was even going to enrich my understanding of history — the debate on capital punishment had resumed recently in the land, in the wake of the murder, by repeat offenders, of two young police officers, one of them a woman who had just completed her training. Normally such discussions don’t interest me, history is far from repeating itself despite what people say, it’s on the move and if barbarous cruelties do recur, those we relinquish are not repetitions of the originals. The last scaffolds disappeared from here when I was still playing hangman, my students didn’t even know they’d once existed. I wanted to put myself to the test, however, the way we pinch ourselves to know if we’re dreaming. I wanted to find out whether, in the face of the acts of violence attributed to the accused, the spirit of revenge, which is hidden under the desire to reestablish the order that existed before the horrors, was going to affect me.
Save for a locksmith who had seen all the vile acts of ordinary lives displayed behind the doors that he forced open, my fellow jurors struck me as a little too impressionable. The women as much as the men, all middle-class and duly salaried, had appeared timid in the face of the lawyers’ questions, stammering their personal information and, in my opinion, playing around with the truth a little when they declared they’d heard practically nothing about the case while I, who make a point of staying away from such disturbances of the common man, had no choice but to absorb the many rumours at the start of the new school year, when the presumed guilty man was apprehended. They, too, wanted to interrupt their everyday existences and, by selecting them, both the defense lawyer and the Crown prosecutor gave the signal that they wanted to play on sentiment. It was possible that I seemed malleable, my appearance is somewhat lackluster and my voice doesn’t carry far.
The name of the accused was Maxime, like several others in his age group who were then entering their twenties. Though unremarkable, he was animated, one of those bright-eyed dark types who go through adolescence without mishap. He stood well, which is rare among us, shoulders back, neck shaved and straight, and while he wore a strange earring that could have irritated a jury, which when all’s said and done was rather conservative, the rest of his attire, a very pale blue shirt with long sleeves and extremely well-cut grey trousers, inspired a certain confidence. He had, however, very strong hands that he did not try to conceal.
Four women had died and three had survived some extremely violent attacks — seven major offences — but the testimony lasted only a little more than a week. First came a parade of traditional regional policemen with thick moustaches and limited vocabularies, who displayed little evidence, lots of deductions, and even more prejudice with respect to a youth that was more idle along the St. Lawrence than elsewhere in the land. Maxime had no known address, his motorbike produced the noise that the survivors remembered; they also recognized his shaven neck, his killer’s hands and his height, though they had a hard time distinguishing his face and, in their trauma, which continued before the court, it was impossible for them to gawk at the accused in any sustained fashion. We were awash in presumptions, which were highly disturbing but rather imprecise, the Crown even called as a witness a retired man who all summer had observed Maxime moonlighting at a neighbour’s. The Crown prosecutor, a woman, tried to draw proof of his character from some odd behaviour. The defense summoned the neighbour to appear, a young school principal, pink and weary, who was his cousin, who loved him like a brother and who maintained he was a peaceable man, but nonetheless could not attest to his comings and goings after five p.m. every evening of the previous season.
We were in a state of lethargy when the accused finally testified. Until then, I had paid little attention to the representative of the Crown. She was a tiny bespectacled professional, the kind we see so many of now that the majority of students in our law faculties are women, and she made her way better than her opposite number through the order of the files. Impossible to guess at her body under the made-to-measure robe, but it must have been slender and silky to judge by her face with its full cheeks, its delicate nose, its olive complexion that was no doubt covered with the down that afflicts brunettes with thick hair; her own she wore pulled into one of those Victorian knots that bare the forehead too much and create a moon face. She must be a copy of her grandmother, whose dull existence in the shadow of some local notable she was avenging. Her name was actually Évangeline Dupré.
For five hours, she ruled over the premises. Without opposition, she strove to extirpate confessions that didn’t come, but her intelligent questions, full of lugubrious innuendo, found a way to consider them as understood. In every minute of Maxime’s time that was not accounted for, she placed a corpse, a torn vagina, lifeless eyes, and the beautiful names of the young women who’d had no choice. She brought back the night, the light sleep of the virgins, the silent commotion that swooped down on them, the mauve moment when it became pointless for them to refuse to die.
He resisted, denial after denial, his gaze was limpid, always. I felt rising in him, however, and in us, both surprise and fascination, as if she were telling a true story, as if she were the sole and irrefutable witness to so much pain. Their confrontation became violent under the fluorescent lighting in the windowless room, I would even say depraved, though I do not interpret that theatre in moral terms. Depraved because of what I saw with my own eyes, during the final exchange, when she spread her arms and leaned on the table that stood between them. The front of her robe fell open, she was naked, her flesh became the question. She was brutal. “You like sex?” He said yes with his eyes and with an imperceptible groan, which I saw him swallow. The defense objected and the judge, shaken though he had seen nothing, ordered an adjournment. I think I was the only one to have caught that bright flash of flesh from my angle of vision at the end of the front row. I confided in the locksmith, who’d become a close companion, who assured me that she was wearing a short beige dress, that it would have been inconceivable for her to be so bold as to make such an argument, risking her career, which was obviously off to a good start.
On the morning of her charge to the jury, I agreed that I’d been a victim of an illusion and prepared to get over it.
Évangeline Dupré’s soliloquy was dazzling.
First she spoke to us, twelve uncertain men and women, potential weaklings. “Before your eyes, which have seen all there is to see on TV, grew dim, before your hearts were consoled without having experienced any cruelty, before your souls, forgiven in advance for all their despicable acts, there was in all of you,” she reminded us, “a place for anger. It was planed down, destroyed, then it was forbidden you by the charlatans of this century’s end — the priests, psychologists, social workers, community leaders, editorial writers, and philosophers who earn their livings and medals by defusing the bombs of your natural indignation, who subjugate you, you flock of sheep, so that you accept life as it is, with its well-managed turpitudes. The archangel who stepped on the head of the serpent, you look at today with amazement, as if he were a Nazi, the power of evil. And you no longer believe in the day of the Last Judgement because it is said to be a day of wrath, of a sin to be committed by God Himself, which is quite impossible when his pastoral imposes the soothing smile of forgiveness. Your brothers kill, they rape, and it’s you who are guilty of seething and hating them, you make haste to dive into the warm water of reconciliation while your sisters are dying, you are their faded shrouds.”
I felt a lump of rage rise, rage at her or at myself, when she turned to face the judge, an insipid soul nearing retirement, to show him where punishment lay. “You have been sitting there for thirty years because once your friends were in power,” she told him, “but also because for hundreds of years, before Pontius Pilate became the idol of jurists fearful of any conclusion, buried under their footnotes, this place was a place for retribution. Lines of just men have overcome their mortal sorrow to stop evil and evildoers through fire, water, the stake, blade, rifle, poison. These have been — stripped bare, the face of Justice. Even today, when dictators are assassinated, entire democracies rejoice and celebrate the executioners. But this same day, thanks to your cowardice, they embrace those who kill their daughters. In this country, the most insignificant oiler of a scaffold was braver and wiser than the abolitionists, judges, and politicians who today no longer know how to cleanse their honour except on the golf course.”
The judge bowed his head as if to the pillory; the prosecutor now addressed the accused. She recounted to him all his crimes, day after day of the summer lately flown, a serial that kept the courtroom under her spell for more than an hour. Then, holding Maxime’s gaze, where flames were flaring, she explained to him, this time minute by minute, how she would have had his skin, how she’d have made him a hanged man had she not been surrounded by a shit-scared judge and jury, sheltered by the law. She described to him vertebrae cracking, viscera loosening, tongue disgorging, eyes rolling, lungs straining for one last gulp of air. And the horrible breeze that finally touches the brain, the ultimate farewell to earthly pleasures, which are the only genuine ones. Like those of the flesh. She described them to Maxime, exquisitely, how his muscular legs would have tightened around a woman’s pelvis, how his young dog’s tongue would have rasped all her lips, how he would have spilled again and again into a convulsed belly, and so on, during all the seasons that desire can wait. Rut instead, if there were such a thing as mercy for his victims, he must die an excruciating death.
She was standing against him, she was delivering her words to him in short gasps, rhythmical, inexhaustible. Some small thing refused to be consumed between them and we were all penetrated by that delirium, penetrated through our own genitals, until the condemned man set us free by taking her before our eyes. Yes, she was naked under the robe, and he impaled her, a few seconds of pure copulation before the officers woke up, came to, all hard no doubt, like me, who desired nothing but her.
