Her head froze, slightly raised, trapped by her whim of curiosity. She closed her eyes and with infinite slowness began to lower her cheek down toward the hollow left in the pillow. Little by little. Her neck stiffened, supporting a lead weight. Her temple probed the distance still left to travel. This distance seemed vertiginous, as if her head were sinking into a bottomless void. Yet her face already felt hot, as it sensed the warmth of the pillow close at hand, and even recognized the texture of the fabric. And through closed eyelids she sensed that a living presence had appeared in the open doorway and was slowly slipping into the room, modifying its volume, the familiar relationships between objects, and even, one might have said, the regular sound of the clock.
The bedroom was filled with the viscous silence of nocturnal rooms where a slow coupling is taking place; or, indeed, a murder; or even the meticulous work needed to eradicate the traces of a murder. It was the numbness of a room, where in the depths of the night bodies are going through the motions of an erotic, or criminal, dumb show.
When her temple finally touched the pillow her eyelashes blinked involuntarily. And this was her last clear perception during the whole night: at the end of the room the long, dark overcoat opened on a naked body, a white body, slim. It did not look like any other body; it did not look like a body at all; it did not look like anything she had ever seen in her life…
Her eyelids were closed again, as if in death. Her face, half buried in the burning down of the pillow. Her body nonexistent. Outside her there was nothing but the purple darkness into which the whole bedroom dissolved, that merged into the darkness outside the windows.
It was in this sanguine ink that suddenly the outline, at once burning and frozen, of a shoulder manifested itself, then that of a woman's breast. And the point of the breast-firm, taut. Another sinuous curve was swiftly felt, that of the arm and a moment later that of the hip. It was neither a sensation nor a caress. It could have been a raindrop making this fleeting trace along her skin…
The line suddenly broke off. There was a rapid movement of air, a whirlwind crossing the bedroom. A slight creak of the door closing told her that she was hearing again. Against her skin, under her skin, she now felt the carnal sketch of an unknown body, an outline poignant in its unfinished beauty.
She fell asleep when the windows were already beginning to turn pale. She woke up again at once. And explained to herself very calmly-only a momentary plunge into despair took her breath away-why he had fled. He must have noticed an unaccustomed tautness in her sleeping body, in its too perfect lethargy… He had snatched up his coat and rushed to the door. And with his hand on the handle he had lived through that momentary but appalling dilemma known to all criminals: to flee or to return to cover your tracks at the risk of being done for. He had gone back toward the bed, had covered up the inert body with a blanket, had straightened out the slippers that he had kicked aside in his flight…
Criminal… She repeated it ceaselessly during that sleepless night. Criminal was the silence she had kept. Her acceptance. Her resignation. Criminal too, the nakedness of the youth, concealed beneath a man's long overcoat. Criminal that whole night…
And yet there was something false about those menacing syllables. Something "too clever," she thought. Crime, perversion, monstrousness, sin… She caught herself seeking out ever more punishing words. But the words merely seemed as if written on the page of a book. Typographical symbols devoid of life.
In the morning she noticed that this time the curtains were open (during the first night they had remained drawn). The day was gray and windy (that other awakening had been to sunlight)… She sensed that these parallels concealed a fearsome truth that would be revealed to her at any minute now. A physical, corporeal truth that gripped the muscles of her stomach, rose up to her heart and closed over it, like a hand around a bunch of grapes in the tangle of leaves.
The truth that the words repeated throughout the night did not suffice to tell.
There were no longer any words but these things that offered themselves to her gaze with their mystery, with a mysterious smile almost. The cold smile of one who already knows the secret. The curtains; the lamp with its great orange shade lording it on the bedside shelf; the well-worn slippers, comfortable to her feet but suddenly unfamiliar; the door handle… struck by an inspiration, she opened the wardrobe, rummaged among several garments on their coat hangers, took out the black dress, her only remaining elegant outfit. Its pleats, its neckline trimmed with silk braid… The dress, too, was silently telling a secret that was about to burst forth…
She went out into the corridor, this time with no fear. And as all the objects seemed to want to confide in her, the big cardboard box on top of the old closet caught her eye. For years now, when dusting or repainting the walls, she had wondered what it could contain and had then forgotten about it until she came to clean again… She pulled up a stool, drew the box toward her, opened it. The thing it contained turned out to be strangely solitary, like a relic at the heart of a shrine. It was a plaster cast, no doubt one of the first of those she had made for her son, something he had learned to fashion for himself while still very young. This one was of such a small size that at first glance she did not know if the plaster had been shaped around a leg or an arm. Of course, it was a child's leg and she recognized the touching delicacy of its shape… She put the cast back in the box and closed it; then unable to curb her desire, seized the plaster mold again, pressed it to her cheek, her lips. And it was then that the secret rang out: "Incest!"
The word shattered into a number of memories, each one earlier than the last. They reverberated in the night of the first snow and even before that night. During the night when the sleeping draft had not worked. And even earlier, when for the first time she had surprised that young stranger beside the kitchen range. And even further back than that in her memories. That old overcoat of her husband's on the youth's naked body. The previous winter she had darned it and, seeing it on her son's shoulders, had had to make a rapid, strenuous effort not to think about her husband's body… And her unique evening dress. And the unique opportunity for wearing it- the evenings when L.M. took her to the theater. She would arrive at Li's house and entrust the boy to her and begin to make herself ready. When she went out, dressed, with her hair up and perfumed, her neck and shoulders very pale, the boy observed her with an insistent and hostile look. That made her laugh. She embraced him, enveloping him in her perfume, ruffling his hair and tickling his ear with her warm voice, imitating a lover's voice, which is, in its turn, an imitation of the voice we use in speaking to children… And there were also the slippers. As quite a young child he had put them on one day for fun when she was still in bed and gone out into the corridor making the soles clatter on the floor. She had protested feebly; he had not obeyed her. She had been overwhelmed by an acute pleasure, that of feeling herself tenderly dominated, of not knowing how to or wanting to resist…
Pushing the box back onto the top of the closet she climbed down from the stool. Now it had all been said. There was nothing else to understand. She knew everything, even that: the word "incest" had already resounded within her but in such cavernous depths of her mind that, surfacing into speech, it had been transmuted into "crime," "monstrousness," "horror." Like those deep sea fish which, drawn to the surface, explode or transform themselves into an unrecognizable lump of flesh.