The Diary of a Chambermaid (21 page)

All the same, I distrust the man. He makes me uneasy, and at the same time interests me prodigiously. Sometimes I have seen really terrifying things lurking in the obscure depths of his eyes. Since I have become interested in him, he no longer strikes me as being a coarse, stupid, loutish peasant, as I used to think when I first got here … I ought to have examined him more carefully. Now I regard him as being unusually subtle and crafty … better than subtle, worse than crafty … I don’t quite know how to sum him up. Moreover, as a result of seeing him every day, I no longer find him so old and ugly. Habit has the same effect on people as on things: it is like a fog that gradually obliterates the features of a face and hides its defects. After a while you don’t seem to notice that a hunchback has got a hump! … But there’s something else—all the new and deeper sides of Joseph that I’m beginning to discover. And they disturb me profoundly. For a woman, what constitutes masculine beauty is not the regularity of purity of a man’s features. It is something much less obvious, and much more difficult to define … a kind of affinity, a sexual ambience, pungent, terrifying and intoxicating, which, for some women, becomes an irresistible obsession. And it is precisely this ambience that I am conscious of when I am with Joseph. The other day I was admiring the way he picked up a barrel of wine, playing with it like a child with a rubber ball. His exceptional strength, the suppleness of his movements, the formidable thrust of his loins and the athletic power of his shoulders set me musing. This strange and morbid curiosity, a mixture of fear and attraction, that the enigma of his shiftiness, of his grim silences, and impressive glances arouses in me is intensified by his muscular strength and bull-like solidity. Though I can’t properly explain it, I feel that between Joseph and myself there is some secret relationship, a moral and physical bond, that binds us a little closer every day.

From the window of the linen room where I work I sometimes watch him in the garden. There he is, crouching down with his face almost level with the ground, or perhaps kneeling by the wall with the espaliers on it … and suddenly he has disappeared … vanished into thin air. Before you can turn your head, he’s just not there. Does he sink into the ground? Can he pass through walls? … No and then I have to go into the garden to give him a message from Madame. I can’t see him anywhere, and I call him.

‘Joseph, Joseph, where are you?’

No answer. I call again:

‘Joseph, Joseph, where are you?’

And suddenly, without a sound, Joseph appears before me from behind a tree or a vegetable bed. He’s just there, like sunlight, with his grim, closed face, his hair plastered to his skull and his hairy chest showing through the open neck of his shirt… How does he manage it? … Where has he come from?

‘Oh Joseph, you frightened me …’ and the terrifying smile that plays on his lips and in his eyes gleams like the swift flash of a knife. I think this man must really be the devil himself! …

Little Clara’s rape has become the talk of the neighbourhood, and whetted everyone’s curiosity. People snatch the papers from each other’s hands to read about it.
La Libre Parole
roundly denounces the Jews, and asserts that it is a ritual murder. The magistrates have arrived, and are carrying out enquiries and taking statements; dozens of people have been interrogated. But nobody knows anything. Rose’s accusation of Monsieur Lanlaire has got around but no one believes it—they just shrug their shoulders. Yesterday the police arrested a poor pedlar, but he had no difficulty in proving that he was not in the neighbourhood at the time of the crime. The father, having been inculpated by all the gossip-mongers, had been completely exonerated … all the reports on him were completely favourable. So the police have been unable to find the slightest evidence to work on. Apparently the crime had impressed the magistrates by the amazing skill with which it was carried out … probably by professionals from Paris. It also appears that the public prosecutor is conducting the case in a very leisurely fashion, mainly as a matter of form. There’s nothing particularly thrilling about the murder of a poor man’s daughter … So probably nothing will be discovered, and before long, like so many others, the case will be classified as ‘unsolved’.

I shouldn’t be surprised if Madame thought her husband was guilty … It may be a joke, but she ought to know him better than anyone else. Ever since she heard the news she has been behaving most oddly. The way she keeps looking at her husband isn’t natural. I have noticed during meals that, every time the bell rings, she gives a little start … Today, after lunch, when the master said he was going out, she stopped him.

‘Surely you might just as well stay at home? What need is there for you to be always going out?’

She even strolled in the garden with him for a good hour. Naturally the master is quite unaware of what’s going on; he eats and smokes as usual, and certainly doesn’t lose a moment’s sleep … What a blockhead the man is!

I have always been interested in what they find to say to each other, those two, when they are alone … Yesterday I was listening at the drawing-room door for over twenty minutes … I heard the master rumpling his paper, and Madame was sitting at her desk doing her accounts.

‘What was it I let you have yesterday?’ Madame asked.

‘Two francs …’

‘You’re quite certain?’

‘Of course, love …’

‘Well, I am thirty-eight sous short …’

‘I can assure you
I
haven’t taken them …’

‘Oh no, of course not. It must have been the cat!’

And that is all they had to say to each other.

Joseph doesn’t like us to talk about little Clara in the kitchen. If Marianne or I try to do so he immediately changes the subject, or else withdraws from the conversation. The whole business annoys him … I don’t know why, but the idea has occurred to me—and the more I think about it the more I am convinced—that it was Joseph who did it. I have no proof … and the only evidence in support of my suspicion is the look in his eyes and the slight gesture of surprise that escaped him, when, coming back from the grocer’s and finding him in the saddle room, I suddenly mentioned little Clara’s name, and told him about her having been murdered and raped . .. Yet this quite intuitive suspicion has increased, until it has become a possibility, almost a certainty. Of course, I may be quite wrong … I try to convince myself that Joseph really is a ‘treasure’. I keep telling myself that I often imagine the craziest things, and allow myself to be influenced by the romantic perversity that I know to be a part of myself … But it’s no use. In spite of myself, the impression persists. It doesn’t leave me for a moment, and it is rapidly taking on the hideous, nagging form of a fixed idea … I have an irresistible desire to ask him:

‘Tell me, Joseph, was it really you who raped little Clara in the wood? Was it you, you old swine?’

The crime was committed on a Saturday … I remember that at about the same time Joseph had been to collect some leaf mould from the Raillon woods. He was away all day, and only got back with his load late in the evening. This is what makes me certain. And by an extraordinary coincidence, I also remember there was a certain agitation in his behaviour, a more than usually worried look in his eyes, when he came in that evening. At the time I paid no particular attention. Why should I? Now, however, I can’t help recalling these details … But was it actually on the Saturday of the crime that he went to Raillon? … I’ve tried in vain to fix the exact date … Besides, did he really have the uneasy gestures, the guilty looks, that now seem to me to prove his guilt? Or can it be that I am desperately trying to convince myself that there was something strange and unusual about him, to insist, unreasonably and against all appearances, that it was Joseph, this ‘treasure’, who really did it? … It annoys me not to be able to reconstruct what actually took place in the forest, though at the same time it strengthens my convictions … If only the inquest had revealed that freshly made cart tracks had been found in the dead leaves and undergrowth near the corpse … But no … it revealed nothing of the kind … merely that a little girl had been raped and murdered. That was all … And yet it is precisely that this impresses me so deeply—the murderer’s cleverness in not leaving behind the slightest evidence of his crime, his diabolical invisibility. It is because of this that I feel, can actually see, the presence of Joseph.

After a short silence, completely on edge, I suddenly summoned up courage to ask outright:

‘Joseph, which day was it that you went to collect leaf mould in the forest? Do you remember?’

Quite unperturbed, Joseph slowly raised his eyes from the paper he was reading. Steeled against shocks, he said casually:

‘Why ever do you want to know?’

‘To find out …’

He looked at me with a heavy, penetrating expression in his eyes. Then, quite unaffectedly, like someone searching his memory in an effort to recall a forgotten fact, he answered:

‘I’m damned if I really remember … But I’m pretty sure it was a Saturday …’

‘The Saturday that little Clara’s body was found?’ I insisted, the urgency of my question giving an aggressive edge to my voice.

He continued to stare at me, and there was something so intense, so terrible in his gaze that, despite all my effrontery, I was forced to lower my eyes.

‘It’s quite possible,’ he said. ‘Why, come to think of it, I’m pretty sure it must have been that Saturday.’ And he added: ‘Oh, you damned women … haven’t you got anything better to think about? If only you read the papers you’d realize that some more Jews have just been killed at Algiers … that’s at least of some interest.’

Apart from the expression in his eyes, he was perfectly calm and at ease, almost good-humoured: he gestured freely and his voice was quite steady. Then he relapsed into silence and, picking up the paper he’d laid on the table, returned to his reading again as though he hadn’t a care in the world.

I continued to brood over my thoughts, trying to recall some indication of active ferocity in Joseph’s behaviour since I had been here … His hatred of the Jews, the way he is always threatening to torture them, kill them, burn them … But maybe that’s simply bragging … Anyway it’s only politics … What I was looking for was something more precise, something that would convince me I was not mistaken about his criminal temperament. Yet all I could discover were a few vague impressions mere hypotheses, which the desire, perhaps the fear, of obtaining irresistible proof, made more important and significant than they actually were … Desire or fear? Which of these two feelings is it that drives me on? I wish I knew.

But wait a minute … there is one thing, something quite horrible, and very revealing. It isn’t something I’ve invented … I’m not exaggerating, and I didn’t dream it … It happened like this. One of Joseph’s jobs is to kill the chickens, rabbits or ducks for the house. He kills the ducks by driving a pin into their heads, the old Norman way. If he wanted to he could quite easily just knock them on the head, so that they didn’t suffer. But he prefers to prolong their agony by refinements of torture. He enjoys feeling the quivering of their flesh and the beating of their hearts. He likes holding them in his hands, so that he doesn’t miss a single stage of their suffering … One day I happened to be there when he was killing a duck. He held it between his knees, one hand round its neck, while with the other he drove a pin into its skull, twisting and turning it with a slow, regular movement like grinding coffee. And as he did so, he said with savage delight:

‘You’ve got to make them suffer. The more they do, the better the flavour.’

The bird managed to free its wings, and began flapping them wildly. Although Joseph still had hold of it, its neck was writhing in a horrible spiral, and beneath its covering of feathers, the flesh kept twitching. Then Joseph threw it on the kitchen floor, and sitting with his elbows on his knees, his chin cupped in his hands, he watched, with an expression of ghastly satisfaction, the [convulsive twisting and turning of the wretched bird, as it wildly scratched at the floor with its yellow feet.

‘That’s enough Joseph!’ I exclaimed. ‘Put it out of its misery. It’s horrible making an animal suffer like that.’

But his only reply was:

‘It amuses me … I like watching it.’

When I think of this, when I recall all the sinister details and even the actual words he said, I feel an even more irresistible desire to yell at him:

‘It
was
you who raped little Clara … Yes, yes, now I am certain of it. It was you, you old swine.’

There’s no doubt about it, the man must be an absolute swine. Yet this opinion I have reached as to his moral character, far from driving me away from him, far from creating a gulf of horror between us, has had the effect, I won’t say of making me fall in love with him, but at least of interesting me in him tremendously. It’s a funny thing, but I’ve always had a weakness for brutes like him. There’s something unforeseen about them that stimulates me … a particular kind of intoxicating odour, harsh and powerful, that excites me sexually. Yet however evil such brutes may be they are never evil in the way respectable people are. And what bores me about Joseph is his reputation for—and, indeed, unless you really know that look in his eyes, his appearance of—complete respectability. I should like him better if his brutality was frank and shameless. True, then he wouldn’t have this aura of mystery, this fascination of the unknown, that so moves and disturbs and attracts me—for I must admit, the old monster does attract me.

Now I am beginning to feel easier in my mind, for now I know, with a certainty that nothing can ever shake, that it was he who raped little Clara in the woods.

For some time now I have realized that I am making a considerable impression upon Joseph’s heart. His attitude towards me is no longer unfriendly. His silence isn’t either hostile or scornful, even when he bites my head off, he does it with a kind of tenderness. He no longer looks at me with hatred—did he ever, I wonder?—and though there is still something terrible in the way he stares at me, it is because he is trying to get to know me, because he wants to put me to the test. Like most peasants, he is extremely suspicious and is afraid of trusting people in case they let him down. He must have plenty of secrets, but he hides them jealously behind a savage, scowling mask, in the same way that people lock up their valuables in an iron box, bolted and barred. Yet, when he’s alone with me he’s no longer so suspicious. Indeed, in his own way he is charming to me, and does everything he can to please me and show his friendship. He takes on some of the heaviest and nastiest jobs I am responsible for, and he does this quite unpretentiously, without any ulterior motive, without asking for gratitude or claiming anything in return. As for me, I tidy up his room, mend his socks and trousers, patch his shirts and put his clothes away in the wardrobe—and I don’t mind admitting I take more trouble for him than for Madame.