The Dead Woman
I had loved her to distraction. Why do we love? It is a strange thing to see in the whole world only one being, have in one’s mind only a single thought, a single desire in one’s heart, a single name on one’s lips: a name rising there continually, rising, as a river rises from its source, from the depths of our soul, so that we murmur it all day long, everywhere, like a prayer.
I will not set out our story. Love has no more than one story, always the same. I had met her and loved her. That tells all. And for a whole year I had lived in her affection, in her arms, in her caresses, in her glance, in her garments, in her words, wrapped round in them, bound, held fast in all that was part of her, in so utter a fashion that I no longer knew whether it was day or night, whether I died or lived, on this old earth or on some other world.
And then she died. How? I don’t know, I know nothing now.
She came home wet, one rainy evening, and the next day she was coughing. She coughed for about a week and took to her bed.
What happened? I don’t know now.
Doctors came, wrote prescriptions, went away. They brought remedies; a woman gave her them to drink. Her hands were hot, her brow damp and burning, her eyes were brilliant and mournful. I spoke to her, she answered me. What did we say? I don’t know now. I have forgotten all, all, all. She died, I remember vividly her little sigh, so weak a little sigh, the last she gave. The nurse said: “Ah.” I understood, I understood.
I have understood nothing since. Nothing. I saw a priest who spoke of “your mistress.” I felt that he was insulting her. Since she was dead, no one had any right to know that about her. I threw him out. Another came, a very good man, a gentle soul. I wept when he spoke to me about her.
They asked for instructions about a thousand things to do with the burial of her. I don’t know now what they were. But I do remember vividly the coffin, the sound made by the blows of the hammer when they nailed her in it. Oh, my God! She was buried. Buried! She! In that hole! A few people came, friends. I rushed away. I ran. I walked for hours about the streets. Then I went home. The next day I began to travel.
I came back to Paris yesterday.
When I saw my bedroom again, our bedroom, our bed, our furniture, the whole house which still held all those mortal traces that death leaves behind, I was seized by so sharp a return of agony that I had almost opened the window and flung myself into the street. Unable to stay any longer surrounded by these things, between the walls that had held and sheltered her, and must still hide in their imperceptible cracks a thousand atoms of her being, of her flesh and her breath, I seized my hat to rush out. Suddenly, in the very instant of reaching the door, I passed before the large glass in the hall, which she had had placed there so that every day before she went out she could see herself from head to foot, and see whether her toilet had been successful, was just right and charming, from hat to shoes.
I stopped dead in front of this glass which had so many time reflected her, so many times, so many times, that it must then have caught and held the image of her.
I stood there, shuddering, my eyes fixed on the glass, on the smooth depths that were empty now but had held the whole of her, possessed her as wholly as I did, as wholly as did my passionate glances. I thought that I loved this glass—I touched it—it was cold! Oh, memory! memory! woeful, searing, living, frightful glass, the cause of all our agonies. Happy the man whose heart, like a glass across whose surface reflections glide and vanish, forgets all that it has held, all that has passed before it, all that is gazed on and mirrored in its emotions of affection and love. How I suffer!
I went out, and by no will of my own, without knowing what I did, without wishing it, I wandered towards the cemetery. I found her simple grave, a marble cross with these few words: “She loved, was loved and died.”
She was there, under there, a mass of decay! Horrible! I broke into sobs, lying with my forehead pressed against the earth.
I stayed there a long time, a very long time. Then I saw that night was falling. Thereupon a strange wild desire, the desire of a despairing lover, took possession of me. I wanted to spend the night near her, a last night, to weep on her grave. But I should be seen and turned out. What could I do? I was cunning. I got up and began to wander about this city of the lost. I walked and walked. How small a city it is beside the other city, the city of the living. And yet the dead far outnumber the living. We must have tall houses, streets, a deal of space, for the four generations that at one and the same time enjoy the light of day, drink the water of springs, the juice of grapes, and eat the bread grown in the fields.
And for all the generations of the dead, for all the serried ranks of human beings, from the beginning to our day, suffices a very nothing, a field, almost nothing. The earth receives them, forgets them and effaces them. Goodbye!
At the end of the cultivated cemetery, I came all at once upon the deserted cemetery, the one where the dead of long ago came at their end to mingle their dust with the earth, where the very crosses were rotting away, where the latest comers will be placed at some future day. It is full of wild roses, sturdy black cypress-trees, a sad and marvellous garden, grown rich feeding on human flesh.
I was alone, quite alone. I effaced myself behind a green tree. I hid myself entirely among its thick sombre branches.
And I waited, clinging to its trunk like a shipwrecked man to a spar.
When the night was dark, very dark, I left my refuge and began to walk softly, with slow muted steps, over this ground full of the dead.
I wandered for a long time, a long, long time. I did not find her again. With outstretched arms, wide-open eyes, striking against tombstones with hands, and feet and knees and chest, with my very head, I went and did not find her. I touched, I felt about like a blind man seeking his way, I felt stones, crosses, iron bars, wreaths of glass, wreaths of faded flowers. I read the names with my fingers, tracing them over the letters. What a night! what a night! I did not find her.
No moon! What a night! I was seized with fear, terrible fear, in these narrow patches, between two rows of graves. Graves! graves! graves! Everywhere graves! To the left, to the right of me, before me, round me, everywhere, graves! I sat down on one of them, for my knees were shaking so much that I could not go on walking. I heard the beating of my heart! And I heard something else too! What was it? A confused nameless sound! Was the sound in my fear-stricken mind, in the impenetrable night, or under the mysterious earth, under the earth sown with human corpses? I looked round me.
How long did I stay there? I don’t know. I was paralysed with terror, I was drunk with fear, near screaming, near death.
And all at once I thought that the slab of marble on which I was seated moved. In very truth, it was moving, as if someone were pushing it up. With one bound I flung myself on the nearest grave, and saw, yes, I saw the stone which I had just left, raise itself bolt upright; and the dead appeared, a naked skeleton who was pushing off the stone with his bent back. I saw, I saw with perfect clearness, although the night was black as pitch. On the cross I could read:
“Here lies Jacques Olivant, who departed this life aged fifty-one years. He was a good, honest man, who loved his family, and died in the peace of the Lord.”
Now the dead man himself was reading the words written on his tomb. Then he picked up a stone in the road, a small sharp stone, and began carefully to scratch out those words. Slowly, he entirely obliterated them, gazing with his empty eye-sockets at the place where until that moment they had been engraved; and with the end of the bone which was once his index finger he wrote in luminous letters, like the lines that are traced on walls with the end of a match:
“Here lies Jacques Olivant, who departed this life aged fifty-one years. By his harshness he hastened the death of his father, from whom he was anxious to inherit, he tortured his wife, tormented his child, cheated his neighbours, robbed when he could and died a wretched man.
The dead made an end of writing and, immobile, contemplated his work. And turning round, I saw that all the graves were open, that all the dead bodies had emerged, that all had effaced the lies written by their relation on the funeral stone, to reaffirm thereon the truth.
And I saw that all had been the executioners of their kith and kin, malignant, dishonest, hypocrites, liars, cheats, slanderers, envious, that they had robbed, deceived, perpetrated every sort of shameful and abominable deed, these good fathers, these faithful spouses, these devoted sons, these chaste maidens, these upright tradesmen, these men and women reputed beyond reproach.
With one accord they were writing, on the threshold of their eternal dwelling, the cruel, terrible, and sacred truth, of which everyone in the world is ignorant or pretends to be ignorant.
I thought that she too must be tracing it on her grave. And fearless now, running between the yawning graves, between the corpses, between the skeletons, I made my way towards her, sure that I should shortly find her.
I recognised her from afar off, although I could not see the face wrapped in its grave-clothes.
And on the marble cross where just now I had read: “She loved, was loved and died,” I saw:
“Going out one day to deceive her lover, she caught cold in the rain, and died.”
It appears that they picked me up at dawn, lying unconscious, near a grave.