Act of Passion Read Free Page A

raindrops on the fair hair escaping from under her black beret.
    The tram passed, its great yellow eye streaming with water and rows of heads behind the clouded windows. A man, a young man, who was standing on the step, jumped off just in front of the shop with fishing tackle in the window.
    After that it was like a dream. At the precise moment he landed on the pavement, the girl's hand caught his arm. And both of them, in a single movement, walked together towards the dark street with such ease that it made one think of the figure of a ballet, and suddenly without a word, on the first doorstep, they glued their bodies together with their wet clothes and their wet skin - and I, too, watching them from a distance, had the taste of a strange saliva in my mouth.
    Perhaps because of this memory, three or four years later, when I was already a medical student, I wanted to do exactly the same thing, and in Caen too. As exactly as possible, in any case. But there was no tram and no one was waiting for me.
    Naturally, you know the Brasserie Chandivert. For me it's the finest beer-restaurant in France, along with one other in Épinal, where I used to go when I was doing my military service.
    There is the illuminated entrance of the cinema to the left. Then the enormous room divided into different parts, the part where you eat, with white tablecloths and silver on the tables, the part where you drink and play cards, and then, at the back, the bottle-green billiard tables under their reflectors, and the almost hieratic poses of the players.
    There is also, on the platform, the orchestra, with the musicians in shabby dinner jackets, with long hair and pale faces.
    There is the warm light inside and the rain trickling down the window-panes, people who come in shaking their wet clothes, cars stopping outside whose headlights can be seen for an instant.
    There are the families dressed in their Sunday best for the occasion, and the habitués, with blotchy red faces, having their game of dominoes or cards, always at the same table, and calling the waiter by his first name.
    It is a world, you understand, an almost complete world, a world sufficient to itself, a world into which I plunged with delight and dreamed of never leaving.
    You see how far away I was, at twenty, from any criminal court.
    I remember that I smoked an enormous pipe which gave me the illusion of being a man and that I looked at all the women with equal avidity.
    And then, one evening, what I had always hoped for, without daring to believe it possible, happened. Alone at a table opposite me was a girl, or perhaps a woman, who was wearing a blue tailored suit and a little red hat.
    If I knew how to draw I could still make a sketch of her face, her figure. She had a few freckles across her nose and her nose wrinkled when she smiled. And she smiled at me. A sweet friendly smile. Not at all one of those provocative smiles I was more accustomed to.
    And we smiled at one another like that for quite a long time, long enough for the audience from the cinema to invade the café during the interval and to leave again when the bell called them back.
    Then with her eyes, only with her eyes, she seemed to ask me a question, to ask me why I didn't come and sit beside her. I hesitated. I called the waiter, paid for my drink. Awkwardly I crossed over to her table.
    'May I sit down?'
    A yes from her eyes - always her eyes.
    'You looked so bored,' she said at last when I was seated on the bench.
    What we said to each other after that I have forgotten. But I know that I spent one of the happiest, friendliest hours of my life. The orchestra played Viennese waltzes. Outside it was still raining. We knew nothing about one another and I didn't dare to hope for anything.
    The movies were over next door. Some people came in and began eating at the table next to ours.
    'Let's go .. .' she said simply.
    And we left. And outside in the fine rain, which did not seem to bother her, she took my arm in the