Story of the Eye Read Free Page A

naked, kept gesticulating, and her agonizing shrieks of pain expressed unbearable terror and moral suffering; we watched her bite her mother’s face amid arms vainly trying to subdue her.
    Indeed, by bursting in, the parents managed to wipe out the last shreds of reason, and in the end, the police had to be called, with all the neighbours witnessing the outrageous scandal.

3. Marcelle’s Smell
    My own parents had not turned up that evening with the pack. Nevertheless, I judged it prudent to decamp and elude the wrath of an awful father, the epitome of a senile Catholic general. I entered our villa by the back door and filched a certain amount of money. Next, quite convinced they would look for me everywhere but there, I took a bath in my father’s bedroom. Finally, by around ten o’clock, I was out in the open country, having left the following note on my mother’s bedside table: “I beseech you not to send the police after me for I am carrying a gun, and the first bullet will be for the policeman, the second for myself.”
    I have never had any aptitude for what is known as striking a pose, and in this circumstance in particular, I only wished to keep my family at bay, for they relentlessly hated scandal. Still, havingwritten the note with the greatest levity and not without laughing, I thought it might not be such a bad idea to pocket my father’s revolver.
    I walked along the seashore most of the night, but without getting very far from X because of all the windings of the coast. I was merely trying to soothe a violent agitation, a strange, spectral delirium in which, willy-nilly, phantasms of Simone and Marcelle took shape with gruesome expressions. Little by little, I even thought I might kill myself, and, taking the revolver in hand, I managed to lose any sense of words like hope or despair, but in my weariness, I realized that my life
had
to have some meaning all the same, and
would
have one if only certain events, defined as desirable, were to occur. I finally accepted being so extraordinarily haunted by the names
Simone
and
Marcelle
. Since it was no use laughing, I could keep going only by accepting or feigning to imagine a fantastic compromise that would confusedly link my most disconcerting moves to theirs.
    I slept in a wood during the day, and at nightfall I went to Simone’s place: I passed through the garden by climbing over the wall. My friend’s bedroom was lit, and so I cast some pebbles through the window. A few seconds later she came down and almost wordlessly we headed towards the beach. We were delighted to see one another again. It was dark out, and from time to time I lifted her dress and took hold of her cunt, but it didn’t make me come—quite the opposite. She sat down and I stretched out at her feet. I soon felt that I could not keep back my sobs, and I really cried for a long time on the sand.
    “What’s wrong?” asked Simone.
    And she gave me a playful kick. Her foot struck the gun in my pocket and a fearful bang made us shriek at the same time. I wasn’t wounded but I was up on my feet as though in a different world. Simone stood before me, frighteningly pale.
    That evening we didn’t even think of masturbating each other, but we remained in an endless embrace, mouth to mouth, something we had never done before.
    This is how I lived for several days: Simone and I would come home late at night and sleep in her room, where I would stay locked in until the following night. Simone would bring me food, her mother, having no authority over her (the day of the scandal, she had gone for a walk the instant she heard the shrieks), accepted the situation without even trying to fathom the mystery. As for the servants, money had for some time been ensuring their devotion to Simone.
    In fact, it was they who told us of the circumstances of Marcelle’s confinement and even the name of the sanatorium. From the very first day, all we worried about was Marcelle: her madness, the loneliness of