The Widow Read Free Page A

in an old ragged coat, her slip showing, and with a hairy mole on her cheek, she is at forty-five more than twenty years older than Jean. She gives Jean to understand that he can expect occasional sex but that she must also sleep with her abusive father-in-law from time to time, because she is living in his farmhouse.
    Belying Tati’s rumpled clothes, and precarious existence among her quarrelsome in-laws, is her animal alertness, a peasant shrewdness, especially as regards her niece. The teenaged mother Felicie lives nearby; the effect of this pretty young woman on Jean disturbs Tati. Her suspicions of Jean’s past are quickly borne out after a visit by the gendarmes: Jean has recently been released from five years in prison (thus the Ticket of Leave title) and his precariousness resembles hers. She had taken him for a foreigner—he seems foreign throughout, a true outsider—but in fact he is from a distinguished family in Montluçon, son of a wealthy womanizing distiller. Estranged from his family, he is “free as air … a man utterly without ties.” And “he was free … like a child.”
    â€œHe did not walk like other people. He seemed to be going nowhere.” But he has walked into a trap. He does not know it yet, though for him, as for Meursault in L’Étranger , there is no future. He lives in a “magnificent present humming with sunshine.”
    He tells Tati that he has murdered a man, almost casually and partly by accident. A woman was involved, though he didn’t love her. Far from being seriously affected by the crime, the trial, or the years in prison, he “scarcely realized that it was himself it was happening to.” He has been cast adrift by the crime, and after prison nothing mattered: “he was committed to nothing, nothing he did possessed either weight or importance.”
    In his lack of remorse, or pity, he resembles the cold-hearted killer Frank Friedmaier in Dirty Snow and Popinga in The Man Who Watched Trains Go By . And of course, he prefigures Meursault, even to the solar imagery, for at a crucial point in the novel, recognizing his desire for Felicie, “At one stroke the sun had taken possession of him. Another world was swallowing them up …”
    He succeeds with Felicie, as he succeeded with her aunt, but wordlessly, rutting among the farm buildings. He continues to make love to Tati, and is always abrupt if not brutal: “He undressed her as one skins a rabbit.” And in this ménage, another familiar Simenon situation ensues, that of lovers separated by a physical barrier, the passions of propinquity, jealousy always figuring in the plot. In The Widow the lovers in nearby cottages are separated by the canal, in The Door a communicating door, in The Iron Staircase an iron staircase, and a similar shuttling back and forth in Act of Passion . All these novels end in murder.
    In this springtime pastoral—conflict in the countryside: fertile farmland, browsing animals, quarreling peasants—Jean slowly goes to pieces, consumed by self-disgust and fatalism. Typically for Simenon, by the subtle building of effects, Jean’s condition is suggested rather than analyzed. Feeling possessed by the desperate older woman who won’t let him go, by the younger woman who is indifferent to him, Jean realizes that he is at a dead end, that a crime is inevitable, and “he waited for what could not fail to happen.”
    The novel becomes implicitly existential, though Simenon would scoff at such a word: there is no philosophical meditation in the narrative. Jean has been put on a road to ruin by Simenon—been set up, indeed. Many if not all Simenon novels describing the occurrence of malentendu imply that there is no exit—and the maddening thing is that even though the doomed character does not see a way out, the reader does. It does not occur to Jean that he can just walk away or get back on the bus. He