The Woman With the Bouquet (13 page)

In the space of a few weeks, Gabrielle convinced herself that she was being swindled. If she listed Gab’s qualities one by one, she could turn the card over and discover the hidden defect. He was calm? The shell of a hypocrite. He was gallant? A way of channeling an overactive libido and attracting future prey. He dealt thoughtfully with Gabrielle’s mood swings? Abysmal indifference. He had married for love—the daring union of a nobleman with a commoner? A contract over money. His Catholic faith? Just another tweed suit, a cloak of respectability. His moral values? Words to hide his impulses. Suddenly, she suspected that the way he helped out in the shop—transporting furniture, either when she bought it or when it was delivered—was just an alibi destined to create free time so that he could move around more discreetly. And what if he used the opportunity to visit his mistresses?

Why, after twenty-seven years of love and trust, did Gabrielle allow herself to be poisoned by doubt? Paulette’s venom did not explain everything; no doubt Gabrielle found it difficult, with advancing age, to confront the changes in her body, as she struggled with her weight, her deepening wrinkles, with ever more insistent fatigue, and blood vessels bursting in her once lovely legs . . . If she found it so easy to have her doubts about Gab, it was also because she had doubts about herself, and her powers of attraction. She lost her temper with him because he was aging better than she was, because he was still attractive, because the young girls smiled at him more spontaneously than young men did at her. In society—at the market, the beach, in the street—people still noticed him, whereas Gabrielle had become transparent.

Four months after Paulette’s “trigger,” Gabrielle could no longer stand him. She could not stand herself either: every morning, her mirror showed her a stranger whom she hated, a big woman with a thick neck, with red blotches on her skin, and cracks in her lips, and flabby arms; she was afflicted with a terrible fold of flesh beneath her belly button which even if she starved herself she could not get rid of, and her diets did not make her any more cheerful. She could not digest the idea that Gab might like this—who could possibly like this? No one!

As a result, all the sweet things—smiles, attention, kindnesses, tender gestures—that Gab offered her the rest of the day were simply hurtful. What a hypocrite! Paulette had hit the nail on the head: a two-faced bastard from the House of Two-Faced Bastards, guaranteed genuine article. In the end, he disgusted her. How could anyone act so unctuously?

The only time he wasn’t pretending was when he would exclaim—although his tone remained affectionate—“old girl.” Go figure, it just came out! Gabrielle hated it when it happened; every time, she felt a shudder down her back as if she had been whipped.

She began to think about divorce. However, whenever she pictured herself in front of a lawyer or her children, trying to justify the separation, she realized she did not have any sound arguments. They would protest: Gab is wonderful, how can you come out with such nonsense? Her eldest daughter might even send her to see a psychiatrist—she already sent her children to the psychiatrist. She would have to go about it differently.

She decided to find some proof against Gab. “Men—” the peremptory Paulette had claimed, “you have to really push them to the brink to see what they’re made of.” Gabrielle started changing her mind about everything, saying she wanted to go to such and such a restaurant then refusing, re-setting the date or destination of their holidays fifteen times or more; she added whim to caprice to find him out and make him wild with rage. In vain: every time, he conceded to her demands. At the most, all she might get was a sigh, a gleam of weariness in the back of his eyes in the evening when she behaved abominably. “What has he got in his pants?” Paulette would have said. That was what she herself wondered. For some time now, in bed, if they exchanged tender gestures, not much happened any more. It was true she didn’t want it as much as she used to, and she figured that they had copulated plentifully in their life, and that to start at it again after decades was like spending vacation in the same place: boring. And while she had gotten used to it, she gave it some thought and wondered if this peace did not have another meaning for him. Mightn’t he be taking advantage of his trips in the van to cheat on her? As a result, she insisted on going along. He said he was delighted and chatted away to his heart’s content for the hundreds of miles they covered together during those weeks. At least twice he suggested stopping to make love, once in the back of the car, another time in the middle of a field. And although she accepted, she was devastated. This was the proof! The proof that when he went on his trips, he was used to having his sexual needs met.

She stopped going along on his expeditions, and became morose, communicating less and less, except with Paulette. Her friend could talk forever about men who cheated.

“In this day and age, those cretins get caught by their wives, because they can look at the calls they make or receive on their cell phones. You’d think that private detectives would march in protest against the way cell phones have harmed their business, in the adultery department.”

“And if a man doesn’t have a cell phone?” asked Gabrielle, thinking about Gab, who refused to let her give him one.

“If a man doesn’t have a cell phone, watch out! Red alert! It means he’s the king of kings, the emperor of bastards, the prince of abusers. Their sort works the old-fashioned way, he doesn’t want to be found out, he uses telephone booths that leave no trace. He knows that adultery was not created at the same time as the cell phone, and he goes on using the well worn tricks he has refined over the years. That kind of guy is the James Bond of illicit sex: you can trail him but you can’t catch him. Good luck!”

From then on, Gabrielle became obsessed with the hiding place on the third floor. Gab’s secrets had to be there, the proof of his perverse behavior, too. She went there several times with tools, wanting to break down the wall; every time, shame kept her from doing it. Several times she tried to hoodwink Gab by putting on a charm act to convince him to open it for her; every time, he came up with a new excuse to get out of it: “There’s nothing in there,” “You’ll only make fun of me,” “You’ll have plenty of time to find out what’s in there,” “Aren’t I entitled to my own little secrets?,” “It has to do with you but I don’t want you to know.” All these contradictory refusals annoyed Gabrielle to the extreme, until finally he said, “You’ll find out after I’m dead, and that will be soon enough.”

His words made her indignant. What did he mean, would she have to wait ten, twenty, thirty years, to have the proof that he had mocked her all her life, and that she had shared her existence with a shifty social climber? Was he trying to provoke her or what?

“You’re awfully quiet these days, my dear Gabrielle,” exclaimed Paulette when they were drinking tea together.

“I keep my problems to myself. That’s the way I was raised. My father stuffed my head with the idea that you should never expose anything but positive thoughts; the other ones you keep silent.”

“What bullshit! You have to get it out in the open, sweetheart, otherwise you’ll give yourself cancer. Women who keep quiet get cancer. I’ll never have cancer because I shout and complain all day long. Never mind if other people don’t like it: let them suffer—not me, girl!”

And that is how her plan took shape: she had to free herself of doubt, so she would have to get rid of Gab, a plan she carried out in the Alps.

Gabrielle was taken back into her cell with her wet hair, and she collapsed on the bed to go on thinking. That was what had been going on in her brain for the last three years of their life together as a couple, that was what she was hiding from everyone, that was how her life had been drained of savor and meaning to be reduced to a continuous nightmare. At the least by killing Gab she had acted, had put an end to that unbearable anxiety. She didn’t regret it. This afternoon, however, the doctor’s testimony had shaken her: she had learned why Gab was no longer as sensual, and how he must be suffering. The doctor’s comment had chipped away at her block of convictions.

Why was she discovering this only now? Before, she used to think he avoided her to devote his energy to his mistresses. Couldn’t that irresponsible Dr. Racan have spoken to her about it earlier?

“Gabrielle de Sarlat to the visitors’ room. Your lawyer is waiting for you.”

It couldn’t have come at a better time.

Maître Plissier placed the four tin boxes on the table.

“There you are! Now, explain.”

Gabrielle didn’t answer. She sat down and opened the tins, voraciously. Her fingers scurried through the papers that lay inside each box, pulling some sheets out to decipher them, then others, and still others . . .

After a few minutes, Gabrielle fell to the floor, prostrate, suffocating. Maître Plissier alerted the warders, who helped him to make the prisoner comfortable and got her to breathe. They took her on a stretcher to the infirmary, where they gave her a tranquilizer.

An hour later, when she had regained consciousness, she asked where her lawyer had gone. They informed her that he had gone away again with the boxes to prepare for the hearing.

Gabrielle begged them to give her another tranquilizer, and lapsed into unconsciousness. Anything, rather than think about what those metal boxes contained.

The next morning prosecution and defense stated their case. Gabrielle resembled a vague memory of herself—pale, gaunt, her eyes full of tears, her complexion blotchy, her lips drained of blood. If she had been striving consciously to gain the sympathy of the jurors, she could not have done a better job.

The prosecutor gave a summing up that was more determined than it was harsh, and it impressed no one. Then Maître Plissier, his sleeves quivering, got up like a soloist called on stage to give his bravura performance.

“What happened? A man died in the mountains. Let us leave the act aside for a moment and consider the two opposing versions that have brought us before the court: an accident, says his wife; an assassination, claims a shepherd, a stranger. Let us stand farther back still, let us stand very far back, at least as far back as the shepherd, if it is possible to see anything clearly at such a distance, and now let us examine the motives for murder. There are none! As a rule, I find it difficult to exercise my profession as a lawyer because everything seems to point to the guilt of the person I am defending. In the case of Gabrielle Sarlat, there is nothing to point to her guilt, nothing! No motives, no grounds. There was no money at stake. No tension in their relation. No betrayals. Nothing to suggest she is guilty, except for one thing. A man. That is, a man who lives with animals, a boy who can neither read nor write, who rebelled against his schooling, who was incapable of belonging to society in any way other than to isolate himself from it. In short, this shepherd, an employee whom I could easily accuse because he was let go by several employers, a worker who satisfied no one, a man who has neither wife nor children; in short, this shepherd saw her. How far away was he standing? Not two hundred yards, nor three hundred, a distance which would already be a handicap to anyone’s vision—but a mile, according to the findings of the reconstruction! Let us be serious, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what can you see from a mile away? Personally, nothing. The shepherd, a crime. It’s extraordinary, no? Moreover, after he has witnessed the murder, he does not rush to help the victim, he does not call for a rescue party or the police. Why? According to his allegations, because he cannot leave his herd. This is an individual who watches as a fellow human being is being murdered, but who goes on thinking that the life of his animals—who will end up on a skewer—is more important . . . I cannot understand this man, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. It would not matter so seriously if he were not accusing an admirable woman, a spouse of integrity, an exemplary mother, incriminating her of the very last thing she would have wanted, the death of her Gabriel, Gabriel nicknamed Gab, the love of her life.”

He turned abruptly to face the jurors.

“Well, you may object, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that nothing is ever as it seems! Even if everybody attests to their love, so strong and so visible, what was going on in their minds? This woman, Gabrielle de Sarlat, may have been corroded with suspicion, jealousy, doubt. Who can prove that she did not suffer from a paranoid neurosis regarding her spouse? In addition to all the witnesses you heard here and who did not offer the slightest justification for such a hypothesis, I would like to add, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my own testimony. Do you know what this woman did, last night? Do you know the only favor she asked of me in two and a half years of custody? She asked me to bring her four cookie tins in which for over thirty years she had been storing their letters, as well as the mementos of their love. Everything can be found in there, theater and concert tickets, the menus from their engagement party and their wedding, and all the birthdays, little notes they wrote to each other and left on the kitchen table in the morning—from the ordinary to the sublime, everything! Thirty years. Up until the last day. Up until they left on their tragic vacation. The warders will confirm that she then spent hours, in tears, thinking about the man she had lost. I ask you, and this will be my last question, does an assassin do such a thing?”

Gabrielle collapsed on her chair while her children, and the more sensitive souls in the gallery, could hardly contain their tears.

The court and the jury withdrew to deliberate.

In the corridor where she was waiting on the bench next to Maître Plissier, Gabrielle thought about the letters she had read the night before. There was one that showed her that from the time of their youth, he had always called her “old girl”—how could she have forgotten, and taken the expression for a cruel mockery? Another where he described her, twenty-five years earlier, as “my violent, wild, secret, unpredictable woman.” That is what he thought of the woman who would kill him, “violent and unpredictable”: how right he was, poor man. So, he really had loved her the way she was, with her quick temper, her rages and angers and spells of the blues, her ruminations, and he was so calm that these storms merely amused him.