VOICE: Tired? But it’s only the beginning.
BARON: Nothing makes any sense now that she’s dead. Perhaps if I went the same way she has. And left behind the unjust, petty world of men. You might be able to help me. All I need is a rope. Could you get hold of a rope for me, since you have access to every wing of the asylum?
VOICE: It’s no use. There’s no escape from here.
BARON: You haven’t understood. I’m ready to end my life.
The Voice lets out a guffaw.
VOICE: I’ve understood perfectly. I think you’re the one who hasn’t understood.
BARON: I want to be with Martine.
VOICE: It’s incredible how, when things get tight, all of you, even the proudest of libertines, begin to believe in the angels of heaven.
BARON: It’s better than staying in this quagmire.
VOICE: Voilà! The same thing the count said to the baroness about the maid.
BARON: Martine. She’s their daughter.
VOICE: Martine, then! It’s all the same. It’s better to send her away from this quagmire, so she’ll not be defiled by this filth.
BARON: This is all getting ridiculous. I asked you to help me. You’re no longer being logical, master. All this is absurd. You want to convince me with a tawdry argument that the two of them killed their daughter to save her? How can you believe that? And that they got rid of the body to save her reputation, so that her honour would not be besmirched? Only so that the news that she had been killed during an orgy at château Lagrange shouldn’t get about?! Is that it?
VOICE: That’s not what I said. You’re interpreting. Whenever they interpret, people lose themselves down these shortcuts. Nobody ever said she’d been murdered.
BARON: What are you saying?! Then Martine’s alive?!
VOICE: That’s the way it looks.
BARON: God be praised!
VOICE: You disappoint me.
BARON: But didn’t they say, in the refectory? . . .
VOICE: That now she was a long way off.
BARON: Ah! . . .
VOICE: On the same night, after you’d swallowed the pastilles, they put her on board a ship going where no one would have any more news of her.
BARON: But of course! They made her disappear to incriminate me, and as the body hasn’t yet been found, there are no proofs, and the court decided to keep them in the asylum. We’re all saved!
VOICE: You’re an optimist, baron.
BARON: What you’ve just said is reason for a celebration.
VOICE: Is it?
BARON: Martine is alive and all we have to do is prove it for them to free me and get on a ship too and find her, wherever she is.
VOICE: No one gets out of here.
BARON: But there’s been no crime! There’s been no murder!
VOICE: No one’s said there hasn’t been.
BARON: It’s because they don’t know she’s alive. Because the count and the baroness did everything on purpose to incriminate me. They set up the whole imposture. They left me unconscious in the château and accused me, all the more with the count’s contacts and so many people wanting to get their revenge on a provincial nobleman like me. What they didn’t think was they’d be taken as suspects as well. And now they’re down a cul-de-sac. To save their own skin, they’ll have to confess they’ve hidden their daughter. And that way, without wanting to, they’ll free me too. It’s all a matter of time, the time they’ll manage to put up with being imprisoned here without saying anything. That’s it! That’s it! Just the time they manage to put up with it without saying anything.
VOICE: It’s incredible how you still refuse to see. The only problem, my dear man, is that there has in fact been a murder.
BARON: (silence) Master? . . . I must be going mad. Help me. I’m certain I’ve seen you, but I don’t want to believe.
VOICE: What in?
BARON: No. It must be a hallucination. It can only be a hallucination.
VOICE: Everyone sees what they want to – or what they can.
BARON: Why isn’t there even a chink of light anywhere?
VOICE: It’s better for you.
BARON: (shrinking back) When all’s said and done, who are you? Who’s there?! (silence) If it’s not the Marquis de Sade, then who is it? What do you want of me? (silence) Why since they arrested me have they been talking a language I don’t understand? Why are they calling me by another name? Why do I only understand what you say? What do you mean when you say there was a murder? Why can’t I get out if I didn’t kill anyone? (silence) I’m pouring with sweat. Look! My shirt’s soaking. Why is it so hot? And even so, I’m still shaking. Why am I having these hallucinations? I’m afraid. Why don’t you tell me who you are? What do you want to spare me from? (silence) If Martine wasn’t murdered, then . . . who was? (silence) Why don’t you answer? (silence) Master? Who died? Who’s the dead one? What is this place? Why isn’t there a chink of light anywhere?
A blinding white light. Two men dressed in white, a black man and a white man, are walking along a white-tiled corridor. They hear shouts at the far end, in another language. Someone, it seems, desperately wants to get out of there.
THE BLACK MAN IN WHITE TO THE WHITE MAN IN WHITE: Where are we? You can’t take anything with you from this world, so make the most of it. That’s what he keeps on saying. You remember the crime. Everyone does. It was some time ago. It was in all the papers. From the beginning, everyone knew who the murderer was. There wasn’t the least doubt. Even if it was never proved. You didn’t have to be very bright. But the world wants proof. He ended up confessing – within his own reasoning, of course, which they didn’t think at all reasonable. Because they didn’t manage to find the killers. There were no proofs. It was only the police who didn’t suspect the obvious right from the beginning; they nearly let him escape. If it hadn’t been for the newspaper article, at the airport. They had to give free rein to the investigation, to get where everyone had suspected anyhow, before they could make a decision. Fools. Their luck, or rather his downfall, was his going into that newspaper stall. He was already on his way back, in the airport, when he saw the news and lost his head. He told the whole story. They couldn’t let him go after the confession, even if he’d been taken for a madman. While they had no proof. And while they waited for it, he ended up being forgotten here. The important thing isn’t who was the murderer, but the paradox of the murder itself. He had his own wife killed so he could commit another crime that never was or will be committed. Because, with his wife’s death, and even before that, with the very thought of killing his wife, though he didn’t know or even suspect it, thinking that that way he made his plan possible, he was already committing suicide. They were a curious couple. Not that she was any better than him. They deserved each other. Neither of them was any good. But there was one extraordinary thing about that marriage. They married in a chapel on top of a hill, as simple as simple can be, in the south of France, in the town where he’d been born and where at the beginning of the nineteenth century, so it seems, a baron laid on orgies inspired by the Marquis de Sade. A libertine writer whose central philosophy was treachery. Six months after they were married, they found out she couldn’t have children. They realised that love doesn’t outlast time, love ends, and they made an explicit pact which, usually, in the general run of marriages, destroys them by remaining unsaid. They decided the best thing was to establish a relationship based on treachery and horror. Horror instead of love. A marriage based on a game of horrors, because, as he keeps saying during his attacks, horror doesn’t die, unlike love. Only horror can keep a marriage alive, on the principle of treachery, according to the philosophy of this libertine baron. Each of the spouses plays a joke on the other, successively and in turn. It’s what they learned to call, in a game restricted to the two of them, the ‘fear of Sade’. A reference to the famous marquis, of course; it seems plain that it was under Sade’s influence that the baron created his own peculiar philosophy. You know. The one who’s more afraid loses. That was the game. Whoever got afraid, lost. ‘Fear of Sade’. And when he ordered his wife to be killed, paradoxically, he lost. They went on playing tricks on one another, each one more horrible than the last, and that way they intended to stay together until death, as they’d promised in the eyes of the Church. They went on playing tricks on each other to keep, as far as possible, the oath they’d taken in the little chapel on the top of the hill, in the south of France, as simple as simple can be. Only the business didn’t last long. Even treachery has its rules, and he cheated. He wanted to put the cart before the horse. He tried to bring death forward, to kill his wife before she killed him. He got scared. And in this game whoever gets scared, loses. It might seem paradoxical to you, and to me too, but when she died, she won. When she died, she terrified him. You can get an idea from his screams. Between one joke and another, she ended up saying something she shouldn’t have. She didn’t exactly say that she’d found out the crime he was planning. It was he who interpreted her that way. She was more ambiguous and enigmatic. It’s most likely she only wanted to provoke him, to exacerbate what she thought was an attack of jealousy. Maybe she was just trying him on. She only put into words what was already in his head. Or perhaps not even that. Maybe she didn’t know anything. But that was the way he understood it. He thought she’d discovered the crime he was planning. Not the crime against herself, of course – that came later, and because of what she said – but against the client. After those words, it was his turn to play a trick on her. And she knew she couldn’t escape when she agreed to the journey he proposed to her, just like that, with the lame excuse that they needed some peace, some holiday, just the two of them. She might not have known, but at least she suspected, if it was only because of his behaviour. That’s why she planned everything before she died. She planned to play a trick on her husband with her own death, since it was inevitable, a trick even more horrible than death itself. She would leave as her inheritance another motive for horror, and this time he would be inconsolable. She didn’t want to die without getting her own back. She didn’t want to take the ‘fear of Sade’ to the grave with her. She left her vengeance ready. And there’s no way of knowing at what point she realised and took the decision, to what degree she’d got everything set from the day she said those words to him, when he thought she’d found out what he was planning, and preferred to have her killed to having to live with the suspicion, however remote the chances of her really having found anything out. They deserved one another. It’s no accident they were married. They met in a firm in the north of France. She worked as an accountant and he was a legal consultant. They were a perfect pair. She was a wizard at numbers, which was just what he was no good at; he studied law because he couldn’t do anything else. She’d always done sums since she was little. And it would be a euphemism to say he’d never been any good at maths. He just hadn’t the gift for it. It’s not that he was stupid, but since childhood his capacity for abstraction had never been anything to write home about. He only understood the four basic algebraic operations on the day he translated them into everyday language and realised that multiplying two by two, for instance, simply meant twice two, a duplication of two. He understood algebra through semantics, which in its turn was not the woman’s strong point, so much so that she signed her own death warrant when she said those words without measuring the consequences. As long as it lasted, they were complementary. Numbers and meaning. They pulled off a hoax on the firm, a first-class swindle, a hoax based on confidence so they couldn’t be caught, and went to live in the south of France, where he’d been born. They were married right there, in a little country chapel, with the ruins of the libertine baron’s château in the background. A discreet ceremony, only for those closest to them, hardly anyone, and his family. She preferred not to invite her own family. Only her sister. She hadn’t been speaking to her parents for years. The idea of substituting horror for love wasn’t alien to her. She might well have been inspired by her own childhood, and her own family. It was putting hunger and the urge to eat together when he introduced her to the collected works of the baron. Because he was a fan of the libertine literature of the end of the eighteenth century. It was through him she discovered the baron and his philosophy of treachery. In one of his books, a moralising novel in dialogue form, the baron recounted how he had avenged himself on the wife who was betraying him: he deflowered the illegitimate daughter she’d had by his cousin. Because, according to the baron’s philosophy, only treachery liberates. Treachery is repaid with treachery. Nothing could be more appropriate, then, than betraying the conventions of a morality which attempts in its turn to be false to nature. And the baron could think of nothing more treacherous than depraving the illegitimate daughter of his own adulterous wife to avenge himself on her and her demure maternal hypocrisy. He’s a writer who proposes a world in which virtues and values are turned upside down, inside out, where evil is good, and treachery is honour. A world of anti-virtues, as the only way of escaping from the hypocrisy of religion and the limitations of human conventions in the name of the truth of the instincts. A world of anti-virtues for a philosophy. An anti-humanism at the beginning of the nineteenth century. And it’s no accident that she was delighted when her husband showed her the collected works of the baron and said to her: ‘We are here to prove God doesn’t exist. No effort should be spared, no means excluded in this undertaking. Our lives will prove God doesn’t exist, or we wouldn’t be what we are.’ They also came across a world of anti-virtues after they went up the hill on foot to the little chapel. The simplest thing in the world. The marriage was a way of sealing the alliance they made when they pulled off the first hoax, which left the boss with his hands tied when he wanted to give the police their names, since they were only able to act thanks to his complete confidence in them. They came out clean and with money in their pockets. The boss was completely to blame, for he had delegated all power to them, and any naming of them, as well as being useless from the criminal point of view – for there was no way of pinning the blame on them – would only be a complete, shameful revelation of the fraud and of his own naiveté. They were careful with the money from the hoax. They didn’t want to attract attention. They inte