h. She wept for the expression on her sister’s face in the church, she was the only member of her family she invited, lost, like her, among his relatives and the members of
the party of the extreme right whose meetings they attended, the expression of someone who knows what everything means, another step in her self-mutilation. She wept when she realised the victory
she’d won when she said those words to her husband : ‘For you, the best thing would be if he didn’t exist, he’s your weak point’, as if she were Lady Macbeth,
‘in the American style’, sitting on the sofa with her eyes shining and a glass of whisky in her hand, the victory of her death after a life of mutilations. She wept for fear as well,
for the fear she would leave her husband as an inheritance when he finally understood what he’d done when he killed her, the fear that now was only hers and that in a few minutes’ time,
after she’d gone, would be his alone. The fear of everyone. The fear of those who are left. She wept bitterly over her thirty years and some. She wept for the look on her husband’s face
when he discovered that she hadn’t had a womb since she was twenty. It was the doctor in the small town who called him into his surgery to tell him with embarrassment the reason why his wife
hadn’t got pregnant after six months of marriage. The husband, dumbfounded, asked the doctor how that was possible, how it was she didn’t have a womb. And the doctor was forced to
explain to him. ‘Is she mad, then?’, was the only thing he managed to ask the doctor, like a kind of answer. ‘Is she mad, then?’ before he went back home and found her
sitting on the sofa, with her eyes shining and a glass of whisky in her hand. She wept for the look on her husband’s face when he got home with the expression of someone who’s just
discovered the trick that’s been played on him. He might have got excited over that mutilation with its philosophical background, which fitted the baron’s ideas so well. He might have
grasped everything from another point of view. But he was horrified. She wept for the slap she got, sitting on the sofa when she greeted him that night, when she saw that they only had horror left.
She wept out of pity for him, that horrible man, and her, that horrible woman. She wept bitterly for the two of them. Until the man on the front seat turned round again and gave her another good
clout right on her cheek, shouting at her to stop crying or else. Now she was near death, she was desperate. The stage-set had gone. Security was gone. Pretence was gone. The certainty she would
end up as the victor was gone. She began to scream, to struggle, and it was only when her husband gripped her that she came back to her senses, looking him in the eyes and seeing what he
didn’t see, that she was the winner – or could it be he was such a fool as to think she was going to accept everything he proposed to her without thinking of revenge? She saw all his
self-satisfied lack of awareness in his eyes, but this didn’t calm her down – rather she went into a catatonic state that at least anaesthetised her for the shock and prevented any
reaction, even stopped her screaming. She was dumbstruck. That was what he thought later, with hindsight. Retrospectively, when he’d understood the trap he’d fallen into, the husband
remembered seeing in her eyes, on the brink of death, what she had seen in his eyes, his unawareness, and that had made her go quiet. He’d set everything up, thinking she’d not see
anything. He’d thought he could flout the rules of the game and bring her death forward without her seeing. He thought she’d go on playing as on other occasions, that she’d
willingly submit, ignorant that this was the last time. He didn’t see that, in a certain way, she’d programmed everything with those words: ‘For you, the best thing would be if he
didn’t exist, he’s your weak point’. What did she mean, he? But he didn’t ask. He fell right into the trap. What did she mean, he? That was the question he should have
asked. But he didn’t. He deduced that she was talking about the client he was planning to rid himself of, as soon as he could, as soon as he had a chance. He thought she knew, that
she’d read his thoughts. Because the only question hammering away in his head was how she’d found out. But it was the wrong question. What if she was talking about God? ‘For you,
the best thing would be if he didn’t exist, he’s your weak point’. Impertinence. Daring to cast doubt on the baron’s philosophy. Or maybe she was talking about the baron
himself. Do you understand? He understood with hindsight. He fell right into the trap of his mad wife’s self-mutilations; she’d already married without a womb so as not to run the risk
of putting a child into the world, another one to prove that God doesn’t exist. That was the way the game had been going from the beginning, towards self-mutilation, how had he not seen that?
He didn’t see it while he held her down in the car and the man in the front seat turned round and slapped her again on the face with the full force of his hand. She looked at her husband,
looked at the man in the front seat, at the driver, and now said nothing further. After everything she’d done against herself, she’d come to the end, and on top of that she was still
taking with her the man who thought he was an executioner when he was nothing more than a victim. She’d come to the end, after all her self-mutilations, as the winner. She was going to die to
destroy the life of the man who thought he could destroy hers. For the first time, with her own death, she could contemplate in someone else the destruction she’d kept for herself throughout
her life, which was an advance, so he understood with hindsight, when he remembered his wife looking silently out of the car window, after she’d been slapped, while he held her down in the
car, as they went towards the place for the sacrifice and the last scene of the game of horrors. Her eyes were lost on the empty horizon, as if she were resigned to her own fate, which she’d
finally understood. The car veered onto an unmade road, and after some ten minutes jolting through a more and more desolate landscape, it stopped alongside thick brushwood. The two in the front
turned round and looked at the husband. The husband looked at the two in the front. He looked at his wife again. The man that met them at the airport nodded his head and the husband let go of his
wife. The couple looked at one another once more in a kind of goodbye, before he told her to get out of the car and run. ‘Run!’ he said. She opened the door but, before she got out,
with one foot already out of the car, she turned to him and managed to say, ‘in the American style’, which always rings false, as if she was in a gangster movie and this was not her own
death, with her eyes shining and a smile on her lips: ‘Checkmate!’ He didn’t understand straight away. He thought she couldn’t have been so naïve as to think she could
still escape now. She began to run. The man who had met them at the airport opened the door, got out of the car, and with one foot out of the car, pointed the revolver at the woman’s back,
stumbling as she ran. The husband had lowered his head in the back seat. He didn’t even bother to get out of the car and run too, even if only as a hammed-up attempt to pretend till the last
moment that they were still in the same boat, he and his wife, after having made it quite clear they weren’t, even if it was only so that she wouldn’t carry the worst possible image of
him with her in death. He lowered his head and shut his eyes at his wife’s last word, which he couldn’t get out of his head: checkmate, checkmate, checkmate, and suddenly he understood
and shouted ‘No!’, with all his strength and at the same time as he heard the two sharp bangs and the noise of a body falling like an animal, flying, cutting through the undergrowth.
‘No!’ He got out of the car and fell on his knees, his mouth open and terror in his eyes. The man with the revolver turned the car round, came towards him and looked down at him. When
the man lifted his face, he got a kick in the thigh and fell to one side, groaning. ‘Chicken, huh?’ asked the man with the revolver. ‘At the last moment?’ The Frenchman said
nothing more. He didn’t understand what the man was saying now, words in a strange language. He’d realised it was too late. He didn’t yet know what was waiting for him, but he
could imagine. He’d underestimated her. The man with the revolver gave him a push with the toe of his shoe and told him to get up, in French. ‘Now it’s your turn to run. Or are
you sorry? Give me all your documents, credit cards, money’. The Frenchman took what he had out of his pockets and said the rest was in the case, pointing at the car. And the payment
they’d agreed on, too. ‘Get up!’ shouted the man with the revolver and kicked him again, before he could react properly. ‘So they won’t suspect anything’, said
the man with the revolver, with a sarcastic smile. The Frenchman tried to get up, groaning. ‘Get going!’ ordered the man with the revolver, and he went, limping, in the opposite
direction from his wife. Whatever happened, he didn’t want to see her. He couldn’t bear to see the body slumped on the ground. ‘Not that way, idiot! The other side!’,
shouted the man, pointing the revolver in the direction where the woman had fallen. The Frenchman ran for some fifteen yards, groaning. Until he heard the shot and, at the same time, felt an awful
pain in his leg, which made him fall to the ground, not very far from where his wife’s body had flown, cutting through the bushes. Still on the ground, he heard the car rev up and disappear
along the same unmade road.