rst, she still laughed,
said he was hurting her, that he was mad, and asked where so much jealousy had come from, so suddenly. But she soon saw that her husband was not in a joking mood; he was beside himself. He dragged
her to the car and asked again where the accident had happened. He asked her a thousand times, yelling at her, while, shaking, she tried to remember where the maize-field was. He carried on
shouting as he drove along the road, asking what else she was hiding, why she’d never said she knew that man. He left her in the house and went out in the car, at a furious speed, following
her instructions. He was determined to discover where the client lived before nightfall. He only came back after dark. That was when she, sitting on the sofa with a glass of whisky in her hand,
greeted him with those fateful words, mocking what seemed to her an unexpected attack of jealousy: ‘For you, the best thing would be if he didn’t exist, he’s your weak
point’. She might have been talking about anyone they’d met in the street, and not specifically about the client, for she didn’t even know who he was. She might have talking about
God. Or about the baron and his philosophy of treachery. But that wasn’t the way he understood it. His weakness was numbers. She must be talking about something else. She must know about
something. But now he finally had a clue as to the whereabouts of the client, who only rang from telephones the police couldn’t track down, from public phone boxes, from a different place
each time, from the most diverse areas of the country, hundreds of miles apart from each other, just like the post offices from which he posted his envelopes, without the least logic to them
— now he finally had a clue he couldn’t miss the opportunity. For months, he’d tried to find the client. He was excited, as if he’d finally uncovered a bit of the secret,
and violated his intimacy. But it was just an illusion. More than ever, he had to be careful he wasn’t being followed, hand the client over to the police and the bankers without meaning to,
so to speak, now he had gone half way. All the way home, he didn’t stop thinking for a moment. He had to get rid of the client before the police or the bankers found him, but he
couldn’t kill him without knowing his secret. He couldn’t open himself to the possibility of the bankers asking for a new piece of proof and having nothing to show them. He needed to
discover the secret at all costs before he killed the client. It was probable that all this had been thought through from the beginning by the computer technician himself, who could trust no one.
He wasn’t going to put his life in the hands of a provincial lawyer without some kind of guarantee. His trump card was his secret. It was the guarantee that the lawyer wouldn’t kill
him. ‘You will be tempted by contradictory desires.’ Nobody could continue the blackmail without him, without knowing the secret. Because the secret was him, in person. Without him, the
secret would disappear. The plan the lawyer drew up, on his way back home, was anything but perfect, but, in the circumstances, it was the best he could have found. He would ask the client for a
new series of proofs, and would make out that it was the bankers’ demand. And, instead of sending them to Paris, he would keep them for any eventuality, after he’d got rid of the
client. He would keep a stock of proofs for when he needed them, even though he hadn’t the least idea of what they meant. The plan was anything but perfect, but there was no other option. Now
he had a clue as to where the client lived (there weren’t many houses in that area, near the maize-field), he had to hurry before he himself disappeared, for he was no fool, and of course he
must be expecting the worst possible outcome after the unexpected encounter in the town. He got home with the whole plan in his head, and was received by his wife sitting on the sofa, with a glass
of whisky in her hand: ‘For you, the best thing would be if he didn’t exist, he’s your weak point’. Who did she mean, he? How could she have come out with that? But he
couldn’t ask. With those words, she signed her own death warrant, as they say in gangster movies. The next week, while he was planning the client’s death, the lawyer planned hers too.
He didn’t know what she was talking about, but he couldn’t risk losing everything because of a simple doubt. He discovered where the client lived and hired his wife’s killers. It
was the time for her to take steps too, while the husband was making his international calls. She got suspicious. She put two and two together. She did her accounts and sketched out her revenge,
while he was agreeing that they would shoot him in the leg. Everything to make it look convincing. It was the price to pay. The lawyer observed the client’s house more than once, from a
distance, without being seen. On the day before the journey, she read to her husband, in bed, a chapter from the collected works of the baron. The part where the author explained vengeance as
pleasure. She read sitting on his belly, leaning against his thighs. It was months since they’d slept together. The fact is that he felt his desire rekindled, excited that he was going to
kill her in two days’ time, that this would be the last time: ‘You will be tempted by contradictory desires’. He was invaded by the morbid thrill of thinking that this body which
was giving in to him would be dead in less than two days. That was why he hardly heard what she was reading aloud: ‘You who are still young and beautiful — and precisely because you are
— have, amongst all of us, the greatest chance of breaking through the bars of the human prison in horror and in revenge. Just because they are young and beautiful, those who could get the
greatest benefit from horror and revenge don’t take advantage of this potential while they still can, they are tricked first by their families and the Church, and then by their marriage, only
to discover when they have been disarmed by years of dedication, reproduction and submission to the same logic which subjects us all, that they have missed the chance to free the human being from
the prison in which he has locked himself, in the dark, unable to see further than his own nose, ignorant of his own condition, uselessly trying to contain his own instincts. I exhort you, my love,
to make of me an instrument of your revenge and horror, my most sincere vocation, which can only be achieved through the hands of a beautiful young girl like you. I exhort you, my deflowered
damsel, to make of your lost maidenhood an implacable arm against the logical illogicality of conventions which prevent us from revealing ourselves in all our natural splendour. Make this world in
which we lived confined, as in a dark cell, as unbearable and incomprehensible for them as it already is for us’. She was reading aloud while he was getting a hard-on and coming, as if he
were deaf, though nowadays he repeats the same passage, by heart, over and over. That baron is a terrible writer. At the time he didn’t see that that book had become her manual, her bible,
that she’d learned the lesson, and was ready to put those teachings into practice. She made no real objections to the journey, after asking with that ‘American style’ smile if it
wasn’t a very dangerous city. And she got the most barefaced guarantee: that nothing can abolish chance, that if it didn’t happen here, it would be in Bangkok or the Yemen or Istanbul
or some other place. And she agreed, not knowing yet that he was talking about her death. She had to disappear, the moment she said those words, her eyes shining and a glass of whisky in her hand.
She preferred not to realise that at bottom he was referring to her death, but subconsciously she already knew or guessed, because she wouldn’t have set up the theatrical reversal of fortunes
if she hadn’t known. Everything was completely synchronised so he would only realise he’d lost at the last minute, when the collapse and the disappointment of the discovery would be too
great for him, making him unable to bear the rest of his life. She calculated her revenge with an inhuman precision. She staged a horror capable of dragging along with it the logic of the dark cell
they were confined in and, making him finally see, made the world so incomprehensible and unbearable to him, and as dark as hers would be when she was dead. Her revenge was to make the blind man
see in the dark and the deaf man hear in the silence. He fell in the undergrowth with a leg-wound. His wife’s face was buried in the earth. She had flown forwards, cutting through the
brushwood, to end up face-down in the earth, dead. Checkmate. He tried to pull himself together. He had to find someone who would take him to the police. In the station, he said they’d been
victims of a robbery. He said they’d gone in the car of a man who’d approached them in the airport. They saw nothing unusual in that. They thought everything was fine until they saw
they were going out of the city, passing by shacks, heaps of rubbish, vacant lots. That was when she’d objected and been slapped on the face for the first time. They took an unmade road in an
area of wasteland; yes, he would recognise it, he could take them there. They stopped the car and after taking everything from them, money, jewellery, credit cards, they made the two of them get
out and run, and while they were running he heard two shots and saw his wife fall, and then another shot and he felt an awful pain in his leg and flung himself on the ground, desperate, beside her,
as if he were dead, dead like her, so they would go away, and leave him beside his only reason for living, the wife who had been with him at every moment, in all the worst crises of his life, even
in the midst of horrors, and had never abandoned him; he lay beside her in the hope of being able to save her also. And when he was certain they’d gone away, he left walking as best he could,
because all he could think of was how to save her, of finding someone to save her, bringing her back from death. That was how he told the story to the police. What had they come here for? To have a
good time. They were on holiday. They wanted to enjoy the happiness of their marriage in peace, like in a dream. They couldn’t have expected that. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t
right. The policemen took them back to the scene of the crime, guided by the unfortunate soul who’d found him lost in the middle of the piles of rubbish and the open sewers, limping along an
unmade road. ‘The world stinks’. That was what the officer said to the interpreter they’d sent from the consulate. But no one said anything, while they were passing through the
mud and the huts till they got the body of the Frenchwoman covered in flies. ‘It wasn’t exactly the way you thought your journey would end, right?’, the officer asked and the
interpreter translated. But no one replied anything. They took him to a hospital to attend to his leg. He asked to be able to go back home. He said he would continue to collaborate in any way
necessary to catch those responsible. ‘No one is responsible in this stinking world’, said the officer to the interpreter, who didn’t translate. ‘This is really bad for the
image of the city. Really bad.’ Three days later, they took him to the airport. The interpreter and the policeman accompanied him. He said he wanted to buy French newspapers. He went into the
shop on his own, while the interpreter and the policeman waited for him outside, and when he came out he’d already lost his head. He turned round to the policeman and said he insisted on
being called baron, a demand the interpreter translated without realising the Frenchman had gone mad. The foreign newspapers always came late. He’d bought a French paper of three days ago, of
the day they’d got here, he and his wife, the day when she was murdered. He came out of the newspaper shop with the copy of the paper folded in his hand; on the front page was the news of the
arrest of the computer technician: ‘Plan to destroy the country’s financial system uncovered and aborted’. The client had been arrested on the same night they boarded the plane.
While they were boarding, he had been detained by forty armed police, who surrounded his house, twenty miles from Lagrange, in the south of France. Now he’d been arrested, no one would ever
know the secret. He read the news when he was still in the shop, and when he came out he’d already lost his head. He’d had his wife killed for no reason. She worked it all out. She must
have seen the sheet covered in numbers on the table. She was always doing sums. She was a wizard at numbers. She worked it all out. Just at the right moment. She’d sent a letter to the
bankers. She revealed the computer technician’s whereabouts. And, while they were boarding, he had been arrested twenty miles from the baron’s château. The Frenchman was gripped
by the horror she’d left him as an inheritance in the airport newspaper shop, with a three-day old paper in his hand. A horror cap-able of sweeping away all the logic of this stinking world,
where no one is responsible for anything. We are all victims of the horror, even when we’re killing, we are innocent victims of the horror, we are what we are so as to prove God doesn’t
exist, said the Frenchman to the policeman, when he came out of the newspaper shop, and that was when the interpreter realised there was no point in translating, for he was no longer making any
sense. Horror is the only thing that doesn’t die. There’s no consolation for horror. They didn’t believe he had really ordered his wife’s murder. But neither could they let
him go after the confession. They didn’t find the killers. They had no proof. They needed proof. Yet another robbery with murder. And the man had gone mad. They didn’t know what to do
with him. He became violent. He couldn’t travel. He no longer knew where he was going. They interned him here, just in case, while they awaited proof. The family in France haven’t said
anything. They didn’t want to know. The case was insoluble. The police didn’t want to let him leave. Because of the confession. Despite the story he’s been repeating for years,
and that I’ve just told you, there’s nothing to prove he had his wife killed. The obvious doesn’t provide proof, though the world needs it. However much he insists, no one
believes him. Officially, it was a robbery. No one thinks he’s not mad. And that’s what he repeats over and over again. That he killed his wife and that he’s not mad. I’m
tired of hearing the same story. Every crisis he has, it’s the same litany. I know it all by heart. Sometimes he gets violent. The rest of his life waiting for proof, to prove God
doesn’t exist. He came here saying he was the baron of whatever looking for the Marquis de Sade. Every now and then, as if he were confessing, he tells the story over again, in detail. This
only lasts the time it takes to tell the whole story and then he says again that he’s baron so-and-so, and he’s looking for the Marquis de Sade. He thinks he’s in a French asylum
at the beginning of the nineteenth century and that only the marquis can save him. Then another crisis comes on and he begins to howl that he wants out of here. He’s afraid. He has
hallucinations. He sees things. He talks to himself as if he were hearing voices. He thinks he’s not alone. He hears voices and talks to them. We move him to another room and two days later
he has the same hallucinations. He shouts for the light to be switched on in broad daylight; he’s afraid of being alone because he says there’s someone else there: ‘You will be
tempted by contradictory desires’. And on top of that he’s a racist. The last time I tried to calm him down, he thought I was the devil. Because I’m black. He can’t stand
the sight of me. Go on then, you go in, and when he yells at you that he’s a dead man, that he’s seen the devil in person, that we’re all dead, try to explain to him that this is
not hell and he’s not dead, but tactfully, go on, try and convince the guy we’re in Rio de Janeiro.