He stretched out on the couch and returned to his pastime, a jigsaw with more than two thousand pieces. A château in the Valley of the Loire: Langeais. He was close to getting it done. In the attic, the first day, he had come across several Heller model kits, complete with glue, paint, and decals. So he had built Stukas and Spitfires, as well as a car—a 1935 Hispano-Suiza. They all stood on the floor now, mounted on their plastic bases and carefully painted. When he ran out of kits, Alex built a model of his parents’ farm: the two main buildings, the outbuildings, the fences. By gluing matches together he achieved a clumsy, naive, touching replica. All that was missing was the tractor, so he cut one out of a piece of cardboard. Later, on a return visit to the attic, he turned up the jigsaw puzzle…
The farmhouse where he was hiding out belonged to a friend of his, a guy he had met working as a nightclub bouncer. You could spend a few weeks there without fear of unannounced visits from curious neighbors. The friend had also supplied him with a phony identity card, but Alex’s now notorious face was liable to be displayed in every police station in France, and in the “most wanted” section, to boot. The cops hate it when one of their own gets killed.
The pieces of the puzzle obstinately refused to fit together. Alex was working on part of the sky. It was all blue, very hard to do. The château’s turrets, the drawbridge—all that had been easy, but the sky was another matter. Cloudless and empty, it was very tricky. Alex got irritated, which made him try even more unlikely joins; he was continually assembling patches of sky only to pull them apart again.
On the floor, just near the board on which he had laid out the jigsaw, crawled a spider. A squat and repulsive spider. She picked a corner of the wall and set about spinning a web. The thread flowed continually from her rounded abdomen. She came and went carefully and laboriously. With a match, Alex set fire to the just-completed portion of her web. The spider panicked, checking her surroundings, looking out for the advent of some enemy; but since the concept of matches was not inscribed in her genes, she soon went back to work.
She spun tirelessly, joining up her thread, anchoring it to rough spots on the wall, making use of every splinter of wood in the floor. Alex found a dead mosquito and tossed it into the newly constructed web. The spider rushed over, circled this carrion, but disdained it. Alex divined the reason for her lack of interest: the mosquito was already dead. Hobbling, he went out to the front steps, delicately gathered up a moth hiding under a tile, and placed it in the web.
The moth struggled to escape the viscous toils. The spider promptly reappeared, turning the prey this way and that before weaving a cocoon for it and storing the insect in a crack in the wall, safe for a future feast.
Eve was sitting at her dressing table, examining her face in the mirror. A childish face, with great sad almond-shaped eyes. Touching her index finger softly to the skin of her jaw, she felt the hardness of the bone, the sharpness of the chin, the relief of the teeth through the fleshy mass of the lips. Her cheekbones were prominent and her nose turned up; it was a delicately shaped, perfectly rounded nose.
She turned her head slightly, tipped the mirror, and was herself surprised by the strange expression that her reflection had elicited. There was almost too much perfection, and such radiant charm created a sort of malaise in her. She had never known a man who could resist her attraction or remain indifferent to her glance. No man could pierce her aura of mystery or pin down the quality that invested her every gesture with an enrapturing ambiguity. She drew them all to her, piquing their interest, arousing their desire, playing on the tension they felt once in her presence.
The outward signs of this seductiveness filled her with an ambivalent calm: she would have liked to repel them, put them to flight, free herself of them, provoke repugnance in them; and yet the fascination she exercised without wanting it was her only revenge, paltry in its very infallibility.
She made herself up, then took the easel from its case and spread out the paints and brushes and resumed work on a canvas that she had in hand. It was a portrait of Richard, vulgar and crudely executed. She showed him seated on a bar stool with legs apart, cross-dressed as a woman, a cigarette-holder in his mouth, wearing a pink dress and black stockings held up by a garter-belt; his feet were crammed into high-heeled shoes.
He was smiling beatifically, even idiotically. Grotesque falsies made of old rags hung pathetically over his flaccid belly. Painted with obsessive precision, the face was covered with red blotches. No viewer of the picture could have failed to supply a voice for this pathetic, monstrous caricature: the rasping croak of a broken-down fishwife.
No, your master had not killed you. Later, you came to regret it. For the moment, he was treating you better. He would come and give you showers, spraying you with tepid water from a garden hose, even letting you have a piece of soap.
The spotlight stayed on all the time. The darkness had given way to its blinding light, artificial, cold, and incessant.
For hours at a time your master would stay with you, sitting in an armchair opposite you, scrutinizing your slightest movement.
At the start of these “observation” sessions, you dared say nothing, for fear of arousing his ire, for fear that at night thirst and hunger would return to punish you for this crime whose nature was still a mystery to you but which you were apparently doomed to expiate.
But then you got your courage up. Timidly, you asked him what the date was, to find out how long you had been locked up here. He replied immediately, smiling: the twenty-third of October. So, he had been holding you captive for over two months. Two months of being hungry and thirsty—and how long eating from his hand, licking that tin plate, lying prostrate at his feet, being washed with a hose?
You wept then, asked why he was doing all this to you. This time he said nothing. You could see his face, which was impenetrable, crowned by white hair: a face with a certain nobility about it—a face that, possibly, you had seen somewhere before.
He kept coming into your prison and staying there, sitting before you, impassive. He would disappear only to return a little later. The nightmares of your early days of incarceration were gone. Could he be slipping tranquilizers into your rations? True, your anxiety was still there, but its object had changed. You were sure of staying alive, for otherwise, you reasoned, he would have killed you already. His intent was not to let you slowly agonize, shrivel up, and die. It was, therefore, something else…
A little later, your meal routine was changed. Your master set up a folding table and a stool for you. He gave you a plastic knife and fork like the ones they give you on airplanes. A plate replaced the tin bowl. And real meals soon followed: fruit, vegetables, cheese. You took enormous pleasure in eating as you mulled over your memories of the first days.
You were still chained up, but your master cared for the abrasions on your wrists caused by the shackles. You would spread cream on the sores, and he would wind an elastic bandage round your wrist beneath the steel cuffs.