Charles Bovary, Country Doctor by Jean Améry

Author:Jean Améry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2018-07-03T12:27:20+00:00

THE BOURGEOIS AS LOVER

NOW it is as though I had acted out a comedy of rage and pain, recited to myself the part written expressly for the betrayed husband. Emma’s rosewood desk, the secret drawer I opened only recently, out of respect for the dead, but also from my smoldering sensuality, which commanded me slowly, very, very slowly to savor everything left behind, to feel, to smell, to resurrect her reality. I turned the key, pressed the spring: a whole packet of letters lay there. I read. Appalled, and with burning desire. These were hardly the letters a gentleman on his heart’s knees would compose for a lady. They were not signed, “votre ami.” There it all is, clear as day, and whoever can read, must know everything. Pour toujours, ton Léon. Je t’aime comme jamais un homme a aimé une femme. Notre chambre à l’Hôtel de Boulogne. Notre lit. Le parfum de ton corps. [28]

I drank these words the way a man dying from dehydration scoops up clear spring water with his hand. They tasted bitter enough to make me vomit, but I swallowed each one of them with a raw throat, a ravaged soul. I rummaged in every corner, in every drawer, behind walls, sobbing, howling, and the child ran from me terrified and cried softly to herself in the garden. I was out of my senses, or thought I was. I kicked the top off of a crate: Rodolphe’s name leapt at my eyes from among a pile of other letters, and his words too were unconcerned with chaste admiration.

Love. Léon, a handsome, tender boy. Rodolphe, the hardy hunter and rider. So they lay in your arms while I rode out in the country in rain, heat, frost, and storms, to my groaning patients, obediently doing my duty. Where were you, gentil petit Léon, viril Monsieur Rodolphe, when her skin turned blue and black and she screamed for God and for relief from the burrowing pain that rent her stomach and belly and heart? Where was your love? Boorish Léon, soon to enter into holy matrimony, not only with a fat dowry but perhaps also with cold feet, as young Charbovaricharbovaricharbovari once did, when he was fobbed off with the haggard widow; et vous, Monsieur Rodolphe, imbécile, pauvre imbécile, who chose some common, venial tramp in Rouen or Paris over lugubre passion unto death? You two were off roving like a pair of fools while she stroked my hair and said: yes, you are good. How can you rest and shutter your eyes when there my love so frigid lies? Charles Bovary numquam ridiculus erat: when the time came, the officier de santé was there at his post; the lover stepped up to the bed to render a last service to his dying bride. Howling and cursing, because that was what custom demanded. As if I hadn’t known it all, without knowing, from the beginning. You read her tender poetry, petit Léon, while I played dominoes with

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