The Benefactor by Susan Sontag

Author:Susan Sontag
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2016-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

TEN

Imagine to yourself, reader, that you are a murderer. What is it that makes a murderer? Is it the bloodstained weapon, the scratches inflicted on one’s face by the struggling victim, the guilty heart, the inexorable police inspector, the bad dreams? No, it is not necessarily any of these. All these conditions can be absent. The murder may be colorless, bloodless, conscienceless, unpunished. All that is needed is that one has committed the act of murder. It is nothing in the present, only something in the past that makes one a murderer.

Still, I looked for consequences; for how else can we assure ourselves of the reality of the past. Upon awakening, I examined my sleep for a dream. I scanned the morning paper, and found a paragraph on page eleven reporting the fire. But there was no mention of Frau Anders, and of course no obituary. I wondered if there were someone who would come to apprehend me. No one appeared.

You must not imagine that I felt guilty, or craved punishment. But I should have liked some token from my life to register this act. I considered a confession, but felt it would surely lack credibility. What could I say? That I had murdered a woman that I had two years before abandoned into slavery, who had returned to the city clandestinely, who had been recognized by no one? How would I convince anyone that Frau Anders had returned at all? The only person who had any evidence of her presence was Monique. Would I say: I have set fire to the house and thereby to the woman who sent you that letter? Would we visit the ruins of the house and poke among the ashes? Would Monique demand that I surrender myself to the police? Perhaps she would merely admonish me that I had been unfair.

When I returned to Monique’s arms the following evening, I averted my face, my gaze was troubled. I did not know if I embraced my confessor, my judge, or my next victim.

“Did you keep your rendezvous?” she inquired icily.

“I did.”

“Is this woman very important to you? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“She is my shadow. Or else, I am hers. It doesn’t matter. In either case, one of us doesn’t really exist.”

“Don’t you think you ought to find out which one of you it is that exists?”

“That’s exactly what I have done,” I replied. “You are embracing the victor at this moment.”

“God be praised for that,” she said sarcastically. “Are you sure?”

“I have made sure, quite sure.” I put my arms around her and pressed her to me more closely. Desire, mixed with an obscure resentment, moved me. Monique sighed and lay still, her head in the hollow of my shoulder.

“You don’t want to see her again?” she murmured.

“No.”

“Then we can be happy. I feel it. Don’t you?” I shook my head. She sat upright suddenly, looked at me sharply, and then buried her face in her hands.

I stroked her back, and spoke as gently as I could.

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