The Count

The Count : Part I : Chapter 1

Wednesday evening: the man of steel.

Emile undid his belt, pulled it through the waistband loops of his trousers, and dropped it onto the sofa. He was not in a hurry. The girl could wait.

He looked at his watch. Ten past six. The Rolex stared blankly back at him, monocular and impassive. The second hand moved with a well-ordered precision from second to second, elegantly signalling the passage of time, providing a little certainty amongst life's great uncertainties.

He pulled then relaxed the end of the watch strap to pass the tongue of the buckle through the hole in the leather, then let the watch fall onto the table which stood in front of him. There, in the mirror which stood on the same table, he caught sight of his own face.

God, was he really that old? he asked himself in a half apologetic manner. So old and so sad, he thought. He discovered, in his eyes, an expression of tiredness, and of lassitude which told of troubling anxieties and worries which weighed on his spirit, and of paradoxes which he had not been able to resolve. He passed his hand over his face, and looked at himself again. Nothing had changed.

“I am,” he said softly, “a man of steel.” At any rate, that was his reputation at the period when he was in charge of his uncle's businesses. He wondered now if that was a good thing. Perhaps not. Re-assuring for the investors, perhaps. And the others? The employees, dismissed following the tough decisions he had had to take, unknown faces, human beings whom he had 'disappeared' at a stroke of his pen. He remembered having met one of these disappeared people one day, a day on which he had recognised hatred in the eyes of another. It was a striking awakening to a reality of which he had been largely unaware in his air-conditioned cocoon of privilege.

“Steel and tears,” he added solemnly, and his thoughts, his true children, began to circulate around these two ideas, the implacable hardness of the steel and the salt taste of human tears.

"I'm ready,” announced a voice from the other room. His thoughts came back to the present. He was still looking at his own face in the mirror, observing his eyes which had briefly lit up at the sound of the voice, and the blank smile which somehow gave him the appearance of a ghost, of a provisional being.

"Ready,” he repeated softly, “ready for what?”

He took the knot of his tie and pulled it to one side, then let the tension relax, pulled again, this time with the other hand to pass the end through the material which encircled it, dissolving the knot, then let the two ends fall against his chest.

“Ready,” the word sounded like a bell tolling inside his brain, not exactly threatening, but ominous.

A knife lay on the table next to the mirror. It formed an interesting ensemble with the length of string and the doll close by. He felt a resonance like a musical accord, not exactly harmonious, but nevertheless interesting. A bit of Stravinsky, maybe, or Alban Berg. The Knife. The Moon, and the idea of blood flowing. His thoughts stopped there for a second, then fell briefly into a black hole. A little jump, an electrical impulse in his brain, and a memory arrived to fill this emptiness.

He had no idea why this memory came back at this particular moment, but there it was, and there he was in London, with his mother. He was six years old. He saw himself again, arriving full of anticipation at the Punch and Judy show. For the first couple of weeks of their holiday, he and his mother had walked around London together almost every day, visiting the parks and the various attractions of that great city. One day his mother had bought him an ice cream, then left him to watch the Punch and Judy show which was taking place nearby, while she went shopping.

He found the spectacle very much to his liking. First of all, he found the way Mr Punch talked very funny. Secondly, Mr Punch's manner of getting rid of all his enemies, by killing them one after the other, amused him greatly, and he was very much struck by the fact that the other spectators to the little drama also found this hilarious. What was it, he wondered, about killing a baby that made people laugh?

After the show, he waited, wondering when his mother would return. His feeling was not exactly that of fear, nor of anxiety, he was just waiting. If his mother had decided to leave, he was convinced that somebody else would arrive to take her place, and, as it happened, a man approached him, and began to speak in English, a language which he scarcely understood. Then the man asked him with gestures if he wanted an ice cream. He nodded, happy to have so quickly found a friend. The man went off and bought him the ice cream, the biggest there was. He took hold of it, and was just beginning to lick it when his mother returned. She grabbed the ice cream and threw it to the ground, then took him by the hand and pulled him after her.

He looked behind, and noticed that the man was following them. His mother turned two or three times to tell him to go away in a manner which became increasingly violent, but the man continued to follow them. The fourth time she turned, he took out a cut-throat razor and slashed her throat, then disappeared into the crowd.

.The memory shocked him even now. There was blood everywhere. People running in all directions, shouting and gesticulating. Someone had grabbed hold of him and lifted him off his feet. A crowd of people surrounded his mother and watched her die. Now, he felt his head turning in a most unpleasant manner. His head was turning, and his feet were tingling. Why was that? he wondered. This strange interweaving of thoughts and feelings which then became physical sensations struck him as somehow inexplicable.

He asked himself whether he should have been able to do something to save his mother, but, in truth, it was evident that he was in no position to do anything at all, given his age. In reality, he had to accept that the death of his mother was a simple misadventure, accept that death stalked the narrow passageways, lurked along the empty paths, hid in the crowd and in the abyss, finally swallowing everything.

He put his index finger on the point of the knife and pressed until it made an imprint. He was conscious of the fact that if he pressed just a little harder, the blood would flow.

But all that was only silly games, he thought, the games of a sick spirit. Games, but, in the past, the authorities had taken his attempts to harm himself very seriously nonetheless. He well remembered his incarceration in the psychiatric hospital, and the wheelchair in which he had been strapped, the sound of the wheels on the well-polished floors, and the way in which people turned to look at him as though he was a savage beast, not at all like them. Normal people. In the finish, he started to do strange things to shock them, these normal people, twisting his body, grimacing, laughing, pissing in the vases of flowers ….

A thousand things presented themselves to his imagination at this point. a hurly burly of confused events, the details largely forgotten, memories of abandonment, misery, white walls, solitude and barred windows, unsympathetic people, the representatives of a corrupt and sadistic authority. He remembered the hated face of his father, who had left him in this institution 'for his own good', and, suddenly, he was aware that there were tears in his eyes.

He could have quite easily dropped back into that world, a world with no responsibility, where devils dressed in white looked after him, poisoned his body and tortured his mind with their infernal medications, and finally smothered his spirit with their much vaunted but useless theories of human behaviour; a world in which he felt just like that American soldier he had once seen in a film, and with whom he had identified, shot in the stomach by the Viet-Cong, dying slowly in a field of rice, crying for his mother.

In reality, everybody was in approximately the same situation. Everything was OK, so long as you could keep the skin outside and the blood inside. There were other horrors, of course. It was possible to rot away from the inside, from a cancer, a rupture, a heart attack, an apoplexy, convulsions, a stroke.... The list was long.

Ah! how romantic it was, he thought, wiping the tear from his eye and trying to escape from these painful memories which often attacked him during the night, upsetting his usual tranquillity.

He took the doll in his hands. The eyes pivoted in their sockets, so that she resembled somebody having an epileptic fit. He could not help laughing at this idea, at least beginning a laugh, which then gargled in his throat and died.

I am a thinking thing, he said slowly, carefully and softly between his teeth, as though it were a mantra, while he looked at the doll and pulled its head out of its socket.

Sum res cogitans, he concluded, looking at the two parts of the doll, the head and the body, with considerable satisfaction.

“Emile!” It was a voice from the other room, the voice of a young woman. “What are you doing?”

Interesting question. Direct, simple, altogether easy. It was a question that thousands of people might have asked hundreds of times in the confident expectation that their interlocutor, whoever he might be, would know the answer, because a man and his acts were thought to be closer to each other than two identical twins.

He put the two parts of the doll back on the table, against the mirror, on the left of the string and on the right of the knife.

“I'm communing with the Almighty,” he said slowly and deliberately.

“What?” asked the girl.

“The Almighty, I'm communing with Him.”

There was a short silence, then the question:

“What for?”

He hesitated. Why had he said that? he wondered. What had he to do with the Almighty? And yet, for a time, he had been convinced of the existence of some power over and above man. Some entity that gave meaning to the whole stupid game.

Now, suddenly, his head was again thick with thoughts of all sorts. Sensations metamorphosed into ideas, ideas were put together in chains of reasoning, which got confused with memories, hopes and other emotions, all of which bubbled away in an unhealthy soup brewing in the kitchen of his brain. All to produce exactly what? Some confused ideas about the meaning of human life which gave him a reason to get up in the morning? No. There was no reason. He did it out of habit.

“Emile! When are you coming to bed?” came the voice again.

Soon, he thought, but he did not want to say it. He wanted to let the little tremor that he had heard in Bella's voice at the end of the phrase, resound a little in the apartment. This tremor revealed everything about the state of Bella's mind. The tone was full of anticipation and uncertainty. An uncertainty into which he would shortly empty his convictions. Or not.

In the final analysis, God had no role to play in all of that. Except that, of course, He, or somebody very much like him, had ensured that all sorts of little miracles happened during the long process of engagement, marriage, fornication, gestation and, finally, the birth of this girl, until this child, this Bella, who was stretched voluptuously over his bed at the moment in the adjoining room, the product of so much sweat, so much work and so much ingenuity, emptied her lungs for the first time in an ecstasy of objections.

"I will be there shortly,” he said, using a semi-official tone of voice which, he thought, accorded well with the situation, a nice contrast, like blue against orange or red against green.

But it was not what the young Bella either expected or wanted. All the same, he thought, a little impatience was no bad thing. It helped to heat the blood.

The trick was, of course, not to go too far too fast, but, at the same time, not to go so slowly that the fire was completely extinguished, even though this sort of temporary frustration could be amusing, leading desire to rise up suddenly and unexpectedly and sometimes inappropriately from the least impulse into a huge conflagration, and push the individual, or the victim, to commit enormous follies of bestial self-abandonment. And afterwards ….

An animal will pass quite naturally from the impulse to the action without reflection, but a human being, on the other hand, may be inhibited by certain norms of behaviour, by social conventions, even by morality, and this can all impede the impulse, which, at that moment, returns into itself. And what then? It is evident that the process can produce the most exquisite expressions of personality, in particular when modesty battles against desire. Or else, on the other hand, it can produce monsters.

How many times before the tension of the excitement becomes loose and uninteresting? he asked himself.

At this moment a feeling of desperation was born in his breast. It began to rise to his throat, choking him. He turned away from the mirror, breathed in deeply, then went to the door and turned the key. He put the key into his left trouser pocket. Returning to the table, he lifted the string by one end, and left it dangling in front of him, like a snake he had caught by the tail.

This string did not present a threat, he thought. In fact, it was rather elegant, a silk string, resembling the sort that people used to hang their pictures. It was not very long. A metre perhaps. He put it in his right trouser pocket.

.Now he was ready, he thought.

It was at this moment that Bella arrived at the door, naked, like a Venus emerging from the waves. Her breasts, not quite fully formed, were nicely rounded, and the nipples stood proudly at the centre of her lightly coloured aureoles, announcing her sexual arousal in unmistakable terms. Her gently rounded stomach and wide hips suggested the sumptuous forms of artist's models of the nineteenth century, and below, between her legs, her sex showed beneath the soft down of her pubic hair, insignificant in the context of the rest of her body, a mere slit between the two inviting pads of her labia.

.“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Preparing for battle,” he replied, somewhat enigmatically.

She smiled. It was a battle for which she was fully prepared.