Forty Stab Wounds
It’s a stroke of luck that trials can’t be filmed. A stroke of luck for me, at least, since I’ve just found a job. A small local paper needed a courtroom sketch artist for the case that stirred up the whole town—one or two years ago now, I can’t quite remember. A man in his forties stabbed his mistress forty times and is being tried this morning.
It’s a stroke of luck that trials are almost never filmed, because if they were, monstrosity would slip into a kind of pathos so close to crude banality it would be unbearable. It wouldn’t add anything to human stupidity, and it certainly wouldn’t elevate its grandeur. The purely documentary aspect would leave us standing at the edge of a void, helplessly confused, simply because we’ve grown used to equating moving images with reality.
I prepared my gear : a few tubes of watercolor, my travel palette, two brushes, my drawing board, and a stack of paper. I’m now seated slightly back, in the front row. I observe the man in the defendant’s box. He’s an ordinary man. He could easily be me. Thinning hair, a sensual mouth, small eyes that struggle to open fully onto the world.
The prosecutor recites the facts in a pompous voice—the voice of the Republic, I imagine—and I sketch him quickly, thinking of my colleague Daumier. Then it’s the defense attorney’s turn, a blonde woman whose sweeping gestures release clouds of Chanel No. 5 into the air.
I sketch her in the same spirit. The prosecution and the defense strike me as nothing more than characters from a Guignol puppet show, so dear to the city where the trial is taking place.
“Defendant, please stand. Do you have anything to say ?” asks the judge, a small dry man, sharp as a club.
“I couldn’t live without her.”
A faint murmur runs through the courtroom. Forty stab wounds for that reason alone must seem absolutely unbearable to the audience. Personally, I’m not far from finding it laughable. Completely ridiculous. If there weren’t a corpse involved, it would be entirely ridiculous.
Ridiculous. The word sends my pencil drifting suddenly toward caricature ; I exaggerate. Fortunately, paint allows you to restore balance afterward, to bring in that realistic touch readers like.
I wonder whether I could commit such an act myself. Come to think of it, haven’t I already committed it ? Virtually, that is. Back when I was his age and the idea of losing the woman I loved haunted me day and night. Which is no longer the case. Twenty years later, you know a little more about the reasons behind despair, about what people call love, too. And yet you don’t kill people like that out of love once you’ve passed forty. Probably because by then you’ve understood that it wasn’t love at all. You realize how thoroughly pathetic you were, and all you want is to crawl underground and shut up, overwhelmed by how stupid you’ve been. Pride and vanity—those false loves you discover in yourself corrode them as surely as acid.
“Georges ? Is that you ?” A woman grabs my sleeve in the stairwell. I recognize the voice at once, turn around, and see an old woman smiling at me.
“Oh. It’s you,” I say, the way one surrenders after a defeat, tail between his legs.
“How long has it been ?” she says. “Twenty years at least…”
“Twenty years, yes,” I reply, trying to make it sound as evasive as possible. And I think of all those years as so many knife blows I, too, had driven into something—probably a part of myself I once believed to be sacred.
“I’m in a hurry,” I say suddenly, despite myself. “I have to go.” And I leave just like that, without turning back, clenching my teeth hard enough to feel like they might crack.