Act of Passion Read Online Free PDF

family? In mine, it was my father. He drank at the fairs. He drank at the farmhouses and at the tavern. He drank at home. He would stand in the doorway watching for someone to pass so as to have an excuse to go to the wine-shed with them for a drink.
    It was at the fairs that it became dangerous, for when he had drunk, the most hair-raising things seemed to him normal.
    I only understood all this later, for I have seen many others like him. I might say that there is one in every village.
    A generation separates you from the soil and you have probably never known the unrelenting monotony of the seasons, the weight of the sky on your shoulders from four o'clock in the morning, the passage of the hours with their accumulation of worries.
    There are some who don't seem to mind and they are said to be happy. Others drink, do the fairs, and run after the girls. That was my father's case.
    As soon as he was awake in the morning he needed a glass of brandy to revive those jovial high spirits for which he was famous throughout the country. Afterwards he needed more glasses, more bottles, to maintain this semblance of optimism. And you see, your Honour, I believe my mother understood that. Who knows, perhaps it is for that reason, more than any other, that I love and respect her.
    Never, although most of our time we spent together in the kitchen and, like all children, I kept my ears constantly pricked up, did I hear my mother say:
    'You've been drinking again, François.'
    Never did she ask my father where he had been, not even on days when there was a fair and he spent the whole proceeds from the sale of a cow on girls.
    I firmly believe that, in her mind, that is what she called respect. She respected her man. It was not only gratitude for his having married one of the Lanoue girls. It was simply because she felt that he could not be other than he was.
    How often at night, after I had gone to bed, have I heard my father's booming voice announcing the invasion of our house by friends picked up almost anywhere, each one drunker than the other, brought home for a last bottle!
    She waited on them. From time to time she would come and listen at my door. And I always pretended to be asleep, for I knew that she was fearful lest I should remember the offensive words being bawled out downstairs.
    Every season, or almost, a piece of land was sold, just a splinter, as we say.
    'Bah! That bit there, so far away, it gives us more bother than it's worth,' my father would say, but on such days he was not himself.
    And he would not touch a drop for days, sometimes weeks, not even a glass of wine. He tried to behave as gaily as usual, but his gaiety was forced.
    One day — I can still remember it - when I was playing, near the well, I caught sight of him lying full length at the foot of a haystack with his face turned towards the sky, and he seemed to me so long, so still, that I thought he was dead and I began to cry.
    Hearing me, he seemed to come out of a dream. I wonder if he recognized me right away, his eyes had such a faraway look in them.
    It was one of those sickly evenings with a sky of a uniform white, at the hour when the grass becomes a sombre green and each blade stands out, shivering in the immensity, as in the paintings of the old Flemish masters.
    'What's the matter, sonny?'
    'I twisted my ankle running.'
    'Come and sit over here.'
    I was frightened, but I went and sat down on the grass beside him. He put his arm round my shoulder. We could see the house in the distance and the smoke rising up straight out of the chimney against the white sky. My father was silent, and sometimes I could feel a slight contraction of his hand on my shoulder.
    We stared into empty space, both of us. Our eyes must have been the same colour, and I wondered if my father, too, was frightened.
    I don't know how long I could have endured that agony, and I must have been very pale, when a gun went off in the direction of the Bois Perdu.
    Then my father shook