The Body of the Beasts

by Audrée Wilhelmy

  One evening, he breaks a window pane, slides his hand through, unbolts a small door to a service entrance, and pushes it open without crossing the threshold. The silence is so heavy it seems to have a sound of its own; the still air smells of lemon oil and scrubbed wood. He stays long enough to take one luxurious breath of it, nothing more. Blood pounds in his temples and he runs away. Later, he can’t remember if he shut the door behind him. He imagines bookcases and armchairs infested by vermin because of what he’s done. Until the Boryas leave Seiche, he steers clear of that villa. The detour, sticking to the streets instead of the shore, takes twenty minutes.

  The more time he spends loitering around fine houses, the more the family’s shack disgusts him. The stench of smoked fish clinging to its walls, the living room and kitchen cluttered with mussels, brine, packing, hunting and sewing gear, bags of sugar and salt.

  Between the ages of seven and thirteen, as soon as he has finished his breakfast, he heads outside.

  One morning, he makes his way to the little bridge and the train station. Leander and he have plans to escape. Every night, wedged together in the hollow in the middle of the mattress, they talk of fleeing to the Cité. Beneath the bed: coins painstakingly amassed, enough to pay for a one-way ticket to the big town. The day before, Leander had asked him again to check the train schedule on the platform’s posters.

  The trails are covered in ice. Osip slips and slides in his boots. The wind glances off the sea and surges along the path, a gust strews garbage from the tavern, rocking the overhead cables and the pigeons perched there. Lit from behind, the birds swaying on the wire form shadowy shapes still fat with the grain they devoured into November. Osip unbuttons his coat, pulls out a slingshot.

  Sevastian-Benedikt hunts with a snare. Some evenings, he’ll deposit two or three hares on the table. Their father skins them and washes the pelts, then carves up the carcasses over a wide, shallow pail; their blood and entrails drop into the basin to be thrown into a pit behind the house later on. Their mother makes rabbit pie from the meat, sells the kidneys to the butcher and, with the fur, makes mittens, hats, and collars that their father sells in the Cité, along with the smoked fish. If Osip should bring home a few rock doves, the way his brother does small game, his parents will know what to do. His mother will bake tourtières and sell them at the market; she could stuff her flat pillow with the feathers.

  The path is deserted. Osip takes a deep breath. He aims at a pigeon. When it hits the ice, the dull, muffled thud of the fallen bird takes him by surprise. When his stone hit its target, there’d been no cry, no final coo rang out, nothing hinted at death. Poc. Nothing more. Overhead, the survivors don’t even flinch.

  Osip stares at the animal. Ash-grey down on its crop, one wing unfurled, the other tight against its body. Rigid shanks, stiff claws; the neck, rump, beak. When, two years earlier, a partridge hit their window, dust from its plumage left the exact imprint of its death on the glass. This time, nothing. Only a bird once on a wire now lying on the ground, where not even a hollow shows in the path’s tamped-down snow. Osip has never killed before. Above him, a dozen quarry bob up and down, oblivious. He yells, he waves his arms; the pigeons don’t budge. So he picks up more stones and aims at each of them in turn. They fall without taking flight, without fear.

  On the path, thirteen rock doves.

  Osip shivers. He’s annoyed at the stupidity of their refusal to flee. He still has to pick up their bodies, take them to his father. He draws near, reaches out, his head pulled back. His fingers close around soft, warm feathers. Beneath his palm, the pigeon’s flank rises and falls, its breast still beating. Osip recoils, loses his footing, slips on the snow. The pigeon lies a metre away. He should finish it off but he can’t. He vomits grey bread from breakfast between his legs.

  He wanders off, the birds stay put; they’ll freeze beneath the build-up of ice on the street. In the spring, other children will carry them to their parents in houses less shabby than his own.

  5

  The train reaches the Seiche terminus at eleven and leaves again two hours later. The whistle sounds, the locomotive chugs and squeals along the rails, white smoke fills the air. Osip holds the railway schedule; he knows the name of each station, the ones with train service and the others that will flash past the windows as the engineer spurs the engine on. He imagines the different stops, the first ones so splendid in the coastal sunshine, but then, before reaching the Cité, Korgata’s two stations, Sa-Ann, and after, the papermakers’ industrial zone, sad, grey, and packed. He imagines the big city at journey’s end, its central station admired by all. In engravings in newspapers, he’s seen the flower-decked handrail up the station’s main staircase, the mosaics in the lobby, the great glass roof, the impeccable uniforms of the ticket collectors.

  The trip from the Seiche station to the Cité terminus takes thirteen hours.

  Leander sticks by the window, pokes his head outside, waves and waves. Osip watches the train pull away. He could run behind but stays put on the platform. His brother’s fingers recede into the distance and disappear; eventually the train itself vanishes. Osip doesn’t budge. He holds the railroad schedule and his own ticket for the Cité tight in his fist. He has squeezed them so hard they form a compact ball good for only one thing — to be thrown on the track.

  6

  The first time, the expedition from the Seiche shack to the lighthouse takes six days because all the furniture, fishing gear, clothing, and smaller possessions dear to the brothers and their mother must be ferried through the forest’s dense trees and vegetation. Their father doesn’t yet know which paths link the village to the open sea — he gets lost two or three times, often wandering blindly, his boys shouldering the entire contents of their household first this way, then that. The trees are massive and tall, even the eldest can’t climb their trunks, and their dense foliage hides the stars. All they can do is advance, hoping to find the lighthouse by following the sketchy map they’d been provided with in Seiche. Their mother complains and their father has barricaded himself behind an intimidating silence; he has no idea how he’ll lead his brood to safety. Sevastian-Benedikt comes and goes at will, bringing back pheasants and hares that he cooks over fires he builds from twigs and leaves.

  Pride drives their father for four days. After that, he pulls the eldest aside and asks him to find the lighthouse, then sits on the upside-down dresser and watches his son sectione in among the tree trunks and tall ferns. Osip has never seen his father like this, slumped over, his chin dropped to his chest. Even their mother doesn’t approach him; she sheds tears at the thought that Leander might come upon their empty home should he return from the Cité, and spends the rest of the time with her youngest sons. They fashion spears without the slightest idea how to use them. Osip wishes he could feed his family but can’t. When he imagines hunting he’s reminded of the pigeons, and whenever he roams through the woods in search of berries, he never recognizes the edible ones and is afraid he’ll poison everyone. So he waits. The eldest reappears the next afternoon. He’s carrying a lantern and the spyglass from the lighthouse. Fifteen hours later, Osip drops a steamer trunk and a chair on the shore; he walks toward the sea, wades in, lets himself sink into the waves. Thighs, back, head: foam washes over his limbs. Not long after, he sits up and looks at this new territory — vast, deserted, and to be shared with his brothers.

  The lighthouse sits on a rock surrounded by reefs. Its imposing structure is connected to the beach by a stone path. The surf has studded it with coral, shells, and mossy seaweed that are revealed at low tide. As the water rises, it swallows up the foreshore and the tower’s foundation, breakers crashing and hammering against the stone. Round in design, the bottom third of the lighthouse is built of porous chiselled rubble encircled by a wall that protects the columns, portico, and railing from the violence of heavy seas. Above, the white paint on the watchtower has deteriorated over the years, the matte yellow
of brick shows under the flaking coat of paint: a weathered observatory, its windows opening onto the waves, the shore, the forest. Then, higher up, invisible in the sun: the watch gallery, the wire-meshed red lantern, and the verdigris dome mark the horizon. Along the wall and invisible from shore is the huge foghorn that flares out to the open sea and its ships.

  Osip has never seen anything this big.

  Sitjaq’s beach is chalky and speckled in parts with black sand whose patterns shift in the wind. The dunes go on forever, wild around the edges; in the distance, toward Seiche, cliffs pierced with caves hem in the rest. At the edge of the strand, trees sprout suddenly, packed stiff and tight behind a small cabin of wooden planks.

  Weary and wet, Osip gets to his feet. He wants to be the first to choose a bed, he checks on his brothers lolling in the surf and drags himself over to their quarters.

  The furniture that used to belong to the previous owner is draped in white sheets. Every drawer and closet had been meticulously emptied before their father, Lousbec Borya, was given access. Osip likes the small cabin immediately; its scent of oiled wood, its dust and drapings remind him of the villas in Seiche. He doesn’t notice the fungus along the walls or the cracks in the ceiling. He trembles as he removes linen from the bookcases. He’d like to be the only one to pull on the corner of each sheet and reveal a couch, a dresser, a table, but his younger brothers have followed him inside and start throwing the covers off everywhere. Within a minute of their arrival all the furniture is bared, and before Osip is able to commandeer the bunk by the window, they’ve already staked a claim to it with their bags and returned outside to explore the caves and lagoons.

  7

  Passing ships are equipped with masts or propellers; they’ve come from afar, have crossed the ocean. The names painted on the ships’ hulls speak of an unimaginable elsewhere; they’re either made of wood or enveloped in grey and red sheathing, except for the trawlers that, in motley colours, look like so many candies bobbing out on the waves. Osip climbs to the lantern every day to study the comings and goings of the commercial, military, and pleasure flotillas. Every morning, he relieves his father; the old man returns to his wife and Osip stays up top. He watches the sea swell and flood the path linking the lighthouse to the shore; he lets the tide rush in and waits for its retreat, listening to the collision of surf and stone. Huge breakers crash against the lighthouse and explode in white spray. Osip, severed from his brothers’ world, sits on the gallery, his skin dry from the wind and salt. He counts the ships in the distance, the bow appearing first, then the whole vessel. He logs the date of their approach and then that of their return to the ocean in a notebook. Sometimes, ships’ captains make out his silhouette against the flaking paint and sound their big horn; in a single bound Osip leaps to his feet, runs to his foghorn’s mouthpiece, and responds to the salute with a rumble that shakes the horizon.

  From the lookout, he sees Matvey and Golby, aged ten and twelve, who’ve made the stretch of beach to the cliffs their own. They score its sand with thousands of neat footprints erased each night, retraced in the morning. The sea destroys everything the boys invent. Osip admires his brothers’ resolve, their fight against the intertidal waters. Sometimes they build structures from branches and pebbles and wait to see if they’ll resist the waves, sometimes they venture far out onto the rocks, their feet slipping on seaweed, then wait for the tide to come in and watch its advance on the cabin. They don’t know how to swim — no one does — but through their inventions and games they ally themselves with the sea all the same. Just as Osip has done with his foghorn.

  Sevastian-Benedikt lives in the forest. He spends so much time running through it that he turns into a sturdy giant with green knees and elbows. From the lighthouse, Osip catches the occasional glimpse of him advancing through the foliage. On such days, the eldest returns to feed the clan, carrying on his back carcasses, bags of rice as heavy as dead bodies, the berries he’s gathered en route, and the delicacies he’s traded for in Seiche. He receives a king’s welcome. Thanks to his efforts, the family will eat. He’s their provider and the favourite.

  8

  Sitjaq empties the day Matvey, Goldby, and their father perish at sea.

  One afternoon, their mother complains of hunger — the eldest is taking too long to bring meat and berries. From his lookout, Osip watches his father and brothers: they carry the patched-up boat overhead along the dunes. In their hands are fishing rods, nets, and colourful fish hooks. Osip imagines them whistling the tune of a ribald song as they recede from view and into the woods and reappear farther down. For a while they row erratically, then turn in circles until they find their rhythm and head for the coast beyond the cliffs, out of sight.

  They do not return.

  For several days, the waves bring in nothing, and then they spit out the youngest brother. Later: blue and yellow planks, a buoy, half a grey oar. Mother Borya buries the relics next to her son; she stares at the lighthouse, the deserted dunes. There’s nothing for her in Seiche. Here, there’s nothing for anyone. Sevastian-Benedikt has disappeared into the jungle and has not been back for ten days. Osip holes up in the lighthouse-keeper’s office to read whatever he comes across there, especially logs from ships wrecked on the shoals. His mother sits on the porch, her chin resting on her hand, and doesn’t move. For a day, a night, another day, another night, until diluvian rains pour down on her, leaking through the roof’s blackened thatch and dislodging her.

  * * *

  Four years later, the eldest brother’s woman scores the beach with her footprints just as his brothers did before her. The cabin has been deserted for a long time — the Old Woman and her two remaining sons live in the lighthouse now — so the new arrival appropriates it for herself, makes it a part of her territory, which soon extends to the dunes, the forest’s edge, the cliffs, the caves.

  She has only to shed her dress to disrobe. She has no undergarments to unlace or throw off. She grabs the fabric at her waist and crosses her arms, then in one fluid gesture, hikes the dress over her shoulders, her head, her hair. Stripped of the taffeta, her skin resembles a leopard’s — a profusion of round pink and white scars. They’re concentrated in the middle of her back, between her shoulder blades, then spaced farther apart; on her ribs and the small of her back they’ve taken on a rusty brownish hue, as though freckles had sprung up after she was wounded. Other marks streak her buttocks, thighs, and upper arms; on her right calf, faded over time, a thin line stretches from knee to heel and sectionides her leg into perfect halves.

  From the lantern, Osip studies the geography of this stranger. He arms himself with the spyglass and follows the walks she takes along the large lagoons bordering the tower. The woman baffles him. Her wandering makes no sense, she bares her flesh without shame, tumbles in the ocean, sectiones headfirst, and resurfaces far from shore. She’s always on the move, knows how to butcher and hunt, fishes with branches she has sharpened herself, grills her catch over pine-cone fires. She lives on her own in the musty, leaky hut, refuses to use the lighthouse bedroom, remains in the hovel, errant, mute.

  Her name is Noé. She is not here to stay. Not that she says as much to Sevastian-Benedikt — he knows.

  * * *

  At the end of September, she expels Mie. The little one glides from between her legs, emits one big cry, then falls silent. The first sound she makes is not even a true wail, more like a breath, a greeting to the world. Mie’s face is all eyes, open wide to gorge on the beach and the creatures inhabiting it. All winter, Noé carries Mie on her side like so much baggage. She doesn’t speak to her, doesn’t fuss over her, but takes her wherever she goes to do whatever she does, beneath her sweaters and dresses, belly to belly, tiny feet striking her hips night and day. Mie learns to suckle on her own, twists to reach her mother’s breasts and grips first one, then the other. When she isn’t nursing, she sleeps, she chirps; she gazes at the animals and the people, the swirl of the big sea,
the stretch of sand along its edge.

  II

  1

  The body — it didn’t arrive all at once.

  At first, the flat nipples turned pink and then protruded, skin pulled every which way — like her other limbs in fact, stretched and elongated until they formed an odd assemblage, arms and legs out of proportion, random curves on her buttocks, on her cheeks and shoulders, on her pubis, swelling quickly as though fat had coiled up inside: this soft new mound, its dense vegetation slowly materializing — one hair to begin with, then ten, thirty — black and thick, quite unlike the tow-coloured hair on her head and the whitish-blond down on her thighs.

  And Mie knows it isn’t over. Her breasts have turned to fatty buds but resemble neither the exuberant peonies that wilt on the Old Woman’s trunk nor the small dahlias planted below Noé’s collarbone. She sees herself with a bust somewhere between her grandmother’s and her mother’s, generous but firm. This is what she imagines without conceiving of the heft and shape of her breasts, or how she’ll move differently once her bosom obstructs her torso.

  She has always borrowed the bodies of beasts — birds and fish, mammals and tiny insects. She can feel the warm and cold drafts of air under cormorants’ wings, water working its way through sharks’ gills; her fingers and toes have sensed the contour of stones under foxes’ cushioned paws. But when she is not inside another creature’s body, she has trouble walking and swims only marginally better. Her feet trip over obstacles, arms stretched wide to either side of her, hands clutching two branches to help her keep her balance. Ten, fifteen times she stops on the path between the sea and the forest and swallows the air in large gulps, out of breath until the sight of a worm, a crab, or a long-billed curlew sectionerts her. When she buries her mind inside another animal, her breathing returns to normal. Otherwise, her child’s body — a young girl’s — is a hindrance. It’s a body Mie cannot master.