Drawing these wild lands, the islets lost in the waves, she feels again beneath her feet the texture of soils on which she has trod — silt, gravel, pebbles, sand, the soft humus of old forests, logs, stones, cobblestones; in the cabin, she lets herself be led by Osip, but beneath her toes she can feel the fifteen years of her peregrinations climbing her ankles, her calves, her legs.
Osip steers her across the room. She is nothing but a body. Her limbs sway like buffeted reeds; her heels drag along the floor, no one left to bid them to lift up. Her buttocks are the first to sink into the mattress, then her back, her shoulders, her head; it’s Osip who initiates her movements, directs them, chooses them.
Morning’s gusts beneath her dress, on her bare thighs and hips as she washes her buttocks, her hands, her face in rivers and ponds.
Her limbs’ exhaustion after days’ worth of walking and portaging.
The trickle of warm water, from her lips on the leather drinking pouch to her belly, when night falls and snowmelt sputters on the brush-fed fire. At the same time, crickets, frogs, cicadas; evening’s echoes replace those of the day. That hour of calm when sounds cohabit.
Noé doesn’t shut her eyes. To do so would mean she’d have to order them to close — lower her eyelids, join them together — but she is neither present nor able. Her lashes remain half-open, her mouth too, soft, round; the simple pressure of the shaft is enough to cause her lips to part even more.
The ocean and prairies, shimmering alike when traversed by the wind.
The body’s travel through landscapes.
Osip climaxes quickly, his sigh brief. Noé lies still, a tangle of hair and blackened clothing. For a moment, he looks at her, doesn’t know what to do. Then, calmly, he rearranges the furniture, the trunks, and the jumble cluttering up the congested half of the room. Against the drawing’s dark form, he places a table and three chairs; he finds a cracked vase, he washes it and centres it on a cloth. He steps out, gathers chicory and asters, and sets the mauve bouquet in the middle of the table. When he finally leaves, he has trampled whatever is left of the charcoal sticks and swept their dust between the floorboards. He has made tea.
Noé stays on the bed, a dirty thing in a tidy house. She doesn’t move. She has gone.
IV
1
When Mie draws the otters’ tree, its branches head off in every direction, intersecting often, but always broadening toward the sky; they sprout shoots again and again as buds are born and procreate in turn. The bears’ tree has heavy boughs that have time to thicken before new scions grow. On occasion, shoots meet, form a knot, and separate farther up. Its branches grow slowly, give little fruit, but its roots are deep and its bark hard.
Mie sighs. By comparison, her tree is a ridiculous sapling. The Old Woman as the skinny trunk, then Osip’s and Sevastian’s branches intersecting so often it’s hard to distinguish between them and finally Noé’s furtive stalk grafted to the bole, rootless, without origins. Life has pruned the other shoots: as for this tree, all that remains is the hope represented by four twigs — Mie and her brothers — but there is no one around to be grafted there.
Mie is alone in the lighthouse bedroom. She’s wearing her grey skirt and woolen underpants, the worn camisole, the blouse, the cardigan with its wooden clasps knitted into the fabric to keep it from falling apart. She has not yet undressed for Osip. He said “after the noon ships,” which isn’t now but another two hours away. As she waits, her clothes keep her warm. Mie doesn’t want to discard them yet; she wouldn’t know what to do with her nakedness. She sits on the foot of the mattress, her knees pulled up to her chin, her arms two dead weights hanging by her sides, hands barely showing at the ends of her sleeves.
She sketches in the dust. She can trace the Borya tree with just one hand, clenching her fingers at first and then opening them as they climb to the crown. She keeps coming back to the branches, trying to find a way to have her own intersect with her uncle’s without making the picture meaningless.
It’s impossible.
She goes over the lines again and again, dust forms small mounds on either side, and the deformed tree looks like an oversized shoot climbing to the sky in a straight line. There are no ascendants, no descendants left, nothing but a weaving of threads that have become infinitely entangled. Mie loses her temper, erases the drawing with the sole of her foot. Clumps of sand and pollen stick to her sock, she falls back on the bed in the shape of a star.
* * *
—
The walls are clad in soapstone tiles, some of them carved by Sevastian-Benedikt and others here before him. Theirs are ragged shapes wrested from the sea — whales, narwhals, crabs, sharks, squid, sirens, seahorses — to which Sevastian has added his forest of bears and wolves, of course, also wild geese, frogs, herons, field mice, ferrets, and owls watching over the children when night falls and one father is at the lantern, the other in the woods, and the mother in her wild woman’s lair. It’s a room full of silent chaperones that keep watch but say nothing.
The large ceiling tiles are untouched. Mie, stretched out on the bed, observes the checkered pattern made by their connecting joints. For years, she’d fall asleep by assigning a square to each person in her family. Closing her eyes, she’d try to imagine how to people the spaces, filling them up with precious objects belonging to her little brothers, her uncle, her father, the Old Woman, to Noé.
For what seemed like forever, the ceiling and the beach were her only blank pages. Outside, she outlined in the sand huge grid patterns in which she’d pile up rocks, feathers, shells. Here was Osip’s house, there Sevastian’s, and finally Noé’s sprawling territory with, at its centre, Mie’s square. For her tenth birthday, Sevastian gave her a notebook and chalk pastels he’d bought in Seiche. She worked in it for eighteen months, and when there was no room left, she traced over the initial images: layers and layers of notes on the same creased paper.
Mie straightens up. As she waits for the appointed hour when Osip will come down to her, she decides to leaf through her notebook. It’s hidden under the mattress by the wall. To retrieve it, she has to lift a corner of the bed; the straw mattress is heavy, so she heaves it up with both hands and uses her foot to drag the book out. She catches her breath, then wraps herself in the soft duvet, settles in by the window, unbundles the book from the cloth.
She doesn’t know how to read words.
Hers is a quest undertaken by means of pictures and invented symbols. A vertical line for the Old Woman ( | ), the same line followed by a dot for Sevastian ( |· ) and two for Osip ( |: ); an empty circle for Noé ( ) cleaved with one vertical Borya slash for Abel, two for Seth, and three for Dé. And lastly, a coloured-in circle that represents her ( ).
Her mark for Noé takes up virtually all of the cover. As soon as she was given the notebook, Mie dipped her finger in ink and traced the big circle. The rest of the cover she left blank. Noé. She had no desire to add anything more. She’d inscribed the as if it were the title of her quest and kept the rest for inside.
She opens the book, skims the notes, studies the diagrams and images, the scribbled-on paper. Patterns repeat, accompanied by drawings of animals that resemble nothing at all, though Mie recognizes them: a rabbit, a stingray, a dog, a grasshopper, a wolf, a crow. Between the various scrawls, she has drawn line after line of detail: the particular habits of each, their way of moving, eating, of being with others.
Mie reads her hieroglyphics in clusters, like sentences.
— Noé burns what she no longer wants to see.
— The Old Woman tilts her head from side to side as she walks, forehead leaning over her toes. She never looks up from her feet.
— Abel kneads his sex in the palm of his hand. He continually squeezes and releases it.
— Noé lives off grilled jellyfish and raw seal, apples gathered on the cliff, blue rice and clams.
— Sevastian kills rab
bits by breaking their necks over his knee.
— Seth cries whenever Sevastian kills a rabbit.
— Abel’s fingernails smell like chives and rancid butter.
— Osip’s eyes are as big as his spyglass.
— Noé has skin you want to live inside, a neck, belly, arms, hands, and buttocks to settle on. Everyone wants the warm space between her thighs, everyone wants her cheek, her mouth, her armpit.
On one page, Mie has drawn and a white doe being chased by dogs. With her forehead pressed against the window, she gently rubs the image. Chalk crumbles and stains her finger.
By day I’m a girl, by night a white doe.
Dogs from the castle all night are my foes.
Noé’s songs never reach the bedroom. The din of waves crashing against the reefs swallows up voices and the sounds of the beach. The Boryas don’t speak much in the lighthouse because it would mean shouting all the time.
Mie extends her legs, stretches, unfolds. She’s sitting in the rocking chair, its large rockers shaping the sand strewn across the floor. The day she drew the doe in her notebook was the day her mother sang the song.
Three times over the brass trumpet sounds.
The third time it blows, the doe is brought down.
Noé was busy gathering pine cones by the cabin, then plunging them into the jars of alcohol she piled up by the kindling and logs. (In winter, when she lights the fire, the Old Woman removes a pine cone from a jar and places it in with the branches. Flames mount and the scent of resin fills the air.) All the while, Noé was softly singing the scary ballad to herself, half the words in her head only, the other half crossing her lips. Mie sat crouched beside her, scribbling down a sequence of symbols meaning, “Noé’s wrist strains when she breaks twigs.”
Let’s summon the butcher to skin the creature.
Who said when he saw her, “There are no words . . .
This doe’s hair is blond, her breast but a girl’s.”
Then he pulled out his knife and he quartered her.
Sevastian-Benedikt tramped home from his forest, setting the earth to rumbling under his big boots. Noé raised her head, craned her neck, pricked up her ears, listened for a moment to the crunch of feet on leaves, then bolted through the trees without a sound. Mie was still crouched by the half-full jars when her father spotted her and, with a frown, said only, “Your mother?” Mie shrugged, returned to her notebook, and drew in the animal’s brow with white chalk. Sevastian plunged back into the forest, tracking Noé as the dogs did the doe.
Go ahead and eat, I’m the first to take a seat.
My head in the dish, my heart in my feet,
It’s my blood that through the scullery seeps
On your grill of black coal my poor bones and meat.
Wrapped in her duvet, Mie stares at the animal’s muzzle, at the white tufts of hair and the grey mass of dogs — a whirlwind in pursuit. Then she turns the page. On the next, is linked to a beast no longer a doe. A swan, a buzzard, a salamander, a she-wolf, a siren. Her mother’s face as changing as the seasons. What she knows: her father is a lynx, her grandmother a fox, Osip an owl, Abel a hare, Seth a dog. Dé is too little, but already she’d swear he’s a lizard. Her mother? She doesn’t know. She wishes she could catalogue Noé in her bestiary the way she has done for the others, but her mother escapes her. Mie goes through her notes, cross-references, compares them. She is forever looking for Noé, who is everywhere and nowhere at once.
— Noé’s lips are dark and often closed.
— Noé sings.
— Noé doesn’t speak.
— When she does, her voice pulses softly, then grows in intensity as words cross her lips and collide with the forest, the rocks, and the waves of the sea.
2
For instance, it happens that a sperm whale beaches and dies without water. It lies there for hours and nothing transpires; at the end of the day, Noé leaves her cabin, her arms laden with blades and pails, hooks and sticks. The children have lost interest in the cachalot. To begin with, they climbed it, touched it, their clothes in need of a wash now, given the cadaver smell. Abel wanted to scrape the inside of its eye to know its texture; with Seth, he propped the huge mouth open with a stick and they slipped inside, grabbed its teeth and shouted down its throat, hoping to hear their echo return from its belly. Afterward, they returned to their hideout.
Noé never speaks unless she feels the need. Sometimes, words push against her lips and so she utters them; they are addressed to no one, or perhaps to herself, but not even that is certain. Mie sticks close by, always, not wanting to miss out on those moments.
On the day her mother prepares to skin the whale, Mie plunges her being into the head of a crab — her little crab legs barely touch the ground when she scuttles — but she can still make out Noé’s clear, low voice and her characteristic accent, “The ogre in his castle loved the Queen of Saba.” Immediately, Mie leaves the creature to its sand nests, her departure so quick that she staggers for a moment and swings her arms in circles to keep from falling. She regains her balance, then approaches her mother, sits by the fire. Noé is bent over a knife as long as a child’s thigh. She scrapes the metal against rough rocks, then cleans it, moistens it, whets it again; she pinches the blade between her thumb and index finger, measures its sharpness. When she decides it’s sharp enough, she attaches it to a shaft, wraps the handle with strips of cotton, pulls the fabric tight, and tests the sturdiness of her spear. She has no thought for the daughter she doesn’t even see, absorbed as she is by the smells of carcass and iron.
The ogre in his castle loved the Queen of Saba.
And though each night, young girls he’d eat,
He’d never lay a finger on the kingdom’s queen.
Mie’s young siblings come running. Whenever she listens to Noé, their sister’s posture changes. She’s less guarded, her shoulders broaden, her head sits taller on her neck. They can read her stance from afar, her straight back announcing a story. They move in — Noé’s voice carries, they don’t need to sit too close, and though they want to hear, they also want to be able to run away because often their mother’s stories frighten them. They separate, each sitting in a spot of their own, Seth as far as possible from the cadaver, Abel half-hidden in a thicket between the beach and the woods. The sounds they make help Mie locate them, but she doesn’t turn around: she’s busy observing her mother. Noé has raised the spear above her head and, with one great thrust, sinks it into the beast’s hide.
Silently the Queen watches as he
Seduces damsels; the pretty ones you see
“Look then on my treasure chests!
Brocades, furs, sumptuous fabrics,
Moonstones, diamonds, rubies shining,
The crown with every sapphire glowing!
My fortune, my gold, should you give
yourself to me,
Will henceforth adorn your body and your
sheets!”
Soon Osip is there, he who never ventures onto the beach; as soon as the triangle of children has formed around Noé, he appears; he comes down from his tower and approaches, always standing too close, his fat man’s shadow swallowing hers. Today, the beast sickens him, the stench of raw flesh, the bubbling blood. He stays behind Seth, torn between the lighthouse and Noé.
But to the Queen he never spoke thus
For she had no need of any king’s riches.
Only maps and globes, Far Eastern parchments,
It was for the maps and only those maps
That one grey autumn day, the Queen of Saba
Ventured out and set foot in the ogre’s castle.
Before she starts skinning, Noé has extracted the teeth of the whale. They have the shape of an adult’s fingers, are thicker than thumbs; she throws them haphazardly into a cardboard box. Blood from the gums has crusted on the ivory. The Old Woman, witho
ut saying a word, has brought out a cooking pot, a brush, and soap. She sits on a rock by the fire and begins to clean them. One by one, she polishes them until their yellow-white is smooth, then lays them out on large cloths to dry. She rocks Dé in his basket, smiles; she even suffers through Noé’s stories without her customary sighs. The Old Woman knows how much ivory is worth; soon she will send her son to sell the teeth to Seiche’s merchants.
As for Noé, she holds her spear in both hands, gouges the ridge from the tail to the head, the thick skin, the blubber and, underneath, the cachalot’s flesh. She chants the story, her voice following the movement of her hands: when the blade thrusts, she recites a verse, when the blade retreats, she breathes in, readies herself for the next.
The Queen lived naked, the ogre oft caressed
Her necklaces, boots, earrings, and bracelets.
But never on that gold-sequined skin had he
dwelt,
Nor on her figure nor hair: her body too sacred.
He told her, “I love you,” and behind him left
His young wife in white and her entire cortège.
Noé finishes the first cut and lays down her spear. Blood has sprayed and spattered everywhere — at her feet, on her skirts, on her hands, her face — and runs in rivulets to the sea. The waves turn crimson, the white sand turns black. The stench of decaying carcass, iodine, and iron catches in throats. Mie shudders. She doesn’t understand everything her mother says, doesn’t know what an “ogre” is, what “sequined,” or “brocades” means, Noé’s stories are full of strange words that speak of neither animals nor the sea.
The Body of the Beasts Page 6