The Life of Elves

by Muriel Barbery

  Then she asked one last question, and a strange ripple went through her before disappearing like a dream.

  “Will I see my father one day?”

  “Yes,” he replied, “I hope so. I believe so.”

  A new era began. Clara spent her mornings working in the practice room, then went back to the villa with the patio for lunch, which was always followed by a siesta; after that, Leonora came for tea and to listen to her play. In addition to her Italian friend she was now fostering an affection for the little French girl and her incredible grannies, for the vision of Maria was constant now, and living with her had become as natural as breathing. Thus the hours spent with the Maestro’s wife were combined with the hours on the faraway farm in a blaze of light that rendered the old ladies from Burgundy as familiar as the high society lady from Rome. All day long she followed them from kitchen to garden and from chicken coop to storeroom, as they prayed or saw to their sewing, as they concocted a meal or hoed a border, and as she studied their sorry faces eroded by age and toil she learned their names, softly repeating the unusual sounds to herself. It was Eugénie she liked best of all, perhaps because she talked with the rabbits while she fed them in the same way she spoke with God when she prayed; but she also liked the father with his fierce silences, and she understood that the trust that bound him to Eugénie and to the little girl extended far below the surface of their land, like a subterranean affinity spreading beneath the fields and forests that might one day re-emerge into the daylight through the soles of their feet. Where Rose, the mother, was concerned, however, it was quite different: she spoke a strange language of the sky and clouds and she seemed to be somewhat estranged from the little community on the farm. However, it was first and foremost Maria whom Clara followed from dawn to dusk and far into the night; Maria opening her eyes wide in the dark and looking at her without seeing her; Maria who touched her heart as she walked through her countryside, making it shine with an ineffable glow.

  Then the new year came, and a very cold January, gripping Clara with painful apprehension. On a dawn so bleak that she thought, darkly, it suited the dead stones of the city perfectly, she ventured to share her feelings with the Maestro, while they were working together.

  “Our protection is holding,” said the Maestro.

  He looked again through Clara’s vision and, wiping his brow, gave a sigh and seemed suddenly very weary.

  “But perhaps the enemy is stronger than we imagined.”

  “It is so cold,” said Clara.

  “That is his intention.”

  “The Governor’s intention?”

  “The Governor is merely a servant.”

  Then, after a pause, “In ten days we will celebrate Leonora’s birthday and several friends will come to dinner. I would like you to choose a piece and prepare it, to play for us that evening.”

  Clara did not see Leonora again before the evening of the birthday dinner, but she thought of her every second of her days, devoted half the time to the piece she had chosen to play, and half the time to Maria, who seemed to be feverishly striding across her pale landscapes. She worked at the villa with the patio, and did not go to the practice room, all the more alone in that Pietro, too, had vanished, and did not reappear even on the day when she was escorted to the other hill. All morning she had been suffering from the same painful premonition, and it had grown so pressing that she had the feeling it was as hard to breathe as on the day of her arrival in the city. All this time Petrus, unswerving in his habits, had snored away in his armchair with little regard for her torments. But just as she was getting ready to leave for the Villa Acciavatti, in a confused and mainly anxious mood, he appeared in a black suit that was in sharp contrast to his ordinarily neglectful allure. He noticed her look of surprise.

  “It won’t last,” he said.

  And as she was still looking at him, taken aback, he added, “The clothes. It’s a strange thing, all the same. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it.”

  It was even colder than on the previous days, and an insidious little drizzle was falling that went straight to the bone. The road wound its way through the night and she heard the song of the water, elevated by winter to its highest melodic level. For some unknown reason, her chest felt even tighter but she did not have time to think about it, because they had reached the steps, where a man with familiar aquiline features was waiting for them. He was extremely elegant, wearing a formal tailcoat with a silk square tucked in the pocket, but the nonchalance of his distinguished gestures seemed to relax his clothing, making them like a second skin despite the gala masquerade. It was obvious that such grace must be inborn, source of great ecstasy and endless ardor, and Clara knew he was handsome because he breathed the way trees do, with a fullness that gave him both airiness and stature. It was through this solar breathing that he was wedded to the world, with a fluidity that human beings rarely attain, and that he entered into a harmony with air and soil that made him a magnificent artist. Then came his fall, when he was judged by a species with little understanding of the fervor of great gifts; but that evening Alessandro Centi—for it was he—was again the man he had once been.

  “Well, my little one,” he murmured, “here we are together, such perfect timing.”

  And he led her away, beginning to tell her a story whose words she did not hear, for she was lulled by the elation in his voice. Behind them, Petrus was mumbling enigmatically but she had no time to understand why, because they had arrived in the grand candlelit drawing room, and her chaperone made a beeline for a tray filled with amber goblets. Gustavo and Leonora were talking with a dozen guests, who kissed Clara on the cheek when she was introduced as Sandro’s niece and also as a young virtuoso pianist. Clara liked the people gathered there. They were close friends, who all seemed to have known Alessandro for a very long time and were pleased to have him among them again; from the snatches of conversation she heard here and there, she understood that most of them were artists. She was surprised to learn that Alessandro was a painter, and several times she heard people suggest that he ought to take it up again and stop being afraid of the dark. The wine they served was golden, there was laughter and conversation, a mixture of seriousness and whimsy in which Clara felt herself gradually drifting off into a blissful sensation she could not recall ever having felt . . . the grandeur of communities woven with similar inclinations, added to the protective warmth of primitive tribes . . . men and women bound by the shared awareness of their naked fragility and a collusion of desire that brought them together in the exaltation of art . . . and it was the same waking dream, the same abysses and the same appetites that had convinced them one day to write down their stories with the ink of fictions of colors and notes.

  Leonora came to speak to her and the guests clustered around them to listen to Clara’s answers to the questions she was asked about her piano and her time spent working with the Maestro. But when Gustavo came and asked her to play, she stood up, her heart pounding, while the premonition that had haunted her all day long now overwhelmed her a hundredfold.

  “What are you going to play?” asked one of the guests.

  “A piece I composed,” she replied, and she could see the Maestro’s surprise.

  “Is this your first composition?” asked a man who was himself a conductor.

  She nodded.

  “Does it have a title?” asked Leonora.

  “Yes,” she said. “But I don’t know whether I ought to tell you.”

  Everyone laughed and Gustavo raised an amused eyebrow.

  “This is an evening of great indulgence,” he said. “You can tell us your title if you play the piece afterward.”

  “It’s called, For his sins, the man was German,” she replied.

  The assembly burst out laughing and Clara understood she was not the only intended recipient of the Maestro’s witticism. She saw he was also laughing whole-heartedly, whi
le at the same time she could detect that same emotion he had shown when he said to her, “That’s typical of your lot.”

  She played and three things happened. The first was that all those present at the dinner were held in thrall: Clara’s playing transformed them into pillars of salt. The second was the amplification of the sound of rain on the stones in the garden, which blended so perfectly with her composition that she understood she had been living in this music from the moment she had first heard it. And the third was the arrival of an unexpected guest, suddenly outlined in the doorway.

  Handsome as an angel from the great dome, Raffaele Santangelo was smiling, looking at Clara.

  PAVILION OF THE MISTS

  Inner Elfin Council

  She knows that the stones are alive. Even in the city she doesn’t forget it. And she plays miraculously. But she is still too much on her own.”

  “Leonora is there, and Petrus is keeping watch.”

  “He drinks too much.”

  “But he’s more dangerous than a whole cohort of abstinent warriors.”

  “I know, I’ve already seen him drink and fight, and win over phalanxes of hostile councilors. And Clara’s powers are growing. But how much time do we have? We may not even be able to save our own stones.”

  EUGÉNIE

  All during the war

  After the eventful month of April with its letter from Italy, there were a few months on the farm as flat as a loaf without yeast. One season passed, and another came to replace it. Maria turned twelve and it had not snowed. The summer was unusual. They had never before seen such unpredictable, chaotic weather, as if the sky were in two minds about which path to take. The Saint John’s Day storms broke too early. Warm evenings followed upon autumn twilights during which you could sense the season was changing. Then summer came back with a vengeance, and the dragonflies arrived in hordes.

  Maria continued to converse with the animals in the woods. Rumors of shadows intensified in the community of hares: these creatures seemed more sensitive to them than others. But the stags, too, spoke among themselves of a sort of decline in supplies. The latter were being spoiled by something, though it was impossible to know how. For the time being, the village carried on with everyday life regardless, but Maria noticed a surprising paradox: the countryside was indeed in decline, while the old women’s gifts were intensifying.

  Proof of this came at the end of January, on the evening of Leonora’s birthday. All day long, Jeannette had had not so much as stepped away from her stove, which had been transformed into an alchemist’s laboratory, because that evening they would be hosting one of the father’s brothers, and his wife, who had arrived from the far South. The dinner consisted of a truffled guinea-fowl set amid a liver terrine, and pot-au-feu en ravigote (all of it garnished with cardoons that had been so well caramelized that the juice still ran down one’s throat, despite the vin de côte), and it was a dazzling triumph. When the meal was brought to a close by a cream tart served with Eugénie’s quince jellies, all that remained in the room was a row of bellies all as happy and stupid as can be—before the onset of indigestion.

  But when it struck two o’clock, there came from Angèle’s room, which she had given to Marcel and Léonce, an unholy racket that awoke the entire farm. People groped their way through the dark, lit candles, and hurried to the room, where they found Marcel writhing in pain from a liver attack and a violent fever, and they feared he might be taken from them that very hour. Eugénie had lain dreaming continuously of deep caves where the sediment of a sticky yellow substance was collecting, and her relief upon awakening from one nasty situation was soon erased by the discovery of another one. She staggered slightly, and tried to adjust her nightcap, which had slipped down over her ear, but the sight of the sick man on his bed of suffering woke her with a start, and she stood bolt upright in her thick woolen socks. She had already treated the entire lowlands for various ills, prescribing a considerable array of potions, dilutions, tinctures, syrups, decoctions, gargles, ointments, unguents, balms and poultices of her own confection, some of them for patients whose chances of recovery were slim, and whose funerals she subsequently attended, much saddened. But however strange it might seem, this was the first time she found herself in the presence of a sick person at the fateful hour. The crisis was all around them and there was no getting away from it. And in any case, she had no intention of fleeing. On the contrary, she was fully convinced that all the paths she had taken in life had been leading her to this little room full of suffering.

  Unlike Angèle, Eugénie was not a woman with a rich inner life where the embers were gradually dying. She saw the world as a collection of tasks and days whose existence alone sufficed to justify them. She got up in the morning to pray and feed the rabbits, then she made up her remedies, prayed again, sewed, mended, scrubbed, went off to pick her medicinal plants and hoe her vegetable garden, and if she managed to do it all in good time and without impediment, she would go to bed content, without a single thought. But acceptance of the world granted to her had little to do with resignation. If Eugénie was content with a thankless life that she had not chosen, it was because she lived in constant prayer, inspired in her at the age of five by a mint leaf in her mother’s garden. She had felt the green and fragrant sap of the plant running in her veins, and it was not just a substance that was marvelously attuned to the texture of her fingers and her sense of smell; it also told a story without words, and she gave herself to that story as she would to the flow of the river. It had brought her incredible clarity, commanding through images a series of actions that she carried out, her heart pounding; only the exclamations of the adults who sought to prevent her from continuing interrupted her—until they discovered that she had been stung in the cheek, and they understood that by rubbing her face with the moist peppermint leaf she was applying the very remedy that could quell the pain. She had not been aware of it, she had not even suspected that others might not be lulled by the same prayer, which had initially come to her in the form of delightful songs she heard during her contact with nature, and which then was filled with meaning when she was taken to church, where the spirit of these psalms was given a face and words; she had simply written the words onto the stave of the score she already knew, and the splendor of the mint had conquered there both its doctrine and its God. In a way, this perception of nature’s hymns came closest to Maria’s own perception, and if Eugénie had been struck by the composition with the cloves of garlic that had rendered the room in the farmhouse so sublime it was because she had already been initiated into the order of invisible reasons that made her happy, even though she was born poor.

  But the greatest tragedy in her life had been the loss of her son to the war: his name was carved on the village monument. During all the battles that rent the skies of France with their poisoned wound, it crushed her to see the violets continuing to wither as exquisitely as ever, and when she lost her son, it seemed to her that the beauty of the woods was an inexplicable disgrace, even in the pages of the Holy Scripture, because it was inconceivable that such a magnificent world could exist alongside such agonizing pain. The death of her husband, while it had greatly afflicted her, had not been a comparable tragedy, because he had departed as all the living depart, as the irises fade and the great stags die. But the war set the lines ablaze and burned reality to the bone; everywhere people were coming up against walls as high as cathedrals that elevated death amid the beautiful plains; and the fact that all this was happening amid the limpidity of spring blossoms was a paradox that touched her in the very place that hitherto had made her live, the place of sacred osmosis that brings together the living and their earth. Prior to her son’s death she had already lost her appetite; but once they informed her that he would never return from the faraway fields, and that they would not send his body back to her because there had been so many losses and such terrible fires that they could only draw up lists of those who had not returned, Eu
génie could not even recall the meaning of desire.

  But one morning not long before the end of the war they brought her a child from a neighboring village who had been sick for months, coughing to exhaustion from morning to night. The boy had such a wrenching, racking cough that the pain she felt could only be assuaged by placing her hand on his torso and try to feel the passage the illness was taking; when she discovered that his lungs were clear, she understood in a flash that he was suffering from the same ailment she herself was slowly dying from. She increased the pressure of her palm on his poor naked chest, where the powers of war were hollowing out a crevice of sorrow and rage, then she caressed the boy’s cheek, applied a bit of clay sprain ointment and said with a smile, overwhelmed to be feeling the floodgates opening inside her and releasing a rush of suffocating debris, opening inside her and finding the dawn again in spite of all the wounds and the hatred—she said to him with a smile, It will be fine, my angel. Two days later the mother told her that the cough was gone, and while the little boy didn’t speak, he smiled all the time, and Eugénie was able to resume her familiar life flushed with the singing of the pastures and the oaks. But she had incorporated the knowledge of evil in the form of a wound, and henceforth she would feel its black hole every day, devouring her allotted amount of substance and love. Oddly enough, it meant that she was better able to detect the deep origins of illnesses, but she also felt that part of her gift was blocked, and the accuracy of her diagnosis was in inverse proportion to her ability to heal. Something had grown, something else had fallen away, and although she was no philosopher, she felt this cross she constantly had to bear impeded her activity as a healer.

  Why do the paths of destiny suddenly appear like letters forming of their own accord in the sand on the shore? After the conflict, life went on, and the men returned to the fields where, during the massacres, only women and old men had worked. There were new harvests, new winters, and more autumnal languor, and the survivors mourned their dead while the horror of the carnage left them forever inconsolable. And yet they were alive, and they smiled at dragonflies in summer, while the countryside crumbled beneath the weight of gray stones carved with one word doomed to condemn them all. Remember! Remember! Remember that crushing fate still begging for alms of remembrance, through the curse of love that was lost to steel! Upon entering the little room where Marcel lay dying, Eugénie felt Maria touch her shoulder, before withdrawing silently into the shadows. And only then did she return from the war. The paths of fate: a garlic clove is moved one millimeter and the world is utterly changed; the slightest shift disturbs the secret position of our emotions and yet it transforms our lives forever. Eugénie sensed all this as she observed the sick man’s ordeal, and was astonished to discover that thanks to the little girl’s touch she had crossed a trifling space, but found herself far removed from the suffering she had just left behind. Several decades of struggle swept to one side of her old woman’s shoulder—and a dying man who was not belligerent but merely made of flesh and blood; Eugénie went up to the untidy bed and placed her hand on her godson’s forehead.