by Henri Bosco
It was, without a doubt, the bed of a dead man. Old Malicroix had been stretched out on it, his hands joined. He must have lain there for two days, lit by a candle. It is the custom. A thin blanket of coarse wool rested on the mattress. From the top to the bottom of the bed, it clung to a hollow—the body’s—and the sagging bolster showed where the head had lain. Yet the bed had been straightened after the burial, and there was not one wrinkle. Still, the rigid form and mysterious limbs of the deathbed could be sensed beneath all that neatness. It was there like a dim being, fixed in death, resting. I could not take my eyes off it. It had a meaning, at once clear and concealed. Yet this final meaning could not be conveyed from its fixed form to my mind. It was the bed of completion, the support of a final sleep, the second body inhabited by the man who had hollowed it out through the night with his human weight and, perhaps, a bitter dream.
What dream? I could not see it, gripped as I was by the very concrete sight of this iron bed. It held me in its deathly presence, and such a strong sense of reality came to me from this narrow piece of gray-painted furniture that I touched it from afar. This contact, although imaginary, made my flesh crawl with horror—the bed was the dead man himself. And I am afraid of the dead.
I could not bear the thought of sleeping on that bed. I moved away. There was no place else to lie down. So I settled into the rush armchair by the fire. But the fire was now no more than a handful of lukewarm cinders where nothing glowed. Yet it was the fire. Aside from the lamp, it was the only living being in the house. I left the lamp at the head of the bed. A little oil, a short wick, and that modest yet bright yellow flame, where the spirit of vigil burned. To keep vigil, to keep vigil all night—that was all there was to do. And the wind, charged with the western river spirit, moved through the heights. It blew in long, slow, melancholy gusts, stirring the ceiling of dried reeds, whistling over the thatched roof.
I was alone. And yet, was I? The shadow did not yield a human sound, and, apart from the wind, there was nothing but silence in the empty house. Still I sensed, I feared—I dreaded—an invisible surveillance, as if this bare room, whose least corner I could see, might hide a silent, listening spirit. I was anxious, troubled. Even so, I felt the weight of sleep between my eyes. From time to time, a cold shiver gripped me between my shoulders, and I could no longer tell whether it was fear or fatigue that made my skin and my flesh crawl like this.
The shower arrived slowly, mingled with the storm’s gusts. At first it beat distinctly against walls and shutters; then great, confused sounds of wind and water moved across the island, and the river’s solitude plunged into the vast November rain. It was cold; I was dropping with fatigue. I knew that, alone, the lamp was truly keeping vigil at the dead man’s bedside. Its light cast my distorted shadow onto the wall. Sometimes it seemed as if this outline, where I saw nothing of myself, came from another presence I thought I sensed behind my armchair. I did not dare turn around, for fear I might see old Malicroix—eyes closed, nostrils pinched, mouth stiff—standing fully upright, and perhaps ready to fall. But this fear—which appalled me—did not last long. I judged it to be a craven projection of my flesh, so unnerved at the sight of the dead. Luckily, little by little, an indefinable form, with no familiar earthly shape, began to press against my growing sleepiness. I could not see it, and yet it touched me, with some unknown contact, perhaps that which a thought uses when it approaches a soul. And the pure emerged from the impure in this place of unforeseen encounter, where in a half dream, a somnolence unknown to men had carried me.
I became lucid, with an impersonal lucidity. I sensed I was at the heart of a mysterious peace, where everything miraculously took shape without my being surprised. I saw clearly that I was rising, and that I was free. I had an ease of soul that allowed me to think all and to believe all. I could do all, without risk.
Without understanding it, I saw that the lofty thought that lived in this house was now entering me, had become my substance. And I no longer sought its meaning, because it was my own self. From now on, I whispered, in this state of the soul’s ethereal life, it is of my self that I must ask the secret of this place. And I stretched out on the bed, where the true sleep of my fathers enveloped me.
•
This sleep takes me only to a half depth. I sleep there, while remaining faintly wakeful. I see, I hear, I sense the presence of beings and things, but sleep filters them and allows through only the colorless image that can mingle with my ghostly dream life. I drift between two worlds. I never enter this state right away. Usually, I sleep like other men. But I often go into this sleep after having thought about ancestors whom I have not known. I am drawn to them. I call this sleep the sleep of my fathers because I do not draw from my personal memory to create my dreams in it. What appears in me comes from elsewhere. My nighttime life is shaped by memories other than those of my own past. Still, these memories belong to me, like a kind of mythic inheritance on which I have always slept and from which such mysterious moments sometimes arise.
The dreams are very light and create a sleep that is nothing more than a state of mental and physical well-being. I enjoyed it for a long time that night, even while the sounds of wind and rain, grown real, made me shiver with a strange delight; I must have been a little cold in that bed.
All of a sudden, I felt myself slipping into warmth, and I thought I saw a human figure, solemn and still, in front of the bed. I could not see any features, only a sort of outline that darkened my light. A heavy fabric fell onto me in long folds. The fabric sank into a budding dream, and my unearthly sleep departed with the phantom. I assumed a more human position; I became an ordinary sleeper nestled under his wool blanket while the storm blows. And in this bed unknown to my body, haunted for so long by another, I became the familiar sleeper, who, in order to sleep well, returns to the hollow he has slowly made for himself, just to his size, and into which another would not know how to enter.
Later, when I awoke at dawn, I saw that my coat, left the night before on the armchair in front of the fire, covered me from head to toe. Someone had gently spread it over me while I slept.
•
I remained stretched out on my bed for some time. Waking never touches me all at once—the regions of my sleep light up very slowly, one after another. I regain everyday awareness only through a series of sensations that arrive enfolded in a sense of growing well-being and happy return.
I smelled, first, a very sweet smell of domestic life—the sharp smell of freshly kindled wood, burning well. And then the aroma, so comforting in the morning, of food—bread and milk, still hot from the embers, peacefully steaming in the warm room where they announce the new day. The influence of such goodly scents made me open my eyes, and this room, which I had been imagining in its warmth, already familiar to my sight, did not in fact surprise me. Waking up in it for the first time, I was at home.
The fire was burning in the hearth with morning ardor. Beside the bed, a low table held bread, milk, and a bowl of honey. Two low windows let in a little light. Outside, the rain had stopped, but it was still dark and damp; only a bit of greenish day was entering the room. But this room was so white, the fire so bright, the warmth so penetrating that, despite the feeble light, life here seemed secure against darkness and bad weather. A black cauldron burbled near the fire, softly singing.
No one was in sight. Someone, however, had come while I was still asleep and silently prepared my meal, kindled the dry wood, opened the shutters. From where? I had bolted the front entrance the night before. But in back, a low door must open onto another room. And it was from there, very early, that the visitor, whose vague shape I had perhaps glimpsed in my sleep, had come.
I rose and breakfasted on bread and honey.
• • •
The bread was warm, crisp; the honey clear; the milk thick, a ewe’s milk, smelling of salt.
While I ate, I studied the room. I could see it clearly now. It was large and spotlessly clean. Between the two window
s was a small desk with copper latches. In front of the fire, on a wooden tray, were a pitcher of water, an earthenware bowl, and a bar of soap for my toilet. The copper pitcher shone softly, and the soap’s scent, slightly bitter, crossed the room. Everything breathed order and will—a simple will, bound to the essential, which must have created this domestic bareness to foster a life devoted to sober contemplation.
An almost unearthly light radiated from the whitewashed ceilings and walls. Meanwhile, it was raining outside. Under the wind’s thrusts, the rain had begun again, and I heard showers lashing the roof. From the window, I could see the clayey soil of the clearing, where drops of water splattered. Nearby, elms, enormous birches, and giant willows rose. Their trunks held up a vast tangle of leafless limbs whose tips touched the storm. They tossed despairingly against the gray sky, heralding winter.
Beyond these trees, stands of thorns formed a dense wall that must be hiding the river. A path slipped through them but was lost in the woods. Of human life, not a sign. The house seemed even more mysterious, and yet I relished its protective shelter with melancholy voluptuousness. I shivered, but with well-being, as I listened to the trees groaning under the rain, while mournful images drifted through me.
My mind is too strong to indulge for long in such states. I turned from the window and washed in front of the fire. After that, I felt calm.
At the stroke of nine, the rain stopped. As no one had appeared in the house, I took my coat and went out. A hundred paces off, I found a wooden hut. The chimney was smoking, but the door was closed. It was useless to call; no one opened for me. And so I set off in quest of the river.
•
The river haunted me. The nearness of its grandeur awakened my ancient fear of water, which torments my soul in the presence of rivers and streams, even seen from their banks. Flowing waters, not ocean waves, for the sea—even when it frightens—always exalts me; it is the fluidity of river waters, swift or slow, that troubles me. I find in rivers a half-seen world of fleeting forms that tempt and sometimes ensnare the heedless soul. Rivers and streams are sinuous, insinuating creatures, untamed. Not one of them has sure limits; they all soften the unstable mud of their alluvial deposits with even more silt. Nothing is precise on that moist frontier where earth and water mingle. Far from shore, infiltrations secretly erode the soil and circulate below ground. Meanwhile, the water rushes rapidly between the threatened banks, drawing the gaze down with it. It is best to be wary of rivers and never to approach them without great care if possible.
For my part, I avoid them. As a man raised in the hills, I like to look at them from afar and from a high vantage point—from where I can see a wide tract of solid ground that, thanks solely to its expanse, can hold them within their redoubtable beds.
But now I was in the lowlands, surrounded on all sides by waters whose presence seemed palpable beneath the soil of this flat island, simple shoal of silt held together by vegetation, yet saturated and rendered nearly pliable by rain and mist. The clayey ground yielded to my every step, and I knew that the roots of the great willows drank from the very heart of the river beneath this earth decayed with damp. Hedges of trees and bushes hid the shoreline from me, but through their grizzled barrier the vague murmur and vast whir of great moving waters reached me. Sometimes a gust of wind shook the trees. The drops fell all at once and lashed my face. They were large, freezing. I tightened my coat, shivering. I was alone.
Solitude of the shiver, of cold. There is nothing like a shiver, like cold, to create a sense of solitude.
And this was a solitude from without, yet penetrating, which suddenly invades us with mute desolation. All is abandonment, silence.
Around me, within me, I felt this silence, this abandonment. “Where have I come?” I wondered. I had barely glimpsed the guide last night. “Who was he?” I thought also of the notaire. Missing from the rendezvous. And yet, I had been waited on, served, cared for. Someone had watched over my sleep. These discreet marks of care, this attention—they were not dreams.
The bread, the fire had welcomed me. The house, though solitary, was clean and hospitable. And was it not my house? Was I not master of the uncertain silt upon which it had been built with these branches and these reeds, sprung from this redoubtable earth? The island belonged to me, and yet I had been abandoned by everyone, as if the humans who seemed to live here, forced to serve this master come from without, did so only for form’s sake, while remaining hidden. For what reason? Reason, I told myself, seems absent from this place where air and water extend their control and render thought unstable. You see, you hear, you feel nothing but them, and it is from them that these plants and these trees, natural inhabitants of the island, draw their life.
Still, as I thought about the house, I was somewhat comforted. I saw it as a refuge. It was the only human entity accessible to me, for it retained the imprint of a man—a very sober man—perhaps his whole thought, a single thought, for long years bound by daily meditation. Everything happens in it, everything moves through it, and yet, motionless, upholding its own weight, it rises above the fleeting currents. Everything is reflected in it without tarnishing its immutable purity. Perhaps, I told myself, under the river waters there is also a pure rock that no mud ever tarnishes and where the currents leave no mark other than reflections from above.
In this way my thoughts rambled as I walked through the woods that cover the island.
The path that crossed the island hewed to the center; at times the branches closed in a narrow arch above my head. Still, I was moving in a direction that seemed to lead downstream, toward the tip of the island. I was eager to see the river; for it is best, when you are fearful, quickly and clearly to confront the object of your fear.
All of a sudden, I heard a louder rumbling. I thought I had reached the riverbank. But above the woods, I saw a rapidly approaching wall of rain. From a huge cloud hanging just above the trees, the rain was brutally beating the earth. It was the sudden fall of slanting waters, whose tightly wound torrents ravaged the air. I quickly turned back, but the rain soon overtook me, and I reached the house, soaked, without having seen the river.
• • •
The fire, fed during my absence, was burning well. A small table and an armchair had been placed in front of the chimney. On the table, a letter. It was from the notaire. I unsealed it.
The notaire (whose name was Maître Dromiols) offered, first, his apologies. If he had failed me at our rendezvous, it was on account of his sciatica. With the onset of bad weather, he always suffered from it terribly. But he had arranged for me to be properly received, and he hoped that his instructions (or rather those of Mr. Cornélius) had been faithfully executed. He begged me to be patient a little longer, for he was planning to come to La Redousse—the Redoubt, the name of the island—to greet me there, as soon as the still-painful (but visibly improving) condition of his leg allowed. Insistently, he absolved me of the need to visit him. His condition, he maintained, made him incapable of receiving anyone.
Furthermore it is in your own house (since in the future it may be yours) that I must speak with you. Mr. Cornélius de Malicroix, the testator, stipulated so. I had his trust. My family has for three centuries, without interruption, drawn up the deeds of the Malicroix gentlemen. It was not always an easy task—for, from father to son, these men have had peculiar spirits. To put it mildly, they often proved unwilling to submit to the narrowness of our laws. From father to son, we, their notaires, have sought to bring their wayward tempers into line with these laws they deemed so petty, and with respect to which, to tell the truth (it goes without saying), their waywardness caused difficulties. Their property suffered.
Your great-uncle Mr. Cornélius, in making you his heir (under certain conditions, moreover, as you will see) has left you but a modest inheritance:
On the mainland, along the river, two hundred fifty acres of barren ground. Nothing grows there except a little grass for the sheep. Of these, you will find a flock of one hun
dred head. It is not much. But Mr. Cornélius eked out a living from them. It is true you will also have the island and the house of La Redousse, unproductive, alas! You will also have Balandran. He tends the sheep. He fishes. He hunts. A singular man, as you will discover. Completely devoted to Mr. Cornélius, down to his marrow; he is thought to have a harsh character. Yet I hope that out of respect for his dead master he will soften his roughness in order to serve you as he served him. For, aside from Balandran, the land is inhabited only by herds of more or less wild bulls and an abundance of waterfowl.
For a man like yourself, Sir, who ordinarily makes his home in a countryside of orchards and pleasant gardens, these wild animals and this man who resembles them cannot, I admit, offer much charm. Still, I trust you will bear with them patiently until the day of my arrival, which will not be long delayed, Sir, so eager am I to complete the mission entrusted to me by the last of the Malicroix gentlemen, with regard to the last heir of a house whose presence honored the banks of the river.
The formal compliments, the name: Maître Dromiols. A majestic seal, green.
I refolded the letter and automatically turned around.
•
Behind me, standing, was Balandran. I rose and we gazed at each other in silence.
Most likely in order to take each other’s measure. It is the human response, the first, the most natural—a response of pause and caution, wise mistrust of the other whose height must be judged, weight gauged, firmness guessed. All this is referred back to the self, stealthily, defensively. For when we meet someone new, we feel we are called into question, and in order to appraise the other precisely, we assess ourselves by the other’s worth, as fairly as possible.