Malicroix

by Henri Bosco

  I must have expected it, but the disappearance happened so fast I was stunned. My absence had been brief—I had barely stepped away from the house, and I could have sworn no one was in the storeroom or elsewhere, and there had been no sign of Balandran. A small cloud of anxiety formed and for a moment veiled the Mégremuts’ presence within me, but they quickly dispersed it. Which is why I awaited the evening meal, planning to question Balandran.

  The evening meal arrived, and with it, Balandran. I said, “Balandran, you took my letter. When will it go?”

  He answered simply, “It has gone.”

  And he set the soup tureen on the table. A heavy, steaming tureen of bluish earthenware. It sat in the center of the table, imposing, unavoidable. “You must eat,” it said, “and only that. When you eat, you eat. You do not speak uselessly.” The soup itself was coarse, thick, mostly bread, but quite savory. It too asserted itself, saying, “I am food, a dense, healthy substance made for solid, patient mouths, without greed. Mouths that are silent.”

  And, as I looked at it, I was silent.

  The meal concluded without a break in this silence. Bréquillet barely appeared, gazed at me, then disappeared before his master did. He must have had his orders. Balandran cleared the table, rekindled the fire, vaguely wished me good night, then left. That night, he did not sleep in the storeroom. I heard him moving toward the hut. After a moment, I went to the doorstep to see what he was doing. The hut was completely closed, but a reddish glow flickered in its small skylight. Through its peak, the hut peacefully breathed a thread of smoke. Reassured, I went back into the house, where everything was calm. I too was calm, which surprised me. Seated before the fire, I let myself go until very late, contemplating the embers, the flames, the ashes. But nothing emerged from the hearth. The embers, flames, and ashes quietly remained what they were; they did not become (which of course they are) mysterious wonders. Still they pleased me, but more on account of their useful heat than because of their evocative power. I was not dreaming; I was keeping warm. It is good to keep warm; it gives you a strong sense of your own body, of contact with yourself, and, if you imagine anything, it is the cold and the night outside, as you curl up around your own warmth, preserved with a shiver.

  Afterward, bed looks good, and you sleep well.

  The bed looked good to me for the first time, and I slept well.

  • • •

  The next few days flowed by in the same way. A simple, direct, prosaic way. We went from morning until night without incident, and from night until morning without dreams. Certainly, the Mégremuts—and of course I was one—are gifted with a vivid imagination, but it is never given free reign. The clan always maintains control over this, as of all its spiritual goods. Moreover, these goods—patiently acquired, lovingly preserved, prudently piled up—would not know how to lend themselves to vast exchanges with life. These are the family riches, drawn upon only for the family: treasures of tender care, reciprocal affection, delicate arrangements, domestic delights, having no purchase outside the clan. They were of no use to me on this wild island where nature and its inhabitants were set against gentleness. Of course, this nature and these inhabitants were inspiring, but in a sort of delirium. And it was the ability to welcome that inspiration, to lose myself in this delirium, that was failing me, ever since the three most representative Mégremuts had found me again. To deliberate any further was unnecessary. I had told myself everything. The only thing left for me to do was to wait. Which is what I did as I counted the hours, but with a growing unease.

  For I could not always keep silent. A Mégremut is very sociable. But how to be sociable without speech? The silences between me and my companion grew longer with each passing day. I no longer knew how to break them. All pretexts seemed futile, untimely, embarrassing. And so I kept silent. As did Balandran . . . And the dog, the house, the woods, the river, the air, the world . . . Uncomfortable silence, false, a silence of suspended misunderstanding. When Balandran muttered his mute greeting, I could barely respond with my own muttered reply. At the end of five days, all that remained of our relations, man to man, was this. But the words were so confused, the meaning so vague, that these few sounds became almost a hostile muteness. I felt that I was in the way and that I must, at all costs, remove myself from this place where I was unequal to the beings and the things, as much by my middling size as by my gentle nature.

  So I posed myself this question: “I must leave, that much is clear: but how?” Absurd question, to which my common sense replied: “You’ll leave the way you came.” Right away I realized how impossible this was. For although all the details of my journey remained precisely inscribed in my memory, they seemed, as they returned to my awareness, to be the memories of a dream. From the moment when the coach (I saw it again—tall, narrow, black-clad) had left me, solitary voyager on that vast plain where night was falling, I had entered a floating world. The beings there seemed imaginary and the objects unearthly. The feelings and thoughts were only half human; and the most ordinary everyday actions, like eating and drinking, traced magical outlines. Every word had a double meaning, difficult to discern; for the hidden thought embedded in each phrase disrupted the ordinary meaning of spoken words. Nothing that did not rest on an indecipherable implication. As much as what was said, what was done concealed thoughts. Their presence, although invisible, obsessed me so much that everything tangible dissolved, leaving nothing but moving yet unintelligible signs. I had come to the island, not on a wooden boat across the real water of a known river with a man named Balandran, who served me; instead, on an immaterial craft conducted by a shadowy ferryman, I had crossed the water of an imaginary river, one night, outside of time, mingling my everyday life with the figures of a half dream. What I had done, I must have done; what I had seen, I must have seen—but by way of inexplicable states of soul, in that nether land between the worlds. States of soul henceforth impossible, land I would never again see. The enchantment—my family had shattered it. But how could I leave this island without succumbing to a similar spell? If the river was a real river, the boat a real boat, and Balandran a real boatman, how could it be that I had known the river, the boat, and the man only in a dream? They who had so miraculously carried me without a jolt from my banal existence into the heart of this irrational but secretly enchanted world—how would they be able to return me to that dull shore where my family would await me with their tears, their streams of words, their warm arms, and their simple good sense?

  It seemed unthinkable to ask Balandran on what day, at what time, where, how, would I board his boat with my modest luggage in order to leave the island. He would not hear me; how could he hear me? Balandran had been placed here not to take me away from the island but to bring me to it. That was his function, his sole function. One does not cross easily from the extraordinary to the ordinary. And so, even restored to reason, I remained a prisoner of these absurd spells in which I no longer believed but whose mysterious effects I still endured.

  To cut short my raving, I began to mark the days on a calendar. Five days remained before my departure. Without incident, I ticked off four more. This puerile game rendered me rational. Now I knew I would leave. Unless you still dream, you do not tick off days in timelessness. And I was sure I no longer dreamt.

  And so, on the eve of my departure, late in the afternoon, I went for a walk in the woods. I had not seen the river again since Maître Dromiols’s departure. But having no desire to approach it, I steered toward the center of the island. A path led me there, well-protected by tall, fragrant timber. The path wound just enough to give me the vague sense of wandering at random through the unknown. Suddenly, after a turn, I chanced upon a long, straight alley. I entered it, and the dog appeared at the far end. He came toward me. “Ah! Bréquillet,” I thought, “we’ll speak to each other.” Bréquillet pattered along and advanced, his muzzle low, mournful; he must have seen me, but he did not show it. When he was just a few feet away, I stood in the center of the path t
o stop him. But he slipped by. I called him very gently; he seemed to hesitate, to slow down, but then, as if in sorrow, he moved away. And he looked even sadder from behind than from the front. “Strange creature,” I thought. And this thought troubled me for the rest of my walk, which lasted until nightfall.

  I returned to the house, ate, and lay down without exchanging anything more than the usual formalities with Balandran. He left, and I put out my lamp. The fire was burning. Its well-regulated flame was bright enough to light up the room. I saw that the door to the storeroom was open; this bothered me. But no one was there. I had heard Balandran withdraw to his hut. I was alone, and this was the last night I would spend in the house of my great-uncle Malicroix, at La Redousse.

  • • •

  The night promised calm. Outside, the air remained motionless above the treetops. Inside, the fire was burning prudently, to last until dawn. Nothing was emanating from it except the sheer sense of life. In me, no movement—my plans at rest, my mental images sleeping in shadow. The absence of imagination was complete. I perceived the few objects in the room, evenly lit by the fire’s steady glow, without drawing from them the slightest dream. A brass pitcher, a white porcelain sugar bowl, a candelabra. Nothing more. And yet I clearly knew that this night, despite its calm, was for me the night of farewell—an emotional night, the strangest of my life—and that tomorrow I would betray my heritage. It was useless to contemplate this betrayal; my soul no longer generated anything disturbing. I would simply fall asleep, and I knew it. Fall asleep upon my blood, this blood that had called me and to which I had responded, this blood that was here, and whose whisper, when I listened carefully, still blew faintly in my ear. This blood, the last of the line, a Malicroix blood—strong, warm, brisk, wild—but whose strength, warmth, briskness, and wildness within me had evaporated. In just a few days, in its very birthplace, I had exhausted its feeble remnants. Without regret, I followed these already drowsy thoughts as I let myself contentedly drift down gentle slopes that promised a most peaceful rest. Little by little, I forgot everything. I was calm until midnight.

  At midnight I awoke, perhaps naturally, perhaps not, but without any anxiety.

  I opened my eyes and looked first at the only part in the room I could see clearly—the hearth. The fire was still patiently burning there. But on the flagstone in front of the hearth, Bréquillet was asleep. He must have come in through the storeroom, whose door, as I said, had stayed open since Balandran’s departure. Bréquillet had his back to the room; and, with his muzzle laid over his paws, he seemed to be tending the fire even while he slept. Never before had he spent the night in the house. His presence astonished me, and I was about to rise to see him up close, so impossible did it seem that he was actually here in the flesh. But he sighed; he sighed with satisfaction, like a real dog who sleeps and enjoys his sleep with unconscious pleasure—the ordinary sigh of a happy dog, making his unexpected presence familiar and reassuring. From a ghostly dog, this sigh had just created a real dog, the dog Bréquillet, a briard sheepdog with long hair, not too tall, resting on his paws, furry, with a hairy muzzle and a big mustache. I noted all this, and I could not keep from thinking (a bit foolishly, it seems) how trivial such a sight was, at the very heart of this night when I had just renounced the legacy of my blood.

  For Bréquillet was of a rustic breed, without beauty. He had come in silently and lain down modestly in front of the fire, had fallen asleep there and assumed, in his sleep, only the most ordinary pose. No sign had come to me, except this sigh of animal bliss. I was vexed. The events, the objects, the beings had all grown unequal to my strange position. Most likely they had transformed into reasonable guises so that I might take the next steps of my departure. It all had to look natural and commonplace, so that I could leave it all. The more this world (until that day so wildly strange) became prosaic, the more I might leave its shores without regret. Shrunk to my small size, it lost the glamour of excess, and from now on, merged with me, it would easily return to human proportions.

  These thoughts saddened me. I felt a heavy weariness. Annoyed, I jumped out of bed, and went to the fire to chase the dog away. I called him, but he did not move. I prodded him with my foot. He still feigned sleep. He was happy to be just where he was, secretly keeping warm. So I grabbed him by his collar. He raised his head, but without looking at me. I seized him bodily and shoved him toward the storeroom. Resigned, he left without complaint, his muzzle low. Then he threaded his way through the half-open door, and I saw him no more.

  I returned to my bed and lay down.

  But I could not sleep. I was looking at the fire, and, in front of the hearth, at the empty flagstone from which I had chased Bréquillet. The fire was still burning peacefully. Nothing in the room had changed. The brass jug, the white sugar bowl, the candelabra still coolly shone. And I continued calm, reasonable, at one with the concrete objects in the house. But already I knew that my fate had turned and that I would not be leaving.

  A SPELL

  IT SOMETIMES happens that our most important decisions are made, not consciously, but of their own accord. The careful weighing of pros and cons has little bearing on this hidden process. A strong act of will does not spring forth from our doubts to settle them. We are not aware of having made a choice, but little by little we unconsciously take all the steps it entails. And so we become committed through the smallest gesture, through a series of simple, natural acts that gradually become more precise. When that precision has been made clear to us, everything is decided.

  •

  Day came, and I had not made any decision. Nothing in me had said, “I must stay.” Such a statement would have been superfluous. It would have marked too clean a break between my actions of the night before and those of the next day, suggesting an effort and the beginning of a new life. Instead, I was moving effortlessly from one day to another; I was not beginning, I was continuing, and as naturally as possible—which is to say, with no emotion at the moment of transition and no plan for the troubling future ahead.

  The day was straightforward and clear. It remained that way until evening. Balandran performed his duties, as did the dog. Not one look of surprise or watchfulness, and few words—those of everyday life.

  I went out for only a short while and did not go far.

  Night fell and was as straightforward as the day. I slept without dreams.

  I was calm. I was telling myself: “Fifteen days—sixteen—or more. I gave that Dromiols no specific date. In short, I’m not crossing any bridge, I’m not changing my stance. To leave in a week or to leave today, isn’t it the same? Time passes, a little more, a little less . . .”

  But like a coward, I was happy to let it pass like this, outside of me, at its own pace, with no need for me to measure its dull flow. I knew that everything in this strange adventure depended on time. Its presence had been imposed on me, and I had to live in relation to it. Best for now to ignore it, and for the five days that followed I gave it no thought.

  I hardly stirred; the weather continued fine.

  • • •

  On the afternoon of December 10, I found a letter on my table.

  Large envelope. Green seal. Dromiols.

  I opened this missive warily; it had substance, weight.

  Folded within a sheet of porous gray paper, Maître Dromiols had neatly placed a still-fresh plant.

  Beside it, a highly formal note:

  Here, sir, is a plant I plucked less than a mile from Roussillargues, on the banks of the Valcadoubre lagoon, where today, the 10th of December, I was taking my morning walk. It seemed remarkable to me.

  Is it too much to ask that a botanist, withdrawn into the peace and solitude of our islands, tell us the name, the genus, the properties of this floral wonder, the like of which I have never, until today, discovered in our region, otherwise so rich in rare species?

  The love that you and I share, Sir, for the plant kingdom, will lead you, I have no doubt, to consider this request with
favor, especially when you recall that I am, and remain, ever scrupulously at your service, as much through duty as through the high regard in which I hold you, and of which these words are but an inadequate expression.

  From Roussillargues, this 10th of December,

  Thomas Dromiols

  I examined the plant, indeed remarkable.

  It was a swamp orchid that rarely grows in Europe: a cypripedium, something like the Cypripedium spectabile, whose solitary flower, large and pink, rises above North American bogs during the month of May. On our shores, the Cypripedium calceolus, commonly called Venus’s Slipper, is similar, but this plant can no longer be found anywhere except on high mountain slopes.

  In any event, exotic or alpine, the specimen sent by Maître Dromiols was not a flower of the wild Camargue; its surprising presence here deserved further consideration.

  I concluded that only a skilled amateur could have grown it in his garden, on one of those leafy loams these species prefer, so long as a filmy shade filters the sun. And so I dared to doubt whether Maître Dromiols could have plucked it on the banks of the Valcadoubre lagoon, whose flora (without any need to explore) I knew to consist normally of bog-bean, arrowhead, duckweed—admirable flowers, to be sure.

  That he had sought to deceive me led me to suspect that the notaire, under the guise of a botanist, had chosen the pretext of a rare plant to remind me of his watchful presence on the other shore, awaiting my departure. It was no accident that, contrary to custom, he had concluded his letter with the date between the closing compliments and the majestic signature. This pompous botanical message was a signal that, on this 10th day of December, the grace period allotted for my stay on the island was expiring. I should have left on the 5th, but the silent waiting had been graciously extended until the 10th. It was time now to go.

  Having understood him, I wrote to Maître Dromiols:

  I return to you, Sir, this flower unknown in our region, but which nevertheless might flourish here if cultivated at home in the proper soil. Cypripedium is the name of the genus, in which you will easily find an allusion to its common name, Venus’s Slipper. But what we have here is a strange specimen that makes me think this Valcadoubre lagoon where you found it, Sir, was the site of a miracle. It may be that some breeze wafted the seed of an American flower across the ocean to our shores; fantastic hypothesis, I confess, but nothing is impossible to the Creator of all creatures, whose creation is itself a miracle.