Malicroix

by Henri Bosco

  I stayed up again very late.

  I was sensitive to every sound; outside, the slightest breeze put me on guard. But the island remained very quiet, and I waited in vain. Nothing came to me but some trivial thoughts that disappeared without a trace. Still, I recognized within myself an already watchful anxiety.

  I went to the landing very early. Across from me, nothing but desolation. I took a sheltered path to reach the hidden cove. The dawning day feebly lit up the beach, where I could see a beast. The fog that shrouded it kept me from seeing it clearly. It was drinking from the river.

  It was like a dark block in the bluish vapors; as the sun rose, I saw its motionless and massive form, gilded by morning light, emerge from the slow mists.

  Within this bluish fog, huge flanks, a black rump, and a powerful back took shape. Then a breeze rent the veil, and the hairy muzzle and shining horns appeared—the beast was lit up; the sun flowed over the water, and I saw the monster. It was an enormous fighting bull, of a kind not raised in the manades of the Camargue, where the wild bulls are lively, small, filled with fury. Standing in full glory on the riverbank, this was a big, square bull with a strong breast and a wide nape. The river, streaming with light, coursed toward him. As he drank from it, he faced the island and the sun, which made his monumental back gently steam; when he raised his head, steam also came from his two nostrils.

  He drank for a long while. For the whole time that he was on the beach, no other animal approached. He snorted, and then, with slow steps, marking the sand with his heavy hooves, he climbed back up the slope, plunged into the copse, crushed the undergrowth, and disappeared.

  • • •

  Balandran did not return. I spent a slow sad day waiting, with no thoughts. Heavier and heavier wait, which led to nothing. Not one thought, not a single image; a sort of mental bad weather, dreary and low, a dark sky, a dull immobility.

  I finished my household chores and went out but avoided the river. Later, when night fell, I noted the time, and my waiting began to come alive with what seemed like irrational thoughts. They offered too-plausible reasons for Balandran’s absence. I could not believe them, because I felt they grew from my deep need to reassure myself at all costs. I was offering myself nothing but commonplaces; they had no power over my soul as it gradually passed from apprehension to anguish. A heavy hand tightened around my heart. And although my imagination remained blank, my growing anxiety was enough to create forebodings. Powerful waves, all the more dark and disturbing because they were so vague. These were imminent dangers, suspended, faceless, right before me as I kept watch between hearth and lamp in the bare room where Cornélius had died.

  The next day, gray and even dimmer, dragged over the island and along the river. As the hours grew heavier, they melted into one another until they became one faint, blurred flow of time. The soul’s least fog sank into endless duration. No thought had any substance; only the vague imminence of prowling danger grew all around me. Within me, it filled the expanse emptied of specific fears. I imagined nothing and dreaded all; I was haunted not so much by a threatening figure like Dromiols as obsessed by the thought of possible danger. I brought nothing back from my visit to the river. Repentance was desolate, the shoreline as well. I reckoned that Balandran had left on the evening of January 6. We had now reached January 9. He had not shown any sign of life for three days.

  I circled the island on a narrow, well-worn path along the river and discovered two new coves. Posts, driven in and solidly secured, marked landings, one in the northwest, the other in the east. They looked as if they had been abandoned long ago.

  In the north, the ferry was not moving. The cable was visible above the water, but the boat, sheltered behind a copse of willows on the west bank, could not be seen.

  I came back along the eastern shore; it was steeper, higher. I saw nothing but vast wastelands beyond the river. Night seemed to be born there, stretched horizontally above an endlessly flat plain where sparse, short grass grew. These were ancient pastures, riddled with stones, where only phantom flocks could sometimes seasonally graze. Not even one crow, anxious for its nest, flew through the dusk, laid out in heavy blue layers. A ghostly light still flickered above these deserted stretches, but no breath of air crossed the void. As evening fell, this impersonal grandeur opening onto impersonal absences created an eerie land of depths in the east—domain of wintry exile, nighttime empire of distances . . .

  I returned from there, my heart even tighter; but, after a few brief moments of reflection, I felt my spirit warm. I felt the desire to know rising up through my anguish, and an initial rupture split me; I crossed from spirit to flesh; I was gripped by a feverish turmoil.

  Night only increased it; the more I thought about Balandran’s absence and formed precise insights, the less I found clear reasons for any decisive action. I feared that some trouble had befallen him.

  But what trouble? Accident, attack, illness? My uncertainty tormented me; it was becoming unbearable, and hour by hour my resistance lessened. To act? But how? I was bound to the island by Cornélius’s will, by the river. I had made an implicit promise. And this promise to a Shadow held me more fully than if I had sealed some legal pact with a sturdy, honorable living man. Even—and above all—if this Shadow was unreal, I considered myself chained, body and soul, to the thought it had conveyed. That thought was the last remaining vestige of a being banished from the earth. Wishing to live on through it, this old man—my blood relation—had asked for my faith. He had it.

  As for the river, it held me firmly. I had no boat with which to cross it, and besides, what would I have done, I who could barely handle an oar, whom these vast waters filled with an unconquerable, mute terror?

  My promise and the lack of a boat kept me from leaving the island to seek Balandran. No debate was possible, and this made me suffer. I was useless; my distress drew strength from my feeling of powerlessness—I could not fight against myself.

  A boat on my shore would have been enough to create an internal struggle between the promise and the fear. Man is born—gains life—from his struggle. I was trapped.

  Moreover, if, either through violence or cunning someone had confined Balandran on land, would it not be to make my stay at La Redousse more difficult, and to entice me to leave? Some message, some boat would come. Doubtful message, vague call, to elicit my confidence and trouble my soul. The boat would be there, ready to carry me . . . I awaited the message, I watched for the boat. But the next day brought neither boat nor message, and my impatience continued to grow.

  I was reasoning too clearly to be calm. I felt the futility of such a clear and practical examination. It offered me nothing but a set of possible actions and conflicts; yet that strange creature, the soul—source of the only true actions—said not a word. Its silence troubled me more deeply than my uncertainties. From that moment on I was left to myself, abandoned. Obscurely, I suspected that because my situation was not reasonable, it concerned my whole self, not just my reason. It was up to my soul to speak, but my soul was silent.

  In its absence, what spoke to me was inhuman. Clear yet useless thoughts came to me, but without conviction; had it not been for the restlessness that rendered me unstable and kept me from reasoning for long, an arid despair would have consumed me.

  • • •

  Three more days went by like this and brought my anxiety to a head. I kept turning things over; and these futile thoughts, these unresolvable questions, frayed into tatters. I became consumed by brute distress. This kind of distress is overpowering, driving one to act. It is like a seething ferment that seeks a crack. Any action seems legitimate, even a blind step. I could no longer stay put; I needed at all costs to escape from myself, to do something. But what could I do on this island where I roamed? What did the oath mean now, the implicit promise? I saw in it nothing but absurdity, folly, danger. There was a man over there, an old man . . . To leave the island, to fly to his rescue, was the only thing that made any sense. It was
my duty, inspired by an honest, human feeling. I loved this old man. And I was separated from him, chained to this ramshackle house solely by the force of my fantasies . . .

  Reasons became flesh, physically; they were my blood, my nerves, which no longer spoke to me but made me race feverishly from north to south, like a caged animal seeking, between two bars, the undiscoverable exit. At times I collapsed, overcome with fatigue. Then I would sleep on my bed for an hour. A bad hour, a black hole. And I would wake up, dazed, stunned, crushed by an even heavier load. Never had my body felt so burdensome. It weighed on all my limbs; it was not my body that bore my life, it was my life that bore my body, with a grim weariness. When I woke up, especially when I emerged from a daytime sleep, its mass had the weight of inanimate matter, like lead.

  And my mind was also leaden, a fixed shape that hung between my eyes like a heavy ball. Sometimes I shook my head and tried to throw it off, but it stubbornly returned to lodge behind the big frontal bone, where my life was soon paralyzed by torpor.

  But at other times, wakefulness tightened my body. Skin dry, nerves stretched to the breaking point, I was poised at the center of an unearthly lucidity. I was all sparks, electrical impulses, tensions, my parched body held to me solely by a magnetic presence. Still, even in this intense and volatile state, I was only a body. Although it burned with abnormal wakefulness, nothing blazed in it but my vital force. It cut me off from myself. I was too lucid to see the depths of my being—my wakefulness seemed like a strange hypnotic state in which I risked succumbing to the first suggestion that came along: a noise, an object’s odd look, the passage of wind over the thatched roof, a memory perhaps . . .

  •

  On the night of January 14, while I was keeping vigil beside the fire, a call rose on the southern end of the island. A gentle yelp. I shivered. Yet I knew very well there were no fox on the island. So I waited. It was a calm winter night, icy, open to the abyss, where the giant mists of the Milky Way floated. I was safe under my thatched roof, shutters closed, door well-barricaded; yet the night’s power was so penetrating, I imagined, beyond the ceiling of reeds and straw, the vast streams of stellar worlds. They were sparkling; great beams of cold light crossed earth’s nighttime path. I dread such star-blazed nights, for nothing can withstand the cosmic radiance. Beneath the descent of those fires that flame with the universe’s electric life, unknown currents of hidden powers quicken the darkness, especially the darkness of our souls. At the least shock, this inner darkness crumbles. The cry had shaken it. I was afraid. First a black stone current, the body’s weight, immobility; soon fear, shrinking, expectation, alarm. I did not move. The cry rose again, closer, gentler. It was no longer a yelp. The animal was issuing a plea. Brief complaint directed toward the night, winter, unseen animals. It convulsed me. It was the Sacristan weeping. He had crossed the river; he was coming toward La Redousse; he was seeking the man, the master . . . Balandran was calling for help. And I had heard the call . . . Oh! How to tell him? . . .

  I remember looking at the time—barely nine o’clock. “It is not late,” I thought. Strange thought and concern, but it did not surprise me. Even while half-hallucinating, I was already wandering through the world of actions . . . I was going toward the bell, I was pulling the rope. I had not forgotten Uncle Rat’s warning—the look, the whisper, the frightened gesture. It was all vividly present. Still, I pulled the bell’s rope, but as slowly, as gently as possible, less with my hand, which I could not see, than with my soul. I pulled, my heart gripped by an unearthly fear, awaiting a collapse—an avalanche, horror, the rush of nighttime monsters. Yet nothing came from the roof except a faint, muffled sound: the impact, against the discreet bronze, of a clapper deadened by wool cloth; nothing but a hushed wave without spatial extension; an almost soundless whisper, confided to the house by the roof; a cautious plea.

  Wasted by age, the worn sound rose so faintly from the silence that it faded over the neighboring trees before it could reach the high wall of the forest. Still, it was enough to make something speak, although I could not have said what, so obscure and indefinable was that being beyond the blunted bell. I had drawn from absence the little that floated, without my awareness, somewhere near the house, or elsewhere perhaps, if we can stretch the space between us and those imminent creatures whose fragile life lasts no longer than the sound that summons them from nonbeing. But their passage, however faint and fleeting, still sets other secret, solemn bells softly ringing, as if in a fog-draped town, at the heart of our innermost strongholds. The distant being responds to our own being, and what we are dissolves into what is beyond what we are, deep within us. Then the vibration subsides, wave eases into wave, and everything is still. And yet, we listen. We hear, and perhaps that illusion is a profound perception. But it too yields to the peace, and we find ourselves, immobile, within the silence of the vast winter night.

  •

  When I came back to myself, I was alone.

  I did not dare move away, not even by one step. It would have meant stepping into the void . . . The fire, which had faded into a heap of fixed embers, offered nothing but a scrap of visible warmth. No smoke, no crackling. The stationary glow had a mineral look . . . Was it alive? But what lived, aside from me and my solitary body? . . . Now the animal that had yelped so gently had fled . . . What animal? . . . Had there been an animal, an animal gifted with such a delicate, disturbing cry on this island where no tender nighttime plea had ever arisen? . . . Purely imagined plea perhaps, for around me the whole island was nothing but this absence. I waited; surely some event would arise from this unearthly vacancy . . . But it was useless to listen—not one sound, not one breath announced the approach of a living being; and even my familiar ghosts, easy daydreams, modest deliriums, had disappeared . . . Still, I waited. With a growing passion, I listened. Someone had to come; an arrival was ordained—I demanded it from this absence that was beginning to grip my heart. This silence in which, little by little, even my inner voice seemed to weaken and threaten to disappear, could not last . . .

  •

  I went out around ten. It was very cold. A clear, high moon wonderfully lit up the island. The gliding river barely whispered as it brushed the frozen banks. The ground was dry. It rang out. I headed north. The path follows the shoreline. I saw nothing. Nothing in the south either. The water slowly arrived and the reef of the Ranc rose out of the icy current silvered by the moon. Immense solitude. Chilled, I took the overgrown path that, in the west, follows, abandons, then returns to the shore where my favorite, familiar haunts—the hollows and the landing—are found. I was at home there, where the corridor snakes its way through thickets to arrive, almost secretly, at my sheltered cove. Nothing stirred there. An instinctive, furtive caution held me back as I approached the bank. I moved like a ghost; the ground lightly rebounded under my steps, without one twig being crushed. The retreat, under its crown of dwarf willows, bulrushes, and tall grasses, was sunk in darkness. I plunged in . . .

  •

  A boat, perfectly visible, was anchored just thirty yards from shore where there are some shallows. A large boat, with heavy sides and a square prow. Black, low, carrying two men. One upright in the stern, holding an oar in the water to keep the boat in the current. The other in front, seated. The first big, strong. The second small, hunched over. Fishermen, perhaps? Hardly. No net, no line. And who would come to fish on this river, in winter, in this cold, in the dead of night? . . . So, Dromiols and Rat? . . . Most likely . . . I could not see their faces, but their silhouettes spoke. The giant and the dwarf—the notaire and his clerk . . . But was it believable? . . . I must be dreaming . . .

  What was the likelihood of their being here? Still, I truly saw the water, the boat, those two human shapes, the strong and the weak; I heard the water’s faint lapping against the boat’s sides. The well-anchored boat tugged its chain as it strained toward shore, from which the oar kept pushing it away. With each stroke, an iron link groaned a bit. The two men were silent. A
lthough the very high moon spread its electric glow over the river, the men’s faces, hidden by their hat brims, remained dark. A cloud came and swept them away. When it had passed, the boat had disappeared from the shallows. The river was desolate once more.

  • • •

  On January 15, at dawn, I resumed my watch. It was futile. Inwardly, the day seemed to go by more swiftly. It deeply disturbed me. I had no thought that did not immediately turn to dust. But my anxiety did not let up. It had me by the throat and its pressure grew by the hour. It was almost warm out. A breeze rose from the south. The riverbanks steamed, and in the evening, toward five o’clock, the sun set into mists. The night was bad, and I was cold. Yet the fire was burning, the air was still warm, and I had covered myself with two thick wool blankets.

  On January 16, I saw the ferry, stopped in the middle of the river. It returned to shore before noon, and disappeared behind a hedge of old willows, from where it did not move for the rest of the day.

  Toward three o’clock, smoke rose in the woods of La Regrègue. Was it a signal? I waited. The smoke lasted until evening, then the shadows gradually absorbed it.

  Before night, someone came and prowled around the island. I heard footsteps. I went toward the sound. Silence. It was useless to search; I saw no one. The night was calm.

  But I slept poorly and I had frequent chills.

  During my sleeplessness, I thought once or twice about Delphine d’Or. But I could not see her face.

  • • •

  January 17 dawned in fog. I wandered around the island all morning. Warmed by the mild breeze still rising from the south, it floated in mists. The shoreline was invisible, and you could no longer hear the river’s flow. Still I stayed out, despite a slow ache that rose from my legs to my hips and weighed them down. At four o’clock, there was a shot. The blast seemed to come from the south. The sound faintly shook the fog. Someone cried out. I unhooked Cornélius’s shotgun, drew three shells from their hiding place, and loaded the weapon. It was too long for me, but surprisingly light for its size. Fighting my lethargy, I went out. My shoulders and arms were leaden, and I had to make a great effort of will to drag myself down the path to the landing.