Malicroix

by Henri Bosco

  I removed her coat, heavy with rain, and took her hands to warm them. Long, firm hands. They sank, lifeless, into my warmer hands, although I pressed them forcefully. Suddenly her whole body shivered.

  “My hair is soaked,” she said. “It feels like ice.”

  She withdrew her hands from mine and quickly undid her hair while shaking her head; then she knelt in front of the fire.

  I brought her some coffee; with her forehead extended toward the flames, she dried her wet hair for a long time. I was silent. Finally, she spoke. “It feels good here.”

  But I could find nothing to say in response.

  She was not deceived by that, because she murmured, so softly I almost did not hear, “For you, too, the fire is good.”

  I answered, “When I was alone, it was good company.”

  And I sat down beside her, close to the fire.

  She did not look at me. Her eyes, lost in the world of flames, seemed to be seeking a distant thought, probably one of those thoughts that differ from speech; but such thoughts cannot break free from the being that forms them. Captured near the other sky, in the dream that doubles our spirits, they disperse like dreams as soon as we try to express them in a clear voice. Body and soul are merged there, and it is only through a gesture, a look, or a strange silence that anything can be conveyed. And so we are silent, and, in order to hear ourselves better, we let the fire, the house, the winter harmonize our hearts.

  It was not until much later that she said, “I’m very sleepy now. It feels so good.”

  I went into the storeroom and came back with the mattress, which I placed in front of the hearth.

  Before falling asleep, she managed to say, “You’ll lower the lamp . . .”

  I covered her with my coat.

  • • •

  During the six weeks that I remained on the island, Balandran’s health rapidly improved. After a brief convalescence, he regained his strength with an alacrity that still surprises me. On March 2, he was walking; on the 8th, he went to the landing. On the 15th, accompanied by Bréquillet, he visited the whole island and saw his seven “planets.” The most beautiful one having burned, he set about trimming branches to rebuild it. I helped him. He was already handling his ax with vigor. On the 20th, he crossed the river early in the morning, and did not return until evening. He told me, “Three animals are missing. But the Sacristan is there.”

  “And La Regrègue?”

  “They have not touched it. The walls are strong.”

  Of Dromiols, not a trace. Vanished toward Roussillargues, with Rat, the spindly old horse, the rickety carriage. No more Rambards. They were scattered on Dromiols’s land—the ancient Malicroix estates, patiently wrung from the family by those stealthy, powerful hands.

  “They no longer move,” Balandran told me. “They spy on us from their holes. As long as the master is gone, that’s all they do.”

  Indeed, we never saw anyone on shore, where sometimes a solitary, motionless wading bird appeared between two strong gusts of brisk March wind. Every now and then the sky pried up from the horizon a slow, heavy clump of cloud that drifted off toward unseen lands in the west. High in the sky, it crossed the Camargue, its flanks in the sun, like a vast snowdrift. These first signs of spring created openings in space through which long limbs of light suddenly stretched. It was still cold, but the weather sometimes turned its compass southward, and winter’s harshness softened.

  Balandran, who had rigorously reorganized the economy of our life on the island, seemed animated by increased strength. He was less sparing with his words, as if spring had made him more tender. On windy days—and during the month of March such days are not rare—he went, with Bréquillet at his heels, from one end of the island to the other to inspect and shore up his huts assailed by blasts. Bréquillet seemed mad. He barked, nipping at the north wind with his hairy snout. In the evening, rumblings sometimes rose from the sea; at night, long flights of curlews or cranes crossed the island. A raucous call or desolate cry marked their passage.

  It was usually night when Anne-Madeleine came to La Redousse. By then Balandran had disappeared with Bréquillet into his hut, carefully shut. He never said a word about Anne-Madeleine. If by day he saw her on the path, or if he heard her step, he disappeared. There was no hostility in his reserve; and from her, no ill-will about his absence. They understood each other; and I am certain that from the depths of his sickbed, during our solitary nights, he had assented to the secret concord of our hearts. He was too secretive himself not to understand the taste for the silence and the shadow that Anne-Madeleine and I required in order to hear what we had never before heard on this earth and which our voices would not have been able to say to ourselves, even at night. Still, he did not pretend to be unaware of our meetings. I often found a bouquet of marsh trefoil or winter heliotrope in an earthen pot on the table. She always took it away without a word, knowing full well it was a rough heart’s homage to the woman who had wrested him from death, and whom I loved.

  • • •

  The reestablishment of a simple household routine, making everything normal, helped keep our feelings in check. Fostered by this perhaps precarious yet potent calm, our life became more secure. My plans were strengthened by this. I wanted to leave. I could not go unless Balandran, Anne-Madeleine, and the old ferryman were safe from all danger during my absence. I thought I had kept Dromiols away from Anne-Madeleine and the old man through the final clause of the codicil—precise clause that released me from the trial whose strange nature Dromiols did not know, and which I was convinced he should not. Legally, nothing required me to inform him of the purely spiritual pact Cornelius had proposed. I was no longer under any authority but that of this Shadow. Henceforth, for Dromiols, I was by law the owner while I lived; and if he guessed correctly that this purely legal right of ownership would not satisfy me until the other trial, at least he knew that, in relation to him, I was now free. Huddled over his rancor, he was most likely deliberating. I still had to fear him. But, uncertain of my conduct, he too was now haunted by anxiety. I calculated that he would wait, without moving, until my first step. My departure would surprise him, and he would be anxious about it; he would try to understand it. But, despite his mind’s acuity, reason would not shed light on this action, the strong and pressing need for which was unexplainable even to me. I knew I would be leaving and where I would be going. I was returning to the Mégremuts, to my family. Already my entire departure was within me. Neither desire nor regret nor struggle tore me. My departure was as strong as a certainty, and I found its imminence so natural I did not speak of it. There would be time enough, on the very day, to ask Balandran for his boat. He would bring me across without a word if I were silent. His faith stood in lieu of knowledge. He had clear insight into my wishes. And on this I rested the power and the peace, as much on the mainland as at La Redousse.

  I would keep for myself the asset of a more steadfast soul at the moment of separating from Anne-Madeleine. I knew only too well that this separation would not be easy, but it was simple: I was leaving; she was staying. This would create two absences: one over there, with my family on the flowering hills; the other here, on the river’s desolate waters. As I thought of it, I saw this double sadness and this double waiting. And already the birth of these two images created a shadow in my heart bound to her wild heart, from which I was hiding my sad plan.

  •

  Every two or three days, she came from the ferry to the island. She liked to land in the east, among the gorse. She knew some safe places there, where her boat could land smoothly and be well-hidden. I was astounded by the skill and courage she needed in order to find these invisible moorings at night. But, like Balandran, she had a wonderful knowledge of the waters and shores of the river. In the evening, I would go to wait for her. The boat would arrive at twilight. At night, it was often quite late when she knocked on the door, and I would no longer be expecting her arrival. She would come in, fresh from the night, and for
a long time I would draw silent pleasure from that freshness. She never spoke of the ferry, of Le Grelu, of her life on the river. But a force that evoked both wind and water emanated from her. All words were effaced. Just the movement of her approach filled me with pleasure and pain, permeated by the scent of the trees and plants among which, young and strong, she lived. Often, she was nothing but body. Everything was contained in her presence. It was not to her heart that I spoke, but to the whole being whose shoulder or arm sometimes touched mine with passionate strength. Our hearts were pure.

  •

  In the evening, when a remnant of light remained, we would go to the familiar hollow and nestled there, we would watch as night fell over Repentance. The river flowed before us, already swollen with the first snowmelts, for the air in the low valleys was beginning to grow warm. Every now and then a wild horse whinnied on the other shore, beyond the lagoons. A light whinny that perhaps greeted, in a billow of air, the fragrance of a distant forest where the first sap was rising. Nothing in the desolate western expanse responded to it, but we gently hugged each other.

  “He gallops over there,” she murmured, “and he is alone.”

  The thought of this solitude troubled me.

  At other times, I would lead her to the east, on that path where one evening I had discovered those pastoral expanses where now only imaginary flocks seasonally grazed. I would be leaving toward the east in a few days. The land there was empty, and my heart constricted.

  “Night comes to us from there,” she said. “Let’s go back; I’m cold.”

  “But day also comes from the east, Anne-Madeleine.”

  “True, but this evening there’s only night in the east.”

  We returned to La Redousse. She stayed late; and, as always, before leaving, she tossed a bundle of dried vines onto the fire; it flared up and crackled with well-being.

  “Girls like flames,” she told me seriously, as she gazed at this brisk fire that shone on her.

  She left before the fire went out. She left alone. She told me, “The water would frighten you. It’s rough tonight.”

  The night and the water . . . I saw the ferry, and the short waves of the bold, ravenous current.

  “To cross it,” she was saying, “you need patience, strong arms, sometimes luck . . .”

  I was anxious. She saw my anxiety. Her eyes, usually direct and clear, suddenly yielded to a strong emotion, and a spot of gold on a widening dark patch appeared. I embraced her fiercely, and for a moment she hesitated to leave. But she left.

  •

  We often spoke of the other shore, about which I had no knowledge.

  “Very few people go there,” she would say, “but it’s haunted.”

  “Who haunts it?” I asked, hesitating, for I feared too frank a confidence, which would perhaps have disenchanted me.

  But she answered my question with strange words.

  “It is I, perhaps, who haunt it, when I skirt the bank at night . . .”

  Troubling thought, which she repeated more than once, and almost always in the same words. This notion dwelt deep within her, and it surfaced like a mute, involuntary confidence.

  Of La Regrègue she had told me: “It is old; the tiles are wearing out; but one could still live there . . .” She loved Balandran. Of the Rambards, Rat, Dromiols—she never spoke.

  “Uncle Rat,” she told me one evening, “needs friendship.”

  I knew that well.

  As I was silent, she went on, “It is you whom he loves.”

  This love troubled me more than an honest hatred, and I could not keep myself from saying, “He would betray me if need be.”

  She replied, “He could betray anyone. He’s a man who suffers.”

  This suffering touched her no doubt, and more than one might think. I heard her murmuring, most likely to herself, “Who knows, poor man, how he’ll die?”

  I was shaken. Uncle Rat—a sigh, an apparition, barely human. How did he hold onto life? Did he, in fact, live? Now this, this breath, which loved without being loved, knew suffering, brushed death, hesitating, frail, hanging by a thread from the shadows. He was himself only a thread, a thread of wind, at every moment on the verge of dissolving into the night from which he had miraculously emerged, to be nothing but desire, fear, reticence, between a faint ray of daylight and darkness . . .

  “Anne-Madeleine, since winter Uncle Rat has also been haunting the island, La Regrègue, and the shore. But before, did he come here?”

  “He did.”

  “Alone?”

  “Sometimes, secretly.”

  “To see Cornélius?”

  “Yes, that’s it—Cornélius.”

  The name fell over us and imposed a long silence.

  “And you, Anne-Madeleine, did you sometimes come to the island?”

  “Never.”

  She uttered this harsh word very gently. A veiled feeling, hidden perhaps even to herself, secretly brooded beneath the regret whose strength was suggested by these two short syllables.

  “Now that I come,” she added, “I think one could live here. In a month it will be all leafed out, with some flowers, the first birds, and Balandran will be happy to build a big fire, among the trees . . .”

  Rarely had she spoken for so long. In one month I would be gone; I was stubbornly silent about it. But silence is not enough when you hide a heavy secret in your mind. The secret permeates your voice, your words, an unusual tone, the very thoughts you invent in order to deceive. Despite yourself, you betray the existence of a mystery. From certain signs, I saw that Anne-Madeleine, unaware of what I was keeping from her, still sensed its presence between us. Her anxiety was sometimes palpable. She concluded that, to compel my silence, the plan I was hiding must concern her, and cruelly. To my silence she responded with her own. When the strength of an emotion, as it enveloped us, made us long to unburden ourselves with a word, this ghostly silence often came between us. Our most secret, most penetrating whispers were lost in that silence, allowing a reticent voice to be heard beneath them. Then, to pretend that we were telling each other everything, we prolonged our effusions. But we did not confide in each other.

  That there was this equivocation between us troubled me, but not with ordinary remorse. Although I suffered, I drew strength from it in order to create a wider field for desire. I would think of it tomorrow, and there, in the beautiful Mégremut gardens, on the clear paths of return, the nostalgia and anxiety of the river would come to me.

  “Anne-Madeleine, tell me, what is the water like in July?”

  “Quite low, my friend, but still quite rough.”

  “Anne-Madeleine, will there be a moon this year on the sixteenth?”

  “The sixteenth? Why the sixteenth?”

  “It’s my birthday . . .”

  After a moment of deliberation, I hear her say, “Last year we had a full moon in mid-July. This year, the sky will be dark; but, even when it is, you can still see a little, because of the stars . . .”

  All the words carry and penetrate me. I wait.

  In a lower voice, with a kind of fear, she confesses, “And the sixteenth is the night of the mass . . .”

  That evening, we were seated at the southern tip of the island. From there you could see Repentance, where darkness was falling. It was not cold. March had grown milder over the past two days. On the shore, a bird—a merganser or a teal perhaps—reassured by the night’s calm, was calling through the reeds to its hidden mate.

  “A male surely. Listen to him. He is speaking loudly.”

  Anne-Madeleine knew. We listened.

  “At nightfall, birds like to nest on this shore. In the east, there are few.” She did not give reasons for this.

  “In the east,” I replied, “it is the void. It’s like a desert. You see no one, nothing. Not even a hut.”

  She said, “There’s nothing left there but the calvary.”

  Repentance, with its dark beach, was slowly disappearing, and, between us and the shor
e, the river rolled ominously, in one livid flow. We returned silently to La Redousse, where the warmth of the fire, peaceful, reassuring, would bathe us in its glow, often until dawn. Fire brings souls together, and we took pleasure in it.

  • • •

  March was passing quickly. I had decided to leave on April 4. It would take two days to go from La Redousse to Le Castelet, my home. The road is long and the countryside changes. I wanted everything regarding the Malicroix to be in order during my absence. I wrote to Maître Dromiols to announce my departure. Except for the codicil, of which, I reminded him, I was the only judge, I had fulfilled all the stipulations of the testament and henceforth I was the legitimate owner of both name and goods. He would not fail, I entreated, to provide me with all the legal documents—accounts, titles, contracts—that by right were mine. He would continue as notaire of the Malicroix, whose familial power, name, rights and responsibilities were now invested in me alone. As the last male of my line, I intended to uphold them as highly and as firmly as such a noble heritage required. That heritage imposed duties on me that none of my family had previously fulfilled. I would rigorously fulfill them. And I saluted him with the usual formulas employed when you speak as master.

  Two days later Rat appeared. An official Rat, a Rat who was a notaire’s clerk, a meticulous Rat, informed about everything, and who had superimposed an impersonal amiability onto the habitual courtesy of the Rat trained in patience and submission. He was lugging a huge dossier in a leather suitcase. All the files he removed were carefully tied with yellow ribbons. They bore inked red numbers, pinned onto large new cards, with lovingly calligraphed headings. I had never seen such order, nor so much ostentation. But I showed no emotion. Without allowing myself to be disturbed by this imposing apparatus—all of Dromiols was in it—I required Rat to lay the documents out before me. For three days, I read, questioned, and insisted on minute explanations of everything. And Rat read with me; tirelessly he answered and explained, with such knowledge of the documents, such subtlety, such a delicate gliding beneath any objection, that sometimes I looked at him out of the corner of my eye to admire the exercise of his art, which made me marvel. But he seemed not to notice my marveling, and to my persistent inquiries he responded with modest but infallible precision. His thin pointed nose bent over the documents; he was sniffing them. As if their odor intoxicated him, he would be silent for a few seconds with his eyes half-shut, then he would reply in a nasal voice both courteous and convincing. Not one word about his errands on the island and his nighttime visits. He had forgotten; or rather, he was no longer the same person. The Uncle Rat to whom I owed my life, the supple and silent Uncle Rat who shivered but still crossed the river in the middle of winter, who was love and hate at the same time, watchful, fearful, on the lookout for the least cloud, all feint, velvet step, breath, smoke, duplicitous and tender—Dromiols had divorced him from the Rat he had dispatched to me, furnished with all my titles. Nothing of the other remained except, here under my eyes, the subtle cunning and outline of a Shadow bent over these venerable deeds on whose august contents he pertinently commented. It was quite clear that these deeds were indeed august to Rat. Cut off as he was from that other self, so sensitive and communicative, this Rat, in the presence of the titles, expressed religious respect through his whole being. Which is why, without showing it, I was moved.