A Beast in Paradise

by Cécile Coulon

  His mother sighed.

  “Of course he won’t.”

  She said it with certainty, and Louis heard it in her tone: she loved her husband, despite all she had suffered at his hands. She loved this man the same way an animal worships the master that beats it each morning and strokes it at night. He stood now, as Émilienne had, and left the room, squeezing his mother’s shoulder once, like the old woman had squeezed his. In front of the house, Blanche and Gabriel were playing with the hens. Louis went to the barn, rolled up the sleeves of his coveralls, and began raking the ground in the half-light, without sparing a glance or even a tear for the mother he now allowed to walk away.

  Louis was a poor worker at first. Even simple tasks eluded him. The cows crowded back against the fence when he went into the paddock or refused to enter the milking parlor in the morning. The hens taunted him; the rooster chased him while he hopped fearfully around the yard, dodging the thrusts of its sharp beak. Émilienne had forbidden him from being violent with the animals, so he ran from them, or tried to befriend the uncooperative ones. He looked like an idiot. It took him six months to herd the cows without any of them escaping, for the rooster to scurry out of the way when he approached, for his muscles to develop. He was sixteen years old.

  In a matter of months, Émilienne turned him into a useful man. She taught him to fence fields, to recognize and cut down ash, pine, and chestnut trees; he memorized the names of the meadow plants, the grasses, and the wild stock. He learned that the cows loved alfalfa and clover, but that the tiny blue flowers bloated their bellies. Then came the slaughtering of the pigs, the skinning of rabbits, the sluicing of the henhouse. He squeezed the cows’ udders in the rhythm dictated by Émilienne. “Milking an animal should be like keeping time with a song,” she said. He assisted with the birthing of two calves. The first time, the veterinarian showed him where to position himself, how to help the mother; the second time Émilienne woke him before dawn, saying it was time for his final “practical exam.” He managed well, flushed with sweat and anxiety, exhausted alongside the little calf, its mother licking its warm muzzle, the hair sticky with blood.

  The pigpen was the only place he had felt comfortable right away. The very first time he ventured into the enclosure, the animals had surrounded him curiously, snuffling benignly at his coveralls. Scratching at the earth with their hooves, grunting happily, they fell upon the scraps Louis piled in the corner of the pen, here at the southern tip of Paradise.

  During those first days, after his forced rest, Émilienne had asked Louis to be there when she killed a chicken for lunch or skinned a rabbit. Louis watched carefully, memorizing each movement; the blow to the hen’s head and then the quick twisting of its neck; the rolling back with the fingertips of the rabbit’s skin as it hung head-down from a nail on the wall; the feathers plucked out one by one, the entrails tossed into a pan for the pigs. He watched Émilienne the way a cat eyes a bird through a closed window. Her contours molded by an endless series of deaths, she looked up at him, green eyes glimmering, radiating that strength, that gentleness, that were such an integral part of her. At last, one day, she gazed at him for a long time, hands slippery with the guts of the chicken just beheaded on an old newspaper in the kitchen, and said, with a real smile—not a half-smile, not a smirk, but a real one, wide and deep and open:

  “Your place is here now.”

  BUILDING

  Louis slept in Marianne and Étienne’s bed until Blanche and Gabriel stopped sharing a room. The brother and sister had the bedroom at the top of the stairs, but on Blanche’s eleventh birthday, Émilienne decided that the girl would sleep in her mother’s bed from now on, alone. Louis was dispatched to Gabriel’s room, to a narrow mattress next to the boy’s bed.

  When you went down the dirt road with the sign reading YOU HAVE REACHED PARADISE, you ended up in the yard, lined with farm buildings, a fortress of wooden planks humming with insects and smelling of cow dung and straw and animal hair. At its center, during the summers, the tree provided a spreading canopy for the child-sized table and benches snugged against its trunk. The house rose up to the right of the path, built of dark stone, its windows overlooking the Bas-Champs. In the distance lay Sombre-Étang and its dark-plumed occupants, the sky clear and violet-hued on the horizon. The henhouse perched on the edge of a sudden, steep slope that ran down into the woods where Émilienne gathered twigs for the fire. A footbridge spanned the small brook and led to several hectares of meticulously maintained fields planted with rye grasses, sweet vernal grasses, foxtail. Woodland ringed the landscape to the east, a dark and leafy belly from which flocks of powerful-winged birds would erupt. Louis knew every inch of Paradise now. The farm had once belonged to Émilienne’s husband, a simple and hard-working man killed by lung disease. On his death, the land had passed to his wife and daughter, Marianne—who had left Paradise at eighteen, lured by the siren song of the city.

  Five years later, Marianne had returned, now engaged to a young geography student she’d met on the green lawns of the university. Étienne was a gentle young man, not very tall and rather thin. Even the smallest details of the country landscape were enough to send him into raptures.

  Émilienne had been wary at first. Marianne seemed so fragile, so incapable of farm work. And her little boyfriend, a hothouse flower, with a complexion as pale as his eyes, and the tangle of hair he never combed, and his voice, softer than a girl’s! Étienne had studied, been active in a couple of left-wing groups at the university, then taught for a few months before admitting that he didn’t have what it took to handle the rigors of “the real world.” He wanted to find a place that would suit him, where he wouldn’t feel overwhelmed by anything more than the fatigue of labor well done. Étienne was like one of those city dwellers forever yearning for a sort of untamed utopia, a return to the kind of world they’d only read about in books. For him, Paradise was Robinson Crusoe’s island. But when he arrived, Émilienne had nailed him with a piercing stare. He wasn’t the type of son-in-law she wanted around—unless he was prepared to work.

  Like Louis, he had to learn everything. But unlike Louis, he never managed to reconcile himself to the difficult, repetitive tasks so necessary to daily life on the farm. The only animals he had experience with were his parents’ cats, and whenever he set foot in the stable he felt useless, utterly useless faced with these great beasts that could so easily crush him, kill him, and were content simply to stand in their stalls or the pasture and gaze at him with their big, dark-lashed eyes, ears pricked, ruminating on their disdain.

  After a few months, Étienne offered his services to the village hall. He could teach private lessons, oversee study halls, tutor struggling students. Anything but the farm. They hired him for fifteen hours a week, to assist the children after school, from five o’clock to eight o’clock in the evening. He was their teacher, their confidant, their supervisor. They gave him a set of keys to the municipal buildings, which he dropped through the hall’s mail slot every evening before returning to Paradise, sometimes by car if some good Samaritan stopped to pick him up along the way. He offered to sell the eggs from his mother-in-law’s chicken coop himself and deliver them after work to customers who usually drove out to the farm. This meant that Émilienne, without him having to ask, let him use her car. Now Étienne had both the luxury of making the eight-kilometer round trip to town each day by car rather than on foot, and the strange pride of finally being something to Émilienne other than simply an agreeable boy.

  Marianne worked alongside her mother, helping with the duties Émilienne would otherwise carry out alone. They spoke little; Émilienne was a woman typical of the region, with no taste for small talk. Her mere presence filled up the space. Marianne was chattier, more lighthearted. She believed in the future, in progress; she was overflowing with ideas for the farm, for making Paradise into an actual paradise. When she’d nailed that wooden sign to the stake at the entrance to the property, Émi
lienne had laughed, thinking, She’ll get over these whims of hers, these fancies. She’ll get over it eventually. Sometimes the young couple treated themselves to an evening out, dinner at a restaurant, but Émilienne stayed with her animals. She was part of the herd, even though she walked at the front of it.

  Blanche and Gabriel were born two years apart. The house quickly filled to bursting with shouts, sobs, laughter, the sound of running feet. The little ones crawled back and forth behind the railing that ran in front of the three bedrooms. At the end of the upstairs hallway, a trap door led to the attic, inhabited by spiders, old furniture, and the dead grandfather’s hunting rifle.

  Étienne and Marianne made an odd couple. She was as lively as he was dreamy; he was as brilliant as she was impatient. Étienne could guide students through thickets of mathematical problems, grammatical traps, and illustrations depicting the history of France. The structures he built were in the heads of those he taught; his were empires of intellect, castles of the mind. Étienne was “not much for cows,” as Émilienne said, but people trusted him, so firmly entrenched did he seem in a world of dates and images, figures and proper nouns.

  Marianne had inherited her mother’s solid common sense; she brooked no resistance, not even from her two children. Blanche, from earliest infancy, had shown herself to be extremely resourceful. She learned to walk before she could talk, overflowing with movement, as if an older child were hidden inside her, waiting for the right moment to blossom. Even before she started walking, she would crawl the floor until she collapsed, exhausted, at the foot of the staircase, to be scooped up by her mother or grandmother. At age three, Blanche spoke little and walked fast; clever with her hands, she imitated her grandmother’s movements. The happiest times were the ones spent with her, frolicking among the hens, sliding between the cows’ hooves, taunting the pigs from her perch on the gate of their pen, squashing her nose into a snout with her palm.

  Gabriel, on the other hand, was reluctant to do anything. Eat, sleep, walk. He wasn’t a difficult child, exactly, but everything seemed to affect him more strongly than it did his sister. The buzzing of a fly woke him up. When Marianne took him outside, the sunlight blinded him, and he screamed. When Émilienne held him, he fell asleep wedged in her armpit. He sat quietly while she balanced him on one hip, tending to her duties. He had been born prematurely, frailer than his sister was at the same age, and more talkative too; the smallest thing set him nattering away. And he was often ill. Mild fevers that lasted a single night, bumpy rashes that came and went, coughing fits, despite his young age and his birth into a family for whom strength wasn’t an option but a necessity.

  “Life will never be simple for him,” murmured Émilienne to Marianne, as the little boy dozed against her shoulder.

  His mother sighed.

  “You can’t tell anything yet; he’s too little.”

  “Can’t let melancholy set in, you know. It makes for a poor bedfellow.”

  Gabriel slept in his parents’ room until his first birthday, when he joined his sister at the other end of the hall, in the second bed, the one she’d used when she was that age.

  OVERCOMING

  Little by little, Louis came to know the Émard family: its absent members, its dead ones, its silent ones. He never asked questions; never pried.

  Occasionally, after dinner or at breakfast, the grandmother let a few words slip, or mentioned something about the deceased. Étienne “always looked like he’d just gotten out of bed;” Marianne “didn’t talk much, but she was so pretty.” She showed him photos of her daughter from before she’d left Paradise for the city. Louis thought Gabriel had inherited his father’s quality of always seeming to be a little bit somewhere else, his delicate physique and his slightly dry air, calm no matter what the circumstance.

  But Blanche, Blanche could have been Émilienne’s daughter, rather than her granddaughter; her movements, the way she held herself, her expressions—all were her grandmother’s. Having realized very early that her parents’ presence would fade rapidly from Paradise and that another behavioral model would become key to her survival, Blanche had turned to Émilienne, had opened her heart wide, to learn everything that this woman who was as respected as a priest, or a witch, could teach her. Louis understood this even when Blanche was still a child. At night, she would sleep curled up in front of her grandmother’s door, Gabriel awakening in their bedroom alone.

  Sometimes, as he watched her grow up, Louis wondered if Blanche remembered that she had had parents once, that they had died one stormy evening on the hill people called The Pin. Émilienne’s car had flipped coming around a sharp bend in the road, killing them both instantly. The car had been found ten yards down the slope, lying on its side, and the bodies of Marianne and Étienne, as bloody as the day they were born, pulled from the wreckage beneath a nightmarish fall of rain. Blanche knew all that. Very naturally, the little girl became her grandmother’s shadow, casting aside her grief in favor of Émilienne’s robust self-discipline. It was as if Émilienne alone could extract her from this hell, this sudden absence she had sensed coming, the way a dog can sniff out a storm hours before the first lightning bolt strikes.

  It took Gabriel a long time, too long, to understand that his parents were not coming back. At three years old, he shied away from death, hoping it was only temporary, asking Émilienne, Blanche, Louis, anyone who came in the door, nearly every day, if Papa and Mama were “late,” if Papa and Mama would “come tomorrow.” Blanche just shook her head, avoiding his questioning gaze, while Louis took the little boy on his knee, distracting him by showing the colorful pictures in the books Étienne himself had written and drawn for his children. Émilienne always answered his questions with a simple “no,” each time he asked them, “no.” The more she said it, the more Gabriel raised his voice, refusing to accept defeat, until one evening in front of the fireplace he climbed into his grandmother’s lap and screamed, “Is Papa here? Is Mama here?” He was crying, fat tears rolling down his cheeks. Émilienne gripped his hands so he wouldn’t lose his balance, and when he began kicking at her legs with his little feet she grasped him by the waist and said, too loudly to be drowned out by her grandson’s snuffling sobs:

  “They aren’t here anymore. They aren’t coming back.”

  Gabriel opened his mouth. Émilienne pressed her long-fingered hand to his lips. Louis watched the scene from the table where he sat, peeling an orange. He had never seen the toddler so worked up; he had never seen the old woman so angry.

  “If you want to cry, do it outside.”

  She took her hand away and Gabriel screamed even louder than before. Émilienne got up and took him out to the front porch, then stepped back inside, closing the door behind her, leaving the boy outside. Louis could hear him hammering on the door with his fists and screaming, screaming, screaming; even Louis’s own father, during his fits of rage—God knew they seemed endless—had never shouted so loudly. It was as if the child’s internal organs were going to come flying out of his mouth, so angrily, so violently was he bawling. Louis would never have imagined a four-year-old body capable of making such an earsplitting noise.

  “Let him back in, Émilienne.”

  “No. He has to get it all out,” she said, sitting down in front of the fire again.

  “What if he runs away?” he asked, rising to go and open the door.

  Émilienne gestured for him to sit back down.

  “He’s not going anywhere. He’s a four-year-old boy, not a dog.”

  She stared into the flames dancing on the hearth, deaf to her grandson’s cries.

  “Please, let him in,” Louis begged.

  But the grandmother seemed hypnotized by the fire; there was nothing to be done. Louis stood up, put his dirty plate in the sink, brushed the crumbs off the tablecloth with his hand, and tossed them into the fireplace.

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “G
ood night. Don’t even think about opening that door.”

  He stalked out of the room, Gabriel’s screams echoing in his head.

  The child eventually calmed down. Once silence had fallen, Émilienne waited another half an hour. When she opened the door, Gabriel was sitting on the porch steps. Surprised, she moved toward him, thinking he might have exhausted himself and fallen asleep, but no; he was just sitting there, his back very straight. His grandmother sat down next to him and ran her hand through his hair, wide-palmed and large. Her palm stroked Gabriel’s head and he melted into her almost instantly. Before carrying him up to his bedroom, where Blanche snored indifferently, her face turned toward the wall, Émilienne let her gaze sweep the farm, the barn swathed in darkness, the boughs of the oak tree drooping over the yard, bowed by the deaths of Marianne and Étienne while the house continued to live. For an instant, Émilienne saw her daughter there, lounging with her back propped against the tree, and tears rose thickly in her throat, tears she gulped back down before they could reach her eyes, which always remained dry. Then, very gently, so as not to wake Gabriel, she stood up on legs made thin and wiry by hard work, by comings and goings, by the bearing of children and of coffins, and let herself be swallowed up by the house, leaving the tree to weep in her stead, turning her attention to the living sleep of Blanche and Louis. That sleep, in this house, here, deep in Paradise—Émilienne was proud of it. Prouder of it than she was of the place itself, because she had raised these young ones up out of the grief and misery in which they’d been mired; Louis, crushed by his father’s fists, and Blanche and Gabriel, crushed by their parents’ deaths.

  GROWING UP

  When it struck Louis that Blanche wasn’t a little girl anymore, he closed himself off, full of shame, of a feeling of violence that reminded him of his father’s. It wasn’t that he wanted to raise a hand to Blanche; on the contrary, the hand that pounded wooden stakes into the moist earth of Paradise, that drove the cows to pasture—he wanted it to tangle gently in Blanche’s hair, to brush it against the nape of her neck, covering it softly the way the eiderdown quilt had covered his wounds, years ago. Watching her transform before his eyes, Louis understood why Émilienne had given her the big bedroom all to herself.