A Beast in Paradise

by Cécile Coulon

  He never went through the meadow. The life of this family stopped at his bedroom wall. Alexandre grew up thinking that whatever his future held would be better than this house and these silences. He grew up thinking that maybe, if he worked hard, earned a good living, he would buy this meadow; then his parents would fill it with tables, chairs, animals, games. His father would finally permit himself a smile; his mother would sigh with something other than resignation. A sort of fanatical optimism had taken hold of him very early. Emboldened by so much praise for his physical appearance, Alexandre saw himself as everyone’s favorite, certain that this part of his life wouldn’t last a moment beyond his youth. He was impatient for it to be over, anxious to show them, all of them, what he was capable of.

  The one and only time he remembered his parents discussing anything at the dinner table was from when Alexandre was five years old. It was all anyone in the village could talk about. The car driven by Blanche Émard’s parents had flipped on The Pin in a storm. Émilienne was left to raise their two children alone. That evening, Alexandre’s parents had envisaged all the possible scenarios. How would the grandmother manage both the farm and the children at her age? Would she send the little ones to live with some distant relatives? Alexandre watched as his mother and father were buffeted by waves of words, torrents of phrases, for the first and last time. The dreadful fate of Marianne and Étienne had woken a passion in them, as sudden as it was fragile. Something had occurred in the life of a person they knew from a distance, something dreadful, insurmountable. Thinking about the Émard family’s tragedy made them feel less poor, less crass, less like the ones who would always finish last. A grandmother and her two grandchildren now found themselves in a situation worse than their own, and now they could, from the height of the miniscule step they had just ascended, imagine what would happen next, like schoolmasters leaning over a student struggling with an unsolvable equation.

  It was the only thing that occupied them for some time. But they had never offered to help; not even once. People said Gabriel was sad, his head constantly in the clouds. They said Blanche was angry and insolent. They said Émilienne was completely overwhelmed by what had happened. The whole village was busy spinning fantastic stories about the old lady. Alexandre wondered who the Émards were, to arouse so much ardor in his little house, normally so calm. He had met Blanche the way you do a movie star or the heroine of a popular song: through the voices of others. And he had loved her for the life that had, if only just for a brief while, penetrated the walls of his home.

  Alexandre realized very quickly that his parents would always be the sort of people whose names you don’t remember; the kind referred to as “the ones who have that little house; yes, but which one, the third one down with the meadow behind it, but the meadow doesn’t belong to them, such a shame.” Once Gabriel and Blanche had gone back to school and Louis was permanently installed in Paradise, silence returned to the dinner table. The hundred and sixty kilometers driven each day were once again marked by stultifying, wordless boredom, fingers clenched on the steering wheel, vacant gazes out the window at fields and forests fuller and richer than the existence of the people contemplating them. Émilienne was stronger, more durable, than they would ever be.

  Life resumed its course; Alexandre hurried to grow up, smiling for no reason at everyone, always polite, his demeanor appealing despite being slightly overblown. Outside the house, the boy was talkative. His face changed the moment he stepped beyond the garden gate, the mask of boredom and resignation he wore around his parents dropping away. Alexandre’s mother and father lived frugally without being poor; they expressed themselves simply without being stupid, existed without living. Their only son grew up with two hearts: one for his parents, and one for the outside world. The enclosed universe in which his mother and father existed, loving toward him despite everything, attentive in spite of their silence—their enclosed universe remained open for him; he could be the handsome, amiable boy in the village, and the quiet, dreamy child at home.

  And so, Alexandre became the ideal young boy, and then the ideal adolescent. Mothers dreamed of finding him scrounging for snacks in their refrigerators; their sons invited him over after school, proud of his friendship. Even in primary school, girls eyed him with a desire they didn’t understand. Alexandre was so nice, so polite. Not strong, just kind. He never got into fistfights, never played roughly, never found himself in a punch-up surrounded by a circle of eager spectators. No; Alexandre always remained outside the fray, dreaming of what his life would be when he grew up, of the meadow behind the house.

  In class, he was a competent student without being the best, because he wasn’t as intelligent as the mothers said; they were confusing politeness with refinement, good manners with good sense. He worked hard but never finished first in his class in either primary school or high school. One year, he managed ninth place, but never higher. It didn’t matter; he was in the top third. His parents were astounded that he’d done so well; having spent their own lives falling short of everyone else, it had never occurred to them that their son might do better than other children. They left him alone to do as he pleased. His mother fixed breakfast for him every morning. When he got up, a bowl and spoon were waiting for him on a neatly folded cloth. They ate together in the evenings; if Alexandre announced that he’d gotten a good grade his father said, “Good,” and if he confessed that he’d gotten a bad one his mother said, “You’ll do better next time.” Alexandre loved his parents because they never put any pressure on him to achieve the success they had never had. They trusted him in an idle sort of way, thinking, He’ll do fine. The good qualities possessed by their charming son had nothing to do with them; they discovered them at the same time as all the other parents, astonished that he was their son, so firmly ensconced in their own defeat that they couldn’t imagine having passed anything on to him except melancholy. And so, their love for him was a bit odd, but it was sincere. He was their boy, and he would do fine, and they would be proud of him if he wanted them to be proud of him. It didn’t matter to them that Alexandre wasn’t at the top of his class because he wasn’t good enough to be there. Something was missing in him: that extra bit of brilliance possessed by children who have already been through it all. He lagged behind the best, and of the top three, only one was a girl. Blanche Émard.

  WATCHING

  Everyone knew her story.

  She had come back to class only a few days after her parents’ car accident, looking daggers at anyone who stared at her, especially the boys. She waited for them to drop their gazes, and they did. “That girl will manage all right no matter what,” her teacher told the mothers at the school drop-off when they expressed concern for Blanche and Gabriel. Émilienne patched up the children’s wounds like a field surgeon lacking supplies; she made do with what she had: herself, her cows and chickens and pigs, her fields and her fireplace and her ponds. Her little band assembled each evening and scattered each morning, confident in its leader. Émilienne had the body of a starving ogress, tough and solid enough to withstand any test, equally capable of both tenderness and violence, caresses and slaps, and everyone around her relied on the support of that body to remain standing themselves.

  Almost immediately, Blanche stood tall. She didn’t need to try very hard to be among the best students in her class. And she was already working on the farm after school with Émilienne and Louis. Blanche had inherited her grandmother’s common sense: learn fast or die. Learn fast or remain at the back of the herd—and remaining at the back at the herd, for an orphaned girl with no prospects but a farm and a lovesick farmhand, was unthinkable from the start. Blanche wasn’t friendly, or gracious, or polite—but she was incredibly quick and clever, with a lively mind and a vibrant way of speaking. Like two workhorses, she and her grandmother towed Gabriel, an innocent boy broken by his parents’ deaths, through the fields of his grief.

  Even while still a little girl, she left the school
yard the moment the final bell rang. Émilienne or Louis would be waiting for her at the gate and they would set off, silently, on the road to Paradise. Blanche always wore jeans, T-shirts, and sweaters, slightly too large but clean, her body pale and slender like the trunk of a young birch tree. The colors of her clothing—blue, black, or gray—accentuated the color of her eyes, enormous in her petite face, the little girl’s face she would never lose, with a mouth bracketed by odd parentheses, as if old age had already staked a claim on her features, even in childhood. After her parents’ deaths she remained in others’ eyes a lonely child, stricken by loss at what should have been a time of normal and necessary innocence. This chaos had turned Blanche into a warrior at five years old.

  When Alexandre and Blanche found themselves sitting next to each other in math class, they quickly formed a business relationship; she helped him with equations, while he sweet-talked his friends’ parents into buying their eggs and poultry from Émilienne rather than the grocery store.

  “I’ll tell them the chickens from your farm might not be the biggest, but they’re the best ones around.”

  “Have your parents ever bought chickens from us?”

  “No. I’ll have to stretch the truth a little.”

  It worked. Alexandre rose to fifth place in their math class. On Thursdays and Saturdays Émilienne sold more eggs and more lettuce and always received some orders for the following week. It all started that way, for the sake of a higher grade and a few eggs. Armed with his charming smile, Alexandre sang Émilienne’s praises, often saying, “The tragedy that family’s been through has only made her more hard-working.” For her part, Blanche took the time to explain square roots to him, how to find the value of x, and which bracketed equation to solve first to simplify an algebraic expression. He wasn’t as good as she was, of course, and she wasn’t as good a salesman as he was. But she never gave him the answers during a test, even when he clasped his hands as if in prayer and gazed at her beseechingly. After class he followed her down the hall, murmuring:

  “You could’ve given me the answers, really; what do you gain by making me lose points?”

  She didn’t turn around.

  “You find answers, you don’t ask for them. Either you’re smart, or you’re an idiot. If I give you the answer, you’re an idiot.”

  He went quiet, crestfallen, trying to calculate his probable score on the test. Blanche would get a 16 or a 17, of course. She understood it all; she had an answer for everything. They walked together to their next class, where Blanche sat down in the second row and Alexandre in the first, listening to the teacher’s comments on some book or another. Alexandre took notes, but he never read the books. Blanche listened closely and read every text more than once.

  One evening, Louis was waiting for her at the gate, the car window rolled down. He watched as the two teenagers emerged from the schoolyard, Alexandre heading for the playing field. Louis knew the boy’s parents; they were very quiet, and very sad. He had seen Alexandre at the market, too, extolling the virtues of what Louis generally sold with his hands in his pockets, forcing a smile, while this boy of sixteen spread his arms and invited his friends’ mothers to buy Émilienne’s poultry and lettuce and eggs. It bothered Louis, but he went along with it, amazed at the boy’s talent, unable to figure out why this stranger who had never set foot in Paradise was bending over backward for the farm.

  When he saw them that evening, for a few seconds at most, striding across the schoolyard side by side, sure-footed, almost triumphant, he knew that Blanche would never be his, that he didn’t have the right even to think about it. He sat up straight behind the steering wheel, exhaling loudly and trying to blot the image of her pale thighs from his memory. And then an unbearable scene flashed through his mind, as assuredly as the boy had walked through the schoolyard: Blanche, being taken by Alexandre, outdoors, on the green grass of Paradise. He doubled over, feeling like he might go mad from pain, his gut twisting at the thought of the lovers, the curving shapes of their bodies.

  “Are you sick?”

  Blanche had stuck her head in the window. Louis looked up at her, anger flashing in his eyes.

  “Queasy,” he muttered.

  She got into the car without another word. He stomped on the gas pedal.

  “Be sure to thank your friend for that show he put on in the market,” Louis said. The words came out in a hiss.

  A half-smile crossed Blanche’s face. A single parenthesis. Louis’s favorite.

  “It’s working, isn’t it?”

  “We don’t need it.”

  “Stop for a second.”

  Louis slammed on the brakes. The car came to a halt in the middle of the road. He sat with one hand on the steering wheel, the other clenched into a fist that Blanche stared at now, her eyes widening. It wasn’t threatening her, this fist; it was a fist that wanted to hit someone else.

  “He’s not doing it for us,” he said, between gritted teeth. “He’s doing it for you.”

  Blanche blushed, but didn’t look away. She wanted to laugh, but before the second parenthesis could make its appearance Louis started driving again, more slowly this time, saying only:

  “He’s a sixteen-year-old boy. Be careful. Émilienne will tell you the same thing.”

  Blanche settled herself in her seat. The seatbelt dug into her shoulder; her book bag held steady between her feet. She bit back her response. “You just wish you were in his place.”

  RISKING

  Alexandre had turned up in the early afternoon. Blanche was reading in her room. Louis sat at the dining room table, flipping through the newspaper. Émilienne was gutting a chicken in the kitchen sink, tugging at the entrails until they detached with a moist sucking sound.

  Three knocks at the door.

  “Go and open it, Louis.”

  Alexandre stood at the foot of the porch steps, his habitual, dimpled smile firmly plastered on, if a bit stiff.

  “Sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if Bl—”

  “Yes, Blanche is here; where else should she be?” Louis spat, looking away.

  Alexandre nodded but didn’t move. He was waiting for Louis to give his permission, while Louis himself was waiting for the boy to say something, but a sudden racket behind him made him sigh. In her room, Blanche had heard Alexandre’s voice and, before Louis could say a word, he was elbowed aside by the girl, who stepped out onto the porch, pleased and surprised.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  Louis had pushed the door behind them without shutting it completely. He stood and listened.

  “What are you up to, Louis?” hissed Émilienne, a dishcloth in her hand.

  He motioned for her to be quiet. She shrugged and moved closer to the door, leaning in to listen to the teenagers.

  “D’you want to go out with me?”

  Louis and Émilienne exchanged a look. Outside, Blanche, frozen on the porch steps, stared at Alexandre as if she’d never seen him before. He’d spoken without taking his eyes off her, his cheeks dimpling, his lips curving in a charming smile. Alexandre didn’t take a step toward her. He’d asked his question like a pupil asking his teacher for an explanation, and now he was waiting for that teacher, so lovely in her hesitation, to answer.

  “Okay.”

  Louis stalked out of the vestibule and slammed the kitchen door. Émilienne, standing alone, staring at the doorknob, took a deep breath, her eyes closed. She shook her head once, banishing an unpleasant thought from her mind. Just as she was about to step out onto the porch and tell Alexandre to leave Paradise, she heard her granddaughter add:

  “But you can’t touch me until I say it’s all right.”

  Émilienne opened the door wide. Alexandre turned and left the yard. Blanche watched him go. Émilienne was about to demand that she come back inside—it was almost dark—but then she spotted Blanche’s le
ft foot on the second step. When the girl turned to face her, Émilienne noticed that her lips were rosier than usual, a pretty pink flush glowing on her cheekbones.

  They had kissed. Her granddaughter’s green eyes were like two stars that had just exploded in the darkness. Émilienne couldn’t bring herself to say be careful; not after this first kiss. She simply gave the girl a half-smile, the one that meant “we’ll talk about this later,” and instead of going back inside, where Louis was muttering over his newspaper, instead of plunging her large hands into the sink full of tepid water, she crossed the yard and headed for the pigpen.

  A handsome boy, with a nice smile, and a pleasant voice, and ambition. Making her way toward the pen, Émilienne reflected that she couldn’t blame Louis for loving Blanche, and she couldn’t blame Blanche for loving Alexandre. It happens, sometimes, that things progress of their own volition, with no thought for who gets hurt, or will get hurt soon.