A Beast in Paradise

by Cécile Coulon

  If he hadn’t gone away to “learn how to sell” in the city, Alexandre could have worked here, alongside Blanche. But he couldn’t, and it wasn’t because his body was unfit for hard work—on the contrary—but Alexandre wasn’t a boy of the farm, of eggs and cattle, Alexandre wasn’t a boy of marshes and manure and frogs; Alexandre was a restless man whose all-consuming dreams went far beyond the borders of Paradise, and his love for Blanche, his teenage love, intense and dazzling, wasn’t enough to pin him down here, near his poor parents and their narrow little house, near Émilienne’s old age and Louis’s black looks, near the daily melancholy of Gabriel, whom he avoided at all costs, afraid of being infected by his sadness. Blanche was the only glimmer of light in that green and brown, gray and pallid, drought-stricken or storm-soaked expanse. And she had driven him away.

  The young woman became a shadow, and like all shadows in ancient houses and vast landscapes, she didn’t sleep. She filled a space and abandoned it all in a split second, elusive, endlessly compelled by her own heartache. She sustained herself with what was left over, moving in the wake of others, drinking after others had satisfied their thirst, stretching herself endlessly between the places of the past and those of the future. Everything began and ended in Paradise, named by an absent mother and made a mockery of by a lover, young and audacious, so beautiful when he laughed, so shameful in his imploring demands. Like a shadow, Blanche enveloped the farm in her silence, noiselessly crossing the yard, feeding the pigs and the chickens and the cows without a word. The animals watched her, ears lowered, nostrils quivering, shying away slightly from her mechanical movements. The hay raked, the grain scattered, the waste discarded. The bucket handle that made a rusty bracelet on the wrist; the fingers closed around the neck to snap it with one quick, efficient twist; the shovel slid carefully beneath the cow manure so as not to lose any. Louis tried to keep her from exhausting herself with difficult tasks at first, but she brushed off his concern. As time passed, as the end of the school year arrived, as the students accepted to colleges and universities gathered in the schoolyard and chattered in great excited bursts about places to stay in the city and ways of traveling there and back and keeping in touch, as those who, like Alexandre, had chosen to leave this place paraded through the schoolyard like soldiers off to fight and conquer, Louis stopped shielding her from the pain of hard work, from predawn awakenings and brief nights. He took a step back, watching the shadow without trying to touch it, sometimes following it at a distance, afraid it would tear and come apart.

  After that catastrophic family dinner, Alexandre tried several times to explain himself to Blanche. He followed her through the halls at school, asking if they could “talk,” and even as he was laying himself bare, pursuing her in her endless flight from him, listing the ways they could stay “in touch”—he’d already stopped using the word “together”; it was always “in touch”—he was confronted with a face he didn’t recognize, closed, threatening. Alexandre tried to persuade Blanche. Always that broad smile, those beautiful eyes, that boyish expression that made people forgive him anything—and all were met with the same response from her: silence. Alexandre wondered if she was listening to him, if something in her was keeping her from seeing him, hearing him, talking to him. He even came back to the farm, but Louis chased him off, also in silence. Alexandre’s smile, his beauty, his love, his tenderness—none of them did him any good at all. For Blanche he was already gone, his abandonment of her already in the past.

  How do you heal from a living love? Every day after Alexandre’s departure, Émilienne mended the rifts, the cracks that this boy had opened in Blanche. She changed her granddaughter’s bedsheets to get rid of his scent. She awoke before Blanche—sometimes she didn’t even go to bed at all—to make sure the girl would have a sumptuous breakfast waiting for her when she got up, despite the fact that it usually went untouched. The fruit was sliced into perfect half-moons, the coffee hot but not scalding, the slices of bread and butter with honey lined up perfectly on her plate. Émilienne washed Blanche’s clothing every day, asking Louis to buy secondhand books at the market, hoping they might take her granddaughter’s mind off things. In the morning, Blanche’s boots and sandals and little canvas sneakers were perfectly clean on the front porch; her bed linen perfumed with lavender in the evening. On Friday, which had been her bath day since infancy, Émilienne crushed mint leaves and set them burning in a little candle diffuser on the side of the tub, adding thyme honey to the steaming water, washing Blanche’s hair with egg yolk and sugar. Mending Blanche. Repairing her. The aged fingers massaged her skin, eased the tangles out of her hair, smoothed her sheets; the wrinkled lips warmed her cheeks with kisses, smiled whenever she passed, moistened the thread to patch her trousers. For his part, Gabriel took advantage of the silence that hung over the place to sink further into his dreams, never understanding why he had never been given the same care, devoid of jealousy, agreeing, like a dutiful little ox, that his sister was the key cog in their machine, and that none of the other three members of the household would survive her collapse if she failed to summon the strength to hoist herself out of the abyss into which Alexandre’s departure had plunged her. She worked, admittedly. As hard as Louis; maybe harder. But she couldn’t bring herself to show her face in the village, or deal with customers, or speak to former classmates, or ask for change at the baker’s. She toiled within a very limited sphere, never venturing beyond the borders of her own grief.

  Alexandre left the village in June. He had found a summer internship with a real estate agency in the city, which would allow him to pick up some pointers before entering business school. It would look good on his record, a young man of eighteen spending his summer in an office, learning.

  Turning his back on the suffocating little house of his childhood, Alexandre carried with him a single, unshakeable certainty that, despite the sense of failure, despite the memory of that last evening at Paradise, filled him with strength, assurance, self-confidence: he had loved Blanche, but he didn’t love the place to which she was so devoted. Not as much as she did, anyway. He couldn’t understand that there was no Paradise for the girl other than the one that harbored her rage and her suffering. With the ineradicable talent for living that protected him and saved him from everything, even the disaster of his first love, he left her there, driven away by himself, by his own ambitious soul.

  CARRYING ON

  You’ll never guess.”

  Blanche was plucking a chicken, its feet dangling limply over an unfolded newspaper, her hands working with the regularity of a sewing machine, tugging and tossing and tugging again at the skin of the headless bird. The years had elongated her fingers, daily hard work gnarling them until they were like talons, phenomenally strong. The backs of her hands, tanner than any other part of her body, were already covered with little brown marks. Scars, sunburn, nicks, and scratches, minor cuts, Blanche’s hands had been sculpted by animal feet, hooves, and claws; they no longer bore any resemblance to the teenage fists that had grasped Alexandre’s hair as he trailed his tongue along her thighs for the first time. The part of Émilienne concealed by childhood had risen to the surface, showing on the backs of those hands. Soon more of her would emerge, her expressions, her posture echoing more clearly in the heaviness of the bust, in the fold of skin sketching a line between the eye and the ear, in the slightly drooping mouth and thin lips. For now, though, only Blanche’s hands had been touched by the beginnings of old age, or “oldness,” as Émilienne called it: peasant’s hands, as powerful as a man’s, a soldier’s, a farmer’s. Immense hands, incisive, capable of gentleness every now and then, when the heart called for a caress, along a horse’s back, or a child’s hair.

  Blanche had turned thirty in April. To mark the occasion, Émilienne had left an envelope on her pillow, a bit of money “to buy whatever she wanted”; the note accompanying the sheaf of bills—as smooth and dry as if they’d been ironed—instructing her “not to buy a
nything for the farm.” It was for her. For a new dress, a new pair of shoes to match, or a nice bottle of wine, some books, a round-trip train ticket to the city. At thirty, it would never have occurred to Blanche to spend a single sou for her own pleasure. She had blushed on reading the note, of course, like a teenager given permission to go out that evening, and then Louis had called from the courtyard for her to come down, that the eggs weren’t going to sell themselves. Downstairs, Émilienne, weary but tenacious, bent but upright, had given her a wink before watching her head outside. A prisoner of her eighty-four years, Émilienne was storing herself up for the winter like an animal, leaving the two sturdy adults to pilot the stationary vessel that was Paradise. A few months earlier, she had still been asking Blanche or Louis to describe their day in detail—were the heifers and the bulls and the calves healthy? Were the sows eating well? The hens laying enough eggs? Had they fed the dog and put it on a new rope?—and each evening they’d complied patiently, rewinding the past twenty-four hours, hoping they hadn’t forgotten to close a door or give the correct change or pour the right grain into the right trough. But they never forgot anything. And when Émilienne had slipped the ten twenty-franc bills into that envelope for Blanche, something collapsed inside her. Thirty years. How old had Marianne and Étienne been when they were killed in that road accident? How old?

  Émilienne had crept softly up the stairs to place her gift on her granddaughter’s pillow. Blanche had overcome the deaths of her parents; she had resisted Louis’s desire, accepted her brother’s helplessness. And above all, Blanche had stricken down her first love.

  “You’ll never guess!”

  Louis sat down next to the young woman and began clearing the feathers from the table.

  “Why am I even putting newspaper down if you’re going to pick them up one at a time?”

  Louis sighed and scooted closer to her, mischievously. Curiously, the years sat easily on him; the shadows of the past had lifted, leaving only the occasional trace, a slight quiver of the lip, perhaps, but he didn’t seem to age. Now past forty, his hair, bleached pale by years of work in the fields, brightened his face. Blanche found him almost handsome when the sun shone on his hollow cheeks and kindled a gleam in his eye of something almost like joy.

  “Cat got your tongue?”

  Blanche picked up a handful of feathers and blew them in his face. Louis snorted and let out a sneeze, making the feathers flutter around the body of the hen, now pink and cold.

  “What, did we get rich overnight?” she quipped, a teasing little nothing.

  “Better! Gabriel has a girlfriend! Finally!”

  Blanche’s hand froze above the newspaper. Her eyes widened.

  “A real one?”

  Louis laughed.

  “Of course, a real one! It’s the girl from Le Marché. You know; the short one, with the boobs.”

  He thrust out his chest, cupping both hands in front of it.

  “I know perfectly well who she is, thank you. No need for a visual aid.”

  Louis gazed into the fireplace, his stare unfocused. He was obviously imagining his head buried between those two magnificent breasts, and Blanche’s mouth twitched with irritation.

  “Louis, are you listening to me? What’s she like, this girl? Other than her chest, which you seem to be quite familiar with.”

  He reddened and looked away, scratching at the table with the tip of a feather larger than the others.

  “She’s cute. Her father works at the train station, not far away.”

  He almost said, “with Alexandre’s father.” Blanche folded the four corners of the newspaper together.

  “Will she chew him up and spit him out, do you think?” she asked, picking up the chicken and thrusting a hand inside its carcass, drawing a groan of disgust from Louis, his thoughts jerked unpleasantly away from the luscious bosom of the girl from Le Marché.

  “She won’t chew him up; she’ll swallow him whole!”

  Blanche smiled.

  “He had his arms around her waist this morning,” he continued.

  She told him to be quiet. The older he got, the more he talked. A real chatterbox.

  So, Gabriel had found someone to share his depression. She emptied the entrails into a dish for the dog.

  “Promise not to make fun of him when he tells us.”

  Louis pretended to cross his heart. The news had visibly filled him with an almost ridiculous energy. Gabriel had found someone. Who would have thought it? Then again, he was an extremely handsome young man. Despite the passing years, he looked as much like a teenager as ever. At twenty-seven, he could pass for seventeen. He didn’t go out much, so his skin had a dreamy pallor, and that paleness, along with his deep, serious eyes, turned every word he said into a sermon. He was like an angel crossing the yard of Paradise each day, with his uncombed hair, his rumpled trousers, his shirts with their buttonless cuffs flapping around his thin wrists.

  Gabriel didn’t live at Paradise anymore. Not in Émilienne’s house, at least.

  Upon finishing high school, he had shut himself in his room upstairs for months. Blanche’s little brother had wanted to be alone. He hadn’t wanted to see a soul. Émilienne had left him to his sorrows, which she couldn’t understand, or perhaps understood all too well. She knew he would emerge when the time was right, and the summer he turned nineteen, he had announced that he was going to find work in the village. He would rent the tiny house across the road—more a box than a house—so as not to be too far away, he said. He’d told them this one evening after a dinner he hadn’t touched, and when he’d stood up and spoken, a defiant look on his face, Louis had whistled admiringly.

  “You felt you needed to stand up to tell us you’re moving across the street?” Émilienne had asked, dryly.

  Blanche hadn’t said anything. She’d given him a look full of affection—not love, but affection—which he had returned distractedly, already elsewhere in his head.

  And he had left. He had actually done it. He’d been a gofer at the bistro and then taken the night shift in the back room at the post office. He’d cleaned streets and dishes and toilets, and then he’d taken a job detasseling corn, and Émilienne had been sure he wouldn’t be able to keep up the pace, skinny and weak as he was. But, as soon as he’d found himself outside Paradise, Gabriel had begun to draw on reserves of strength his grandmother and sister didn’t know he had. When the summer season ended, after having paid two months’ rent in advance, he had moved with nothing, absolutely nothing, into the little wood-and-cement cube on the other side of the bend in the road where his parents had been found dead.

  From that day on, it had been his habit to drop by Paradise to “say hello,” asking how things were going, sometimes staying for a coffee. But he never said much about himself or gave straight answers to Émilienne’s questions. He came, that’s all; simply came and showed himself to be healthy, to be managing, managing better than he had ever done at home. He wasn’t happy, or even unburdened, exactly, but there was a sort of lightness in his way of arriving each evening at seven. Maybe living away from Paradise had brought him a kind of welcome anonymity, opened up a space within him, a place for thoughts and memories belonging only to him. Away from the watchful eyes of Blanche and Émilienne, away from the room he had shared with Louis, Gabriel—finally—grew up.

  No one had commented when he’d moved across the road. Émilienne had asked Louis not to say anything, and when Louis had asked why she’d replied, “You know,” her tone irritated, almost sad. Louis had stopped by Gabriel’s place often at first, asking if he needed anything, or if he’d like to take a stroll together, or go for a beer. He always found Gabriel lounging on his bed or ensconced in his armchair, very calm, and the young man always answered, “No, but I appreciate it.” Not “No, thanks,” but “No, but I appreciate it,” in a new voice, the voice of someone who had found a place of his own i
n the world. A small, shabby place, perhaps, but a place of his own. He felt almost as if he’d been born a second time, and after a few weeks, Louis had stopped visiting him. He still kept an eye out for Gabriel in the village and watched him when he was at Paradise in the evenings, like a bird hovering over a dark forest. Eventually, though, Louis had to reconcile himself to the idea that the boy was all right. Not perfectly fine, but all right, simply all right.

  And now he was embracing a girl, and now there was a girl walking with him. Gabriel was living in his cube beyond The Pin, with his dreams and his silences, and now here was a girl, ready to share those dreams and those silences.

  Gabriel had always drawn. Since earliest childhood, since Louloute’s death, his hand had endlessly sketched sweeping lines on scraps of paper and whole pages and walls. Émilienne said he took after his father, that he was the same type, with the same messy hair, the same absentmindedness, and that he’d been knocked down in the dirt at an early age, too, just like him. And now a girl, a pretty girl, had come to lift him up.

  As was his habit, Gabriel now stepped quietly and unobtrusively into the dining room. Blanche, still in shock, stared at him with wide, shining eyes.

  “You certainly look pleased,” her brother said, taking off his shoes even though he’d already tracked dirt into the vestibule.

  “She only just heard the news,” Louis said, teasingly.

  Blanche looked daggers at him. He sat down next to her at the table, his expression uncomprehending.