A Beast in Paradise

by Cécile Coulon

  “Is that what’s making you so happy?”

  Blanche laughed, both hands in the carcass.

  Gabriel shot a glance at Louis, who caught it like a knife thrown across the room. Blanche’s brother stared questioningly at the farmhand now, brows knitted.

  Louis blew out a breath. “Fine, okay; I told her. But I saw you both outside the school this morning; it’s not like you’re hiding away.”

  Gabriel sighed. Blanche thought he would start telling them about the girl, but he seemed to close himself off. She pulled her right hand out of the bird’s carcass, her palm dripping with blood and juices. Gabriel avoided her eyes. If he could have left the room; if only he could have left the room.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You look so serious all of a sudden.”

  Louis opened his mouth to make one of his jokes, but Blanche silenced him with a look.

  “I thought you meant something else,” Gabriel said, uncomfortably.

  Louis let out a pfff. He generally knew everything that was going on.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Gabriel turned and stared into the cold fireplace, his gaze lost among the ashes.

  “Alexandre is back.”

  TELLING

  People loved his wide smile, the dimples that framed his mouth, giving his face a boyish look that made them trust him immediately: This young man could never be anything but good and kind.

  Alexandre had lost none of his charm; if anything, he had added to it, building battlements of friendliness, of promises that fell softly on the ear. He spent his life scrutinizing the gazes of others, their movements, the meandering intricacies of their souls, in order to slip inside them, smoothly and softly, with that ease that was as extraordinary as it was wounding and cruel. This was the key to his ability to make deals rapidly, to obtain signatures within just a day or a week, checks he promised to deposit “whenever is best for you, of course.” Everyone praised his manners; the man who had agreed to take him on as a summer intern fresh out of high school had been sufficiently impressed by his protégé’s sharpness to keep him on for two years in a work-study program. Then he’d hired the young man on the spot. For twelve years, Blanche’s great love worked for the same company, owned by the same family for three generations.

  He sold office space, land, apartments, houses, garages, and businesses. At first, he worked solely by telephone; his voice soothed his customers’ anxieties with the same reassuring frankness he’d conveyed selling eggs in the market as a teenager. Of course the apartment keys could be available a week earlier; of course the house was sound, the roof redone; of course the plot of land just outside the city was zoned for construction. Every sentence, every answer started with of course. And it worked. It didn’t matter that the roof was full of holes the size of your fist, or that the land was on a flood plain, or that the apartment stank of dampness; those two magic words made it all go away. Of course, ma’am. Of course, sir. Even better, no one ever blamed him for anything. He was so young, so charming, his eyes so full of disingenuous honesty; who on earth could be angry with him over a few little fibs? Of course, Alexandre was the man for every occasion.

  Eight years after he began working for the company, they sent him to New Zealand for a month to find the mysterious heir of a family whose only son had gone to sea years earlier, and whose inheritance constituted a financial gold mine for the firm. Once there, Alexandre located the man in question, struck up a friendship with him, and spent some considerable time roaming with him around the southern part of the country, its coast lined with abandoned properties left to rot. Alexandre made a deal with his host: he would buy a parcel of beachfront land, which the heir would live on and care for, and Alexandre would look after the family residence in France so that it could be sold at a good price. He returned from New Zealand the owner of a dozen hectares that would, in twenty years’ time, be worth ten times what he’d paid for them, and the heir, on his gigantic island, knew that a young man was working busily to ensure that he’d have a nest egg for his old age. He trusted Alexandre. Just like everyone did.

  After his return to France, Alexandre kept up a regular correspondence with the heir. While the other man maintained the property in New Zealand, Alexandre carried out improvements on the outside of the family residence, had the lawns mowed and the hedges trimmed, the floors redone, and the walls painted. Nothing too major. Nothing beyond the capacities of the men he habitually called on whenever a property required quick renovation for resale. He even lent a hand at the worksite sometimes, to show that he paid attention to everything, down to the smallest detail. The faulty plumbing was left untouched, as was the antique wiring. From the outside, to an untrained eye, this was an impeccably maintained house. It was sold three years after Alexandre’s return, to a couple from out of town who fell in love with the immaculately landscaped garden. The gate was new; the windows had been replaced; there wasn’t even a single dead leaf on the path to the front door. A wonder. For sale. Alexandre deployed his dimples and adopted a conspiratorial air, like someone letting you in on a delicious secret, and in the months that followed, the heir became, thanks to the sacred word of his distant friend, a contented exile, without a single link to France left except his amiable business partner.

  “ . . . that’s what I’ve heard, anyway,” Gabriel finished.

  He’d told them everything. Alexandre’s return, New Zealand, the faraway friend. The money. Everything.

  Émilienne was watching him keenly. Gabriel seemed feverish. With a sort of eagerness mixed with fear and excitement, he kept piling on details about the heir, the house, the garden full of heirloom-variety rosebushes, “really amazing ones.” Louis shook his head, consumed by curiosity.

  “But, so then why come back now?” the farmhand grumbled. “Why doesn’t he go back to New Zealand instead of playing the big shot here?”

  Gabriel darted a glance at Blanche. She was listening. She hadn’t moved.

  “She told me he was planning to move back here, but nothing’s definite. His parents haven’t seen him in twelve years. They’re as excited as kids,” he mumbled, trying to meet his sister’s gaze, which was now fixed unseeingly on the knots in the wooden table, a swarm of unspoken questions visible in her eyes.

  “Who is ‘she’?”

  “Aurore, from Le Marché. Her dad works at the train station with Alexandre’s father. He told him everything.”

  Louis chuckled.

  “Oh yes, I’d forgotten about her.”

  Gabriel shrugged. Émilienne turned away on creaking joints and began running water into the sink full of dirty dishes.

  Aurore and Gabriel. It has a nice ring to it, actually, thought Blanche, still gazing at the table, at the grooves and ridges in the wood, wishing they would open wide and swallow her, take her down, down, to the center of the earth, beneath these fields and these cows’ asses and these chicken feet, beneath Sombre-Étang, where Alexandre’s presence still hovered like a spring bird no one was waiting for anymore.

  HUNGERING

  The little house, sandwiched between two others that looked exactly like it, down to the color of the shutters and the length of the grass in the front lawn—the little house made Alexandre shudder as he parked, the wheels of his car exactly parallel to the low wall where an empty brown terra-cotta vase sat next to a mailbox on which his parents’ last name was slowly fading. They never bothered to change the label; the postman knew who lived here: these people, this couple whose son had gotten the hell out of town the moment he reached adulthood, hadn’t budged an inch; their lives had not changed, except for the departure of their child for the big city, where people said he’d made a success of himself, had even gone to New Zealand. Their Alexandre, so handsome, so polite, so confident—in New Zealand!

  He pushed open the iron gate, his gaze sweeping quickly over the immaculately trimmed lawn, and made
his way toward the front door. He hadn’t even had time to ring the bell before his mother opened the door, smoothing her blouse, tugging it down, and when she took him in her arms, Alexandre shivered. Childhood rose up in him again like a corpse floating to the surface of a river.

  “Well, come in, come in! Don’t just stand there!”

  He gave her what he thought of as his most charming smile.

  After he’d left, the son never went back to his parents’ house again. He did call them, and his mother came to visit him several times in the small, tidy room he rented, which he paid for by working weekends and holidays. His father always picked up when he called from his office telephone every Friday afternoon to tell them about his week and ask about theirs. Always the same stories. Alexandre called, and he worried, but he didn’t come back. At Christmas and the New Year, he stayed in the city and took holiday work while everyone else traveled or went home to their families. He manned the cash register at the movie theatre, cleared out shelves at the grocery store, it didn’t much matter what; he was earning a living. “Mama, it takes money to rent a real apartment, and I have to earn that money somewhere; it’s not just going to fall out of the sky,” he’d say when his mother begged him to come home, at least for a weekend, Sunday lunch with his family.

  On the day his father, from the depths of his armchair, had listened to Alexandre announce over the phone, “I’m coming back to the village. I’ll be there on Sunday,” the parents had thought something terrible had happened. He’d lost his job, maybe, or developed some terminal disease. They understood neither this return or the self-assured voice on the other end of the line.

  Now, going down the narrow hallway, the closed door of his old bedroom beckoning, brimming with memories, Alexandre was overcome by a wave of dizziness. He veered off toward the dining room, where the table stood between the fireplace and the sideboard, set with its china plates painted with blue-and-white country scenes. His mother had cooked roast beef, his father brought out a suitable bottle of red wine. On the other side of the room, out the window, the field bordering the forest had been fenced off, but a two-meter-wide bed of nasturtiums ran along the foot of the fence.

  “Those flowers are pretty,” he managed to say, sitting down in his place next to his father.

  A wide smile lit up his mother’s face.

  “Aren’t they? The owner of the field let us plant them, as long as they didn’t take up too much space. Gives a bit of color.”

  “And it keeps your mother busy,” quipped his father.

  Alexandre felt suddenly nauseated.

  “Are you all right, son? You’re not sick, are you?”

  The man put a hand on his son’s shoulder.

  “It’s nothing. The emotion of being back,” lied Alexandre.

  Under the table, his foot tapped feverishly on the carpet.

  “I’d like to buy that field,” he said. “We could put in a terrace behind the house. Plant more flowers. It would be beautiful.”

  “Oh, you, always with your crazy ideas!” his mother exclaimed, filling her son’s plate.

  Alexandre shot her a look of fury before restraining himself. For a split second, it was as if a veil of rage covered his face and he was peering through a sort of meshwork, seeing his parents as nothing but bent, blurred silhouettes.

  “It’s not a crazy idea. I’d like to come back and live around here, make things nice, you know.”

  They stared at him, dumbfounded.

  “But, dear, what on earth would we do with a terrace?” his mother asked, bending over him. “They’re nothing but a hassle.”

  “And wood warps in the rain,” his father agreed, taking a sip of wine. “Now eat up before it gets cold, son. You’ve lost weight; you’re working too much, not eating enough.”

  Alexandre opened his mouth to respond, but his father was hunched over his plate, cutting his meat so forcefully that the entire table shook.

  At the end of the meal, they sat for a long while in silence. His mother asked the occasional question about his employer; Alexandre replied that everything was fine, since his return from New Zealand he’d been seen as the team leader. Everything was just fine, really. Nothing much to tell.

  “Is there a girl in the picture?” his father asked, as his mother began to clear away the dishes.

  Alexandre flinched.

  “You really think I have time for that?”

  “The Émard girl doesn’t have time for it either, I hear.”

  An image of Blanche’s face, against the pillow, flashed through Alexandre’s mind.

  “I’d like to move back here, start a business, open my own office.”

  “But why?” his mother called from the kitchen, over the gurgling sound of the coffee pot.

  Alexandre sighed, his guts contracting again.

  “Because I want to do things properly; I want to have something that belongs just to me.”

  And then he added:

  “And to make you proud of me.”

  In front of the house, his car, clean, neatly parked, clashed with the gray of the asphalt and the dingy white of the fence. In the middle of the tiny front lawn, hands on his hips, Alexandre gasped for breath. His shoes were getting wet; the hems of his immaculate jeans, wicking up water from the soaked grass, dampened his socks. He’d tugged on his shirt too much; it was wrinkled around his belly button, the shoulders sagging a bit. The cheap synthetic fabric rasped against his skin. He closed his eyes for a long moment, then, very calm, walked to the low wall. He picked up the terra-cotta vase and threw it as hard as he could on the pavement, where it smashed.

  SEDUCING

  Aurore was dozing on Gabriel’s bed.

  She worked at Le Marché, the café in the square where, every Thursday and the first Sunday of each month, people set up tables, trestles, crates, bags, and tarps. Always selling. More and more. Faster and faster. Aurore understood that; her bosses demanded efficiency from her, especially on market days, saying things like, “The customers should feel like you know what they want even before they order it,” and, “Don’t give them enough time to start wondering if they’ve wasted their lives between the moment you take their order and the moment you set a full plate down in front of them.” So, she worked quickly.

  They’d met in the back room of Le Marché. Gabriel was washing dishes. At first, he’d hardly been able to keep up; she’d shown him a few little time-saving tricks. They’d spent months together in that white kitchen, every day, bright white against the gray weather outside, sparkling clean in the morning and gleaming with grease in the evening, mocking the boss’s orders and the customers’ drunken guffaws. On the day Gabriel had saved enough money to move across the road he’d walked out of that kitchen, vowing never to come back, and when he’d reached Paradise, his hands red and raw from dish soap, he’d found a cardboard coaster in his jacket pocket, folded in half, with a telephone number written on it and the note “not after ten o’clock.”

  Gabriel had called. They’d met the next morning. Aurore was wearing her uniform, but, for the first time outside that blasted kitchen, neither of them knew what to say. Gabriel kept his head down, nodding nervously, while Aurore stood beside him, more nervous than she’d been at her first communion. They’d walked a little way through the village’s main street, silent and shy and happy, and then they’d returned to their starting point in front of Le Marché, and Gabriel had whispered, “See you tomorrow.”

  He’d come back the next day. She was wearing her uniform. They’d walked for a little longer this time, and Aurora had said knowingly, smiling, “It’s nice just to walk when nothing needs to be said.” Every day, they’d played out the same scene, at the same time. Aurore was funny; she made him laugh, and the more this overgrown little boy laughed, the more that laughter was filled with love and joy. Six months of walking and laughter eventually had their effect
on Gabriel, and as they were parting one morning, he asked her if they could see each other “in the evening, maybe.” He’d stammered a little, adding, “We could walk, or do something else,” and Aurore had replied, “I’m sure we’ll do something else.”

  Gabriel’s bed was like Gabriel himself: messy, but comfortable. Now that she was in the habit of spending her nights there, Aurore realized that she wouldn’t be able to heal Gabriel, that a sort of black tree had taken root inside him in early childhood, a tree watered with fury by his parents’ deaths. She couldn’t cut it down, only lop off a few boughs when they became too heavy. She cared for the tree, caressed it with her words and her smile, shook it so that the dead leaves and poisoned fruit fell from his soul.

  “Aurore?”

  She grunted. The day had been a long one. Her clothes still smelled like onion and boiled potato.

  “Why has Alexandre come back?”

  She raised herself up on an elbow, eyes half-closed, the folds in the sheet imprinted on her cheek.

  “Aurore, what do you know about him?”

  She pulled herself into a sitting position, crossing her legs. Gabriel had perched on the side of the bed.

  “I told you everything my dad told me,” she sighed. “Alexandre made a fortune in New Zealand. His parents are very proud.”

  Gabriel’s gaze was fixed on her mouth, searching the movements of her lips for a word she refused to say aloud.

  “I just want to try to understand why.”

  “Why what?”

  “Why he came back.”

  Aurore leaned back against the pillow.

  “His father says he’s going to buy the land behind their house; he’s going to buy the whole village . . . ”

  Gabriel pictured the horrible little street where Alexandre’s parents lived. The hectares of land behind it.