A Beast in Paradise

by Cécile Coulon

  Alexandre’s voice seemed to come from a long way off.

  “Blanche?”

  He’d put his hand on her arm to get her attention. They hadn’t been so near one another since his return. From this close up, his bruised and swollen face was truly ghastly.

  “God, you’re hideous,” she said.

  Alexandre smiled briefly.

  “It’s very trendy right now, cockfighting.”

  Blanche stood up with difficulty and vanished into the hall without slamming the door behind her, and in that simple, restrained gesture, Alexandre sensed the beginnings, infinitesimal as they were, of renewed trust.

  TENDING

  The house was empty.

  And yet, the floorboards creaked, the roof murmured, the beams in the attic groaned. A dormouse could be heard skittering. The frequent barking of the dog, in its place in front of the barn, penetrated the thick walls. When the wind blew hard, the windows rattled like a skeleton. The napkin folded in quarters on the table, the cup still atop it, the coffee left in the cup; the newspaper, open to the real estate listings; another cup, on the table, its bottom stained with a dark ring. The bench seat askew. The coffeepot half-full. Louis studied each object, searched the kitchen and the dining room for some hint, some clue.

  He’d woken early, on Blanche’s brother’s sofa. He’d heard Aurore’s breathing in the dimness, lighter and more serene than Gabriel’s. For a split second he’d been tempted to go closer, to watch them sleeping so peacefully. Then he had turned and opened the door noiselessly and crossed the street, stoop-shouldered, his forty-year-old bachelor’s body in the dawn light like an animal crossing a field of flowers.

  His first, reflexive act was to go upstairs. The covers on Blanche’s bed were pulled back on one side only. A wave of relief washed over him. They hadn’t slept together; Blanche hadn’t joined Alexandre in the night. She had undoubtedly taken refuge in Louis’s own bedroom with its two twin beds. He glanced inside. She had clearly slept late; he could smell her morning scent, the smell of skin that has spent hours steeping in bed linen, that smell that is only bearable if you love someone.

  He’d never known the house to be empty. No note on the table, not a sign of life, simply that square of cloth with the coffee cup on top. Alexandre had had breakfast here, had read the newspaper. Blanche had remained standing, perhaps leaning against the wall where Émilienne had held her that evening. They’d chatted together like an old married couple.

  A couple.

  The idea tore him apart. He saw them, both of them, there in the kitchen where Louis had rejected his mother in favor of Émilienne; he saw them there, contentedly settled in. His fist clenched the dishtowel. Through the window he saw the chickens gathered in front of the porch steps, their clucking more agitated than usual.

  Where was Émilienne?

  Louis left the dining room at a run. The grandmother’s room was empty. She wasn’t there, but the bed hadn’t been made, and the covers had been pulled to one side, trailing on the floor. A large sweat stain was visible on the mattress, and Émilienne’s glasses sat on the nightstand, neatly folded on top of a book next to a tube of medicine.

  He circled the room in a sort of animalistic frenzy. Where were they all? Why hadn’t anyone said anything to him? Why was he here, alone, now? An old feeling rose up in him, one from childhood, from those evenings when he had stayed outside on the front step, to keep away from his father’s fists. Alone. He went to the window, opened it, drew in a deep breath of the fresh air scented with hay and earth and manure.

  He didn’t belong to this family. He was an employee here. No one had spoken to him because they didn’t expect anything from him except what you would normally expect from a farmhand. Feed the chickens. Clean the yard. Take care of the barn. Sort the eggs. Milk the cows. He wasn’t part of the family; he was part of the farm. Louis had forgotten what it meant, to be part of the scenery without being part of the picture.

  Before going back downstairs, he stripped the sheets from Émilienne’s bed, dropping them in a pile on the floor. At least she won’t have to sleep in a dirty bed when she gets home.

  The car pulled hastily into the yard just as Louis was setting off down the slope toward the pigpen. The crunch of wheels on the beaten earth startled him and he whirled around, shoulders hunched, fists raised. When the driver’s side door opened, he expected to see Alexandre step out of the car, but it was Blanche who appeared instead, breathless. Their eyes met, full of inexpressible reproach. Louis moved closer. She was wearing Alexandre’s jacket.

  “Wow, things are progressing quickly, I see.”

  “Shut up.”

  Blanche’s voice was low, deep, almost masculine. Émilienne’s voice, whenever anything went wrong.

  “Émilienne’s in the hospital,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I called, but you didn’t answer,” Blanche lied.

  I must already have left when she tried to reach me, Louis thought.

  “I’ll go there now,” he said stepping closer. “Give me the keys.”

  She shied away.

  “Alexandre’s with her.”

  Pain lanced through his heart, deep and sharp, like a tree being cut down.

  “Why him?” he asked, the words coming out as a groan.

  He didn’t say anything else. An image of Louis in Marianne and Étienne’s bedroom, his face ravaged by his own father’s fists, appeared in Blanche’s mind, and then Alexandre’s face was superimposed on it, in that same room, at that same time of night.

  “He knew the doctor, Louis.”

  She’d pronounced his first name distinctly, impressing each word on him so he would understand. Alexandre knew the doctor, and so Émilienne had been treated more quickly.

  His hands were trembling. They embarrassed him, these hands used to cowhide and dog hair and the rough bark of trees. He didn’t know what to do with them, so he scratched at some imaginary sores.

  “You should have left a note. I was worried.”

  Blanche could sense the anger draining from his voice. Louis loved Émilienne as much as she did. She imagined how he must have felt when he came home, with no one in the house or outside. She realized how furious she would have been in his place, with how long he’d been taking care of this family, this Paradise, with how long he’d been reminded, every day, that he would never be part of it.

  “There wasn’t time . . . you should have seen her, when I found her . . . ”

  Then she added:

  “I asked myself what you would have done, in my place.”

  Louis sighed. He turned and continued toward the pigpen, pretending to ignore what had just been said.

  She watched him disappear down the slope, his big frame swaying among the trees.

  RETURNING

  For a week, Blanche and Gabriel took turns at Émilienne’s bedside.

  She was recovering, but weak. The first time they’d seen her after her arrival at the hospital, they’d been shocked by the pallor of her skin, by the sight of her lying in bed, woozy from drugs. Standing next to their grandmother, they’d hardly moved. Émilienne had gazed back at them between half-shut eyelids. Blanche had spent that first day in a chair next to the bed. When she’d come back to the hospital, Alexandre was waiting at the door of Émilienne’s room. “I figured I probably shouldn’t go in,” he’d stammered, “but the nurses say she’s doing well; she’s very tired, but she’s doing well,” and then he’d withdrawn silently, like a manservant.

  Aurore accompanied Gabriel to the hospital twice a day, staying in the lobby while he went to the room. Every morning, Alexandre was there. Sitting in a chair, magazine in hand, waiting for Blanche, very well dressed, neatly groomed, at ease, confident yet unobtrusive. When Blanche appeared, he spoke to her briefly, and then left the hospital.

  Gabrie
l always walked through the hospital entrance first. At first, he’d simply waved to Alexandre in greeting. After all, Alexandre knew the doctor; it had been his idea to come directly to the hospital rather than making Émilienne wait. Gabriel knew he owed his grandmother’s comfort, and Blanche’s relief, to him.

  Alexandre’s face still bore traces of his fight with Louis. Gabriel figured he’d probably had it coming, really had it coming. To his credit, Alexandre didn’t complain, just carried on, with his black eye fading to yellow and the rainbow of bruises on his cheekbones. For a week, they came and went, speaking little, filing past beneath the orderlies’ watchful eyes. On the following Monday, Émilienne was taken home in an ambulance. That morning, Blanche looked around for Alexandre despite herself, uneasy at first, then reassuring herself that he must know her grandmother was leaving the hospital.

  Back at Paradise, the two ambulance attendants wanted to help Émilienne upstairs, but she refused, protesting that she was perfectly fit to die in her kitchen. Louis, beneath the tree, watched them assisting her up the porch steps. She was skin and bones, like a crumpled sheet of paper. He read in their eyes a kind of admiration for this old lady, but they had absolutely no idea how much she needed this place, the same way she needed water or oxygen. Every hour spent in the hospital, away from Paradise, had weakened her. They helped her sit down at the kitchen table. One of the attendants unfolded a page of instructions, smoothing it with the palm of his hand, repeating that she had to “follow the directions carefully.” Émilienne agreed, exasperated; yes, she would take her medication; yes, she’d be very careful; yes, she’d follow the prescribed diet to the letter, and when he told her for the tenth time to “take care of herself,” she murmured:

  “Please, go now, if you don’t mind. I understand everything you’ve said. I’m old, not deaf.”

  When the ambulance had departed, Louis unfolded himself from beneath the tree. His big hands, buried in the pockets of his work coveralls, had dug into the fabric so hard as to poke holes in it. He hadn’t seen Émilienne in eight days. Walking into the dining room, where Blanche was mulling over which leftovers to prepare for dinner, he felt like a little boy again. He edged over to the window and whispered:

  “Hello, Émilienne.”

  The grandmother nodded at him. Louis had never seen her so glum, so weak.

  “Since when do you take vacations without warning me?”

  WAITING

  Blanche, Louis, Gabriel, and Aurore worked together to care for Émilienne. Aurore cooked dishes of vegetables and rice and potatoes and prepared jars of stewed fruit, which she stored in a cool place according to the doctor’s instructions. Blanche refilled the pill dispenser each night: three tablets, three times a day. She wanted Émilienne to be comfortable, to regain her strength. The operation had weakened her; in the days following her return home, she couldn’t manage the stairs to her bedroom alone. Every morning she took one more step in the kitchen or the front hall, on the porch or in the yard; every one of those steps was a victory, and Blanche saw how Louis, so attentive to Émilienne, to the expression on her face when exhaustion took over, went out of his way to encourage her. He supported her, bearing her old woman’s weight on his overgrown boy’s arm, talking with her about his day, or the cranes that had come back to the pond. Louis brought Émilienne back to a place where she was strong, solid; he compelled her, calmly and gently, to make it to the door, to the gate, to use her mind and her memory in spite of fatigue and old age and the shock of eight days spent in a hospital room. Watching Émilienne make her way through the immense yard, her steps so achingly slow, Blanche feared that the immobile week outside Paradise had sapped her strength forever. Leaving her land had brought the full force of her years crashing down on her. Time had affected her like ice water on delicate lingerie; Émilienne had shriveled with age. Soon, despite everything she had given to this place, she would no longer belong to this earth—or rather, she would belong to it utterly and completely, would be consumed by it.

  Blanche sensed that the end was near. Émilienne seemed so agonizingly vulnerable. Her granddaughter had never seen her like this. And Louis was caring for her as if his own life depended on it. Sometimes Blanche thought Émilienne didn’t really need her, or Gabriel. That this man was enough, this unexpected protector, on whom she had breathed gently for so long to revive his flame.

  For three weeks, neither Blanche nor Louis left Paradise. They tended to Émilienne, while Gabriel managed things at the market with Aurore. Once a week, they set up their tables and trestles, amorous as lovebirds beneath the scandalized, skeptical, and occasionally fond gazes of the market regulars. In truth, Gabriel had never been so alive as he was during those few days, those three consecutive Thursdays when he reigned, finally, over a tiny scrap of Paradise, his queen at his side, whom he loved the way Blanche loved the land and Louis loved Émilienne: unconditionally.

  And so, they carried on that way. The days passed, and Émilienne slowly regained the use of her limbs. The further she seemed from danger, the more Blanche’s thoughts roved beyond the boundaries of Paradise. She hadn’t seen Alexandre since that second-to-last day at the hospital. He had been there every morning, sitting in the waiting room. They’d exchanged a few words about the weather and Émilienne’s condition. Then he’d left the building, calmly, and she’d watched him go, every time, always in the same direction.

  But since Émilienne’s return to Paradise, nothing. Not a call, not a note. Blanche had thought perhaps he was afraid of Louis, that he was taking a step back while Émilienne regained her strength. She’d tried to reassure herself by repeating that he had “other things to do,” but after three weeks without a word, she was beginning to feel stripped of her reason, anguish threatening to overwhelm her. She waited, like the wife of a sea captain, for some sign, some news of him. Anything. Some hint.

  On the fourth market Thursday, unable to bear it any longer, she begged Gabriel and Aurore to let her go instead, insisting when they balked at the idea that she “needed some air.” They looked back at her, certain she was lying. At last they gave in, still offering to go along and help her, which she refused. Blanche wanted to take back the reins of Paradise, and she wanted to do it alone, backed up by Louis, each at their own station, with their own mission, their own animals, their own secrets. Their own actions. And each with their own fears of being merely transient, temporary; of destroying what was already fragile, of spoiling the beauty. Each with their nights of anger, their dawn awakenings, and each for themselves, and all for Émilienne, to the end.

  In choosing to live elsewhere, Gabriel and Aurore pushed themselves away from the shores of Paradise, navigating the same waters as Blanche without encountering the same rocky shoals, always retreating, hand in hand, to the little cabin a few hundred meters from Émilienne’s house.

  REUNITING

  It was hot enough to cook the eggs in their shells. Blanche covered them with a damp cloth. Sweat beaded on her forehead, curling the wisps of hair behind her delicate, almost bony ears. The market was crammed to bursting on this first market Thursday in May; a mob of tourists and regulars, merchants and farmers, children and old people pressed close in front of the stalls. People negotiated three for the price of two, shook hands without knowing each other, kissed without loving each other in the shadow of the church bell tower, which chimed every half hour. The vendors cast a quick eye over their accounts; the minutes ticked by, and the money flowed in. The spring was dying rapidly, smothered by the damp heat of what promised to be a scorching summer.

  Blanche hadn’t appeared in public since Émilienne’s hospitalization. People kept coming over to see her, hugging her tightly and asking for news, always requesting more details, making more assumptions, buying more eggs from her than usual, mentioning Gabriel and his “pretty girl . . . .” No one could ever remember her name. “Aurore,” Blanche said, sighing, “it’s Aurore,” but they kept referring to h
er as “that pretty girl.” By the end of the morning, her stock was almost completely sold out, one sale immediately following another, and the conversations too, and in that uninterrupted flow of faces, customers, regulars, no trace of Alexandre.

  The bells were chiming twelve-thirty when she saw him near the village entrance at the other end of the marketplace, lined with low trees planted along a path that snaked among the houses. “Alexandre!” she called, but he didn’t hear. With remarkable quickness, Blanche ducked under the table, reappearing in the aisle crowded with families goggling at every vegetable and piece of fruit. Jostling three old ladies as she dodged between bodies made slow-witted by the heat, thrusting a hand in the air so that Alexandre, who had his back to the square and was about to cross the street, would see her. When she’d passed the last vendor’s stand and the terrace of Le Marché, where Aurore saw her narrowly avoid overturning a table, she flung herself across the lawn, as breathless as if it were a holiday, and scrambled across the street after Alexandre. He was ambling down the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, heading toward the part of the village where his parents lived.

  He turned just before she grasped his shoulder. At the sight of Blanche, red-faced and sweating, her hair disheveled, steadying herself with one hand on the wall, a wide smile lit up his handsome face.

  “What on earth’s gotten into you?” he asked.

  “I saw you from the market . . . I called to you, but . . . you didn’t hear me so I . . . ”

  She gasped, sucking in a lungful of air.

  “Relax, Blanche.”

  She straightened abruptly.

  “How do you expect me to relax? I haven’t heard from you!”

  Anger distorted her fine features. Alexandre tried to take her hand, but she jerked it away.

  “I thought you’d left again! What game are you playing, Alexandre? Why did you come to the hospital every day? Why are you doing this to me?”