The memory of their embraces made her stomach clench, cramps doubling her over. Groaning, Blanche lifted her head, both arms wrapped around her middle, and above her head, all along the baseboards and the windows she counted the daddy longlegs and spiders, spinning on their webs. In the half-light it was difficult for Blanche to make them out; two of them moved to within a few centimeters of her head, their webs swaying, and Blanche watched the tiny dancing feet, eyes half-closed, the cramps receding. As soon as she could straighten up without pain, Blanche plucked the spider nearest to her mouth and repeated her act of twelve years earlier, swallowing it without chewing, sensing nothing on her tongue but a faint tang. Her movement had caused a second spider to fall. It lay near her ankle. Very quickly she seized it and sent it, whole, down her throat. Shivers ran through Blanche’s body, greedy, avid, like a bird beating its wings between her breasts and her sex, demanding to be fed, famished, imploring, and Blanche, aroused by the taste of blood and chitin, scrutinized every centimeter of the wall in search of another living being to devour.
In the days that followed, she was a beast, eating the animals she could trap within the pathetic confines of her bedroom, her eyes accustomed to the half-light, her body coming apart. She didn’t sleep until her work was accomplished, and when she woke, the hunt began again. The morning after that first feast, she opened the window to let in any creatures lurking in the environs; she thought a mouse might scurry through the room, and then she would have no mercy, none.
Little by little, Blanche began to recover. But the days passed, and the plates set in front of the bedroom door returned, full, to the dining room table. Louis worried; he could hear Blanche moving around, he called out to her, she didn’t respond, and yet he could hear her distinctly. Sometimes it even seemed like she was jumping, clinging futilely to the walls. Louis wondered where she was getting the energy for it, and Émilienne, watching her assistant’s face darken with anxiety, kept repeating:
“What a racket!”
Louis didn’t have the strength to laugh. At night he dreamed that he broke down the door of Blanche’s room and carried her into his own, settling her in his bed and sleeping at her feet on the floor like a faithful dog, on the alert for the slightest noise of distress, ready to do anything and everything to help her get over Alexandre.
AVENGING
Louis?”
The farmhand stared at Blanche, stunned.
“You need to eat something,” Émilienne chided.
Blanche didn’t even look up. “I’m not hungry.”
“I don’t care,” replied her grandmother, pushing a full plate toward her. “You have to eat.”
Blanche’s ghost occupied the room, step by step. Her body seemed as light as her breathing was heavy, every movement weighing on that chest that rose and fell with such difficulty. The tracery of veins beneath skin stripped of its vibrant color looked like twisted flower stems on her arms, her neck, her temples. She was losing her hair, which floated wispily around her head. Louis watched strands of it drift to the floor and he wanted to scramble for them, to gather them into a bouquet to give to her. They hadn’t heard her come downstairs; the floorboards no longer creaked under her weight. The staircase, which usually squeaked so noisily, hadn’t made a sound.
The young woman sat down at the table. Her body, horrifyingly thin, seemed as if it might collapse into a heap of bones at any second. Louis avoided looking anywhere but at her big green eyes, so distressing to him was the sight of her fleshless arms and skeletal legs. Blanche had disappeared; nothing remained of her but eyes and pain.
“Louis, I want you to take a vacation,” she said.
“Like hell!”
He was wolfing down his potatoes as if he hadn’t eaten for months. Blanche read the fatigue in the stiffness of his movements, his hunched shoulders. Louis was forty-one years old but, at this table, at this time of day when the white glare of the sun was merciless, he looked ten years older.
“Louis, you’re going to take a vacation. Two weeks, at least. If you don’t, I’ll fire you,” Blanche said, coolly, dispassionately.
He looked up from his plate. His hand, suspended in the air, sketched faint circles, digging an invisible tunnel between them.
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“Right now, I’m ready to do anything.”
Émilienne nodded.
“Do as she says, Louis.”
EMERGING
Blanche took over the next morning, starting at five o’clock. First the cows, which she called, and which came, slowly.
“No, I’m not Louis,” she said to them, impatiently. “But that’s no reason to make me wait.”
Next, the chickens. She washed the car, made Émilienne’s breakfast, went to Gabriel’s house and asked him to handle things at the market for the next few weeks. Dumbfounded at the sight of his sister’s body, Gabriel couldn’t say a word. Blanche congratulated him on his upcoming wedding. “I’m here if you need anything,” she added. Gabriel stared at her uncomfortably, wide-eyed, and murmured a quick thank you that stood for all the rest, all they had never said to each other.
In the afternoon, Blanche walked down to the village. Every step felt like a hundred, so weak was she, but she drew energy from the fury that dwelled inside her. At Le Marché, she sat at a table on the terrace and ordered a beer; it had been so long since she’d had one, especially so early in the day. Aurore brought it to her. The terrace was deserted. Aurore offered to make her something to eat, a little plate of something; she was so pale, so thin, that Aurore wondered how she was even able to hold herself upright. “It doesn’t matter; I can manage,” Blanche snapped. Then she paid, leaving Aurore alone next to the wobbly table in this forgotten village that still bore the traces of Alexandre’s passage through it.
On the road to Paradise, she paused at the hairpin curve where her parents had died. There was nothing to indicate that a tragedy had happened here; the grass was as green as the eyes of the Émard women, the trees very tall, a chainsaw rumbling somewhere in the distance. The asphalt cut a wide black smile through the face of the forest. Blanche made her way down to the pigpen, where she stood among the wild grasses, murmuring, “Everything will fall into place.”
When she got back to the farm, her body stiff, Blanche went to the little shed where there was an iron faucet above a cement slab perforated with holes where Louis emptied the soured milk and the dirty water from the animals’ drinking troughs. The shed, damp in every season, sat in a hollow between the path to the pigpen and the outbuilding where they stored hay and straw. Louis washed his hands here before returning to the house; in the summers, he would stick his head under the faucet and let the icy water cascade down his back, his muscles flexing beneath his taut skin, marked on the knees and elbows and ankles from the constant friction of his work coveralls, and from crowding cows and nuzzling pigs and the dog’s tail wagging in the yard. Louis was used to being knocked around. When these slaps and bites and scratches came from Paradise, he kept his head down and accepted the slight pain indulgently, resignedly.
Coming out of the chicken coop on the day before his forced vacation, Louis had watched Blanche bypass the barn and vanish into the hollow. He’d blinked, surprised when she didn’t return right away, not having seen her go in the direction of the pigpen, much less the little shed, in weeks. Louis had set down his pail of grain, bringing a dozen guinea hens scuttling around his feet, and, picking his way through feathers and piles of chicken droppings, had crept after her noiselessly. The farm was humming with the last songs of the spring. Soon the summer would lock men and animals in its fiery prison. Swallows sought out the cool air on the edge of Sombre-Étang, and yellow-bellied toads sang their hymns among the boxwoods, the boughs of the tall trees trapping and holding the gentle melodies. Louis could feel a million tiny feet crawling in the hollows of his shoulders, but he didn’t dare slap them away for fea
r that Blanche would notice his presence. When he reached the corner of the barn, in front of the path choked with tall grass and stinging nettles, he pressed himself to the wall, his back very straight, head bent forward.
Blanche was crouching on the concrete slab, her hair loose, legs apart, drinking the cold water thirstily, her neck bent at an odd angle beneath the faucet. Bile rose in Louis’s throat: Blanche’s arms hung uselessly at her sides, her cheekbones jutting sharply. She drank for a long moment, hardly pausing to breathe, gulping the icy water as if to fill herself up. When she had finished, Louis shrank back, thinking she would turn back to the house, but then he heard the scraping of her trousers against the concrete slab. He leaned forward again.
Blanche was still on her knees. Her trousers were lying on the grass, her matchstick calves, drawn up beneath her thighs, flushing red. Water was still flowing from the faucet. Blanche used the flat of her hand to direct the stream between her thighs, holding on to the faucet with one hand, using the other to guide the jet of water—so cold, Louis thought—at her sex, into it, rubbing it so hard that Louis could feel, in the pit of his stomach, the burns the movement and the cold water were inflicting on her. With stiff-jointed, long-nailed fingers she polished the cleft in which Alexandre had buried himself so many times, into which she had agreed and wanted and begged for him to plunge again. Now, beneath Louis’s stunned gaze, she was emptying herself of Alexandre, scratching her walls until they bled, washing away the traces of his passage, the remains of their afternoons entangled in the sheets embroidered with the Émard family’s initials. She cleaned herself like a wounded animal, shriveled into herself, half-naked, the water flowing over her thighs and soaking into the ground with the milk and the dung and the slime and the little that Alexandre had left behind of himself. She rubbed herself so hard, that blood seeped between her fingers and streamed along the groove in the concrete slab.
Here, in the realm of the chickens, the pail emptied of its grain had been poorly received. The geese had plunged their beaks into it and, finding nothing, screeched in concert. Louis had kicked them away. He was due to leave the next day.
The ten days that followed resembled that first morning. The cows, the chickens, Émilienne, Gabriel, Le Marché, Aurore. The pause at the hairpin curve. Every day she repeated, “If either of you need anything at all, please don’t hesitate to ask.” She hardly ate. Slept even less. At night, she put Émilienne to bed. Sometimes she smoked a cigarette on the front steps of Paradise. Louis maintained radio silence. She wasn’t worried; he would be back. Wherever he was, he would come back. She was sure of it. The rest didn’t matter anymore. Only Paradise counted, and the people and animals it sheltered.
Three days before the farmhand was scheduled to return, at nine-thirty in the morning, she called the office where Alexandre worked. A young woman asked her to hold for a moment.
“Hello, this is Alexandre, your advisor. How can I help you?”
“It’s Blanche.”
Silence on the other end of the line. She could hear the sounds of the telephone being shifted, the door being closed, the scraping of a chair.
“Yes?”
“I want to sell it all.”
Another silence. She could feel Alexandre’s breathing, which she knew so well, in which she’d lost herself. She could hear it distinctly: excitement. His eyes must be shining at the gift being offered to him. Paradise. All of it.
“What are you talking about?”
“Stop playing dumb. Émilienne told me everything.”
“We had an agreement, she and I,” he said, defensively.
Blanche used her most resigned tone.
“I want to sell everything. Not just the pond. The rest of it, too.”
He coughed. She held the receiver away from her ear.
“I’m ready, and Émilienne is too, to sell you the land near the road,” she continued.
The ease with which she lied was astonishing even to her. There was dead silence on the line. Blanche thought he had hung up.
“Alexandre, are you there?”
“Yes.”
The voice of a little boy.
“Come to Paradise day after tomorrow, and we’ll talk about it some more.”
He laughed nervously.
“What’s the catch? Louis will be lying in wait to beat me to a pulp, is that it?”
“Louis is gone.”
Blanche didn’t need to be in the same room to see Alexandre’s face changing under the influence of all the information he’d just been given, impossible to untangle.
“Why would you do that?”
Blanche took a deep breath.
“Louis is gone, Émilienne’s very old, and”—she hesitated for a few seconds—“your presence is too strong here. I’m selling it all. I can’t keep up the farm by myself. Either you come tomorrow, or I’ll call another agency.”
She hung up the phone. Behind her, in the vestibule, Émilienne watched her desolately.
“I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Breathing hard, she left the room with difficulty. The door creaked in the late afternoon breeze, and Blanche, one last time, saw Alexandre, in front of his wife and son, soiling her with shame.
BITING
The colors of life drained out of Blanche. She walked through the house, tired of repeating the same movements every morning. Her hair, drier than hay, was knotted into a hard little bun on top of her head like a tightly wound ball of wool. The pulled-back style emphasized her once-triumphant face, the bones now standing out in sharp relief around her eyes and mouth and ears. Nothing was left of that face, distorted by hunger and the desire for vengeance, but the green of her eyes, now pale and cold, focused solely on the approaching moment, when Blanche would marshal all the force of her rage.
The cows.
The barn. The chickens.
Émilienne. Breakfast.
Blanche took a shower at midday. In the bathroom, which she hadn’t visited in days, the mirror above the sink showed her the image of her own ravaged face. Rapidly, the hot steam obscured what was left of her body, blurring her life, marking her skin with painful red welts. She could hardly make out the contours of her own silhouette in this mirror in which, on rare occasions, she had once enjoyed looking at herself naked, admiring herself, thinking that these buttocks, this belly button, these breasts were pleasing to Alexandre.
At lunch, she drained a large glass of milk and cut a tomato into thin slices. She did the dishes and dried the plates and the silverware and the big platter with a clean dishcloth. Hunched in her chair, Émilienne watched this skeleton rattling around in her kitchen, applying frail joints to the activities of everyday life, in which every movement had become an ordeal.
Blanche went to Gabriel’s house, where he told her he had found a job at the elementary school. He would be overseeing the study hall for older children for an hour and a half every day and possibly in the mornings, too, before school. Blanche congratulated him. He wanted to hug her, but she frightened him, so self-assured in this vanishing body. He confined himself to a soft, sad goodbye and she continued on her way to the village, walking alone, her back held very straight.
She sat down on the terrace. Aurore brought her a beer without waiting for her order. They exchanged a few pleasantries about this and that, customers, and business, and the money coming in and the money going out, and the weather, which never turns out how the forecast predicts. Blanche listened without hearing. She had already left Le Marché, the family, Paradise, sinking into the chasms inside her, focused on what was to come, obsessed by the violence that lay in each of her movements, each of her words.
After a long quarter of an hour, the Émards’ daughter left the rickety table and went back home.
The sky was a steely white that hurt the eyes. Blanche wondered if her father, as he roamed through Paradise,
had thought about what his children might grow up to be, if he’d ever imagined that those photos and diagrams and the notes in his beautiful, old-fashioned handwriting would turn out to be his ultimate legacy. That love for the land that had disappeared in an accident as foolish as those felt-tip pen sketches.
Everything was perfectly in place. Now she could see herself reflected in the eyes of others: a dead woman. Blanche drew in a deep breath as a voice from the past rose up in her, repeating to that fleshless, yet living reflection: Never hurt anyone smaller than you. Or you’ll suffer much worse in return.
DEFEATING
Émilienne sat reading in her usual place in the dining room. Alexandre knocked on the door. She got up very slowly, made her way to the front hall, turned the knob.
He backed up, as surprised as she was.
“Is Blanche here?”
“She should be back any minute. You can come in and wait,” Émilienne said to him absently.
Alexandre took another step backward and then hesitated, caught between what politeness required of him and his impatience to tour the property.
“I think I’ll walk a bit, if you don’t mind.”
“Make yourself at home. If you want to go out to the pond, go past the pigpen and take the path down; it’s the best way.”
Alexandre looked where she was pointing, in the direction of a narrow passage next to the henhouse.
He crossed the yard, his steps tense. As he got further away from the porch, ducks and chickens surrounded him. His car was parked off the main road, in the little hollow that led to the farm. Sunlight flickered on the ground through the tall trees bordering the chicken coop. Alexandre’s shadow stretched out in front of him. He walked more quickly, pursued by his memories. Something didn’t feel right; the place seemed so quiet, so still. The gaggle of poultry that had escorted him to this point now turned around and went back to scratching and pecking. The path to the pigpen was well marked, its edges neatly trimmed. Insects hummed in the undergrowth. He was seized with the sudden desire to go that way, all the way to the far end of the property, as if to assess the extent of it.
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