A Strange Country

by Muriel Barbery

  “Caught between frost, mud, and fire,” murmured Alejandro. “The only true hell.”

  The scene grew darker before changing to the estuary of the channel in the Southern Marches. A group of dolphins was circling around the barges moored there. The elves of the Deep Woods would never have imagined there could be so many of them, perhaps thousands. An elf standing firmly on the pier was addressing them.

  “The channel is dying,” he said, “leave this place and go to the sea.”

  A cloud of mist around the landing stage parted and let in a bleary light, then another gap formed a few yards further away and the channel swayed suddenly. Through the opening, a strange jumble was visible—whether it was houses, trees, streets, or mountains, no one could say.

  The elf on the pier raised his otter forepaws toward the sky.

  “The boatman,” murmured Petrus, feeling a strong bond with him.

  “Farewell,” he said, “friendship survives falls.”

  The dolphins performed a deep arpeggio before diving and disappearing for good. The members of the last alliance looked at the channel and, above it, the city where the ashen flakes were drifting. The decline of the mists was continuing, and from the channels came the sound of a wrenching dirge.

  The vision changed, yet again.

  “For the last time, before the final painting,” said Tagore.

  On a patio of roses, Gustavo Acciavatti was holding a woman in his arms and saying I love you. Next to him, wrapped in paper and placed against a wall, a rectangular shape was waiting. Farther away, a tall, bent man, of a respectable age, but vigorous appearance, was also waiting. Gustavo embraced him in turn—embraced Pietro Volpe, Leonora’s brother, the son of Roberto and heir to the painting that will open the gates to the future.

  After looking one last time at Leonora, the former Head of the Council, now direttore in the land of the humans, set off for Nanzen.

  It is snowing on the plain of Ireland

  And the flames are of clay

  Book of Battles

  TEARS

  There were so many tears in the painting of destiny.

  Landscape paintings show the soul of the world in the shimmering that the painter’s genius extracts from our ordinary perception, but the tears of a pietà show humans in their invisible nudity.

  The soul now liquid, the beauty of fervor visible at last—we must dream of the landscape that contains all landscapes, the tear that encloses all tears, and, finally, the fiction that encompasses all others.

  THE FOUR BOOKS

  The life of humans can be portrayed through prayers, battles, paintings, and legacies.

  Through prayers, so that the world will have meaning.

  Through others’ wars, where the battle with oneself is fought.

  Through paintings—be they gardens or canvases—which, in causing our vision to hesitate, reveal the essence hidden behind what is visible.

  And through invisible legacies, which are the only ones that allow us to attain love.

  IN THE FINAL HOUR OF LOVING

  The former Head of the Council appeared on the bridge of mists, the painting of destiny under his arm. When he left the arch of the bridge, he was transformed into a white horse, then into a hare with immaculate fur. When he stepped into the pavilion and became a man once again, he looked at Clara and seemed unsettled.

  “I am smiling because I no longer have to play for you,” she said mischievously, and the Maestro seemed even more stunned.

  When he stood before Maria and handed her the painting, the little veins on the young woman’s face darkened.

  She gently freed the canvas from its tissue paper.

  In the morning light, the painting acquired all its texture. Its splendor was intact, but the Nanzen dawn gave new meaning to the fresh tints and material. It was no longer a scene of lamentation and fervor, but a story, drifting as it waited for its words. And yet it was the same scene reproduced over and over in human art: Mary and Christ’s followers, weeping over the body taken down from the Cross; tears like dewdrops, the beauty of the Flemish style, so sharp, crystalline; in spite of this, beyond the story of the image, the members of the last alliance felt something vibrate, something that responded to the wood of the pavilion, the trees in the valley, the stones on the tea path, something beneath the surface of the painting that was struggling to get free. The mist idled in the forest, intact and light. Beyond the last treetops, a stormy sky still threatened. A bird sang. Something in the order of reality shifted and the dawn light took on a clarity which reminded Sandro of the landscapes in Flemish painting that he’d once loved. The transparencies of the path flickered and, in the space between two breaths, the trees appeared in sunlight. All along the black stones were hundreds of maple, pine, and plum trees, interwoven above the passage, whose vanished form received the power to transform itself into a vision with an intensity of presence that no living tree could ever attain. The transparencies of the path were turning opaque again and this rebirth from beyond death was the sign that the elves were waiting for. Tearing themselves away from the contemplation of the resurrected trees, they looked again at the canvas.

  A transparent wave passed over its surface, altering the scene before them, and mingled with the tears of the faithful. Maria held her hand out to the painting and the wave withdrew, then froze. Tears were flowing down the Virgin’s cheek, water in water forming drops that caught a blurred reflection, and what was vibrating below the scene took refuge in these moving pearls.

  “The pavilion is revealing the essence of the painting, its internal power of transformation,” said Solon.

  They all felt their hearts beating as if at the moment of a new birth.

  Tagore handed each of them a flask.

  “Let us see what the gray tea can do,” he said.

  When they’d all drunk, Maria and Clara looked at each other.

  “First Pietro,” said Maria, “then the other battles.”

  “I would like a piano,” said Clara.

  A piano appeared in the room.

  It was a fine student’s piano, smooth as a pebble, although it had traveled far and gone through a great deal. Clara went closer to the object that had come to meet her the summer before her eleventh birthday, and which had initiated her into the profound delight of music, taken her to Rome under Pietro’s protection, and led her to the painting which Roberto had acquired by committing murder.

  When she ran her fingers over the keys, the notes made an interval that tore the silk of time and revealed a beach swept by mountain winds. You must understand who Clara Centi was, the orphan from the Abruzzo who had learned to play her piano in one hour and was acquainted with the stones of the mountain slopes the way sailors are acquainted with the stars in a black sky. The daughter of Tagore and Teresa knew the path to spaces and souls; through her music she was connected to landscapes and hearts, and this made her a ferrywoman, assembling spirits beyond their regions and their ages and, in the end, giving shape to the dreams that Maria would incarnate in the world.

  The music told the story of the father and the son who had hated one another, even though one never knew why and the other would not say why. But Clara played and, through the power of the gray tea, all those present heard Roberto’s confession to his son.

  Which said: the night before your birth, I killed a man who wanted to sell me the Flemish painting. When he showed it to me, something glittered, but I felt he had been sent by the devil and, on a sudden impulse, I killed him. A murderer has no right to love and I did penance by forbidding you to love me. I have no regrets, because if I hadn’t had this determination, the murder would have led to other murders. Farewell. Love your mother and your sister and live honorably.

  In the end, moved by one last thought, he added:

  May the fathers bear the cross

  And the orphans,
grace.

  The piano fell quiet.

  Tagore shared the vision of a great hall filled with paintings and sculptures. The art dealer was on his knees, weeping, the way one weeps in childhood, huge sobs as tears rolled down his cheeks like dewdrops and fell, with a cheerful little bounce, in keeping with the words that came to him in the hour of knowing. As mad as you are, he said, I love you and you will never know it.

  Then he disappeared from the mind of the humans and elves in Nanzen.

  Against the partition, the painting was changing. Again, water was flowing, erasing the scene of lamentation. The faces trembled before they were washed away by the wave and, before long, all that remained on the canvas were Mary’s tears. After a moment, when the tears had swelled to the extreme, there was only one left, a transparent, rounded setting for a new scene, hidden behind the first. Beneath the lamentation, the same elfin hand had painted a verdant, bluish landscape, with hills, cliffs by the sea, and long patches of mist. The Flemish masters are the only ones who have ever attained such perfection in the execution of scenes, which their mastery of light infuses with the glistening of the world, but in this painting, there was an additional sense of soul and beauty, given the fact it had been started in Nanzen then painted over in Amsterdam with the scene of the pietà. It had remained as it was until the conjunction of the pavilion and the gray tea brought it back to light in its dual stratification, offering the visual symbiosis of human and elfin lands and mist.

  “It looks like Ireland,” said Petrus.

  A strong earthquake shook the pavilion, and Tagore shared other visions. The moon lingered in the Irish sky and, despite the heavy downpour submerging the fighting, it shone through the storm clouds. Corpses were piled into dunes of red blood; black blood covered the wheat of Shinnyodo, and the fields here and elsewhere were littered with flesh and mutilated bodies.

  And then.

  And then Maria entered the battle.

  BOOK OF BATTLES

  The moon above the plain of Ireland was bloodred, and Clara played a whisper of notes lighter than snowflakes. Everyone heard the story they contained, the story of snow and the soul of the country that met like plum flowers on winter wood and transformed the clay of combat into flames. Then Maria’s power brought the melody to life and the clay from the field actually seemed to be germinating and rising up into a tree of fire that did not burn, but warmed the soldiers’ bodies and hearts. The cold spell passed, the ground turned solid, and everyone looked at the burning clay covering the fields and stopping the battles. It began to snow.

  You must understand who she was, Maria Faure, the little girl from Spain and Burgundy, born of two powerful elves, but brought up by the old grannies in The Hollows. To the totality of art that Clara incarnated, Maria responded with her power to know the totality of nature. Since childhood, she had been in constant contact with flows of matter that took the form of impalpable traces, and this allowed her to see the radiance of things. She recognized no other religion than that of violets, and was stunned that other people could not hear, as she did, the hymns of the sky and the symphonies of the branches, the great organs of clouds and the serenade of rivers. Through this magic, during the first battle on the fields of Burgundy, she had processed and transformed the sketches traced by living things the way one would paint on a canvas of desire. In this way, she had known how to turn the earth and sky upside down in order to open the breach through which the elfin fighters appeared.

  It was snowing over the countryside of Ireland and, while the magnificent, idiotic snowflakes were falling, the clay of the massacres became a fire where pain was assuaged.

  Clara’s music became more tragic in tone.

  At the other end of reality, through the power of the young women, the bridge and the pavilion at Ryoan began to burn, and their dull gold rose into the sky in magnificent spirals.

  In Nanzen, through the bare openings in the pavilion, they saw the red bridge fade away. It hesitated then vanished like a mirage, while the mist over the arch shot upward in bursts of silver, then hung suspended, uncertain of its death.

  In Ryoan, the golden smoke turned to gray, dirty streaks.

  Nanzen trembled, and Solon said:

  “They have drunk their last tea.”

  The final message from the enemy passed through the mist.

  Mad, insane as you are! What choice have you left us? History is not written with desire, but with the weapons of despair!

  Father François felt an icy shiver down his spine then a furtive presence slipped into his mind.

  Give us the words, said Clara’s voice.

  What words? he asked.

  The words of the wordless, answered Clara.

  BOOK OF PRAYERS

  He pictured himself, after the battle, back on the hill where one of the brave village lads had fallen. He was a country boy, hard-working, more stubborn than a stone, high and mighty in speech, with a rough tenderness, a reveler when feasting, but solemn in friendship, who loved his wife with a love that stood straight as a candle under the stars. As a peasant, he’d been poor, as a man, rich with the only treasure that cannot be owned, and when he died in the fields of Burgundy he gave the priest his confession. It was the dream of a wooden house opening out onto the forest, where everyone would aspire to know love and a peaceful existence; a dream of a land that would belong to itself; of hunting that would be as just as it was beautiful; and of seasons so grand they would make one feel grander. It was a story of desire and hunts, a dream of a woman and her scent of leaves and lemon verbena, the fantasy of a simple heart festooned with mystical lace. This brave fellow’s name was Eugène Marcelot, and at the time of his death, he had never learned to read or write. The inner flames rising on the marl of his fields cried out to tell him why he was a prince, but he did not know how he could tell his wife that he’d gone on standing under the sky because he loved her. Maria and Clara’s powers had enabled Father François to hear the text from that simple heart, and after closing the valiant man’s eyes, to take his message to his widow.

  Today, as the tears of lamentation were diluted, it seemed to him that, at last, he understood Eugène Marcelot’s mute confession, its significance in the first combat, and its role in the last battle of the war. He’d seen the landscape behind the tears at Eugénie’s funeral, in the moment when he was searching inside for Christ’s words, and all that came to him was the proof of the grandeur of trees and the incantations of the sky. To our suffering, he thought, death suffices, and to our faith, the fervor of the world. He suddenly remembered another painting that had left him thunderstruck when he was a young man—a German painting from the sixteenth century representing Christ between his Deposition and the Resurrection, lying on a sheet in a tomb—cold, alone, and abandoned to the work of decomposition, and Father François says out loud: if the universe is simply a novel waiting to be written, let us choose a story where salvation does not require torture, where flesh is neither guilty nor suffering, where mind and body are two accidents of a single substance, and where the idiocy of loving life does not have to be paid for with cruel punishment. So it goes, in the lives of humans and elves, alternately scenes of passion and vast plains, battles and prayers, tears and sky. I look at Mary’s tears and call out to the love of Eugène Marcelot in the total landscape; I look at the landscape behind the crucifixion and I call out for the harmony in the substance of our tears. Through that harmony, all borders to lands and to the mind will be abolished, an act which, since humans became human, we have called love.

  Finally, he looked at Petrus and thought: may the blind bear the cross and the idiots, grace.

  As Clara was conveying the message to Maria, playing a melody that seemed to her the exact transcription of his words, beautiful and lyrical, placated and serene, he felt himself falter. The world had changed its appearance. He saw its substance and energy spread out before him in an undul
ating fan that rippled and snapped like a ship’s mainsail. A force leapt through the world with the energy of a will-o’-the-wisp, riding currents and gliding over the foam of magnetic lines above abysses of indistinct vibrations—just as everything vanished, he seemed to discern a luminous painting and he thought: earth and art have the same frequency. When the tempest abated and he came to in the world as he knew it, he thought: this is how Maria perceives the universe, in the form of waves and currents that order the mutation of each thing; and he thought again: such power should have consumed her, but she has only a few marks on her face.

  Several new shapes materialized on the landscape of the canvas. What is there to say about this miracle where roses, irises, and hawthorns appear, along with humans, elves, and houses opening out onto the forest? Before their eyes, the painting was transformed into a synthesis of the two worlds, where there were vineyards and tea plantations, houses of wood and stone at the edge of silent forests, cities beside rivers where barges without sails slid by. They could sense Eugène Marcelot’s dream everywhere, they could sense the harmony of the mists everywhere; before long, on the surface of the painting there was a spray of sparks where a blurred figure appeared, taking form as it erased men and elves.