Short Stories in French

by Richard Coward

  Sa tête, elle la tenait bien haute et droite, hors de la brume qui floconnait jusqu’à son cou; ses yeux grands ouverts avaient une expression encore plus douce et vide que de coutume. Des yeux tant roués de nuit et brûlés de chagrin que leur absence de regard ouvrait sur un regard second. Son front, le creux de ses oreilles, ses cils brillaient de givre. Les minuscules cristaux de glace qui incrustaient ses paupières entouraient ses yeux d’un cerne lumineux. Guillaume n’osait toucher l’ânesse. Il tourna lentement autour d’elle, dissipant de ses mains hésitantes le brouillard accroché à ses flancs comme on écarte un voilage de lin, comme on soulève un voile de mariée. Il tournait, brassant la brume avec des gestes de nageur glissant au ralenti dans l’eau qui toujours se referme sur lui. Il effleurait presque l’ânesse maintenant, laquelle, caparaçonnée4 de glace, avec son ventre et ses oreilles hérissés de fines stalactites, sa crinière et queue parsemées de cristaux, ses yeux couleur d’argent mati fixant un regard lunaire dans le vide, lui parut fantomatique. Il frôla du bout des doigts le chanfrein de l’ânesse, puis posa en tremblant ses deux mains sur sa tête, les fit glisser le long du cou tendu, et, lentement, tout doucement, il la caressa. La glace craquait et fondait sous ses paumes et le corps d’Héloïse commençait imperceptiblement à ruisseler. Les gouttes glissaient sur ses flancs en un froid et muet pleurement. Et lui se tenait penché vers elle, envahi d’un émoi sans mesure. Ses mains n’étaient plus siennes, elles semblaient s’être déta-chées de son corps, mues par un désir inconnu. Elles s’affairaient avec délicatesse autour de l’animal ainsi que des mains de femme œuvrant à la toilette d’un nouveau-né, ou bien d’un mort. Ses doigts effleurèrent les paupières durcies de l’ânesse, et ce fut comme s’il touchait le regard même de la tendresse, de la plus nue des tendresses. Le regard de la douleur, aussi bien, ou celui de la patience. Le regard de l’amour sans écho ni partage, mais demeuré fidèle.

  Alors vint à Guillaume la faim des larmes. Son cœur soudain s’affola, ses gestes se firent désordonnés. Il manquait de mains maintenant, il aurait voulu avoir mille mains pour multiplier ses caresses. Il enserra la tête de l’ânesse entre ses paumes et se mit à lécher ses yeux tout piquetés d’infimes fleurs de givre jusqu’à ce qu’elles exsudent un goût de sel. Lui-même pleurait sans s’en rendre compte, et ses larmes coulaient dans les yeux d’Héloïse.

  Et il lui vint aussi la faim des mots. Cela se bousculait en lui, éclatait dans tous les coins de son corps en confuse rumeur. Des mots, des noms, lui venaient par essaims. Cela affluait à sa bouche tremblante, s’arrachait par syllabes brumeuses de ses lèvres gercées. Il se mit à dire des choses dérisoires, il appelait l’ânesse «ma belle, mon enfant, mon ange, ma douceur, mon amour, mon Héloïse …». Les mots fleurissaient sa orge de roses de sel et de sang. Il enfouit sa tête contre le cou de l’ânesse.

  Héloïse s’effondra d’un coup, la corde et le piquet cassèrent. Elle se renversa d’un bloc sur le flanc avec un bruit sourd de statue descellée de son socle. Ses pattes gelées se tendaient, raides, dans le vide. Alors il comprit, et les larmes et les mots ne suffirent plus à son chagrin, à son amour, à sa folie. Il roula sur le sol, se coucha tout contre l’ânesse et s’enlaça à son cou.

  A bout de mots, à bout de larmes et de raison, il se mit à crier. Et c’était un braiment.

  Ce fut un cri profond, tout enroué de vent, de terre et de brouillard. Un long cri monocorde, rauque, obstiné. Un cri d’humain et de bête mêlé, mêlé et déchiré.

  Héloïse

  ‘If your name has seven letters, seven branches burn your name.’

  EDMOND JABÈS

  Héloïse had never been away from her few acres of land covered in undergrowth, surrounded by apple trees, ash trees and aspens with branches that had been twisted by the wind. She had reached a grand old age and throughout her life she had known no adventures other than those that were silent, banks of clouds in full migration, those that were so full of life, flocks of birds on their way to summer nesting grounds, and those full of shivers and rustling, trees coming into leaf, coming into blossom and then losing their leaves again.

  Her hair, slate-grey, had for a long time had faded, and had become an ash-white colour. Her whole being seemed to have been silvered with ash and dust, and especially her voice.

  Her cry, which replaced at one and the same time speech, song, moan and murmur, had completely lost its vigour; all that remained henceforward were barely audible groans flecked right through with sadness. It rose suddenly, but never screamed out; it was a cry with no variety of tone, with no strength, a muffled sob.

  The woman who had bought this she-donkey more than twenty years before had given her this name because the name of Héloïse had plagued her since childhood. Her name was in fact Marthe, but she had never liked her first name, which she considered too harsh, and from the day when, still a little girl, she had discovered this other name, so light, so fluid, she had never ceased to want it for her own. For years she had stubbornly begged for this name from her parents, beseeching them to give it to her as a present at Christmas or for her birthday. She received toys, picture-books, dolls – which naturally she all called Héloïse – but never that name whose softness made her dream so much. When she became engaged, Marthe asked the man who was going to become her husband to call her Héloïse; he, a surly, taciturn young man, considered this whim to be absurd and paid it no attention. So Marthe directed her obsessive passion to the girl to whom she hoped to give birth; in anticipation she bestowed upon the little girl the fine name of Héloïse, as though placing her under the protection of a saint, and she changed the nappies of the child, rocked her, in the glow of this word, which blossomed with vowels. But she never did have a child, her own body refused her the last chance finally to give flesh to the beloved name. And it remained buried in silence, a splendour that was ever more sad and distressing for having been left with no heir. And so it was that a young she-donkey that Marthe acquired one day inherited this melodious name made great by women of legend.

  The mere fact that Marthe had given her this name meant that she became extremely attached to the animal; she treated the she-donkey with more tenderness than she would have done had she been a pure-bred greyhound or even a unicorn. She spoke to her as though to a child – the one she no longer was but who still dreamt within her, and the one she had not had but who none the less slept within her. She spoke to her as though to the lover that she was not, but who passionately kept watch within her. She spoke to her endlessly, with words, with gestures, and with looks, as one addresses an angel who, unseen and mysteriously, walks beside us. And she continued this lovers’ dialogue with even greater tenderness because her life was weighed down with loneliness. Guillaume, her husband, a silent man, did not utter ten words a day. He really was a product of that earth and that sky where he had been born, parched and sombre. He was as avaricious with words as that stony earth was with flowers and light.

  One night a violent storm broke. Marthe, woken with a start, immediately thought about the she-donkey, which was still outside. She leapt out of bed and ran as fast as she could, without even pausing to put on her shoes or slip a coat over her night-dress. Through the veil of sleep Guillaume was vaguely aware of the storm that was thundering and the footsteps that were racing down the stairs, but he did not wake up.

  Marthe had scarcely opened the door on to the stone steps outside when the wind tore it from her grasp and crashed it against the wall, all but tearing it from its hinges. The rain was falling so hard that it rebounded in spurts from the ground that it struck, and the water seemed to spring as much from the earth as from the sky. Marthe raced into the yard; her bare feet slid in the mud and the rain lashed at her face. Between the trees in the paddock, whose branches seemed to be swirling round, she spotted Héloïse, trembling from head to toe beneath the blasts of the icy wind and the burning rain. At that moment, the she-donkey appeared to her, in the incandescent whiteness of the lightning and the whirl of torn fo
liage, like a mythical animal, with her long ears pointed straight towards the sky like the wings of a motionless angel. The beautiful name of Héloïse was resplendent in the mud, streaming and vibrant with light, winged for a flight into the exploding sky, into the turbulent night. The body of Héloïse, transfigured by the storm, conjured up the mount of a horseman of the Apocalypse. Marthe stretched out her hands to the she-donkey, whose eyes were wide with terror, as though to hold her down on this earth that she seemed ready to leave with a great beat of her wings, and she called to her in a voice terror-stricken with tenderness. ‘Hél …’, but the lightning cut her short and the name remained unfinished. She collapsed in a heap, her face to the ground, her arms splayed. Then the she-donkey, stretching her neck in the rain, let out such a long and piercing cry that it drove back into the distance all the noises of the storm.

  It was this cry that woke Guillaume. He leapt up, without even taking the time to come round. His mind was still clouded with sleep. ‘Marthe,’ he said, as though looking for an indication of where she was. ‘Marthe,’ he repeated in the darkness of the bedroom. He looked at the bed, felt at the pillows and muttered. He slipped on his trousers and went out of the room. On the landing he called out again to his wife. But Marthe’s name was lost in the silence of the house, and the only echoes that came back to him were the haunting cry of the she-donkey and the loud banging of a door as it beat against the wall. He went downstairs; he saw the gaping door, silver reflections shining from pools of water on the tiles, and through the open doorway a large white mark that seemed to ripple in one place in the mud. The she-donkey was stubbornly letting out her cry over and over again. Already the storm was moving away, spatters of bluish light glowed over the hills, the lightning was cracking further and further away. Guillaume was still standing in the doorway, motionless as if he too had just been paralysed with fear. He watched the white mark fade slowly into the darkness of the reconstituted night. At last, he moved forward, swaying slightly, towards that pallid, rippling shape.

  Marthe’s brown hair sprayed all around her head was as one with the mud, some of her long locks were like the roots of a charred shrub. The wind inflated her night-dress, which flapped, drumming out a staccato sound, revealing the very tops of her legs. Guillaume knelt down next to Marthe’s body; his hands, numbed by disbelief, moved aimlessly with hesitant gestures over her muddy hair, her stiffened shoulders, her bare legs shining like mother-of-pearl from the rain, without daring to come to rest.

  Finally, he forced his hands into action; he grasped in the palm of his hand one of Marthe’s heels, the roundness of which enhanced the arch of her foot. This coiled roundness in the palm of his hand awoke in him a new awareness of Marthe’s body. An awareness born from astonishment and from infinite tenderness. He held this heel, round and firm like a girl’s breast, he raised it to his lips, kissed it; he mistook the warmth of his own lips for that of her foot, so attractively curved and from which the warmth had, however, disappeared. The footsteps that had so very recently crossed through his sleep returned to dance against his mouth, to echo in his body, to run all round his heart. Marthe’s footsteps as she went off into the night banged in his chest and made his heart pound at the same rhythm as the broken door knocking against the wall, at the same rhythm as the she-donkey with her mournful cry.

  The donkey! Guillaume suddenly released his embrace; all the blood that he had thought he could feel beating in Marthe’s body flowed back towards his heart bereft of hope. Marthe’s footsteps were sucked down into this blood of grief, and a blood of anger flooded up from his deepest entrails. Guillaume stood up, walked straight towards the she donkey, whose stubborn cry was inflaming his anger. He came to a halt facing the animal and struck her brutally in the eyes with the back of his hand. Héloïse reared up and let out another cry, shorter and more piercing. Guillaume seized her by the mane and rained blows upon her, with his foot, with his knee, in the stomach and on the legs. So great was the hatred with which he struggled with the animal that they were almost entwined. He even made her fall and continued the fight in the mud. He could not feel the blows that he received from the struggling animal, he could only feel those that he was giving her. The she-donkey finally managed to stand up and fled far from Guillaume. For his part he remained for a long time crouched in the mud, breathless, his fury abated.

  The years went by. Guillaume lived a more reclusive life than ever since the death of Marthe, and the loneliness in which he immured himself held something bitter, something jealous. The days, the nights, piled up like iron waste cast up by the sea on to a deserted shore. Time was no more than a slow coalescence of emptiness.

  He talked to no one, not even to himself, not even in vague unspoken monologues. It was no longer so much the case that he was mean with words, it was more that he had become totally devoid of words. Now all he uttered were dull rumbles, unpleasant grunts when he addressed Héloïse. He eventually lost the meaning of language; he could no longer compose sentences, and his thoughts hardened about his own suffering as the claw-like fingernail of an old man bends and pierces his flesh. But his suffering, which he could neither name nor express, had become corporal. A sickly body with protruding bones, flanks and legs that had been flayed. Héloïse’s.

  The evening of the storm he had wanted to kill the she-donkey, but he had merely wounded her. He had allowed her to live – to live in wretchedness, in hunger, in terror. He felt towards the animal a hatred that was constantly on the watch for maliciousness. He kept the animal prisoner in the fallow paddock, permanently tied to a stake with a rope that cut into her neck. He ill-treated her, made her endure thirst and hunger, deprived her of shade in summer and of shelter in winter. Yet the animal was determined to survive; the years went by, she grew old, becoming ever thinner and balder, her eyes covered with a grey film, but she did not die. This fierce determination to last, this endurance of misfortune, this resistance to death, intensified Guillaume’s fury towards the tireless donkey.

  He could have finished her off but, in spite of the desire to kill her that often overcame him, he spared it. The sight of that slow death afforded him an indefinable joy, as if he were distilling the poison of his hatred, sublimating his revenge. But above all else there was Héloïse’s cry, her quite muffled, rasping cry, immeasurably doleful. Guillaume could not bear it and, at the same time, he could not go without hearing it. He had to hear it; all day, and all evening, and even at night, when sleep eluded him, he pricked his ears to listen to it.

  For he listened to it avidly. He listened to it madly, that breathless braying which made strange inroads into the invisible and the memory, which made the silence shiver, and evoked the wandering voices of those whose faces have gone, whose stay is over in the land of the living. It was a cry that was human and animal combined, combined and torn. It was the cry of his own loneliness, of his own distress, a cry uttered outside him. It was the cry of everyone, of everything, of no one. It was the cry of the living and the dead calling to each other. It was the cry of the world, of the empty, abandoned world. A naked, archaic cry, which had risen from the outer limits of time, and which ravaged all senses, memory and hope, turning the heart back in on its nothingness. The cry of God perhaps; of God doubting Himself through the limitless suffering of mankind.

  This cry haunted Guillaume, for it bound him to the she-donkey with more violence than the coarse rope tied the animal to her stake driven into the scree. And he had no means of defending himself against this cry. As soon as he heard it, his body was immediately seized by a shivering fit, it knotted his throat and his entrails, bit into his flesh like a fever and plunged into his heart with a taste of tears and dust.

  That winter the cold was particularly biting. It caused the earth and tree branches to crack, gutters to shatter, rivers to freeze and birds to die. The nights were sparkling; the sky shone with the purest of blacks in which the stars glistened like magnificent grains of mica, and the trees stripped of their bark by the frost twist
ed their pallid branches, in mourning for the birds, towards these twinkling grains. But at dawn a whitish mist rose from the earth and coiled around the trees, bringing the hedgerows into bloom with milky chrysanthemums that the wind quickly stripped away.

  It was on such a morning that Héloïse silenced her cry. On entering the paddock Guillaume noticed the she-donkey rigid by her stake, her body semi-veiled in mist. There was something about her that was astonishingly fragile, humble and yet haughty at the same time. He went towards her, she did not move, did not even look round.

  Her head was held high and straight, out of the mist that rose like snowflakes up to her neck; her eyes, wide open, looked even gentler and emptier than normal. Eyes so beaten by night and burnt with grief that their sightlessness seemed like a kind of trance. Her forehead, the skin inside her ears, her eyelashes shone with frost. The tiny ice crystals that encrusted her eyelids surrounded her eyes with a luminous ring. Guillaume did not dare touch the she-donkey. He walked slowly around her, waving away with his hesitant hands the mist that had stuck to her flanks as one brushes away a veiling of flax, as one lifts a bride’s veil. He turned, causing the mist to eddy with the movements of a swimmer gliding slowly through the water that always closes back around him. By now he was almost brushing against the she-donkey, which, caparisoned with ice, her stomach and eyes bristling with fine stalactites, her mane and tail sprinkled with crystals, her eyes the colour of dull silver staring, moonlike, into the emptiness, seemed to him like a ghost. With the ends of his fingers he lightly touched the nose of the she-donkey, then, trembling, he placed both hands on her head, slid them down her taut neck and, slowly, quite gently, he kissed her. The ice cracked and melted beneath his palms and imperceptibly Héloïse’s body began to stream with water. The drops slid over her flanks like a cold silent weeping. And he leant towards her, over-whelmed by boundless emotion. He could no longer control his hands, they seemed to have become detached from his body, to be moved by an unfamiliar desire. They delicately fussed around the animal like the hands of a woman washing a new-born baby or even a corpse. His fingers brushed lightly against the hardened eyelids of the she-donkey, and it was as though he were touching the very expression of tenderness, of the most undisguised tendernesses. The expression of grief, as well, or that of patience. The expression of a love that has been neither returned nor shared, but has remained faithful.