The Poisoning Angel

by Jean Teulé

  When she requested he be more specific – oh, her charms, her amorous postures – he told her about a chasm that swallowed up a battle front, an earth maw that in one go downed cavalry, infantry, canons, buglers, drummers, the din of the skirmish round the standards, the way a warring multitude was suddenly swallowed up by Death in the intestines of the abyss. The adjutant was developing stomach ache, but insisted, after another mouthful, ‘No matter who my country employs me against, I’ll joyously and blindly accept this glory, because I love the medals.’

  ‘Hah, people give you medals because you kill, do they? They don’t drive you out shouting “Dirty bitch! Lily liver! Evil Breton! Sick bitch, be on your way! Ki klanv, ke gant da hent! Ankou, Ankou!” Have you never heard that?’

  ‘No, but I’ve seen rosettes of fire exploding from walls crushed to dust. I’ve smelt the gold powder of their pollen, which smells like you,’ he added, sniffing her between the thighs. ‘Up a bit.’

  When she lay on her stomach, Thunderflower’s backside was like a young boy’s, but as soon as she raised them, her hips became extremely female. The adjutant would have liked to tell her about wars in which troops wallowed in mud, the myriad vicissitudes of his daring career, his lengthy campaigns and extravaganzas of murder in equatorial nights, the sound of fists breaking teeth. He would have liked to tell her of rough horseback rides in Africa while he rode her, but … a strange malady was eating at his entrails, and he collapsed on to Thunderflower’s back like a colourful carpet in a souk at Bab el-Oued. The woman of Plouhinec freed herself from the burden, and as her fair hand caressed the spiky hair in forgiveness she was already enquiring, ‘Who’s next?’

  ‘This galumphing sailor coming towards you, taking off his sailor’s breeches,’ replied François Aupy. ‘Not a pretty sight, certainly, but with a body built like that there’ll be staying power.’

  ‘But look how big he is. My fingers wouldn’t go round his mast.’

  ‘On board the ships he’s known as Attila’s Sabre.’

  ‘Ho hum, what a strange lover. He’ll do for my purposes, though. Right, you’re a sailor, are you? Tell me about the destruction of a wrecked fleet,’ she said, slipping one of her delicate frog’s legs over the seaman so that she was stuck on to him, as he lay on his back. ‘Whew! Have yourself a feast on this triangle of pastry I’m giving you and tell me about vessels lost and men drowned.’

  The sailor’s neck was thick and pink, with a lace tied round it. Laughing, but giving her nasty looks, he buffeted the whore with his rounded belly like a naked animal. In terse phrases he recounted a shipwreck, the way the vessel tipped over, sometimes covered in spume, cloaked in damp mist, and Thunderflower was drenched in sweat. A rag doll shaken like a soaking floor cloth, she came apart. It did not matter what that oaf inflicted on her (and in what manner!), her body no longer belonged to her. She had left it in Lorient at the home of a kind widower, along with her gift-wrapped heart. As the sweat ran along the blond hair at her brow, she lifted her glazed eyes towards a window pane with fresh water streaming down it, and pleaded, ‘Matthieu …’

  The other stupid Poseidon suffered from the nostalgia common to military crews. He began describing brass canons at the ready, port and starboard, stuffed full of powder, setting off their broadsides. He himself fired bloody big ones into Thunderflower, who was crumbling. He was indefatigable, ardent as the devil. Wrapped in the sheets or upright against a wall of the bed, he lifted her off the floor without using his hands. She was like a target. And she who could wear out four Hercules, with an undercarriage that was never tired, kept up her role but told him, none the less, ‘Have some more cake, a big piece.’

  The filthy sailor sank his greedy fangs into it and was struck down, falling on to the backs and bare legs of the sergeant and adjutant, which bounced. That was the end of the party for him. Thunderflower crept on all fours to lean and whisper in his ear, ‘Near my home, in the direction of the ria d’Étel, when a fisherman is ill he waits for the ebb tide before he dies.’ He looked at her with the burning ecstasy of the first Christian martyred under the wild beast’s claw, and stopped moving.

  ‘How strong that little thing is,’ said the army doctor at the table approvingly, caught in the sweet intoxication from the cloud of plant fumes enveloping him. ‘With her, it’s paradise from floor to ceiling. Her bed’s never out of use. Here she is with one last one.’

  He was so young, curly-headed, delicate and timid.

  ‘This one will give me a rest,’ sighed Thunderflower. ‘Already in the army, and even in a brothel? You only look about fifteen.’

  ‘When my mother was left a helpless widow, she had to enlist me in the navy early to help her make ends meet, Madame.’

  This sort of delicate ship’s boy called her Madame and treated her with respect. He did not dare take off his standard-bearer’s uniform in front of her.

  ‘It was Attila’s Sabre who forced me to come. “Adrien,” he commanded, “it’s time you learnt to do to women what I do to you down in the hold on the high seas. I’ll go first to show you how I stun, joint and fillet females as well.”’

  ‘What would give you pleasure Adrien, besides my cake, which is very sweet, just the way children like it?’

  ‘I’d like a taste of that too, Madame,’ he replied, pointing to the tart’s chest as she wiped herself after the previous client – the hulk who had made her pour with sweat between her breasts.

  With her soft, slightly yielding belly, she knelt down, back flexed, leaning towards him where he lay with his head on a sea-blue pillow. Against it the boy’s hair looked like the vegetation of an island. His curls made the shape of exotic palm trees growing on a brow of white sand.

  ‘Have you already been to war, Adrien? Tell me while you’re eating. It doesn’t matter if you speak with your mouth full.’

  The standard-bearer’s eyes grew wide at the terrifying memories of the disasters he had witnessed at his young age. Through quivering lips, scattered with cake crumbs, he related a series of massacres planned so boldly, executed so coldly and remembered with so little remorse.

  Propped up on her arms, one on either side of the youth’s shoulders, Thunderflower leaned over him to run the tips of her breasts – as pendulous now as if she had suckled three infants – over the lad’s face and eyes, beside his nose, towards his ears and at the corners of his mouth. Her dusky nipples with their broad areolas rolled, folded and bounced as, sprinkling her listening with ‘Really?’s and ‘Oh, tell me’s, she also wandered among the tales of cruelty as if in a beautiful garden. She almost came. An expression of intense pleasure appeared on her face whenever Adrien described the victims’ death throes.

  ‘When our captain was killed, he fell into the arms of a sailor, and looked at us, smiling. I was there, I saw it, as I live and breathe, Madame.’

  Was it also the gentle tongue of this child-man circling her hardened nipples, his teeth nibbling on them? – Thunderflower came! She pleased him, she felt it lower down as well, and how delighted she was by it! But, you may be sure, her cake was lethal, as that was the end of the young standard-bearer. With white foam running down his chin, he went silent and sad, as very young children do when they are about to die.

  ‘What? I’m not even seventeen, and my life is coming to an end. Mother, you’re childless now,’ he lamented, with blood boiling. The victim made one last senseless gesture among the lace on the pillow. Thunderflower smoothed out his contorted eyebrows and closed his eyes on his memories.

  ‘You will see no more horrors, will never face the true abyss that the human soul can be.’

  A cloud of acrid smoke swirled up to the brothel’s low ceiling. Sitting beside the table out of the way, legs crossed and stoned as at Shanghai, the army doctor took another puff on his hashish pipe and pronounced, ‘And that little one to end with. Aupy, look how your lodger has exhausted all four. They’re asleep around her, in a star shape.’

  Head down and red-eyed, the pimp poured h
imself an umpteenth bowl of cider laced with far too much brandy and raved, ‘Hélène is outstanding. I don’t know what would become of me without her.’

  With difficulty he lifted his addled head towards the still lovely forty-something, seeing her first in duplicate and then in focus. Seated cross-legged and naked as if in the centre of a band of victims of sacrifice, she thought they smelt almost innocent, as she gathered up medals, stripes from epaulettes, army handkerchiefs and tied them into a chain. Upsy-daisy! The pimp stood up, his legs unsteady.

  ‘Come on, soldiers, time to wake up and go back to your barracks. Up we get!’

  Going over to the bed, he gave the brigadier a nudge in the back, and looked at the adjutant. ‘They’re all dead!’

  ‘Dead?’

  The news was sobering. The army doctor went round feeling pulses, lifting eyelids, holding a mirror up to open mouths and noting violet-blue patches on skin, then gave his diagnosis: ‘Tropical disease. I’ve known a similar incident on the other side of the world where an entire regiment was wiped out in a matter of hours by a contagious illness. I can’t remember whether it was Lassa fever, river blindness, kala-azar or sleeping sickness. At any rate, these four unfortunates must have brought something nasty back with them on board ship. Quick, I’d better rush to put the barracks under quarantine in the old convent buildings, or else the whole of Port-Louis or even Morbihan will catch it.’

  He thrust his hands into a basin of cold water and held them against his face to bring him to his senses again. Then he ran out into the lane while Thunderflower got up and began dressing.

  ‘What are you doing, Hélène?’

  ‘I’m leaving, François. I couldn’t be happy here any more.’

  ‘You see me in tears over this tragedy that’s taken place in my house and you’re leaving?’

  ‘My work here is done. I’m afraid popular rumour will blame me over these corpses. Death follows me everywhere I go.’

  ‘But if you desert me, Hélène, I might throw myself in the harbour or fall ill.’

  ‘Have some of this brew I’ve made. That’s bound to make you better, or there’s no luck. Is it all right if I tear off and keep one of the lace cuffs from your multi-coloured cassock?’

  As night fell, ashamed of her existence, a shrinking shadow carrying a double bag, afraid, hunched over, she slunk along the walls and left the town.

  Plouhinec

  Thunderflower was wilting. Sitting on the Plouhinec side of the wide ria d’Étel, she watched the water go by from her place on the bank of this short coastal river, and gazed across at the village of Belz on the other side. At low tide, the river revealed the expanse of its muddy bed. At high tide, it filled up with seawater coming in from the estuary. Where it met the fresh water from the source of the river, the water became bitter, like Thunderflower, and not fit to drink.

  ‘Well, Hélène, you’ve taken a long time to come back and see your father.’

  ‘I don’t really feel part of the family any more, Papa.’

  Jean Jégado, now thin with long white hair, had his face shaded by a broad felt hat and was wearing a tattered canvas smock, which clung to his skin and smelt of mould.

  ‘When I saw you coming, I thought, “Who’s that woman? A stranger among all the strangers. An unknown woman, expected by no one.”’

  Everything father and daughter said, standing beside each other, was in brezhoneg. The nobleman who believed he was descended from Arthur or Morgan le Fay was leaning against a tree trunk on which mistletoe grew, brushing the edge of the abandoned church. He was using his sword hilt to knock rusty nails into sprouting branches placed along the broken rungs of a ladder he had found, to strengthen it.

  ‘It’s odd, Hélène, that you should come across me beside this old chapel on the very Tuesday I decide to climb up and take some vinegar to the window with our moss-covered coat of arms. I’ve always promised I’d do it one of these days and then the morning I make up my mind to it, there you are as well. It’s funny, isn’t it?’

  ‘You might laugh, I suppose. Life is hilarious. All the people whose homes I go into end up clutching their stomachs, it’s so funny.’

  ‘Did you hear about the awful things that befell your godmother, your other maternal aunt and even your sister, just like your poor mother?’

  ‘Each time, I was there. They didn’t suffer for long. Papa, do you know where I could find Émilie Le Mauguen? You remember, the little shepherdess with the flat face and bulging eyes? I’d like to see her again so I can finish something I didn’t know how to do properly when I was eight.’

  ‘The one whose soup you put the whole belladonna berries in? That old spinster left Plouhinec a long time ago to become a day servant in Guern, I think. Whether she’s still there I have no idea.’

  ‘Right. That’s too bad. Perhaps some other time, if the occasion arises.’

  The tide was coming in. Boats tied up and resting in the mud earlier were afloat and moving again. When the tide was high they would be able to go up the river. The sun set the water ablaze. Thunderflower, who was looking pale, shaded her green eyes with a hand in order to see better.

  ‘What a long bridge they’ve built across the ria d’Étel to Belz, Papa. Did they shut up a live nurseling in one of the piles to ward off ill fortune, since it’s said that the first one to cross a new bridge will die within the year?’

  ‘No. Our traditions are dying out. That bridge is new and charges a toll: five centimes for a pedestrian, ten for someone on a horse and twenty for a cart. It’s the Pont Lorois, but across there they call it the Pont du bon Dieu for fear that one day the Ankou will cross it from our territory. It was time there was a crossing, though. It’s ruined the seamen on their barge, which no one uses any more, but well …’

  Jean Jégado’s daughter looked at the stone-clad arches, and the roadway of the structure, which was more than a hundred metres long and four metres wide. Past the toll booth, she saw a rickety cart starting to cross from Plouhinec; it was being pulled with difficulty by two old men.

  ‘I feel better now we’ve passed that village – my memories of it are not good,’ murmured the man with one eye.

  The sickly, twisted one lifted his eyes, dark-rimmed in his face with the broken jaw and, seeing something bowling towards them in a cloud of dust from the other end of the bridge, wondered aloud, ‘What on earth ish that?’

  Pulling the shafts of the rickety worm-eaten cart with its load of bales, they continued on their way. Opposite them, heavy cart horses, in harness, were drawing a carnival wagon at a lively pace. Standing on the vehicle’s broad platform, drunk and laughing as he held the reins, was someone disguised as Mardi Gras, clothed entirely in cod tails. He was being pursued by the strident din of a pack of wives and children throwing eggs, sugar and flour at him and yelling, ‘Mardi Gras, don’t go away, you will have some pancakes! Mardi Gras, don’t go away, you will have some chocolate!’

  Mingling with these shouts were those of the husbands, who were running and yelling, ‘On Shrove Tuesday, whoever doesn’t have an ox kills his cockerel! If he hasn’t got a cockerel then he kills his wife!’

  That Tuesday, 8 March 1847, the procession celebrating the last day before Ash Wednesday left Belz in the direction of Plouhinec, in pursuit of Mardi Gras. The pounding of the horses’ hoofs and people’s clogs, and the din of the iron-rimmed cartwheels made the roadway of the new bridge shake. The two wigmakers had already ventured some way on to it, confident about the moment when the two vehicles would have to pass each other. ‘That wagon is just over two metres wide, and our cart slightly less. There should be room enough to pass.’

  There was not. The cart was sent flying through the air like a fairground doughnut. Its shafts slipped out of the Normans’ hands and the whole thing went over the parapet, its rusty hoops whirling above the countryside. The short wigmaker, whose nose had been mashed in the accident, felt weak with shock. His hands turned to jelly when he saw the cart plunge into the
river, where the current rippled, carrying away the bales of hair. They tore open and gaped, grinning horribly. That was a near lifetime’s worth of hair-gathering that was escaping and spreading over the surface of the brackish water, driven by the tide. The ocean wind howled and the tall wigmaker raised his arms, a crazy tree whose twin-branched top encroached on the sky as he yelled at the top of his voice, ‘Diskredapl! Diskredapl!’ (‘Unbelievable! Unbelievable!’)

  ‘What? Can they speak Breton now?’ said Thunderflower, beside her father as he picked up his makeshift ladder to lean it against the wall of the former sanctuary.

  All that was left on the bridge was a single bale of hair, which had fallen down beside a chain on the huge brass lantern, which lit the cart on night-time trips. While the festal procession was already alighting on the other bank in a cloud of dust, apparently unaware that anything had happened, the toll keepers from both Plouhinec and Belz came running. They were very upset.

  ‘That’s the first accident we’ve had on the bridge.’

  ‘It won’t be the last,’ promised the Normans, ‘if those drunken Bretons carry on driving like madmen.’

  The toll keepers offered them their hats as compensation, and the Normans put them on and continued complaining. ‘And then there’s the communal letting off steam at Breton festivals, God save us. The torch-lit circle of Saint Lyphard, for example, with its effigy of a human sacrifice …’

  ‘While Shaint Mandez, God alone knows why, ish content with an offering of a new broom. Thish region ish mad.’

  Hooking their lantern chain to the remaining bale of hair, and carrying it between them, one behind the other, they continued on foot in the direction of Belz and, in particular, the coast.

  ‘To wash Brittany off your handsh, you really need the shea.’

  ‘It takes that big a wash bowl when there’s so much filth.’

  The bands decorating their round hats fluttered over their Norman necks as they went.