Arvida

  The little girl drew her hand out from under the covers, and stretched it forward. At the last moment she stopped, and closed her fist. The thing made itself even more loving, but it was too late.

  Behind the smile, the lavender perfume, and the feigned benevolence, the little girl had seen the rictus, the hideous stench, and absolute evil. She pummelled the air with her feet and fists, and screamed at the dead. The thing rose up. Its nightdress was now a filthy soutane. There was no face. Just bone-white skin, and planted therein two eyes like raisins, contorted by hate. Through the large slits slashed into its neck on each side of its face, the thing hissed like a cat. This time it was neither her grandmother, nor her twin sister, nor the malformed ghost of the little girl they had both once been, but a demon of the fields, an occult force, nemesis to childhood, that seized on the shattered love of young girls to uproot them from the world.

  The thing disappeared when the grandfather opened the door and came to take the little girl in his arms. She told him everything. The grandfather himself had become a bit of a sorcerer, out of necessity, through the years. He congratulated her on having defended herself so well, and told her that, had she grasped that hand, the thing would have taken her to a place that was not death, but where no one would want to go.

  All week, while mourning her grandmother, she’d sought Jim with her eyes. But she found him nowhere. Months ago he had stopped coming to play cards with the little girl and her grandmother. She would have wanted Jim to take her to where the blueberries were. He would have put on soft music in his car, and opened the windows, and they would have got out to dance, right in the middle of the field. He would have kissed her on the mouth, saying that she was the only one for him, he would have blushed and said that it wasn’t good for her to ask him to touch her the same way you touch a woman or that he touched other girls.

  The next week, Jim killed himself.

  No one knew exactly why. They said he took drugs and owed a lot of money. He came from a village and had never really left it. He didn’t know that the world is wide enough for you to hide yourself in it.

  He left one night in his car, and parked in their favourite field. It was full of blueberries, and run through with tight rows of black spruce.

  Ten years earlier, the little girl’s father had brought in a big bulldozer to turn over a section of the field that was full of roots. The bulldozer was old. It broke down, and the operator left it there. For weeks her father called the agricultural equipment company to find out when they’d come to get it. They never came. Her father could have had it towed, but what was the point? Everyone liked the bulldozer a lot. It was a big sculpture in rubber and steel, falling apart in the sun. The shrikes made their nests on the driver’s seat, the paint was peeling, the metal rusting, and the machine was sinking into the crumbly soil a bit more each year.

  The field was a single long small valley. From where he sat, Jim would have seen endless blueberry stalks, then the bulldozer perched on its mound, the dark wall of trees, and beyond that, the mountaintops.

  The blueberry field had its own tragic beauty, but nothing to reassure a young man concerned about the Lord’s compassion for his flock. The fields were criss-crossed by insects, mice, field mice, gerbils; on their periphery you could flush out tetras and grouse. They were teeming with so much life that you couldn’t take three steps without killing something. The blueberry plants were veritable bonsais clutching at the earth, raked by the seasons, doused, frozen, then buried under tons of snow. Every four years, in autumn, they were burned. In spring the earth was fed with their ashes and they rose from their own graves.

  There was nothing in that spectacle to save Jim, but everything to remind him that death and life are nothing, that the world orchestrates each instant the life and death of a billion things, that the living are born from the dead, and the dead give birth to the living, and that no one among the living and the dead is any the worse off for that.

  From time to time she asks if, while breathing in carbon monoxide in little gulps, settled into his car, Jim wasn’t wanting to come into the world anew.

  During the harvest, in the month of August, when the weatherman forecast a freeze, they lit big fires at the corners of the field. The wind made the flames dance and propelled the smoke, which crept in between the plants, enveloped the leaves, and protected the berries from the cold. When the wind was light you had to help it along by shaking big blankets in front of the fires. In the darkness it was like making passes with a cape, veronicas executed right up against the muzzles of great blazing bulls. He might have thought about that, Jim, instead of going out and killing himself. Those people formed a race of builders with heavy feet, unable to settle anywhere without felling a million trees and shooting off guns in all directions. The people were cunning and dumb, tender and cruel, fleshy but strong as horses. You had to see them moving with a matador’s grace, dangerously near the big fires, to save the fragile violet berries no bigger than peas, from the freeze. He could have joined with them, Jim, instead of going off to kill himself. Those people could snap a chicken’s neck with their bare hands, but they never allowed the delicate things the Lord placed in their care to die.

  Not before the harvest, in any case.

  Sometimes things are more difficult.

  She dares not think of Jim, but she thinks often of her grandmother. Occasionally one of those grey days will come back to her vividly, the way the raw light fell onto the linoleum and the metal legs of the second-hand table, of how good it smelled in the kitchen where they sat to play cards. She remembers the smell of the dishes simmering on the stove, not one in particular but all at the same time, the colour of the walls that was different from now, the children’s programs that her afflicted uncles listened to at the other end of the house. The red playing cards swish as they slide across the green plastic tablecloth, a half-consumed cigarette fumes among pistachio shells in the ashtray, the rain taps out a tuneless tune on the dining room windows, but she finds nowhere the face of her grandmother, and sees too late that even this moment, this tiny moment, will never be returned to her.

  Every year, in the month of March, she finds herself feeling an infinite sadness for things of no importance, and she rarely wants to make love. The rest of the time, she’s happy. She knows the future will be good, that the living and the dead watch over her, and that all will be for the best once more in the fields of the Lord. The cards murmur many things in the ears of people who know how to listen. Her grandmother taught her that a woman has the right to hear what she wants to hear and to leave all the rest suspended from the wings of the birds of affliction.

  A Mirror in the Mirror

  She’d always wanted to be blonde, but never dared.

  It was only for those creatures who bleached their hair, creatures who wore culottes and cut their hair short. She had dark hair that she wore very long, flowing free, and she would have felt naked without its weighty shadow on the back of her neck. The creatures danced to jazz. Gemma idled at home, tranquil, dreaming of sweeping waltzes that no one danced any more, anywhere.

  In any case, the phonograph no longer worked, like many things in this vast dwelling. They had moved there when her father died, to perpetuate the line and take care of her mother. The family had not prospered as a result: her mother had died the following year, and their household remained childless. Gemma belonged to one of the founding families of the town, of which no trace would soon remain other than this great decrepit house, perched at the top of a cliff that overlooked the town to the west and the lake to the north. She was not ashamed of embodying decadence and extinction, she accepted it philosophically. Everywhere, beyond the sawmill, the paper mill, and the site of the aluminum smelter, the air was alive with modernity, emitting a kind of background noise that was as yet unidentifiable; would it prove to be the grating of metal or a Dixieland melody? The townspeople waited impatiently for the answer, but
not her. In either case, it was a music the family would never play.

  Michel was away. Michel was a man of the theatre. Gemma’s father had welcomed him into the family with reluctance, as one resigns oneself to a fatal illness, knowing that it was certainly not this man who was going to set the family back on the rails, or usher it at last into the twentieth century. But his daughter loved him, and above all Michel loved his daughter, despite her condition. He found her beautiful with her angular features, her paraffin complexion, and her tubercular mien. He liked to see her wandering through the house like the hush between the lines of a romantic poet. So much the better for him.

  Michel had promised to return. He’d transferred Gemma’s parents’ annuity into his own name, and had left to try his luck in Montreal. He’d written several plays which Gemma thought very good, he could act, and there would surely be a place for him in the city. He’d promised to write and to send money. He did neither.

  Gemma didn’t hold it against him in the least. He had to concentrate on his art. She spent her time dusting and taking care of the garden. The house was enormous and the garden very small, and so she spent more time inside than outside, which was all for the best; when she felt dizzy she sat down in one of the reading room’s upholstered armchairs, and gave herself up to daydreams about Michel’s success and his imminent return. There wasn’t much more to do. The phonograph needle was broken, and she’d read all the books in the house. Sometimes she danced waltzes with herself, her arms crossed, her hands on her shoulders, her head gently tilted to the right, as if offering her neck to be kissed. She could easily imagine the music when she danced, but she tired quickly.

  If Michel did not return, it would be a terrible punishment, but a fair one. Michel was not dead set on having children, she knew that, but she also knew from the outset that she could not give him any. She’d lied to him, as she’d hidden the truth from her father. It was a secret she kept to herself, deeply buried: she was not made like other women, she didn’t bleed as they did, every month. She had soiled herself, like everyone, around the age of thirteen, but then she had discovered that the bleeding stopped if she took care of herself and ate properly.

  Michel’s coming, I must make myself stunning. She loved alliteration and naïve rhyme, especially the way it made your tongue quiver against the palate. It tickled.

  She had to preserve herself. She went down to the village less and less. The people’s faces repelled her, and the walk along the road was long, without horse or car. She cultivated her garden. At first, she had set a few rabbit traps in the nearby woods, but the need to skin them deeply disgusted her, and in truth she hated meat. The vegetable garden produced all she needed, and Gemma put up preserves for the winter. She lived on very little, in any case.

  No suitor declared himself during the two years that she waited for Michel, but townsfolk came by occasionally to see how she was. Burly men with shirtsleeves rolled up, along with wives in their Sunday frocks. The men smoked while gazing down at the toes of their boots, and the women asked all sorts of stupid questions, extending invitations that Gemma sometimes had a hard time courteously refusing. Soon she no longer saw anyone, but she awoke from time to time to find pots of food on her doorstep, which she went the same day to empty in the woods before scouring them, her stomach turning, with well water. The intentions were all good, she knew, but it was out of the question for her to eat those fatty soups and those dishes with mud-thick sauces that common people thought fortifying, but that only served to add bulk to a paunch and make women bleed.

  You couldn’t see the lake from the house, not even from the second floor. From generation to generation the family members had tired of the view, and had let a wall of trees grow up around the point, which had the merit at least of sheltering the house from the wind. Despite this barrier, Gemma sometimes had the feeling, in the depths of winter, that the gusts might raise the house up and heave it stone by stone into the ravenous waters of the lake.

  Early in the morning or just before going to bed, she took the road leading towards the town, to where the trees gave way and brought the lake into view. It was an enormous lake, and when the clouds rolled in and shrouded the other shore, it might well have been an ocean. She stood there for a long time, her arms folded, watching the thunderous waves that were invisible from the house.

  One day, when she found herself there at dusk, she felt as if a giant hand were lifting her up in its palm, and she let herself be carried off by the wind. For a long time it twirled her about like a cloth ripped from a clothesline, like a poplar leaf, like a speck of dust, just above the lake. She saw herself mirrored in its surface, and for once she found herself beautiful.

  When he arrived back in town, Michel did not receive a very warm welcome. He must have been judged severely for his prolonged absence, and perhaps stories were circulating. He took no offence. Soon he would be with Gemma, and for him that was all that counted. There had been no successes in Montreal. Like many failed artists, he had conceded his defeat in small increments, tirelessly repeating to himself the stirring saga of his own genius, prodigious, but misunderstood. He returned, resigned to his wife and his annuity, to contentedly count out the days, and to await posterity in the great empty house that was divorced from a world that had not known how to take his measure.

  He bought an enormous bouquet of flowers, and in his enthusiasm, decided to climb the road to the house on foot. By so doing, he spared himself the knowledge that no one would have agreed to give him a ride.

  It was not so much his abandonment of Gemma that determined the villagers’ reaction to Michel, nor even that it was bruited about that he had applied himself rather lethargically to his artistic ambitions and had squandered his money in the company of a woman whom the prudes spoke of as an actress, but whom the malicious called a whore. Had he been more insightful, not only would Michel have been a better playwright, but he would have seen that the people didn’t really hate him, but looked on him rather with an uncommon blend of fear, scorn, and pity.

  Madame Nazaire, the butcher’s wife, had gone up a few months earlier to retrieve the clean dishes that Gemma left on the doorstep. She found them untouched. Under the towel draped over the broiling pan, the roast beef was crawling with maggots. She left everything the way it was and headed home, driving her team of horses a bit too fast on the long descent.

  Monsieur Nazaire made the return trip the next day, after having closed up his butcher’s shop, and fetched the dishes. To all the questions his wife and two sons asked him on his return, he replied by slamming his fist on the table. He left the kitchen without having touched his plate, and sat himself down in the living room, in his armchair, where he drank enough small glasses of De Kuyper to empty half a bottle. Before going to sleep, he said to his wife:

  “We’ll have to tell everyone never to go up there again.”

  Now that he seemed calm, Madame Nazaire was able to say to him:

  “You know, if she’s dead, we’ll have to tell the police.”

  He turned his back, stretched out his hand to turn down the oil lamp, and grumbled in the half-light:

  “She’s not dead.”

  She was often seen after that, at the curve in the road from where she looked down on the lake. But from such a distance, she couldn’t be identified with certainty. It could also have been a long black dress hooked onto a post and lifted by the wind.

  Michel entered the house, put his suitcase down on a bench in the hall, and walked towards the reading room calling out to Gemma, his big bouquet of flowers in his hand.

  She didn’t come. From the dining room, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he could make out her silhouette in the kitchen. He quickened his pace and burst through the doorway, to surprise her. She wasn’t there. He climbed the stairs, and thought he heard her moving around in one of the bedrooms. He negotiated the corridor in long strides, and found all the rooms emp
ty. He repeated her name, loudly, retraced his steps, and passed in front of the bathroom door. He stopped cold.

  He had seen her, in front of the mirror, shockingly thin, her face hidden behind her dark hair, which she was brushing in short strokes. But Gemma wasn’t in the bathroom. The brush was there, lying on the dressing table, there were also a few hairs in the bottom of the bathtub, and Michel even detected, hanging in the air, the scent of that heady perfume she adored, but that didn’t suit her.

  He looked for her for a long time. He paced the house, opening doors and calling her name. He often glimpsed her slender silhouette at the other end of a room, but it vanished as soon as he fixed his eyes on it. He persevered long after he had realized that this was not a game, long after it had far surpassed the scope of the simply strange, because he didn’t see what else he could do.

  One night, dozing in his armchair, he was awakened by a smell. Gemma was there, before him, very close. His head was bowed and he saw her only as far as her chest. She put her hand in his. The hand was neither warm nor cold. It might have been a set of knucklebones enclosed in a thin suede bag. She said:

  “Look at me.”

  He gave a start, perhaps woke, and made a decision. He rose, went to the bathroom, shaved, took a bath, and lay down on the bed. He had eaten nothing for three days.

  The next day, he went down to the village and shopped. He then cleaned the house from top to bottom, removed the shutters that no one had taken off in the spring, and opened all the windows. The rooms had been plunged in darkness for so long that the light, almost gaseous, penetrated slowly, rolling over itself like a drop of blood fallen in water.