The Governesses

by Anne Serre

  It was at this point that they hired the governesses. The moment they walked through the golden gates, Monsieur and Madame Austeur knew that it was all over between them; they would have to start playing a different game.

  When the child was introduced to the group of little boys, he was welcomed like a king. They would fall over each other to offer him the finest fruits, the prettiest silver fish caught in the river, to show him the “hideaway” behind the greenhouse or point out the spot in the corner of the kitchen garden where the gooseberry bushes grew.

  While the child staggered around, collapsing in a heap on top of the ducklings he’d try to catch like a cat chasing its shadow in the mirror, the governesses followed behind, splitting their sides with laughter as they reached down to prevent him from falling or to push a branch or the handle of a wheelbarrow out of the way.

  Such a fuss was made of the child that there were times when he seemed slightly overwhelmed by it all. He would plop down on his little padded bottom, clench his fists, and let out a howl while dogs circled round sniffing at him and turkeys waddled over.

  Since recovering from her lying-in, Laura seemed almost to have forgotten what had happened to her, delegating her responsibilities as a mother so readily to the other women in the household that Madame Austeur was shocked. She tried to knock a bit of sense into the absentminded governess, but Laura wasn’t listening. She was happy to roam back and forth on her own all day, drifting around, chewing on a blade of grass. It was as if her former life had taken possession of her again, but even more firmly and artfully than in the past.

  The child would sit crying among the turkeys, and Laura wouldn’t even glance over. He would wake in his cot, but she had already gone out, tramping around since dawn. And when she returned, instead of going up to his room she would linger on the porch with the little maids or stand at a window, gazing out at the garden.

  She believed she had put that life behind her while lying up in the huge white bed at the center of the house. But little by little, in that very room, she had fallen back into her old ways. At the moment of birth she had felt like a violin, a vessel that had been split down the middle. From her had sprung this little creature already miraculously formed, singular, unknown. Then the sides of the vessel had slipped quietly back into place and nothing remained of the opening. When she placed her hand there she found it mute, and so similar to what it had been before that it was as though she’d been dreaming. Then she heard crying or babbling in the next room, rose from her bed, walked through to the other room, and bent over the cradle. In it was someone unknown crying out for her care but, in all important respects, already equipped for life.

  She felt a kind of love for him, a strange, giddying tenderness. Yet it was as if the child had chosen to be born in her rather than she to bear him, and she couldn’t understand the mystery of that choice. Why her, rather than one of the others? What was being asked of her, Laura? They looked into each other’s eyes, she questioning him, he responding to her gaze with the lake of his eyes. There was something ancient about him, as though he had sprung from between her bleeding thighs after a long journey. She felt very small and very young in his presence, ignorant. Didn’t she have something to learn from him? When he looked at her, it reminded her of other gazes: the last glance of a dying man, or the look of a man who loves you and must leave you. It was a farewell, of that she was certain.

  And so it was, for the creature would grow into a baby. A laughing, crying, thirsty, hungry little thing, who instead of an ancient gaze had the youthful gaze of a baby. He was no longer the creature full of space and time she had borne into the world, he was someone else. The other had gone forever.

  That was why Laura had grown mournful and started to roam around on her own. She had lost someone. She grieved for the figure who had vanished in a matter of days to be replaced by a different one, one who was fresh and new. It was the other figure she loved. The one who had chosen to be born in her and had said so through the lake of his gaze, and whose body of knowledge had vanished in a matter of days.

  She mulled the matter over as she walked alone, telling herself that she, too, in that case, must have chosen the cradle of her fate. What was it, then, that she had pledged to do? And had she done it? Was she doing it now? She viewed the gardens in a different light, the tops of the young trees in a different light, Eléonore and Inès with curiosity. Suddenly it all made sense, it all had a purpose. And she became lost in thought, forgetting to care for the child, engrossed in her own birth, which had followed so closely on that of her child.

  But even that didn’t last. Impressions spring up, for a time alter your body temperature slightly, and then fall away, blending so completely into your flesh that nothing remains. Laura gobbled up the powerful impression the birth of her child had made on her. Just as the intimate gap in her belly had closed again after the child appeared and was today as intact as if nothing had ever happened, so her spirit, after opening for a moment, had folded its wings. It was the old Laura once more, the one with her head in the clouds, the slowest of the three when it came to running to the gates or plunging into the woods with a throbbing heart in pursuit of God knows what.

  Eléonore and Inès were surprised to find her restored to her former self. They asked her to tell them about the lying-in, the sensations she had felt, sure of hearing extraordinary revelations. Laura’s words — hesitant, vague — disappointed them.

  After a while, the child joined the group of little boys and soon became hard to tell apart from the others. He had the same hair, the same eyes, the same cries of delight, the same quick little legs that raced up and down the stairs ten times a day. Like them he rolled a hoop, like them he unhitched the ponies and went trundling across the lawns, like them he slept in the attic, daydreamed in the greenhouse, sucked on the pistils of flowers.

  Nothing, then, had changed. What bomb would need to be dropped on the house for life to change all of a sudden? For the gates to fly open and the uprooted trees and displaced house to form a different landscape?

  The elderly gentleman had returned to his window, happy and at the same time a little disappointed. So he wouldn’t be leaving after all. There would be no new life. And holding up his spyglass, he turned his back on the lithe new woman and the love he would have felt for her, her way of saying the word “darling,” their travels together in those distant lands.

  Once more they were jumping around on the lawns, soliciting his gaze and signaling to him, clapping their hands when they discovered the reflection of his telescope once more playing over their dresses and the wall of the house, or climbing into the trees like a butterfly in summer.

  With the little boys, they larked about chasing after the reflection, trying to catch it, slapping their hands down over their skirts or a windowpane. Then, all of a sudden, they would pretend to have caught it, and when the little boys huddled round in a circle, curious to see, they would quickly part their hands and, at the same instant, the elderly gentleman would angle his spyglass in such a way that the little boys saw a blond flame flying up. Dazzled by this new marvel on the part of the governesses, they gazed up into the sky, while the younger boys rushed off into the house and up the staircase to try and catch the reflection on the roof, as though going to flush out a bird.

  By the time they reached the roof, the reflection had vanished. They searched everywhere for it, rummaging through the trunks in the attic, then running their hands along the gutter on the hunch that the birds might have gobbled it up and spat it out again. Only at nightfall did their treasure hunt come to an end.

  They dreamed about it. It was as though there was a mystery in the house, something hidden that, from time to time, would reveal itself so that they could look for it, then disappear again just when they were getting warm. It was there somewhere, the reflection, but where? And how could you catch it before it flew away? They armed themselves with butterfly nets and bo
xes pierced with small holes, and stealthily, speaking in whispers, spent whole days combing through the house, accidentally knocking over a vase at the bottom of which they thought they had glimpsed the reflection and frightening the little maids when they clapped their nets over their heads all of a sudden — and then, with a great fanfare, trailing triumphantly out onto the lawn.

  The older boys turned their noses up at all this excitement. They wouldn’t be caught dead taking part in one of these hunts. But sometimes, as they strolled around the gardens with their superior airs, they would glance round suddenly at a fleeting glint of light and feel their hearts pounding.

  From time to time, the governesses go off on long treks and disappear into the heather. For three days, nobody sees them. It’s not that they’re outdoor types, or even that they have a passionate love of nature. As we have seen, they do everything by fits and starts and never carry anything through to completion — except Laura, perhaps, in giving birth to her child. A hundred times, for example, they have vowed to learn Latin or Hebrew. They take lessons for two or three days, then all of a sudden a word, a tree glimpsed through the window, a dream they had the night before distracts them, somehow requires all their attention, and they stop studying so that they can daydream. Or else they decide to take up botany and wildlife, buy books and herbariums and consult dictionaries, then two days later they’re their old selves again. It’s as though the channel they seek for their lives has been present all along, but buried so deep and so hidden from view that they can never position themselves there by thinking, only by a sort of yielding. When they’re idle, they feel much closer to the riverbed than when they’re busy and determined. An obscure sense of guilt, however, forces them to act from time to time. “Let’s go hiking,” they say, “let’s explore nature, look at trees and flowers, we’ll bring back a harvest of new impressions which we can examine at leisure when we get home.”

  Their bodies jump around in the heather. They’ve left the little boys back at the house and are having a few days off. Here there’s a hazel tree where the hazelnuts are too green and taste bitter; over there, some cows looking round at them, whom they wave at cheerfully. A yapping dog comes skipping over, accompanies them as far as an invisible boundary, then stops dead in his tracks. They’ve seen so many different landscapes in this region: waterlogged spring meadows filled with the sound of burbling streams, moorlands of grass and water with wild daffodils shooting up everywhere; gorse bushes flowering under a stark, cold blue sky, while they pound the dry earth with their feet, their hands sunk deep in their pockets; in late summer, blackberry bushes that make your fingers bleed and hedgerows of sour pink red-currants clustered together beneath tender green leaves.

  They’ve been living with Monsieur and Madame Austeur for so long now that they’ve swallowed up all these impressions and images, possessed them a thousand times over. And yet they’ve never felt it was enough to live on. It was like the first intimation of happiness, or rather, the precise note struck by happiness. By listening carefully, they try to make their life resemble that sound.

  Hiking around like this, they experience the kind of joy that makes you eager for life, and eager to lead a fuller life. Whenever they walked past a leafy green enclosure they felt, not that happiness was there in that leafy green enclosure, in the shade of the thick oak trees, but that happiness was like that, had the silent majesty of those leaves, the dimensions of that buoyant enclosure, the dreamy depths of its carpet of grass, and that they needed to have all these forces and qualities coursing through their life.

  Then there were the late autumn landscapes when everything gently decays, when wood mixes with the earth and water turns leaves into a russet pulp. Yielding to those laws, the governesses would allow their impressions of summer to mingle together and grow heavy. They would sit passively by the fireside, as though going to meet their death, feeding their forthcoming spring with this fuming dung heap weighing heavily inside them like a witch’s brew. Then winter set in, season of bones and skeletons. They read prayer books, honed their souls, enclosed their bodies in long mourning robes, grew pale, barely ate a thing.

  The arrival of spring called for a celebration. At the first scent of April, when space seems to expand all of a sudden and become as airy and light as a bubble, they would put on their pale green dresses and run to the gates. In the kisses they exchanged with strangers, the whole of the previous summer, and the whole of autumn and winter could be found. They were frenzied kisses, unrestrained and overflowing with mystic thoughts. Kisses that contained — as though in little cases — the sweltering heat and sweating bodies, the screaming red flesh of summer; the decay and weight and fumes of autumn; the slender, black mineral forms of winter. The strangers were taken aback. They took another taste of the governesses’ mouths and found all the seasons there. They seized on their lips and pink tongues, ran their fingers over their pearly white teeth. It was flowers they were biting into, rivers they were drinking, which is why they felt so powerful after kissing them. When the governesses put their dresses back on and smoothed their collars and hair with the flat of their hand, the men thought them heartless and felt abandoned.

  In the course of their excursions, the governesses would stretch out in the long grass or tumble headlong down an entire mountain meadow. They loved to climb trees, feel their legs being cut to ribbons and their muscles working. They bathed in streams where the cold water gripped you like a fist, chewed on the stems of flowers and stroked their faces with clumps of pink grass. Everything was a delight to them — stubbing their foot on a stone, tearing their flesh on thorn bushes, feeling the venomous soft caress of stinging nettles on their calves. At times they would have liked to rub the nettles all over their bodies.

  Did they come back from their excursions in one piece? Oh, never! They would come back like true travelers, after almost freezing to death, getting burned, cutting themselves on the razor-sharp grass and bleeding, bleeding. . . . Had they been younger, they would have wallowed in the mud and smeared it all over their bodies. But they weren’t twenty anymore and drew a line at certain forms of behavior. They climbed naked into the trees, of course. They needed to feel the rough, gnarled skin of tree trunks against their tender breasts, their tender bellies, their tender thighs, just as they needed to bathe naked in the icy water that made their hearts leap. When they were up to their necks in the water, they would close their eyes, and their bodies, as though anesthetized, would fly overhead, winging their way across the sky and on into the firmament. All that remained was their heads, resting on the surface of the stream like water lilies.

  The moment they emerged from its icy fist, their bodies came back to life. To warm them, they would rub them so hard that they turned bright pink. Then they would lash themselves with twigs and, streaked with crimson welts, race along the riverbank, clutching their breasts and giving off so much heat that a mist would form around them, accompanying them as they ran.

  In autumn, what they most enjoyed was the smell of leaves softened by the rain. They would lie down with their bellies to the earth, bury their faces in a mulch of red and black leaves, rub their cheeks in them, then inhale deeply like a dog sniffing at a scent. They loved to feel the rain flooding their bodies and would prolong their walks until they were soaked through, arriving home with their hair all over the place and their eyes on fire.

  Madame Austeur didn’t really like seeing them in this state. It was as though they had been at a witches’ sabbath or something of that sort. The governesses seemed so alien to her at moments like these that they might have torn her to pieces with their teeth or flown straight up to the second floor in the whirlwind of their boiling robes.

  Fearful, she hid in the small salon and watched them through the half-open door as they passed along the hall.

  They climbed the stairs as if cleaving through water, gripped the banister as though about to start dancing, raced upstairs, then back down again, qu
ite oblivious to their supernumerary powers, which were far too potent for a single household, too nimble of foot for a single flight of stairs, and so ardent that the mere electricity of their presence was enough to set the curtains ablaze. And when they went to close the shutters of their room, it was only by clutching on to them that they were prevented from being caught up in their own slipstream and flying out the window. The world had become Lilliputian to them, the house a doll’s house, the gardens a Japanese garden of the kind you concoct with children on rainy days, making trees out of twigs, rocks with three bits of gravel, a lake in a saucer, and casting caterpillars in the role of enormous prehistoric monsters.

  That’s how the world looked to them when they came back from one of their excursions. With one hand they would pluck bunches of trees from the garden, folding them flat against the grass then snapping them off at the base of the stem; with the other, they would lift off the roof of the house and take hold of a distraught Madame Austeur or one of the little maids between thumb and forefinger. At the end of his telescope, the elderly gentleman would discover a leg like the tower of Babel or a breast the size of a heavenly sphere. In this new landscape — where there were woods, plains, mountains and streams, and a few tangled creepers — he was quite lost and would wonder where the governesses had gone. Then all of a sudden, on a clear day, he would see their gigantic heads high above him. Laura would be sticking her tongue out at him — an enormous fiery tongue, like a red carpet unfurling from the heavens. He would plop down on it, the tongue would quickly roll up, and lo! like Jonas he would fall into the governess’s gullet and belly. It was a huge pink echo chamber, like the inside of an ear or a seashell. He would lie down there, a tiny old man in a nice, warm overcoat, with his scarf knotted around his neck. He would lie there flat on his back, his hands cupped behind his head, happy as a lark, smiling to himself and gazing up at the sky and stars, for in this pink belly there would be some form of sky and stars. From time to time, he would stand up and, shading his eyes with his hand, search for the horizon; but try as he might, he could see no end to the belly. It was infinite.