One Day I'll Tell You Everything

by Emmanuelle Pagano

  When the snow was high and the sky full of sunshine, my brother and I used to lie near the top of the young trees, beneath the forks of the lateral branches. Bands of sunlight fell through the shadows of the branches, and our faces would be sprinkled with crusts or crumbs of snow, depending on the strength of the wind.

  The snow is hard, but every now and then the kids’ legs disappear entirely: suddenly they’re up to their thighs or hips in it (I hear bursts of laughter). We’re close to the pinnacles, but also to the raised forest floor. The snow-covered ground is scribbled with pine needles and dust and pock-marked with frozen snowflakes. We walk hunched over through the undergrowth, where the snow has been dirtied by forest fragments dumped during weeks of headwinds. The torches illuminate the slightly perfumed terrain all around us.

  And yet we move rather swiftly, but cautiously, into the space of a clearing, chalky-coloured and chaste, like a resting place.

  In between the spindly trunks, the water is rising. My big kids start talking again, in anticipatory relief, and go back to being what they are, carefree, chatty and annoying. I take a break to do a silent headcount in the twilight of their torches.

  We arrive at the edge of the lake. Silence descends on us all again, but it feels different now. The water is smooth, slick as a polished stone. Close to the shore, the waves have been clotted by the ice. No one tries to go out to play on it. It’s not that my big kids, still children, don’t want to play. They’d love to, I know. But the lake is a sinkhole with hundreds of metres of water in the middle, the sound of which you could hear by smashing the ice, thus breaking our silence. The frozen, sleek waves of ice are barely visible, covered by snow from the storm. When the wind gusts, you can glimpse the ice beneath the snow in places, because the wind that piles up the snow is the same wind that carries it away. Further away, frost flickers, blinking in a gap between the clouds and the snow. Even further away, you can intuit the movement of water starting up again in the middle of the lake, open like a dilated pupil.

  I send the younger kids up to the head of our line. After scarcely five hundred metres we reach the beach. It’s completely dark now, but the beach of snow and wind lights our way. The little path that leads up to the cave is at the other end. The boys muck around on the white beach, but I remind them that I need all their young male strength to force open the door. Their spirits are dampened by the thumping they’re getting from the wind that has taken refuge in this exposed place.

  Everyone cheered Sébastien. The door opened at his first push.

  We made sure to close it again properly.

  The inside of the cave is fitted out for tourists in a sort of long, narrow corridor. The window panes, set into solid aluminium, run along both sides and along the end, circumscribing a U-shaped display area. The tourists are meant to stay in the corridor, inside the U. On the left is the meal area, on the right the sleeping area, in between is the stable (the bottom of the U is taken up by a hay rack). The high windows are made of thick glass.

  As we entered, our moving head torches cast a patchy glare on this place that we were used to seeing under neon lights bolted beneath the lower part of the window frames. It seemed weird, and no one said a word.

  Julien and Sébastien gave Nadège a leg up first. She glided down the other side of the glass like a flower, all cold and wet. She had taken off her shoes so she could get a better grip with her right foot in Sébastien’s hands and lever herself up with the other foot against the window, all the while laughing about how incredibly cold and ticklish the glass was. Julien held onto her hips, telling her she wasn’t that heavy after all. The boys all tumbled over by themselves. Julien chucked over Nadège’s shoes, then they took turns to jump up and grab onto the metal rim at the top, hoist themselves up using their arm strength and drop down the other side. (Move over, Nadège.) Nielle stayed with me so we could pass them the shivering little ones, who were frightened, fatigued, freezing, and in awe. They shrieked as if they were at the funfair.

  When it was my turn, I took my boots off, threw them over, and Nielle lifted me up, then he climbed over by himself like the others.

  I’ve managed to get the fire going without too much trouble. There was no shortage of lighters in their pockets, wet, but still working.

  It’s stupid, but we all really feel like we’re part of the historical re-enactment, even though there’s no one behind the glass to look at us.

  Marie has noticed some half-decent clogs sitting on a makeshift bench.

  Well, sure, I say to the kids, put them on. How many pairs are there?

  We line up our shoes around the fireplace. There are enough clogs for all my big kids.

  It doesn’t matter about me, I’m fine in socks. No, don’t worry.

  Julien and Joël take off their snowsuits and go and hang them on the hay rack. I look at the others, drenched and exhausted.

  I think we’ll have to strip down to our underwear.

  They all protest. I stand up, ignoring them. I make my way round the U, then hand out all the scraps of material I’ve found in the display furnishings to the boys, the sheets and bedspreads to the girls. So they can stay together, Marie and Marine pick a single sheet, made of stiff, coarse cotton, and leave me the other one. I send the boys off to change on the other side of the U, in the bedroom (just a small bed in a dark corner).

  We girls are going to undress in front of the fire.

  The three boys come back with cream-coloured scraps of cloths tied around their hips and forbid us from saying a word. I feel a bit foolish in my dusty sheet, so I don’t say anything, and the little kids stifle their mice squeals behind their own sheet.

  Holding her bedspread tightly shut around her, Nadège places a battered packet of cigarettes on the mantelpiece.

  The boys’ clothes dangle from the bed frame opposite. We hung ours on top of the windows. I feel a wave of sadness when I look at them drying.

  Sylvain is leaning over Nadège, he takes her hand, lifts her up and asks her to follow him.

  They are hidden behind the hay rack when we hear Nadège squeal with delight, then Sylvain leads his princess back: he has dug up a beautiful black- and-red dress from last century.

  Yeah, Adèle, it was on the bed.

  Probably a Sunday-best outfit. Looking drop-dead gorgeous, Nadège spins on her heels in her clogs, smiling and bowing. Her damp black hair glides down the flounces. We cheer for the second time.

  Shh! says Sylvain to us all, pointing to the baby doll in the cradle next to the fireplace.

  Joël has set himself down at the end of the table and, imitating Julien’s grandfather, calls out to Nadège, demanding his dinner. He gets out his pocketknife, opens the blade and wipes it up and down on his scrap of cloth repeatedly, all the while swearing in a dialect mixed with rapper slang to annoy Sylvain. Marie, who has been holding back tears for a few hours, starts laughing (and crying a bit too).

  The nine of us don’t all fit around the table, but it’s funny because we’re wedged behind the window where our clothes are hanging. In order to make room and to compete with Joël, Julien goes and sits at the end of the cave, on the (contemporary) cow sculpture. In front of the wooden beast there’s a sign advertising parsley-flavoured meat. We’re definitely hungry, but we’re already sharing what we have left in our pockets, and it will pass—I know and they know that we can go a fair while without eating.

  The glass fogs up, we draw on it, and manage not to get bored. If I wasn’t thinking about Tony, about the kids’ parents, about their anxiety, if I didn’t know that the kids were all thinking about it too, I would even feel quite okay.

  Sylvain, who has just come back in from taking a piss, after putting on his clothes that were still stiff with ice, gives us a report on the night: The sky’s clear, plenty of stars. (But I froze my arse off.) They’re reflected on the frozen surface of the lake—the wind cleared away all the snow, it’s really beautiful.

  He clambers over the glass again to join u
s, and knocks over the cradle when he lands.

  Nielle starts talking about the boarding-school mirage. Sébastien remembers it too. Last December, every night at the same time, the boarders got caught up in the mystery of a luminous spot in the schoolyard. It had nothing to do with the moon, or the streetlight, it wasn’t a bit of something that reflected starlight onto the asphalt surface. Ten minutes every night at the same time.

  Every morning they went out to check. There was nothing in the schoolyard.

  Sylvain starts up again. I swear to God, Adèle, it’s as cold as stone out there, not metal. The lake’s like metal. He looks at me and in his eyes I see my lake, my break, crammed with lights.

  They must have sent out a search party by now.

  Julien asks me if it’s true that Tony is a volunteer fireman. So perhaps he’ll be the first one to find us. For sure.

  Nadège asks if she can go outside for a smoke.

  I say, Yes, but then bring back some snow, I’m thirsty.

  Marine shrugs. Yeah, right, go and freeze your lips off.

  Nadège doesn’t bother teasing her. She could have smoked next to the fireplace. She picks up her packet of cigarettes, removes a few that might be smokeable. She takes off her clogs, gets a hand up to climb over the glass, grabs her clogs from Julien when he stands on the table to pass them over to her. Thank you.

  Then the cooking pot, which I pass to Julien.

  Shit, my lighter.

  Sylvain picks it up and slides his hand between two metal window supports towards Nadège’s hand. I notice his delicate wrists, his slender hands.

  Their hands touch, indistinguishable, and their fingers briefly interlace.

  Suddenly concerned, Sébastien is staring at Marine. He starts telling me about the cows’ backsides. The calving season has begun. This morning, the vulvas of four of his cows were hanging out. The cows had lain down.

  It had popped out, do you get it, the vulva was outside. Those vulvas have been puckered up, bulging outwards, for fifteen days, and the nerve has already snapped. Cows’ve got a nerve, you know, near the tail, up high. When it’s time, it snaps, and makes a hole. I promised my father I’d help him this evening. Four at a time is tricky, and one of them was full of a big calf, perhaps two. I’m the one who gets them ready for caesareans, it’s easy. I call the vet, and I shave the cow’s flank. I don’t know how my father will cope all by himself.

  He seems to be pondering the situation, his forehead wrinkling like the backsides of his cows.

  Who knows, perhaps they’ve calved during the day.

  I pat his forehead with my cold hand. If you ask me, I don’t think your father is that worried about the cows. They’re going to find us, you know.

  Now we’re on for a round of gory stories about all sorts of freakish calving incidents. They trawl through their young memories for stories they’ve heard, carried down from their ancestors. I let them tell the stories, so that the wrinkles on their foreheads, the blood-stained bumps on their chapped and trembling lips, all their frown lines are transferred into the bovine vulvas and the blood-streaked buttock clefts, so that, instead of the tears they’ve held back, what flows are the tall tales of full discharges of afterbirth secretions onto the straw.

  For now, it’s about who can describe the most hardcore calving, while still remaining credible. Malformations, stillbirths, haemorrhages. Long, tough births (they compare size and breed). Prolapsed uteruses that have to be put back quickly by the vet thrusting his arm inside before the cow croaks.

  Through the door she left ajar, I can see the quivering red of Nadège’s third cigarette and the dark shadow of her arm, extended for over a hundred years.

  I can just make out the overflowing pot of packed snow at her feet.

  The caesarean stories are hitting the mark. It’s Charolais country round here, the calves are large, larger than the Aubrac calves. Cutting open a cow is a common occurrence. The vet knows how to do it, but so do the farmers. Scarcely a week ago, a cow belonging to Marie’s parents was cut open. Standing, the left flank slightly anaesthetised, she seemed to withstand the shock. But as they were finishing sewing her up, she collapsed, just like that, without a sound, except for the thump of her big, numbed body on the floor. All the stitches split open. She bled to death. Marie had to unwind the hose. She emphasises just how much water she ran in order to rinse the floor in the stifling warmth of the cowshed.

  Julien starts another one, a legendary, decades-old story, but they shut him up: not that one, we know it already.

  No, hang on, I don’t, I insist, and they all start telling me, each with their own variations, their memories, their parents’ versions. The story is twenty, twenty-five years, thirty years old.

  You know, Adèle, the rope worker, Axel, it happened on his parents’ farm, the bottom farm, right where the lake is now, the other lake. Oh yeah, of course, you know Axel. Well, that’s where they found the cow. Alive. Alive a week after the first contractions, unbelievable. She’d been drinking from the river. There used to be a river there, down the bottom.

  I know.

  All the ground around the cow was flattened, trampled. The calves were dead. They say it really stank there. She’d gone into hiding. In the morning, the owner had worked out that she was due at midday, and then when he returned to the field, she’d gone. It’s often like that, when they calve in summer. When they’re not in a cowshed, they look for secret spots. The calves were still stuck inside her.

  No, that’s wrong, one was outside, one was inside.

  You’re an idiot, she’d pushed them out, both of them, otherwise she would have carked it.

  Yeah, but anyway that’s how they found her, by the stink of the dead calves.

  I ask them if they’re absolutely sure there were two calves.

  Oh yes, twins. (They’re all in agreement on that point.) And the cow was still alive. The vet said so, he said she had to be left outside. He gave her an injection to stop infections, and she survived. I’m not kidding, Adèle, she was alive.

  Sylvain looks at them, a faintly scornful expression on his face, and announces that, on the subject of damaged vaginas, he has a much better story to tell us. Oh no, it’s not at all what you think, it’s beyond imagination, something you’d read about.

  You should take your clothes off again to dry, I say. He does a little striptease for us, adjusts his scrap of material, then puts his jumper back on, and his hoodie—it’s been a while.

  Nadège comes back inside, the pot in her arms. From behind the glass, she tells him to shut the fuck up. Sylvain persists.

  No, I mean it, she says.

  You don’t even know what I want to say, he counters.

  She puts the pot down and holds out her arms. The five boys get up to help her. Sébastien and Julien leap over the glass to the other side to help her. She climbs up and lets herself fall into the arms of the other three boys. She stands, grabs her clogs and the pot that Julien is holding for her. Just like a mother from days of old, she hangs it on the hook near the fireplace, and slips into her clogs. Like a little girl, she neatens up her dress, smoothing the folds, then sits down next to me. She gives me a look that is both sly and eager.

  You’re the one with the frozen lips, Adèle, she says, you never speak about yourself, we don’t know anything about you, except for Tony. But there’s Axel, for example. Axel from the bottom farm, how do you know him? Why have you got the same name as him? Okay, sure, it’s a common name around here, but still. And what about your life before you arrived here, all that?

  Sylvain’s eyes are like slits. His expression is still scornful, but now tinged with glee.

  He stands up and takes Julien over to the other side of the panel to do a performance for us, or so it seems. They walk around until they reach the bedroom and press themselves up against the glass.

  Now that Marie has delivered herself of her bloody story, she is crying silently, I mean crying her eyes out.

  In an uncha
racteristic gesture, Nielle puts his arms around her, gently making fun of her: Oh, she’s crying for her mother. Come on, cheer up, they’ll find your note, don’t worry. It’s awesome here, don’t you think? Look!

  He points to Julien and Sylvain opposite, leaning against the window, getting clobbered by the cold, making faces and squashing their distorted features against the glass, dribbling warm drool in some sort of private contest. Sylvain has kept his hoodie on, which makes his grimacing mouth look even more grotesque. Marie starts laughing again.

  I wrapped Marine inside my sheet when her Siamese twin went and sat on Nielle’s knee. I feel her warm body tense up when she falls asleep and wakes with a start straightaway. She drops off, stiffens, wakes up. I slide her head onto my shoulder.

  Sleep if you want to.

  No, not yet, I don’t want to sleep yet.

  I sympathise with her battle.

  Nadège is looking at me closely. I finally reply: We should have brought a camera.

  She gets out her mobile phone, as do the others, and Sylvain and Julien take ghastly pictures of everyone striking poses, then Nadège turns to me: Yeah, okay, so there you go. Now, let’s get back to where we were.

  I point out to her that no one knows anything about her potato beetle either.

  You first.

  Sylvain has come back to our side. He wipes his mouth and takes off his hoodie. Everyone whistles as if it is some kind of miracle. Swaggering like a movie star, he sits down, looking pleased with himself, and turns towards Nadège.

  I know, he says. Axel is her brother.

  All my kids gather round, arguing like they do about the White Lady, about landslides, about the guy on the side of the road, but they all agree on one thing: Axel did not have a sister, only a big brother. I tell them to be quiet. The condensation on the windows thickens, keeping the warmth in. I ask Sylvain to be quiet too, and then I say: No, go on, continue.