by Anne H
She might have been doing it deliberately, parading slowly in order to be seen, so people would know who she was — horse thief and the village’s queen of the night. Men, women, children, anyone not busy in the fields watched her cross the village like an apparition. A little farther and she would be free of them. Already the horse’s steps rang out, heavier, faster, across the hardened earth.
That was when they got the idea of blocking her path to stop her from getting away. Alexis Boilard parked his truck across the road.
Julien was there with his sister, on the sidewalk across from the general store. He took Hélène’s hand in his own and held his breath.
The big horse reared up before the truck, and the girl’s long legs were unable to hold him back, nor could her long hands, which clung to his mane. She was thrown to the ground. For a moment she lay there, huddled motionless on the ground, as if she were dead. When the men approached her, cautiously, fearing one of her tricks, she got to her feet like a sleepwalker, her blue shorts streaked with dust, knees covered with dirt and blood. She looked around, seeing no one, stunned to be there, thrown by the horse, defenceless and surrounded by strangers. She said “Damn animal” and walked away, very stiff, in the direction of the river, displaying indifference to the horse Alexis was now trying to capture. She walked so gingerly that she seemed about to stop at every step. All her efforts were intended to keep herself from limping in front of all these people assembled on both sides of the street to watch her pass.
No one dared to go after the girl. The villagers were unsure, in fact, what accusations they could make to the authorities. Neither the mayor nor the curé was alerted. And then she had seemed so strange and proud on her grey horse, as if she were riding in glory, elusive as a vision they might all have seen together in full sunlight on the main street that afternoon around three o’clock. Every one of these people, captives of an austere, monotonous life, were now suddenly living an amazing adventure that glued them to the spot with surprise and satisfaction.
“Please God, don’t let this incredible drama end too soon,” a fat woman murmured, one thumb rapidly making the sign of the cross on her vast bosom.
Their attention soon turned away from the long silhouette moving stiffly, almost imperceptibly, down the road. They turned to the horse, because of its neighing and the sound its hooves made as they scraped the earth. Clutching its mane, Alexis stroked the horse’s neck and tried to climb onto its back. He talked to the animal, fierce words proffered with a kind of stubborn, hypocritical sweetness. The man looked very small, like a gnome hanging onto the mane, and the horse rose on its hind legs, shimmering grey and bluish white, as if its quivering coat were reflecting the sky and the restless clouds.
Once he was on the horse’s back, Alexis had no need at all to drive him, so eager was the animal to return to the stable.
As he was about to cross the bridge that spanned the river, Alexis spied the girl two steps ahead of him, limping terribly along the ringing planks of the bridge, thinking herself safe from any eyes. He invited her to ride behind him so he could take her to Zoël Ouellet’s, but she shook her head, glaring at him. Her eyes seemed to be pure white in her face smeared with blood and dirt. A lock of black hair was plastered against her cheek, like seaweed on a drowned man’s face. Alexis couldn’t tell if she was truly beautiful or simply strange. But he remembered her long thighs spread wide across the horse.
✦✦✦
Once they were back at the house, Julien and Hélène began to describe, with a good many gestures and details, the ride across the village by an unknown girl astride Zoël Ouellet’s dappled horse. They omitted nothing, neither the truck parked across the road, nor the girl’s brutal fall in the dust, nor her departure along the main road, nor the silvery brightness of the horse as he reared up against the sky. As they talked and Pauline, frowning, listened, mute and icy, they had the impression they were committing some bad deed, betraying themselves or divulging something precious that should have remained secret.
In the long low room with its rough walls, Pauline’s silence lingered on. It seemed as if she was grabbing hold of every word her children uttered so as to silence them, to enfold them in her lap again as if they had never existed, neither they nor the stranger who had come to Duchesnay to change their life, which had been good and without complication.
Soon there was nothing alive and palpable left in the stifling and thickening air of the room, nothing that was expressed or spoken between mother and children, only a tremendous refusal on her part and theirs.
Pauline was the first to speak, her voice hardly louder than a muffled breath, snatching each word from the silence as if it was difficult for speech to emerge from her throat:
“That girl is nothing but an outsider come here from who knows where; she’s a horse thief, a crackpot, a lunatic. Watch out, and if you ever run into her, above all don’t speak to her.”
That night Hélène and Julien went to bed in their adjoining rooms under the eaves with walls of darkened fir, briefly saddened that Pauline wanted to rob them of even the memory of their marvellous afternoon in the village. They were consoled almost at once, though, for in their still fresh memories that persisted into sleep rose up time and time again a stunt horse and the fabulous creature who rode it.
✦✦✦
She entered the Ouellet house through the small side door so no one would see her in such a sorry state. She went directly upstairs to her room, pulling the door shut behind her. Now she is standing naked on a newspaper spread on the floor as a bathmat. The flowered basin, the ewer filled with cold water. She sponges herself from head to foot. The water in the basin turns red. Her knees and legs are covered with scrapes and scratches. She weeps as if she had never wept before, suddenly discovering that the salt of her tears scalds her slender face. She weeps because she has been humiliated and insulted. And she is ashamed because Alexis Boilard caught her limping across the bridge that spans the river.
“Supper’s all ready, Mademoiselle Lydie, it’s on the table.”
Madame Ouellet calls to her through the closed door.
Lydie pulls on silk stockings and her longest dress so nobody can see her scrapes and scratches. She combs her wet hair and carefully ties it at her neck with a black velvet ribbon.
She remains silent all through supper, afraid her animosity will get away from her in angry words dropped into the Ouellets’ big bright kitchen.
“You’re pouting, Mademoiselle Lydie. That’s not nice!”
Only when dessert is served, when she sees the hot apple pie on her plate, does she feel life becoming good again, and light. She declares:
“This is the best apple pie I’ve ever eaten!”
Madame Ouellet smiles with contentment.
And that was when Zoël Ouellet, encouraged by his wife’s smile, stood up very straight across from Lydie and forbade her to ride his horses in the future. His muffled voice trembled a little between his tobacco-stained teeth.
“My horses aren’t made for the circus, and anyway it’s not fitting for a young girl like you.”
She finishes her apple pie, not so happy now, and the words “not fitting” stick in her throat.
✦✦✦
False summer breezes, the sun beating fiercely on the brown ploughed fields. These brief flamboyant days, these bright red leaves — there is nothing in the world more beautiful, and evening is quick to return all this splendour to the deep darkness that is like a foreboding of endless winter.
Pauline has already begun to examine every one of them, without seeming to, as if merely asking about the weather. Madame Jobin at the general store, the dressmaker Mélanie Richard, the Pruneau twins — young ladies who play the harmonium in church, each taking her turn, Jean-Baptiste Dumont, the schoolteacher from Pont-Rouge, Réjeanne Cloutier, the curé’s fierce and garrulous houseke
eper who has eyes in the back of her head.
I shall turn this village upside down, Pauline tells herself, I’ll shake it up as hard as I can. Information must fly through the air like the dust when you shake a carpet.
They have told her everything they know about the young woman boarding at the Ouellets — which is, in fact, very little: Lydie Bruneau, aged seventeen, a horse thief brought to Duchesnay by her parents and entrusted to the Ouellets, who rent out rooms in the summer.
Julien and Hélène walk across the roads and through the fields all the way to the little woods at Les Ours, in the hope of seeing Lydie again.
The countryside is full of the smells of soaking leaves and damp earth. Most of the time the river is blue, with glittering waves. Julien and Hélène climb and descend endlessly. The country is covered with hills, and with hollows between the hills. It is rather as if every person lived in a compartment of his own. A valley, a rise, a rise, a valley: the country is full of secret places, of landscapes buried or spread out. A land on many levels. There is the village proper, with the church, the graveyard, the presbytery, the high school, a few frame houses, the bridge that straddles the river. It is all flat and hollow, level with the river, made for holding in the mist and dampness. To escape, you must climb Savard’s hill, which takes you to a flat expanse that extends all the way to the little violet-coloured railway station. Moïse’s hill takes you in the opposite direction, towards Pont-Rouge, along the sandy road that skirts the broad flat fields hemmed in by the squat, slate-coloured mountain. Seen from there, the river runs deep and grows agitated, bristling with white rapids amid a haze of water and a savage roar, and divided in two by an island.
The Zoël Ouellets built their house on this steep hill, shielded from the river and its heady sound, in the middle of fields lying at the end of a long lane that’s hard to keep up in winter because of the snow. Three silvery poplars rustle above the house.
Lydie treats her scrapes and chomps at the bit, under the poplars, wondering how she can get herself a horse and ride it without provoking the whole village. While she waits she struggles to string delicate beads of multicoloured glass on a nearly invisible thread.
✦✦✦
Faithful to the promise he’d made himself to see Lydie again, Alexis Boilard came to the Ouellet house one fine Sunday afternoon before Lydie’s wounds were fully healed.
She was sitting in the grass under the poplars when she saw him approaching, his truck speeding down the lane in a cloud of dust.
He asks how she’s getting along, then immediately offers to take her for a ride in his truck. She shakes her head as if she were mute, and at the same time gives him a mocking look, her slanting eyes half shut against the brilliant light. He asks “Why?” in a bewildered way. She is still looking at him from between her eyelids. He sees a little glimmer of blinking green.
He stands there before her, with his sun-reddened face, his hair glistening with brilliantine, a white shirt unbuttoned on his pale chest. He has gone to some trouble for her and here she is refusing to get in his truck. Stubbornly he asks again, “Why?” A shrug and she goes back to her beads, creasing her brow. In the silence one can hear a delicate little sound as glass beads clink together in a tin box.
He turns on his heel very quickly, ready to flee, takes a few steps in the direction of the truck parked by the kitchen door, then retraces his steps. For a moment Alexis looks in silence at Lydie, who is zealously stringing her beads. He says very quietly, weighing each of his words:
“It could be that somebody my family knows very well has got some horses for hire. If you want, I could ask that person one of these days . . .”
She echoes, without looking up:
“One of these days . . .”
For the first time he hears her voice, somewhat hoarse and pitched low, and he finds it inexplicably overwhelming.
Since he’s just standing there, she gets up abruptly and drops a string of beads around his neck.
“In the meantime, wear this day and night, in memory of me.”
He still has not moved, looks crestfallen and glum, his ears red, the beads around his neck. She sends him away with an imperious wave of her hand.
“Bye now, Alexis Boilard, one of these days . . .”
And now, in a flash, he regains the image he has always invented for himself — a virile man and quick to take offence. A village rooster with his hackles up, a flamboyant cockscomb, his heart filled with violence and rancour. He rips the necklace from his neck, breaking the string, scattering the beads, and they sparkle here and there in the grass. His voice trembles with rage.
“Horse thief, outsider, cripple . . .”
With one leap he is back at his truck, starts it up with the grating sound of stripped gears.
✦✦✦
In the meantime, Hélène and Julien run through the countryside as soon as they can get away, hoping to catch a glimpse of Lydie. Evenings, bent over their schoolbooks, they grow distracted, dream in silence about the runaway rider astride Zoël Ouellet’s dappled horse.
The rain has come all at once, settling over the landscape day and night, draping it in a grey and barely transparent curtain. Its steady sound drips inside the frame houses, already made airtight for winter. From the shingled roofs comes a sound like the stamping feet of a patient, stubborn crowd, countless, endless. The wind rises quickly and the glorious leaves of Indian summer become dull then fall in close-packed swirls. The smell of damp earth is so strong now it permeates the animals and people who breathe it in, sniffing it as if it was their own odour.
There is a long bench in the general store, a plank resting on kegs that hold nails of all sizes, from tacks to six inches long. Julien and Hélène are sitting on the bench, engulfed in the leather aroma of the harness hanging on the wall above their heads. Their feet in rubber boots are flat on the knotty wood floor, making puddles and rivulets. They sit there in their yellow oilskins, bags of groceries on their laps, waiting for the rain to let up so they can go home. They can see nothing through the screen door silver with rain, but they can hear the gusts of rain falling on the countryside all around them.
She has come inside, streaming wet, the door slamming behind her. Everyone who is in there waiting for a respite stares at her. In her grating voice she says, almost softly, as if it was a secret:
“I’d give my soul for a chocolate bar!”
As soon as she is served she sits on the bench next to Julien and Hélène and munches the chocolate without looking at them. She is so wet, she’s dripping onto the floor, even onto the bench near Julien and Hélène who can breathe in her odour of wet wool. Her hair plastered against her skull gives her the look of a Buddhist priest with shaven head. Julien would see her like that much later, in his dreams, when she would have a little death’s head.
She laughs with her mouth full, and her teeth are smeared with chocolate. The two youngsters next to her as if frozen in their glistening raincoats dream of being beyond her reach, and they cannot move, like spellbound birds.
She speaks without turning around, addressing no one in particular. Everybody in the store is looking at her, listening to her. She does not raise her voice, and her low, rough inflections overwhelm them as they sit there killing time, stripping their defences, putting them at her mercy, from the first word she utters.
She chatters about this and that, about sunny days and dull ones, about horses, those magnificent creatures, about her parents who live in Quebec City, at the Claridge, about how boredom lingers in the rain, about her tremendous yearning for life, which possesses her like a fever. She seems to be speaking only to herself, and her last words are barely audible. Unanimous silence follows her remarks. The others dare not move for fear of being suddenly, brutally thrown back into their everyday lives.
Just then Alexis comes in, slamming the door behind h
im. Checked shirt, leather boots, a mulish look on his face. He spotted her on the bench right away and now he looks at her impudently while conversations in the store pick up again sotto voce.
As soon as she recognized Alexis she turned towards Julien and Hélène.
“Look at these little dears sitting beside me, all yellow like baby chicks! Cheep, cheep!”
Alexis laughs very loud. He thinks he is back in Lydie’s good graces because she is mocking others in his place. A kind of transference that gladdens him and makes him swagger. He leans on the counter, sends great gusts of cigarette smoke to the ceiling and never takes his eyes off Lydie.
People have been looking at her for so long, she should be used to it. When she was hardly more than one or two years old, when her parents entertained they would display her naked on the table, like a centrepiece surrounded by flowers. The white cloth, the silver, the china and crystal gleamed before her like an entire city with all its wonders in a row. There were little flashes of strange rapture in the eyes of the men in tuxedos, the women in long dresses, who loudly applauded the naked child in the middle of the table where they sat. The torrential sound pouring over her is one she will hear forever.
Lydie grew up under those same gazes of idle men and women avid for pleasure. Her father’s friends would introduce her very early to scotch, cigarettes, and flirtation. The desire of some was at times so urgent that they coveted more than her nascent beauty, desired even that which was sacred and lay at the heart of her beauty. She would insult them with all her might, ridicule them with a skill at mockery that stunned them.
And now she is here, unable to bear any longer the stale air inside the store or all those eyes staring at her. She turns towards Julien and Hélène.