by Anne H
He is here in the suffocating heat. He breathes in an odour of stable and hell. His wet clothes steam on his body. Only with effort can he make out Lydie among the children sitting on the floor, side by side in the shadows, fascinated by the spectacle of fire and horses.
She stands and approaches him, smiling ecstatically, as if she was about to disclose her whole life. Comes very close to him, murmurs:
“I have a passion for horses.”
Julien hears himself say, his voice barely passing through his tight throat, as if he, too, was confessing a formidable truth:
“I have a passion for you.”
Pausing long enough to hear the fierce laughter that shakes the blacksmith like a storm, Julien races outside.
While Pauline won’t leave the bedside of her son who is burning with fever, little Hélène takes advantage of his illness to get closer to Lydie.
Meetings at the blacksmith shop, long walks through the countryside, blue letters exchanged in the hollow of the old birch tree.
You darling androgynous creature with your little breasts, your narrow hips, your indescribable candour, your beautiful hair. I want you to be trusting and shameless in my hands, as if I were everything and you nothing. I want you to be obedient from the start. A single quiver of my eyebrows should bring you to the brink of tears, and I’ll be your queen and mistress till I disappear on the horizon, like a day that has run its course. If you want, I’ll take you to the gates of death. Should you escape, nothing will ever be for you as it was. You will be queen and mistress in your turn. But before that you must submit to the trials, all the trials I’ll suggest to you. Only then will you become strong, independent, and cunning enough to face your mother who dreams of stifling you in her bosom. I shall rid you of your childhood before I leave. That’s a promise. And then you’ll be so lonely, you’ll miss me forever.
Lydie
The two of them are sitting on a pile of beams behind the Ouellet house.
“In my letters I play at being a creature from Hell, like my favourite poets. It amuses me. Relieves my boredom. And it’s fun. Pay no attention, Hélène dear. Writing letters makes me drunk, it goes to my head. Till I don’t even know where I am.”
Lydie laughs. Hélène, her little face tilted up towards Lydie, is filled with a sense of helplessness and fear.
“How you’re trembling, and how silly you look with your pale eyes as wide as saucers.”
What Hélène fears most in the world is that Lydie will do what she did the other day: shift one of the heavy beams lying on the ground and uncover the monsters that hide underneath and swarm across the yellow flattened grass — earthworms, a toad, a thin grey snake . . .
“You’re afraid of your own shadow, Hélène dear! We have to tame you. Come here, let me fix your hair.”
Hélène’s hair covers her shoulders, her back, falls to her hips. Lydie works with the comb and brush, makes Hélène’s hair froth in the light.
“What hair you have! It’s a pity to braid it like that, tight as rope.”
Hélène grabs the comb and brush from Lydie’s hands.
“My turn now. I’ll fix your hair. You’re so dark, Lydie, and your hair feels cold.”
“Turtledove, sweet turtledove,” says Lydie.
“Crow, beautiful crow,” says Hélène.
They cluck, each louder than the other, like little girls. Soon they are coiffed identically, hair pulled back on the neck and tied there with a black velvet ribbon.
Now Hélène mounts the bicycle while Lydie runs behind, encouraging her.
“Faster, Hélène dear, faster. Now straighten out, you’re swerving all over the road.”
✦✦✦
In the half-light of the little bedroom under the eaves, with its walls of darkened fir planks, Pauline’s ailing son has been restored to her, delivered into her care. She helps him drink by raising his head, she turns him over in his bed, changes his sheets and pillowcases, lets her cool hand rest on his brow for long moments, listens for the incoherent words of his delirium, despairs at his confused remarks, records every one of the extravagant words that break like bubbles on the surface of a deep, dark pond. A single word stands out from this magma, detested above all others — the name of Lydie, which he utters several times. From what strange illness does Julien suffer, and what business does that girl have at the most secret moment of his suffering?
The doctor summoned from Quebec City talks about the persistent ache in his side, about the lingering fever. He prescribes calm and rest.
As she’s done every morning since he took sick, she bathes him from head to foot with a sponge soaked in soapy water.
Now the fever has broken. Already he has ceased to be that child, inert and burning with fever, who let himself be tucked in and turned over in his bed. He opens his eyes wide, is astonished to see himself so thin and so naked, lying full-length on the narrow iron bed while Pauline bends over him with her sponge and soap suds. Abruptly, he pulls the sheet over his nakedness.
“Never mind, Mama, I can manage perfectly well by myself now. I don’t need you, honestly. You ought to get some rest.”
Now that she has been dismissed, she goes into the corridor for a smoke, stands leaning against the wall. Her first cigarette in ten days. She barely has enough time to take a few good deep drags, to watch the blue swirls rise to the ceiling, when already she must see to her daughter, Hélène.
✦✦✦
The girl stands before her, inexplicably triumphant in her torn and dirty dress, with bloody knees and a big lump on her forehead.
“I was coming back from the lake and I fell on the stones. Lydie’s bicycle is all twisted but Lydie says it doesn’t matter. The important thing is, I pedalled all the way to the lake by myself. Lydie says that’s very good.”
This child is beyond lying. She didn’t think it necessary to invent a story to explain her cuts and bruises. Shamelessly and with perverse pride, she flaunts her deed and defies me.
Pauline bandages her daughter in silence, swallows her misfortune, grits her teeth, promises herself to return to Quebec City as quickly as possible, to get away from the stealer of children who is wreaking havoc on the shores of the Duchesnay.
There are odours nearly as strong as those of spring, but poignantly sharp, like freshly turned earth. At times a semblance of summer floats in the air, then disintegrates at the end of day with the freshly fallen leaves.
The polio epidemic is subsiding with the arrival of the cold. Pauline packs her bags. Negligently tosses into trunks and cartons armloads of clothing and sundry objects, seeing nothing, it would seem, so anxious is she to be gone.
Little by little a strange kind of peace comes to her, while an astonishing thought was forming that leaves her disarmed and saps her strength. To end in triumph. Invite Lydie here to the house. To unmask her, uncover her true face. To stop struggling against a ghost. To confound her. Have the girl at her mercy. Look her in the eye as if she was a real person who can be touched, seen, heard. Make her lower her gaze. Let her know this is the first time, and the last, she’ll ever set foot in this house. After, it will be too late. Julien and Hélène will be far away, safely out of Lydie’s reach.
Soon Pauline’s desire to know Lydie becomes so urgent, it is virtually the same as Julien and Hélène’s fascination that first time they saw Lydie riding Zoël Ouellet’s horse.
✦✦✦
She has unwound her long red scarf, taken off her coat, and now she is standing among them in her sleeveless white summer dress, her tennis shoes, her long bare legs, with that insolent little beauty spot on her right cheekbone, her mocking manner, and the pride at being alive that illuminates each of her deeds and even her immobility and silence.
“Hello. It was so nice of you to invite me.”
Her voice is l
ow and deep.
She replaces her scarf, winds it twice around her neck. She sits down calmly, is as familiar and agreeable as any ordinary guest — a relative, a cousin, a sister — suddenly very real in their everyday life, in this low room with its darkened beams.
Hélène already regrets having to share Lydie’s presence with her brother and her mother. She stares obstinately at the toes of her shoes. Seems embarrassed and uncomfortable.
Julien shields himself behind his convalescence. Shuts himself inside a state of languor where all considerations are due him. Waits for someone to draw him from his solitude and console him. Listens to the heartbeats at his wrist. Is distressed to be so tall and thin, barely recovered from his fever and released into the world, frail and flayed and as breakable as glass. He looks surreptitiously at Lydie, is sad to see her beautiful face offered to everyone, and bitterly but very softly reproaches her.
Everything that happens now is between Pauline and Lydie. The teapot and thick china cups rented for the season with the house, the freshly baked galette and the strawberry preserves. Lydie bending over her bread and jam. Pauline facing her.
“I’ve never eaten such delicious preserves.”
They play at having tea. Hide their evil designs under equally stubborn brows. Exchange of rapid glances, strong impressions retained. Both profoundly occupied with efforts to avoid a settling of scores.
“How are your parents?”
“Very well, thank you. They’re coming to get me in a few days.”
“We leave next Thursday. We’ve already booked the truck.”
“What a beautiful autumn! I’ll remember it for a long time.”
“I’d rather forget it, like a dead leaf that’s rotting in the ground.”
“That’s up to you. I’m very glad to be leaving for my school in the States, on Staten Island . . .”
Suddenly they are very close to one another, leaning across the table, their faces almost touching, like two fighters ready to exchange blows.
Pauline tries to stand up to her, her imposing stature now huddling on her chair, her entire being reduced to a thin, fierce voice:
“The sooner you go the better it will be.”
Lydie takes the scarf from her neck, pulls it around her shoulders as if she was cold. Her moves are exaggeratedly slow and precise, her voice excessively cautious and polite.
“My own parents are very broad-minded. They’ve never forbidden me to see anyone, not even the Vallières children . . .”
Pauline remains motionless, content to exude her fury in silence, through every pore of her skin. She is surrounded by clouds of cigarette smoke like a cuttlefish by its ink.
Lydie springs from her chair, strikes her forehead.
“But this is our day for goodbyes! We mustn’t let bad tempers ruin what time we have left. Julien, dear, don’t look so grim. Get that look off your face for heaven’s sake. Cheer up! And you, Hélène, you look like a little girl paying a visit. Come and sit beside me. Shall we put on some music to clear our minds?”
Everyone’s attention is so keen, so strained, they can hear, magnified tenfold, the needle as it moves across the record in silence. Pauline has all the time she needs to fear the music before it even begins.
The long low room whose wood bears the patina of time serves as a resonance chamber. Woodwinds and strings reverberate off the darkened beams, while the piano’s voice flows limpid as a spring between one’s fingers.
It is a concerto by Mozart that suddenly emerges in the untamed New World landscape to the delight of three grave and silent children.
Once again Pauline wants nothing to do with it, for she fears music, has dreaded it since her own childhood. But Lydie is there, listening so attentively you can see the music move across her animated face in jubilant waves. Pauline looks away. The girl is indecent, she thinks.
And now Lydie jumps to her feet, approaches Hélène, pulls her with both hands as if inviting her to dance, forces her to stand.
“Listen carefully to those little piano notes, my angel. They’re so much like you. They’re Hélène personified. I’ll never be able to hear that rondo again without thinking of you.”
Facing her mother and brother who are staring at her, Hélène restrains herself from dancing. She merely blushes with pleasure, while her little face is creased with suppressed laughter.
It is while listening to Schubert that this solitude develops for each of them, this isolation inside a poignant secret. Here is the heart-rending andante. Too concerned with his own torment, Julien doesn’t see a veil of shadow fall over Lydie’s face. Soon she turns towards him, grave and dreamy, is astonished to find him so remote, a prisoner of himself. She calls out gently, very softly, for him alone to hear; names him the Sombre one, the Widower unconsoled.
She is on her feet in the middle of the room. Her eyes cold cinders, her hair bristling in sturdy tufts on her head, all her height, all her being offended. Pauline feels deprived of her children, she watches them move about as if they were behind glass while the music enfolds them inside an enchanted circle, ruled over by the stranger she has invited here herself, at her own risk.
On the gallery, when the time has come for Lydie to leave, Hélène clutches Lydie’s scarf, throws her arms around her neck, whispers something in her ear. Then Julien approaches, says very low, as if he was choking:
“I’m going to write to you, we can’t say anything to each other here.”
Pauline stands in the doorway gazing silently at the scene, fretting because these two children who are her whole life have suddenly been caught in an act of betrayal.
✦✦✦
Strangely at ease now that he is alone and no longer facing the person who causes him to stammer or fall silent, he writes her a long letter, as if he were slashing his wrists. For the first time he calls her “tu.”
This is my first letter and probably my last, in other words my one and only letter. It’s as if I’m a man with just one word to say, who suddenly throws it in the face of anyone who’ll listen, an all-inclusive word that contains everything and spares nothing and no one. The other day at the blacksmith shop I told you I had a passion for you, and saying that was better than all the letters in the world. It was more condensed, closer to a cry or, more surprising, a truth that probably shouldn’t be said aloud, like all the truths we hold back because we’re well brought-up and on our guard, for fear of betraying ourselves. I did betray myself at the blacksmith shop the other day and I’m prepared to do it again in this letter, so that you’ll answer me as directly, as truthfully as I’m speaking to you, this time with you across from me and forced to answer, to tell me clearly it’s not just horses or the people in the village who matter to you. I’m here, too, I’m truer than the horses, the trees, and the river, more alive than all the villagers assembled at the blacksmith shop or the general store, more real than the entire countryside rolled out at your feet like a carpet, I, Julien Vallières, with the strength of all my years, promoted to the state of mature man thanks to you, Lydie Bruneau, from the first time I saw you riding Zoël Ouellet’s dappled horse, I existed so strongly beside you that my heart pounded between my ribs like a captive beast, screaming with more life than Alexis Boilard who looks at you with rotten eyes. See me and know me, as I do you. I must have your answer to what I said at the blacksmith shop the other day, and to this letter today, which is the same thing, the same confession, only longer and more urgent, because time is passing and soon we’ll be apart, you and I, as you go to your American college and I to Quebec with my mother and sister. Above all, don’t think I don’t know that appearances are against me, my little boy’s manner that makes you laugh. Brought up under the mother, as they say about an unweaned calf, I may seem like a child gone to seed, yet I love you as a man loves a woman. You who are full of experience, don’t see this as negli
gible, a boy who is in love for the first time and refuses himself nothing. My ignorance is equalled only by my love. Watch out for the traps set by Pauline, my mother. Those social get-togethers where I die of loneliness, with the music, the cakes and preserves, under her vigilant eye, such occasions exist the better for her to keep her eye on us and prevent us from seeing each other unless she is there. Poetry and music illuminate my life, enlarge it endlessly, bring me closer to you at the speed of light, let me be there with you in the same brightness. Tell me quickly where I can see you alone before we leave, day or night. I’ll do anything to be with you, no matter where you are.
Julien
✦✦✦
Hoarfrost covers the fields, the grass by the side of the ditches, the trees and bushes. If you would make your way along the road at dawn, you must pass through banks of fog that unravel as the sun climbs higher in the sky. The Ouellets wait till mealtime before they light a fire in the kitchen stove. Lydie has decided to stay in bed and wait for her parents, now home from New York, to come and fetch her. Twice already Alexis Boilard has come to the Ouellets amid the din and clatter of his old truck. He asked for Lydie and was told she didn’t want to see anyone.
She is shivering in her bed, under the woolen blankets. She reads Julien’s letter. That child is out of his mind, she thinks. His demands are unreasonable, they kill me. He begs me for everything. He will have my soul in his beak if I let him have his way. I must defend myself. His letter drives me to despair. But if I’m weeping now it’s from anger.
She wipes her eyes. Crumples Julien’s letter, closes her fist like someone smothering a bird, while Alexis’s truck circles the house with an infernal roar.