Collected Later Novels

by Anne H

  The order is given to her in the obscurity of her heart to take revenge, at once, for a slight she experienced in the mists of time, at the very sources of her own life. She writes:

  Julien, dear, you read too much. You write too much too, romantic letters that are far too long. I like my poets in books, not in life. In real life I prefer boys like Alexis who don’t beat around the bush, who expect from me only what I can give, which is very little, as I’m stingy with the gifts that nature gave me and I fear love as I fear my own death, and the death of my freedom.

  Lydie

  She hears the truck driving crazily, turning sharply around the house. She covers her ears with her pillow. She feels a very strong desire to roll in the mud and to do crude things with Alexis, to fling herself headlong into disgrace.

  Lydie plants herself in the very middle of the lane, waves her arms above her head. Alexis stops his truck. His angry head appears out of the cab.

  “Are you getting in, yes or no?”

  She says in a feeble voice like a sick child’s:

  “Yes, yes, I’m coming, you don’t have to make such a racket!”

  ✦✦✦

  She swears very softly that she will impose her law on Alexis and bring him to pleasure according to limits she has chosen.

  Her father’s friends smelled of after-shave and scotch. Alexis reeks of beer and sweat. But it’s still the same face, ravaged as if by illness. She looks at the profile of the boy hunched over the wheel, at his mulish expression. As she is accustomed to hasty, inconsequential caresses in cars and other unsuitable places, she refuses to worry for another few moments.

  The truck bumps along a bad road, a shortcut that Lydie doesn’t know. Alexis hasn’t raised his head. Driving his truck seems to demand maniacal attention. When the road begins to resemble a path about to disappear through the spruce trees and the leafless birches, Alexis cuts the engine. He turns to Lydie, meekly, like a pet begging to be stroked. Says, over and over again, “Lydie.” Lets his head fall onto her lap. She feels the wet warmth of his mouth, his puppy’s teeth, through her skirt.

  He nibbles at her skirt, her underwear. Spreads her thighs with his head. Buries his head under her skirt.

  Soon it will be done, she thinks, I’ll still be unscathed, I’ll pull down my skirt, go back to the Ouellets, and eat supper with the family, as usual.

  She tries to sit up.

  “I’m the one who decides, Alexis Boilard: let go of me.”

  He grabs her around the waist and drags her out of the truck. She struggles and falls to the ground, onto the grass, full-length. She is momentarily stunned and sees the sky above her, white and chalky. The metallic dazzle blinds her briefly until Alexis’s heavy body drops onto her and blots out all the light.

  He pleads with her, insults her, calls her “Little slut” and “Sweetheart.” She insults him and derides him. Calls him “Clumsy ox.” And now an unfamiliar little voice is emerging from her, demanding its pleasure and giving precise instructions.

  ✦✦✦

  He has donned a navy blazer with his school crest, he has put his head under the pump, run a comb through his streaming hair again and again, and left the house. When his mother asks where he’s going so late, he shouts hoarsely:

  “Leave me alone and let me live my life!”

  A vast prairie sky at sunset, flat land with stubby hills on the horizon. Here is the lane of poplars, their leaves still green and curled by the wind. Julien makes his way amid the sound of trembling leaves and he trembles along with the leaves.

  From her bedroom window she has seen him coming. She tells herself that nothing will ever be the same again between them, that she is a woman now and has no need for this child with his burden of dreams who is coming towards her down the lane.

  Lydie’s face is creased with worry and dread. She believes she can feel, moving in her bruised belly, small brick-coloured hands with diminutive black nails, a whole creature, white as lard, taking root, strangely resembling Alexis.

  Before Julien can knock at the door she is there on the threshold, her mood foul and grim.

  “Did you want to see me, Julien dear? You can call me ‘Madame’ now, you know, I earned it yesterday, while you, you’re just a little brat still wet behind the ears!”

  What is strange is that Julien doesn’t hear what Lydie says to him. He repeats in a mechanical voice that doesn’t seem to belong to him:

  “I have to know. I want to know. Alexis Boilard and you, in the truck — is it true? The whole village is talking about it.”

  An icy silence filled with menace nails him to the spot for a long moment.

  “Do you really want to know, Julien dear? Too bad for you. But first we have to find a quiet spot so I can tell you everything, so you can hear everything, since you want to so badly.”

  She has thought of nothing better than to take him to where the fox cages are, abandoned now for a long time.

  They walk down the narrow path one behind the other, Julien following Lydie, like birds lost in the wake of a ship they depend on for their sustenance and their lives. He expects everything from her, the revelation that has already broken his heart, the knife and the wound.

  On either side of the path the crickets’ last song before winter crackles in the cold air. Lydie becomes voluble, starts to explain that fox farms are always far from houses because of the smell and the yelping that sounds so mournful, especially at night. She turns to Julien.

  “Besides, if the mother foxes are disturbed they eat their young, to protect them.”

  She bursts into great cracked laughter that breaks.

  Julien’s voice again, still just as strange, as if detached from his body, sounds dry and mechanical:

  “You already told me that. You’re repeating yourself, Lydie. You’re talking for the sake of talking.”

  Here are the ramshackle cages, the wooden shed where they used to kill the foxes. Julien wonders how they were able to slit the foxes’ throats without damaging the fur. How could they take the lives of russet or silvery animals and have nothing of their torture show on the lovely pelts destined for lovely ladies?

  Lydie walks around the shed, looks in vain for a window, spies a small plank door with a rusty padlock, tries to open it, thrusting with her shoulder.

  The door gives way at last, while Julien pleads:

  “Let’s get out of here, Lydie. It feels so eerie.”

  “What are you afraid of, Julien dear . . . Of me or of any foxes that might have escaped the massacre?”

  The light is gradually dwindling. The grey shed, the rusty bars of the cages seem to be dissolving in the autumn dusk. There is no pity in the livid sky as its light is extinguished.

  Animated and light, she leads him into the shed, bumps into the furniture and objects piled in the shadows.

  “What a lot of junk! Like a beggars’ auction!”

  Striking match after match, they make out an old eviscerated horsehair sofa, a rickety table, quantities of rusty, battered utensils, a handleless rake, a pitchfork missing half its teeth. Here and there on the floor are dusty straw and quantities of field-mouse droppings. On the table, a lantern with blackened glass. The candle inside is almost intact. Lydie lights it at once.

  The silence catches at their throats, impresses them as if someone infinitely fearsome, the worm-eaten genius of the place, were hiding in the big footless armoire, or behind the little straw-bottomed chair that’s half eaten away.

  Their shadows shift on the wall and on the piles of furniture. They have to come very close to the lantern that sits on the table if they’re to remain visible one to the other, one opposite the other, all smeared with night, as the candle flame flickers between them.

  Julien is astonished to find Lydie intact before him. Smooth and hard as usual.
Not a trace of her disgraceful behaviour with Alexis. He persists but looks in vain for signs on her face. Stares wide-eyed. Is like a blind man; his whole life is before him to be grasped, yet he sees nothing.

  Lydie is the first to look away.

  “Don’t stare at me like that, shooting daggers with your eyes.”

  With no rifle or knife, I’m unarmed, thinks Julien, and he presses his long bare hands together as if he was testing the fineness of his bones.

  She goes and sits on the little horsehair sofa at the back of the shed, in the shadow zone, as if she wants to burrow into it.

  Her voice seems to emerge from the gloom of night.

  “Have you ever seen the sun come up, Julien dear? What if we stayed quietly inside here, you and I, until dawn? You’ll see how sad and beautiful it is when the night slowly gives way and is filled with light.”

  She seems moved by the fate of the night to die in the first hours of dawn.

  “Come closer. Stop looking at me with those eyes like pistols aimed at me. Come.”

  He collapses at her feet with a muffled growl, like a wounded beast. Hugs her legs with his trembling hands. Raises distraught eyes to her.

  She shrinks from him. Good Lord, what is he doing at her feet, this boy who demands everything of her, even the secret part of herself that she persists in refusing, her childlike innocence.

  “Julien dear, let me go, you’re frightening me.”

  She buries her head in a cushion that is split and smells of mildew. She laughs because her mouth is full of horsehair. She chokes and spits.

  “You’re so funny, little Julien, with half your hair plastered down and the rest standing up on your head. You look like a kingfisher that’s been in the water! And so curly, Julien dear, it’s quite amazing.”

  She runs her hands through his hair again and again.

  “You’re too late, Julien dear. How I would have loved you only yesterday, and you’d have been the first and maybe the last. But today it’s too late. My day of kindness has already passed. I’d be too afraid of becoming pregnant twice at once. Can’t you see it: twins pressed close together in my womb, one all red and smelly, the other as curly as a lamb!”

  She buries her face in the cushion, chokes with laughter again.

  He has got to his feet and is speaking now into the door, his hand on the panel, ready to go out.

  “You’re cruel, Lydie, and I wish I’d never met you.”

  “I’m neither cruel nor kind, little Julien, I’m possessed, that’s all, which isn’t the same thing. Don’t go right away, please don’t go.”

  He turns and comes back. Again he kneels close to her. He speaks in a muffled murmur, his head on Lydie’s lap.

  “I love you so much.”

  “What are you complaining about, Julien dear? You wanted to become a man and now it’s done. You have your disappointment in love, your broken heart. At least you have that.”

  Julien can’t hear Lydie, he is so busy savouring the warmth of her knees against his cheek, his forehead.

  “You’re a beautiful boy, Julien dear, very beautiful. I think that tomorrow I’ll be madly in love with you and I’ll shed every tear in my body because of it. For the time being, though, I’ve other things to do. This is the day after my wedding and I have ordinary things to look after. My parents are coming for me in two days. I’m going to a college on Staten Island, in New York, by the ocean, where all the fishermen are Portuguese. I’ll be there till the end of the school year. But before I leave, I must take care of your little sister, Hélène. I have a date with her tomorrow.”

  She speaks as if to herself, choosing her words, seems unaware of Julien’s warmth against her legs, the weight of his head on her knees.

  For some time now a little field mouse atop the footless armoire has been gazing at Lydie with its beady eyes. How he looks at me and how I look at him. She is fascinated. It seems to her that the image of the field mouse on the armoire is being engraved in her with strange precision, as if later, in the normal course of time, any other memory of her night with Julien would be taken away from her.

  They have waited for the sun to rise, Julien huddled against Lydie’s legs, Lydie running her fingers through Julien’s hair. Between them, quantities of things both childlike and childish. He speaks of his primitive state as a child of the Sun. She says it’s the same for her, though she’s a girl. Julien swears that it’s till the end of life, till death; Lydie pulls his hair by the handful, assures him she’s as old as the earth and the sea together, and that it’s pointless to think of tomorrow.

  “Between us, Julien dear, the order is reversed, for in the proper order of things it’s the man who is older and the woman who’s as artless as a yellow-centred daisy in a field.”

  Again, her cascading laughter.

  All around the shed, birds have begun their quiet chatter before even a vague glimmer of light appears in the sky. When he kisses her, like a boy bestowing his first kiss, she tells him to start again and to pay close attention. The second time, she pretends to be asleep. She is like a dead woman who is about to fall to the ground.

  The day dawns slowly, on all sides at once, seeping into the sky second by second, like liquid spreading underground, far from its source, its bleeding heart hidden behind the trees.

  It is she who kisses him, who puts her tongue into his mouth, who bites him fiercely. Here she is, now on her feet, tidying her dishevelled hair, smoothing her dress.

  “Hurry, Julien dear, it’s morning. If you don’t go now you’ll be scolded. Don’t complain. You’ve had your wedding night. Goodbye. I’m going now. My holidays are over.”

  He stands before her, stunned and helpless, like a traveller who is lost in an unfamiliar station.

  He speaks softly, tonelessly, as if the words that come from his mouth do not concern him.

  “Goodbye, Lydie Bruneau. I’m leaving, too. Right now. It’s morning. I have to go home. I won’t see you again. You’re the devil, Lydie Bruneau.”

  As Julien walks away, down the path that grows brighter as the sun climbs higher in the sky, he doesn’t know that Lydie, behind him in the shed, her face in the split cushion to muffle her wailing, is saying his name again and again:

  “Julien, Julien, Julien . . .”

  ✦✦✦

  No cries, no insults, no reproaches. She has no thorns or barbs. Is exhausted. Bereft. Turned away from her life. She stands before her son and asks where he’s been.

  “Lydie and I wanted to see the sun come up . . .”

  She waited all night for his return, standing at the window in the hall, pressed against the cold glass.

  Pauline is silent. There are no words available to her to express her grief and fatigue. Strange phrases form in her head that will never see the light of day: I loved you first, I am the first woman in your life, like Eve beneath the tree of good and evil, in the lost Paradise; remember, that was your childhood.

  He puts his hand over his mouth to hide the lip that was bruised by Lydie’s bite. As if he was suffering from a toothache.

  ✦✦✦

  Already Hélène obeys her every command. I whistle and she comes, Lydie thinks, as she drinks cup after cup of coffee in the Ouellets’ big kitchen so as not to succumb to the urge for sleep. Forget her sleepless night in the fox shed. Forget Julien. Wash herself clean of her night with Julien. Turn her attention to Hélène. Make her undergo the final test. The brother first and then the sister. Each one in turn. Has she not sworn to set them both free? Tomorrow it will be too late. Today.

  She lights a cigarette. Blows the smoke up to the ceiling. She likes the mixture of coffee and nicotine. Her eyes are half-closed, she is resting. Madame Ouellet is bustling about the table. She has seen that Lydie’s bed wasn’t slept in and looks at the young girl surreptitiously, s
uspiciously.

  Concentrating on her coffee cup, Lydie has caught a glimpse of Madame Ouellet watching her. Lydie’s green eyes are utterly blank above the cup. Madame Ouellet goes back to her cooking. At once Lydie calls to her, bows low to her.

  “Good morning, Madame Ouellet. Consider yourself greeted by me, Madame Ouellet. Morning has come. I have a busy day ahead of me. I’ll tell you about it tonight. Till then, think of me. Make a cross over your heart when you think of me, Madame Ouellet. Tell yourself no one can paddle down the river like me. I’ve been doing it since childhood. It’s been decided. I’m going now. And little Hélène Vallières is coming with me.”

  Lydie asks for the key to the boathouse. She doesn’t say that she wants to shoot the rapids. Quietly overcomes her apprehensions. There is only the savage heart of the river to be crossed.

  ✦✦✦

  Soon Hélène is there in her yellow oilskin, her hair knotted at the neck like Lydie’s.

  “I’m scared, Lydie, I’m so scared.”

  “You have to get beyond your fear, pass through it as if it was a ring of fire in the circus: you know that. Afterwards you’ll feel strong and tall, your mother’s equal, and you’ll be able to look her in the eye and tell her to mind her own business. No one will dare to pit themselves against you, you’ll be a grown-up person forever, as free as me, Lydie Bruneau. And it’s not complicated. You’ll just sit in the canoe without moving, while I paddle. There’s nothing in the world like shooting rapids, dear Hélène. Tempting God and the Devil at once. Quite a feat! You’ll remember it for the rest of your life. Do you have a heavy sweater on under your raincoat? You’ll need one. Here, let me fix your clothes a little better.”

  She tugs at Hélène’s turtleneck, pulls it over the collar of her raincoat, brushes Hélène’s cheek with her fingers.

  “You’re so sweet, Hélène, so lovely.”

  Hélène melts like a Christmas candle under Lydie’s caress.

  “You’re the lovely one, Lydie, and I’d die for you.”

  Lydie has only to smile at little Hélène to be sure of herself beyond life and death, even though she knows she’ll hurt Pauline.