by Anne H
The days of diapers and bottles passed nearly without incident. Lines draped with baby clothes were hung once a week between two stunted trees. The rest of the time, Clara, in her diapers, smelled very strongly of urine and of milk gone sour.
Aurélien took his daughter with him everywhere, rolled up in a faded sweater that had once been blue. He would lay her down in the grass in the shadow of the trees, under cheesecloth because of the mosquitoes, when he had to earth up plants or reap or plough. From time to time Aurélien would pick Clara up and hold her against his chest, to console her for being alone and so tiny, lost at the edge of a field or at the foot of a fir tree. He would decide on occasion to go to the village, do his errands with his daughter on his back, tied into the faded blue sweater, its sleeves knotted under Aurélien’s chin.
With the image of his wife buried in the very marrow of his bones, all lament, all desolation forbidden him, Aurélien cared for his daughter and cared for his fields. The village people were kept at a distance in the same way as rebellion and tears.
Shaving before the pocked mirror above the kitchen sink, he would see his own face come to meet him like a taciturn stranger, and he would think about human dignity, which forbade him too much hidden aloofness or secret tumult.
Life flowed by, silent and monotonous, between the father and his child, along the bank of the river. It passed beneath the vast country sky, slack and bare, forever stripped of its angels and its saints. At no time would Aurélien, in the simplicity of his heart, dare to apply the name despair to the dark hole that moved along with him, under his feet, wherever he might be — in his house, on the road, or in the fields.
Clara grew up amid her father’s silence and the voices of the countryside. Long before acquiring any human speech, the little girl could chirp, cackle, purr, coo, moo, bark, and yelp. Her imitation of the great horned owl when dusk had fallen was so true that the blood of the field mice froze in their veins.
Sometimes Clara would surrender herself to the trills of birds known to her alone, so limpid and pure that she would abruptly fall silent, choked with happiness.
“What an opera singer my Clara could be,” thought Aurélien, having picked up the word “opera” long ago, during a conversation he overheard at the general store between the notary’s wife and a passing traveller.
At the age of ten Clara was unable to read or write and her vocabulary was as limited as that of a child of three.
✦✦✦
Three times already the new village schoolmistress had come to fetch Clara and take her to school. Just out of normal school, her zeal was extreme, and she taught her class as if the salvation or damnation of every one of her pupils depended on her good will.
The schoolmistress had frothy red hair that made a halo around her in the sun, and goldrimmed spectacles that gave off flashes whenever she moved her head. She sat very erect in the cluttered kitchen while some round-eyed white hens pecked beneath the table that was never cleared. The schoolmistress accepted the glass of dandelion wine Aurélien offered her, drained it in one gulp, wiped her lips with an embroidered handkerchief, and began to extol the benefits of school for children. According to her, all the knowledge in the world was to be found collected in texts and exercise books, coloured maps that hung on the wall, and on the enormous blackboard which was gradually inscribed with the rapid signs of knowledge on the march.
It was a whitewashed village school, under a pinnacle of grey shingles, and in it children of good will were promised that they would possess the earth.
“You understand, Monsieur Laroche, your daughter is as beautiful as the sun and moon combined, but the mind inside that curly head lies fallow, fallow . . .”
She repeated “fallow” despairingly, and Clara thought she could hear beneath the leaves the muffled lament of an animal unknown to her. And then it occurred to Aurélien that the entire earth was lying fallow, resembling in that way his own fields filled with rocks and sand, as well as the devastated sky above his head and his heart, which was equally mute and stony. He asked himself if it was good for his daughter to leave abruptly the deep dark life where things are never expressed or named, to go and lose herself in a garrulous and pretentious world. At the same time, though, Aurélien was filled with pride because the teacher had acknowledged Clara’s beauty and had compared her with the sun and moon.
As for Clara, from the schoolmistress’s first visit she was dazzled by the light that glinted from the young woman’s red hair, from her gold-rimmed glasses, and from the rings she wore on both her right hand and her left — rings that wedded her to all the earth.
And as the teacher spoke, all her unfamiliar and mysterious words were charged with the same gilt and reddish radiance, so superb one could die from it.
Soon Clara had but one thought, to learn to read and write and count, simply so she could spend the day under the influence of that radiant redness.
After several days of grim reflection, Aurélien finally gave in to his daughter’s pleas. The next day he bought her patent-leather shoes with straps so she could make her entrance into the school. Very soon it turned out that Clara’s feet, accustomed to running about quite bare, could not tolerate the fine shoes Aurélien had bought. She carried them all the way from the house to the village and only put them on once she was within sight of the school, and she entered it very erect, standing firmly in her shiny shoes.
Seated in the first row with the youngest nursery-school pupils, facing Mademoiselle, fiercely flashing, Clara learned to read and write in record time. It seemed to her she had to run with all her might across shifting ice that was constantly threatening to shatter. Even more than the tiny black letters in her reader that she gradually deciphered, Clara loved the ringing sound of the new words in her teacher’s mouth, as if she were discovering some new music that enchanted her.
One day, when the little girl had worked particularly well, Mademoiselle took her white hand bedecked with rings and lifted Clara’s face up to her own, gazing very deeply into her eyes, and she murmured so softly that only Clara could hear her, as in a dream:
“In the depths of those eyes, the river is deep and all the king’s horses could drink there together.”
These remarkable words, like a sigh against Clara’s cheek, scarcely surprised her, so certain was she that all the wonders in the world would soon be revealed to her. For were not the king’s horses and the king himself, wearing his crown, advancing solemnly from the end of the horizon on their way to her, to drink from the pupils of her own dark eyes?
Time seemed suspended between Clara and Mademoiselle. The entire class, from nursery school to fourth grade, became more and more agitated, buzzing like a flight of hornets. Mademoiselle, bending over Clara, did not speak and did not stir. Clara came to fear her teacher’s stillness, her feverish pallor which she now saw up close, with the freckles drifting across her linen-white skin.
The little girl lowered her gaze and for a long time she concentrated on the knots in the wide boards at her feet.
While Clara had easily won the admiration of the nursery-school pupils, thanks to some ringing imitations of roosters at sunrise and of barn swallows at sunset, such was not the case with the older students at the back of the classroom. Girls and boys were constantly nudging each other and snickering because Clara’s dresses, which were too short for her, resembled faded calico sacks, her unkempt hair a blackbird’s nest after a storm. But what soon proved to be the last straw for the class, the older children and the younger ones united in their resentment, was their certainty that Mademoiselle’s lessons were now addressed only to Clara. Numbers, letters, words, whole sentences now flew over their heads, floating in the stuffy air of the schoolroom like a wild swarm that had broken free, to settle solely on Clara’s mop of towcoloured hair.
For the teacher it was a question of delivering to the dau
ghter of Aurélien Laroche, as quickly as possible, before it was too late, all the knowledge stored up in her blazing red head.
Clara, for her part, was keenly aware of her teacher’s urgency. Her intelligence was wakened at the speed of the day when it emerges from the darkness, then climbs to the horizon, leaps across the pebbles on the river’s banks, skips over the dark crest of the trees, gallops full speed across the water’s flat surface, intoxicated by its own movement, by its singular dazzle, as it emerges from the night.
Though Clara did not leave her place among the nursery-school children in the first row, very close to Mademoiselle’s platform, after two years she reached the point where she could share the lessons and homework of the grade four pupils at the back of the class, where there were mainly girls, since schooling beyond grade three was considered by the parents to be something that might unman their big boys.
Often Mademoiselle kept Clara after class, explaining to her very quickly problems that had to do with faucets and trains, then lingering briefly over the agreement of participles before moving on to fables and tales, sometimes even progressing to poems, while her cheeks were stained with red and her voice became increasingly choked.
One winter night, when darkness had long since fallen and the fire in the schoolroom stove died out completely, and Clara was ready to leave, with her tuque on and her coat buttoned up to her chin, she gathered up her courage and decided to speak to her teacher. All in one breath, with her eyes fixed obstinately on the floor, she said that this could not go on, this haste, this extreme impatience, this lack of time in which they were both trapped, she said that this was no way to live, that she could not breathe, and that it frightened her. Saying this, Clara dropped her head lower and lower, as if some explanation of the mysteries of this world would come to her from the wide grey boards that lay barely touching at her feet. Soon the young girl had lost her voice and she finished her tirade in a nearly inaudible gasp.
“Why are you in such a hurry, Mademoiselle, why? Will you go away soon and leave me all alone in my house by the river, with the cries of animals and the songs of birds?”
Mademoiselle shuddered under her black woollen shawl, a little as if an icy weapon had touched her back between the shoulder-blades.
“I need to tell you everything I know, give you everything I have. It is like a legacy I want to leave you.”
“Are you going away then?”
Two small red circles appeared very clearly on Mademoiselle’s pale cheeks, like make-up applied with too heavy a hand. Clara thought this sudden redness was caused by her teacher’s bewilderment at the thought of a mysterious journey of which she could not speak.
“I don’t want you to go away!”
As she cried out, Clara’s voice had the tone, familiar and harsh, of the inhabitants of Sainte-Clotilde.
Mademoiselle pulled Clara’s woollen tuque further down over her ears and told her that she should leave, that it was very late.
Once she was on the road home, which followed the frozen river, amid the vast solitude of a winter night wherein the only sign of life was a thin thread of water that glistened black in the middle of the current, Clara found herself regretting the fact that Mademoiselle had never taught her how to ward off the ill fortune that was moving through the snow-covered countryside, in the very heart of the shadows, where there were neither moon nor stars.
Mademoiselle lifted her two diaphanous hands into the light; one after the other she pulled off all her rings and let them fall onto the little iron bed edged with flowered cretonne. She said to Clara:
“Pick the rings up. All of them. They’re for you. It’s all for you. Books, linen, dresses, everything. The others will have nothing.”
Clara asked who these others were. Mademoiselle shrugged her shoulders, as if she considered the question to be annoying.
“The others, all the others, the family, every last one of them. They’ll have nothing. Only you.”
And at the same time she was saddened to be reduced to material gifts, with nothing left to offer from her country schoolmistress’s mind. Had she not already given Clara everything — reading and writing, arithmetic and sacred history, even stories and poems that were not on the curriculum but were the very substance of the singular flame that was burning inside her?
It was then that Mademoiselle thought of the recorder as her supreme offering, the little instrument she sometimes played when she was alone, that she carefully concealed under piles of linen in the fir chest of drawers.
Clara was in Mademoiselle’s bedroom for the first time, and she was astonished to find it so cold and bare.
“I must teach you how to play the recorder, this minute, this very minute! I forgot to teach you to play it!”
The schoolmistress sat on the floor, her back against the wall. Little by little the circulation was restored to her icy fingers and her harsh breathing softened, became pure and limpid. It was as though the voice of an angel were bursting from the magical instrument, to the amazement of Clara who had never heard anything like it.
All this was taking place in the dead of winter, in the snow-covered countryside around Sainte-Clotilde, in the heart of the schoolmistress’s little bedroom adjoining the village school. The schoolmistress who now was crumbling like a dead leaf.
Day by day, Clara was learning to play the instrument. Mademoiselle was growing more and more exhausted and her breath had the taste of fever.
When the little girl knew how to produce a tune, how to modulate and to play trills and runs quite easily, Mademoiselle said that her days as a teacher were now at an end and that she had nothing more to give Clara, save her living woman’s vermilion blood, and that soon it would be done. Saying this, she smiled. Clara had hardly enough time to be astonished at so strange an utterance when already her teacher had taken to her bed to die, half-sitting, with her back propped against a pile of pillows.
The death throes lasted all day and all night. Clara watched over Mademoiselle, wiping the sweat from her forehead, the blood from her mouth. Clara thought about the shattered order of the world, about her mother who had died giving her life. Twice begotten, by two different women, Clara secretly weighed the twofold mystery of her mingled legacy.
Mademoiselle’s sisters, who arrived the next day, at first resembled her like three peas in a pod, with their russet hair and their gold-rimmed spectacles. Little by little, each of them took on a fierce expression that did not evoke Mademoiselle at all. Little red-headed vultures, for had they not come to observe that nothing was left of their youngest sister’s belongings, neither in the drawers of the fir chest, nor in the battered old raffia trunk, nor on the roughly peeled wooden shelf, nor behind the door where big black nails had been planted for clothes to hang on? Clara had taken everything away with her to her father’s house on the bank of the river, according to her teacher’s wish.
Her name was Blandine Cramail. She was nineteen years old. Sainte-Clotilde was her first post. It was said in the village that the schoolmistress had been carried off by galloping consumption.
Clara did not attend the ceremony in the Sainte-Clotilde church. She stood at her window, unmoving, her face turned towards the church, while the bells tolled the knell. When silence had been restored to the countryside, in the way that ice re-forms and solidifies from one end of the world to the other, Clara improvised funeral music on her recorder, so heartbreaking and pure that Aurélien’s walled-up sorrow erupted again as it had in the early days of his widowerhood. Then there was only a single mourning, celebrated by the sound of a recorder: that of the father and of his daughter, on the frozen earth on the bank of a white river, like a field where white foam had been spilled.
II
In the heart of the day, the heart of the night, time passes. On the river, in the fields and the woods, birth and death reign in equal measure,
with no beginning and no end, from the minuscule mayflies skating across the river on long thin legs that dissolve at once into the blue air, to the children of men who are astonished at the speed of the light as it makes its way towards the darkness.
Clara’s age changed so quickly that she scarcely had time to carve it with her knife, along with the date, on a heavy brown beam above her bed in her attic bedroom, amid the garlands of onions hung on the walls and the shrivelled, sour little apples that sat on the sill of the dormer window.
Twelve years, thirteen, fourteen. Soon, she will be fifteen years old.
Clara no longer reads tales or poems. She no longer reviews in her head the knowledge bequeathed by her teacher. Clara is bored.
For a long time, when the wind blew in the evening, Mademoiselle’s dresses would sway gently where they hung on the wall near the poorly sealed dormer window, breathing in the shadows and seemingly alive. And now little by little Mademoiselle’s dresses are losing their colour and becoming as thin as onionskin. The day is approaching when the very image of Mademoiselle in Clara’s memory will become like a coin that has grown faded and worn until it is no longer legal tender.
Clara did the laundry for women from town who spent the summer in Sainte-Clotilde, and hung it on long cords stretched between two trees; she cared for the animals, hoed the garden, and prepared the meals.
In the evening, taking shelter in her attic, she would sometimes feel in her entire weary body how deeply she resembled the grass and trees, the animals and fields and all that lives and dies, without complaining or breaking any silence.
Some evenings, though, when the newborn moon, red as a sun, spread out in broad streaks across the river, Clara’s heart would leap in her chest, would pound against her ribs as if it wanted to break out and roam the world. Under the russet moon the earth’s beauty would weigh down on Clara, seeming to demand that her life burst outside her and that she offer up entirely her remarkable and fierce little self.