Blanche’s eyes lost some of their fire as they focused on a nearby meadow, where a cow was ambling to and fro. It looked a strong, peaceful animal and she felt the desire to walk towards it and fondle it. She’d walk into the meadow, pat its horns and say, ‘Poor old cow, so strong and peaceful, and yet so alone…’ Her view of the world now crystal clear again, Blanche began to howl with laughter, because she could well imagine herself saying that to the cow, and what would anyone think if they saw her? She went on laughing until she remembered – pull yourself together, Blanche – that she had some washing to do. She turned round and, stepping into the kitchen, was on the point of collecting the bowl. But then she thought: before doing that, perhaps it would be better to…
She looked at the saucepan on the corner of the stove and poured the stew out on to a plate, just like she’d done the first time. Then she washed the pan again, this time gently, her face at peace. Slowly she dried it, with very careful movements, and put it back, spotless, on the shelf next to the other pots and pans. Looking at it again, she said, ‘You’re all right now. Keep to yourself those blobs which my still fiery eyes inflict on you: green, yellow or red, shut them inside you, enclose them in your enamel. Keep them to yourself and let them radiate from you in a beneficent halo…’
(‘Hello, Mama, I’ve brought you my school report… and I’m so hungry. Quick, give me some bread and jam…’)
Blanche carried the wash-bowl outside on to the wooden trivet and began the washing. She was in a hurry; before this evening, she had to rinse and blue the linen, lay it out to dry, peel the vegetables and make some soup. She’d better stoke up the fire: not with a pair of bellows like some people did, but with her own breath. Kneeling, she blew into the stove every breath of air in her lungs. Let the fire exist through me, she thought, and let me exist through the fire. My life is made up of a thousand necessities, or a thousand complicities with water, with enamel, with soap, air and fire. And that is exactly how it should be, for they are necessities that must be accomplished if a household is to remain clean, and if Louis and the child are to find their food ready for them.
All the time she was doing the washing Blanche could see herself: she could see Blanche washing and, even though she didn’t move away from the trivet, Blanche breathing into the fire, Blanche washing the stew-pan, Blanche contemplating the sun, Blanche making the stove shine. This is my place, she thought, between fire, water, iron, earth and wood… Here I am completely myself, I am Blanche, and it is here that my task lies. Failing to accomplish this work would mean risking isolation from the universe. This is me, Blanche, these are my legs, my head and my arms.
As if to grasp a better understanding of herself, she raised her arms and drew herself back a little. She stood there, her wild black head framed by her raised arms still slightly dripping with soapy water, her chest straining beneath the pink linen apron. This is me, Blanche, and I shall never know who I am. She lowered her arms, plunged her hands back into the lukewarm water and stood stock still, head lowered, hands immobile, watching the foam as it died, with a light sound, around her wrists. This is Blanche…
Louis and the child came home to find the kitchen tidy and the table laid, and when they had finished their evening meal Blanche washed and put away the dishes. Louis read the paper, which was spread out over the table, while the child cut out a picture. Blanche sat next to them darning a woollen sock.
‘Blanche,’ Louis said, ‘Is there any beer?’
She got up and poured him a glass.
‘Blanche,’ Louis said, ‘you haven’t forgotten to iron my shirt?’
‘It’s ready,’ Blanche said. ‘It’s in the cupboard.’
He leaned over the paper again; Blanche returned to the sock.
‘Blanche…’ Louis said.
She didn’t like hearing her name spoken on its own like that. Nor did she like the colour; she never wore white dresses, and she preferred red roses to white ones, black hair to blond. She didn’t like snow, because it covered the colours of the earth and concealed the life beneath.
‘Blanche…’ Louis said.
Why does he call to me with that dead name?
Blanche looked around her – at the stove, the sink, the cupboard and the pile of linen which she’d had to leave half-dry when a summer storm had suddenly darkened the sky. Then she looked at Louis and the child. All these objects and the man and the child, they made up such a strange sight… Yet surely there was nothing sad or tormenting in a man reading a paper and a child cutting out a picture?
Blanche looked again. Could it be that she didn’t love this man and this child? No, she did love them – she loved them so much that she would throw herself into an abyss or into flames for their sakes. And that was precisely where the tragedy lay. Otherwise she could simply look at them, faintly moved, imagining that she was lightly stroking their hair – ‘There’s a good boy, there’s a good child.’ One at either end of a kitchen table: a man reading a paper and a child cutting out a picture…
‘Blanche…’ Louis said.
Perhaps she should have soaked and resoaked that shirt and then have boiled and boiled it again… Or perhaps it was the darkened sky, or her own name – which ought to be totally scraped away and obliterated so that she could be called Jeanne, or Marguerite; or perhaps it was her own heart, which ought to be smashed, smashed to smithereens…
There would be nothing to be gained from shouting out, nor even from weeping softly, and there was no point in looking at the pan, which refused to divulge its blobs of light. There was nothing for it but to wait for time to pass, to let it wash over her, and over the man reading the paper and the child cutting out a picture. Would nothing, no colour, no smell, come to deliver her? Quite soon Louis would say, ‘Blanche, it’s time for bed.’ And she would feel that little knot of distress in her chest, she wouldn’t be able to look calmly at any of the objects, and she wouldn’t receive any co-operation from them either. All through the night she’d lie there in the darkness with her eyes open, her heart full of wild searchings. Would nothing come to her, no sign at all? The sock was in her hands and through the hole she could see the sewing-egg that she’d slipped into it: it looked like a white window. No sign, no sign. And soon Louis will say… Suddenly she put the sock down on the table and said:
‘I forgot to collect the milk. Will you come with me, Jean-Louis?’
‘Oh yes, Mama.’
‘At this hour?’ Louis said.
‘The farmer’s not in bed yet,’ Blanche said. ‘We’ll need some milk for breakfast.’
She wrapped the child in a coat with a pointed hood, threw a shawl over her shoulders and they went out together.
‘Don’t take the child with you,’ said Louis. ‘It might still be raining.’
‘It isn’t cold,’ said Blanche.
Louis drained his glass and put it down on the table, shrugging his shoulders. This was the latest: she’d forgotten to collect the milk. And while on that subject, he thought, I’ll get my shirt and take it up to the bedroom. He went to the cupboard and took it out. He was just about to close the door when to his astonishment he noticed a bowl full of boiled milk.
‘Forgetting to collect the milk is one thing – but forgetting that she had collected it, that’s too stupid for words.’
Blanche hurried along the path, holding her child by the hand. Some drops of rain were still falling but the heat of the day lingered and the air was warm.
‘Shall we walk through the wood?’ Blanche said.
‘It’s all black in there, I’d be frightened,’ said Jean-Louis.
‘You mustn’t be afraid of a wood. We might see some squirrels in there…’
‘Squirrels? All right then,’ said Jean-Louis.
In the wood the ground was soft and wet. Holding the child’s hot hand tightly in hers, Blanche strode calmly into a dark, dank universe, its silence interrupted only by their light footsteps and by drops of rain on the leaves. She sat down on the bare we
t earth at the foot of a tree and pulled the child on to her knee, wrapping his coat more tightly around him.
‘Rest there,’ Blanche said, ‘and close your eyes. If you do that the squirrels will come out and put nuts in your pockets.’
‘Mama…’ said Jean-Louis.
She held the child close. Close to the earth, the trees and the clouds, she felt good. And inside the dark mass of coat on her lap there was the whitish blob of a child’s face. As she leaned over him she could smell the sweet smell given off by the damp woollen coat and, when she stroked the forehead and hair of the whitish blob inside it, she inhaled the smell of her little son.
The child began to snore softly. Blanche leaned back against the bark of the tree and looked up at the sky. Yes, she felt good. A sense of peace rose up softly inside her, the peace of a universe that was wet with the wood and the sky. Not that it was a happy or easy peace – nothing was happy or easy, either inside or outside her; it was a fiery peace, a peace that meant all is well; the truth may be concealed but it is straightforward and powerful, like the trees and the sky; life is woven on a background of forces that are both straightforward and obscure, like the wet earth, like the sky, like the tenderness of the flesh, like love. In my life, Blanche thought, there are trees and sky, there is water, earth and air, there is the child and there is Louis. My life is beautiful.
She leaned over the child and listened to his breathing, then moved her legs a little further apart so that he had more space to snuggle into. Some clouds separated themselves from the moon, lighting up Blanche’s wild head and the sleeping infant. She could see water glistening on the leaves, and then it was dark again.
Will there ever be love in my life? she wondered. Now love, that would be… She closed her eyes. Just suppose, for example, that a man came up to me in the wood: a young, strong man, wearing a velvet or leather jacket and trousers kept in place by a wide belt of material slung low on his hips. Why would he be dressed like that? Because that is how I see him: and because it is an attractive costume. He’d pass in front of me and we’d both look very serious. He’d say: ‘Put your child down,’ and I’d lay the child on the ground, and he would cover him with his jacket, saying, ‘The children of women can never be cold.’
He would take me on the leaves of the wood, in the silence of the night. There would be silence between us and our embrace would take us to the heart of the trees, the water, the sky and the air, and the corn beneath the sky. It would be as if we were touching the knot of life itself; as if, while we were making love, we were at the very heart of the universe. And afterwards he wouldn’t say anything – that he loved me or found me pretty – he’d just disentangle the leaves from my hair. He’d say nothing of his life, nor I of mine. He’d say, ‘Off you go now. You are my wife, for all my life and all yours, perhaps even longer than that. If we should ever happen to be passing through the wood on the same day, we’ll come together again, and love each other. There’s no better gift we could give each other, for there’s nothing greater in the whole world than to have been together, for one moment, at the heart of the universe.’ He would leave, and I’d either see him again or I wouldn’t. And there would be love in my life.
The wood was deeply peaceful. Blanche could sense the tree standing behind her like a pillar of life, and the child in her lap was as hot as a nest. The layers of air were unbroken, without the slightest scar, finely soldered on to the infinity of the night. She could go home.
Louis would say, ‘It’s time for bed,’ and she’d answer, ‘Yes, Louis,’ and take a long, understanding look at the table, the stove, the coal in the bucket, the haloed saucepan.
The child stirred in her lap, mumbling a word from his dream. Blanche thought he said ‘water’ but perhaps she hadn’t heard it right, perhaps he’d simply said ‘aaah’, an expression of admiration or pain.
‘What are you dreaming about?’ she said softly. ‘Are you happy, are you sad? Answer me, Jean-Louis…’
Dreams help me, Blanche thought. The child didn’t wake. She got up, still carrying him in her arms, and made her way across the wet earth, between the tall trees.
RENÉ
RENÉ CROSSED the little shop, lifted the torn curtain and stopped by the white enamel basin that was occupied by a woman’s upside-down head. He poured out some soapy liquid and rubbed it in, then repeated the process, first washing and then gently massaging with both hands. As usual he could feel the slippery soap under his fingers, but today there was something else: today his fingers were discovering another, subtler softness, the softness of hair that was unusually fine.
Time passed. He gazed out of the window at the landscape, its wide expanse of sand, its pebbles and stubbly tufts of grass. As he continued to caress the unaccustomed softness beneath his fingers, René’s mind went a complete blank. Time passed and still he hadn’t finished.
‘How long it’s taking,’ the voice said.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, it’s finished now,’ said René.
He glanced at the upside-down head but the eyes were shut, the face closed. He rinsed the hair, moved the basin away and dabbed gently with a towel. Now he was touching a cascade of damp, light, sleek curls, which he smoothed out, combed, and then smoothed out again. Absent-mindedly he asked:
‘What shall I use for friction?’
He listed names and makes but she didn’t respond, so, following the advice of the manager, he gave her the usual sales talk.
As if to settle the matter once and for all, the voice said:
‘I’d like some pure lavender.’
Nobody ever asked for lavender. René went to a cupboard and found an untouched bottle, with a hand-written label.
‘We’ve only got it in bulk,’ he said.
‘That’s all right,’ she said.
He poured out the liquid, but all he could smell was the spirit.
‘I’ll call the manager,’ he said, ‘so that he can do your set.’
‘No, don’t do that,’ she said, ‘I just want it dried as it is.’
To dry it as it was, that was unheard of. You couldn’t use the automatic drier because if the hair wasn’t raised on top of the head in curlers the heat wouldn’t reach it all, so he’d have to use the hand-drier, as he did for little girls. What’s more, it would take at least half an hour. He picked up the hand-drier.
He ran the hot air over the head – or rather, he held the drier still for a moment at every stage, so that he could see each lock become lighter and lighter as it fell back into its natural waves and floated gently of its own accord. And all the while the scent – of the lavender now, not the spirit – became stronger and stronger, until it took possession of him, entered every part of him. He stood there, steel drier in hand, and because the noise was quite similar to (though in other ways quite different from) the noise at the munitions factory where he worked during the week, he could also see himself standing in front of his machine, as he passed his lathe over the steel casting and smelled the lubricating oil in the air all around him. Through the smell of the oil every detail stayed clear in his mind: he knew that he had to lower the lever with the red handle and that the procedure should take three minutes; he knew that in half an hour, work would be over and he’d go for a snack with his mates.
René felt as though he were inside a cloud in which there was nothing but the smell of lavender and this cascade of extraordinarily fine, vaporous hair that he was holding up in his left hand. It was floating now, fluttering like a ringed, golden bird under the hot air. He touched it, he raised it, he ruffled it gently with his fingers; he spread it out in a fan shape on her shoulders; he lifted its entire mass up towards the light, so that the cascade became clear and alive. From its waves the triumphant scent arose, and he could see, as if they had come to life that very moment on the cascade, the fine stalks and blue flowers of the lavender: at first just a few, and then an infinity of them, a swelling mass of blue. Vast, borderless lavender fields – though whether they were actually in
front of his eyes or elsewhere, in some distant unknown place, he couldn’t be sure.
‘How long it’s taking…’
Yes, next to the hair there was a face. He could see it in the mirror. The eyes were open now, and very close to him as he bent forwards, but they weren’t looking at anything visible in front of them, neither the mirror itself nor the objects that were reflected in it. Only the iris of the eye stared into the glass: pale blue with a touch of mauve. The eyes were lavender blue.
René felt apart from the world: he was inside a cloud filled with the smell of lavender, borderless lavender fields, and eyes that were lavender blue. And the more the cloud offered him, the greedier he became. What did it matter that she had spoken? He stayed where he was, his movements arrested as he held the drier over the fluttering hair. She too remained still, her eyes far away.
René looked at her face: it was impassive, even-featured. The local sun had given it some colour and the skin was pink and brown. He could not see her shoulders and her figure because they were concealed by the little white protective cape, but he could see her full, knee-length, blue linen skirt and her bare legs, smooth, brown and very beautiful. Why on earth had she come here, a woman like this? There was nothing in this forgotten village apart from one dismal hotel. What was she doing at the village hairdresser, which catered only for local girls wanting to doll themselves up for Sunday?
A Nail, a Rose Page 10