The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

by Gaetan Soucy

  “He should have taught us the value of money,” said my brother.

  “These are cents,” I retorted. “Our cents must have the same value as those of the villagers.”

  I neglected to mention it, but of the two of us I’m the more intelligent. My arguments strike like cudgel blows. If my brother were writing these lines, the poverty of thinking would leap to your face and no one would understand a word.

  “But we may need a lot more. When papa left he always took along a pouch packed with cents. He had a lot and I think he used to go somewhere now and then to stock up.”

  “Where is that pouch?” I asked.

  But my brother kept repeating: “He should have taught us the value of money.” On those few occasions when he’s visited by an idea, it doesn’t leave his bonnet easily.

  I forced him to lend me a hand and we searched the cupboard from head to toe. It contained nothing but rags, crucifixes, and papa’s priest clothes from when he was a fine-looking lad, along with the stories of saints from which papa had taught us to read, and which he required us to reread, to transcribe ever since childhood, every day or almost. They had pictures of people with soft beards who went around in sandals in sunlit deserts with vines and palm trees, amid scents of jasmine and sandalwood that almost wafted from the pages of the books. It was papa who had written them, in that microscopic script that today is mine, is ours. He had pasted in the illustrations himself, after he’d wet them with his long ox-tongue, I remember seeing him do it. Many of the stories that were given to us that way were only imperfectly intelligible, though, if that’s the right word. They were set in judea, which is in japan or in some unfathomable lands where we assumed father had lived before we were put upon the earth, here in this landscape. In fact we believed for a long time that the stories were his and that he wanted to bequeath them to us as a memory to protect us from disease. If you supposed only that, father would have been capable of doing miraculous things — causing water to gush from a rock, turning beggars into trees, making mice out of stones, and who knows what. But why would he have left those enchanted lands and withdrawn into the empty space of this barren, cloudy countryside that’s frozen for six months of the year and has neither olive trees nor sheep? With his sole source of entertainment, his only company, his two thin, daydreamy sons? No, in time that notion came to seem barely plausible. There was also the library, but that I’ll talk about later, with its dictionaries of chivalry and its poisons.

  “I wonder if father would let us have used these coins,” said my brother all at once.

  “Would have let us use them,” I corrected.

  “Same difference. Maybe papa wouldn’t have liked it.”

  “Papa is dead,” I said.

  “Maybe we should bury them along with.”

  I rested the spade against the stove and sat at the table, turning the coins over and over in my fingers and shaking my leg. I always shake my foot when I’m angry, it keeps me from using it on the backside of you know who.

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN getting close to noon and still nothing had moved. The rain was making strange sounds as it fell, like mew or woof. Horse had taken shelter on the veranda. The stoneloaf stayed on the table and we folded our arms over our soup, bereft of appetite, a rare occurrence with kid brother. Of course the morning hadn’t passed in total silence, and we had discussed the remains, demise in general, what would become of us now, the shroud and the pit. It was pretty well decided that we’d wrap papa in a bedsheet and that would be that, we’d have our shroud. There was still the problem of taking action, for which we didn’t feel we’d been conceived, that is, going up and getting the body, swaddling it, bringing it downstairs, and all the rest, we couldn’t envision how it would end. As for the grave, we hadn’t yet made up our minds: we would inter him in the empty vacant lot, but where? Any guessing game is as good as another. My brother said near the ravine, by the pine grove. But, you see, I was more inclined towards the woodshed.

  I hasten to add that we weren’t the kind to change our minds constantly, not me at any rate, and that we’d have eaten our soup and the stoneloaf even if all appetite had fled, as the hour had come for a snackbar. It was just that, before every meal, papa would make gestures and mutter meditations. Without those rituals, as they’re called, eating seemed incongruous to us, even reprehensible, let’s go that far, for father must have had his reasons. Take for example. One day, having surprised brother dipping his finger into the pickle jam at an hour when it was not appropriate to take sustenance, father had grabbed the bat, that’s what it’s called, and batted so hard that brother spent three days in bed bemoaning the fate that had had him born that way, I mean dressed in his future remains. Father cared for him conscientiously, and kisses and affection and humph. And what about me?

  The soup was getting cold, it made me wonder why my brother had heated it up. That’s typical, he’s just like horse. I’d taken our frog from her jar and we watched her pranks with glum concentration. She was the only toy in our possession, or almost, and she didn’t know many things. She could walk a distance of eight inches, with her legs spread like my brother’s when he wakes with a start, looking distraught because he’s peed his pants, then she’d flatten herself in front of us along her full little frog’s length, which is rather sad and didn’t make us laugh. To comfort her, because a frog’s life has its despondencies too, I’ll have you know, brother would feed her a dead fly which he’d pull from a window jar that we’d fill to the brim with deceased insects for that purpose. She’d croak too, let’s grant her that, the way crows do. But there’s nothing as exhausting as idleness, and we had the fait accompli. Fine, I say, we must. “We must what?” replied my brother. Ah la la. With him one always had to sweat buckets over explanations, even draw him a picture!

  And so we undertook to bring down father’s swaddled corpse and lay it on the kitchen table of our earthly abode. That couldn’t be done without difficulty, especially the taking down. The remains were becoming rigid, which gave us something to think about. Putting our hands on them was like touching nothing. If we closed our eyes, as I did just to see, we didn’t have the impression that our arms were full of father’s flesh, we really had to open them and see him to believe it was actually him. It was also hard to bring his swollen ankles together to get the whole thing through the doorway, it was as if there were a spring that made them fly apart every time. Now for thirty-six moons or more we’ve had at our disposal a kind of carrot made out of metal or stone, I’ve never been able to decide which, that attracts nails through the power of magic, and once my brother broke the carrot, and if we brought the two ends back together they’d fling themselves on top of one another through the power of magic, but if for instance we kept the left end in its initial position and turned the right end 180 degrees and tried to bring those two ends together they would push each other apart, again through the power of magic, I don’t know if you see what I’m getting at. In any case father’s legs repelled each other in the same manner, like the two ends of that magnet, that’s what it’s called. “Turn him the other way up,” my brother said, referring to my father, but I protested. “His attributions will hang down,” I argued.

  On the staircase, it was the wolf on his prey. I mean, brother lost his footing, papa slipped out of our hands over the banister, and he was off like a piano. Everything happens to us, always, there’s no avoiding it. Papa crashed to the kitchen floor vertically with his feet in the air like a rabbit’s ears. Something must have broken in his neck because he was standing on the back of his skull, which had never been one of his exercises, as far as I know. His chin was squashed against his chest and he looked like someone trying to free a belch from deep inside. I delivered a clout to my brother’s face that my father wouldn’t have repudiated, and he pulled himself up as best he could, looking not too proud of himself there in the middle of the staircase. I grabbed him by the ear.

  “Now tell me, has he or hasn’t he got a moustache?” I said,
rubbing his nose in it so to speak.

  I’m not a violent man but I have my almighty rages too, and I’ll have you know, I dot my is. And the young man burst into tears, humph.

  We elbowed aside the bowls of soup and tipped papa onto the table. The bowls were quick to fall to the floor. Brother wiped his eyes on his sleeve. The shroud had gaped open when it fell and, since father was dressed like eve, it was as if we were on first-name terms with his balls. They were all soft and chubby, much bigger than brother’s, or mine in the days when I still had them, and they hung there on the stiff white body like a bearded baby’s face. The sausage had flopped to one side, its mouth agape, looking as if it had been shot. I asked brother if he really believed we came from there, in the manner of calves and piglets. Brother stuck his finger inside the sensitive orifice to see if it could stretch enough to make way for two chicks like us. And the sausage grew and stood up, through the power of magic it became as hard as the thighs it fluttered between like a flag, I’m telling you this the way it appeared to me.

  Brother had put his hand on his chest to keep his heart from jumping out. Once he’d recovered his voice, which sometimes abandons us, that’s life, he said: “No. I think that what he did was knead us from clay when he arrived here and that we’re his final works of wonder.”

  I covered his attributions with the sheet, for I have my modesty, and my brother said apprehensively:

  “Now where are you going?”

  I already had my hand on the doorknob. “To the village.” Brother started searching all around him. When he thinks, brother looks around, panicky, as if his noggin isn’t enough and he has to find ideas in things; I don’t guarantee the effectiveness of this method.

  “What about baby sister?” he asked suddenly. “What are you doing with her?”

  I stared at him without replying.

  “I said, what about baby sister?” he repeated, more than a little proud of his nasty brainwave.

  It was high time, I sighed, to bring the matter back to the barely cold body of papa, who was no longer there to defend himself. Goaded by allusions, actually by hints that father had dropped, last winter we’d examined from every angle the possibility that we had a sister, a little one, who lived somewhere on the mountain, what do I know. But a baby sister! Us! … Yet as we thought about it, it’s true that a kind of memory, very vague, came back to us from our childhood. A little girl had once been here among us, imagine our amazement, unless she’d been there forever, who knows? And then she’d gone away like a meteor. Brother went so far as to say that she and I were as alike as bubbles. But were these really recurring memories? Were they not rather a false retrospective illusion resulting from our hypotheses? These so-called memories of a little sister beset my brother in particular. Myself, it’s never kept me awake nights, or rarely. I don’t let myself be easily bombarded by things I don’t like. I turn my back on them, I shrug a shoulder, I flick blood at them.

  “It was a dream,” I said, my hand still on the doorknob.

  To be honest, I thought my brother was simply trying to keep me in the house. So I went on: “Unless you’d rather go to the village yourself?”

  And wham. It was a low blow, a punch in the jaw, but what can I say, you have to make the best of things. Staying with papa’s remains wouldn’t appeal to him, I knew that, but if I had ordered him to go to the village himself he’d have hidden in the attic, I knew that too; of the two of us he is by far the more shy. On another hand, brother and I couldn’t leave the remains all by themselves and go off whistling hand in hand to the other side of the pine grove. Afterwards we’d have to put papa in a suitable coffin, and to do that one of us would have to make the sacrifice and rush to the village to exchange something for a grave box.

  “I’ll go at once,” I said then, intrigued nonetheless that father had thought it wise to establish such a disparity between the rational abilities of his two sons.

  BEFORE I FAITHFULLY TRANSCRIBE the astonishing things that happened to me in the village, I have to talk about our neighbours, mine and my brothers, who numbered something like four. I exclude from the list of our neighbours those whose flesh existed only on the paper whereon were drawn the words that had given them life, cavaliers, for instance, or mad monks, because there would be too many; I shall consider as our neighbours only those who were endowed with bodies like us, though in many ways those bodies were unlike, as much unlike one another as unlike my brother’s and mine, though now that I think of it they were undoubtedly less unlike one another than they are unlike our future remains, just as a green apple and a red apple are more unlike one another than a cucumber — and I repeat, they numbered something on the order of four, all categories considered. As for the people in the village, I had not yet determined whether they might be ranked among our neighbours. I’ll exclude the hypothetical little sister too, there are limits after all. Instead of saying neighbour you could say fellow man should it strike your fancy, it’s allowed, the difference is infinitesimal.

  Here they are, all jumbled together. At the beginning of every season an individual used to pay a visit to my late father, though the phrase pay a visit to is presumptuous since we didn’t know if they met elsewhere or otherwise. Brother and I anticipated this neighbour without worrying about him too much, with no useless expenditure of energy, since anticipation can be hard on the nerves, but we knew that he’d come eventually, just as we know that the first snow will fall, and didn’t get into a flap over it. One morning we’d see papa make his way towards the field. He’d stop in the very middle, arms crossed, rain pelting down or not, turds could have been falling, and we knew that the visit was going to swoop down on us and we hid away. Just past the pine grove the individual would leave the road and make his way straight to my father, the way a gadfly heads for the only flower in the garden. My father would listen to him without unfolding his arms. And then sometimes he would leave, sometimes father would bring him to the house, in which case we would decamp. They’d go up to the upstairs bedroom, from which just the day before papa had commanded everything, and if my brother and I climbed onto the dripstone to spy on them through the window, it was so we could watch them annotate and sign some pages in big registers that papa would then put away in a trunk before he walked the individual back to the very same place right in the middle of the field and crossed his arms again as he watched him disappear along the road he’d come by, because papa was doing big business. All the same, now and then the individual caught sight of us through the upstairs window, when we weren’t alert enough to duck his gaze, or sometimes in the kitchen when we didn’t really give a hoot owl if he could see us and when he came back down the stairs, he’d look at us as if we were something incomprehensible that was making him queasy.

  Another man also came, much less regularly but more often, accompanied by a young boy who didn’t seem to get bigger or older from one time to the next, and from the harsh way he treated him we deduced that the boy was his son. Those two came by cart and papa would go off to meet them by the side of the road, there was no question of their soiling our fields with their dirty boots and we didn’t mind telling them so. The sole reason for their presence seemed to be to make father fly into a rage, which happened every time. We didn’t like it because afterwards father would distribute whacks. Nevertheless, those were the people who kept papa supplied with hot peppers. He would bring a chock-full basket back to the house, grumbling. That shipment would last him barely a week, on my conscience. Any hot peppers within a radius of a hundred metres and my father stopped living till he’d got to the bottom, when he would roll under the table, sated, a volcano between his lips, it was quite a sight. That man and his son were also the ones who brought the billy goat every year. On occasion, the fellow in question would arrive in his cart without his putative son, that’s why I wrote something like four, because the times when he didn’t accompany him made us question the times when he had seemed to us to accompany him, maybe the boy was only a dream
, anyway, counting him, that would make five neighbours.

  The one you’d most want to spend time with, if not the most timely, was called the beggar. Judging by the solicitude my father showed him, he must have been an important somebody with access to sluts and blessed virgins I’ll certainly have more to say about later on, as well as miracles up his sleeves, besides that he was mute, he expressed himself through throat sounds, the way dogs do. He also had only one leg, stuck in the very middle like a fool’s bauble, and he hopped along this earth like a magpie, propelled by his cane. Father would give him something to drink and a sandwich made from food he’d cooked up, then he would make us sit at the same table, the very same table, and not take a bite, just watch him eat, and sometimes we were hungry too, especially brother, who’s greedy. Father would comment on this character in his most solemn voice. Often he had him stand up, take off his coat and his shirt, under which he was as woolly as a sheep that hasn’t been shorn for three winters, then he’d pull back the man’s lips with one thumb to unveil his gums, which made the beggar chuckle with his mouth full. Or else he would ask him civilly to lie on his back and brother and I would take turns bending over his face, holding back his eyelids with our fingers and examining his pupils, irises, and so forth, to see what a beggar’s eyes looked like in their deepest depths, in which papa apparently saw constellations. Then he would make him turn around in front of us on his one heel, making numerous remarks intended to teach us about him without skipping any details. Finally, and this would have been inconceivable with any other neighbour, father would open the door himself and let him go after placing a widow’s mite in his hand, believe it or not. And then he made us recite the lesson, threatening us with whacks. We didn’t like that. And when snackbar time arrived on those days we’d go away with empty stomachs, by father’s express decree, to reflect on mendicancy while we gazed at the toes of our shoes, which caused kid brother to suffer more than I did, because I had my expedients, as you will see, when it came to sustenance.