The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

by Gaetan Soucy

  He didn’t seem to find what I told him very clear but I can’t help that, when I say things I always say them the way they are and if they seem strange it’s not the fault of my bonnet, blame the things themselves. He sat facing me and stared at me very impolitely, and sometimes with an amused smile, as if I were a little show starring just me, like our only toy, our frog.

  And then he started asking me questions too. But he did it with the intention of helping me, I was well aware of that, and it made me feel better when I answered him. Since he wanted to know why I’d come to the village, I replied that I’d come for a grave box, also called a coffin in the vulgate, and that I was most aggrieved at not having found one, and in so saying I put on an air that was quite pitiful, I think. He asked what my brother was like and I replied that he was an idiot who was always laughing and crying and who pulled my hair when I was reading the memoirs of the due de saint-simon or made me smell the oozing from his sausage on his fingertips, but the purpose of his question was to know if he was younger or older than me, which I eventually understood. I declared that papa had kneaded us on the same day at exactly the same hour, a good long while ago apparently, according to religion.

  Using his thumb and his index finger the mine inspector rubbed his eyelids as if he had a pain in his noggin. Then he stretched his legs out under the table and began to reflect during a long minute of silence, hands crossed behind the back of his head, as true as I’m. His eyes were like those of an owl, vast, with light standing inside them. Then he leaned towards me and said, with the little voice you use in certain dreams when you’re talking to something that doesn’t exist:

  “Do you know that your father was rich? Fabulously rich?”

  With my nose, I pointed to my cents bag. I let him draw his own conclusions. The truth is that for some time I’d been feeling a need to be outside. It’s hard for me to be inside a house for a long time, even in my own or in the woodshed with the Fair Punishment, which will astonish people, and to get to sleep at night I sometimes lie down in the landscape with my face all wet from the field stars. That sensation comes back to my memory because I’m in the woodshed now as I write this and I’m starting not to be able to hold on, I feel as if I’m going to start screaming but I mustn’t.

  The inspector told me that I was no doubt also unaware that what he called my family was a genuine mystery to my neighbours in the village. Apparently no one knew exactly what transpired on our side of the pine grove, and people told all sorts of tales, ah la la, those filthy gossips. Furthermore, he thought he was teaching me that father was the most powerful man in the region, as if I could be ignorant of such a thing, and that was why, he went on, no one would ever have dared go against his orders. Without a formal invitation, no one had the right to venture into our estate, you see! Not even the priest.

  “I know something about that, the mayor preached to me about it for an hour when I came to see you last spring, when I first arrived in this part of the country. Do you remember me? I talked to you … Incidentally, what’s your name?”

  “Brother calls me brother, and father called us son when he commanded everything just the day before.”

  “And how did you know which one of you he was speaking to?”

  “Most of the time, one or the other, it made no difference to him. But if we really did make a mistake, if I reported when he called and brother was the one he wanted, he would simply say: cNot you, the other one.’ It never caused anyone any problems.”

  “I see.”

  He saw! The gentleman saw! Who did he think he was anyway? swear, some people are like that, as my father liked to say when he talked about the days when he was a fine-looking lad. But the gentleman in question, the secretarious of poems, didn’t stop at that, as you may well imagine, and the limits were overstepped when that brazen and ill-mannered fellow declared:

  “Would you like me to give you a name that’s just for me? Wild one. I’ll call you wild one. It goes well with your perfume of grass and rain. Mine is paul-marie. If you like.”

  I’ll tell you, wild one has a fringe of hair on his forehead, it’s the only place papa cut my hair, around the beginning of every season he would take out the kitchen knife and slice, but the rest of it is very long and very black and very luxuriant and very fragrant, it’s true, and as he smiled at me with urges standing in his eyes like candles, the mine inspector took a lock of my hair that was tickling my cheek and gently tucked it behind my ear. I didn’t hesitate for one moment, I put it back in the very same place on my cheek, where it was perfectly fine, thank you very much. That made him laugh. He brought his face closer to mine. And then, what can I say, it happened by itself, I have no other explanation, I gave him a long lick on his cheek with my tongue, which surprised him so much that he shrank back into his chair.

  He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand, not briskly and energetically as if he were disgusted but with a sort of surprised affection, the way papa used to stroke my brother’s hair after he’d let loose a storm of whacks that had left him on the floor amid the pumpkins. I have no idea what kind of look I gave the mine inspector then, but it must have been worth its weight in little thunderbolts, I don’t know if I’m making myself understood.

  “I see …” (He was seeing again!) “You’re a wild little goat, is that it?”

  He said this with a sardonic smile, if sardonic means what I think it means, but I could see his green pallor and the intense fear in his beautiful blue eyes, because I don’t know if I remembered to say this but, as for the inspector, the wild little goat thinks he has the eyes of a knight with his great brackmard sword, which is what we say about a sophisticated suit of armour, if my memory’s not playing tricks.

  In any event I can’t explain what happened next, really, how he suddenly found himself standing right up against me, disasters happen here below, and better things, things we’ll never understand no matter what, but my teeth nibbled at his cheek and I licked his nose, his forehead, his eyelids, his hair overflowing my hands. I felt his palms running all over me, as if he wanted to hold every part of me at the same time, he pressed me as if he wanted to thrust me into the interior of his person, which was fragrant with the odours of cedar, celery, and fir, while I, I died every time and I wanted to die again and I wanted it to begin again at every moment and forever, but soon it was beyond the strength of the little goat, who stood there limp, dead, arms dangling, mouth brimming with the salty taste of a knights skin on his tongue.

  Then why did he suddenly grab hold of my wrists? He stepped back, there was a look of dread on his face. “We mustn’t!” he said and it was a horrified whisper, I’m choosing my words carefully. I freed my wrists from his embrace, I didn’t have all my faculties, they were wandering on their own I know not where, the little goat lay down on his slightly bulging belly at the feet of the knight and I wished he would stretch out on top of me with all his weight, with all his length, with all the dignity of his person while he spoke close to my ear and didn’t move, but he threw himself so to speak to the other end of the room, you’d have thought he was trying to run away, and it was, how can I put it? It was precisely as if someone had planted a dagger right in my heart, or my name’s not wild one.

  AND SINCE I’M A SHY LITTLE GOAT, a spurned one, a failed one even, because a certain individual doesn’t want to take the trouble to make my existence happy for a few moments, his entire person stretched out full length on my back, I’m going to use the gender of sluts for my pronouns now, though I’m still my father’s son and my brother’s brother as religion would say. I mean that, as I relate the rest of my sorrows and lamentations, I’ll speak about myself as if I were a blessed virgin with inflations and seasonal streams of blood, that will relieve the tedium of my distress, but here I must pause to explain something: the shed where I’m writing, also known as the vault.

  I’ve taken refuge in the shed where I’m writing because my brother has been touched by grace and it has driven him mad, that�
�s what you call it, and I panicked. I’m frightened too because there’s a basement window with amazingly dirty panes in the vault where I’m writing and I was able to clean one small corner of it by rubbing with my little fist, which allowed me to notice someone coming along the road just now, and I still don’t know who it is because he’s so far away but maybe it’s a horse and maybe it’s a knight or maybe it’s just the beggar hopping on his fool’s bauble like a magpie. I’ve felt urges to start screaming, strewth, but I mustn’t. Now that I’ve provided this clarification, which frees my chest where I was beginning to suffocate, let’s go back to my romance with the mine inspector at the town hall, because you have to call a spade a spade, after all.

  The inspector came back to me while I was still lying there in all the dignity of my full length, and told me not to lie there like a stalk of boiled asparagus but to get up, he spoke in a voice filled with pity and sweetness but I’ll tell you, just then pity was very far from what I was feeling. I reflected for a moment, while I looked at his thrilling shoes the size of firearms, as to whether it was worth the trouble to start living again after such an assault of disdainment. I don’t know if that word exists but it deserves to. I finally got back on my feet and that was too bad. If we had to come up with reasons to go on breathing, the earth would be as naked as an egg. I have fingernails as hard and sharp as tacks, I planted one of them under the eye of my handsome knight and pulled down, true as I’m. He grabbed my wrist and this time he squeezed very hard as if to hurt me too, like the priest. On the back of his neck I saw red patches of great emotion which reminded me of the ones father and brother displayed once a year, when we all laughed together and we could barely stand on our feet from drinking fine wine, it was to celebrate the friday when jesus died. The inspector had three fine lines of blood, daughters of my own hand, like beads on his cheek. He stared at me, breathing very hard, I could see he was scared fitless.

  “You’re a genuine witch

  I hurled my head sharply against his, like a cannon shot really, my tongue all the way out to lick the blood on his face, which I desperately wanted to do. He threw back his chest. Then he forced me, brutally is the word, to sit back down in my chair. I couldn’t resist but I knitted my brow and gritted my teeth. He wanted to impress me too, because he started talking very fast. He didn’t dare look me in the eye though, and I could see that I had triumphed, boiled asparagus or not.

  I didn’t know what lay ahead for me, poor little girl, he said. Everything was going to be different now for brother and me. There would be all sorts of problems with the inheritance but that, he imagined, was three hundred feet over my head, wasn’t it? (I nodded.) One thing was certain, father wouldn’t be there to protect us, he went on. The law would take charge of the matter et cetera and we, my brother and I, would be at the mercy of all those people.

  I don’t know whom he meant by all those people but he pointed with his thumb as if they were invisible somewhere in the room. I also don’t know what he meant by the law, which he was making such a fuss about, or what. Then the inspector delivered the final blow by saying, in a way that could drill a hole in your chest just like that:

  “I doubt if your brother and you will be able to go on living on your estate.”

  In a flash I was out of the room. I ran, groping my way, holding my stomach as if it were about to overflow, and on the way to exit of the building, that’s what you call it, the mine inspector caught up with me.

  “I’ll try to help you, I promise,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “I don’t yet know how but I’ll try. I’ll do my best to buy you time till tomorrow, I’ll tell them I made you promise to come back with your brother, I’ll do everything I can to rebuild your house

  I don’t know what he said after that because I had disappeared. I ran full tilt through the village all the way to the edge of the road that goes through the pine grove, where I found horse waiting for me. I pitched, yes that’s the word, I pitched the cents bag into the thicket and flung three gobs of spit after it to ward off evil spells. I rubbed my scalp frantically with my fists, as if I wanted to make little demons fall from it. At last I got my breath back and I was a little calmer. With his teeth horse had picked up the spade that I’d left against a tree when I’d come here, he was looking at me with his worried gaze, I told him everything. I could see that he was suffering too, that there was crying in his round eyes. I told him to go on ahead of me so he’d arrive at our estate sooner and reassure brother, who must have been fretting to death when he saw the day vanish without us.

  All this had left me worn out and distraught, and I was moving along with the sensation that everything in my head was going to crumble into an avalanche of ashes. And I felt exhausted and sick to my stomach, as if everything about my health was askew. I stopped to snap off some twigs and stick them into my long hair, and I curved them to make myself a crown of thorns, then I walked in such a way that you would have said I was dancing despite my sorrow. My hands are full of grace, I don’t know if I forgot to say that, like the ovember waves on the pond, because I know the names of the months too, all my friends are words. I’m always surprised to note that once the first gust has passed I can be so indifferent to what might happen to me here below, it’s my nature. Slowly I turn myself around with my skirt the friend of saturn who is my planet and I laugh without its showing inside the little altar of my silence, just like her. My feet move lightly, following the example of the birds that take their flight around my body, that are the colour of my eyes, for all birds waltz with me, that’s my secret, even those at the other end of the earth. I’ve often dreamed of being able to dance on the summits of pine trees the way elves do, as warm and light as candle flames, sheaves of powdered gold would tumble from my hands to spangle the countryside with stars, I was born for that, but I can’t. And then, I tell you, I would have wanted never to come back, never to return, to stay forever on the road through the pine grove, between estate and village, to be the unobtrusive divinity of the distance that separates all things, the little fairy of the paths that lead nowhere. But I plucked up my courage in both legs and continued on my way. And in doing so I found the strength to resist the great temptation I often feel to thrust things very deep between my thighs, onto my skin, sometimes even to push them inside, grass for instance, or flower buds, or pebbles as round and soft as horse s gaze. Other times I take my inflations in my hands and squeeze them till it hurts, because someone has to look after them while my mind is elsewhere, roaming in a country of my dreams, where everything pleases my heart, and where I have the misery of not existing. Bad luck can come to anyone at all, what can I say, its a law of the universe.

  All that to say that at nightfall, when I set foot in our kitchen again, I was most surprised, given the state of mind I was in, to find my brother holding a saw and getting ready to cut papas mortal remains into pieces.

  II

  THERE IS A THING THAT EXISTS everywhere in the universe, according to what I’ve read, and that thing is communicating vessels, and how true it is. For sometimes papa would have a heavy hand with his whacks and my brother would take the rap like splinters of green wood, and afterwards I’d be subjected to my brother and that’s called communicating vessels. My brother is a little bit smaller than I am but I don’t know, it’s as if he were made of hard rubber. When he lashes out at me there’s nothing I can do but hunch my shoulders around my head and pray that the time will pass as quickly as possible. My father hardly ever had a go at me towards the end of his time on earth, in the interests of truth I even have to say that the last time goes back to a day of yore if not longer. Since then, he used only little whacks with me, when he was impatient or strictly for form, as if he didn’t want to lose his touch, and to remind me that I was his son, and in the interests of truth I also have to say that the whacks he intended for me paled in comparison with those he dealt out to brother, which brother was well aware of as he snickered in his corner with sinister bitterness, for my brot
her is envious by nature, it’s his worst flaw I think. I must say that papa considered me the more intelligent of his sons, as I think I’ve already written, and that I was well behaved when I had my nose in my dictionaries or when I was picking flowers and very softly singing the music of the fairies, the wild roses are pretty in the mud near the pumpkins, I wasn’t always playing with my balls like you know who. And finally there was the fact that I didn’t hit anyone, I’m not in the habit of doing that unless the little goat is seething with an almighty rage as you may have the goodness to recall, o my beloved who was lacerated by my nails. All this to say that it was only right if kid brother found himself, more often than he deserves, stretched out as if dead in the backyard of the house among the potatoes in their hunting jackets.

  And also to say that when I saw what kind of hell he was heading for with his handsaw I wasn’t worried, not in the least, and I tried as gently as a woman to quiet him down and seduce him into explaining to me, before he did it, why he seemed so intent on cutting papa into different pieces. And do you know what his reply was? His reply was:

  “We have to reduce papa to ashes before we bury him.”

  Horse is like me and doesn’t have balls, in case I’ve forgotten to mention that, but he still had the cord I’d wrapped around his belly like a girth so he could haul the wretched grave box, and the end of it was still hanging between his legs like a prick. For horse had entered the house behind me, an unprecedented act showing that something was beginning to go rotten in the state of denmark. He was lying on his side and the half of his big belly that lay flattened on the floor increased the volume of the other half, I think that’s what I mean to say, and it reminded me of papa’s chest during that sweet time when he was still breathing. The sudden and entirely unaccustomed soundness of my brother’s reasoning left me flabbergasted, strewth.