Madeleine Is Sleeping (13 page)

But Mimi, the youngest and most foolhardy, has already leapt down from the cart and begun running towards the house. As her feet fly beneath her, as her breathing quickens and the long grasses wave her on from the side of the road, she thinks, with each shuddering burst of her heart, That is my mother. There she is.

Maman! she cries, coming closer, and the familiar figure turning towards her, arms spread. Maman! she shouts, for she is running to meet her mother, with her thick waist and her deep skirts and her dark, intoxicating smell. So pretty! is what she sobs before sinking far into her mother's folds. Then, surfacing only long enough to say it, her face swollen, her eyes swimming with love: You must have looked so pretty.

For this is a revelation to Mimi, that Mother for her wedding wore moths in her hair, a revelation that casts her in an entirely new light.

MADELEINE IS CARRIED HOME
in the company of bees. Before sunrise, she walks away from the hospital at Maréville, until in the darkness she comes upon a wagon, lit by a dying lantern and driven by a drowsing boy, whose head lists far to one side as he is pulled helplessly back into sleep. It is with hardly any effort at all that she breaks into a little run and scrambles up among the beehives on their way to Saturday market, the boy not even turning around or murmuring in protest.

She leans against the hives and dangles her feet over the edge of the dray, watching the road unfurl in her wake. To move backwards in this way through the landscape that she left long ago—it makes her feel like a kite being reeled in from the sky. Passing beneath her are dusky fields, linden trees, a scattering of stony houses. The sleeping boy pulls her forever back, past the cupola atop the mayor's new house, past the slate roofs and the barely smoking chimneys, past the sprigged curtains hanging in upper windows, the painted doorways, the homely fences with their latched gates, past the pigsties and the henhouses, past the little low bench where her mother sometimes liked to catch her breath. And though Madeleine knows that her long spell of weightlessness has finally come to its end—the tug of the string, the smell of damp earth—she feels, contrary to all expectations, her heart begin to lift.

MME. COCHON TOUCHES DOWN
upon the chemist's shop. Here, with a light wind blowing and the sun still caught behind the church, she pulls her diary from between her breasts. She presses the tip of a pencil to her tongue.

In the left-hand column, she notes:

At dawn, ate a plum. Bitter. Spit it out. Saw wagon on road to Saint Nicholas. Beehives in back. Madeleine slid out. Pangs of indigestion. Watched her walk into woods. Dress needing a good scrub.

For now, the right-hand column remains empty. Mme. Cochon is not her regular self today.

On the left, she continues:

Mid-morning, took some tea. Appetite returning. Clouds dispersed. Wanting jar of pear jam. No chance to ask. Children arrived with cart. Beauty in back.

It is the sight of this stranger, sitting in the pony cart, that prompts Mme. Cochon to write her first full sentence of the day.

She must drink vinegar to keep herself so slim.

BEATRICE DOES NOT RISK
making the introduction immediately, as Mother hails her triumphant children parading through the yard, the moth-eaten veil all but forgotten, the chest abandoned by the doorstep, but of her own accord the stray woman dismounts from the cart and inches towards the gate, where she waits to be noticed, invited in.

Mother straightens, plucking Mimi's arms from about her waist: Who is that?

There are gypsies wandering about, and thieves, and she has also heard many chilling accounts of kidnappers. As for this woman, is that a trick of the light, that makes the shape of her head seem familiar? It is unnerving, the way she gazes so wistfully at the house, the yard, the swarm of clamoring children. Yes, she is well-dressed, but her hand crawls up and down the length of her pale neck like a spider.

The sight of this stranger prompts Mother to ask: Where is M. Jouy?

Oh Mother, Beatrice exclaims, what a story we have to tell you!

And as if on cue the other children stop where they are and drop down onto their bottoms, elbows on knees, chins in hands, rapt faces turned towards their sister. Mother, her suspicions aroused, her eyebrows raised, remains standing. It is difficult to tell whom she regards with greater misgiving: her gesticulating daughter, grown so tall now, or the vagrant woman hovering outside her gate.

ON THE ROAD WE FOUND
a woman, covered in blood. As she walked, she left behind her a trail of red drops, falling from her hair and her sleeves and the tip of her chin. But she was so beautiful, so much more beautiful than we could ever imagine, we stopped the horse and asked her to come with us.

We wanted to know, Why are you covered in blood?

She told us, It is the blood of my husband. I returned to him because I had grown lonely for the sight of my face, and for the sound of my voice.

We asked her, How lonely?

And she told us, So lonely that I heard it in the branches of trees, in cart wheels and doorknobs, in the moans of a flatulent man, in all kinds of wind. And though I scraped on my body and ordered it to speak, the sounds I made were strange to me.

And so I went home to my husband, and as soon as I stepped into his gardens, I heard him playing. I heard the sound of my own voice, carrying to me from an upstairs window. But when I entered his house, the viol fell silent, and all that I found, sitting down to his supper, was my enormous husband—

And then she killed him! Claude cries as he slices an invisible sword through the air.

CLAUDE IS BANISHED
to the orchard, to say hello to his father.

I'm home! the boy cries.

So you are, observes his father, arms high above his head, hands lost in the mottled ceiling of the leaves.

When his hands emerge, holding apples, he offers one to Claude.

And your trip, Father asks, it was pleasant?

Claude nods, mouth occupied.

And the horse did not complain?

Claude shrugs his shoulders.

Tell me, Father says, where is it that you went?

As Claude struggles to swallow, Father apologizes.

Your mother—she has a business, she's thinking all the time—and with her mind so full, she sometimes forgets to tell me.

Claude takes another bite, so he doesn't have to answer.

AS I WAS SAYING
, Beatrice perseveres.

My husband seemed not at all surprised to see me, perhaps because he had grown so used to looking at my face. Where is Griselda? I demanded, and he merely shrugged, intent upon helping himself to a great quivering pudding.

In the scrapheap, I suppose, is all my husband said. And then he considered: Or maybe burned as firewood last winter, when it grew so very cold.

I watched as he carved off the glistening leg of a goose.

On further thought, said my husband, it is most likely at the orphanage, because in my old age I have cultivated the habit of charity. Did you know that they are musical, orphans?

I knew only that my husband was lying. For hadn't I heard her raise her lament, heard her sobbing to me from across the gardens? And who better than I to recognize the sound of my own voice?

See for yourself, my husband told me. And off I ran into the dark passageways of his house, a black labyrinth of chambers and corridors that had remained, even when I lived among them, impenetrable to me. But now I moved through them with a strange clarity of purpose, as though a little lamp were burning before me, and the doors I remembered as locked now fell open beneath my fingertips. Room after room of his mother's shrouded furniture; and my old bedchamber sheathed in white; and his libraries, the books
rising untouched from floor to ceiling; and his practice room, spare as a cell, with sheets of music still spread on the stand—

Don't bother with all the rooms, says Lucie impatiently. Tell about the
girls.

AWAY FROM HIS FATHER
Claude drifts, kicking at the apples on the ground, his neck bent, his gaze fastened downward. When at last he looks up, he thinks he sees, flickering at the edge of the orchard, a girl. But she moves so quickly through the crooked trees—is it two girls? Or three?

IN THE FARTHEST CORNER
of the smallest practice room, a room so small and nearly forgotten that even the curls of rosin on the floor had gathered dust, there was a little door, like one covering a cupboard, and behind this door is where my husband kept his failed compositions. If ever another human eye should see these, he once confessed, I would die of humiliation. And when he said this to me, I took pity on him, for indeed his eyes watered and his lip trembled, and for an instant it did seem possible that his huge distended heart might collapse upon itself in shame. So though I crept repeatedly into his practice rooms, I never once disturbed that little cupboard door.

But upon my return, I noted that the cupboard door stood ajar, as if opened from the inside by a very faint draft. And I was overpowered. By my own curiosity. My hands shook, my breath faltered, and the door opened to reveal not sagging shelves but a passageway ablaze with light. And rooms, yes, more rooms (had Lucie been present she would have received a deadly look, but Lucie, too, has been sent away), unlike those I had ever seen inside my husband's house. Rooms without windows, but lit from within by such brilliant colors, the strange color and light that emanates from expensive things: walrus tusks, snuff bottles, paintings so black that nothing could be discerned but a cheekbone or an eye, tapestries of rape, swords with sharkskin hilts, tiny jeweled boxes whose interiors rattled. I wanted to touch everything at once.

When I reached out to feel the tapestry, I saw her: long neck,
seven strings, melancholy face. She was turned halfway to the wall, as if in embarrassment, propped between a footstool and a glass case displaying postage stamps. And selfishly I felt only joy: it was not Griselda, trapped in this airless place. But who was she, with her weak jaw and her melancholy expression?

WANDERING THROUGH THE ORCHARD
, Claude wonders, Who was she?

WHY DID SHE WATCH
so sadly out of the corner of her eye? Following her gaze, I understood, for there was another, stripped of her body, who, together with a covey of umbrella handles, was peering timidly from a severed elephant's foot. Prompted by their poor pleading faces, I went from room to room, finding more: those with gaping, half-finished bodies; those with their own strings twisted about their necks like a noose; also the decapitated, their heads turned to paperweights. It took no effort to imagine what had happened in these brilliant rooms. What hunger, on his part. What extreme terror on theirs. And my whole self trembled then: in pity for what they had suffered, perhaps, or in relief that my own face was not among them, but in truth I think I shook only with the cool exhilaration of being right.

For I had known all along. I had known when I sat down to dinner with my husband, when I spent the afternoon by a window reading a book, or drifted down the dark corridors of his house, feeling my way to his bed. I had known of their terror, that they languished on the other side of the wall, yet I had moved through the corridors thinking only of my dinner, my book, his bed, my lovely face. I had known of them in their bright hidden rooms, and at last I was here, shaking in triumph, sick with my own acuity, sick with the pleasure of being right.

It was with this sickness and elation that I sought out my husband, knowing now where I would find Griselda. For wasn't the appetite of my husband as cruel as the wolf's, as great as the whale's? In one despairing gulp, he had swallowed her.

THE STORY IS TOO LONG
, Mother interrupts. All those dinners, those corridors. And where is M. Jouy? I fixed him something special to eat.

Beatrice's face, her hands, collapse: But I haven't finished.

I already know what is going to happen, Mother says. Claude told us at the beginning.

Do you understand how difficult it is, to slice someone open with a carving knife? His intestines—his liver—his marbled heart—

This is why I use the butcher, Mother says. Where is M. Jouy?

Don't you wonder if she found Griselda?

I made him sausages!

Mother and Beatrice stare at each other, white-lipped, ill-matched in their obduracy.

The daughter relents. But this is the best part, she says mournfully.

And seeking encouragement, she finds none, for Mimi has been exiled for coughing, Jean-Luc for looking bored, and the only audience remaining is her unimaginative mother.

Blood everywhere, she murmurs as her audience stalks off, in search of an idiot.

And when the curdling cries rise up from the shed, when the cart is found empty and the bridegroom missing, Beatrice watches in regret the woman backing from their gate, whose tragic story, it must be admitted, she somewhat mismanaged. If only her brothers
and sisters were not capable of such sabotage! She had gotten rid of a useless thing, put a beautiful thing in its place, and yet they were, all of them, intent upon finding fault and thwarting her.

Her sense of injustice is so strong that she stamps her foot against the ground and then, with the other foot, kicks her mother's precious, pointless chest.

AT THE FAR EDGE
of the orchard Madeleine freezes. What is that sound? A howl of fury, a long barking cry. Like a lick of flame it flares up from the shed in the distance, threatening to burn down the whole world around it. My home is not my home, it cries, my children not my children; all that I thought was mine is alien to me. Like the smell of smoke it snakes its way to where Madeleine stands frozen; it sets the apple leaves trembling, lifts the birds from where they feast upon the orchard floor. And Madeleine herself, like a wild forgotten thing, begins to stir: her ears prick, her eyes water, and bringing them up to her mouth, she cups her misshapen hands and lets out her own long howl of sympathy.