The Life of Elves (4 page)

 

Alle orfane la grazia.
*

 

 

 

*
To orphans let there be grace.

T
he little girl, whom they had baptized Maria in honor of both the Holy Virgin and the words that had come from Spain, was growing up on the farm under the protection of four formidable old women. These grannies had their rosary beads ever at the ready, along with the eye of the Lord, or so people called it when referring to old women who did not miss a thing for miles around, even though they only ever left their homes to bury a cousin or marry a goddaughter, and for as long as anyone could remember, they had never crossed the borders of the region.

 

Ah, but they were something else again, those old women. The youngest was just recovering from her eighty-first birthday, and respectfully fell silent whenever her elders gave their verdict on the salting of a pig or the way to cook sage leaves. The little girl's arrival hadn't changed much in the routine of the days, devoted to the painstaking, pious activities which, in Christian lands, are the lot of decent women; they simply made sure to have morning milk fresh from the cow for her, and to read her the Sacred History, when they weren't busy drying the mugwort, and to teach her about simples—listing, in order if you don't mind, each one's medicinal and spiritual properties. No, the coming of the little girl did not seem to have changed the configuration of the months and years, filled to the brim with the four staples the people in these parts used as nourishment: devotion, work, hunting and consequently provender; but in reality Maria had transfigured the hours, and if no one had noticed it at first, it was because her action needed some time to take effect, while her own powers were spreading, becoming seasoned, without her even being aware of it. But there came a wealth of bounteous springs and magnificent winters, and no one ever thought for a moment that they might have something to do with that first snowy night, just as the enhancement of the grannies' gifts was seen as nothing more than a blessing given to those lands where women pray in abundance; it never occurred to anyone that these marvelous old crones might owe their surfeit of talent to two words in Spanish.

 

The wariest of the four old women was Auntie Angèle, the sister of the paternal grandmother, from a lineage renowned for its women as tiny as mice but more pigheaded than wild boars surprised by the hunt. Angèle belonged to that same lineage, and she'd even added something of her own to it by cultivating a special form of obstinacy which, had she not been intelligent, might have proven abstruse; but since she was as lively as a stream, her obstinacy liberated a surplus of wisdom which she employed to understand the world, without ever setting foot in it. From the very first—and this we know—Angèle sniffed out that there was something magical about the little girl. After the episode with the creature—when the men were so hopeless they were incapable of saying what it looked like, though she could have sworn it was no animal—she had no further doubt, and she even embraced the certainty, enhanced daily with new layers of proof, that the little girl was not only magical but also very powerful. And since they were old women who knew as sure as sure could be—even though their entire acquaintance with the world consisted of two forests and three hills—Angèle trembled at the thought that the child's magical powers made her a natural prey; so every morning before Matins she would say to herself a pair of Hail Marys and an equal number of Lord's Prayers, and out of the corner of her eye of the Lord she kept a close watch over all the child's comings and goings, even if it meant the milk soured ten times in a row on a poorly adjusted flame.

 

A year had passed since the event in the clearing in the east wood, as if in a dream, in tranquil surges of happiness. Then one morning at the end of November, Angèle turned her eye of the Lord to look for the child, whom they had seen at dawn in the storeroom helping herself to a piece of cheese, then setting off like a whirlwind to her trees and her lessons. Those folk who have forgotten the life to be had in contact with primitive nature will think of the metaphor, and assume that her purpose was merely to go and chat with the neighbors, and in truth the weave of acquaintance in our countryside, as tight-knit as the cells of a beehive, has always existed. But the eye of the Lord sees far beyond any village gossip: if anything, it bears greater resemblance to a probe that allows one to make out—as if in semi-darkness—those people or things that are not immediately apparent to the naked eye. Of course, deep down Auntie Angèle would not have been thinking any of this, and if you questioned any of the old women about their vision they would have fingered their rosaries and muttered something vague about the clairvoyance of mothers—for magic is the devil, and they kept well away from it, even if that meant denying certain aptitudes that, however well-established, were hardly what you'd call Christian.

 

The countryside that morning was dazzling. There had been a frost at dawn, and it sparkled from one end of the land to the other; then the sun came up, all of a sudden, above an earth now covered with a cloth that glistened like a sea of light. So when Angèle cast her gaze over the frost-laden fields, and found the little girl almost at once at the edge of a cluster of trees to the east of the farm, she was not surprised by the clarity of her vision, and for a moment, so beautiful was the scene that she was lost in contemplation, because Maria stood out against a background of trees girdled in white that arched above her head like diamond ogives. Therefore to contemplate such a scene is no sin: it is not idleness but praise of the Lord's work, and it has to be said there was no shortage of such work in those days, in those parts where people lived simply; it was easy to run one's finger along the cheek of the divine, and the divine came from a daily commerce with clouds and stones and the glorious, dripping dawns that shot salvoes of translucent beams toward the earth.

Thus, from her kitchen, as she stared into space, Angèle was smiling at the sight of the little girl at the edge of that lovely copse, ringed by ice as if by a prayer, when she was startled by a sudden realization. How could she have failed to notice? It occurred to her, quite abruptly, that such clarity was not usual, and that the luminous arches and cathedrals of diamonds had concealed the fact that the little girl was not alone and, consequently, that she might be in danger. Angèle did not hesitate for a moment. The mother and the other old women had left earlier for a funeral, and would not be back for a good two hours. At the neighboring farm there would only be Goodwoman Marcelot, because all the men in the village had gathered at dawn for the first of the winter's major hunts. As for the priest, whom she could have gone to fetch from his presbytery, he appeared to her in all the splendor of his fine goose-fat-filled paunch (she promised to do penance later for this ungodly thought), radically unsuited to combat the dark forces of the universe.

 

The hearths of progress had not yet produced their culpable heat in that era, so Angèle wore three bodices and seven skirts and petticoats, to which she added a heavy woolen cape. In this armor, with her headpiece pulled tight around her remaining meager strands of hair, she strode out into the treacherous light of that perilous day. In all—in other words, Angèle, along with her eight winter layers, her clogs, her three rosaries and a silver cross upon a chain, not forgetting the headpiece with its ribbons, over which she had placed a thick felt headscarf—in all she could not have weighed more than ninety pounds; hence, her ninety-four summers seemed to soar above the dirt track, so much so that you could not even hear the crunching of wooden sole against frost, and she rushed almost soundlessly, short of breath, crimson-nosed, to the patch of the meadow she had contemplated earlier. She scarcely had time to catch a glimpse of the little girl, who was shouting something in the direction of a big gray horse with a coat that glinted of unpolished silver, and she tried to utter a sound that meant to say,
By all the Saints and the great mercy of the Virgin Mary!
but it only emerged as
oh oh oh!
—before darkness fell over the meadow. Yes, a hurricane swooped down upon the little girl and the intruder, and would have knocked Angèle onto her behind, had she not held fast to one of her rosaries and, believe it or not, the beads were instantly transformed into a walking stick. A miracle.

 

The little auntie brandished her rosary in the storm, cursing the barrier of opaque swirls that kept her from approaching Maria. She had lost her headscarf and her beribboned headpiece, and her two white braids with strands as fine as a spider's web stood straight up on her head, which she shook in frustration at the tumultuous wind.
Oh oh oh!
she said again, and this time it meant,
Don't ye dare come for the little lass or I'll skin yer ugly villainous mugs.
Let it be known that a clog thrown straight ahead by an indignant old granny can part the waters of a downpour, not unlike Moses who may also have had all his robes blown inside out, right down to the last one which was as red as the sea in the Holy Book. When she saw the breach her clog had made in the weather, Angèle hopped into it like a young goat and landed head over petticoat in a furious maelstrom, wind and currents hurling all around her. But the downpour that obscured her view and prevented her from reaching the little girl was now swirling around this magma of energy (this she understood in a flash of awareness which could never be translated into words) and kept it constant, as if in a pressure cooker. Angèle opened wide her near-sighted eyes, and using her rosary stick, tried to get to her feet and tidy her petticoats. Maria's clothing was spinning in the screaming air, and she was shouting something to the gray horse, which had withdrawn to the edge of the trees, because between them there was a black column of smoke that rumbled like thunder and grew thicker as it spun on itself. But the horse, too, was wrapped in a mist that swirled delicately before his noble head; he was a beautiful horse, with glossy nostrils and a coat of shimmering mercury, and his mane was streaked with fine threads of silver. The auntie, for all that she was as blind as a mole, was hardly surprised that at twenty paces she could make out that fine mane (after the business with the rosary, this was small beer). The little girl went on shouting something she couldn't hear, but the black smoke was stronger than the horse's desire to reach Maria, and in the movement he made in her direction, his neck arched with compassion both to reassure her and bid her farewell, she could read sadness but hope, too, something that said,
We will meet again
—and quite stupidly (they were surrounded by lightning, after all) she wanted to weep and blow her nose profusely.

The horse vanished.

For a few seconds the fate of these two souls trapped in their dark maelstrom seemed uncertain. Then there came a terrible whistling, the clouds grew lighter, the black smoke rose skyward like arrows of death then dissipated in a raging splash. In a petrified silence the countryside returned to its finery of gems and salt, until the auntie regained consciousness, and squeezed the little girl fit to stifle her against her heavy woolen cape.

 

That evening the men were summoned to the farm. The women made dinner, and they waited for the father, who had put in a brief appearance earlier (in addition to bringing two hares and the promise of some fine cuts of wild boar) and heard the others tell of the day's extraordinary events. Consequently he had gone away again to knock on a few doors while the women laid the table for fifteen. Ordinarily they would have supped on soup, bacon, a half-cheese per pair of feet, and a smidgen of Eugénie's quince jellies, but instead they were busy preparing a stew and a chanterelle pie: they'd just opened three jars from that year's harvest. On Maria's plate was a big pear drowned in honey fragrant with the thyme the bees had frequented all summer long, and she was silent. They had tried to ask her a few questions, but they'd given up, worried by the feverish gleam in her dark pupils and wondering what she had shouted to the gray horse of the mist. But no one doubted Angèle's story, and the supper began in a great hubbub, talking of rosaries, storms, and days in late November, and through it all Angèle had to tell her story in detail half a dozen times, making it a point of honor not to change a single thing.

An elaborate story, but not altogether complete, or so Maria noticed as she sat unspeaking and thoughtful, eating her pear. She thought Angèle gave her a sidelong glance as she was about to begin a certain part of the story, when the black smoke formed long thin arrows, and when you looked at them you knew they were deadly. You looked at them, and you knew, that was all there was to it. And Maria noticed, for a slew of reasons that offended Angèle's love of truth, that the auntie said nothing of the horror etched in her breast by the baleful vision. All she said was,
And the smoke went up to the sky like that and exploded all of a sudden up there and the sky turned blue again
—and then fell silent. Maria went on thinking. She thought that she knew many things these fine folk knew nothing about, and that she loved them with all the strength a child of eleven can place in a love born not only of early attachment but also of an understanding of others in their moments of both greatness and unspeakable misery.

If Angèle chose not to speak of the deadly force of the black arrows it was in part because she feared her words might turn into a prediction, and in part because she did not want to frighten the little lass—because she didn't know whether the child had seen what she had seen—and in part, too, because once upon a time she had been a fiery woman. While now her auntie might look like a dried-up walnut who fed on immaterial prayer alone, Maria could see—because since her tenth birthday she had acquired the gift of knowing the past through images—that in years gone by Angèle had been a pretty firefly, and that her body and mind had fated her to the winds of freedom. She could see that she had often crossed the river in her bare feet while staring at the sky, daydreaming; but she could still see time and destiny, vanishing lines which never vanish, and she knew that Angèle's fire had gradually retreated inside her, reduced to a point long forgotten. But the discovery of the little girl from Spain on the steps to the farm had revived the memory of the ardor that had once flowed in her veins: now in its second life it was ordering Maria to be free and fiery. Angèle was afraid that if she spoke of the arrows of death, others might think it best to restrain the child in her everyday life, but Angèle thought she could protect her—or at least she hoped she could, keeping the child from being shackled, a child whom one afternoon spent shut indoors would kill more surely than all the arrows a simple rosary had managed to repel.