The Body of the Beasts

by Audrée Wilhelmy

  After the folly of his act, Osip no longer knows what to do with himself and so he stays in his tower and watches. Noé spends three days salvaging the remains of her boat. On the fourth day, she disappears before dawn and returns after noon, her skin covered in scratches, brushwood under her arm. She sits on the porch steps and sorts through the branches, peels them, then cuts them into sections as long as an adult hand. Later, she digs a hole in the sand beyond the tide’s reach. She carries the branches in the folds of her skirt. Its fabric stretches but doesn’t tear. She lets the sticks fall into the hole and form a small pyramid that she pats down, sliding her fingers along the wood. She carries stones polished by the sea in the same manner — Osip is surprised at how resistant women’s clothing is, delicate but unyielding under wood or stone — and covers the pit with the rocks and then, on top, she piles mud, seaweed and, finally, the dried bulrushes. There in the yellow straw of the boat, the burning begins. Noé makes another dozen trips from the cabin to the fire, feeding the flames with frames and chairs, books, dresses, paddles, canes: her possessions and the Boryas’ all in a jumble. Flames leap as high as a lighthouse storey, and the acrid stench of burning wafts far enough into the forest for Sevastian-Benedikt to catch its scent. Inside the cabin, she rips away what’s left of the wallpaper, and its glue blackens the smoke as it burns. Finally, she retreats to her quarters and sits on the floor, stares at the empty half of the room, its large wall bare. She breathes.

  Osip keeps watch over the fire all night long. He’s afraid the flames will spread to the cabin. They don’t. Once everything combustible has burned, the flames die; the wind scatters the embers across the beach, leaving the stone mound covered in nothing but cinder and ash.

  Osip takes the stairs down from the lantern, trying not to wake Mie and the Old Woman, asleep in each other’s arms. Outside the lighthouse, he hesitates. A shallow expanse of water still covers the path linking the tower to the shore. If he waits for low tide and daylight, he won’t dare do anything. Only the prospect of a sleeping Noé gives him the audacity to act. He crosses the dunes and imagines her asleep, collapsed from fatigue, half-naked, her dress falling off her shoulder.

  He shakes his boots over the first porch step, and sand falls in a cone on the tread.

  He pushes on the door into the cabin.

  Noé is seated on the floor, she hasn’t budged. She’s contemplating the wall; at the creak of the door’s hinges, she starts, then blinks, as if waking from a dull dream, neither alarming nor pleasurable. For a second, the surprise makes her close in on herself — her chest collapses, her clavicle drops toward her belly, but when she sees Osip, her body grows rigid, her trunk forms a rod, her chin lifts. She stares at him long and hard. Her face betrays nothing, neither anger nor curiosity nor pleasure. She eyes him, and he has no idea that she will never look on him again. Still in the doorway, he bows his head, and when he lifts it, she has already ceased to see him. She concentrates on her wall. The white half of the room seems to devour the whole space. Osip wishes he could fill the silence of the cabin; the void here has pulled Noé to a side of the world where he cannot follow.

  Nothing happens for the longest time. He stands on the threshold, Noé focuses on the wall. Occasionally, she squints and tilts her head, as though seeing something she can’t quite grasp; she draws curved lines in the dust, then sits up straight and observes in silence once more.

  A crow’s cawing wakes Osip from his torpor. He steps through the doorway, makes his way to the bed, feet as heavy as lead, and begins to speak. His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth and he utters whatever comes to mind. “I’ll make the bed see I’ll just straighten the blankets that’s better your pillows don’t have enough stuffing I’ll talk to Sevastian he can pluck a turtledove you need a comfortable bed I want you to feel at home are you sure you don’t want to live in the lighthouse the bedroom is bigger and the mattress soft I could sleep next to you on cold nights the wind won’t touch you anymore I want to shelter you here I’ll make a fire would you like some tea I always have a few tea leaves with me I’ll make you happy let me show you you’ll be fine staying here how is it that you have no kindling to start the fire I can use the seat of this chair the leg is broken anyhow.”

  * * *

  When Sevastian-Benedikt emerges from his forest, the last embers have died out on the beach. He looks at the lighthouse, which has not burned, and at the cabin gradually buckling within its prison of birch. The fire alerted him, and he’s back three days earlier than planned. He pushes open the door. Osip, bare-chested, has pulled Noé’s sleeve down, he’s leaning over her, studying the burn of an ember that has swollen her shoulder. Sevastian steps into the cabin as if entering his own home, unfazed by the new decor or the presence of his younger brother; though Noé’s does surprise him somewhat. He rummages through the objects that have escaped the purge, pulls out a trap with grayed teeth, looks at Osip, “Signs of a bear in the clearing. Tell mother to be careful.” Before leaving, he turns one last time and, smiling, looks his brother up and down, “When did you start growing hair there?” he asks. And disappears.

  * * *

  Osip dresses quickly. He does the buttons up on his shirt as best he can, steps out of the cabin, looks for his brother. Three times he circles the house, and then surveys the various trails plunging into the forest, he doesn’t even know which leads to the clearing but ventures down one anyway, walking on and on before the thought of the bear slows him down, before the noises begin to worry him, he reasons with himself for half a league then retraces his steps. He’d have nothing to say to his brother in any case.

  * * *

  Noé is on the beach, kneeling before the pyre. She brushes away the cinders that float up and adhere to her face, her arms. Sevastian-Benedikt emerges from the lighthouse — he must have stopped by to greet his mother, his daughter — follows the trail, then lays his trap on the ground; Osip sees him from a distance, would like to join him, but shame holds him back.

  Sevastian speaks to his woman, short sentences that his brother can’t hear. Osip can’t tell if his brother is angry or not. He stays out of sight, half crouching behind the wood piled on the porch. Noé gets to her feet. From his hiding place, Osip wonders if she’s looking at his brother or staring right through him at the trees. She lets her dress drop from her shoulders. The top falls to her waist, stops at her hips. Noé pulls the neckline down over her buttocks, in one motion the fabric glides to the sand. Sevastian-Benedikt approaches, grabs her wrist, turns her. With one hand he holds her by the waist, and with the other he forces her to bend. Noé is doubled over his arm. She speaks, the wind carrying her voice to Osip. “Do it,” she says. Her legs are two lines perpendicular to the beach, her dress wrapped around her ankles and feet.

  For a long while, she stays on the ground as the eldest finishes putting his clothes back on, hikes the trap hanging from its chain over his shoulder, and trudges toward the forest. Osip wishes he could melt into the trees. What could he possibly say? What did Noé give away? He’s afraid of his brother’s anger, or his mockery, and looks for excuses — she’s the one who pulled the sheet away, I was near the cabin, she gave herself to me — but when Sevastian passes next to him, he doesn’t even look over; he swerves around his brother and proceeds to the edge of the forest, the trap hanging down his back like the gaping maw of some enormous fish.

  He stops only when Osip finds the courage to speak his name.

  He’s already halfway into the trees by then, the leaves of the trees draw living shadows on his face.

  He says, “You can, after me,” then turns his back and plunges into the undergrowth; the forest swallows him whole.

  4

  The charcoal sticks are wrapped in rags and stored outside the entrance to the cabin. Once Noé had finished scattering the ashes from the bonfire, she dug up the carbonized sticks from beneath the stones, carefully wrapped them in dried seaweed, then the seaweed in clot
h and the cloth in a tin box. Fifteen sticks per packet, twenty-two packets in the box and one rag full of broken ends.

  Those sticks, it was like she was living off them. Osip watches the ramshackle cabin incessantly, on the lookout for Noé who never steps outside. He trains his spyglass on the porch and counts the disappearing bundles. Sometimes, a hand, a wrist, emerges from the doorway, dips into the box, grabs a bundle, then the door closes and the blond flash of arm disappears.

  For two days, he resists. On the third, he comes down from his tower, cuts across the path, climbs the gentle slope to the beach — behind him, waves ferry shells, seaweed, dead fish — and tiptoes up the porch steps. Once at the door, he doesn’t know what to do. At first, he presses his eye to a window pane, but it’s dark inside and the window is dirty. He stands and stares at the door jamb for an eternity; finally he gives himself a shake and turns the knob. He tries not to make a sound, but the hinges creak and the door sticks, he has to give it a shove to get it to open. Behind the door, metal pails tip and clatter onto the floor.

  Noé doesn’t turn around. She’s covered in black dust: on her hands, her arms, her face, beneath her nose, her chin, her neck. Wherever beads of perspiration collect, the charcoal adheres, as it does to her blouse and skirt, to the floor, the furniture, and the sheets.

  In front of her, the wall is smeared with charcoal. At each end, blank surfaces, grey wood and strips of wallpaper. In the centre, a crude shadowy blotch with moving contours that make no sense. Noé darkens it some more, charcoal floats in a cloud around her hand. In some places she draws the outline of empty patches the size of a fist or a toe. Her gestures are fluid; it’s as though she’s making it up as she goes. The shadows extend to the blank territory at each end.

  Noé lets herself be rocked by the strident screeching of the charcoal on the wall.

  She is inside the image, caught up in the long line she continues to draw.

  A river born in the northwest that runs to the south of the picture.

  Sand on her tongue, in her throat, her nose, her ears, her eyes, in the bend of her elbows, on her knees, her belly, her neck; between her lips and in her opening, too, filled like a conch shell. Sand in her scalp for days on end, that itches and is scratched, sand that falls in fine grains as though her whole skull is nothing but a sandcastle. Crusted hair, a perpetual squeaking in her eardrums, specks disintegrating beneath her teeth, mouthful after mouthful, catching between her molars and gums; sand when she sneezes, in her mucus, in her feces, everywhere. And under the sand’s bite, the bite of salt; lesions on her limbs inflamed by the friction of the elements (halite, sediment, water); skin rough for days, months, the healing from huge waves dragging on forever.

  * * *

  Her life began with a drowning, in a meander in the long black line that descends from the top corner of the wall to the centre. Whatever happened in her early years and dragged her into that heavy swell, she does not remember. She came into the world at the age of four tangled in the nets of unknown fishermen, with the sharp taste of rye and the raspy texture of the ocean’s bottom on her tongue. Leaning over her: a huge woman and a man rubbing away layers of mud with their handkerchiefs. Their faces come back to her as she traces the river over and over again.

  After her convalescence, by order of appearance:

  — Wind on salt burns. The cold bite of its gusts against bared flesh: awakening of the body within the painful pleasure of senses heightened by the accident. She scrapes at the scabs to rip them off, exposes the wounds to squalls rolling in from the sea.

  — The buttery, metallic taste of blood. That of exposed sores, bug bites, scratches, cleaned each time with licks of the tongue, even the tiniest abrasions pinched to release their claret, her mouth pursed to nurse the wounds.

  — The sound of her own voice, explored in secret in coastal caves. The echo of songs ricocheting off rock faces.

  — Her heels sinking into the silt of low tide. The slurp of suction beneath her feet, the ground sticky with seaweed, redolent of salty kelp.

  — The rigidity of her clothes washed in seawater and dried in the breeze. The cold of their touch in early spring when ice melts into the river, the enveloping heat in September when the sun hits their seams and warms the fabric.

  — Her shifting shape over the seasons and years, the shooting pain behind her knees as her legs grow, the cloth of her blouse rubbing against the swollen nipples of her budding breasts.

  — Slick, muddy rocks and the sharp slice of clams beneath her feet.

  Some days, messages from her senses are magnified. Rays of light filtering through the foliage, the sun through slatted fences or the lamp’s reflection in newly washed windows trigger strong reactions, sometimes so brutal that she flinches, falls to the ground, her eyes rolling back in her head, and remembers nothing afterward. The fat woman says she’s possessed, the man that a physician from the Cité could treat her. Noé doesn’t want to be cured, she likes the oblivion that consumes her, the reset to zero of her body and thoughts. For hours before the fits, tension seizes her hands and arms, her legs, heart, lungs: even the air is in excess, takes too much space in her belly. Noé knows that nothing but the black of sheer darkness will soothe her.

  Noé’s life is on the wall. The expanse of white bordering the river is dazzling. Dust from the charcoal floats above the image, bringing to mind the flocks of ducks and geese that stopped on the shores of the village of Oss on their way north or south.

  For fifteen years, Noé observes their flight and envies them. She knows the blue strip of spruce behind the houses and the boundary it forms, and has no idea what lies beyond. The trees look like soldiers aligned in tight rows, they protect the village but lay siege to it, too.

  It takes the death of the fat woman and the man for her to plunge into the pine grove and discover the unfamiliar audacity of movement.

  Bare trunks topped with cone-filled branches smell of resin, bristle with dry twigs — a labyrinth for insects and birds, especially woodpeckers, nesting in the boughs, also June bugs, and termites that tunnel their holes between tree bark and sapwood. On the ground, a carpet of yellow needles that creatures cross, leaving no trace. A damp circle, the vestige of late summer rains; a warmth different from that in the village, this one less breezy, and sheltered from the open sea’s moods.

  Noé doesn’t draw the woods. She only traces waterways, though in the blank space to the north of the drawing she’s aware of the pine grove that can be crossed in less than an hour — a fake dense forest to keep the village children to the same hard life as their parents. Beyond, prairies stretching as far as the eye can see.

  Over and over, she sketches the river’s dark lines, opens them to the sea. Her palm travels along the coast, she digs estuaries, rivers, lakes, follows the waterways, finds her homes again.

  The filthy tents of a circus; a forest of blue huts; the partly submerged cloister of the Sisters of Sainte-Sainte-Anne; an oilcloth stretched between two trees, every night under different leafy boughs, across thirteen hundred square rods of green, golden, russet, and white fields; northern peoples’ shelters on the ice-covered taiga; old tubs and actual ships that toss, pitch, and rock; the baggage compartment of one train, another’s boxcar; mountain isbas; the deserted castle at Luce-aux-Farolles; coppices of birch and cedar, rabbit warrens, beech, almond, and fig groves; thatched farés; gîtes and hovels; Father Libouban’s hermitage; gourbis with walls of sand; caves; countless stables, cottages, and chartreuses; harbour warehouses and noisy factory hangars; church squares, temples; the gaudy windows of greasy smelling restaurants, the cots of Ismador’s boarding school, the attic of the Cité’s Opera house, then its grand train station.

  She shades in the Bastindale River; above, she imagines flamboyant fields of wild mustard, and coastal villages identical to one another with their clotheslines and painted cottages: Lastaigne, Sérodes, Marydales, Bounia, Nan Mei. She reaches the open
sea — the squeak of charcoal resembles that of ice ferried by the tides — and moves on to the ochre earth of the pigment quarries of Oronge; once more she hears the chant of the Circé grottos, the echo of waves against rock walls; and then, when the black mass of water swells into a bay, an ocean, she discovers again the first of the washed-up medusas announcing the welcoming beaches of Sikkim and Saint-Samovar; and finally, the cliffs of Triglav, the remote village of Seiche. Sevastian’s forest.

  Sitjaq, she has drowned in the sea. It’s not on the map, it’s not on the wall, she has smudged its spit of sand, its rocks and lagoons, until they merge with the waves and leave no trace.

  * * *

  Osip is standing behind her. For a good while, he studies the drawing, understanding nothing. He backs up. He steps over the objects piled on the other side of the room, leans back against the partition wall, and examines her work from a distance. The blotch, Noé’s broad gestures. The drawing tapers off at both ends. Osip looks for meaning; doesn’t see black as water, white as land. He thinks he’s looking at the scribbling of a madwoman.

  The charcoal crumbles, squeaks, Osip loathes the grating sound. He walks across the cabin, draws near, gently takes Noé’s hand, distances her from the wall. He doesn’t put his arms around her but leads her like a living bird, from the sea to the bed. One by one, he separates her fingers, the charcoal makes a gleeful sound as it strikes the floor.

  The ocean is opaque, dotted with small dusty islands in the shape of ripe fruits. Noé has seen them on maps, globes, she has drawn them a hundred times: the curves and hollows and jagged edges of the coastlines, shoals, coves. She loves their contours, the movement of her hand following the shore. The geography of the Dark — this sea with its scattered atolls and sand islands — adheres to her own. Her sketches disappeared with the sinking of La Coquille, swallowed up by the ocean along with her rush bundles, but she has not forgotten them.