The Life of Elves

by Muriel Barbery

  Then the wheel of memory turned and she saw Angèle again with a newborn baby in her arms, wrapped in white swaddling clothes. She had parted the folds of embroidered cambric and taken the infant as her daughter, with a joy that resembled an ether shot through with indecipherable traces of light. She received the message from these glimmerings, just as, in the crystalline lapping emanating from the child, she had read of an annunciation: that two worlds would coexist. Which worlds? She did not know, and yet they existed.

  The memories stopped.

  The rain was falling like an axe. She heard a new clamor from the village, even as the wind blew ten times harder. She looked behind her, beyond the stable roof, at the sky of snow that was waiting for Maria. And then she cast her whole heart, as a woman and as a mother, into the wind.

  Meanwhile, Gégène’s men had gone to fetch rifles from Chachard’s workshop. This gentleman of the forest hunt had masses of them: the care he had lavished upon them was as loving as any caress he would have given a wife, had the plumage of a partridge not been more desirable to him than a kiss; so now each man was able to choose the weapon that suited him, and stop for a moment to listen to Gégène’s instructions. They were more like conjectures that, given the situation, he might as well make, because they had to do something after all.

  “We have to go through it,” he said, “and I don’t see why the rifles shouldn’t give us the upper hand.”

  “So you think there are men waiting to ambush us round the back?” asked Riri.

  “How can we get through?” asked Ripol.

  “We can do it,” said Léon Saurat. Apart from the real distress he felt, he was secretly jubilant that the day was proving to him that he still had what it took for action and no one was about to bury him yet. “But we can’t stay here,” he added, pointing to the roof.

  It would be wrong to imagine that this conversation took place in hushed tones in the comfort of the workshop, smelling sweetly of seal blubber and handcrafted leather. Even there they had to shout, and they had to leave soon; Maria had given them the order, and they knew it full well after having seen their church decapitated against the sky. But it was impossible to speak out of doors, and Gégène ventured to stay on a bit longer because he wanted to be sure the men had grasped the truth of what he was trying to ram into their brains.

  “What do we do when we want to shoot a partridge in full flight and there’s a fearsome wind?” he shouted.

  That was an easy one, and they did not even need to give him the answer.

  “And how do we go about shooting game with a bow and arrow?”

  That was an easy one, too, but what was not so easy was to connect the two trains of logic that in Gégène’s head were clear, apparently. Despite the prevalence of hunting and battues, it was traditional in the region to favor a form of hunt that was nominally forbidden because it encouraged poaching, but for all that, it was considered a finer method than the others. There were not many of them who practiced it, for lack of material or know-how, but three or four of them would gladly set aside their rifles for the bow and arrow, and they were much respected, because at this game only those who had sufficient knowledge of their prey could excel, and they had to adjust their aim well enough not to miss, and have at their disposition an elaborate repertory of all the tricks required to approach their quarry, including awareness of terrain and winds (for what is the point of being a stone’s throw away from a deer if the breeze suddenly blows one’s tobacco breath right into the animal’s nostrils?).

  In short, ancient natural forces joined in this game at which the true squires of our regions excelled, forces of men and of forests which once again for a day of pursuit had become the same fundamental matter. The bows they used had neither sights nor any of the accessories that have flourished in an era when hunting has declined to the status of a mere pastime; these bows resembled those used by savages and, because they lacked any precision instrumentation, they required so much more from the archer. They could also be used as paddles, or as walking sticks, because their simplicity required a combination of elegance and solidity, and the instrument was valued because there was no harm in it being so versatile and useful. But every attention was paid to the quality of the arrows, which had to be fashioned so that the trajectory and the impact could be calculated to perfection, and they were carried in their quivers with all the delicacy excellence requires (for what would be the point of finding oneself a stone’s throw away from a wild boar only to miss the charming beast?).

  The other men were actually beginning to see the light, and they could almost hear Gégène’s voice resonating under their scalps, in that sententious, mocking way he had, the only difference being that they were not all on the verge of uncorking a bottle and slicing their salami and raising a toast to friendship. But the terror of the moment did not manage to extinguish the spark of excitement that had flared ever since they had opted to act rather than let themselves be crushed like roaches, and they could easily do without the plonk and the pork, provided they understood the order of the day, which was there before their eyes as clearly as if Marcelot had said it out loud: Go closer, take aim, and shoot into the wind. All in all, the furtive procedure of things was now clear to these men, who were used to spending their Sundays in the forest: they would be cunning, and they would anticipate. That they did not quite know how did not prevent them from seeing the beauty of their plan, and they felt revitalized as they recalled that the grace of the land belonged to them.

  “Straight into the wind and head for the fallow fields!” shouted Marcelot, and they nodded vigorously, feeling for their rifles.

  They went out into the wind and hail; it seemed to have grown even stronger while they’d been conspiring indoors. But the roof had held. And they made headway. Despite the lashing rain and the flooding, they advanced slowly and surely, as if their courageous determination offered less purchase to the gusts and made them somehow invisible to the enemy.

  Up at the clearing the first act of fate was being played out at last, while the years materialized into a whirlwind of revelations brought forth by the inhospitable shrieking of the wind. The preliminary storm vanished beneath the icy onslaught of rain, and with every passing second the drama became more terrible and more apparent. Maria stood motionless for a long time, in spite of the tragedy unfolding in the village. All around her she could feel friendly presences waiting behind the sky of snow; she could hear the voice of the other little girl murmuring her name, and she saw a landscape she had already seen in her dreams. Access was along a passage of flat black stones beneath a canopy of chiseled trees until one reached a wooden pavilion with windows that had neither glass nor curtains, then finally across a wooden pier over a misty valley. But she could not determine how she was to use this vision when there were men who had perished, and in the ice was murmured the beloved name of Eugénie.

  A succession of images caused her to hesitate. First she saw a country road where young men in tight Sunday suits were picking armfuls of wildflowers, then a window in the clarity of a winter dawn, where two stars had frozen, their orbits stopped forever, and finally an unknown graveyard in the pounding rain, spray splashing and splattering over the granite slabs. Ordinarily the pictures from her dreams were as physically precise as the fields and hares, but these images were blurry and marred by distortions, and she could not see the faces of the young men as they bantered under the July sun, any more than she could read the names and dates carved onto the tombs in the graveyard. But she was astonished that the image could reach her during the battle, because she knew she was seeing it through her mother’s eyes. Other images followed, emerging from Rose’s memory; she had entered into a sort of communication with Rose that was unlike anything Maria had ever shared with another, not even Eugénie at the time of the healing, or André when they would gaze long and silently at one another. The images poured over her then moved on; there were trees and
pathways, blazing fires on winter nights, a little shed of gray tiles where they went to fetch the firewood on a cold day, and faces whose features were blurred by memory but which, intermittently, revived in the sudden radiance of a smile. She saw an old woman whose corneas were engulfed in whiteness, who smiled as she mended a worn veil, and she knew that this was her grandmother at a time when she herself was not yet born. A long lineage of women . . . She caught glimpses of faces melting into a chain that was lost in time. There were graves, and women singing lullabies of an evening or screaming with pain as they read the letter from the army. In one last, spinning round of fleeting images she saw each face clearly, every glittering tear. Then they all disappeared. But in the swirling of shared memory their message had carried.

  And in Rome, Clara also received the message from the women, who told Maria that she was one of them and that she must honor the lineage beyond death. Then she heard the little French girl say:

  “What is your name?”

  PETRUS

  A friend

  Tu come ti chiami?” translated the Maestro.

  “Mi chiamo Clara,” she replied.

  And he translated again. “Where do you come from?”

  “L’Italia,” she said.

  “That is so far away,” said Maria. “Can you see the storm?”

  “Yes,” said Clara. “Can you see me, too?”

  “Yes, but I cannot see anyone else. Although there is a man who is speaking French.”

  “I am with him and with other men who know.”

  “Do they know what I must do?”

  “I don’t think so. They know why, but they don’t know how.”

  “It is urgent,” said Maria.

  “It is urgent,” said the Maestro first in French, then in Italian. “But we don’t have the keys.”

  “The revelations will not come on their own,” said Petrus, “and at the moment the sky is not exactly on our side.”

  “Who is speaking?” asked Maria.

  “Petrus, at your service,” he said, in French.

  “I know you.”

  “You know all of us. And you also know your powers. Your heart is at ease, you can set them free.”

  “I don’t understand what I must do.”

  “Clara will guide you. Can you hold the tempest back a little while longer?”

  “I am not holding it back. Men have died.”

  “You are holding it back, and we are helping you. Without you there would be nothing left of the village or the land. We are going to speak to Clara in Italian, but we won’t forget you, and we will be with you again soon.”

  Then, to the Maestro: “The key is in the stories. Clara must know.”

  “What is a prophecy if it is revealed?” asked the Maestro.

  “It is still a prophecy,” said Petrus. “And perhaps a guiding light, as well. It should have been done earlier. But we must begin at the beginning.”

  In Petrus’s mind, Clara could see the Maestro, thirty years younger, shaking hands with a man who looked like Pietro, then following him down familiar corridors where marble tabletops and brocade curtains had assimilated a toxic, suffocating heat. It hung over an indescribably terrible scene and cast a predatory shadow over the man’s amiable person. Then Roberto Volpe opened the door to an unfamiliar room, and the Maestro stood opposite the painting Clara had seen on the very first day.

  “From our Pavilion I saw and already knew the art of humankind,” said the Maestro, “and I have always been fascinated by their music and their paintings. But this painting was different.”

  “You must understand what is happening here,” said Petrus. “We are a world without stories.”

  “You told me that elves do not tell stories,” said Clara.

  “Elves do not tell stories the way people do but, above all, they do not invent them. We sing of fine deeds and great exploits; we compose odes to the birds of the ponds, or hymns to the beauty of mist; we celebrate the things that exist. But imagination never adds anything. Elves know how to praise the beauty of the world, but they do not know how to play with reality. They live in a splendid world that is eternal and static.”

  “From the beginning I have loved what humans create,” said the Maestro. “But that day I made an additional discovery. Roberto Volpe had attracted the attention of the Council because he had done something which continues to this day to have consequences on our destiny. I crossed the bridge and I met him. And he showed me the painting. I had already seen portrayals of the lamentations of Christ, but this one was different, and the shock was enormous. And yet it was the same scene as usual, the Virgin and Mary Magdalene leaning over Christ taken down from the cross, the women’s tears, the crucified man with his crown of thorns. But there could be no doubt that it had been painted by an elf. I knew it the moment I saw the painting, and later I conducted an investigation that confirmed it. One of our kind, four centuries ago, had left our world for this one, taking a human name and a Flemish identity—we believe he lived in Amsterdam—and painted the greatest fiction of humankind with a perfection that has been rarely equaled.”

  “What did Roberto do?” asked Clara.

  “He killed someone,” said the Maestro, “but we won’t tell that story today. The most important thing is that, as I stood before the painting, I made the same decision as the artist who painted it. It was the most marvelous emotion of my entire life. Prior to that, I had been yearning for human art. Now I could see the path that had been opened by this unknown painter, a passage to the other side of the bridge, and a complete immersion in the music of this world. And others besides me also made this discovery, before and after, but for different reasons.”

  “Some of them want the end of humankind, others want an alliance,” said Clara.

  “The alliance is the message of the Flemish painting,” said the Maestro, “just as Alessandro’s canvases speak of the desire to cross over in the other direction. It is inconceivable that we have taken so long to hear and to understand this call from the footbridge. All the more so in that, not long before this, I made another discovery thanks to an elf whom you know well, and whose perspicacity far exceeds that of great and wise men. I was still the head of our council, and I went to consult the ancient texts in the library of our world. I was looking for something that might help me understand the era we were living in, but I didn’t find anything that day.”

  “You were the head of your council before Maria’s father?”

  “Yes. But another candidate ran against Maria’s father, and almost won.”

  “Aelius.”

  “Aelius, whose anger you can see today in the sky over Burgundy. Now, as I was leaving the library, I had an interesting conversation with the sweeper, who seemed to be behaving very oddly.”

  “There are sweepers among the elves?” asked Clara.

  “There are gardens all around our libraries,” said Petrus, “and we sweep the paths every day at dawn and at twilight during the seasons when there are leaves on the trees. We have pretty brooms, and the moss mustn’t be damaged. It is a noble task, although I have never found it very interesting, but as I already told you, for many years I was a rather uninspired elf. And besides, I always liked to read. I think I have spent my life reading. Even when I drink, I am reading.”

  “So the sweeper wasn’t sweeping, he was reading under a tree,” said the Maestro. “And he was so absorbed in his reading that he didn’t hear me approach. So I asked him what he was reading.”

  “And I replied: a prophecy,” said Petrus. “A prophecy? asked the Council Head. A prophecy, I said. In the body of our poetic texts, there is one that is different from the others. It belongs to a collection of poems and songs, most of them elegiac, entitled Canto of the Alliance, and it celebrates the natural alliances: mists in the evening, clouds of ink, stones, and all the rest.”

 
He sighed, vaguely chagrined.

  “But that text was different. It did not celebrate any known event, nor did it evoke anything in my memory, but it described our trouble as if it had anticipated it, and it proposed the remedy as if it had dreamt it. No one had ever paid it any attention. But when I read it, I believed that the world was being torn in half, and that a door was opening in my heart. Only three verses telling an unknown story—but after centuries spent drinking tea and listening to sublime poems, it was life as a whole that was exploding and sparkling, like after a glass of moscato.”

  His eyes shone with the emotion he had felt at the time.

  “I read the text and I understood what the sweeper meant to say,” said the Maestro. “Then I had to convince others, and Petrus showed a great deal of talent for this. Since that day, the prophecy has been our guide in war.”

  When he recited the poem, the ancestor trembled and Clara thought she could see a silvery glow flash through the soft fur.

  the rebirth of the mists

  through two children of November and snow

  the rootless the last alliance

  “It is the only text of fiction ever written by our kind,” said the Maestro. “For that reason, we think it is prophetic. That it depicts a reality that is still to come, but that might save us. For the first time in our history, our mists are declining. Some think that men are responsible for this decline, and that their negligence has weakened nature; others, on the contrary, think that the trouble stems from the fact that we are not sufficiently united. If I consider the paintings inspired by our alliance, this Christ painted by an elf—and who has for all that never seemed more human—and Alessandro’s last canvas, which exalts the bridge of our world without showing it, then I know that the art of humankind has given us stories we could not have conceived of, and in return our mists transport them beyond their lands. It is time to invent our destiny and to believe in this last alliance; there are too many footbridges showing the desire we have to cross the same bridge together.”