The Life of Elves

by Muriel Barbery

  “To another girl,” said Maria. “She’s the one who knows about hearts.”

  “The priest must take his other hand,” said Clara.

  On a sign from Maria, Father François took the dying man’s hand. Through that paw squeezed by the little French girl, Clara could hear the music of Eugène Marcelot, so like the dream she had contemplated in the sky earlier. It told her a story of love and hunting, the dream of a woman and of forests with a fragrance of verbena and foliage; it spoke of the simplicity of a man who was born into poverty and remained poor, and the complexity of a simple heart laced with mystique; wound through his music were frank gazes and ineffable sighs, bursts of laughter and religious eagerness that asked nothing of the Good Lord, and it swelled with the coarseness and generosity that had made him the representative of a land where little Spanish girls found refuge. All Clara need do now was play, and transmit his grace, which reminded her of old Eugénie’s as she performed her exalted devotions. So, with exquisite deftness, she ran her fingers over the keyboard, until Father François in turn could hear the music telling the story of Lorette and Eugène Marcelot. When the piano fell silent, he placed his other hand on Gégène’s forehead.

  “Will you tell Lorette?” asked Gégène.

  “I will tell Lorette,” said Father François.

  Eugène Marcelot smiled and looked up at the sky. Then a trickle of blood seeped from the corner of his lips, and his head tilted to one side. He was dead.

  Father François and Maria got to their feet. Men and elves were silent. In Rome, the same silence reigned. Petrus had taken out his giant handkerchief.

  “All wars are alike,” he said finally. “Every soldier loses friends.”

  “Those who died weren’t soldiers, they were just good folk,” said Maria.

  There was another silence. On the hill they heard what the little girl said, and they searched inside themselves for an answer which, by definition, they knew they could not find. But it was the bay horse who solemnly unearthed it for the others.

  “For this reason we must win the war,” he said. “But first you must bid farewell to your dead.”

  Then he withdrew to his own line, and his fellows bowed in unison to the stunned peasants. Their bow was one of respect, and of the brotherhood of old comrades-in-arms. Maria closed her eyes, and the dark wrinkles that ran beneath her skin grew darker still. Then, from the circles of her palms, the mists began to envelop the strange creatures one after the other, until they reached the emissary, who smiled and waved, then disappeared in turn. All that remained in the land was a handful of men torn between stupor and sorrow. The departure of their allies left them as helpless as children, orphans abandoned to their grief. But after a short spell they rallied: they had lost a friend to whom they owed the tribute of the friendship, just as he had shown them, right up to the doors of death. So they set about carrying their fallen brother in the most dignified manner possible, in order to present him to his widow, and it was Léon Saurat who took charge and declared the battle over when he said, “They got him, that they did, but he did for a few of them before that.”

  When they were within sight of the church where the women and children were waiting, Lorette came up to them. She knew. Her face had been altered by the dark scar of pain, but she listened as Father François said the words Eugène would have wanted her to hear.

  “From Eugène to Lorette, through my voice, but from his heart alone: my love, I walked for thirty years under the sky without ever doubting that I lived in glory; I never wavered; I never stumbled; I was a reveler and a loudmouth, if ever there was one, as stupid and useless as the sparrows and the peacocks; I wiped my mouth on the cuff of my sleeve, tramped into the house with mud on my feet and burped many’s a time amid the laughter and the wine. But I always held my head high in the storm because I loved you and you loved me back, and our love mightn’t have been all silk and poetry but we could look at each other and know we’d drown all our woes. Love doesn’t save, it raises you up and makes you bigger, it lights you up from inside and carves out that light like wood in the forest. It nestles in the hollows of empty days, of thankless tasks, of useless hours, it doesn’t drift along on golden rafts or sparkling rivers, it doesn’t sing or shine and it never proclaims a thing. But at night, once the room’s been swept and the embers covered over and the children are asleep—at night between the sheets, with slow gazes, not moving or speaking—at night, at last, when we’re weary of our meager lives and the trivialities of our insignificant existence, each of us becomes the well where the other can draw water, and we love each other and learn to love ourselves.”

  Father François fell silent. He knew he had come closer to his mission, which was to serve, and which gave his life the only meaning it had ever pilfered from the deafening silence of the world, and he was destined for all time to be the spokesman of the wordless. Proud and magnificent, Lorette was weeping, but the dark scar had vanished, and through her tears she was smiling faintly. Then she put her hand on her dead husband’s chest and said, looking at Maria, “We’ll give him a fine funeral.”

  Night was falling. They clustered beneath the roofs that were still intact and, at the Marcelot farm, they organized the wake. Then they took the time to think. The lowlands had been cruelly ravaged and only after an eternity would they be able to return to any sort of routine. First they had to bury the enemy; the fields had been devastated and they did not know what state their crops would be in; they had to repair the houses, and the church could not wait until last to be restored, because they did not want a priest like theirs to head off to some other steeple. Finally, they wondered what would happen in the future because they figured that while the sinister enemy may have retreated, it had outlived its soldiers, and would prepare further attacks. But they had become acquainted with fantastical squirrels and wild boars and they knew that in spite of their misfortune and grieving, they had been changed forever.

  So, the next day, the second day of February, they held a council at the Hollows Farm, attended by André, Father François, Gégène’s companions, Rose, the grannies, and Maria.

  “I cannot stay in the village,” said Maria.

  The men nodded but the old women crossed themselves.

  Then, looking at the priest she said, “Three men will come tomorrow. We will leave with them.”

  “Are they coming from Italy?” asked the good father.

  “Yes,” said Maria. “That is where Clara is, and we must join forces.”

  The news was greeted with heavy silence. The events of the previous day had made it clear to them that there was another little girl, but they’d had no idea of her role in the affair.

  Finally, summoning her courage, Angèle asked, “Will Father François have to leave with you, then?” She seemed almost more alarmed by this desertion than by Maria’s departure.

  “Thing is, he speaks Italian,” said Julot.

  Father François nodded. “I will go,” he said.

  The old women made as if to mumble and grumble but one look from André silenced them.

  “Will we be in touch?” he asked.

  Maria seemed to be listening to someone speaking to her. “There will be messages,” she said.

  André looked at Rose, and she smiled at him. “Yes,” he said, “I believe there will. By heaven and earth, there will be messages.”

  The morning of the funeral came at last, two days after they had buried Eugénie and the tempest had laid waste to the land. Father François did not say mass in the roofless church, but when the time came to bid farewell to the seven victims, he uttered a few words which resonated for a long time in those grieving hearts. Once he had stopped speaking, three men came into the cemetery. They walked up the lane and, as they went by, the peasants took off their caps and nodded their heads. When the strangers reached Maria, they nodded in turn.

  “Alessandro Centi
per servirti,” said the man who looked like a prince without a throne.

  “Marcus,” said the second one, and the fleeting image of a brown bear was superimposed upon his heavy form.

  “Paulus,” said the third man, and a red squirrel hopped briefly in the sunlight.

  “La strada sarà lunga, dobbiamo partire entro un’ora,”* said the first man.

  Father François took a deep breath. Then, with what seemed to be a pinch of pride, he replied, “Siamo pronti.”**

  Alessandro turned to Maria and smiled at her. “Clara mi vede attraverso i tuoi occhi,” he said. “Questo sorriso è per lei pure.”***

  “She is smiling back at you,” said Maria.

  Ever since the end of the battle, each girl had seen the other as if she were there on the edge of her ordinary perception. The permanence of this bond was a balm for Maria, and she was all the more eager for it: now that her powers, her suddenly painful connection with the elements, had been demonstrated, she felt isolated from the beings she loved most. When she had spoken to the sky of snow, she had felt the strength of every natural particle deep inside her, as if she herself had become solid matter, but she also felt another internal change, which terrified her, and she intuited that only Clara would know how to appease its violence. So she kept her fears to herself, waiting for the opportunity to speak freely with the other girl.

  Immediately after the battle, Clara had placed the ancestor on her lap, and when the Army of Mists returned through the breach in the sky, it became inert once again.

  “What is going to happen now?” she asked the Maestro.

  “Maria will set off for Rome,” he replied.

  “When will I see my father?” she asked.

  “There cannot be an answer to everything today. And you are not the only one who is on a quest for light.”

  “My own father,” said Pietro.

  “The footbridges,” said Clara. “We need more of them, don’t we? Will I know the other world some day?”

  But the Maestro had fallen silent.

  For an instant, Clara thought Petrus, in his armchair, his gaze dark, looked disapproving.

  Now on this new day when a funeral was to be held, all four of them had gathered in the piano room.

  The Maestro turned to Pietro. “My friend,” he said, “after so many years when you have accepted not knowing, I promise you: before the end you will know.”

  And, to Clara: “You will know the worlds that you opened for others.”

  Then he fell silent and looked at Petrus in such a way that she thought she could see the trace of a well-intentioned capitulation.

  “Listen to this as well,” said Petrus. “On behalf of the sweeper and the soldier. I would like very much to sit quietly drinking while you play amid the fragrance of the lovely roses on the patio. We could walk up and down the rows of our libraries and wax ecstatic over the beautiful moss, or we could go to Abruzzo with Alessandro and chat and eat plums until we die. But for the time being, that is not quite what has been planned. However, I do know from experience that there will be light amid the danger. You will know the mists and the living stones and you will also meet your dream. You will meet Maria and it will be the story of a great friendship, and you will see what it means to be in the company of men who are united in the fraternity of fire. We will go together to the land of the sign of the mountain, and we will drink tea there, but some day, and I bless our mists, you will be old enough for a glass of moscato. And on every step of this great adventure I will be with you because I will be your friend forever. Now if I am not quite the hero of the stories, I do know how to fight and I know how to live, too. And I prize friendship and laughter above all else.”

  He poured himself a glass of moscato, and propped himself comfortably in the armchair of dreams.

  “But for the moment,” he said, “I want to raise my glass in the honor of those who fell in battle, and remember what Father François said this morning in tribute to a great man whose name was Eugène Marcelot: My brother, return to dust and know for the eternity of the forests and the trees how much you have loved. This victory and this strength, I shall always maintain. And surely it is not by chance that the motto of our mists slipped into his words.”

  Manterrò sempre.

  *We have a long way to go, we must leave within the hour.

  **We are ready.

  *** Clara sees me through your eyes. This smile is for her as well.

  COUNCIL OF MISTS

  Half of the Council of Mists

  Our kind came under a surprise attack last night in Katsura,” said the Council Head.

  “Casualties?” asked a councilor.

  “They all died,” said the Guardian of the Pavilion.

  “That means the start of a new war,” said another councilor.

  “We have raised a great army,” said the Council Head, “despite betrayals and renegade bridges. And the armies of men are mobilizing. We will soon be fighting on every front.”

  “Can we wage two wars at the same time? We have to find the enemy’s bridge.”

  “Maria is our new bridge. But no human beings have ever crossed over to this side, and we don’t know how dangerous it could be for them.”

  “That sort of uncertainty worries me less than the present betrayals,” said the Council Head. “And I have faith in my daughter’s powers.”

  “Perhaps there is a traitor among us at this very moment,” said the Guardian of the Pavilion. “But the transparencies of the path are pure, and at least we can be sure of this enclave. As for my daughter’s powers, they will soon surpass my own.”

  “Councilors,” said the Council Head, getting to his feet, “the withering of our mists does not only threaten the beauty of our lands. If they disappear, we will disappear as well. The world has never stopped fragmenting and losing its way. In ancient times, were humans and elves not kindred species? The greatest evil has always come from divisions, from walls. Tomorrow, those whose thirst the enemy is hoarding will wake up to a modern world, which means old and disenchanted. But our hopes lie in a time of alliances and we pursue the illusion of ancient poets. We will fight with the weapons of our Pavilion and of their stories, and nowhere is it written that the paths of tea and dreams cannot triumph over cannons. Our bridge is holding, compressing the harmony of nature and uniting the living. In the little girls’ wake, we see men and women aspiring to build footbridges from nature and dreams. Are Maria and Clara the ones we have been waiting for? No one knows yet. But they have been fighting courageously and we owe them the hope that enlivens us, even as the first battle has shown us the bravery and compassion of their human protectors. No matter the outcome of this war, remember their names and fight alongside them with honor. And now, after you have wept your tears for those you have lost, withdraw and prepare for battle. As for me, I will do what I must. I will maintain.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With my thanks and gratitude to Jean-Marie, Sébastien and Simona.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Muriel Barbery is the author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog and Gourmet Rhapsody. She has lived in Kyoto and Amsterdam and now lives in the French countryside.