Malicroix

by Henri Bosco

  Where were we? It seemed he no longer knew. As for me, stirred, I marveled that he, even more than I, could sing the praises of growing fruit I would have thought he confined himself to eating as a connoisseur.

  Had he once more been taken by his own eloquence?

  A little rain, drawn from the sky by a gust of wind, pulled us from this pleasant world and wet our faces.

  “It is time,” said the notaire, pointing to the house in front of us at the end of the path.

  But the rain did not last. It simply dispelled the charm, and we silently went back in.

  I was shaken, overcome. I was thinking about the candelabra. At that moment, worried about Uncle Rat’s advice, I no longer felt able to insist that it be left with me. Deprived of my anger, despite my distrust, I was defenseless. My legitimate request was now a discourteous pretension; after communing among fruits and flowers with this man who hated me, I no longer dared oppose him with my insolence.

  We entered the house. It had been cleared. No more screen or mat; no night table or camp bed. Just this bare, empty space, enclosed by the coldness of its whitewashed walls. My heart was gripped. Would I miss this man?

  Standing at the center of the room, he was deliberating.

  Waiting for him to conclude his deliberations, Uncle Rat, deferential, and Balandran, scowling, stood on either side of the door that opened into the storeroom. We were all suspended from Dromiols’s meditating mass; even Bréquillet, sitting on his rump in front of the hearth, seemed to be waiting.

  “Uncle Rat,” the notaire suddenly cried, “where have you put the candelabra?”

  Uncle Rat studied the floor. Completely closing his eyes, he replied, “As usual, in the yellow suitcase.”

  “Uncle Rat,” the notaire continued, “you will take it from the suitcase and place it here, on this table.”

  Uncle Rat disappeared, reappeared, placed the candelabra on the table.

  I sought his gaze. But he no longer had a gaze.

  “Mr. de Mégremut,” began the notaire, “the testament is explicit; it says, speaking of you: ‘He will have full use of everything, as much on the island as on the mainland.’ Enjoy then, Sir, this candelabra, which, if I am not mistaken, caught your interest yesterday. During the few days of your residence on this island, you will be able to light it in the evening, to ease the weariness of your solitary vigils.”

  He sighed and, in a strange undertone, murmured, “May they be solitary!” He raised his voice a little and, without abandoning his strange tone, said, “Above all, Sir, not too many dreams.”

  As I remained silent, he added, “Imagination, elegy, vague desires, aspirations: remember, Sir, what your hand says. You are, I fear, entirely lunar. Islands favor the moon. Dreams form over water, peopling it with unreal, captivating shapes; and if you dream too much, Sir, you will never leave this isle of magic . . .”

  He repeated the word “magic” three times, more and more softly.

  “If, however,” he murmured, “you ever need help . . .”

  He raised his arm to indicate the bell’s rope.

  I followed his arm’s movement with my eyes.

  Uncle Rat was standing beside the rope. He had approached it without anyone’s notice. He raised his eyes and looked straight at me.

  “Above all,” this look told me . . . I guessed.

  “Let us go,” sighed the notaire, as if in sorrow. “It is time for us to be on our way.”

  Everything came to life. Uncle Rat and Balandran entered the storeroom. The luggage was shouldered. The cloak, the bag, the valise, the umbrella on Uncle Rat; the heavy bundle on Balandran.

  It was no longer raining. It was drizzling.

  Bréquillet took the lead. Balandran followed him. I followed Balandran. Maître Dromiols walked behind. At the tail end, as the night before, Uncle Rat, leaping from puddle to puddle with a horrified look.

  We reached the landing, where the heavy water was lapping the boards. Bréquillet leapt into the boat and took his post in the prow. He sat there calmly. Balandran followed Bréquillet, set down the luggage, welcomed Uncle Rat. Uncle Rat kept the umbrella.

  Maître Dromiols extended one foot and placed it in the center of the boat; once secure on this support, he brought in his second foot, then turned to face the shore.

  “Mr. de Mégremut,” he said, “you will have wind tonight.”

  He bowed. Slowly the top hat peeled away from his head, traced an elaborate arc, and, with a flourish, returned beside his ear. Then it came to rest on his bony skull and clung to it; he seemed an unreal statue, blurred in the mist.

  Carefully, Uncle Rat opened the umbrella above the hat.

  Balandran cast off the moorings, caught the current, grasped the heavy oar, and the boat drew away slantwise toward the center of the river, where a great eddy soon carried it off. It disappeared suddenly between two clumps of willows on the other shore.

  A while later, on the levee, lost amid the sad waters, the coupé reappeared. With its spindly horse and Uncle Rat hunched on the seat, it struggled through the mist. For a long time, I followed it with my eyes. In the end it vanished into the haze behind some large poplars at the far reaches of the flooded plain.

  I was alone.

  LA REDOUSSE

  I WAS IMMEDIATELY overcome by a feeling of grandeur. Without warning, it suddenly swept over me. Maître Dromiols’s departure left a void all around, and a strange pang within. My desertion on the island during such bleak weather could only lead to melancholy. But I experienced nothing of the sort—neither sorrow nor regret, just this surprising sensation. Perhaps, at the heart of this colossal world, I suddenly had the vivid awareness of my own smallness. As I took the measure of all that was crushing me, I mingled with it to the point of participating in its superhuman strength.

  The vastness of the waters; the majesty of the river as it flowed to the sea; the loftiness of the clouds; the number, height, and vigor of the trees; the bareness of the shore; my wild isolation—a whole, limitless world sank into my soul, widening its narrow boundaries to suddenly create huge spaces alive within me. Above these endless expanses, airy heights rose up; below, depths plunged to a new realm, where, dreamlike, they disappeared. I did not lose consciousness; the muddy earth as much as the river water remained present, but I was suddenly more aware of this feeling of amplitude, inspired from without by nature, and arriving from within with all the voices of a new solitude. This meeting of external sights and internal voices created, in an indefinable place neither inside nor outside me, a strange state in which water, sky, and woods were exalted and transmuted. My soul’s vibrations gained an echoing fullness thanks to the grandeur of the river, the wildness of the sky, and the spacious silence of the trees. An unexpected force was constructing this living abstraction right before my eyes, replacing everyday sights, scents, sounds, emotions, and thoughts.

  The enormous substance of river, silt, earth, and woods melted into this feeling of grandeur, unalloyed by matter. Freed, I know not how, from ordinary constraints, I had just unexpectedly crossed from a human situation already too weighty for my mediocrity to the ineffable awareness of majesty itself. I breathed grandeur; my heart beat within it; my mind, unmoving, self-absorbed, was nothing but a great, sonorous body, coequal to the solemn heights and depths of this world.

  • • •

  When I drew away from the riverbank, a mysterious dawn was enveloping the island. The clouds had evaporated to form a light, filmy vault. As they faded, they had swallowed the stormy winds and rains. But the moisture suspended in this haze, still floating above the ground, seemed to brush the treetops. The clarity filtering from the sky, radiating through impalpable, luminous mists, softly diluted the light. A gigantic, pale world was bathing in the glow of that green-tinged day.

  The ghostly trees formed a sort of underwater forest where long, gentle waves of light slipped through the branches, like sheets of water dimly dyed by fleeting phosphorescence. Not a breath, not a shap
e that was not suffused with this light. Light was the sole substance. Bodies were growing ethereal, transparent. I walked beneath a tangle of mesmeric branches, a strange growth of impalpable gleams above my head, where the world of winds was silent. No woodland beast, no falling leaf disturbed the wondrous peace of this fragile illumination.

  Still, the air was heavy with the still-suspended threat of new storms. The waters were rising. Far away in the north, the massed clouds that had blown over me were pouring streams of torrential rain into the river’s roots. Soon, heavier rolls of silt-laden water would reveal this influx. Fear of water would arise, the fear that, along with the fear of forests, must be the most ancient, the most harrowing in the human heart. Weak and still alone, I would be surrounded by this primeval power; all around the house I would spy the first surges of water, forerunners of the siege. So spoke my anxieties, even as I enjoyed the calm. Unawares, I wandered along the muddy, serpentine paths that circle the house until they brought me back, completely worn, toward evening.

  The fire had died, and I went straight to bed. I was so eager to cross into the stillness on the other side of life that I avidly seized the sleep that swept over me, fading into the night without a sigh.

  • • •

  I had daydreamed so much while awake that my nighttime dreams had little strength to force their way into such a heavy sleep. I sank deeply into the impenetrable rest where my fatigue dropped me. For a long time, and in every way, I was nothing but that soulless night. I do not know how nor from where a strange feeling crept into this heavy darkness. It formed on the margins of a nameless sensation that seemed to be mine, and mine alone. All I noticed was a subtle change. Perhaps some bodiless movement took shape in my unconscious, where, entirely unmoored, I floated freely; and within my sleep, I was shaken from my sleep. As I returned to conscious life, I first met the bizarre forms of nascent anamorphoses, distorted images I gradually encountered as I rose slowly toward the uncertain planes where dreams wander on the verge of wakefulness. I did not cross that boundary, but I enjoyed a vague relief, the only conscious state that seemed somewhat distinct. Soon I felt as if I were hearing faint calls from a distant, nameless being—remembrances, mental transmissions, dawns flowering on the borders of a dim recollection. Although they did not remind me of anything, a clear memory had begun to color my soul’s contours, and now and then gentle prods from without bent the pliant walls of sleep. When I entered this memory, first with the advent of mother-waters and then of a silty bank, I felt roiling within me the endlessly wet world of rain, and the whole horizon blossomed like a green rose from which the winds unfurled. All I could do was say to myself in my sleep: the rains are leaving. I heard the roof of the house speak in the night at the wind’s first breath, and then I awoke.

  • • •

  It sometimes happens that, when you wake in the middle of the night, everything is still. You return to life through silence. As I awoke that night, it was as if everything in the world were at rest, and I felt some ease, but only for a moment. This unusual peace was out of all proportion. Such calms do not last—they are but the dreadful prelude to change. Still, when you emerge from dreams after a struggle to escape the turmoil of sleep, it is comforting to enter the solemn peace of the world. The stasis of night seems to have built this silence. Dizzying edifice, it raises its invisible towers vault by vault toward the night sky, above the still-anxious soul. The lightest shudder causes its frail walls to quake. Like a fragile thought, the mysterious castle wavers from base to precarious peak before dissolving into the dark from which its fleeting form had emerged like a troubling wonder.

  Everything around me was silent. Nothing suggests unlimited space like silence. I entered that space. Sounds color an expanse and give it a kind of sonorous body. The absence of sounds leaves space completely empty, and in silence the sensation of vastness, depth, and boundlessness possesses us. That sensation pervaded me, and for several moments I was one with the grandeur of nighttime peace.

  It imposed itself upon me like a living being.

  This peace had a body. Acquired in the night, composed of the night. A real body, an immobile body. And yet an animated body. Its passions were hidden, its thoughts unvoiced. Yet it contained both passions and thoughts. Its soul was but an augury, a harbinger of the storm. Neither body nor soul was moving. Confounded with the dense yet airy substance of night, they seemed to be waiting. They were. Being within which my own being was lost, body within which mine was an enclosed fragment—yet still human, still troubled, watchful, fully alive on the cusp of this ephemeral nighttime calm. An event was taking shape at the heart of this dense peace, its imminent grandeur manifest through the majesty of the silence that enveloped us.

  • • •

  The nighttime creature’s first sigh was merely a light touch on the roof’s thatch. The wind hovered; it made leaves hover. I heard treetops tremble and, very gently, beneath two thrusts, the peak’s sensitive straw quivered. Then everything was still. But a rustle arose some distance from the house, and the world of branches shuddered. A gust. The forest undulated nervously. A muffled murmur coursed over the shadowy island. The gust took life, then struck the twigs with three or four little blows. They yielded by the thousands to the gust’s pressure, and a fringe of air broke from the wet mass of trees. A faint but universal hubbub disturbed the night’s rest. Rising from all directions, this clamor set in motion a mysterious tide that mingled the murmurs of a faint horizontal breeze with those of countless branches. The clamor unleashed several stronger bursts of air, and the chafing of this new air ruffled the roof’s reeds and scattered some leaves. The wind took shape and began to sound out the house, the trees. It rattled the door’s shutters and made the rafters creak. Then it plunged into the night. Numerous branches were disturbed and Balandran’s hut complained a little. Alarmed by that lament, bushes and shrubs groaned in turn, and I sensed streams of already emboldened black winds dawning in darkness. A few hundred branches near the house writhed. One, the weakest of all, wailed. The wind, angered, issued an appeal to the north; other winds responded. Just about everywhere, the night was alarmed, and the rain’s filmy structures slowly tottered. Above the vast sheets of water, damp clumps of darkness were being displaced, and the huge realm of rains presented its flank to the keen points of the whistling winds. Above the wild waters, the weather was starting to turn; I could hear the first north winds rushing into the disheveled clouds’ gashes. I lit a candle. It was eleven o’clock. I put the candle out.

  The wind was growing in abrupt fits and starts; already funnels of air were forming brief whirlwinds. Beneath the all-out blows lashing the roof, the house, foreseeing the coming storm, was silent. A guttural voice growled in the echoing hollow of the extinguished hearth. Small yelps slipped through cracks in the doors. Above, their sound swelling, the assault’s first winds neighed before plunging into the clouds; columns of air tumbled in turn. Atop the headstrong herd of clouds, loud trumpet cries rang. In frothing waves, the winds hurtled across the vast plain. Howling spires ascended, causing clusters of dark vapor and pale winds to shoot from the sky. The roof-cloud shattered under the whirlwinds’ pressure. From one end to the other, the soaked island was veiled in swaying, weeping trees. The huge clump of old clouds, shaken by the blast, began to pivot heavily above the flatland and river waters. For several seconds, the winds rested. And then a voice arose, the imperious voice of the Master Wind. And so, from the north to the sea, the whole span shuddered, and the storm began.

  First a squall. It yowled, filled with the winds’ rage. All the twigs in the forest were seized, lifted, scattered into the distance. The walls around me crackled under this volley; the thatch sagged; the north window rattled. An icy gust charged the house and tore into it with fury; I felt the cold flow through the room as it whistled along the floor. The sky’s heights clamored as armies of clouds retreated; the squall sprang, rose, wrung masses of vapors, and struck the clouds’ belly. I heard shrieks, roars
, and a mad, galloping stampede. The clouds panicked as the whole tempest bore down. Head lowered, it plunged into walls of rain and was swallowed up in strong spray. The sky was nothing but wind, the wind nothing but fire. All around, broken branches crashed noisily. Sounds of bellowing, trumpeting, lowing swept the ravaged air in furious herds. Through the spatter and smoke of the wild wind, aerial cities collapsed and crumpled in the dark.

  The squall became a tempest. It filled its breast with fury. One staggering blow felled the cloud, and a torrential surge of mad winds poured from the sky in whirlwinds, tornadoes, avalanches. The turmoil wrung the air into a thousand cries. The winds joined to form a spiral that climbed back up to the clouds. This wheel of winds pierced the heart of the clouds and made the storm whirl through mists and then explode. The heights rang with roars, and suddenly the whole expanse, from earth to sky, from mountains to sea, was nothing but wind. One wind, the wind itself—the body, soul, substance of wind. Wind’s passion, wind’s mind, wind’s being; Wind King, Wind God, Wind, Wind, nothing but wind. Everything was becoming wind. Sky, trees, water, river, earth, house, body, soul; wind vaults, wind limbs, wind waves, wind earth; wind walls, wind flesh, and I myself, undying wind, with no thought or feeling but wind, wild wind. The wind had seized, entered, emptied me. Henceforth, I was made of wind. Uprooted by wind, my mind flew scattering from my echoing skull. Sprays of wind pierced it and, flooding it from all sides, tore it from me, twisted it, and then, in crazy spirals, mingled its weak eddies with the storm’s wild whirl. Before this fierce assault, everything within me fled in ragged shapes; unable to resist, I became nothing but a flight of echoing sounds, one following another with dizzying speed. All boundaries between me and the storm collapsed; I became a fragment of flying space through which spun a faint awareness of the cosmic spirit, the last vestige of my own self clinging to my endangered soul, far from my body, on the knife-edge of the wind.