Malicroix

by Henri Bosco

  I needed help, but I do not know why I sought it in the flame of this small lamp. It gave little light, as it was no more than a badly trimmed, ordinary lamp that flickered from time to time and threatened to go out. Still, it was there, and it was alive. Even when its thin flame dimmed, it maintained a religiously calm clarity. It was a gentle, friendly being that imparted to me, in my distress, the modest halo of its life as a lamp. Its glass globe was fed by only a bit of oil. Unctuous oil that rose up to the flame and melted into the flame’s light. But the light, where did it go? My eyes took in some part of it, enough to draw from shadow the walls, the bed, and the motionless body—but not enough to illumine myself. In order to grasp it entirely, I would have to hold it with a stronger and more steadfast gaze; I would have to fix the incandescence, fascinate the flame . . . I was raving . . . Yet, my eyes were no longer moving; and I felt as if I were gradually drawing from the lamp’s rays a more secret light. Its progressive penetration of my soul lit up the source of my vitality, whose awakening caused my fingers, tightened with horror around Balandran’s head, to tremble. For the contact with this already cold head unnerved me. I had tried to take it in my hands and to lift it toward me, but it was so heavy that, frightened, I had put it back down on the pillow. It had sunk down, and it weighed on my hands. Still, despite myself, these hands were slowly moving. I was seeking the spot where I would transmit life; and it seemed as I searched that a little warmth persisted at the base of the neck.

  I buried my fingers in his stiff hair; I touched his skin; I pressed the hollow beneath the bone.

  Warmth was clearly there. A localized, thin warmth; its pulsation beneath my fingers faintly conveyed the plea of a dim hope.

  And so I forgot everything. I became solely life.

  • • •

  I cannot say how long I remained in this state. I entered it abruptly and once there I withdrew from outside awareness. The room disappeared and everything in me was confused, everything except the image of the lamp. I still saw it; for as long as the exaltation of which it was the source lasted, it was truly present to me. It is my only recollection. I see it. In my memory, it replaces everything—the room, Balandran, myself. It is the time and space of the soul’s radiance, traversed by the wave of life.

  I reemerged when an anxiety arose. Unease that gradually was transformed into a memory. In an instant it was clear: the letter! This fearsome letter on which depended the testament, my fate, and perhaps Cornélius’s peace among the Shadows. Last will, supreme charge, still-unknown sacred message—Cornélius had hidden this letter and only Balandran knew where.

  I came back to myself; I looked. I saw the yellow face, the closed eyes, the pinched nose, the flat forehead. Beneath the weight of this impersonal mask, he had neither blood nor glance nor breath nor thought. Only, beneath my finger in the hollow of his nape, that little ball of living warmth. Not stronger or weaker, but alive. For how much longer would it cling to this already failing body? I thought of the hour. Were we far from dawn, that dawn so dreadful to the dying? Would he resist until then? And for how much longer would I be able to hold up with my stiff fingers this head that was growing heavier and heavier, but where nevertheless the sole sign of life persisted?—a life I imagined my fingers had at least maintained.

  If I were to withdraw my hand, would I not be removing the last help from his dwindling forces, abandoning to death this stubborn thing that refused to die? It was all I had left on earth of my old friend . . .

  At dawn, Balandran still lived and I was still holding him, but I was asleep . . .

  • • •

  I was awakened by a fresh scent.

  Someone loosened my hands, lifted my head. I had collapsed onto the bed. The door must have been opened, for a powerful breath of woods and moist earth was coming from it. Of the dawn, barely a glimmer. The room, where things were vaguely taking shape, was still in shadow. The rain had stopped, but the weather must still be low and damp. Outside, silence. Inside, the dry crackling of wood beginning to blaze. The fire had been kindled and the lamp was still burning, but the oil was nearly gone, and the small flame was fading. It seemed to be waiting for dawn before going out.

  I had opened my eyes onto the lamp, and suddenly an extraordinary emotion overcame me at the memory of this nighttime companion. It had been, through the night, my lamp of faith. This thought was very sweet to me—and then I felt behind me, as I still leaned heavily on the bed, the sylvan, freshwater scent that always heralded the presence of that creature whose wild friendship was worth more to me than anything in the world. I turned my head and saw her. Standing, she was gazing at me. I had never before seen her face from so close, nor so well. It was lit by the lamp, whose light outlined the precise chin and strong cheekbones, making the soft, dark skin shine. The eyes, arresting and calm, reflected the clarity of the lamp in their depths. Responding to this night’s call, a mysterious thought was rising from the heart of this gaze where clouds hovered. Still, it was a look of great peace, and a slow wave of pity and tenderness fell onto me from it.

  She said to me, “I had a great deal of trouble, but at last I brought him back to you.”

  And so I rose and took her in my arms. She remained motionless, but I felt her breath on my lips, and her body pressing, little by little, against mine.

  “We will save him,” she breathed, “because you love me.”

  •

  Later, she told me her name, what she called her “name of this earth,” but her true name—she still hides it.

  I did not know what to think of this bizarre reticence. Are there secret names you cannot confess even to those you love?

  She told me, “You will call me Anne-Madeleine. It is a local name.”

  I repeated it slowly, and it became fixed within me, where it shines like a mortal body.

  •

  Of that grueling night and the days that followed, my memory has kept only a few images, some so precise they seem like hallucinations. Others, by contrast, drift in the mist. But clear or confused, they all arouse powerful emotions the moment they are evoked, even today. Everything comes back to life: the waiting and the fear, the hope and the anxiety, the nighttime worry and the love, whose muffled movement, especially in darkness, even in the face of death, took us by surprise, and caused us to tremble until dawn.

  • • •

  I clearly remember that the next day, inconclusive and long, dragged on beneath a sad, still-rainy sky. At nightfall, heavy mists rose from the river. We took turns at Balandran’s bedside. We nursed him. In the storeroom were several jars filled with medicinal plants chosen by Anne-Madeleine. Roots and bitter leaves to stimulate the heart, cleanse the blood, and ease the movement of the lungs. We spoke little and softly. Balandran’s body remained lifeless. Toward evening I feared he was slipping away, because I could no longer find the little ball of warmth beneath his nape. He had sunk further. The night was painful. All the while, I was thinking about the mysterious letter whose secret was enclosed in this little bit of warmth on the verge of extinction. This obsession grew so strong that toward one in the morning I called Anne-Madeleine, who was sleeping in the storeroom. She came and sat beside me. I spoke to her for a long time.

  She listened to me; she was silent. Sometimes I felt the pressure of her shoulder and the slow movement of her firm arm hugging me. I told her everything. Nothing in the world more difficult to say, but I said it, without haste, carefully weighing each word. When I was done, I rose to snuff the oil lamp that had been smoking for a while.

  She said, “They must have killed Bréquillet; I have not seen him again.”

  • • •

  The next day brought nothing new. Balandran was alive.

  We watched over him, nursed him steadily, but without much hope. Several times, we thought him dead.

  Our nursing—these plants our only medicine—seemed but paltry help. We tried to reinforce it with our unbreakable presence. We each brought to the task the full strengt
h of our souls. The thought of the hidden letter never left us. We were nothing but anxious expectation, apprehension. In ten days, I would be free, but to no avail. My months of seclusion were becoming futile; I had been trapped by Dromiols.

  It seemed impossible that Balandran could last more than a day. He declined hour by hour, and yet he was so low we were surprised he could sink any farther. We kept the house carefully shut, as a precaution.

  “They will return,” Anne-Madeleine said. “There’s nothing left for them at La Regrègue. It’s all here.”

  As for me, I did not think Bréquillet was dead. On this subject I had a strange, absurd notion: Bréquillet dead, Balandran dead. But Balandran lived . . . Sickly and childish, lazy logic . . . Anne-Madeleine, wiser, preserved an inward silence in which her only thought was to wait. I was weaker and she knew it, but perhaps in her secret heart she was moved, for her dark eyes suddenly grew tender when they gazed at me,. And so my heart throbbed, surprised by this tacit tenderness, and I lowered my head. She came to me, and gently our bodies drew closer. Between them, only a filament of soul, the purest, the last . . .

  • • •

  They arrived on the night of February 12, toward eleven. I was alone at Balandran’s bedside. Anne-Madeleine was asleep in the storeroom; she would be taking over at midnight. Only a small circle of light fell from the lampshade onto the table. The glow barely lit up one of Balandran’s hands resting on the sheet. From outside, the house must have seemed shut and asleep. It was cold. I remember that the fire was burning poorly. I had just fed it.

  Balandran was still alive. He was not moving. I was looking at his hand, knotted and brown, on the grayish sheet. It fascinated me. For it was the hand of an old man, a man who, through the long, rough years of a wild, lonely life, had by patient labor shaped a few original thoughts. Also, as the beauty of the bones revealed, a simple, faithful hand. For now it lay lifeless, unmoving and withered, and yet its grip was so strong it seemed to hold Balandran’s soul between the callous palm and five bony fingers worn by work, age, and countless storms. Sun, wind, and winter rains had beaten down on it for long years; you could sense the wear that stone, wood, iron, and fire had wreaked on this dark skin, still hardened by veins and tendons.

  A long shudder of pity shook me as I looked at that inert and impoverished old hand. My heart’s muffled beat could be heard outside my body. Despite my dread—and even more, I am ashamed to admit, my repulsion—some force pushed my hand, full of life yet tense with the fear of nonliving flesh, toward this possibly dead and already stiff hand. A paralyzing, persuasive force gripped me from my shoulder and lifted my whole arm in a slow gesture of compassion. Little by little, my hand moved across the sheet, bringing its overly sensitive fingers toward this brown object, cut off from everything, present solely by virtue of its material existence. Powerful virtue that, in this still-human form, evoked my pity, awakened my love. Balandran’s old hand, palm up, lay in complete surrender, its back against the sheet, its fingers half-curled. I touched the tips of those fingers. They were calloused, rigid, a dreadful contact. Still, I bravely thrust my hand into the hollow of the calloused palm, and then I pressed. And so, very gently, the hand closed, and, almost imperceptibly, I felt the pressure of Balandran’s fingers against mine. I nearly stopped breathing.

  That was when I heard them.

  •

  They were coming from the hut side; they were carelessly snapping twigs beneath their feet and thrusting branches out of their way, but they were not speaking. You would have thought they were animals. I remained motionless. The door was bolted. Nothing was stirring in the house. Anne-Madeleine was asleep; the lamp was giving off just a little glow. Still, they knew we were there.

  Balandran’s hand had gradually tightened; it was taking in my warmth and, still frozen, its slow contraction was gradually drawing my life toward its own faint life. It was less a plea for help than a dim offer. The fragment of memory and distant soul floating in this body must be remembering and answering me from the depths of its shadow. Friendship came before life. My heart was gripped. What did the others matter, outside? Right now, not one sound indicated their approach. Where were they? What were they going to do? I listened, anxious; but the twig-snapping had ceased. Perhaps I had been dreaming again. Yet I could see the lamp quite clearly, along with the bed, the shotgun on the wall, the little reed cross. I could smell the sick man; I could feel the dead skin of his fingers beneath my thumb. Lurking in the silence—in the house as much as in the woods—was a sense of something imminent, suspended, awaiting a movement from me, perhaps a breath. But I was holding my breath. It was necessary at all costs to exhale very little life, to be constricted, and this constriction increased my anxiety. My hand contracted involuntarily, and suddenly I feared I would transmit my agitation and anxiety to the old body seeking to revive.

  For a long time not a single sound disturbed the house’s surroundings. Then a hand brushed a shutter, but without trying to open it. It fluttered across like a leaf, then moved away. Someone tapped at the door; the lock rattled. On the northern wall, a long scraping—perhaps a hanging branch grazing the roughcast at a man’s height. The roof’s thatch was scratched. Someone must have climbed up there; but I strained to hear, to no avail—no sound of footsteps on either the ground or the roof. On the eastern wall, something sharp probed the crumbling plaster with little muffled blows. Sinuous, sly hands invisibly crept everywhere, palpating the house. Little by little a mysterious plot was taking shape, outside of me, around La Redousse. It was as if these unknown men were trying to paralyze the soul of the refuge beneath their strange, mesmeric movements; and already, under their slow pressure, the walls were collapsing inward. Indeed, for some time already, the walls’ strength had seemed to lessen, and the fragility of their tracery of cob, mortar, and worm-eaten wood roused my anxiety. The walls were thinning. At times it seemed that only their pigment—this whitewash without tangible thickness—separated me from those creatures who were sliding, dark and slow, behind an unreal screen. I had the feeling that they saw me, seated between Balandran and the lamp, already enthralled by the inexplicable envelopment of all the light touches, brushes, and gentle blows with which they had, before showing themselves, surrounded this fragile shelter where I was keeping watch against death, always ready to insinuate itself. And perhaps death was behind them, waiting for them to break through the door panel toward which I no longer dared look, so ready was I to give way to fear.

  For now, after having surrounded the house—where I alone kept unsleeping vigil—with hypnotic gestures and intentions, these touches were gradually approaching the door. But I was getting drowsy; this drowsiness, without subduing the terror rising from the depths of my soul, paralyzed both my mind and the will required to ward off these obscure threats. I was afraid, and the more this fear grew, the less I could control myself. I was slowly becoming incapable of any gesture of defense. My already poor courage was benumbed, and like limp prey, I slipped into terrified hallucinations. I was thinking not of danger but of the imminent appearance of those faces and bodies prowling around the house. They seemed so dreadful that the concrete things still grounding my sight were already dissolving, giving free rein to these mysterious creatures. I lost all sense of reality; in vain I tried to focus on familiar objects, to affirm a still-human thought. Already the room was swaying beneath, before, above, around me—its ceiling melting into its walls as its white expanse tilted toward the opening of a vague space where the first vertigo of fainting unfurled before my eyes.

  All of a sudden, I felt something hard. There, at the heart of this dissolution, one object remained immobile, and I clung to it. Hard and rough, like wood, holding well, holding me. That I was held, I knew from a tightening grip and an obscure pull that strained by light jerks to draw me upward. My hand rose toward Balandran’s heart—this heart was beating. It was beating, still far from human life but preserved on some sort of parallel plane. With enormous efforts, his so
ul was struggling to join me through the stiff old body it strained to cross. His hand was moving; it took mine, drew it toward itself, and the fire of life it conveyed awakened an unknown force, hidden within me. Without Balandran’s help, it would most likely have abandoned me, but within these confines and through this connection it gained power. Little by little, it brought me back from my vertigo, back to the simple balance between fear and danger. Naked fear, well-circumscribed; clear and present danger, unavoidable. This clarity dispelled the fogs of fantasy, for it was the invisibility of those phantom assailants that had forged delirium’s power. If I could see them, my courage would return. Meanwhile, now that they were insistently exploring the joints, hinges, and fissures of the door, their close presence froze my blood, and I waited despairingly for the flimsy panel to give way, so that I might finally see human faces.

  Bodies were pressing against the door. The door held well. Still, I could hear it creaking. In front of me, I saw the shotgun hanging from the wall. All I needed to do was to rise and reach out my hand. I could not. My weight kept me bound to the chair. I did not want to let go of Balandran. I was his life. And even if I had wanted to, he was holding me. To pry off his stiff fingers, now folded over mine—just the thought would have filled me with shame. The two of us together were just one life, fallen into the same dangers; our only strength came from these two hands almost instinctively clutching each other. Death itself could not have separated them; they were more than we ourselves. I awaited the blow.