A Beast in Paradise

by Cécile Coulon

  They touched, at last, a few months after Alexandre had come to Paradise. She refused to hold hands with him in the schoolyard, or the main street, or the little roads that branched off it. She always rebuffed him gently, saying she “didn’t like how it felt to be touched like that.” Alexandre never pushed the issue, his hand dangling awkwardly at his side, waiting for the mysterious moment when she would give the signal. He and Blanche worked together, ate lunch together, walked together; they were like a young old couple, so attractive—that was what the teachers and the other students thought; so attractive—but connected to each other only by words. Blanche would kiss him hello and goodbye; quick, dry pecks, on the cheek rather than the lips.

  A Thursday in March. A bright late-winter sun shining. Bathed in white light, the façade of the high school was dazzling, the students shielding their eyes as they headed for the entrance. Blanche was out in front of the building, leaning against the wall, waiting for Alexandre to finish gym class.

  He burst suddenly out of the school to her left, more quickly than usual. Breathless, he didn’t even take the time to kiss her, pulling his latest report card from his backpack.

  “You’re my best teacher!” he declared, waving the paper beneath Blanche’s nose.

  Alexandre had risen two places in class. He was in the top three now.

  “My best teacher, and definitely the prettiest,” he added, winking.

  Blanche seized the report card. Instead of turning away into the shadow of the wall so she could read the comments written beneath each column of results, she flung her thin arms around Alexandre’s neck and kissed him, for real this time. Her mouth explored his for a long time, their lips moist, Alexandre’s hands on her waist, his fingers pressing into her skin through her clothing, gently, as if he were afraid she might fall to pieces, or maybe this was a dream—but no, Blanche was really here, in his arms, in his mouth. The report card still clutched in her right hand, Alexandre felt her fingertips stroking the back of his neck, her tongue seeking his, gently coaxing. She seized Alexandre’s hand and they set off down the main road together toward Paradise, where the young man would soon discover the upstairs bedroom with the big tree outside, safe from Louis’s watchful gaze, safe from his own room in his parents’ house, where he would have been ashamed to bring a girl or even a friend. His own room, which he wanted to leave behind more than anything in the world.

  RUNNING AWAY

  Fucking. They never used that word. They’d heard it, of course; heard it everywhere, all the time: on TV and the radio, in books and magazines, in conversations at the café and in the market and late at night, and from the back of the classroom and in the schoolyard and in homeroom. They heard it, but they never said it. When Alexandre was alone he spent hours thinking about Blanche, dressed or barely dressed, wearing only a single garment or even just her summer sandals; he imagined her taking pleasure from him, even though he never actually included himself in these scenes he drew in his mind until every muscle in his body was paralyzed with desire. He pictured Blanche, sometimes from behind, offering her backside to him; sometimes beneath him, her eyes closed, and him ordering her to open them so that he could see her pleasure in them; other times in strange positions, from the side, slightly twisted in on herself, so that the curve of her breasts seemed rounder, or the line from her neck to her shoulder straighter. Alexandre spent most of his time imagining Blanche. And when the images overwhelmed him and he came, in his sheets, or his hand, or the shower, or in a bathroom stall at school or even, once, on the side of the road where he had lain down among the tall stalks of a wheat field, even then, he was never thinking about “fucking” Blanche. Having her, taking her, filling her, holding her, maybe, yes—he had said these words in his head. But “fucking” her, no. The people who used that term were boys who had never fucked anything but their right hand, or men, dirty, drunk, lonely, and celibate, who couldn’t even really remember what had, in that brief moment of their existence when women looked at them with desire, truly given rise to the giving or taking of pleasure. Alexandre was certain that using the word “fuck” was proof that you didn’t fuck, and that it was bad for the mind, that it made you sick. Blanche would not make him sick; he would never think or speak of her like that, like a girl more “fuckable” than the rest.

  It had taken some time for Blanche to let Alexandre get close to her, but once she accepted his hands on her, her apprehension evaporated the way fog dissipates and suddenly gives way to a clear, bright sky. Now, both of them were walking together through this life that had previously been pocked with dark holes and accidents and dim, confined houses, with the absence of money, with absence, period. If Louis was working outside when Alexandre came to visit Blanche, the boy was careful not to upset the chickens, not to disturb anything in the house, not to cause any change at all. He touched the farm lightly and he touched Blanche lightly, delicately, leaving no trace of his passage, knowing that his presence was new and probably unwelcome in the fragile state of equilibrium that Émilienne had painstakingly, laboriously established, aware that he posed a threat to that equilibrium. He was careful never to linger too long; he always brought sweets, fresh bread, cordial, butter. When she looked out the kitchen window and saw him crossing the yard, Émilienne never said anything. He walked carefully.

  Alexandre avoided Louis, and Louis avoided Alexandre. At Paradise, in front of the high school, at the market, in the café, they spoke little, almost not at all, a curt, silent wave their only greeting to one another. Blanche went from one to the other like a rowboat between two riverbanks, seeing Louis the way she’d always seen him, as part of a family bound not by blood but by tragedy. She respected him but was careful to avoid saying or doing anything that might make him think she felt any more for him than that, or regarded him as more than the survivor of a drama that was still playing out in the little bungalow where he’d been born. Alexandre’s arrival on the scene brought Louis even closer to Émilienne. The old lady knew what it cost him to be in the younger man’s presence, and in the silent country air she urged him to stand firm the way she did, to keep going, not to let himself be mired down in the dark pits that were opening up in his life. Teaching him that learning to live meant stepping around these pits.

  On the day the pig was butchered, as Blanche and Alexandre left the bedroom, Louis fell savagely on the animal, his hands drenched in blood, the way he would have done on his own father, or on the body of a girl he didn’t love. The smell of the blood gave him strength and he inhaled it, drawing deeply, filling himself up with it so he wouldn’t think about what they had done upstairs, in the very room where he had been cared for and loved for the first time. He stepped around the pit that his desire, his anger and rage, were causing to yawn beneath his feet. The men around him were praising him, calling him a “good lad” and suggesting that he come work for them occasionally. Louis replied that he didn’t “work” here; that this was “his life, that’s all,” and in saying the words he realized that he wouldn’t be able to raise or feed or kill animals that belonged to someone else. His hands sticky with blood, Louis felt like the guardian of Paradise. Necessary and needful.

  Émilienne was aging. It wasn’t that she ever complained, or walked more slowly, or balked at a task; no, it was just that Louis had noticed that she was out of breath when she came back up the hill from the pigpen, maybe went there a bit less often. Sometimes she’d sit down to rest or repeat the same thing several times. Louis heard her muttering secrets, talking to herself about her fears for the future, or the price of eggs or meat, or the weight of the cows, or the number of calves. He heard it, and it hurt him; he felt as if he wasn’t a worthy enough confidant for Émilienne’s needs or her worries; that she preferred to talk to herself, her younger self, rather than sitting down with Louis and asking him to take the reins from her in her old age, leaning on his strong peasant’s arms to maintain the farm long enough for Blanche to finish high school an
d learn from her grandmother how to keep Paradise going. Louis knew that he and the eldest daughter of the Émard family shared a deep physical attachment to the land of Paradise; consuming, voracious, untamable. Blanche would never leave. Despite her excellent school marks and her teachers’ urging to pursue a successful future—she hated that word, “pursue”; like a hunter stalking an animal; they were pushing her to stalk the outside world—Blanche would never abandon her grandmother or her brother in Paradise.

  DISTORTING

  Gabriel was consumed with melancholy, in the way of children who have known shattering loss. Émilienne had been severe with him. Fair, but severe. She had left him outside to cry until he was drained of tears, of anger and violence, forgetting that tears and anger and violence are flowers that bloom all year round, even in dry eyes, even in bodies that are loved, even in hearts that have been patched back together.

  Gabriel grew up distorted. He was polite, but his politeness was forced, the politeness of a person unable to think about anything but those who should be here but aren’t; the politeness that means please don’t hurt me; I’m already damaged. Émilienne, Blanche, and Louis worked endlessly, beasts alongside beasts, machines alongside machines, the industrious angels of this Paradise of mud and beaks and manure. Gabriel was thin, frighteningly thin. Émilienne fed him twice as much as his sister, but his body refused to fill out, his arms like two matchsticks with round pebbles glued to them for elbows, his impossibly long legs like stilts made of flesh and bone. From a distance, in a T-shirt, he looked like a tattered scarecrow mounted on a couple of poles, wandering through the tall grass, his arms held out in an embrace no blood parent could return. The future held no interest for him; it took the occasional slap from Émilienne or shove from Louis to make him move forward, like a sickly foal, along the path marked out by the Émard family’s sorrows.

  Friendless at school, talentless except for his knack for staying aloof, he was horribly calm, the calm of the grave, of a child who held his spine very straight, eyes cast down toward the ground or up to the sky, not looking at anything except measureless space, the ceiling of the heavens and the floor of the earth, trying to break through their surfaces to escape this world, his age, his family, his school; all the others, human and animal, the roads and prairies, the hills and the brooks. Everything was defined by lines and borders and signs: the body, the riverbank, footpaths and sidewalks and barbed-wire fences; everything had a direction and a form and a function. Gabriel stood in the middle of all this like something dropped there at random.

  Small children thought Gabriel was bizarre, while the older ones called him a daydreamer. His body grew faster than he did. He was an odd sight, both as a little boy and a teenager, walking alone on the side of the rutted road to town, that potholed strip of black asphalt whose bends and curves, sometimes easy, sometimes dangerous, here a horseshoe, there a hairpin, led those who traveled it toward the confines of a horizon clotted with trees and low-roofed houses. Yes, he looked odd, as waiflike in his person as he was monumental in his grief, ambling along the verge. There was something of the animal about him, an animal sick with sadness and timidity. Émilienne and Blanche lived alongside him like two cats, going about their duties, occasionally throwing him a questioning glance, which he always answered with a shrug. His constant fatigue, his absolute lack of love and desire for this farm where he’d known the worst moments of his short life; all these things excluded him from this strange family, whom he loved, certainly, but whose arms were too full to gather him up in a hug.

  Louis was different. In a way, he understood the boy’s orphan grief. Every night, he sat down on the edge of Gabriel’s bed with a simple “Good night; pleasant dreams,” and every morning, he perched in exactly the same place at exactly seven o’clock. Gabriel would wake up, and Louis would already be dressed, smelling of hay. The boy would pry his eyes open and the farmhand would say “Have a good day; stay out of trouble.” And then he’d leave the room, and the boy wouldn’t see him again until lunchtime. Those few words created an invisible bridge between them where they sometimes found themselves together, like two sad, sweet friends.

  As a teenager, endowed with the intuition common to those ravaged by depression, Gabriel realized before Blanche did—and even before Louis—that the two of them could never be brother and sister, or friends, or companions. None of those things. He knew, because he understood his sister’s rage and Louis’s suffering, that there was nothing aside from Émilienne and Paradise keeping them in the same place. They were so different, so scarred by the respective horrors they had endured, that they had mutually convinced themselves that no one deserved their trust, their friendship, or their love. Gabriel watched Louis fluttering in Blanche’s orbit, watched his sister flinching away from his touch, both with fangs bared, confusing tenderness with a vicious bite.

  Until Alexandre knocked on the door that day, Gabriel had always thought of his sister like a malfunctioning robot. And then he’d watched her get close to this handsome boy. Seeing Blanche’s heart touched despite her harshness had made her brother less gloomy; discovering that she was capable of loving something other than a farm made her seem prettier, made him feel closer to her, and that idea soothed him, drove back the nightmares. But even as Blanche became more human in his eyes, Louis, defeated by Alexandre, battled with himself. Gabriel heard him at night, in the grip of bad dreams; he watched him during the day, plagued by dark thoughts. The more Blanche loved Alexandre the more Louis hated himself, while Gabriel observed them both from afar, alone in his room, an actor refusing to play his part.

  DREAMING

  Even after having undressed and offered herself, after standing defiant beneath the gazes of others, especially Louis, Blanche acted as if nothing had changed within her. For weeks, she behaved rudely, accepting Alexandre’s small gestures of affection in silence as they stood together at the edge of Sombre-Étang, the grebes dipping their little beaks in the water, feet paddling at right angles to the choppy surface. They filled the bedroom with their scents, wanting pleasure, wanting not to have pain anymore, the pain of the past, of the childhood that must be left behind, of Louis, of everything. Émilienne tolerated the teenage couple’s presence under her roof so long as they pretended to evade her watchful eye; of course she knew they were upstairs, but Alexandre was so discreet, and Blanche so meticulously private, that she accepted their love-play while Louis sweated in the muck with the cows and the pigs, while Gabriel, in his room, ruminated over things she preferred not to think about. In the end, Blanche and Alexandre could spend hours, whole days entwined in Paradise; in the sighs and saliva, the soft laughter and the semen, it was life they brought to the place; finally, life. It was as simple as that.

  Little by little, Blanche surrendered herself.

  She took him into her confidence first. Just when he was least expecting it, in biology class. They were dissecting the corpse of a frog and Blanche, while extracting the animal’s heart, murmured:

  “Sometimes I wonder if the doctors did this to my parents.”

  Alexandre stopped short.

  “When they were found,” she continued. “I wonder if they were all cut open, like that”—she indicated the frog’s thighs—“or if a doctor did it, or a cop.”

  Her voice was low, steady.

  Alexandre didn’t know what to say.

  “I don’t know,” he stammered softly, leaning slightly toward her.

  “I don’t know either.”

  Then she straightened up, stretching, and seeming to yawn, though no sound escaped her lips. Just before the bell rang, she said:

  “There are a lot of things I don’t know about them.”

  They left the classroom together, Alexandre lagging a bit behind Blanche, watching her carefully. All around them, students were exchanging a barrage of insults, unbearably naïve and touching, the insults of boys and girls terrified by the idea of becoming men and wom
en. Blanche and Alexandre never paid attention to any of it, regarding their schoolmates in the manner of annoyed hall monitors or indifferent teachers. They didn’t belong to this world of textbooks and report cards and grades anymore, because their families—what was left of them—had forced them to create a future for themselves before the others. Fear had brought these two children into bed together; fear, and the rejection of the pain that blood inflicts, the absolute, insolent, terribly living refusal to go down without fighting, even against themselves.

  Blanche slowed. She didn’t take Alexandre’s hand, and he didn’t try to reach for hers. Their steps matched the rhythm of Blanche’s voice, murmuring things about her parents, about life with them, and about Émilienne too. As she spoke, Alexandre stared at his feet, concentrating as hard as he could on each sentence, memorizing them, unable to say anything; he felt as if a single move, even a breath, would shatter the trust she was placing in him, the liberty she was taking, and the pain, the unutterable pain that was being released with her words, here on this ordinary walk from the high school to Paradise. Pain that overflowed in her pronunciation of her parents’ first names, Étienne and Marianne. She never called them Mama and Papa.

  “They died because of the road,” she said, gesturing to the asphalt.

  “What happened?” he asked, even though he knew the whole story already.

  “The rain, and the bend in the road, over that way.” Her index finger picked out a point on the horizon, beyond Paradise, sketching a sharp curve, trembling slightly.

  “Who was driving?” Alexandre asked.

  Now Blanche stalked ahead a few steps and then whirled to face him.

  “Why does that matter?” she hissed.

  Alexandre felt unbelievably stupid. He went to her and pressed his lips to her neck. She didn’t move, her body neither yielding in forgiveness nor stiffening in rejection. His hands slipped down to her waist and he laid his head on her shoulder, and Blanche relaxed more quickly than he had expected. He felt her melt into him. After a few seconds she broke the odd embrace, and as they reached the turn onto the road, she breathed, softly: