A Beast in Paradise

by Cécile Coulon

  “What’s he going to do with it?”

  She leaped out of bed, lightly.

  “I can’t stand this onion smell anymore.”

  Aurore came around the bed and knelt down in front of Gabriel.

  “I really don’t know anything about it, Gabriel. I don’t know Alexandre. I don’t know why he came back.”

  Then, before he could say a word, she pressed a finger to his lips.

  “You’re worried for your sister. But there’s nothing you can do.”

  HIDING

  Blanche hadn’t gone into the attic at Paradise since she was a child. Even back then, she’d been reluctant to set foot in the room, with its menacing beams like frowning eyebrows above her head.

  It was a long space crammed with broken furniture and objects of all descriptions that Émilienne had never bothered to throw away. Three-legged tables and chairs; moth-eaten, musty old bed linens, empty picture frames, stacks of large wooden trunks full of old dishes and pots and jugs, draped in tattered blankets. Émilienne kept them “just in case,” or maybe she’d simply forgotten everything she’d stored away up here. An armoire with a broken glass front leaned against the wall, full of dresses and sweaters on hangers that Marianne and Étienne had worn in their youth, dresses and sweaters no one would have dared to put on today, so dark were their colors, and their portents.

  Blanche had no interest in her mother’s things. Briskly, she moved aside boxes of crockery, shook out blankets. A spider alighted gently on her shoulder, as if it didn’t want to disturb her, and Blanche dragged another trunk from behind a heavy old dresser missing its drawers. The letter E was etched on its lid. She stroked it with a fingertip as if it were a case containing some precious piece of jewelry, and then the spider appeared on its edge.

  Mere centimeters away from the creature, Blanche’s hand trembled. She wasn’t afraid, not of its eight “knitting needles” or the hair that covered them, or the speed with which the tiny animal appeared and disappeared—and yet her hand shook harder and harder, seized with an unexpected convulsion. Blanche leaned closer to the spider, and instead of blowing it away or dislodging it gently, the Émards’ daughter picked up the creature, her fingers closing over the round, struggling body. She could feel it against her palm, its legs kicking against this trap in which it suddenly found itself. The quivering of the spider ran through her own body, and her eyelids fluttered slightly before she seemed to come back to herself. She brought her hand to her mouth, the tiny legs stiffening one last time between her lips before being chewed up furiously, like an unripe berry. Blanche kept her eyes open the whole time she was devouring the creature.

  She swallowed and stood up and climbed back down through the trap door, her treasure held beneath her left arm, her right hand gripping the rungs of the ladder.

  Émilienne always said that Étienne had felt as if he’d moved to a different country when he came to Paradise. His training in geography had given him a fondness for the land. When he wasn’t working, Étienne had roamed the Bas-Champs, kneeling beside the water, exploring the trails, parting the dense leaves of the box hedges and clambering through them. When he’d died, his mother-in-law had packed away his things in this box, “just in case,” she’d said, “just in case” his children wanted, one day, to know what their father had loved, what passions had made his face light up when he wasn’t in the classroom at the school, children buzzing around his tall body like a swarm of bees.

  Blanche lifted the lid. Inside, a broken pencil case. A watch, stopped. A photo album, which Blanche knew well because Émilienne had shown them pictures of their parents every day for months, so that the children—especially Gabriel—wouldn’t forget them. Gradually, Blanche and her brother had stopped finding any comfort in the images.

  Notebooks. Of varying sizes. Small sketchbooks. Blue. Inside there were stories, countless stories, some highly detailed; others stopping midsentence. Drawings, maps of Paradise with its little dirt path, the yard sketched quickly, the house to the right with its striped shutters on the windows, the barn to the left, stuffed with hay. Then the domain of the chickens, and behind it all the Bas-Champs and Sombre-Étang. Other notebooks, three of them; larger, with hard covers; no grids inside, only wide black lines. Blanche took one of them from the stack in the bottom of the trunk and leafed gently through its pages, afraid the paper might crumble at her touch.

  On the first page, Étienne had written, in his beautiful teacher’s handwriting:

  A brief history of Paradise

  Blanche smiled.

  The first volume was a mixture of observations, notes, and sketches. Étienne had inspected each building, each space on the farm; he described the shape of the roof, the cows’ muzzles, the sounds the chickens made. He talked about the color of the grass on the other side of the house, and about the pigpen, which frightened him a little.

  She spent hours examining the three notebooks. Everything was there. Each volume dealt with a specific subject: the rocks, the animals, the plants. The third book held a faded photograph that showed two naked children in a washtub, a dog’s nose poking above their heads. Blanche recognized the bath; it was in the attic now, under the armoire full of sweaters and dresses. Her heart clenched, suddenly assailed by the memory of that afternoon, her mother bathing them outside in that tub. The dog had loped over, wagging its tail, and Gabriel had laughed. She stifled a sob and turned to the next page, where her father had drawn a rough sketch of the pond Émilienne owned some six hundred meters from the farm, behind the slope on which the henhouse perched. The pond was surrounded by thick grass where the cows grazed placidly for a good part of the year. Woods edged the property to the north. Blanche and Gabriel had played at the pond’s edge in the summers. Étienne had loved the little body of water; he spent five or six pages describing the curve of its banks, the depth at its center. A brief article cut from the local newspaper had been taped to the inside cover of the notebook, entitled “A little corner of Paradise,” and Blanche drew in a deep breath, soaking in her father’s penciled words, the secrets they revealed about this man she was sure she had loved. Her father. Louis, Alexandre. They were the only men she’d ever known. One had left her very early, and sometimes she couldn’t exactly remember his face. The other lived alongside her like an animal she had to constantly restrain from launching himself at things and people. And the third, Alexandre, had ripped her heart apart the way you tear the paper from a first birthday present.

  BATTLING

  Whenever Blanche thought back to that last evening, that dinner when her grandmother had held her back against the stone, which had seeped into her back—or maybe it was her body that had sunk into the stone, begging it to swallow her up—when Blanche thought back to the knives slicing through her, she felt Alexandre’s presence. She saw Émilienne again, bent over her in the bath; Blanche had been seventeen, almost eighteen, and her grandmother was bathing her and talking to her and holding her as if she were a baby. Her love for Alexandre had stripped her of all her weapons, or maybe she had given them up willingly, out of love for him. She had allowed herself to be seen as she really was, so young, so light, relieved of everything that had been weighing her down, and he had broken her. It had been his apologetic air, even more than his leaving; that stupid ambition of his, when she and Louis got up so early and worked so hard for Paradise—yes, that’s what was devastating her now, all over again: Alexandre’s words, those pathetic words he couldn’t do anything with except string them together to form pretty sentences without any depth or meaning. And she, brokenhearted, crumpled against her grandmother, who had fought so that she wouldn’t fall, who had always fought, so that Blanche would be strong.

  Since she had learned the news, learned that Alexandre was hanging around town again, just a few kilometers from Paradise, Blanche hadn’t set foot beyond the boundaries of their own property. Louis took care of things at the market on Thursdays an
d the first Sunday of each month; he didn’t ask questions, just carried out Émilienne’s silent orders. Blanche crossed the yard and went down to the pigpen and then came back, inspecting the barn and feeding the chickens. She was in constant motion, unable to sit still, terrified. Émilienne watched her through the kitchen window and said nothing.

  Alexandre was back.

  It was all people were talking about, at Le Marché, in the village, at church.

  Protected by the stockades of Paradise, Blanche prepared herself—for what, she wasn’t sure, but she prepared herself. Her body was tense, rigid, as if a tree limb were growing inside her; she moved like a machine, so straight, so precise, with such dreadful, cold energy, and rumination, and tightly controlled rage. Alexandre was back, and he hadn’t told anyone he was coming, hadn’t announced anything in the village; no, he was simply here, alive and well, back home, in the place he had hated. Blanche was preparing herself to accept his presence near her, to accept that it was enough for her to go to the village to cross paths with him, to hear his voice, his name. Alexandre.

  Thirty years old. What had she accomplished? What had happened in her life since that disastrous night?

  “So little,” she murmured aloud, her eyes closed. So little.

  The past twelve years had been grueling. And so beautiful. Each morning, the sight of the yard and the scarlet tree flooded her heart with hope, crushing the rage that Alexandre’s departure had fueled in her. Each evening, the sky hanging low over the pond, the cowbells chiming from the stable, brought a comfort she couldn’t quite describe. The routine sounds, the familiar colors made it possible for her to go to bed, to drift into a sleep where her dreams looked very much like everyday life. Blanche had learned everything about the land, the animals she raised in order to kill, the other farmers, whom she distrusted even as she worked alongside them. She had learned to be solid, respectable. But Alexandre, with his big ideas, his big dreams, and his little words, had swayed her. No one else had ever swayed her that way. No one. Of course, boys, and men—and sometimes the fathers of those boys and men—had invited her out. Blanche wasn’t stupid; she said yes, and then had Louis drive her to meet them. At the sight of the two approaching together, they invariably forgot the girl, focusing instead on the bogeyman next to her. No one ever discovered that her pubic hair was the same color as the leaves on the tree in the yard.

  Hearing Alexandre’s name had awoken a beast in her, a creature of desire and tears. Blanche prepared herself; she patrolled Paradise unceasingly. When she stopped, exhausted, she forced herself to go to sleep as quickly as possible, haunted by Alexandre’s beautiful, sweet face. That face, which never failed to stir flickering flames inside her.

  ENCOUNTERING

  The village square was an open belly, swarming with men and women, children and animals. Tables were set out beneath awnings, some forty of them in all; children dodged between sellers’ legs, sometimes getting scratched up on the edge of a low wall or a stand overflowing with fruit. On Thursday, the square was crammed with people until late in the afternoon, the first vendors arriving to unload at five in the morning, the “livestockers”—so nicknamed because they sold live animals—coming later. Occupying the area in front of the church, their stalls teemed with feathers and fur, grunting and scratching. Children played near the animals, the one who could get closest without receiving a slap on the wrist winning the game. Every week, rain or snow or shine, Thursday was market day.

  At her stall, behind her calm façade, Blanche managed the conversations and the till with one eye on the central promenade and the other on the customers browsing through her eggs, her tomatoes, her lettuces, her chickens in a cage they couldn’t escape unless hauled out by the scruff. On this Thursday, she was standing in for Louis, detained at the farm by the difficult birth of a calf. Émilienne hadn’t needed to nudge her granddaughter; she had naturally volunteered. For the first time since the news of Alexandre’s return, she was breaching the borders of her realm, away from her bedroom, her woods, her beloved pigpen where the pigs, wallowing in the mud, snuffling among the scraps tossed to them over the fence, seemed to her better companions than these people acknowledging her with a wave or a quick but polite word, or a gentle tap on her back—she, who hated to be touched. Since Alexandre, the slightest caress opened a bottomless pit inside her; the faintest quiver, even friendly, even welcoming, reawakened the nightmare of abandonment. Only Émilienne and Gabriel were allowed, on rare occasions, to embrace her gently, or brush her hand, or murmur a loving word—but always very softly, to protect her from what smoldered inside her, that nameless ogre, that scaffold of grief and pain, of pride and resignation.

  The market was crowded that day. More so than usual. From her stall, Blanche could see the steeple of the church. That long, tall arrow towering over their lives soothed her. She was making change for an old lady who was talking about how she’d known her when she was a little girl, when her parents were still in this world. Blanche wanted to reply that no, her parents weren’t the “poor souls” of the story, that the “poor souls” were the ones who remained, all the Émiliennes of the world, and no, she didn’t remember the name of this woman chattering away at her. But she held her tongue and handed over the three coins, and the woman went on her way. She was stowing the crumpled bill in their little moneybox when four simple words rose above the buzz of conversation around her:

  “Well, there you are.”

  That voice.

  It wasn’t a boy’s voice anymore. There was still, in that “well,” something of the habitual attempt to please, to create the illusion of mutual trust in just a few seconds. That voice came from a distant land; it had been changed by work, by fatigue, by speaking itself; it was a voice used to being listened to, but Blanche recognized in that “well,” in that way of ending the sentence, the expectation that the voice would remind her of the gentle boy who had gestured out her bedroom window at the oak tree. Confident in her preparations for this conflict, she looked up, straight into Alexandre’s eyes, ready for anything, fortified by the violence of childhood.

  That violence had no effect on Alexandre. He simply let it slide off his back, and as his lips curved in a sheepish smile, Blanche, overwhelmed by the sight of his face, remodeled by the years, drank in every line of his features wordlessly. A taller man, and thinner, than the boy she had known, was looking at her now with bewildering tenderness. Blanche had to turn her head, to look away. Alexandre wore a button-down shirt and dark trousers. She had never seen him dressed so casually. Now he waited, so calm, so sure of himself, for her to speak at last.

  “I’m really the one who should be saying that to you, ‘Well, there you are.’”

  Her voice was hard.

  “That’s true,” he acknowledged, his smile widening even further.

  Behind him, two customers were waiting. Blanche shot him a dark glance and refilled the egg baskets, mechanically. Alexandre stood, his spine very straight, one hand on the table and the other in the back pocket of his trousers, his eyes moving from Blanche to the customers, giving them his best “you won’t regret your decision to buy these” look. When they left the stall, she beckoned him closer, as if to tell him a secret.

  “You don’t need to do that,” she whispered, forbiddingly.

  “Do what?”

  Exasperated, she gestured at the customers, now on the other side of the street.

  “What you just did, there. I can manage perfectly well. We haven’t just been waiting around for you.”

  Alexandre took a step back.

  “Yes, I can see that. Congratulations on Paradise.”

  “Did you think we wouldn’t make it?”

  He looked away and said, his voice almost boyish:

  “I never doubted you. Best of luck with your work, Blanche.”

  He gave her a little wave of farewell and vanished into the crowd gathered in front
of the church. Two more customers approached the stall just then; Blanche left them by the chicken cage, turned her back, and leaned against the stack of crates. Bent double. Overcome.

  DRYING

  Louis wiped the clean soup plates dry as Émilienne handed them to him. Doing the dishes, taking out the garbage, dusting the table, sweeping the floor—he enjoyed these moments. Side by side, at this sink chipped in its corner by thousands of uses, meals, large feasts, he felt close to Émilienne. This interlude lasted only a few minutes, but it might as well have been hours, so deeply did he feel like he belonged, like he was part of the family. When Émilienne made the familiar gesture with the plate, lifting it out of the water, shaking it briefly between two capable fingers and flipping it over, a movement her old hands performed as naturally as breathing, Louis felt as if he was receiving all her confidence, her trust that he wouldn’t break this plate, or the equilibrium of Paradise.

  “Have you seen him yet?” Émilienne asked.

  “No.”

  He wiped his hands with the damp dishtowel.

  “Wait, here, use this one,” she said, plucking a dry cloth from the shelf with her wet fingertips.

  She drew in a deep breath.

  “Are you planning on going to see him?”

  It hadn’t occurred to him, not for a single second. Seeing Alexandre would mean seeing Blanche, that night, her face twisted with pain. The memory was unbearable.

  “No, I hadn’t planned on it.”

  Émilienne sniffed.

  “But I will, if you ask me to,” he added, quickly.

  She pulled the plug from the sink’s drain, the murky water disappearing with a gurgle.

  “I’m not asking you to do anything, Louis.”