A Beast in Paradise

by Cécile Coulon

  She was screaming. From the other side of the square, on the terrace of Le Marché, Aurore stared at them, her serving tray clutched in one hand. Alexandre took Blanche by the shoulders.

  “I thought you all just needed a little time.”

  Blanche closed her eyes, impervious to the reassuring words. He was gripping her shoulders hard. She let him do it, trembling, accepting it all. Eager, even, for him to touch her.

  “Louis wouldn’t have let me in. You know that.”

  He let go of her, dropping his gaze, his face suddenly like a little boy’s. Blanche’s anger evaporated at the sight of his innocent expression.

  “Louis calls all the shots at Paradise.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have shouted.”

  She moved closer. He cupped a hand over his eyes to block out the sun, but Blanche was quicker, putting herself between him and the light, silently offering her lips, hard and impatient on his.

  LOVING AGAIN

  A bell from the past chimed inside her.

  For a few seconds, her ears were filled with the warped, distant sound. She could hear it, this furiously chiming bell, the sound swelling and throbbing with each beat of her heart. It was inside her, this strange childhood voice, this eerie instrument, this sharp repeated tone, harder and harder to bear the longer it went on, vibrating from her skull down to her toes.

  The bell chimed one last time and she let it take over entirely, so that it would exhaust itself. As the sound faded, the noises of the outside world returned; she couldn’t have said who was talking, who was shouting, which child was running between the parked cars in the square, and it took a few seconds more for these familiar sounds to fill her, along with the rasp of Alexandre’s breath against her neck, right there in front of everyone.

  “Come to Paradise tomorrow,” she whispered.

  Alexandre didn’t reply. His mouth was pressed to her shoulder, his hands on her back, hardly daring to hold her against him; he caressed her very gently, afraid she would crumble at his touch. Blanche could feel a vein pulsing in his neck. Suddenly he didn’t seem so sure of himself anymore; his calm had deserted him.

  For three weeks, she had thought of nothing but this. She’d fallen asleep remembering that first kiss, in high school, and that first time, in the upstairs bedroom, the pig being slaughtered outside, fallen asleep remembering all the times that had followed. She’d realized that fighting the memories only made them more vivid, every detail strikingly clear. Alexandre was so beautiful, so gentle, his face, even with the damage inflicted by Louis, as perfectly smooth as warm wax, emotions flitting across it lightly, like a fine rain. How she loved that face, those perennial dimples.

  When Alexandre had come to the market that first day, when he’d seen her, she had read the joy in his eyes, and her own contempt and the rage and teenage anger still pent up in her woman’s body had been powerless against it; in those eyes she had read his affection for her. He hadn’t asked for forgiveness, or given excuses; he was just here, back from the city, where he had conquered so many hearts in the intervening years. That doctor, for example, Doctor Neyrie, who had spoken to him like a son; even in the midst of her concern for Émilienne, Blanche had been reassured by the confidence this man, so used to death and injury, to rapid and efficient speech, had shown in Alexandre. He was different; he deserved to be given everything: time, and words, and love. Her love, which she had guarded like a rare delicacy, perishable and fragile.

  “Will you come to Paradise tomorrow?” she repeated.

  He nodded.

  She crossed the street, feeling Alexandre’s eyes on her back.

  She left the market at three o’clock. Normally, she stopped by the café to see Aurore, but today she drove straight back to Paradise, her mind filled with nothing but him, his taste, the softness of his lips, his flushed face when she’d reproached him for his absence over the past three weeks. Alexandre had come back and Louis had punched him, given him the thrashing of his life. Even now, her fists clenched on the steering wheel, Blanche thought he had deserved that beating, more than anyone. Louis had launched himself at Alexandre and he’d been right to do it. He had to pay for the heartache, the pain his leaving had caused, for the abyss toward which he’d pushed Blanche, who had spent so many years clinging to the edge, trying to pull herself up. Louis had hit him, and then her grandmother had fallen ill, but Alexandre had saved her. Yes, that was what she believed: Alexandre had saved her grandmother’s life. What would have happened if they had waited in that bedroom for a doctor to come at some unspecified time? And that doctor, Doctor Neyrie; would he have seen to Émilienne so quickly if Alexandre hadn’t stepped in?

  Blanche thought back to those mornings in the lobby, when he’d waited for her amid the tears and the sorrow and the imminent deaths and the bad news. He’d waited for her with perfect composure, as if none of that could ever touch Émilienne or her family, utterly confident in his actions, his decisions. And Blanche had loved him for it. Once again, she’d let herself be seduced by those deep eyes, that sweet smile, those comforting phrases. Alexandre’s words didn’t pierce her heart with pain anymore; now they soothed her, promised that everything would fall into place; they would take good care of Émilienne, and it would all be fine. He’d said that each morning before leaving for work, and Blanche had believed him, had clung to those words during the three weeks since her grandmother’s collapse.

  Alexandre hadn’t come around in those three weeks. That had been enough time for her to give herself over entirely to the idea that he would never abandon them again, her and Paradise. Going away a second time would have made him a monster, and that was a word Blanche reserved for the calves born with five legs, for one-eyed cats, for all the world’s atrocities that hovered at the edges of their domain without ever penetrating it.

  Blanche loved him.

  As she was parking the car in the barn next to the tractor, a wave of dizziness came over her. She breathed deeply for a few seconds, her hands still clutching the wheel, unmoving, her body stiff in the seat that smelled of sweat. She loved him.

  “Everything will fall into place.”

  Blanche heard Louis’s footsteps in the yard, a bit heavy, but quick. She wiped her eyes and slapped her cheeks lightly to bring back the color that the dizzy spell had drained from them, and when she pushed open the car door, he extended a hand to help her out, but she brushed the gesture aside.

  BELIEVING

  Émilienne would never again be what she had been.

  She was still standing, certainly; she hadn’t lost her strength of will, but she came downstairs later in the mornings. In the evening, Blanche could hear the stairs creaking and her grandmother breathing hard as she made her way up them; the distance between the front hall and the second floor had become almost insurmountable for her. She never complained in front of Blanche and Louis, but the more time that passed, the more indications her granddaughter saw that she had aged greatly. Émilienne ate less and more slowly. She just wasn’t hungry. She laughed less often; when Louis recounted his day the corners of her mouth would twitch, trying to stretch into a proper smile, but very soon her lips would droop again. Blanche wanted desperately to prop the corners of that mouth up with her own fingers, to bring back Émilienne’s youth—all those moments when she and Gabriel had shrieked with laughter in the bathtub in front of the house and she’d gazed at them as if seeing them for the first time. Nothing could have wiped the joy from her face at that blissful sight, the certainty that everything was in its right place, and that rightness, sometimes, was as simple as two toddlers in a washtub with a dog romping around them.

  As time ravaged Émilienne’s body and her memory, those moments of intense happiness left her one by one, becoming foreign to her existence. Soon she began keeping mostly to her chair; each movement, each step, each word undertaken only when absolutely necessary. Little
by little, life became limited to the dining room table and her armchair by the window. Blanche and Louis resigned themselves to the fact that, despite their efforts, she was slipping away from them.

  One evening, after the market, Émilienne seemed more exhausted than ever. A churchlike silence reigned over the dinner table; the grandmother ate nothing, scraping at her plate with her knife like a naughty child. Louis watched her hopelessly.

  “Alexandre’s going to come here,” Blanche announced.

  Émilienne turned her head very slowly toward Blanche. Louis stopped staring at the old lady’s plate.

  “Out of the question,” he grunted, pushing his own plate away.

  “I didn’t ask for your opinion.”

  He pushed back his chair and stood up, as long and thin as a rifle. Émilienne, concentrating on Blanche, didn’t seem to notice that he’d moved. Louis went to the door and opened it but, instead of going out, he slammed it, abruptly, violently.

  “Stop, Louis,” Émilienne whispered. “Stop, all right?”

  The sound of her voice had an instant calming effect on him.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  Blanche thought he would sit back down but he planted himself by the window, arms crossed.

  “So—he’s coming here,” Émilienne repeated.

  “Yes. I think so.”

  The old lady set her knife delicately next to her plate.

  “That’s good.”

  Blanche heard Louis let out a breath heavy as a stone.

  “How can you let him come back here? After what he did to you!”

  Blanche buried her face in her hands. Louis paced back and forth near the table, a prisoner of his own anger, of the two women in league against him. He hated Alexandre more than his own father. He hated the man more than anything in the world.

  “You can’t do this, Blanche,” he implored.

  This time, she half-turned toward him in her chair.

  “You can sleep at Gabriel’s, if it’s so unbearable for you to see him.”

  “You don’t understand.” The words came out in broken shards.

  He went to Émilienne and kissed her quickly on the forehead. Very calm all of a sudden, he put a hand on the doorknob. The door opened with a loud creak. Before disappearing into the vestibule, he said, his voice low:

  “I won’t be able to handle it if he hurts you again.”

  Like a mechanical doll, Blanche cleared the table and helped her grandmother stand up. Out in the front hall, at the foot of the staircase, she faced Émilienne, took both of her hands, and they went up the stairs together like that.

  She guided her without saying anything, without hurrying her, and as she was leaving the bedroom, she heard Émilienne breathing hoarsely behind her, plunged immediately into dreams.

  BEING HAPPY

  Alexandre came the next day.

  Up in her room, Blanche didn’t hear the young man knock. At two o’clock in the afternoon, the house, sweltering in the heat, was humming with the sounds of turtledoves and mice. Sitting on the clean sheets of her bed, knees drawn up, Blanche was gazing out the window at the tree, the color of its curling leaves. Louis hadn’t eaten lunch at the farm. His plate was still on the table, “just in case,” Émilienne had said, but Blanche knew she wouldn’t see him again outside working hours. They’d cross paths in the Bas-Champs, or on the road maybe, or at Gabriel’s, but as long as he knew Alexandre had license to enter Paradise, he wouldn’t eat at its table. Blanche and Alexandre would have the house to themselves and, above all, Émilienne’s approval.

  Rocking gently back and forth on the bed, Blanche felt as if she’d reached the end of a long dirt road studded with booby traps. It was a road she’d traveled from childhood to reach this summer afternoon; she had been hurt, had fallen more than once, but now that she was here, at this window, waiting for Alexandre, Blanche believed this was the culmination of an odyssey that was ending here, now, in the clarity of deep emotion. She had achieved what she had never dared to hope for: she was happy. Everything was falling back into place. Émilienne, Alexandre, Paradise.

  Alexandre’s coming would change everything. She thought anxiously about the dust on the banister, the smell of dampness, the whiteness of the sheets. He was coming to hold her, kiss her. The whole life she wished for waited, now, along with her.

  She went down the stairs. A slight breeze wafted in through the half-open door; sunlight fell in a shimmering arrow on the floor and shattered against the wall. Surprised, Blanche took a few steps and froze in the dining room doorway. Alexandre was there, sitting next to Émilienne. Blanche couldn’t make out what he was saying, but her grandmother was nodding, repeating, “Good, good.” She glanced at Alexandre quickly, then again. The young man had seated himself a modest distance away from the old lady, though still close enough to help her if she wanted to stand. The newspaper was always on the table now; even at dinner, it was merely shoved into a corner, but the rest of the day it was spread out over the whole surface, unfolded. Alexandre was pointing out something on the second-to-last page, while Émilienne continued to murmur “Good, good.” They looked as if they might have been the only two people in the world, and Blanche was afraid to disturb this moment of companionship between them, so sudden and so strange for two people who had wrenched themselves apart so violently years ago, in this very room.

  “I don’t want to interrupt . . . ”

  Alexandre leapt to his feet.

  “We were having a reunion!” he joked. “Émilienne seems much better, I think.”

  But Blanche didn’t want to talk about that, about her grandmother’s health or the hours of her exile from Paradise—or the three weeks, more painful still, that had followed without him.

  Alexandre had dinner at Paradise that evening. He promised to come back the next day, and in the days after that. Blanche suggested that he stay the night, but it was “impossible.”

  “Why ‘impossible?’” she asked, her green eyes darkening like storm clouds.

  Very calmly, Alexandre explained that he had things to do at the office; that he would be moving to the village soon, but first he had to give notice that he was vacating his little apartment in the city, and to figure out the costs of transporting everything. He was thinking of suggesting to his boss that they open a branch of the company out here in the country, to manage farmland business and the needs of new buyers directly without wasting time in the car. And he was in discussions to buy the land behind his parents’ place; he wanted to own the meadow, to build a terrace in it, to knock down a wall and add an expansion so that light could enter the narrow little house at last. All of this, he said, meant that he needed to “take care of some things.” Blanche took careful note of every word, every name; she asked his address, and the address of his office, and whether his boss was a good person, and for him to tell her about New Zealand. Gabriel had already told her everything, but she wanted to hear the whole story again, and Alexandre, his smile touched with a hint of exasperation, kissed her gently on the forehead and murmured:

  “We’ve got all the time in the world to talk about our lives from before.”

  She flushed. Her expression was apologetic—sorry for being so hungry for him, sorry for pecking away at him with questions; it was just that she wanted to know everything. Everything.

  The days that followed were like a dream, passionate, exquisite.

  Alexandre generally arrived at around one o’clock in the afternoon. He had coffee with Émilienne, sometimes bringing marzipan sweets. Blanche watched her grandmother gobble them up, cheeks bulging with the indulgent treats, a hint of childhood blooming again on the aged surface. Alexandre usually spent around an hour with her, talking about the lovely weather or the car in the barn or the health of the cows, or sometimes they didn’t speak at all, Émilienne reading the newspaper, Alexandre sipping his coffee and gazi
ng out the window at the ballet of the geese beneath the oak tree. After a few days, he dragged the table out into the yard, beneath the shade of the leafy canopy. He always came just as Louis was passing by; the farmhand never looked up, his face and arms gleaming with sweat; he was just passing, with the chickens and the guinea hens and the ducks, just passing. The only sound he made was the swishing of his coveralls around his legs. Louis was living at Gabriel’s. Blanche wondered how they managed, the three of them in that tiny cube on the edge of the woods, but the questions were quickly wiped from her mind by Alexandre’s smile.

  And so, she gave everything up; she was his, theirs; the time for worrying about others was past. These moments together were all that counted; these hours outside, or in the kitchen, these pieces of the day filled her with joy, with pride, with certainty. She hadn’t felt this way for so long that experiencing these emotions now, so strongly, in her flesh and her soul, gave her absolute confidence in the future.

  Blanche led him to their room, the way you guide a mule up a hillside. His body against hers, his mouth, the new muscles, the hair that now grew where, years earlier, his skin had been perfectly smooth, and the things he did, too, things he’d done with others first, his kisses, deep, sometimes rough, hungry; his sex. She played with his lips, his thighs, all of him, from his toenails to his hair; all of it enchanted her, all of it was hers to delight in, to nibble, to lick. She devoured him as if she were a starving animal, desire erasing fatigue and anxiety. She was theirs, the past receding; she was theirs, and she murmured it to him over and over as they made love, making up for all the afternoons they had missed; she said it again and again, and Alexandre closed his eyes. They made love noisily, wrapped tightly around each other. When he left to take care of some business, Blanche dozed, limp and contented, her body still pulsing, while beneath the window, out in the yard, Louis worked himself to the breaking point, saturated in the scents of manure and mud and smoke, destroying himself so he wouldn’t be destroyed by Alexandre and Blanche, continuing to take care of Paradise like a sad and weary bird still adding twigs to the nest.