A Beast in Paradise

by Cécile Coulon

  On the second day, Alexandre had apologized to Émilienne.

  “I’m so sorry. I know I hurt all of you.”

  He wanted to make things right. He was coming back to live in the village; he’d already left the city behind, a distant memory. Alexandre had “thought about things long and hard, from every angle.” And Émilienne, in her bed, in her suffering, listened to this boy describe his feelings to her. He loved Blanche, more than anything. If taking care of Paradise was what it would take for the grandmother to forgive him, to trust him, he would do it.

  In the days that followed, he assured her that he had thought of everything, planned everything so that Paradise’s future, and Blanche’s, would be guaranteed. He explained to Émilienne, in her sickness and exhaustion, that it would be necessary to sell off some of the land, the least productive parts, in order to provide themselves with the means to make better use of the rest. They would need to replace some of the farm equipment, and to farm a smaller area. It was too difficult, this life, as Émilienne knew, of course; too hard. It was no life for a modern young woman. They would have to relieve some of this weight, this burden on her, so that she could be happy, and think about things other than work.

  Louis let out a curse. Blanche was utterly still. She listened to the story and she watched the trap closing on Émilienne and she understood, a dreadful hint of pity stealing into her eyes, that her grandmother had allowed herself to be hoodwinked.

  “I’m not going to live much longer . . . ” the old woman murmured. “He made a good case . . . ”

  “Six thousand per hectare,” said Louis.

  The two women stared at him.

  “What?”

  “Six thousand per hectare. That’s the price around here.”

  Blanche’s face sagged.

  All of that, just to build, and sell, and build again, and sell again. Alexandre had fucked her. For the first time, she felt like there was no other word for it: he had fucked her, and she had let him. Had even asked for it.

  “What happened then?” she asked Émilienne.

  “After that he disappeared for three weeks, as you know,” said her grandmother, straightening slightly in her chair.

  She had drained herself completely of tears.

  “I couldn’t talk to you about it. You would have said no.”

  Émilienne was right; Blanche would have refused even to discuss it. That was why Alexandre had stayed away for three weeks: to give the old lady time to worry about the future, to fear death, and the paucity of the inheritance she was leaving behind, and the burden maintaining this land represented.

  “When the two of you got back together, it was perfect. I’d dreamed of it.”

  Blanche thought back to the days when Alexandre and Émilienne had drunk coffee together, whispering, their heads bent close. Alexandre had come back; he would take care of everything. The sale of the hectares of land around the pond would pay for new milking machines and the cost of extending the barn, and for more animals to enlarge the herd. It was modernizing, allowing themselves a little less harshness, a little more comfort.

  “Everything seemed to be falling into place,” Émilienne whispered.

  Louis was silent. Blanche was afraid to look at him. They’d forgotten him. They’d even driven him out of Paradise, which was what Alexandre had wanted from the beginning. A skilled strategist, Alexandre had stayed away, pretending to be afraid of Louis; at every turn he’d portrayed himself as a victim of the farmhand, and Blanche realized it only now, in defeat. She saw the stages of his plan unfurling before her eyes now, one by one. The memory of every one of his smiles scalded her now; he had been laughing at her, at Louis, at Émilienne. He’d been laughing at her love. And, even worse, he’d made her eat dirt.

  “Yesterday, when he showed up with his overnight bag and his gifts, everything seemed so lovely,” Émilienne murmured.

  “Have you signed anything?” demanded Louis, abruptly.

  “Yes.”

  He stood up, flinging his chair back against the wall, and stalked out of the dining room. Out in the front hall, he let out a long cry, like the scream of a horse, guttural, terrible. Émilienne pulled her hand from beneath Blanche’s and pressed her palms to her ears; in Louis’s howling she could hear all his innocence, his naivete, his fear of dying.

  The old woman wiped her eyes, rubbing them so hard that it seemed as if her fingers were actually digging into the sockets, the movement slow and uncharacteristic.

  “Why did you do that?”

  Blanche could hear a something in her own voice, like a broken bell, quivering between her teeth and beneath her tongue and roiling in her throat, a cold manifestation of horror that was growing heavier and heavier, taking up the space between her words, between her thoughts, between the tears that were to come. Yes, the tears would come. But not in front of the others.

  “Because I wanted to do things right before going.”

  Blanche almost said, “Going where?” Her grandmother was old, very old, and Blanche knew nothing about that, about the questions people ask themselves before dying, or their last wishes, or the agony of not knowing whether this night will be the last, or if there will be one more, or ten, or a hundred. But Blanche had known death earlier than the others, and now that Émilienne was approaching her own end, on the slippery edge of a cliff, Blanche was watching her disappear, little by little, beyond the horizon of Paradise.

  “What does he want to do with the land?”

  “Sell it.”

  Blanche pictured what Paradise might look like in ten years, honeycombed with lots and second homes and campsites all around Sombre-Étang and in the Bas-Champs.

  “I don’t understand,” she whispered. “It’s not legal to build around here.”

  “Not yet.”

  Blanche frowned. She’d always been told, both in school and at home, that this was protected land.

  “What do you mean?”

  Émilienne sighed. “Don’t you see what’s happening out there?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  Houses would soon be built; identical, practical houses, like endless sets of twins. The city would arrive with its grasping arms of asphalt and paint and tolls, it would come all the way to Paradise, and Paradise would become part of the spreading city. Men and animals would die so that cities could continue to grow, all-consuming.

  Blanche swayed in her chair. The dam broke behind the green of her eyes, so beautiful, the green of water and drenched leaves. In ten years, or perhaps even less, the world would begin to nibble away at their land. And Alexandre had taken the first bite.

  WEEPING

  Here they were, then, the tears, real ones. Bouts of weeping overtook her at all hours of the day and night, rising from the depths of her heart, drowning everything in their path, crushing this body that work in the fields had made strong and solid, methodically destroying the ability to think clearly. They irrigated her face, leaving behind salty riverbeds in which Blanche’s memories lay like dogs starved to stop them from barking. Here they were, then, the tears, real ones. Torrents of shame, of incomprehension, words of consolation butting against them. Blanche, bereft of food and fresh air and tenderness, curled and shrank in the big bed that still smelled of Alexandre despite its sheets being changed. Her body withered, cracking, and Blanche refrained from filling it so as not to fuel her tears, not to taste the saltiness any more on her dry lips, seamed with a thin, bright line. Blanche was starving to death in her big bed; behind the door, Émilienne waited. She couldn’t bathe her now, or carry her, or soothe her the way she had before. Now Blanche was alone in her pain.

  Here they were, then, the tears, real ones. An avalanche of wounds, her muscles and skin and bones and blood trying to escape through her eyes, fleeing this unmoored vessel, this wreck incapable of accommodating any sailors but those of the past, its d
eck long since collapsed beneath the weight of the bell, enormous now, monstrous, a massive sphere still growing even now. Here they were, then, the tears, the triumph of despair.

  They didn’t call the doctor. Louis kept on working. In the morning, he ate his breakfast alone in the dining room, flies buzzing in circles above his head, flitting in and out through the open window. Émilienne got up later; he helped her downstairs, made her a coffee and some bread and butter that she hardly touched. Not for anything in the world would he let himself be defeated by the deathly silence. Outside, life was going on; the cows whipped the air with their tails, the chickens scratched and clucked whenever they heard a bird scurrying up the slope, the pigs crowded against the gate of the pen. Louis took care of everything, crossing the yard twenty times a day, looking up at the bedroom, the half-open window sometimes giving him hope that he might glimpse Blanche’s face. She was in bed, sinking quietly into her grief, surrendering to the torment of memory, more alive than any of the members of this household where the animals still flocked, moving along despite the absence of the women, huddled in their pain. Louis had moved back into the house; his room felt so large and the house so full of Alexandre’s trap. He would have preferred to sleep with the livestock, so afraid was he of being contaminated by misery.

  And when he heard Blanche tossing in her bed on the other side of the wall, he thought, Here they are, then, the tears.

  STRIKING

  Émilienne set plates in front of the bedroom door. The bread and meat and potatoes disappeared, but she and Louis weren’t sure if it was the work of Blanche or a mouse. She came out to go to the bathroom or take a shower, locking the door behind her, just long enough to rinse off with cold water. Anything that eased the pain in her soul, anything that pulled her, even for a few seconds, from the bottomless pit into which Alexandre had shoved her, anything, even the jet of icy water that left red welts on her skin, she accepted it all. But she remained upstairs, wallowing between her sheets or sitting on the edge of the bed by the window. She was disintegrating between those four walls, her skin dreadfully pale, burning pink at the merest touch of sunlight. She went round and round in circles in that strange laboratory made of nothing, both the mad scientist and the guinea pig at once, rummaging in what remained of her carcass, trying to assemble a new person from the leftovers, a strong person, someone who could no longer be hurt, humiliated, destroyed this way.

  One morning, at the time when Émilienne usually set down her breakfast plate, Blanche heard three light knocks. She didn’t answer.

  Three more light knocks.

  “Blanche, it’s Louis.”

  She shook her head the way donkeys do when they’re trying to shoo away the flies buzzing around their faces.

  “Blanche, I have something to tell you.”

  She crept toward the door, timidly, trying not to make the floorboards creak, not to make Louis think she was about to open up for him.

  “You don’t need to open the door. Knock once if you can hear me.”

  She did it. On the other side of the heavy wooden door, Louis sighed.

  “You’re going to have to come out eventually, Blanche. You can’t stay shut up in there forever.”

  She took a step backwards, nausea welling up inside her.

  “Everything is so beautiful outside,” he said, softly, in a voice that was almost tender, a voice Blanche had never heard him use.

  She felt heavy. She was so familiar with the old floorboards in her bedroom that she knew exactly where to stop to make it seem like the room was empty.

  “Blanche?” Louis murmured.

  She reached out a hand and pressed her palm to the door, making the wood creak.

  “Gabriel and Aurore are getting married.”

  Then Louis turned away.

  READING

  She didn’t touch her plate, not that day, or the next day, or the next.

  Her brother was in love with a young woman. Her brother, so ill-suited to life, had found love. Soon, they would be married. Blanche sat on the edge of the bed, a grotesque smile pasted on her face, hiccupping. Gabriel had bypassed the farm. He looked at Aurore with eyes overflowing with gratitude and tenderness, protecting her from rural life, from its hardness and efficiency, while she protected him from the endless daydreams in which he’d been lost. Gabriel and Aurore completed each other. They were good together.

  Blanche had been happy with Alexandre. Never relaxed or replete, but happy. She was sure of it. For several months, aged seventeen, she had known the power of emotion. At thirty, the return of that emotion to her life had filled her with certainty. How long had they been happy together? A few months, and then, years later, a few weeks.

  And now she was paying for that happiness with her whole life, her own tortured body, her jealous memory, and her humiliated soul. She and Alexandre should have gotten married too, lived here, been beautiful the way they had always been beautiful, dimples and green eyes united, on the edge of the pond Émilienne had sold too quickly to save Paradise, to save Blanche.

  Gabriel loved, and he was loved. This simple truth devastated his sister; she had been so convinced that he would never be able to cope with life. Knowing him to be so secure, so strong in his relationship forced her to confront her own lies, to accept that Gabriel wasn’t going to be just her little brother anymore, but soon the husband of a wife, living proof that he didn’t need Blanche, or Émilienne, or Louis. In her older-sibling arrogance, in the sense of responsibility she had borne since childhood, Blanche had forgotten that Paradise wasn’t inhabited solely by animals, but also by human beings capable of anything, even of better things.

  Sitting down on the wooden floor, Blanche pulled out her father’s box, the one full of his notebooks and his writings and photos. She opened “A brief history of Paradise” again. In the middle of the first page, the snapshot of the little Émards.

  Blanche and Gabriel, in the washtub. Naked. Bony, for children of that age. Blanche gazed at her wrists in the picture; not eating took her back to those early childhood years, sapped of strength. At thirty years old, Blanche was more fragile than she had been at five, in that iron washtub Émilienne must have had to fill and leave out in the sun to warm the water. The dog, its snout against the handle, lapping with a long, long tongue at the bathwater of these two children splashing around in the heat of a summer’s afternoon. Blanche examined the photo for a very long time, searching for some sign to reassure herself, to overcome the loss of Alexandre. But the child she had been didn’t look back at her; the little Émard girl beat her hands in the water, her face wet and triumphant, the dog taking advantage of her joy to drink behind her back, and it seemed to Blanche as if her own childhood was mocking her, that right at this exact moment she couldn’t rely on it, that the people in the image didn’t care about her pain.

  Blanche ran a long, dirty fingernail beneath the snapshot, which came away easily from the page. She wanted to slip it beneath her pillow. But on the back of the photo she saw that her father had written a few words in his beautiful cursive, the writing of a disciplined man:

  This Sunday, we dragged the big washtub to the edge of the pond. Marianne didn’t want the little ones to swim in the muddy water. You can only see the children in the picture; you have to imagine Émilienne dipping her feet in the water, Marianne trying to push the dog away, and me, not talking, because this is where the world stops and happiness starts.

  The text, written in beautiful script, took up the whole back of the little square. Blanche squinted to make out each letter, so closely were they squeezed together.

  The Émards’ daughter read her father’s message ten times. She pictured her grandmother, younger, sitting at the edge of the pond; Blanche hadn’t even quite been five years old when the photo was taken, but her memory had retained every detail of the place, the moment, the other people in it. The dog hadn’t been playing with them, j
ust drinking the bathwater. Marianne had scolded it, undoubtedly hissing, “Get away, get away,” to the great amusement of her sun-dazzled husband. Blanche felt her heart—or what was left of it—rotting in her chest like a blackened, empty piece of fruit. The land of happiness, Étienne’s promised land, had been sold.

  Sold.

  Blanche repeated the word, rocking back and forth, sick, crazed, starved, singing a hopeless melody: land. Drained of tears, the orphaned girl bit the inside of her cheeks until blood flowed down her throat. Its taste soothed her instantly; she loved its texture, its thickness, its warmth. For weeks, she had been so cold. The blood revived her mind, her muscles, and her desire. And then Alexandre’s betrayal became so clear, so precise, that she almost fainted: for him she had lost her love, her dignity, and her land.

  Even beyond her own life, in buying the land that contained the pond, Alexandre was robbing Étienne of the happiness he had found here, wiping out with one signature at the bottom of a contract the life of the Émard family when it was still solid, still rooted. He had given himself the right to draw a line through those children, that washtub, that dog lapping the water from it.

  FILLING

  Blanche crawled on all fours along the wooden floor where she had first seen Louis, lying there, his face distorted by his father’s blows. Half-conscious, she thought she could see the farmhand’s face in the walls, the colors shifting, his eyes now empty, now black and full. The floor scraped her knees and Louis’s face disappeared, feature by feature, to be replaced by that of Alexandre. Blanche shook her head to banish the image but, on the wall, the mouth of her great love was forming words she couldn’t hear. Daylight filtered through the closed shutters, the rays slashing the throat of Alexandre’s memory.

  She cowered in a corner of the room. In front of her, the unmade bed, the locked door, the box with its lid pulled aside, the notebook on the floor. Her whole life contained in this dark room, around this bed that had known Marianne and Étienne’s lovemaking, and Blanche and Alexandre’s. The Émards’ daughter saw herself lying against the pillows, in the arms of the man she loved, who didn’t love her back.