A Strange Country

by Muriel Barbery

  It covered the entire landscape.

  “Are you the one who is doing all this?” Sandro asked Maria.

  She nodded.

  “But it’s Clara’s music that gives me the image and the meaning,” she said.

  On the floor of the pavilion, Solon placed a little sphere covered in fur that looked like the blurry form on the painting.

  “An ancestor,” murmured Petrus.

  The downy sphere began to spin and a first essence emerged from it, that of an otter, followed by a hare, a boar, a bear, and so on until a multitude of species were represented and were turning with all the others in the space of the pavilion, now infinitely expanded. The last essence to appear, a tawny squirrel, ended the dance and stood there quivering with its fellows, in a perfect representation of the entire animal kingdom.

  “Is this what we are going to become?” asked Jesús, looking at the resurrected ancestor.

  The painting changed again, the ancestor disappeared, and two figures appeared: a jovial peasant and a little potbellied ginger man, Eugène Marcelot and Petrus of the Deep Woods. Then the landscape began to melt, the outlines of creatures and things faded under a new flow of water that formed little eddies on the canvas, the impact of invisible tears falling from a sky of black ink. The landscape was engulfed, then vanished completely, again revealing the scene of lamentation.

  It was transfigured.

  There was nothing more marvelous than seeing the delicate touches Maria gave to the scene, because through the power of the gray tea, her mind had become the bristle of the brush modifying the story of life. The music Clara composed, echoing Father François’s words, ended in a wrenching ode, a murmured farewell—the last gaze—the last battle. The nails of the crucifixion faded first, then the stigmata, the crown of thorns, and the blood on Christ’s brow, and all that remained was a dead man surrounded by the affliction of his loved ones, while superimposed upon the faces, the landscape of trees and hills reappeared, carpeted in hawthorns and roses.

  So it goes, in the lives of humans and elves, alternately scenes of passion and vast plains, battles and prayers, tears and sky, thought Father François. Why add suffering to suffering? There is only one war, and it is enough for our sorrow as living creatures. And he thought again: so be it, may the idiot triumph over the madmen.

  The piano fell silent.

  BOOK OF PAINTINGS

  Hostus placed a sable brush before Sandro, along with black ink, and I must tell you that this black ink was not there by chance, either. It came from a quarry at the edge of the mists, by steep slopes where lampblack was mined, and through it, Sandro’s life was endlessly reflected to him. The first painting he’d shown Pietro on arriving in Rome featured four lines of India ink, made in a single gesture, a single breath. In the language of elves, this was the sign for mountain, and Pietro, who knew how to read it, was astounded that Sandro could have imagined the sign without ever learning it. After that, Sandro only painted works he found trivial, although in Rome they called him a genius, until Pietro showed him the Flemish painting and its incandescence burned his eyes with a beauty he didn’t know how to survive. But before leaving Rome and heading for his retreat in L’Aquila, he produced a final canvas of flat tints of black ink with neither figures nor outlines, simply enhanced by three strokes of carmine pastel. And everyone who had ever seen the bridge of mists immediately recognized it.

  After that, he gave up painting for good.

  On the floor of the pavilion, the silver dust froze, then escaped in flurries of tiny stars. We are adrift, thought Sandro, looking at Petrus, we are vagabonds blindly searching for a kingdom, because they know that they are from elsewhere even though they are from here. We are adrift from being in two worlds at once: the one that gave birth to us and the one we desire. Petrus was born in a sublime universe, and all he thinks about is drinking and telling stories; I come from an imperfect life where I drank more than I painted, although I aspire to the silent, absolute nature of visions. We who know the price of land and the message of the wind, the taste of roots and the headiness of uprooting, can be pioneers who build the unknown footbridges.

  Tagore handed him a last flask of gray tea.

  “Plums from the garden,” he murmured after drinking.

  He dipped the brush into the ink.

  There was a strange quivering in the air—or was it in the earth, the sky, the universe? They blinked.

  The world had become black and white, except for the creatures of flesh, and the ancestor, who was vibrating through his multiple avatars.

  Reader, do not think that the authentic line is born on the canvas, it occurs before that, in the intake of breath through which the painter absorbs the totality of the visible, in the exhalation with which he prepares to restore it to the tip of his bristles. When they touched the floor, the pavilion trembled slightly. How long did the gesture last? It was fleeting and infinite, concentrated and widespread, unique and multiple, but Sandro had been nurturing it for sixty years, and the line was traced with a flowing ease that made the members of the last alliance rub their eyes, because on the wood of the pavilion there was only one line.

  a single naked line

  that contained all the others

  a single black line where

  all the colors and all the shapes

  could be seen

  a single line starting on the floor of the pavilion

  and extending to the surface of the Flemish painting

  absorbing its figures and its stories

  Petrus had already seen a similar line in Katsura, drawn by the Head of the Council who, it was said, had witnessed the birth of the bridge. His curving calligraphy looked like a single line which, in turn, represented every possible curve, just as today they could see only a single brushstroke and yet they perceived everything that was visible. What illusion of vision enabled it to bring with it the consistency and prolixity of the world? While this world was regaining its colors and Maria was focusing her mind on Sandro’s line, Petrus thought again: it is the visionary who gives his flesh to the story, but he must have the power of these little girls to write the text.

  On the floor, the ink dried, and gradually the line grew larger until it passed through the wooden partitions of the pavilion, which had become transparent. Outside, the line changed into a colossal structure that expanded to create a bridge sparkling with darkness, with neither arch nor pillars, a simple black streak leading far away to the outer reaches of one’s gaze.

  “The new bridge,” said Maria.

  The mist that had once engulfed the arch coiled in on itself in one last graceful sigh of languor, then pulled apart, before melting slowly into the arch. Mist from all the provinces appeared on the horizon and, unrolling over the valley, they too headed toward the new bridge between the two worlds.

  When there was no more mist they looked at the bridge and saw that it ended in the void. Its pure line flowed into nothing, where one could discern neither mist, nor trees, nor clouds. Below it, a dark lake had appeared.

  “I have lived for no other reason than to see this vision,” said Sandro.

  In the room, the ancestor in his multiple incarnations began to spin and, with each spin a species was absorbed into him, while it went through the partitions of the pavilion and melted into the lacquer of the bridge. And so, Clara played a hymn—a strange hymn, as free as the clouds, as dangerous as fervor—and on the painting, which had become a simple spot of black ink, there were inscriptions in the language of elves that humans could now understand—the drifting story they’d foreseen in the beginning, the one that simply wanted to be written and was waiting for someone who was willing to continue the work of the painter from Amsterdam—the story that told of the tears of love and the landscapes of fervor.

  In the final hour of loving

  Everything shall be empty and full of w
onder

  How does one capture the passing sparkle? All that is required—something elves know how to do—is to reduce life to its most basic framework and inscribe it on a final landscape in its essential nudity; then in the end, turn the landscape—something humans know how to do—into the setting of the last story—the novel of novels, the fiction of fictions.

  In the final hour of loving

  Everything shall be empty and full of wonder

  The inscriptions, on leaving the surface of the painting, passed through the partitions of the pavilion and melted into the bridge of ink. The mist had lived and now was making room for the void where creatures and things move about. Just like the miraculous mist that rendered the world never completely visible—sometimes opting to cover all the universe except for a single bare branch, then contracting to allow the greatest possible proportion of things to be seen—the void restored the balance of invisible wholeness.

  You must understand what it is, this void we are talking about, because we people in the West are accustomed to thinking it is simply nothingness, absence, or lack of matter and life, whereas the void that the new novel of the world wished for was an authentic substance. It was the valley in which things bathe, the inhabited breath of life which takes them into the cycle of their mutations, the invisibility of the visible, the inner image of living essences, the nakedness of the currents where the winds of dreams are engulfed; it was the energy that makes the world turn on its invisible hub, the palpable impalpability of the mystery of being there, the ineffable become presence; and it passed over the wonder of the hawthorns and the roses in a painting that preserved the precedents, although it never stopped abolishing itself—I would like for you to touch this beauty that exists only thanks to the victory of the void over fullness, the recomposition of the world’s paintings in keeping with waves of effacement where what kills and encumbers us is drowned—that beauty which sends its roots into the earth and sky and is not born of the continuity of things, but of the destitution that reveals the heart. New landscapes from the story passed over the painting, taking shape, then vanishing in successive volleys of rivers and verdant hills, of valleys of white trees or branches drowning in the invisibility of clouds. The void encircled them with breathing like an ermine stole, made them shine in their brilliant nakedness, then gently dissolved them before giving birth to a new configuration of nature, a new victory of the wonder of visions.

  Here, anything is possible, thought Petrus.

  “We have heard the gospel of the idiot,” said Maria to Father François.

  “Empty and full of wonder. The old song from Extremadura that Luis reminded you about, yesterday, in the cellar,” said Jesús.

  “Yesterday,” murmured Alejandro. “An eternity has gone by since then.”

  In the final hour of loving

  Everything shall be empty and full of wonder

  Book of Fathers

  ONE

  One must know the language of the elves and the peoples of the East of the planet in order to bring about the union of nature and the spirit, but one must also have the imagination of humans to tell the story that commands all the others.

  The single brushstroke is the unit through which multiplicity comes about, the bridge between species and worlds, the mold of all novels, the unveiling of the passing sparkle, the feast of wonder, the freedom of the void, and the enchantment of the world.

  And what is more, a single brushstroke is proof that reality is always generated by a vision transformed into fiction. The vision offered by the gathering at Nanzen was clear: wonder is born from the void which, in turn, generates the simplicity of beauty.

  And, in its wake, the complexity of fervor.

  FATHERS

  The fourth Book is the Book of Fathers.

  One’s understanding of fathers must not be any different from one’s understanding of the other great Books. The female continent fully subscribes to the mandate through which we learn to live. We say fathers the way we could write mothers, brothers, sisters, or friends. But men and elves, beyond gender, beyond culture, inscribe the reality of invisible transmissions upon paternity, the proof that the living are responsible for the dead, and the dead are responsible for the living—thus, the Book of Fathers is the depositary of territories, lineages, and legacies that cannot be detected by the naked eye.

  Real prisons and real legacies are always invisible, transmitted by the wind of dreams and the breathing of trees.

  EPILOGUE

  1938–2018

  The fathers came to the rescue of the last alliance.

  There are no sons without fathers, there is no life without a mandate, no freedom without legacy. Alejandro had watched in silence as the red arch was transmuted into a black footbridge, and the dead trees appeared above the transparencies of the path. Their vibration was similar in nature to that of the cemetery in Yepes, and there he also found the sparkling of bygone days. The dead of each kingdom speak to one another, he thought, and he wanted to share this thought with his beloved. Looking at Clara, he saw she was gloomy, her gaze distant and dark.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Something’s not right,” she said quietly, “but I don’t know what it is.”

  Tagore showed them the battlefields of the two worlds, where the fire was subsiding. The clay of fire had consumed weapons and bodies: the surviving soldiers from Ireland and elsewhere were wandering, sobbing, through the snow. Alejandro looked at the wheat of Shinnyodo, imprisoned in its black blood, the field where orcs, bows, swords, and dead bodies had vanished into the flaming earth, and he thought he could hear a new sound. The guardian handed him a flask of near-black tea, which had a familiar taste, and he murmured: sherry. The sound rising from the fields of Shinnyodo grew louder, and the gray tea revealed its source.

  Do you know what it means to inhabit the province of life and death? It is a strange country, but only those who speak its language are human. They are called on to address the living and the dead as if they were only one being, and Alejandro was familiar with that idiom. As a child, no matter which path he took, he was irresistibly drawn back to the walls of the cemetery at Yepes. There, among the stones and crosses, he felt he was among his loved ones. He did not know how to speak to them, but the peacefulness of the place rustled with words for him. What’s more, even when it meant nothing, the music of the dead reached him in a place in his chest that understood, with no need of words. In these moments of great fulfillment, he could discern an intense sparkling at the edge of his vision, and he knew he was seeing the light from some form of unknown, powerful spirit. Now, in Nanzen, it was taking on a new form and he understood the power the gray tea could give him.

  He looked at Maria, and she nodded to him. Clara, drawing on their silent dialogue, played a psalm in tune with the legacies conveyed by the heavens.

  BOOK OF FATHERS

  The dead of Shinnyodo were the first to be reborn. It was a fabulous sight, not only because Alejandro’s desire resurrected the dead, accompanied by Clara’s music and catalyzed by Maria’s power, but also because the world became atmospheric and they all felt themselves drifting in the reality of the great mixture, where the living and the dead are united. We live in the atmosphere, thought Petrus—in the newly liquid world, where the present, past, and future came together on the infinite span of an instant, and the dead of all eras stood up and joined the soldiers on the side of the last alliance. Men, women, and elves of eras long buried appeared, not in the form in which death had taken them, but as they had been in that moment in their life when they had been happiest. And so, dressed and prepared according to the customs of their century, they came into sight, incarnate and tangible, with none of the singularities that common faith grants to phantoms.

  One could see this crowd, or rather, this army of the dead on every field, and the survivors fell to their knees
in shock. It was an army that carried no weapons and did not want to fight, wandering through the snow of battles and sowing the flowers of plum trees, speaking of invisible legacies and bringing shame upon the folly of war. One could also sense, in the heart of this crowd, a puff of air in the form of a rose or, perhaps, a snowflake, and one could hear, flowing through every consciousness like a river, the women’s singular message. They murmured: we are with you, and everyone could feel the power of the lineage, its liquid force and the grace of a wild continent. Then Clara’s piano fell silent.

  Two men came into the pavilion and Alejandro embraced Luis Álvarez and Miguel Ybáñez, restored in the final hours by the great mixture. I have given the mercy of poetry to my prayers, Alejandro thought, and I have accepted the mandate. As a reward for this devotion, I see the life of my dead—and, indeed, he saw them returned from death, while the past reasons for their fate were revealed to him. He saw Miguel’s murderer, an assassin of the same sort as the Yepes killers, all recruited by the traitor, then sent into the void from which no one returns: it had destined them for the mists in the same way one might be destined for Nanzen or Rome, and the unfortunate souls had disappeared forever. This is what had enabled the enemy to kill the general who could defeat the Confederation, without leaving a trace, along with the witnesses, in Yepes, of the quest for the gray notebook.