A Strange Country

by Muriel Barbery

  Outside, the new bridge vibrated with the totality of life. Below it, the new lake of time was filling. Its shores were submerged by water that flowed away into the void and, on the other side of this void, rejoined the land of humans. Water lapped against the walls of the castillo in Yepes and flowed onto the plain of Extremadura in a scene of great beauty because the lake, in covering the landscape, also changed its configuration. Was it that the black waters offered one’s gaze a form so simple they created wonder, or was it that one sensed the world was less full in its plain liquid nature? Or was it that the waters told a story without a Church, a fable to greet the wishes of every heart?

  The battle was coming to an end.

  “We have to go, and we don’t know whether murder or poetry will carry the day,” said Luis.

  “What began with one murder ends with another,” said Miguel.

  “What came about through treason engenders treason,” added Luis.

  “Something’s not right,” Clara murmured again.

  “Something’s not right,” said Solon.

  Sandro Centi stood up.

  As shared by Tagore, the scene at Yepes was changing.

  The lake was burning.

  Tall, raging flames rose above the water and as they spread, roaring, the world was filling up—yes, the world was becoming fuller and denser, until all these crowded panoramas became suffocating, with their cities, houses, factories, and throngs of people moving indifferently through their surroundings.

  Luis and Miguel vanished. Sandro staggered.

  He collapsed on the floor of the pavilion.

  They ran over to him, and Maria and Clara, kneeling by him, took his hands.

  He was burning with fever.

  “He’s dying,” said Clara.

  Gustavo, Solon, and Tagore had leapt up and were peering out at the world—casting all the power of their great minds into the struggle as they searched through the universe with the force of the tea, going over every acre and every pathway, trying to find the seed of betrayal, every breach of strength and every tremor in the dream.

  It is the visionary who dies, in the first exchange of gunfire, and when he falls in the snow, and knows he is dying, he recalls the hunts of his childhood, when his grandfather taught him to respect the deer.

  Who told me that? thought Petrus.

  Then he remembered.

  “It was the writer,” he said.

  He knelt down next to the painter.

  “Give him snow,” he said, to Maria.

  She looked at him, not understanding.

  “He is dying,” said Petrus. “Give him the comfort of snow.”

  “He cannot die,” she said.

  Sandro opened his eyes.

  “My little one, for ten years you have been there, whenever I’ve been reborn and whenever I have died,” he whispered. “How many more times will this happen?”

  With an effort, he added:

  “I have lived only for this peace.”

  It began to snow in the Pavilion of the Mists, and there came a breath of air, which filled their thoughts with the image of a deer at the edge of a snowy forest, then of a cascade of transparent plums in a summer orchard.

  The air stopped moving.

  “He is dead,” said Father François.

  The snow was falling gently.

  Minute gilded cracks slithered like lizards across the new bridge.

  “We’ve been blind,” said Tagore, “the enemy has been playing us from the beginning.”

  “History is not written with desire, but with the weapons of despair,” said Petrus. “The gray tea is deadly.”

  Must one be clear-sighted or blind to thwart the machinations of destiny? Of them all, Petrus was the one who foresaw how that which touches our hearts is always that which we come to understand last—alas, at first we see only the inessential, and our hope is always caught up in its net, and we pass by the garden of our soul without seeing it. The gray tea was deadly. By agreeing to let it rule their vision, Katsura and Nanzen had sealed their own ruin. Had Aelius activated its toxicity only toward the end, or had he made use of it right from the start? It was too late to go solving riddles. The enemy preferred its own destruction over a victory of the alliance. All those who had drunk the tea would die there today, enemies and allies alike, in a final tragedy.

  Some are born to assume responsibility for other creatures. That is our realm, and our mandate, the ministry that gives life to the powers of death, to their territory and legacy. This eternity and this responsibility are henceforth incumbent upon you, because you have drunk today from the thousand-year-old tea.

  “Who said that?” wondered Petrus.

  Then he understood.

  Those who had drunk the thousand-year-old tea would survive the poison, because they would be traveling forever in the company of their dead. Since the boatman from the Southern Marches had presented the three elves with the tea upon their arrival from the Deep Woods, Petrus, Paulus, and Marcus would go on living.

  Those who had not would die.

  “We’ve failed,” said Solon.

  “There are no prophecies,” said Petrus, “only hopes and dreams.”

  “Those who drank the thousand-year-old tea will live,” said Tagore. “And perhaps our daughters, who are from both worlds at the same time.”

  On the fields of the two worlds, the resurrected had disappeared, and the fighters from each side were burning with an invisible fire. Cries of suffering could be heard; Tagore maintained their clamor for a moment, until the terror of the sight gave way to the lake in Extremadura. The fire had gone out and a brown mire, a plague that had infiltrated the black water, was overflowing onto the shores of the lake. It spread across the world, over the ground, and through the air, beneath the crust of the earth and into the strata of the sky, poisoning fields and clouds for more years than one could count. The trees were weeping, and they could hear a wrenching requiem rising from the transparencies of the path. Finally, the dead foliage faded away until it disappeared from view altogether.

  “Our presence was revealed to humans,” said Solon.

  “How will the war end?” asked Alejandro.

  “Fighting will resume on earth,” said Maria.

  “The tea has had its day,” said Solon, “we no longer have any purchase on the tide of History.”

  “Other camps will be built,” said Tagore.

  “The pavilion is still there,” said Father François.

  “Amputated of its mists, its dead, and its bridge,” replied the guardian.

  When death is drawing near, there is only one lake that can distract us from it. We all have one in our heart that stems from the favors and pain of childhood. It remains in our breasts and become granite, until the enchantment of the encounter makes it liquid again.

  The images of the dried lake came back to Jesús, the place where his father and the long dynasty of poor fishermen had suffered; the taste of betrayal and the redemptive relief of burdens came back; the wars he’d fought as son and soldier, their insanity and afflictions came back; he looked at Maria and once again he saw the stones that the mist turned to liquid. In the end, everything is empty and full of wonder, he thought; so must we die to understand nakedness without suffering? And with a heart that was now unburdened of regret, he looked forward to going to join the dead souls of his fathers—the great Eugène Marcelot, who loved his wife the way one lights a candle in a church, and all those who, before him, had known the peace of encounter.

  To Alejandro, the image of Luis’s calm, dark lake came back, a lake where men pray when they want to live and love. I have spent my entire life pleading that my dead might be saved, he thought, and they are the ones who are saving me in the hour of my death. He saw again the bowl where one could contemplate a life of effacement and of the
land, he remembered the presence of the elves in the mists, he looked at the woman who’d elevated him to love, and heard the last message from those who had come before him. Empty and full of wonder, he murmured. Ideas always triumph over weapons and, whatever Luis might think, poetry triumphs over murder.

  Every major tale is the story of a being who leaves the desolation of the self to embrace the vertigo of the other and, from this freely given absence of self, finally embraces the wonder of existence. Jesús Rocamora and Alejandro de Yepes had laid down their burdens. They looked at the women they loved.

  In that hour when dreams were crumbling, and they did not know whether they would live or die, they were transfigured. The transfer that had come with the war, making Clara joyful and mischievous, was reversed once again; there was an ultimate migration of hearts, and Maria was the child she had been, lighthearted and full of cheer like a clear stream, spreading the charm of her impertinence all around her. But she looked at Clara and plumbed the wild soul the little Italian girl had regained through this reversal: that soul once bereft of laughter and tears had reconnected with her former gravity, but now she was unable to shed the traces of gaiety that had been entrusted to her for a time, and thus she forfeited the darkness and solitude of her newly recovered childhood. In this way, Maria Faure and Clara Centi, finding themselves equally balanced as sisters, stepped together onto the female continent and, comforted by the compassion of the lineage, prepared to live or die in the company of their loved ones. Everyone felt the presence of that guild, its seal of exalted solidarity. Everyone felt Maria’s burden of grief and power vanish like a dream upon waking, and Clara’s gravity acquired a sheen of stippled silver as she was grazed with happiness.

  Paulus, Marcus, Hostus, and Quartus wrapped Sandro in a light-colored cloth and the group left the pavilion.

  “The dead never leave us,” said Petrus, walking side by side with Alejandro. “The second sanctuary was the heart of this world. I wish I had understood it earlier.”

  “Would it have changed anything?” asked Alejandro.

  “You would have drunk the thousand-year-old tea,” he replied.

  “If you drank the thousand-year-old tea, it was because you deserved to,” said Alejandro.

  “Fate is unacquainted with dignity,” said Petrus, “but it has earned me the right to be in charge of the rest of the story, like all those who stay behind to contemplate the fall of their worlds and the deaths of their friends.”

  “Of the lot of us, you’re the aristocrat,” said Alejandro.

  They reached the shores of the lake. The brown mire muddying the waters on the other side of the bridge troubled the surface here with ripples that resembled hostile writing. The black bridge began to break in a strange way: the little fissures became cracks that disappeared in on themselves and created nothingness where previously the mist had lived. Then it seemed that this nothingness produced a new substance, thick and clogged, where vast metropolises and buildings could be seen through the fog—a yellow, viscous fog that stuck to creatures and things while the sky opened and let in harmful rays.

  “Nothingness is not emptiness,” said Solon. “From the void come dreams, fullness proceeds from nothingness, stifling and killing us.”

  “How could we have lost this war?” asked Tagore.

  “The first murder is never the first,” said Father François.

  “The world was not ready for the fiction of fictions,” said Petrus.

  “It was a beautiful dream, though,” said Father François. “A tale without a chapel, a story without a Church.”

  “Who wants to chart their own destiny when others can choose it for them?” asked Petrus.

  And all at once, the time had come to say goodbye, the way it always comes, too soon, and there is no way to be prepared for it, because it is difficult to live well, but even harder to die well. It is autumn, November, the most beautiful month, because everything is decaying with beauty and dying with grace—and this loss, which means that everything perishes, leaving in its wake the fervor of an ephemeral sparkling, is the very thing that we call love. And so it is that in these hours, when everything is declining, the last Book makes itself known, the most precious of all, the only one that matters to the living and the dead. I cannot describe to you precisely what was in the heart of those who were about to die, but you must know that on the face of the little French girl, who was also a little Spanish girl, there were once dark little veins, and now there was not a trace of them, and Petrus pointed this out, mumbling something only Father François could hear: in the final hour of loving.

  The elf took a dusty bottle from his bundle.

  “This one picked me,” he said.

  On the label, decayed with moisture, one could read:

  1918 – Petrus – Grand Vin

  Need I tell you that the moment they all drank from the crystal glasses—miraculously preserved in the idiot’s bundle—the last wine of this last day, strange figures appeared on the surface of the evil waters?

  Wild grasses upon the lake.

  END OF THE FOUR BOOKS

  OF THE PRESENT TIME

  LANDSCAPES

  There have been two major landscapes in this story—the cellar at Yepes, on the one hand; the harsh, poetic lands of Burgundy, the Abruzzo, the Aubrac, Ireland, and Extremadura, on the other.

  If the cellar attracted pilgrims among winemakers and caused ghosts to appear, it is because the vine and the dead both participate in the great story of the world—and what better metaphor is there for this than that of voyagers carrying the elixir of fables into the laboratory of the novel?

  Finally, if all the protagonists of this story grew up in lands of solitude and the mind, it was because everything is born of the earth and the sky, and everything decomposes when that native poetry is forgotten—as Alejandro de Yepes and Luis Álvarez had once found out.

  I shall always maintain was the motto of the mists and of the castillo at Yepes. What is there to do in this life other than maintain the magic of a story of phantoms and roses?

  NOVEL

  Quand il n’est pas songe, le roman est mensonge—When it is not a dream, the novel is a lie, said a writer whom Petrus may meet someday.

  The spirits of the world are no different from those of the novel—consequently, the writer who holds the pen holds, in the ink, the totality of what was and of what will be. If the first elf to have crossed the bridge of mists went to Yepes, it was because he wanted to reach the limits of reality, the heart of the strange stronghold where the borders between lands and the mind are abolished. And if the first elf to have opted for a human life also went to the poetic land of Extremadura, it was because my pen had decided so, and my dream, and the totality of the world to which my kind give their voice.

  Ultimately, I also included phantoms and wine, because everyone is heir to a story that they must make their own, something which, as we know, would be most compatible with the magnanimity of a good reserve vintage.

  THE APOCALYPSE ACCORDING TO PETRUS

  The idiot, given his blindness, can see far into the future; given his heart, he knows space and time; given his mind, the layers and alluvia of reality; it is because of him that all have gathered here, because he is the servant of stories and I decided it would be so.

  Petrus knew the power of hope and the inexorability of the fall, the grandeur of resistance and the eternity of war, the power of dreams and the perpetuity of battles—in short, he knew that life is only what happens in the interstices between disasters. There are no better friends than those who despair, no more valiant soldiers than the adepts of dreams, no more brave knights of wonder than unbelievers and drinkers, when faced with the apocalypse.

  Proof of this is the words he said at the end, when everyone was standing by the black water, and the humans and elves who had not drunk the thousand-year-old tea were dying in the
arms of those they loved.

  We have lost the battle, but time does not stop with this defeat—thus, I am destined to continue the novel of this strange country of war and dreams which we call the life of humans and of elves.

  CHRONOLOGY

  4,000,000 B.C.

  Birth of the Pavilion of the Mists.

  100,000 B.C.

  First decline of the mists.

  20,000 B.C.

  Birth of the first bridge in Nanzen.

  First regeneration of the mists.

  1400

  Beginning of the second decline of the mists.

  1501

  First definitive passage of an elf into the world of humans.

  Beginning of two centuries of regeneration of the mists.

  1710

  A hare elf from Katsura (Gustavo Acciavatti to humans) is elected councilor to the upper chamber.

  1750

  Beginning of the third decline of the mists.

  1770

  A hare elf from Ryoan (the future Aelius) becomes head of the gardeners of the Council.

  1800

  Petrus arrives in Katsura.

  Gustavo is elected Head of the Council, a boar elf from Katsura (Tagore to humans) is appointed Guardian of the Pavilion.