The teacher, Mlle. Bonis, noticed my reaction and, as soon as she thought I was ready, she gave me books that I could read on my own, books that made sense of the lessons the class was learning on the blackboard. My parents used to say they never knew where it had come from, but I seemed to be aware straightaway of the importance of books and words. The connection between the fantastical pictures illustrating the story and the images the words suggested in my head.
By the age of ten, I was reading Dumas, de Maupassant, and abridged versions of Victor Hugo’s works. Very often, when my work on the farm was done, I would run up the path through the woods to sit reading on a hard chair in the village library in the corner of the mairie. I can still recall vividly the terrible shock I had while reading a passage by Giono, in which a man was killed by a storm. Lightning “planted a golden tree between his shoulders.” The image has been imprinted in my mind ever since, both as a picture that is as beautiful as it is horrifying, and as a monument to the immense power of words.
I kept it quiet, but I wanted to be a teacher myself, just like Mlle. Bonis.
I feel him here all the time now. Pierre. He is at my back, in the vulnerable hollow at the base of my spine that acts as a warning sensor.
Why has he chosen to come back? After all these years, why now?
So typical of Pierre.
Always here, behind me, at my side: a presence beyond the familiars of the house, the well-known shapes and voices from the past that live benignly alongside me. Odd noises are disturbing now, and I am unsettled by voices when I know it is only the wind in the trees. My skin prickles as if a change has occurred but is not yet completely revealed.
Finally, four days after Pierre’s first visitation, when he hadn’t reappeared, I allowed my shoulders to drop. It was when I began to relax, of course, that he returned. This time he was standing by the hearth in the kitchen, quiet as you like.
I was making bread, which I don’t do so often now, as the girl brings me bread from the bakery every two days. But I had a sudden craving for the bread that Mémé Clémentine and Maman used to make, when there was a brick bread oven at the end of the cottages. Into the mixing bowl they’d put a fistful of dough kept back from the previous batch; they called it the spirit of the bread, so there was continuity, a link down the years and generations, living and breathing in the yeasty pillows of the new loaves.
I was at the table, arms floured, kneading, and sad that there was no spirit of the bread to be placed inside, when Pierre strolled in again.
He didn’t follow me this time, just stayed where he was, hands in pockets, guilty smile playing about his lips. A cut bottom lip, I noticed, as if he’d been in a scrap, which he often was. This was the Pierre who set snares in the woods and caught rabbits and larks with sticks and twine: the clever, grinning ten-year-old boy who provided the meat for Maman’s herb-laced casseroles. The look on her face when he presented her with a fat animal or string of dead birds was beatific, like the face of the Virgin Mary at church, but she never knew that for every one he gave her, he had sold two to the restaurant at the foot of the hill and spent the money on cigarettes: real cigarettes, not the rubbish made of dried clematis rolled in leaves, which most of the village boys learned to puff on.
Head down, eyes almost closed, I scuttled past him down the few steps to the hall and into the sitting room, scrabbled in the drawer next to the bed, and drew out my rosary. Holy Mary, Mother of God. Bless us and keep us.
The third time he came, he was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes in the morning. I was still bleary, emerging from sleep. But there he was, standing by the side of the bed, waiting for me to rouse myself.
I knew for certain then that Pierre, in the guise of the unsettling child he once was, had come back for good. He was staring at me mockingly, wordlessly, as if to make sure I had understood that there should be no mistake about it. His fingers were playing with the smooth twigs and the twine he used to make his most effective traps.
Chapter 10
At that stage, it was only a wisp of suspicion, but it was the first time I had ever had reason to feel it about Dom. There had been bad times with other men, but never with Dom. He was different. I trusted him absolutely, in every way. Obviously, there was an element of disappointment in this small intrusion of reality. But at this stage, it would be more accurate to call it a dread of disappointment rather than the fact of it.
So, when I started asking questions, it was in the spirit of wanting to be proved wrong. I knew that in pressing him I risked one of his cold moods, but it wasn’t fair of him to expect me never to be curious about his ex-wife. She was part of who he was, for better or worse.
“Are you still in touch with Rachel?”
It was a few mornings after the lunch at the Durands’. The hilltop lay on the cloud like a lushly vegetated island, long and low on a spumy sea. On the other side of the valley a village high on the Grand Luberon emerged in golden light from the same cloud waves, so that the great fortified walls appeared as seafront buildings.
The question clearly irritated him, as I had known it would. “In touch with Rachel? No.”
I searched his face, the frown, the eyes, which avoided mine, staring past me at the floor, at the wall, and only then finding the great vista on the other side of the window.
I couldn’t help but pursue it. “No, not really . . . or no, not at all?”
Again, a beat lost.
“No, I’m not in contact with her.”
“But you know where she is?”
Just the tiniest fraction of a second. “Yes.”
“What does she do?”
“What is this?”
“Just . . . curious.”
“But why are you asking?” A flash of anger now, with a sarcastic bite. “Have you overheard me phoning her, found some texts between us, or—God!—perhaps you think I’m still in love with her!”
“Of course not.”
There were so many other questions: How long were you together? How did you meet? What’s she like? Is she anything like me? Why did you split up? Whose fault was it? What was so bad that it has hurt you so much?
But the look he gave me before he walked out of the room ensured they would remain unasked. Don’t go there, it said. I asked you not to. You promised.
Before the incident with the woman at the Durand party, it never occurred to me that I might be jealous. I thought I knew as much as I needed to about Rachel, and accepted that she was a part of Dom’s past, without wanting to know more.
But from that day on, it seemed Rachel was constantly there: hiding unacknowledged in the background of stories Dom told me; beside him in the pictures that reinforced his memories; informing his opinions; smiling inside his silences.
I brought her on myself, of course. I alone allowed her into my mind; I can’t blame Dom for that. Dom did not talk about her. It was not as if I had moved into the house they shared. I was not living surrounded by her old belongings, or even their shared household items. Her hands had probably touched his books and pictures, but that was the extent of it. (Her hands on him, though; that was a different, altogether trickier, matter.)
But it was not as though I was condemned to sleep on sheets or walk on rugs that she had chosen, or wonder at her taste in wallpaper. There was no eating from her forks, taking food from her plates, sipping from her glasses and cups that would have underscored how far I had come in and taken her place.
Surely, though, it was only natural to want to know their story. It was precisely because he would not talk about Rachel that I found myself wondering more and more about her.
Who was it who said that what is hidden or cannot be said grows more powerful? “I told my wrath, my wrath did end . . . I told it not, my wrath did grow.”
I remember now: Blake. “A Poison Tree.”
PART II
Chapter 1
They say this region was once under the ocean, many millions of years ago, that the rocks
were shaped by the tides, and the stones contain the outlines of forgotten sea creatures from the dawn of time. I would say there are days when all history stands still and all the spirits gather.
You can feel it when the air in the valley is so hot it ripples the horizon. The blue hills rise and fall in waves, a mirage of the sea, and the breezes rush and expire like rollers as they form and collapse on distant shores.
Bénédicte’s voice breaks here. She takes some deep breaths. The audible suck of air into her lungs is imitated by the pull and hiss of the tape moving through the recording machine.
This is important. She must go on.
She must remember it all, not only the bad. She must not let herself be defined by the worst, not when there was so much that was good, and there is so much to teach.
After Pierre came back, I knew I had to find a way to ground myself in the present. Forget the past. What was real now was bad enough.
There was silence when I opened up the cottages, four in all, to assess the condition of the damp and the cracks. Spiders and scorpions rule the cool, musty emptiness, and dead insects crunch underfoot. The human inhabitants are long gone, to the towns, to the bad, to the sky. No guests come to stay. The bread oven is a locked storeroom, stacked with pieces of wood and iron that might once have come in useful.
Above the main house, the roof is falling in. The walls are weakening and the worst damage is in the stairwell, the walls that form the height of the house where the staircase winds up to the bedrooms. The staircase itself is breaking apart; the cracks in the banister wall and between steps are as wide as my thumb. Plaster dust has begun to seep out in thin streams like sand in an upended hourglass. One day, the whole staircase, the four half-flights up from the kitchen, is going to give way in a roaring tumble of bricks and plaster and tiles.
I have moved most of my possessions down to the ground floor. All that remains in the rooms above are wood-wormed cupboards and iron bedsteads that are impossible to move, since the screws that hold the struts and sides together have rusted so badly they will not turn. The beds that once held the family are fused black skeletons, too large to fit through the doorways. Abandoned, and trapped.
What a big, rambunctious family it was, not only the five of us but all the others who lived here with us. I miss them. I miss them all so badly sometimes, even Pierre.
The house is already full of ghosts, friendly ghosts. Wherever I look, in every corner is the outline, in my mind’s eye, of a person who once occupied it, of an object that once stood there, right back to Grandfather Gaston and Mémé Clémentine. Papa so strong and silent and hardworking, not a particularly tall man, but, like many of the subsistence farmers here, wiry and tenacious. Our gentle maman with her soft, wide face and the smile that lit up our enclosed little world on the hillside. The tenant families. Old Marcel in the sheepfold. My friend Arielle. And here am I, the only one left, the one who was so clear about where her duty lay and what tradition demanded.
Outside, the figs fall, the wasps drone at the sugar bursting on the ground and on the branch, the scents of summer are overblown in the heat.
When I was a child, we were lucky in so many ways. It’s only now I realize how poor we were and always had been. Such was the pride of the Lincels. Set apart on our land with our buildings and tenants, the family seemed like ruling nobility, to us at least.
In summer, the hillside was a kind of paradise.
By mid-June, great, white candelabras of blossom opened on the catalpa tree, and waved acid-green leaves like flays against the clean, new blue sky to mark the return of the long, hot months. Mulberries dropped from a soaring tree by the sheepfold into an obscene river of plenty. Arielle and I would cram the fruit into our mouths, letting the watery sweetness burst on our lips and tongues and stain our faces and hands purple. The plum trees and olives on the terraces below the main house were loud with birdsong, drowning out the first feeble cheeps from the cicadas.
In the mornings, we woke early to a warm shock of the brightness that suddenly filled the room as the shutters were thrown open, and the deep blue of the morning outside. Hearts singing with the knowledge that there were no school lessons to detain us, we tumbled downstairs to grab whatever was on the breakfast table.
A splash of coffee in boiled milk, a hunk of bread dipped into it, and we were out at our chores while the air was still cool. Later, as the hillside heated up and duties were done, we were off and away, out across the tough, hardy grass that soon scorched to hay, into the infinite sunshine. The hills were so blue it seemed they had soaked up the sky. Eagles and hawks hovered, riding the thermals, puppets suspended on invisible wires. The thyme and rosemary and lavender patches released their musky incense. Tender puffs of wind were silken on the skin: a gorgeous vent roux from the southeast.
As children, we spent whole days in the woods above and below the house, collecting treasures, climbing trees, watching the insects: complicated towns of ants, scarab beetles, copper-green rose beetles, and the hummingbird-like hawk moths.
Marthe and I once sat for an hour, observing a huge hornet dragging a cicada up the stony wall of the courtyard barn. Twice it almost reached the top but then fell at the last obstacle with a scratchy flop at Marthe’s feet.
We shared a capacity to stay very still and just look, and touch, and smell. Toward the end of summer, we would lie facedown in the courtyard. After the brief, hard rainstorms of late August, the earth was caramel-sweet and spicy, and the warm, smitten flesh of fruit gave off a smoke of incense. I may be imagining this, of course. Perhaps memory has rendered these interludes larger-than-life, but it’s true we did spend hours simply looking and inhaling, feeling life slowly, in close-up, burrowing into our surroundings, eating vanilla pastries with dirt on our fingers.
Marthe loved to talk about the scents and smells of the farm. My sixth sense was never as acute as hers (as I said earlier, my imagination has always been poor, which leads me to worry that the present situation is indeed precisely as I fear) but I could almost always smell what she smelled. Perhaps there was a family nose we both inherited that enabled us to read aromas, some small quirk of nasal membrane or nerve setting that provided an extra sensitivity. Old Marcel up by the sheepfold always claimed he had no sense of smell at all. Well, that went without saying; there’s no way anyone else would have chosen to live in that fetid, dungy quarter.
Marthe wasn’t blind then, or if she was, she never said.
Of course, there were many other hours (more hours than any child these days will ever know) spent working: gathering fruit and picking vegetables; washing and scrubbing; digging and clearing irrigation channels; sewing and mending for us girls as soon as we could hold a needle, and knitting in winter; running errands and taking messages between our farm and the others and the village at the top of the hill. That was thirsty work, in this country of drought. In the summer, we rushed back to Les Genévriers for great, gasping drafts of the pure, cold spring water.
It was precious stuff. Some years, in other hills to the south, the wells would run dry by May and the locations of springs had to be kept secret. At times like that, so it was said, the men used wine for shaving, though none of our menfolk would ever admit to such a thing, even if it was the rankest brew.
In any case, we were lucky. There was always water at Les Genévriers: there was even said to be an underground river beneath the house, though this was never proved.
What we had for certain, linked to our abundant water, was progress. The pride of the hamlet was a large brass tap in the lower kitchen-cum-laundry. My mother and the other women of Les Genévriers no longer had to traipse up to the village with their bundles to sit at the communal washing place, that mysterious, echoing stone room open to the street where mothers and grandmothers gathered to gossip around the long, pitted trough.
It helped, of course, that the house was situated on a hillside, so the pipe from the spring could be laid downhill, ending in that magnificent tap. When it first
went in, groups of neighbors gathered around it for weeks after, marveling at the engineering and ingenuity. When we were children, our showers were a hose attached to that tap and hung out of the kitchen window over the alleyway between the big house and the row of workers’ cottages. The wastewater ran down the hill and fed one of the vegetable patches. For other, more personal ablutions, there was a toilet built in a kind of sentry box attached to the side of the barn.
There was something else that was special about Les Genévriers. As our father had told us, “There’s treasure here.” Right from the time when he first started telling us stories: “A legend says so, there is hidden treasure.” It was a subject he particularly enjoyed, and the ensuing conversation would be a variation of the following:
“What kind of treasure?” we all wanted to know.
“No one can say for certain. Most people say it’s a cache of gold coins. But it might be jewelry, or Roman swords and cups. The Romans were here, you know.”
“So why haven’t we been looking for it?” asked Pierre, skeptical from a young age.
“Why do you assume we haven’t?” countered our father.
“What if someone has been and stolen it?” asked Marthe. That was always her concern, and probably well-founded.
“It might have been, but surely we would have noticed the hole where it was dug up.”
“So it’s buried!”
“That’s most likely. It must be in the ground, or beneath the stones of the house.”
But why? But how? But when? And so we would go on, round and round in circles of perplexity as the light faded. The oil lamps would be lit. Inside or out, the method of generating light was the same. In Marseille and other great cities, they had le gaz, but we children had never seen it. We relied on the lamps, which drew flying insects and moths to butt hopelessly against the glass, and candles set in jam jars, in which they finally succeeded in killing themselves.
The Lantern Page 5
