The Poisoning Angel

by Jean Teulé

She followed him outside and asked: ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Yann Viltansoù. What’s yours?’

  It was his turn to look at her. Thunderflower’s absolute perfection had something about it that froze him in his tracks. The extreme charm she exuded captured Viltansoù’s heart instantly. ‘Have we seen each other in our dreams?’ he asked.

  ‘How heavily you’re breathing,’ she said.

  ‘That’s because it’s hot,’ he replied, in the cold night.

  ‘Gulls, gulls, bring our husbands and our lovers home to us …’

  The following afternoon, along a beach made of white sand and broken shells that looked like crushed bones, Yann Viltansoù was passing the time by singing the song of the sailors’ companions under his breath: ‘Gulls, gulls …’

  Thunderflower, her dainty black buckled shoes in one hand, was walking barefoot alongside the former stable boy, who had had enough ‘of bedding down in the horses’ manger to look after the animals’.

  Now dressed in seaman’s clothing from several countries – baggy breeches like an English explorer, a red belt like a Spanish fisherman, a Dutch trader’s tarred hat – he bent down to show the girl from Plouhinec how to gather razor clams, known here as ‘knife handles’.

  ‘When the tide is out, you sprinkle salt on the sand. The creature thinks the tide’s coming in. It wriggles up to the surface, and you grab it. I’ve also found you two river pearls.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Thunderflower, gazing out to sea lost in thought, felt an overwhelming emptiness inside her. The sight of this sterile infinity brought her to tears. Over there, the islands looked like sleeping whales and nearer to the shoreline, richly coloured rocky islets were like jewels set in the silvered foam of the waves. When the waves were high, shafts of light criss-crossed them in shimmering ripples, and cormorants glided into the bed of the wind. Their pulley-like cry was an answer to Yann’s secret concern: ‘Will we catch any game from the sea tonight?’

  Some men came towards Viltansoù, who raised his hand to his hat in greeting. One had a bare torso reminiscent of one of those wooden logs the sea throws up on the beach. A tall, bald individual, an incongruous mixture of eunuch and slaughterman, was conversing with an old man with lots of white curls about the way to save a drowning man.

  ‘Might as well save their breath,’ moaned Yann, examining the sea through his spyglass.

  The waves took on a violet colour where there was seaweed underneath the surface. There was now a mixture of reflections and shifting light. In the distance, the boats went by, their sails furtively bleeding in the light of the setting sun. Some women arrived on donkeys. On the customs men’s path, bordered by thistles and brambles, a cow was grazing the granite. A wise woman foretold the future from the dance of the waters. Men knelt at the sight of the star of Venus. They were dressed in berlinge, a fabric of wool and hemp, out of which they made their yellowish brown waistcoats and breeches. Viltansoù observed the movement of ships in the distance, and noted sudden changes in the atmosphere. The noise of thunder shook the air. It grew suddenly dark and the wind whipped up the sea. Lightning flashed a zigzag course, and a bolt struck the coast.

  By now, sky and sea were indistinguishable. Yann smiled, seeing the vessels suddenly headed for disaster. ‘Come to me!’ he told them. ‘It’s a game.’

  Leaving the sand to climb back up to the coastal path that skirted the edge of the cliff, Viltansoù, with Thunderflower in his wake, hung a heavy copper and glass signal lamp between the horns of the waiting cow. Lighting it, he explained to the girl from Plouhinec, ‘I’m burning coal because when the weather’s bad, full of rain and fog, it gives a brighter light than oil burners, which get dull and are less visible on the horizon.’

  Faced with the puzzled look of this splendid woman from Morbihan, who seemed not quite to understand what was going on, Yann from Côtes-du-Nord said by way of justification: ‘A ducal prerogative has given us the droit de bris, permission to help ourselves from wrecks washed up on the shore. But since natural shipwrecks beside the coast are fairly rare, we have to help destiny along a bit. Long live organised fate, and shoo!’ he cried to the cow, which began to move, notwithstanding the weight of the gleaming lantern bowing its neck.

  While the bovine hoofs trampled the stones, Thunderflower recalled, ‘Round the dunes where I’m from, when we want to find the body of someone who’s drowned, we put a lighted candle on top of a loaf and set it adrift on the water. The corpse is found beneath the place where the loaf stops.’

  Viltansoù was mocking. ‘If we did that here the shore would be one big bakery.’

  The wind blew the flame and harried the glass in the lantern. The sea grew increasingly angry. Yann was watching it from the top of a rock.

  ‘There! Over there! A boat’s coming! Get the cow going! Oh, I did the right thing yesterday, going to pray to Our-Lady-of-Hatred!’

  The bovine lighthouse made its way along the coast. The non-stop swaying of its head sent shimmering waves of light back and forth at regular intervals across the water. On board the vessel, the crew were deceived by the light, which they believed they could follow. It was the weather for a tragedy; shipwrecks seemed to be written in the stars. The former stable boy called to the ship, ‘This way! Come! The way is clear and it ends in your death.’

  Beneath her soaking wet headdress trimmed with lace, Thunderflower was licking her lips. The ocean was huge and fearsome, forming peaks and troughs, sometimes deep as the grave. The waters were raging so uncontrollably that it was as if the poles had lost their magnets. Viltansoù who, spyglass to his eye, could make out the vain efforts of the sailors on the bridge, gave precise information regarding the time and place of the collision.

  ‘Ten minutes from now, on the Maiden’s Teeth rocks.’

  And indeed, the ship was drifting towards the reef, with no hope of avoiding disaster.

  ‘Everyone must perish,’ said Yann.

  ‘Yes, oh, yes,’ sighed the girl from Plouhinec.

  Beneath the cliffs, the locals ran to hide behind the rocks across from the reefs indicated by Yann. Armed with hooked poles and ropes, they crouched down to wait, their eyes fixed on the dark waters and the sea’s gifts with rapacious greed. Suddenly there was an enormous crack right in front of them, and splinters of boards flew about. On the Maiden’s Teeth, a series of rocks where seaweed rotted, the ship had impaled itself as on a knife blade, which had sliced it like a fruit. And indeed, hundreds of thousands of oranges came tumbling from the gaping bow. Rushing towards the broken vessel came crowds of women and children with bags and baskets. Like a horn of plenty, the wreck was spreading a flotsam of luminous exotic fruit. Thunderflower came down quickly and filled her turned-up apron several times, making a pile all to herself on the sand. A wealthy trader from Saint-Brieuc, who owned the ship, had fallen overboard and was drowning, shouting for help in Breton: ‘Va Doué, va sicouret!’ (‘My God, help me!’)

  ‘Of course we will. That’s what we’ve come for,’ guffawed the old man with the full white locks, beside the slaughterman with the face of a eunuch, who thought it perfectly fair to go and disembowel the trader and grab his belt, doubtless stuffed with gold coins.

  Driven on by the demon of pillage, the coastal peasants hurled themselves furiously on the remains of the ship. They clubbed down the wretched survivors who were stretching out their arms to them for help, stripped them, and mocked the drowned ship’s boys who had been at table in the hold below.

  ‘Whatever can have made those children so ill?’

  ‘They’d just eaten their bacon soup.’

  ‘Maybe there was something wrong with the meat.’

  Many of the sailors were thrown into the sea, sinking to the depths of a pitiless grave that instantly forgot their names. At the bottom of this natural abyss, the rocks were turning red. The play of the mists and foam made them appear to be moving. The women also climbed aboard port and starboard. They exuded a mad sexuality, cla
mbering up phallic ropes wearing no undergarments, their skirts hoicked up on their bare thighs. Even bolder and more fearless than the men, they reached the height of cruelty with the last survivors, forcing themselves on them.

  ‘Go on, take me, that’ll be a change from a cabin boy’s arse. And don’t say no, or else guess where the hook of my stick’ll be going.’

  On the bridge, their cuckolded husbands were getting drunk. When they had consumed their fill of wines and brandy, they downed a whole chest of medicines, which killed some and sent the others into convulsions. The sky was filled with an apocalyptic tangle of cries. On the beach, Thunderflower witnessed all this without getting involved. It’s not my area of expertise, she thought. But she watched with relish as a bottle that had escaped from the wreck floated towards her, and she grasped hold of it. How well arranged life is: on the litre bottle filled with white powder, the girl from Plouhinec recognised the label, which was like the one on the tiny vial bought in the pharmacy at Pontivy. As Viltansoù came back on to the sand with his arms full of boxes, she asked, ‘Can you read, Yann? What’s written on here?’

  ‘There? Arsenic.’

  ‘Reusenic’h? Why were they travelling with that?’

  ‘In the bowels of a ship, what people fear most is rabbits or rats, which could gnaw at the wood of the holds and sink them in the middle of the ocean. And that would be a shame – for us! Come on, throw that useless thing away and come and help yourself from the wreck as well.’

  Thunderflower placed the bottle upright snugly between her lovely rounded breasts.

  ‘I’ve got my trophy already.’

  Then as Viltansoù, raising his eyes, neared her pile of oranges on his way back to the ship, she put her order in as if he were going to the grocer’s: ‘If there’s any sugar, bring me some.’

  Thunderflower was making jam. On the previous evening, Yann had found sugar (brown, to the Morbihan woman’s amazement) and had also brought back a cask of rum – an alcohol of whose existence Hélène Jégado had been unaware. She poured a little of it over the deseeded citrus fruit quarters and the zest, boiling in cane sugar and water.

  It was inside Viltansoù’s curious dwelling that she was stirring away with a wooden spoon amid the sugary fragrances, and singing in shrill tones. In actual fact the house was the upturned back half of the hull of an inshore fishing boat, which had been wrecked one night, sheared across as if by a razor on the Witch’s Fangs archipelago.

  Once pulled with ropes to the top of a dune, the upturned hold of the old tub henceforth formed the curved roof of a most individual home. Daylight came in through the portholes. Yann had covered up the open part of the wreck with boards from another vessel’s bridge, placed upright. Then he had cut an opening to put in the mahogany door from a captain’s cabin. There it was, squeaking as Viltansoù came in through it.

  There was no floor at Yann’s. When it rained, the ground ran with water. For this reason he had not put a sailor’s mattress on the ground. He had preferred to extend the triangular sail of a fishing boat horizontally in the air like a hammock. Through the eyelets in the three corners of the jib, he had stretched ropes to three places in the shelter. Viltansoù’s eyes went from the sail to the girl from Plouhinec, who was pouring her orange jam into jars, turning them over as soon as they were closed.

  ‘You can taste it in a moment.’

  ‘No, it’s only you I’m hungry for.’

  While the jam was cooling, Thunderflower’s lover was growing hotter. ‘The seductive power you exert is so sudden and so commanding. The enchantment of your smile is even more disturbing. A pollen of sensuality floats around you. You perfume the air.’

  Goodness, the wrecker was growing sentimental. He went on, ‘Your eyes are like blue flowers in milk’ and that kind of nonsense, before suggesting: ‘You know, we’d be comfortable, just the two of us, hidden in that sail.’

  All the furnishings here had been looted in various shipwrecks: a whalebone crucifix was nailed up beside a clock whose glass was broken, above an anchor with its rope for decoration. The portrait of a stern Irish sea captain, complete with a hole made by a hooked pole, appeared to be making a disapproving face. Was it because, across from him, the sail was beginning to move without his orders? The white sail rocked as the entwined lovers tumbled like pebbles on the shore. One moment it wrapped them round completely like a cocoon, the next it unfolded, and grew taut, tossing them up into the air. The girl from Morbihan lobbed her cook’s headdress, her hairpins and her dress over her head. She straddled Viltansoù’s bare hips as he lay on his back, her long wavy blond hair tumbling down to the points of her breasts. The wrecker cupped them in his killer’s hands. This girl was his favourite shape. With her pert bust, she danced, seated on him, moving her navel, and his eyes went spinning with delight.

  As Yann’s gaze became more vacant, she began to sway, casting the flying net of her caresses around the young man, who turned her on to her knees. She: arms stretched wide apart, holding on to the eyelets of the tack and sheet as her guitar-shaped bottom burst into melodies. He: clinging to Thunderflower’s sides. Into the swing of things now, she moved her hips from right to left, backwards and forwards, then Viltansoù began to cry out Jesus’s name again and again.

  ‘Will you try my orange jam, Yann? There’s a secret ingredient in it.’

  ‘I don’t eat jam.’

  The dawn mist was licking itself like a she-cat emerging from its dreams when Viltansoù woke up. He patted the area around him with his hands, and was surprised not to feel anyone there. Sitting on the edge of the hanging sail, he noticed that his marine anchor had disappeared as well, and that the door of his half-hull house was standing wide open. As he finished dressing among the reeds of a dune at the foot of a high escarpment that summer morning, he noted that little remained of the vessel loaded with citrus fruit, guided to its destruction two evenings before. Almost everything had been looted, carried away: cargo, furnishings, portholes, sails for making into rainproof garments or covers, and practically all the wood, which would serve for heating or building. The ship that, in the storm, had sought the port of Saint-Brieuc was now nothing but a washed-up fish skeleton.

  Viltansoù heard someone calling him from near the wreck: ‘Are you coming?’ It was Thunderflower, sitting naked on the furthest rock of the Maiden’s Teeth. Yann was concerned for her.

  ‘Be careful you don’t topple over. There’s a huge abyss behind you.’

  ‘Come …’

  On the cliff top, the two Norman wigmakers were walking along the coastal path in front of their horse, holding its reins to get the covered cart to go between the spiny thickets. The shorter of the two griped, ‘You can shay what you like, but I’m telling you that the reputation of Breton bone fixersh is vashtly overeshtimated. You can’t tell me it’sh normal to have a shoulder like thish.’

  ‘But the healer promised it would sort itself out.’

  ‘Yearsh later? Look, he’sh put my arm back the wrong way round.’

  It was true that the joints of the limb formed unusual angles.

  ‘And it’sh not at all practical for cutting hair.’

  The speech defect resulted from the hoof kick to his jaw received at Bubry, which had been equally badly set.

  ‘It’sh annoying me. Would it be all right with you if we untied the horshe and I had a little resht?’

  ‘Ash you wish,’ joked his tall colleague with the one eye.

  Thunderflower spotted the two Normans unharnessing their outfit up above, then looked down to watch Viltansoù coming towards her. He jumped from one rock to another, approaching her in the same way one falls in love, aware it is a risky journey.

  ‘You madcap, the men who associate with you will soon lose their way. Ah, you’re leading me a merry dance, you enchantress.’

  ‘Come …’

  He was helpless to resist the call of the nymph, seated gracefully, legs crossed to one side. The reflections of the light on the waters p
layed along her ankles and calves, more than knee-deep in the sea, drawing scales on them, while her feet, heels together but toes apart, looked like a fishtail.

  ‘Goodnessh, a shiren.’ Thus the portly wigmaker, with his arm making the shape of a figure five above the cliff as he pointed.

  ‘A siren? You poor thing, you’re becoming more and more Breton since that hoof-kick in the head,’ moaned the one-eyed man, turning towards the sea.

  Down below on the rocks, surrounded by the mirrors and chandeliers of the waves, Thunderflower held out her hand to her lover, singing in an unearthly voice, ‘Come …’ In her slow, clear voice there crept a serpent, like the rope that, as a joke no doubt, the woman from Morbihan was winding round Yann’s neck. Then, behind her back, she gave a push to the anchor she had stolen from him. Viltansoù swayed, ‘Aaaargh,’ before plummeting head first to the bottom of the abyss. Large bubbles burst on the water’s surface; the tall wigmaker was dumbstruck. Thinking he must be seeing things, he rubbed his good eye. ‘That can’t be happening. It’s just not possible.’

  ‘Ha, Monsieur Viltansoù didn’t like jam.’

  On her rock, Thunderflower resumed the pose of a mermaid dwelling in the sea.

  Her lovely eyes were languid – beautiful, sad, the last of her line – as she ran her fingers like a comb’s teeth through her sunbeam hair.

  ‘No, it can’t be real.’ The one-eyed man couldn’t believe what he saw. ‘Sirens don’t exist!’ He raised his hand and brought it down hard, unfortunately on the horse’s rump. It kicked its hind legs in the air. The short wigmaker was relieved to be standing by the beast’s nostrils but, as it brought its hoofs down on the ground again, the horse slipped on the cliff edge. It tried to save itself with its forelegs, only in the end to topple backwards in a shower of pebbles. The tall Norman, seeing their horse skinned and already rotting, white among the rocks, yelled out, ‘I’m growing heartily sick of Brittany!’