by Jean Teulé
Thunderflower stood up to join her father by the chapel where the patched-up ladder was propped up under a tall window.
‘Papa, before you climb up, have a look at what I’ve got in the bag you gave me when I was a little girl. There’s a bit of tobacco for your pipe – I found it in Port-Louis. That’s where I’ve come from and I’m worn out. It’s from the colonies, I can’t remember where.’
‘Thank you, Hélène,’ replied Jean Jégado, after filling the bowl of his old Morlaix clay pipe and taking an initial puff. ‘That’s tobacco, is it?’
‘I think so. An army doctor, who smoked a lot of it, left it on a table.’
‘It’s a tobacco that makes you drunk. How are you, Hélène?’
‘In general I’m at risk of being disgusted with myself. My path is strewn with corpses. I have so little taste for the world of the living.’
‘Daughter, in recent years, a priest from Auray – the abbé Olliveau, I think he called himself – police from Morbihan, a handsome widower from Lorient and, just yesterday, soldiers from Port-Louis have come asking me whether I know your whereabouts. Apart from the handsome widower, they’ve all painted you as a girl for whom hanging’s too good.’
‘Oh, they’re not wrong. People can think what they want about me. A handsome widower from Lorient too, you say?’
‘Hélène, when you were a child, did you kill your mother? Things have been so bad with me since she’s been gone. Could you be the cause of all my suffering, the most implacable of enemies, worse even than Marianne, the hysterical slayer of kings?’
‘Still a monarchist, Papa, though you’re living on hand-outs? Here, I’ve brought you a leftover piece of the cake I baked last week in Port-Louis. You can try it up the ladder in front of the window.’
Carrying a pail of water and vinegar with a real sponge floating in it, Jean Jégado climbed the first few rungs, holding on to the uprights and observed, ‘You haven’t answered my question, Hélène.’
With his nobleman’s sword fastened determinedly to his belt, he scaled the ladder with its several branches going off in different directions, as if he were climbing back up his family tree to the familial coat of arms obscured beneath the sea moss. Balancing his pail against the wall, he held on with the hand holding the piece of cake, and his sponge was already washing the top of the church’s principal window. Dribbles of emerald and black were gradually revealing the shape of a vermillion lion on its hind legs, when Jean Jégado heard his daughter confess, ‘Papa, I’m weary of living.’
In straw rotted by a stream of dirty water, she related her moral crisis, sitting on one of the bottom rungs of the ladder so that it would not slip. She was watching peasants spreading the moorland with the run-off from a dung heap. Her back to her father, who was right up high, she confessed, ‘Papa, since my poor mother used to call me Thunderflower, I’ve actually become the Ankou. I can tell you that because you’ll never tell anyone else.’
‘How do you know I won’t?’
‘Try my cake. It’s not too dry, is it, even though it was baked a week ago?’
‘It is a bit, of course, and very sweet, but it’s nice. So, Thunderflower, will you be going to look for Émilie in Guern?’ Jean Jégado added, the pipe in his mouth giving off acrid swirls.
‘No. After what you’ve told me, the police and all that, I’m going to leave the area and cross the stêr an Intel at last.’
At the top of the ladder, Jean began to sweat as he was overtaken by an unquenchable thirst, which he put down to the ‘tobacco’ his daughter had given him. His eyes were red, and not only from the reflections of the vermillion lion in the main window, now partly washed and with the sun shining on it, and a bitterness boiled his stomach. His legs began to flail about. The hashishin up the ladder – not to be confused with the assassin at the foot of the contraption – swayed towards the glass coat of arms, which suddenly imploded.
‘Good, there we are,’ sighed Thunderflower, without looking round as her father went through the window.
It was like the splashing of the water when the Normans’ cart went into the ria d’Étel. The shards of glass flew out in circles.
Jean Jégado entered the church the opposite way from your normal churchgoer. Head first and pointing towards the floor, he passed a Crucifix whose Christ, he thought, looked a bit crafty.
As for Thunderflower, leaving five centimes at the Lorois bridge toll, she emigrated towards Rennes, muttering, ‘My, my, that’s another one. And to think it won’t be the last …’
Vannes
The following day, Ash Wednesday, on a road leading to Vannes, a large woman made of straw covered in rags was being paraded through a village to be burnt in the marketplace. Four thin workmen plus a stocky one with a bare chest, side by side like the five fingers on the hand of a giant, were, together, turning the wheel of fortune on the front of the church, to see what the future had in store.
A priest came out, objecting angrily, ‘Consulting the wheel of fortune is now forbidden by the clergy.’
‘Kant brô, kant illiz, kant parriz, kant kiz …’ (‘A hundred regions, a hundred churches, a hundred parishes, a hundred customs …’), said the giant’s hand by way of justification, spinning the wheel of fortune again, with its twelve little bells, each of which made a different sound.
Next to them, two shopkeepers were discussing the forthcoming municipal elections. ‘So, who will you vote for?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know? That means you’re voting for our rival.’
‘Maybe.’
‘But the man’s a liar.’
‘Oh?’
‘Didn’t he tell you he was Breton?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that’s not true – he comes from Lorient.’
‘And is Lorient not in Brittany?’
‘Oh, there’s no having a sensible conversation with you.’
One of the pair noticed Thunderflower in a black cape with the hood down over her eyes and her bag on her shoulder. She was at a herbalist’s stall, buying a few medicinal plants and looking at the mouldy pancakes on display, which the saleswoman was recommending to her.
‘It’s a remedy for wounds. Look, I scrape off the whitish film that’s grown on the pancake, and slide it into this little jar. You then apply the ointment to a wound. Will you take some of this as well?’
Next the orphan from Plouhinec bought a piece of dried eel, which the fishmonger offered to cut into three. ‘It’ll be easier to chew.’
The straw woman went up in flames. By the time Thunderflower, looking suspiciously innocent, left the village by the coastal route, the fire was not quite out in the pile of ashes.
*
After passing through the rugged, windswept countryside the gallivanting cook rounded a bend in the rutted track and saw the coastal dunes, and the wigmakers at the edge of a piece of land. Rye, oats or buckwheat would be sown there no doubt, but for the moment it was still bare earth. The Normans were on their knees, breaking up clods with the sides of their hands, and planting the Breton hair from the bale. First they folded each long strand in two. Making a hole in the ground with the tip of a finger, they placed the capillary fibre upright in it. The clay was pressed back around the base, and the long hair, duly planted, would begin to wave, reclining and standing up again with the wind. It was beautiful. The watercolour sky was shot through with the shrill cry of the gulls. A butterfly fluttered by, a stemless flower. In the distance a donkey brayed. So much of Nature was in this vignette. The vivid blue sea and yellow sand shifted. Thunderflower admired the order of things and she understood what the Normans were doing. She knelt down beside them at the edge of the field and began pulling hairs out of the bale and planting them in the ground. Silently, the wigmakers turned their soulful eyes on her. Thunderflower spotted the deep nasal wound that the weakly Norman had incurred at the time of the accident with the cart on the Pont du bon Dieu. She opened a pot and, taking the white fo
am on her finger, applied it to the scarred wigmaker.
‘Crampöes mouzee?’ (‘Mould from a pancake?’), he checked.
The one-eyed wigmaker offered the unexpected nurse a bottle of brandy. ‘Gwin-ardant?’
She took a long drink straight from the bottle, then gave each of them a slice of her portion of dried eel.
‘Sili mor?’
In a row from left to right, the Jégado woman, the short wigmaker, and the tall one, chewing the dried eel for a long time, spent the whole afternoon on their knees planting hair without exchanging another word. Before them the ocean was rolling in a bed of golden seaweed. Islets lay on the water like baskets of flowers. A sacred unease was fermenting in the brains of the three hair farmers, longing for the infinite. A smile came over the world, and some graceful sailing boats danced on the horizon. The wind got up. It began to stir the scents of leaves and resin. As evening drew near, at the time the first star rises and work is at a close, countless rocks sprouted among the waves into which the red disc of the sun was sinking. Weary now, the wigmakers put an end to their day’s work and stopped lining up their rows of planted hair. Back by the roadside, they lay down on their fronts in the field, without worrying about dirtying their ruined clothes. Thunderflower went over and did the same. Chins on folded arms, they surveyed their handiwork. Against the backdrop of the setting sun, the wind combed, ruffled and smoothed the field’s hair. With a tall band of sparkling foam behind it, the meadow found its hair parted first on one side, then on the other. It tidied and untidied its hair to the sound of the waves. Thunderflower and the Normans kept the silence. Faced with the hallucinatory scene, the dreams consuming them must have come from a dark place. Wild geese, cormorants, gulls and herons flew swiftly overhead, making for the fields.
Beside a thatched outhouse used for storing the plough and farming implements, a house door slammed shut as if a storm were approaching. The field’s hairpiece was all dishevelled. The two wigmakers were snoring away on the hair bale, near to the chain of their now extinguished lantern. The darkening horizon was echoed in the shape of their folded arms. A sigh deflated Thunderflower’s cheek. A death’s-head moth flew by.
Fww! Fww!
Thunderflower continued along the coast by night, holding in her outstretched hand the end of the chain of the lantern stolen from the wigmakers, which she was turning around above her head. The big glass lantern, like a coastal beacon, cast large regular circles of light. At each revolution the dazzling flame could be heard hissing – Fww! – mixed with the sizzling of the rain that followed, as it changed into streams of white steam. Fww, fww! The rusty links of the chain rubbing together creaked like the squeaky axle of a heavenly cart. Squeak! Squeak!
Soon Hélène Jégado heard a huge cracking behind her, like a nut splitting open, and then the yells of a ship’s crew as they drowned beside a reef. It reminded her of her youth. She did not turn round, but continued on her inexorable way as if hanging on the thread of a star. While the endlessly whirling lamplight washed back and forth over her face, the woman who caused shipwrecks was brushed by the shades of the dead in her mental chaos. Encircled by puffs of smoke rising from her censer in the darkness, pale and tight-lipped, she glanced into the future and saw only despair. Nearby farm-dwellers broke from telling ghost stories to come running out carrying baskets and knives. They passed Thunderflower as they rushed towards a ship that had gone aground.
Late in the afternoon of the next day, still in the rain and seventeen kilometres from Vannes, Thunderflower, who had taken a detour through Auray, pushed open the gate of the cemetery. At twilight, treading between pots of budding geraniums, she was looking for the tomb of Madame Hétel whose last moments she had been forced to miss. Ostensibly seen off by some treacherous soup, the elderly lady with little mirrors on her headdress, the mother-in-law of Dr Doré who had ambitions for the mayorship, had to be there somewhere, but how could she find out where if she could not read?
‘Excuse me, Monsieur, could you show me the way to the family vault of Dr Doré, the mayor?’
‘Doré? But he was never elected. Something to do with an unfortunate dinner party around ten years ago, I think.’
‘Ah? It’s actually his elderly mother-in-law’s grave I’m looking for.’
‘Oh, work it out for yourself,’ said the rich man, who was dressed in fine blue linen and carrying an umbrella, as he went off in the direction of some horses with violet accoutrements pulling a funeral carriage. Beside it were some women wearing mourning hoods with trains. Someone else joined them, weeping copiously. Pensive, Thunderflower sat down with her bag on a soaking wet bench off to one side. The rain was sending streams of mud down her cape and dress, which were dirty from when she had lain down in the field beside the two Normans. She was covered in earth like an idol.
‘Can I help you?’ a man asked. ‘I heard you asking the way to an old lady’s grave. What’s her name?’
‘It’s not important really. Her mirrors stopped twinkling a long time ago.’
‘Have you ever noticed, Madame, that some old ladies’ coffins are nearly as small as children’s? I know what I’m talking about. My wife and I are monumental masons in Vannes – which is where I’m off to now if you have no need of me.’
‘Vannes. That’s where I’m going as well, and I hope to get there before dark,’ sighed Thunderflower, getting up from the bench.
‘On foot, Madame? Would you rather climb up into my cart? The cover would protect you from the bad weather. You’ll catch your death in this rain.’
‘But I’m all muddy. I’ll dirty your seat if—’
‘Pah,’ said the monumental mason, ‘what does that matter? You can dry off and change at our house. If needs be, my wife will make you a gift of some clothes. Here, these are for you,’ he added, handing her three roses taken from a wreath.
The itinerant servant was touched by this. ‘For so many springs, no one has given me flowers to wear on my bodice. Monsieur, you are extremely kind to welcome me in such terms. Since I’m a cook, I will make soupe aux herbes for you, if your wife will allow. That’s my speciality, my triumph. There’s not a soul alive with a bad word to say about it.’
‘Then with pleasure! Off we go. Let us leave this cemetery where there is no future, and the people here are gathered round that fool who disdained to help you. That kind of mortal’s idea of happiness has always made me want to vomit.’
Leaving a half-timbered house in Vannes, under cover of darkness, Thunderflower, dressed in clothes not her own, hurried along a street with a runnel down the middle. Bag over her shoulder, she suddenly heard shouting behind her. People looked up towards a lighted window above a monumental mason’s business. There they saw the jerky silhouettes of a man with both hands at his throat, and a woman clutching her stomach, like a shadow play, as the clouds scudded by overhead.
Rennes
Chantons les amours de Jeanne
Chantons les amours de Jean!
29 December 1849. Death of Albert Rabot. He was nine years old.
Jean aimait Jeanne
Jeanne aimait Jean.
14 April 1850. Death of Joseph Ozanne. He was five years old.
Mais depuis que Jean est l’époux de Jeanne
Jean n’aime plus Jeanne, ni Jeanne Jean.
When on 5 May 1850 Thunderflower arrived at the top of the Lices, in a little square that looked as if it dated from the Middle Ages, she was singing a Breton song from her childhood, and soaked by rain that looked set to go on for ever. The first thing she noticed was the two Normans in the middle, ripping open the mouldering canvas on their last bale of hair. Hurling themselves headlong on their stomachs, they rolled about in the rotting remains of their Celtic hair harvest. They flung grubby balls of lank hair in each other’s faces like dirty snow. Their cracked sabots slipped from under them in the mud and again they threw themselves into the long hair from Morbihan, which clung to their bare chests, arms, bagpipers’ bragou-braz and to their roun
d hats held on by ribbons tied under the chin. With a wondrous hairiness floating over their bodies, which were entirely coated in Breton soil, they were shouting like madmen.
The cook from Plouhinec walked through the square between them, making for the front of a hotel where she asked, ‘Is this the Penn ar Bed?’
‘The what?’
‘The End of the World. I want to go right to the end and am hoping the world ends here.’
The servant, descendant of Jean Jégado, seigneur of Kerhollain, who saved Quimper, looked a perfect fright and was doubtless a little drunk. The man she was speaking to put the visitor’s dishevelled appearance down to the squally wind and rain, and answered, ‘Indeed, this is the hotel known as the End of the World, from the name of this square where in the Middle Ages the town gibbet stood, for executing criminals condemned to death. That was where their careers of destruction ended.’
‘Really?’
At the far end of the ground-floor room, whose walls were decorated with stuffed animal heads, a door opened and a voice could be heard asking, ‘What has that woman come to say to us, Louis? The one who doesn’t look like one of our guests.’
‘That she’s going to the very end, Mother.’
The voice, which was coming nearer, was the very quavering one of an elderly lady, so stooped she was like a caricature little old woman. Trembling continually, she was supported by a maid who helped her into an armchair.
‘There you are, Madame Roussel.’
‘Thank you, Perrotte. Hand me my shadowpoint needlework as well, please.’
‘Mother, with your illness the needle’s going to jab into you all over,’ Louis warned.
‘Perhaps it will be all right,’ said the Parkinson’s sufferer, hopefully. ‘I would so like to be still again.’
‘Give up hoping,’ advised Perrotte, the lady’s maid.
