Madeleine Is Sleeping

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  Stirring

  MADELEINE STIRS in her sleep.

  She Dreams

  MARGUERITE SINGS THE HERO. In Venice and in Mantua. Breasts tamed by wide strips of muslin, a dulled sword rubbing warmly against her gams, she inspires in the composer his most fearsome arias. The tortured Radamisto, spying his wife's fine white hand as it disappears beneath the currents. Sextus, hot with youth and vengeance, pleading with the shade of his murdered father. And brave blustering Tauris, defiant Tauris, the general who alone dares Theseus to battle. She sings them in Bologna and Reggio, in Milan, Parma, Naples, Florence. In London and in Versailles. She is adulated. George I and the Princess Royal stand godparents, by proxy, to the daughter who had strained, unforgiving, against the buttons of Tauris's starched uniform.

  Marguerite is the primo uomo. She is the leading man.

  Impostor

  UNTIL THE ARRIVAL of an impostor whose very unnaturalness makes him all the more irresistible. Senesino, the celebrated castrato. A curious aberration. Even an abomination. Indeed, he is illegal: against the law of God. How wicked that Rome, the fulcrum of excommunication, should be the home of the castrati. The city hides them away in its bowels, together with the whores and the Protestants, but if tenacious, one will find several there. In the Conservatorios they lie upstairs, by themselves, in warmer compartments than the other boys, for fear of colds. Influenzas. Inflammations. In the smallest hours of the night, the masters comb the sleeping quarters. A tender foot, which has twitched free from the bed linens, shadowkicking in dreamy repetition the demonic barn cat it remembers from home: this hot, tender foot is coveted, tucked jealously back beneath the counterpane. An acute sensitivity to boyish sniffles makes the conservatory staff anxious and high-strung. Colds might not only render the fragile voices unfit at present, but hazard the entire loss of them forever. And what a loss. These are the voices of angels.

  Surgery

  THE COMPOSER discovered Senesino in the company of the Duke of Wurtemburg, whose retinue includes twenty ballet dancers, three trained monkeys, a small string orchestra, fifteen castrati, and two surgeons from Bologna. The two treat their operation with the strictest professionalism: they wield their instruments only on the condition that the young subject has been tried as to the probability of the voice. The boy muffled, the heady reek of ether, the surgeon delicately sweating, and brava! The vas deferens is severed. Nothing now will touch the resonant high C; the vein is closed down, like a mine. Senesino's mother, it is rumored, keeps the dainty pair pickled in a tiny clay pot.

  The boy ages into a fleshy and strangely hairless man.

  Menses

  ONCE DETHRONED, Marguerite is bitter.

  A vocal absurdity, she sniffs. He is nothing but a caged nightingale!

  But the composer remains unmoved. He has made his decision. The dark-hued female alto, fragrant and soiled, is not the voice of a hero. But Senesino! Such purity. Such extraordinary range. Lily-white, crystalline, without stain.

  The stain, Marguerite grumbles, of my menstrual blood.

  Adieus

  AS SHE BIDS HER FAREWELLS from the stage, Marguerite curtsies to the gelding. She reprises a couplet that a poet of great celebrity has penned for the occasion:

  But let old charmers yield to new;

  Happy soil, adieu! adieu!

  The audience murmurs at her pretty sportsmanship. They crane to examine the castrato, who is perched in the composer's private box, shielding his smile with a gloved and demure hand. He whispers in the composer's ear, promising, Together we will delight them.

  The composer, prompted, flatters the castrato, but he is interrupted: My timbre is flawless, yes. But it is the cruelty of my condition that will afford them such unbearable pleasures.

  Marguerite, suddenly immodest, makes a rude gesture from the stage. She grabs her genitals lovingly. She flicks her hand from beneath her chin. Her wrist snaps in the air with wonderful elasticity.

  Success

  MOTHER IS FLUSHED with business. Her preserves fetch an admirable price. Visitors arrive from long distances, grown ravenous and dissatisfied from the stories they have heard. I will not be happy, a dying girl says, if I cannot taste those heavenly preserves. In the city, Mother is told, the rich have made a habit of spreading it on their morning rolls.

  Mother is always distracted, floured, clotted with fruit meat. She bobs up from her cauldron, dabs her upper lip, and asks the small children: Is Madeleine too hot?

  They flank the bed and roll up their sleeves as they have seen the midwife do. Small hands press expertly against her throat, her cheeks, her eyelids. Madeleine is snowy beneath their fingertips. But is she perhaps a little warm right here, by her left temple? We had better feel once more. To be safe.

  Prince

  A HANDSOME MAN appears at the door, wearing a bristling moustache. He is not craving preserves. He is asking for Madeleine.

  Claude says, She is sleeping.

  The handsome man answers, I have come to awaken her.

  Claude asks, How are you going to do that?

  I am going to kiss her mouth.

  Wait a minute.

  Claude shuts the door.

  Princess

  MOTHER'S FINGERS TWITCH as she makes her calculations. Into the tub they bathe in on Saturdays, she stirs enough ingredients for one hundred tarts. Four sacks of flour, a winter's worth of lard. Begrudgingly, a fistful of salt.

  Mother kneads the face. Jean-Luc, the legs. Beatrice dimples the torso. And Mimi, the youngest, shapes the two lush arms.

  Her body grows golden with an egg yolk glaze.

  Papa's woolen nightcap goes on last.

  Suddenly, Mother remembers. She conceals the hands beneath the coverlet.

  Kiss

  SHE IS PERFECT, the handsome man says. More perfect than I ever imagined.

  He turns to Mother and plunges into a gallant bow: May I?

  Mother says, proudly, If you would.

  He shoos the brothers and sisters away from the bed and smoothes back his hair, moving with the grace and determination of a maestro. He is nearly overcome with the warmth and fragrance rising from Madeleine's body and pauses, suspended over her, savoring the moment. He imagines how he will describe it, sitting by the hearth, to their flock of children.

  He descends for the kiss. It is loud and ardent.

  Crouched over, he waits for the blissful response, the two unresisting lips that will succumb and then, hungrily, lunge for more. Crumbs speckle his bristling moustache. Simmering preserves fart in Mother's cauldron. The handsome man waits, stiff as a statue. He discovers that he has developed a cramp in his side.

  Gift

  THE HANDSOME MAN is crestfallen.

  Mother sends him home with a pot of preserves.

  She refuses his money. It's a gift, she insists.

  Stirring

  AS A REWARD for their bravery and cunning, Mother gives the small children delicious bits of the princess's body. They are eaten with enormous appetite.

  The brothers and sisters, prickling with crumbs, are allowed to tumble, glutted, into Madeleine's bed. They nuzzle against her and sigh, tucked into the warm pockets of her body. Madeleine stirs in her sleep. She smiles. Mother watches her and wonders, Is she amused by what she dreams?

  She Dreams

  WHEN M. JOUY placed his cock in her palm, it looked accusingly despondent and she was ashamed, for other girls had spoken of its liveliness. But when she wrapped her sturdy fingers around its girth, it shuddered in her grip like an infant bird. She had learned to rattle the orchard trees so that the weakest nestlings would tumble down into the cradle of her hands, where she found pleasure in the jerk and quiver of their frantic breaths. The organ of M. Jouy felt wondrously similar. It struggled against her tightening fingers with soft, bird-like heaves, and she was comforted by knowing that if her attentions grew too avid, its violent heartbeat would not disappear. Too often, a bird's pitiful state would excite in her such an awful tenderness (
Oh I love you! I love you! the girl keens to the shivering bird) that she would fondle it to death. Buried in a dung heap, so that the cats cannot sniff out its carious flesh, the bird is wet with tears, its body ravished.

  M. Jouy, she said. I have felt this before.

  The sad and stately half-wit could not answer, he was so moved by her expertise. She admired how mummy-like he remained while his cock writhed in her hand, as if life had abandoned his body in its eagerness to seek out her touch.

  Dandelion

  SOPHIE HAD INSTRUCTED her to watch his face crumple, majestic and startling like a damp sheet collapsing from the washline, but despite the girls' demands—Look, Madeleine, look!—her gaze never strayed from her hands, his helpless cock.

  She wondered at the larger girls who claimed that they were too old, that the game had become dull. She could never outgrow this; she would be drawn back ceaselessly, her curiosity constantly renewed. This she knew: you never tire of decapitating a dandelion and squeezing out its milky entrails. The more the motion is repeated, the more irresistible it becomes. You have no choice but to desecrate a dandelion stalk. That is what it is there for.

  His come smelled of the sweet and musty hay that he slept on. She would kneel down daintily and wipe her hands in the long grass. As she walked home from the secret place, the village dogs would nuzzle her palms, their hot tongues lapping up the fading scent.

  Pastoral

  WHAT HAD SHE DONE differently? She had modeled herself, precisely, on the others: as a very little girl, she stood patiently at the periphery of the ring. As she grew older, she accepted her turn and grabbed hold of M. Jouy without trepidation: she pocketed his pennies, laughed to see his breeches puddled about his ankles, mimicked his lumbering gait. When they dispersed, screeching like crows, she did too. And when they approached the village, suddenly composed and inscrutable, she too fell silent.

  We're gathering flowers, she announced, when Mother asked. It made a lovely picture: a procession of girls, filing homeward in the dusk, hands stained green from their efforts. Locals who dreamed of migrating to the city now paused and marveled, What was I thinking? I could not live without these simple pleasures.

  curdled milk

  WHAT HAD FRIGHTENED the others? Something in the tightness of her grip, or the way her eyes fed upon the cock. She had betrayed no distaste for the game. The other girls crowed to see his defeat, to see his idiot's composure dissolve, and then rushed to wipe themselves clean of his ejaculation. But M. Jouy held no fascination for her; she did not feel triumphant when he brayed and snorted; she was occupied only with the soft, stubborn thing clamped in her fists, and grew reluctant to run her fingers through the long grasses. Every Midsummer morning, Mother woke her before dawn and ordered her to kneel down and bathe her face in the dew: it ensures a year's worth of loveliness, she explained. As a child, Mother had performed the same ritual.

  When Madeleine wiped M. Jouy off her hands, she left glistening mollusk trails in the underbrush.

  Bureaucracy

  WHEN AROUSED, even the bucolic village moves with unforgiving swiftness, its machinery oiled and eager. Sophie was eating oatmeal when she decided to tell her mother, and by the time she finished her bowl, her mother had already told her father, who told the priest, who told the mayor. And then it was too late to recant. The mayor puzzled for an afternoon, and by supper had sent his oldest son to fetch the gendarmes. The gendarmes arrived before the sun rose, were directed by a hundred silent fingers towards the barn and apprehended M. Jouy with hay sprouting from his hair, his smile still heavy with dreams.

  Madeleine's hands were thrust into a pot of boiling lye.

  Host

  CAN I HAVE SOME MORE? Beatrice asks. She has scrambled down from the bed and planted herself in Mother's way. I prefer the burnt part.

  Doubling over to stoke the fire, Mother grunts before she gives her permission. Save some for your father, she says.

  Beatrice sidles up to the sleeping princess and surveys the devastation: one leg lost, from the knee down. The open wound looks tempting and buttery, but she likes the acrid edges best, where the dough has blackened, and breaks off an entire hand. Before biting, she examines it. It looks exactly like the hand of her sleeping sister: shiny and tempered and mitten-like. The fingers are no longer articulated because baking has sutured them all into one.

  Why did only the hands burn, Maman? she asks through a mouthful of crumbs.

  Because only her hands were wicked, Mother says.

  This makes Beatrice pause and consider. Finally, she objects: She will never be able to sew or play the piano!

  It is no great loss. Mother pats her on top of her head, leaving the floury trace of her five fingertips. And, she adds, they will always remind her of her childhood. As you grow older, it is often easy to forget.

  Mother hitches her skirts up to her thighs. See. Scars are remembrances. This slender, sickle-shaped one—she runs her finger along her shin—reminds me of my best friend, of stealing eggs, of a shard of glass glinting in the sunshine. And these here—she caresses the white piping that striates the back of her knees—put me in mind of your grandfather.

  Beatrice nods, but secretly she disagrees. When she deposits the last bits into her mouth, she keeps her back turned to Mother. She lowers her eyelids and sticks out her tongue as she has seen the older girls do in church.

  She Dreams

  IN AN OLD HOUSE in Paris that is covered with vines live twelve little girls in two straight lines.

  Madeleine is the twelfth girl. The smallest and the wickedest. Sister Clavel has been instructed to take special care of her.

  How the sisters wept when they first saw her! Her hands swaddled in snowy strips of muslin, Mother picking absently at the invisible insects that she feared were infesting the poultices. The sisters gave Madeleine a brand new prayer book and a straw hat strangled by a broad brown ribbon. She went with them happily.

  The other little girls stroke her bandages as if they were touching the hem of Christ. Their eyes grow enormous and glassy and she can hear the prayers escaping beneath their breaths, a slow hiss of perforated air. At night, as they lie in their two rows, the moon rises and she shadows it from her cot, her arms arcing like a ballerinas, her milky fists rising like two false moons, like two spectral dollops of meringue.

  She takes pleasure in her helplessness. Everyone must wait on her. She cannot even pee by herself. Bernadette, the eleventh girl, would like eventually to become a saint, so now she is practicing on Madeleine. She has made it her special duty to clean her when she menstruates, her little holy hands becoming sticky with the blood.

  Bernadette's fingertips are warm when she parts Madeleine's knees and passes a damp rag between her legs. From her cot, Madeleine can hear the plash of water against the bowl, the trickling of fluids as Bernadette wrings the cloth. She waits for the firm hands that will pat her dry, tuck a clean rag against her wound, press together her splayed thighs. She wonders if the abbot at Rievaulx, when ministering to the bloodied Saint Michel, was as unflinching as Bernadette.

  Delivery

  M. JOUY HAS NOT forgotten Madeleine. On Christmas Day, a brown paper package arrives from the hospital at Maréville; out of the package spills a fluttering array of drawings and charts. No message or holiday wishes enclosed. Mother walks into the village and asks the local chemist to decipher the contents.

  Ahhhh, he murmurs. They have measured M. Jouy's brainpan! And he holds up the diagram for her to see.

  It looks like the moon on its back, Mother observes.

  His anatomy is quite regular, no signs of degeneracy, the chemist continues, peering at a new sheaf. Oh, but look! His scapula is protuberant.

  Shuffling through the papers, the chemist hums to himself, his spectacles propped on the bald crest of his head. Mother furtively examines a bottle of whooping cough remedy that within days, it was rumored, could miraculously resuscitate even the most exhausted breasts.

  So, she inter
rupts, are they ungodly or not?

  Ungodly? the chemist echoes. He frowns briefly. Why, not at all!

  Are you sure?

  He clutches the drawings: These sketches are the work of medical professionals! It seems as if M. Jouy would like her to have them. As a keepsake, perhaps. This picture—he picks out a physiognomic chart—is a very good likeness.

  Conversion

  THE DRAWINGS ACCUMULATE.

  The small brothers and sister discover that they make buoyant kites. Jean-Luc ties one apiece to the posts that support the pasture fence, and on gusty days, the kites swell into the sky, dodging and nodding to one another as if in conversation.

  Mother begins to enjoy the delicate swirls of the cranial diagrams, so she cuts them in quarters and decorates her pots of preserves.

  Custom Made

  WHEN SISTER CLAVEL lays out her tidy uniform, Madeleine slips it neatly over her head, and then, with exuberance, her bulky fists burst through the careful seams, like twin whale snouts breaking the surface. So it is decided that she must have special dresses made for her, with long and liquid sleeves like those of an Oriental concubine. The diminutive tailor clangs the convent bell and Sister Clavel ushers him up the back stairwell and into a sunlit room, where Madeleine awaits him, perched on a tiny embroidered stool, wearing nothing but her stockings. Crouching, the tailor spreads out his tools, and with an irritating air of indifference, goes about measuring Madeleine's dimensions. She wonders if she can be seen from outside. She pictures the next-door neighbor trodding home, miserable, and then, by chance, he looks up. His smile spreads: from across the square, the schoolboys let out a blissful, unanimous sigh in the middle of their verb conjugations. The nursemaids who perambulate the park peer coyly from beneath their bonnets, squeezing each other's fingers and giggling naughtily. And the degenerate man, the one who waits by the rhododendron bushes, swivels his eyes up to her window, his neck supple as an owl's, and his cock rises triumphantly out of his breeches. Meanwhile her bare buttocks warm in a sunbeam and the tailor's deft fingers slip and alight upon her skin. Madeleine feels, this is divine.