Madeleine Is Sleeping

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

But Mother finds she can no longer recall the details exactly, nor the ending, nor the plot.

  Well, there was a story, she says, and what matters is that you liked it, and that I told it to you. I told it to you countless times, for you could not be satisfied, and would refuse to hear another story, or to hear the story told by any other voice but mine. So I told it, again and again, long after I had grown sick of it, because you wanted to hear my voice, repeating the words that pleased you. Do you remember that? Do you remember my voice?

  And, leaning very close to the pillow, so close that she can feel the moistness of her daughter's breath, she says, again, I love you.

  The sleeping girl does not so much as shudder.

  Ach, Madeleine! Mother cries in despair, turning away from the bed. You were always stubborn!

  Mutiny

  SMACK! IS THE SOUND of the girl's hand falling squarely upon the backside of M. Pujol. Smack! is the sound of her palm meeting the flesh of his bared cheeks.

  Tonight, though, the widow hears nothing. No sound at all. She leans forward, frowning, in her delicate chair. She cups a hand around her ear.

  As M. Pujol twists his head over his left shoulder, Adrien steps out from beneath his shroud, and Charlotte lifts her fingers from her strings. They all look at Madeleine, who is wincing and wagging her hand, as if from the sting of a very sharp blow.

  At last she declares: The widow has gone completely deaf!

  The performers stare at her effrontery. Hasn't the widow just complained of M. Pujol's sighs, and punished the servants for singing in the kitchen?

  I am not in the least deaf, the widow says.

  All but Madeleine nod slowly in agreement.

  Leaning back in her chair, the widow says, Why not try again.

  But Madeleines paddles are now fists, and her arms hang stiff at her sides like two furious exclamation marks.

  No, she says.

  She is obstinacy itself.

  Iron Maiden

  THE WIDOW SMILES at Madeleine, and rising from her seat, gestures for the girl to follow.

  Together they disappear inside the widow's chambers, where the drapery falls behind them with the soft, deadly sound of snow sliding off a roof. The last thing the performers see is Madeleine's scornful glance, trained on them as she turns back, before the curtains envelop her: You are cowardly, all of you, she remonstrates. I had a plan!

  In silence the performers imagine terrible things. No one has ever entered the private rooms of the widow.

  In the Chambers of the Widow

  THE CURTAINS OPEN onto a darkened hallway, so dark that she must run her fingertips along the walls, and at the end of it, there are more curtains, as dense and velvety as the first. Then there is a warm room, with walls the color of pomegranates, where she is given toast with raisins, told to take off her shoes, placed before the fire on a footstool. And above her, on the mantelpiece, is a miniature circus made all of tin, with its stiff pennants flying and its elephants parading.

  Am I too old for this, Madeleine wonders, because she would like to touch it, to see if the lion tamer's arms move in his sockets, or if there is a key she can turn, releasing music.

  She would also like to unbutton the dress of the waxy doll standing aloof in the corner; slide her hands over the sad, long face of the wooden horse; ask for two more pieces of toast. Then she remembers: I am in trouble. Also: I can neither button nor unbutton.

  But the widow does not seem angry in the least. When she speaks, it is in a coaxing and conspiratorial tone that Madeleine is startled to recognize, and all at once the pull of the horse, the perfect circus, becomes stronger: for the widow—of course—is a grandmother, and these belong to her grandchildren, and Madeleine is not indifferent to the strange magnetism exercised by other children's things.

  Beatific

  THE WIDOW SAYS: I, too, feel sympathy for M. Pujol.

  Madeleine studies her toast. There are three raisins remaining, clustered like a birthmark, and the crust, which isn't burnt.

  The widow says, So you must not think that I am unfriendly.

  Is it better to take many small bites, that taste almost of nothing, or to devour it all at once, and feel regret?

  The widow persists, I might even understand why you won't do as I ask.

  Crunch. Then no more.

  Is it perhaps because, the widow ventures, you have fallen—

  The crust catches on its way down. Madeleine turns colors, throws her fist against her chest.

  He reminds me of my favorite saint, she gasps.

  Who is your favorite? the widow asks. Let me guess, she adds, leaning closer: Sebastian.

  Saint Michel, Madeleine says, recovered. In the cathedral, in my town, there is a picture of him in the window. M. Pujol looks exactly like him, except M. Pujol wears a moustache.

  And remembering what they taught her at the convent, she folds her paddles neatly in her lap.

  But unlike Michel, the widow says, M. Pujol has not been restored to his former beauty and perfection. He remains wretched.

  So the widow is familiar with the excesses of the saints.

  And for that reason, she murmurs, you wish to spare him.

  Madeleine nods. She believes herself saved.

  For the widow has turned her back to Madeleine, as though in deference to her argument, and is now fingering the small figures on her mantelpiece. From her stool, Madeleine contemplates her own piety.

  Very softly, the widow says: You are mistaken.

  And whispering to the tiny circus, she says: He moans like a man in pain. But what you must understand is that you comfort him with your blows.

  Turning towards Madeleine, she hands her the lion tamer in his tight scarlet trousers. Madeleine grips him unsafely in her mitts and discovers it is true: his arms move, as do his well-shaped legs, and his head; all of him moves, with terrible pliancy. Even his wrist, flicking his tiny lash, twists on an invisible screw.

  You are attending to his wounds, the widow murmurs. You are ministering, with your maimed hands, to his every suffering.

  Inside Madeleine something trembles, then falls into place with a thud.

  Like the abbot at Rievaulx, she says dully.

  The plash of water in a bowl, the wringing of cloths—

  Exactly, says the widow, who again offers her lovely smile, and places her hand lightly upon Madeleine's head: You are filled with kindness.

  Unlike

  IT IS RARE that the widow experiences surprise. But when the girl leaps from the stool, threatening the teacups, and gnaws her lips in agony, and roughly returns the lion tamer to the mantelpiece, his limbs all askew, and at last announces—I am not like the abbot—careless of how she strews crumbs everywhere, the widow is taken aback.

  I am more like Michel, the girl says, before she struggles her way into the heavy curtains, without waiting to be dismissed. Michel! she shrieks, with all the fury and astonishment of one usurped.

  Shrubbery

  THE PRIEST ADDRESSES his flock with affection.

  My children, he says, and feels a sudden strange yearning of heart, for indeed they are like children, stirring in their seats, nudging the warm sides of their neighbors, marking time, he is sure, through all manner of small devices. See how the chemist, with his bemused expression, calculates the amount of emetic he should order in the coming week. The mayor's lips barely move as he rehearses the difficult conversation he must have with his daughter. While the captain of the gendarmes, he closes his eyes and dreams.

  But the girls—look at them—their concentration is ferocious. They nod over their prayer books. Their heads touch. They follow the words with their fingers. How sober, and upright, and fine they appear, like a stand of young trees growing in the midst of untended shrubbery. They are the first to echo him: Amen. Their low, sweet voices sound all at once, in perfect agreement.

  Prayer

  BENEATH BEATRICE'S FINGER: the word Handmaid.

  And then: Unto.


  Her finger drifts to the bottom of the page: Shall.

  And rests upon the word: House.

  H-U-S-H, Sophie spells, shivering in her excitement.

  Hush

  BEHIND THE HEAVY CURTAINS, all is quiet. Madeleine pauses, there at the end of the passageway, and listens: where is the sound of Charlottes bow, tapping absently against the floor, and the murmur of Marguerite's disparagements? The swish of stockinged feet, the clanking of canisters against the little wagon, and the sigh of the drawing-room windows being pulled shut after the last cigarette has been flicked onto the lawn? The secret, languid sound of the performers laughing, unobserved?

  Madeleine had hoped to burst through the curtains, ablaze with her anger, frightening the others and making them feel small. They would freeze; they would stare at her. They would be struck, as if with Marguerite's wooden sword, by the sight of Madeleine, enraged.

  So she had thought as she came rushing down the hall. But now she halts, uncertain, thwarted by this peculiar silence. Not a silence, exactly; a peculiar hush: for it does not sound as if the drawing room is empty, but rather that those inside have grown suddenly quiet. Madeleine gets the uncomfortable feeling that were she to enter, were she to throw back the drapery and storm through, it would be an intrusion.

  Audience

  WITH MADELEINE, though, curiosity prevails, always.

  And so the curtain is lifted.

  Behold: the flatulent man is nearly dressed. No longer on his hands and knees, he wears his black satin breeches, his elegant tailcoat. His fingers fumble in the stiff white folds of his butterfly tie. The others have grown tired of waiting, perhaps, and wandered off to bed. This seems an unexpected gift to Madeleine, that he should be alone, that she should be allowed to watch him as he dresses, to love his fastidiousness, to picture him as he once stood: upright, clothed, framed by a scarlet curtain. She imagines the dimming of lights, ushers disappearing, programs rustling, an old gentleman coughing, and the breathless heavenly feeling that yes, yes, it is all about to begin....

  But then another player stumbles out from the wings. His face wears the dismayed expression of someone who finds himself in the wrong production. He looks back over his shoulder beseechingly, as if a stagehand might whisper his lines, or a tremendous piece of scenery might roll out and flatten him beneath its wheels. How did I end up here? his whole body asks, twitching in the candlelight, longing to do away with itself.

  The flatulent man makes a small, exasperated noise. His arms drop to his sides.

  Upstaged, once again, by an amateur. His triumphant return, foiled!

  Reveal

  NO; HE IS HAVING DIFFICULTY with his butterfly tie.

  And suddenly Adrien seems to remember what it is that he is supposed to do. His eyes brighten; he steps forward with courage; he lifts his arm and—like that—it falls away from him, his clumsiness and coarseness and bewilderment, it all falls away, like the sleeve of a dressing gown as a young woman raises her hand to brush her hair, exposing the whiteness of her forearm, her elbow—like that, his purpose is revealed, that beautifully. He must fix the flatulent man's tie. And his face no longer resembles that of the sleepwalker, or the opium eater; his face is that of a man who must tilt M. Pujol's chin, with all the tenderness in the world, and arrange the wing-like folds of his white evening tie.

  Metamorphosis

  SHE LETS THE CURTAIN FALL. She stands there in the darkness, panting.

  Memory will not adjust to this: the pulse, the stirring, of new organs. Her desire draws out its feelers, and unfolds its sticky wings.

  Transfixed

  NEVER—NOT WHEN the prince kissed the princess, nor the priest laid the host upon one's tongue, not when Madeleine gripped the despondent member of M. Jouy, nor when Papa held Maman in the dark, not the brothers and sisters pressing their small, hot hands against the sleeping girl—has a person touched another with such tender concentration.

  And in his touch there is not the kindness, the abnegation, of the abbot tending to the wounded Michel: here, there are no ministrations, no saints; no blazing suns, no attendant moons. There is only this perfect reciprocity—two stars in orbit, two flowers unfolding—an exchange of pleasure unlike that she has ever seen.

  She watches how his fingers float over the crooked tie, the pale throat, the apple bumping along its narrow path, and it is as if this gesture has never before existed, has only now been invented by dint of his hunger. He must teach his hands, his fingers, to do that which is utterly strange to them. And to defy habit in this way—what force is great enough? How shabby, how halfhearted, her own mutiny now seems. So what force? Madeleine does not know. She knows only that the sight of it could impale her. That she could part the curtains and watch, swooning, as the gesture is performed again and again.

  Overture

  AND SO THE CURTAIN is lifted.

  As she looks once more on the scene inside, she thinks of a violinist tucking his instrument beneath his chin.

  Behold: M. Pujol is pressing his cheek upon the photographer's hand. The hand is resting, like a violin, against his collarbone. He does not rub his cheek against the hand, as though it were the rabbit trimming on a coat, nor does he dig his chin into the flesh, like a half-wit who wants nothing more than to sink his face into the warmth of his own shoulder. He simply holds the hand against him, and in his touch is the impatience with which musicians handle their instruments.

  He closes his eyes. He takes a breath.

  It is all about to begin.

  Interrupted

  THEN, IN HER EMOTION, in her extreme but vague excitement, it happens—Madeleine makes a wheezing sound. If there is a nestling in her hands, she will fondle it to death. If there is a reflection in a pool, she will peer too closely, lose her balance, splash through it with her boots. Her rough hands, her muddy boots, and the wings thrashing savagely inside her, sending up this wheeze, this strange whistling sound.

  The hand retreats. The two men step away from each other. They look about them slowly, blinking sleepily like children.

  To her relief, to her anguish, they do not see her.

  Invisible

  THEY DO NOT SEE ME! Claude rejoices, silently. For everything about him now is silent: his thoughts, his beating heart, his footfalls in the underbrush. He can tiptoe past all sorts of doors and nobody inside would know it. He seems to be mastering invisibility as well, for look: how close to the girls he crouches! So close that if he were to sneeze and not cover his mouth, they would each of them feel, on their necks and their cheeks, a satiny mist, like one coming off the sea. Claude is that close to them. He has crept there silently. His invisible body trembles in its joy and proximity.

  It will be his at last, the secret. He alone will know what happens when the girls all disappear. For a moment, in the underbrush, he imagines how he will raise his hand, and stand, and issue a statement, or file a report. He imagines the magisterial weight of approval, the heaviness of men's palms clapping him on the shoulder. But then, easing a ticklish branch to one side, he pictures another possibility: that of nursing his secret, hiding it from sight, taking it out in the dark and stroking it, keeping it for the enjoyment of Claude alone.

  But how to get that meaty one to move—her hips now occupy the whole of his view. As she sways back and forth in her eagerness, he catches only slivers of what he wants to see, which is maybe more maddening than not being able to see at all, and certainly more exciting than being able to see everything at once. He glimpses a pair of tentative hands, reaching out; a scattering, on pale skin, of petals; the flash of a mirror in the sunlight; the pucker of a navel. Could that be right? Naked skin? A belly button?

  Little Jug

  THE MAYOR CLEARS his throat. He pushes aside his plate. He regards his youngest daughter, who is chewing her bread enthusiastically, and not giving him any encouragement at all.

  I am an indulgent father, he begins. Which is a fine beginning; which is what he rehearsed. Firstly: his affection
ate nature and dislike of tyranny; secondly: his public obligations; thirdly: the strange reports that have lately reached him, of sightings, and silences, and the odd, glittering look in his youngest daughter's eye, the bits of grass seen caught in her hair; and fourthly: he cannot remember fourthly.

  Emma, he says.

  And notices, as he often does, the stubbiness of her fingers. It would be quite impossible to pry those fingers from anything they might decide to grasp. One day, he expects, they will lengthen into cool, slender, white fingers, from which will issue all sorts of gentle touches and the pretty, even handwriting that he sees on invitations. As it stands, her lettering is heavy on the page, and executed with the same methodical relish with which she is now sawing off another piece of bread. But yes, her fingers will lengthen, and her complexion will not be so swarthy, and little curlicues will bloom upon the barren slopes of her alphabet.

  Emma, he says again, and because her mouth is full, she reaches across the table and squeezes his hand. Yes, Papa, I am listening, is what her stubby fingers say. With warmth, and great insistence; and what a very pleasant feeling it is to be gripped by such fingers, and to know that nothing could ever tear you from their hold. The mayor finds himself thinking that perhaps it would not be so terrible were his daughter to remain always like this: this small, this brown and sturdy, like a jug.

  I am an indulgent father, he repeats, helplessly, and he can go no further.

  Apprehended

  THE MAYOR'S ELDEST DAUGHTER is more to the point. Circling around the table, dishes balanced dangerously in one hand, she sees a butter knife making its way towards the jar of preserves.