Madeleine Is Sleeping

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  Don't bother with all the rooms, says Lucie impatiently. Tell about the girls.

  Sylph

  AWAY FROM HIS FATHER Claude drifts, kicking at the apples on the ground, his neck bent, his gaze fastened downward. When at last he looks up, he thinks he sees, flickering at the edge of the orchard, a girl. But she moves so quickly through the crooked trees—is it two girls? Or three?

  Viscera

  IN THE FARTHEST CORNER of the smallest practice room, a room so small and nearly forgotten that even the curls of rosin on the floor had gathered dust, there was a little door, like one covering a cupboard, and behind this door is where my husband kept his failed compositions. If ever another human eye should see these, he once confessed, I would die of humiliation. And when he said this to me, I took pity on him, for indeed his eyes watered and his lip trembled, and for an instant it did seem possible that his huge distended heart might collapse upon itself in shame. So though I crept repeatedly into his practice rooms, I never once disturbed that little cupboard door.

  But upon my return, I noted that the cupboard door stood ajar, as if opened from the inside by a very faint draft. And I was overpowered. By my own curiosity. My hands shook, my breath faltered, and the door opened to reveal not sagging shelves but a passageway ablaze with light. And rooms, yes, more rooms (had Lucie been present she would have received a deadly look, but Lucie, too, has been sent away), unlike those I had ever seen inside my husband's house. Rooms without windows, but lit from within by such brilliant colors, the strange color and light that emanates from expensive things: walrus tusks, snuff bottles, paintings so black that nothing could be discerned but a cheekbone or an eye, tapestries of rape, swords with sharkskin hilts, tiny jeweled boxes whose interiors rattled. I wanted to touch everything at once.

  When I reached out to feel the tapestry, I saw her: long neck, seven strings, melancholy face. She was turned halfway to the wall, as if in embarrassment, propped between a footstool and a glass case displaying postage stamps. And selfishly I felt only joy: it was not Griselda, trapped in this airless place. But who was she, with her weak jaw and her melancholy expression?

  Echo

  WANDERING THROUGH THE ORCHARD, Claude wonders, Who was she?

  Appetite

  WHY DID SHE WATCH so sadly out of the corner of her eye? Following her gaze, I understood, for there was another, stripped of her body, who, together with a covey of umbrella handles, was peering timidly from a severed elephant's foot. Prompted by their poor pleading faces, I went from room to room, finding more: those with gaping, half-finished bodies; those with their own strings twisted about their necks like a noose; also the decapitated, their heads turned to paperweights. It took no effort to imagine what had happened in these brilliant rooms. What hunger, on his part. What extreme terror on theirs. And my whole self trembled then: in pity for what they had suffered, perhaps, or in relief that my own face was not among them, but in truth I think I shook only with the cool exhilaration of being right.

  For I had known all along. I had known when I sat down to dinner with my husband, when I spent the afternoon by a window reading a book, or drifted down the dark corridors of his house, feeling my way to his bed. I had known of their terror, that they languished on the other side of the wall, yet I had moved through the corridors thinking only of my dinner, my book, his bed, my lovely face. I had known of them in their bright hidden rooms, and at last I was here, shaking in triumph, sick with my own acuity, sick with the pleasure of being right.

  It was with this sickness and elation that I sought out my husband, knowing now where I would find Griselda. For wasn't the appetite of my husband as cruel as the wolf's, as great as the whale's? In one despairing gulp, he had swallowed her.

  Saboteur

  THE STORY IS TOO LONG, Mother interrupts. All those dinners, those corridors. And where is M. Jouy? I fixed him something special to eat.

  Beatrice's face, her hands, collapse: But I haven't finished.

  I already know what is going to happen, Mother says. Claude told us at the beginning.

  Do you understand how difficult it is, to slice someone open with a carving knife? His intestines—his liver—his marbled heart—

  This is why I use the butcher, Mother says. Where is M. Jouy?

  Don't you wonder if she found Griselda?

  I made him sausages!

  Mother and Beatrice stare at each other, white-lipped, ill-matched in their obduracy.

  The daughter relents. But this is the best part, she says mournfully.

  And seeking encouragement, she finds none, for Mimi has been exiled for coughing, Jean-Luc for looking bored, and the only audience remaining is her unimaginative mother.

  Blood everywhere, she murmurs as her audience stalks off, in search of an idiot.

  And when the curdling cries rise up from the shed, when the cart is found empty and the bridegroom missing, Beatrice watches in regret the woman backing from their gate, whose tragic story, it must be admitted, she somewhat mismanaged. If only her brothers and sisters were not capable of such sabotage! She had gotten rid of a useless thing, put a beautiful thing in its place, and yet they were, all of them, intent upon finding fault and thwarting her.

  Her sense of injustice is so strong that she stamps her foot against the ground and then, with the other foot, kicks her mother's precious, pointless chest.

  Instinct

  AT THE FAR EDGE of the orchard Madeleine freezes. What is that sound? A howl of fury, a long barking cry. Like a lick of flame it flares up from the shed in the distance, threatening to burn down the whole world around it. My home is not my home, it cries, my children not my children; all that I thought was mine is alien to me. Like the smell of smoke it snakes its way to where Madeleine stands frozen; it sets the apple leaves trembling, lifts the birds from where they feast upon the orchard floor. And Madeleine herself, like a wild forgotten thing, begins to stir: her ears prick, her eyes water, and bringing them up to her mouth, she cups her misshapen hands and lets out her own long howl of sympathy.

  Stirring

  MADELEINE STIRS IN HER SLEEP. Her eyelids flutter open. What is that sound? From deep inside her dream she heard it: a wail. An inconsolable cry. It is a voice she thinks she recognizes, and sliding out from beneath her covers, she steals off into the orchard to meet it.

  Beating

  THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS cannot sleep, with Mother outside in the yard and still angry.Thunk, thunk beneath their window, quickening like a heartbeat, while the children lie stiff in their beds, fearing that, in her excitement, Mother might send fruit hurtling through the glass. Pitched with enough force, an underripe pear could leave a small person unconscious.

  Claude thinks it would be wise to slip off and make himself scarce. Down the ladder he goes, into the larder, filling his pockets, feeling the floor grave-cold beneath his feet, dreaming of what he will find inside the barn. Not a proper cowshed like their own, with a pony cart and six cows and a collection of deadly tools, hung in descending order against the wall; but a forgotten barn, a skeletal barn, where he is not allowed to go. That is where the half-wit once slept, the moon coming through the rafters and casting him in white stripes. But tonight, the boy dreams, the barn is thick with an apple smell and small rustling noises, the titters and sighs of girls settling into sleep: three of them, he now believes, most definitely three. Three girls flickering through the branches, roosting inside the forbidden barn and he, Claude, the only one to know of them.

  They must be hungry, he thinks as he touches his swollen pockets. And then his heart stops; for that other heartbeat, thick and wet, has stopped too. I'm through, he thinks, his hands crammed in his pockets. But then it resumes—thunk, thunk— and the boy steps out into the night.

  Lunar

  SEEING THE MOON through the rafters, Madeleine remembers other moons, the same moon: a grey coin dim in the window above her siblings' bed; a golden balloon snagging upon the spires of a city; the sliver that curved away from
her as she tumbled off a caravan's slick roof.

  What moon, she wonders, is looking down upon the hospital at Maréville? Why, a moon as round and mild as her own face, with eyes set far apart, the forehead high. Shedding light as she once shed droplets of water, her face emerging from the basin. A half-smile, a pox scar, a pair of eyebrows pale as wheat. Madeleine is moon-faced, her mother would say as she handed her the towel, and from that fact deduce a hundred other things, among them a guileless nature, a love of cream. But did she know this luminous face would wake inmates in the asylum, make women bleed, open night-blooming vines, pull everything irresistibly towards it?

  Inside the hospital at Maréville, the photographer turns the flatulent man to the window and says, Look.

  Anatomy

  BUT M. PUJOL CANNOT LOOK; he is too distracted to look. For the photographer has stepped out from behind his equipment. He has placed his hands on the flatulent man's shoulders; he has kept his hands on the trembling shoulders; he has turned him to the window under the guidance of his hands.

  M. Pujol is now familiar with names, due to the great black anatomy book the director has been kind enough to share with him. So when the hands slide downward from his shoulders, M. Pujol's first thought is, My scapulae. These are the two triangular blades. Thinking such thoughts, recalling such names, might possibly prevent him from trembling. As the hands travel, so do his thoughts: There are my vertebrae, he thinks, as the hands drift ever downwards to the sacrum. The sacrum, the sacred bone, the spot where his fluttering soul resides. On this point, and on many others, M. Pujol is in accordance with the Greeks. Not the heart, nor the head, but the very bottom of the spine: this is where the photographer will find him. Upon reaching the crossroads—my sacroiliac, he gasps—the two hands part company, one turning to the west, the other to the east, and on its own each traces the crest of his hipbones.

  As the hands advance along the ilium, he feels a pair of lips upon his neck. Lips, plural; neck, the nape of—but already the name for lips, the name for neck, have escaped him.

  Under the Gaze of the Moon

  M. PUJOL CLOSES HIS EYES; relinquishes names; makes his surrender. It is as she wishes.

  Waxing

  AS CLAUDE STUMBLES through the orchard, his expectations take on form, enormous size. They will have soft fingers. And gleaming hair. Their nipples will be tiny and wild as strawberries. In an interesting coincidence, Claude found a patch of berries last summer behind this same barn. He kept them to himself. He made visits when no one was looking. And remembering how shyly the berries appeared when he lifted up the canopy of their leaves, Claude pictures the girls' sleepy faces, their looks of surprise. How delighted they will be to see him.

  The barn is bathed in moonlight. Claude presses his face to a crack in the door. He wants simply a glance, an unhurried glance, before he comes in and startles them. Maybe he will catch them as they are brushing each other's hair, or softly embracing, or kissing good night. Countless entrancing scenes could await him, but when he presses his face to the crack in the door, the sight he finds disturbs him.

  There is only one girl, not three. She is lying on the floor of the barn. She is small, and wearing a filthy party dress, and appears to have been dropped down from another world. But not in the pleasant way he was expecting. Her body lies rigid except for her hand, which is tucked between her legs and moving desperately. Though her face is turned away from him, Claude believes that its expression must be of suffering. Look at the violence she does to herself! She is in thrall to that furious hand. He forgets the nipples, the shining hair: his thought is to save her, to knock down the rotting door and make it stop. But there is something in the way she stiffens that tells him such a rescue would be unwelcome. That annihilation is in fact her purpose. That she wants nothing more than this hand, this moon, this forgotten barn, conspiring to release her, to rub her out.

  Claude knows where he's not wanted. He has several sisters, an older brother; he is familiar with the feeling. His hopes and gifts hang heavily on him. As he backs away from the awful barn, he empties his swollen pockets of their sausages.

  Waning

  THE PHOTOGRAPHER LIFTS his mouth from the neck of the flatulent man, and the moon turns away from them, diminished. Her hand drops to her side.

  Buried

  IN THE MORNING Madeleine finds, lying on the ground, three sausages. Not wrapped in brown paper, or set on a plate, but poking out from the spiky grass that grows alongside the barn, as if the earth itself had offered them up overnight. They are good-looking, and smell quite deliciously of garlic. Madeleine knows that some further investigation is probably required, but she is hungry, and blessed, according to her mother, with the stomach of an ox.

  All that's needed is a little knife, some radishes. Without thinking, she pushes her hands into the soil and feels about. It is not a wishful or improbable thing to do. Her father once found a coin. Another man, a pale blue bottle. Why not a knife? Or, for that matter, a copper tub, a flask of wine, a rolling pin? A king's kitchen could be waiting down below, all flashing utensils and giant vats, the cook with her cleaver raised, the scullery maid weeping, their poor old mouths filled with dirt.

  What's that rumbling then, but the heave-ho of the earth sending up its lost city, its thoroughfares and byways, its traffic jams and slop jars, broken hearts, stillborns, waiting rooms, concert halls, card games and night terrors, its quick-witted children, its constables and beggars, usurers, pilots, its laughing women, its libraries, its collection of familiar, half-forgotten lives? It could be the sound of a girl's empty stomach. Madeleine sinks her ear into the ground and listens: yes, there it is, beneath the tumult of her blood, a tapping. From the city down below, a sound; a sign. The knife against the chopping board? The cook putting down her cleaver? Tap-tap, it says, then hesitates. A blind man's cane. A teacher's ruler. Tap-tap, it says again and all at once she knows: stacked heel. Worn floorboards. A hesitation in the step, a stutter. Should he draw the sword here? Or wait until the final line? Should he pause before the 'O'? The tap-tapping of an actor, pacing. He turns his eyes to the soil-black heavens and sighs; she hears now only the anguish of the 'O!' And in this very place, she knows, there was once a stage.

  Surprise

  MADELEINE'S HANDS dig deeper, searching for a tin of pastilles, a pair of opera glasses, the buckle from a stagehand's belt. It would be lovely to find something useful, something with which she could begin: like a nail. The earth feels cool as she shovels through it. But then, there in the soil, is something warm. And twisting. It wriggles against her with curiosity, or possibly affection. It is not, she hopes, a worm. She would not like to have such a humble thing attached to her. For when she moves her hands through the dirt, it follows.

  If she pulls herself rudely enough from the ground, if she stamps her feet and flaps her arms and trembles all over like a tambourine, then perhaps the worm will think better of the arrangement, and leave her alone.

  Madeleine shakes so hard that the sky turns colors. She wants to make herself clear to her new appendage. She shakes so hard that even once she stands still, the world keeps tilting, fireworks keep bursting, her limbs stay unfamiliar to her, and when she lifts her dirty hands before her face, she does not recognize them. Her paddles, which have taken her to places she would never otherwise have seen, have disappeared. Her two great mitts! In their place she finds ten wiggling digits: slender and stretching and bumping into one another in their newness. How funny, Madeleine thinks, to go looking for a little knife, and then a nail, and to find instead, in the cool black soil, her fingers.

  Madeleine Rejoices

  I CAN BUTTON, SHE THINKS, and unbutton! I can light a match, hold a cigarette, and wave it languidly in the air. I can point at a person with whom I disagree. I can scratch a small itch. I am capable of pinching; also, of peeling an orange. I can take a photograph; remove a splinter; tuck a piece of hair behind my ear. I can be of help. I can grip, between my forefinger and my thumb, a
penny nail. I can hang a curtain. I can build a riser. I can write, in tall red capitals, the letters of his name.

  Blessed

  IT IS A MIRACLE. The full weight of it falls upon her. I am like Michel, she says aloud to the barn. In her cathedral, in her town, there is a picture of him in the window. Once, on a Sunday in summer, a blade of empyreal light illuminated his melancholy face, and she instantly recognized it as her own.

  Why, it's me, she says to herself, full of wonder. I have been looking at myself all along.

  For she has been restored, like the saint, to wholeness and perfection. Madeleine possesses two lips, two eyes, two arms, and now—ten immaculate fingers.

  And the face will no longer be lengthened in sorrow, but bright and fluid with color. She will stand up from her family's pew and walk towards the stained glass, her eyes locked with her own. At the altar, she will pivot on her toes and face the congregation. Look upon me, she will say.

  And even the devout will find it difficult to remember the suffering she has endured.