by Anne H
From his first day on Canadian soil, the Lieutenant knew that nothing was finished, knew that everything was beginning again as if he had not crossed the Atlantic, as if the savage expression that passed over his face was the same as the London smog on the nights of bombardments.
It took just one normal day at the military camp in Valcour. The ravaged hills of the firing range, the smoke escaping from the mortars, the detonations rending the air, the military orders like streams of abuse shouted by officers and NCOs. And life had become intolerable again.
It was he who chose this refuge in the middle of the woods, along the river between Valcour and Sainte-Clotilde. Neither radio nor newspapers, a woman to clean every Thursday, auburn and plump, pallid and strewn with freckles, who gripes and who blithely breaks the few dishes put at the Lieutenant’s disposal. Too much noise. The woman makes too much noise. And she’s too fat. In a little while he will send her away, as he himself was sent away from England and from the military camp at Valcour. Let each person remain ashamed to be hunted down. For in the secrecy of his soul each has good reason for his shame and for being hunted down. This morning, for instance, that little girl dismissed from the sight of his man’s face, her hands red from berry-picking, her eyes open too wide, her entire slim, hard body no doubt already suffering the ravages of the menstrual flow. Too many grown-ups in the world. Too many little girls who cross the frontier and meet up with the cohort of grown-ups who are huge and without pity. Only little girls with smooth bellies, asleep amid their rumpled wings, can lay claim to the sweetness of the world.
He opens the plank door that gives on to the river and the night. Breathes deeply. There is no salt in this air, it is muggy and pervasive, like water that is too soft. It is pointless to live here, in parentheses, separated from everything. Life here, life there, like two sections of the Red Sea that has been parted to allow the Lieutenant’s boundless solitude to pass.
The heat persists though it is night, it has stopped moving, is slow and viscous, flows between the trees, through their needles and leaves, it floats upon the river.
Sweltering heat like that in a steam room fills the enclosed space where one must, after all, live until tomorrow.
Even before dawn comes to light up the black sky, the birds have begun cheeping very softly and a muted rain has started to fall, small, wide-spaced drops, clearly perceptible but hard as pearls spilled onto the leaves and the log roof.
The Lieutenant listens to the rain fall, distinguishes each drop, each hard pearl in the noisy air, his hearing increasingly keen and quick, suddenly alert and awake, eager to know what kind of day it will be.
Soon everything grows hazy in the countryside and in the Lieutenant’s ears. He has shut the door behind him and now he is alone, in the middle of a violent downpour that is coming from everywhere at once, pouring onto the roof, beating against the windows, streaming in rivulets onto the floor.
Little by little the smell of damp earth penetrates the Lieutenant’s house, seeps into his clothes, clings to his skin. The furious summer rain awakens the black heart of the earth, pulls from its entrails its primeval breath, fills the Lieutenant’s nostrils, his throat and his skinny chest. In the same way, the little strawberry-picker yesterday was as fragrant as the earth, filled with wild scents beneath her faded calico skirt, every time she moved under the intolerable sun. Nothing else to report. He does not even know her name.
The next day, Thursday, John Christopher Simmons dismissed the woman who cleans his house.
✦✦✦
For several days Clara is unable to go back to the Lieutenant’s house because of the storms. She uses that time to tidy the house (as if she were leaving on a journey), and starts mending and darning, while violet glimmers rap at the windows to enter the kitchen, and the river studded with lightning rises before her very eyes.
This girl would like to play the flute amid the storm and the desolation, but she is unable to do so. What is inside her resembles nothing that is known and it ravages her like a fever that cannot be expressed in words or in music. At this very moment something is being decided in the rain-drenched countryside, something deaf and blind and terribly opaque, of which she can see neither the beginning nor the end, and which concerns her. If she should happen to lift her head from her work, it is to look out the window at the river rising in the rain, like someone spying from the corner of her eye a pan of milk that is boiling over on the stove.
Long attentive to the disasters inside him and around him, Aurélien peers out at his garden and his flooded fields. Has on his hat, his old jacket. Rain is falling onto his face, running down his neck and inside his sleeves. Endlessly he checks the level of the river. Aurélien has planted a post on the bank and he waits for it to be completely submerged or swept away by the current. He is apprehensive about the moment when he will have to make a decision about the imminent disaster caused by the rising water.
She is the only daughter and he the only father, and she is making ready to betray him in secret.
Accustomed since childhood to this rumbling of the water at her door, day after day, more powerful or less, more lilting or less, at times elusive and disappearing suddenly amid the regular respiration of the earth, then coming back in force very close to her ear and enchanting her again, Clara has come to confuse the beating of her own life with the river’s rise and fall. And now she is astonished at her inner confusion and tumult, which are reflected in the eddies in the rising river.
Clara’s hands grow languid as she works, and she lets them drop side by side onto her knees like two small animals that have been killed. Naive as the angel ruffling the feathers of his white wings in the sunlight, her heart is filled with dark zones that disturb her. She tries to take her own inventory, in order to see a little more clearly in the growing night. She is thinking very hard, as if she were carefully writing in a schoolgirl’s scribbler.
My name is Clara Laroche.
I am nearly fifteen years old.
My father, Aurélien Laroche, a farmer at Sainte-Clotilde, is a widower, my mother having died when I was born.
I know how to read, write and count.
Everything I know I was taught by Mademoiselle, who is dead.
I weigh about one hundred pounds.
I stand five feet and some inches.
I am growing before your very eyes,
I am dark as a crow,
I play the recorder.
I think I’ve fallen in love with the English Lieutenant.
Seeing her so absorbed and so remote, so near to being lost in thought, Aurélien cannot help asking his daughter the question he has always been careful not to ask, one he could not bear to be asked himself.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing, really, nothing.”
Saying that she lowers her eyes, sticks her needle again and again into the coarse fabric of an old skirt; her mouth is shut, her eyes closed, and her heart is brimming with uncontainable joy.
Thinking of his harvest that is rotting where it stands, Aurélien has gone outside to look at the disaster. The door slams behind him.
Clara has not stopped sewing. Each small stitch, even and straight, that she tirelessly sews in the cloth seems to be speaking in her stead, repeating like a monotonous litany: “I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I’ll do it.”
After she has cut the thread with her teeth, she lifts her shining face from her work. She looks at the blank wall before her and murmurs, talking to herself, as if she cannot help it, her voice hushed, softly, for herself alone, each syllable standing out from the others, holding back her laughter as the amazing words are whispered into the silence of the empty kitchen: “I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I will be the wife of the English Lieutenant.”
She is astonished that she wants it so badly, as if her life depended
on it.
That evening in her attic, she stands for a long moment undecided before Mademoiselle’s dresses hanging on the wall, like a woman choosing a dress in a shop who does not know which to select. Clara finally decides on the most beautiful one, both skirt and top a slightly faded red, with bursts of colour deep in the folds. She spreads the dress on a chair, placed on the floor next to the chair the high-heeled patent-leather shoes. For a long time she has been holding a tiny lipstick in a golden case that turned up in a surprise package she’d been given at the general store.
Beneath the downpour tumbling from the sky and against the earth that steams from its own warm breath for long days still, coming and going from the house to the outbuildings and from the outbuildings to the house, Clara is now waiting only for good weather, like a fiancée who has secretly prepared her finery, who goes about her usual business and now, in her head, is counting the hours until her wedding day.
Sometimes at night she gets up to look out her dormer window at the rainwater that can no longer disappear into the earth, that is creating a slack lake around the house.
✦✦✦
He saw the bright sky move across the countryside. He shaved closely then, sprinkled himself generously with rainwater from head to toe, donned fresh clothes and waited until the fine weather had fully arrived.
There are still too many vague glimmers hanging in the electric air for the Lieutenant to feel truly at peace. It would take only one small match held high above his head for the entire sky to be set ablaze once more and look just like the nights in London, under the bombardments.
The Lieutenant’s windows are as narrow as an arrow-loop in a castle wall. He looks out through the dirty panes, riddled with green and violet bubbles embedded in the rough glass. All he can see before him is the lane lost beneath the trees, like a lumberjack’s path. Any trace of footsteps, either coming towards him or going away, has been washed away by the rain. He is alone, as though on a desert island.
The Lieutenant’s supplies have been dwindling visibly now that the cleaning woman no longer comes.
And now he tests the sodden ground with his foot and sets out like someone who does not know what he is doing, letting his steps decide, leading him where they want to go, where he must go if he is to survive.
Once he has come to the end of the path and is facing the main road covered with puddles and mud, his feet no longer hold him up. He no longer has the courage to advance. The fear of facing up to this unknown village where he has never set foot freezes him where he stands. Besides, he is well aware of the true reason for his visit to the village. Though he will ask in a confident voice for milk, eggs, flour, tea, and potatoes, there is a serious risk that in the dim light of the shops he will arrive at the essential questions about the little girl that are tormenting him. Her name, her address, her house, and her garden. Her parents and her grandparents. Her friends. Her fields and her outbuildings. Her language and her religion. Her innocence, like a green fruit to be picked in the storm-furrowed countryside.
He retraces his steps. He goes back inside his house and heats up his last tin of Campbell’s soup. He will wait until there is nothing at all left on his shelf to drink or eat before he turns back to the village. That way he will be able to arrange matters so that his hunger and his thirst for the little girl are null and void, for long days yet to come.
III
There is a rainbow, all its colours laid out clear and precise, while a second arc is forming behind the first, fragile as a glint in the water.
Clara is on her way to marry the English Lieutenant.
Dressed up and made-up, hat, gloves, and purse, perched on her high bicycle, Clara is making her way towards the luminous arches spread before her. She is paying close attention to the puddles that spatter her legs and are liable to ruin her wedding dress. Low branches drip onto her skirt and leave streaks of a deeper red than the rest of the dress.
Amid the imperceptible vibration of the day and the prism colours streaming before her, Clara pleads with a god she does not know, trembles before his hidden face, prays very softly that the Lieutenant will not take her as a cat takes his mate, sinking his fangs into her neck to keep her there beneath him while he tears her open.
The Lieutenant sees the red of Clara’s dress coming in the distance, moving very quickly beneath the trees along the path.
When she is very close to him, all decked out and smeared with paint, her bicycle tossed into the grass, he does not recognize her at first. For a long moment he does nothing but look at her in amazement. He says:
“My God!”
And he rediscovers the fierce and joyous laughter of circus afternoons in his childhood.
“I was not expecting such a lovely clown!”
Clara does not stir under the laughter that tumbles onto her and insults her. Her high heels seem to put down roots in the floor. She has come here to be married to the Lieutenant and nothing and no one can prevent that from happening. Not laughter. Not tears. She is waiting for him to come back to his senses and stop laughing.
Now he becomes excessively grave, as if he were about to risk his soldier’s life in a battle already lost. He takes the time to note meticulously everything about the little girl that bothers him. The dress, too long and out of date, streaked with grease, the high-heeled shoes, the little hat with its veil, the lipstick, and above all the ridiculous little gilt-clasped purse that she clutches as if her life depended on it. He doesn’t know where to begin to rid her of all that, so that naked childhood will appear before him.
He wipes her cheeks and lips with a damp towel. He cannot bear Clara’s eyes, which are open far too wide in her freshly washed face. He tells her to close them. He walks away from her in the room. He says some words in hushed tones, making them stand out clearly from one another, like pebbles he would fling into the water.
“Good girl, funny girl, good childish stuff, gorgeous gift from God to my poor soul.”
The Lieutenant’s words, incomprehensible, do not reach Clara, they seem to die along the way, having to cross the entire room in a foreign language before they reach her.
She has taken off her hat, her gloves, and her uncomfortable shoes. She is waiting for him to approach her. She has closed her eyes. She does what he has asked her to do.
In two strides he is beside her. He says again and again, “Good girl, good girl,” and strokes her frizzy hair as if he were trying to soothe a small animal which is at his mercy. The scent of Clara’s hair is on the Lieutenant’s hands. He sniffs his hands after they have left Clara’s head. He is wild about its smell. Again he takes her tousled head in his hands. All the perfume of the little girl in the red dress rises to his face in warm exhalations, like the acrid odour that escapes from gamebags filled with wounded birds after a day of hunting, when the men return home staggering from a strange, cruel intoxication.
He sniffs her neck, under her arms, the folds of her dress, the hollow of her thighs. He drinks the tears from her blazing cheeks. He beseeches her to close her eyes and not to cry.
Amid a sound of old silk that rustles and tears under the Lieutenant’s fingers, Clara is quickly undressed, having had nothing on her body but her bridal dress.
She does not open her eyes. She does not say a word. She lets him do what he wants to do. She learns from him what she was supposed to learn from him, for all eternity. Clara utters only one little cry, the cry of a dying child, when he enters her.
In the semi-darkness of the closed house they get their breath back, both of them, like castaways flung up onto the sand, with the ocean’s backwash still beating inside them. For the Lieutenant, the sadness has already begun. Clara seeks him and calls him with her closed mouth. With the sensitive hands of a blind woman she tastes the sweetness of the Lieutenant’s skin. He barely flinches under Clara’s fingers, as if a light breath were brushing,
in a dream, his sleeping body, his disarmed sex.
The kitchen table between them. The red-and-white checked oilcloth. The last package of crumbling biscuits. The boiling water poured over the last tea-leaves. The Lieutenant’s provisions are exhausted.
They sip very pale tea from the chipped cups that came with the house. She has donned her rumpled dress again. Across from her there is a man dressed as a soldier who is drinking tea and crushing a biscuit in his saucer. A vague smile is frozen on his lips, is intended for no one, seems to drift in the stuffy air of the room with its drawn curtains, its locked door.
Already there is misunderstanding between them because of their different notions about the time that has been given them to be together, time that is ending and soon will be taken away.
She would like very much to stay with him in his cabin until the sun comes back and the roosters of Sainte-Clotilde and Valcour answer one another in the countryside, all together, upright on the first rays of dawn as on a high-wire, trying to outdo each other as they celebrate with a single raucous, strident fanfare the marriage of Clara and the English Lieutenant.
And she laughs because her notion is extravagant and fills her with joy. The Lieutenant will not know Clara’s dream, any more than she will know his.
He waits for her to finish drinking her tea. He is filled with impatience and fear. His solitude is already there in the room, wary, only awaiting Clara’s departure so it can take back the Lieutenant and close in around him.
He looks on his wrist for the time. He lifts the curtain at the window, sees that the daylight is fading, fears more than anything in the world being surprised with Clara here in his house.
“It’s late, very late. You must go home now. You’ll come back another time . . .”
He repeats “another time” and muffles his words so well that, later on, Clara will never be sure that she really heard them.
