The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

by Gaetan Soucy

  “Who are you?” asked the other one.

  Fearing whacks, I pretended I hadn’t heard.

  “Where are you from?” added the soutane. “From the house on the other side of the pine grove? What are you doing here?”

  As you may imagine, I didn’t dare mention the coffin for fear it would lead to more marmalade stews for me because I was getting to know a thing or two in that department. Don’t speak of rope in the house of a hanged man.

  “Follow us,” said the soutane, putting his hand gently on my shoulder, in fact his gentleness did something to me.

  He added: “We won’t hurt you,” which was something at least. My stoppit now just a memory among others, I followed them. As long as you don’t hurt me, you see, you can get anything from me, that’s the lesson to be drawn. It’s because I was born under the astronomical sign of the ass that I’m like this, in the manner of calves and piglets.

  I FOLLOWED THEM, and I tried to be a pitiful sight with my mouth and my eyes and all my airs and graces so they’d treat me nicely, so they would help my heart in all this suffering, so they’d think I was a handsome youth. The priest didn’t look nasty. Because his soutane was all dungy and covered with chalk dust I felt safe, he looked more like a neighbour than the others, papa had been a priest too when he was a fine-looking lad. The other individual had a revolver in his belt, which startled me, because from the pictures I’d seen I had always thought firearms were very small, whereas in reality, my goodness, this one was as big as father’s balls.

  While I walked I rememoried in bits and pieces what our life had consisted of to date, and what it would no longer be as everything passes here below, for instance the sound that papa made upstairs while he was doing his exercises, or when we all ate together and we tied a bib around our frog for a laugh and fed her flies, and the care that papa lavished on the Fair Punishment in the woodshed when he took it out of its box, which would now be more berefted than ever, I thought about all that and it helped me be a pitiful sight because it turned me every which way in my sadness and I felt something like an urge to cry. It’s a pretty word, rememory, I don’t know if it actually exists but it means to recall things.

  Now I’d like you to pay close attention because what comes next will be difficult.

  First of all they showed me into the town hall, that’s what it’s called according to what I could read above the door, and it was a very pretty house, so clean that you felt like applauding and walking around inside dressed like adam and dancing barefoot among the manikins of light. We walked down a corridor, which evoked for me the portrait gallery on our estate, I’ll certainly have something to say about that later because of the sudden light these portraits would shed, a few hours from now, on my own origins here below, then we entered a small room equipped with tables, seats, and lamps that were attached to the wall by ropes and created light through the power of magic. The two men who accompanied me hadn’t said a word to me along the way but between themselves they talked a great deal, energetically and anxiously it seemed to me, and the priest said officer to the man who was wearing the firearm with its breathtaking dimensions. The first thing I noticed in this little room was that there was someone else inside it, at first I could see only the feet crossed on a desk and the hands because a screen concealed the head, but right away I felt safe because the hands were opening a dictionary entitled the flowers of evil. They sat me down and then the officer’s questions began.

  “You live in the house on the other side of the pine grove, don’t you? And your father is mister soissons? And it’s his horse that was with you?”

  I moved my torso from side to side as if I were humming a little song inside my bonnet, I stared vacantly into space, but I didn’t reply. Incidentally, the strange thing about that word soissons is that sometimes I would nod off in the middle of my dictionaries and all at once, perfectly clearly, I would hear the word soissons whistle very quickly past my ear and flee like a trout that slips between our legs when we walk barefoot in the lake in summer, and I had the impression that the word had something to do with me, that it belonged to the most intimate part of me more than any other word, I’m saying it the way it seems to me, and that word soissons brought me out of my dozing all surprised.

  The priest and the officer went on reviling me with questions, and it seemed that I annoyed them with the way I appeared not to hear the vulgate, but I meant no harm and they got lost in conjecture and other calculations of the sort and, let me tell you, even though I had the strongest sense of such things, never would I have believed that my father was such an important man. The officer even had a big grey moustache as if he wanted to imitate him! That moustache was so much like his, you’d have thought it had flown from papa’s face like my friend the dragonfly, as it’s said that our soul flies away when we die, and had settled above the lip of the officer, as true as I’m.

  The gentleman in question, along with the soutane, soon opted for speaking to me as if they’d known me all my life, thinking that would sound better between my ears, and when they asked me if something had happened to my father I finally showed them that I understood the human tongue like everybody else, and I answered, he died this morning at dawn, which made an impression.

  They asked me to repeat it, it was a piece of news that would travel far if proved correct, but repeating isn’t my strong point. “We found him hanging this morning at the end of a rope that he was clinging to like one man without a by-your-leave,” I said instead. The priest made the sign of the cross on his belly. The officer seemed calmer. Mind you, he didn’t have a crucifix around his neck that he’d be constantly tempted to play with, the way kid brother does with you know what. He told me in a voice full of tact, as if I were something infinitely fragile that had to be treated sensitively:

  “You said, ‘We found him.’ Who is we?”

  “Papa has two sons,” I said. “Me and my brother.”

  They drew back their necks in stupefaction the way pigeons do when they walk, they gazed at me as if I’d said something outrageous, just try to understand them, my contemporaries and friends. The officer moved his hand as if to say, we’ll come back to that later, and he asked me:

  “What about your mama? Isn’t there a mother living with you?”

  “There have never been any sluts in our house,” I said.

  From the look on their faces I realized clarifications were called for, so I added:

  “All mothers are sluts but you can say blessed virgins too if you fancy, the nuance is infinitesimal.”

  I received two very quick whacks from the man in the soutane, one with the flat of the hand, the other with the back, both with the right hand and in less time than it takes to write it down. I’d have liked to put my fingers in my underwear and flick blood at him, but I didn’t have any blood that day, it had healed over until next time.

  Then the third man, of whom I’d so far seen only the hands and feet, got out of his chair and I immediately recognized my neighbour who’d come to my house to importune me, the prince that brother teased me about and said I was in love with, humph. He seemed interested in everything we were saying but he said nothing himself, in the manner of cats and wise men. He had crossed his arms and he rested his shoulder against the wall and he was looking at me with curiosity and gravity for some reason I’m unaware of, maybe he was in love too. Just seeing him gave me a kind of urge to run my tongue all over his face, to put his nose in my mouth, things sometimes happen in my head and in my body that are genuine riddles for me. He still had his dictionary in his hand and he’d made a bookmark with one of his fingers and I liked that detail because it was something I very often did too when I broke off my reading to dream about the handsome knights the pages talked about, I’d make a bookmark with one of my fingers. As for the priest, he had withdrawn to a chair in the corner and he was staring at the floor with eyes like saucers. For a man who had promised not to harm me, it struck me that, despite the soutane he was wearing, his
word had no more weight than a comet that emerges from our hole.

  But getting back to sluts, I tried to explain to them that I did indeed have a very distant rememory of a blessed virgin who’d held me on her knees and smelled good, and even of a cherub on the sweet-smelling virgin’s other knee who was as much like me as a bubble, as my brother tried to convince me. But was that a memory? And was she a slut?

  The priest had come back and with a stunned look, like the one kid brother had the time he told me dog had just died, whereas I didn’t give a hoot owl as my father would say, he repeated: “She’s crazy. Or possessed.” Soutanes don’t know the genders of pronouns, if I’m any judge. What’s more, I don’t know what that priest did with his saliva but in the corners of his lips he had a sort of dry verdigris foam, mouth-kelp if you’ll believe me, that I was seeing for the first time on a neighbour, I don’t know if it’s rare or what, in any case I have a horror of it, if you’ll give credence to these words of mine. For want of blood I flicked contempt at him with my eyes, which were always filled with little thunderbolts according to my late father.

  They started talking between themselves again, I mean the officer and the priest, with no concern for me aside from the glances they shot at me now and then, glances that froze them for a moment in a kind of horrified stupor, and I’m choosing my words carefully. But there was also the prince and he was observing me with touchingly friendly eyes and when I saw him smile at me I turned my face away, shrugging and putting on airs, because who did he think I was anyway?

  The serious matter that seemed to overwhelm the other two, which they kept harping on like a refrain, was the fact that my late father was the owner of the mine and his death was going to cause changes, and they seemed to have a horror of change if you want my opinion. They finally told me that I was going to be obliged to take them to papa.

  “Papa has disappeared.”

  “What’s that? What do you mean? Have you lost his remains?”

  “His body is there,” I said, “but he himself has disappeared.”

  That shouldn’t be hard to understand.

  “Then you’ll have to take us to his remains.”

  To show them that such a thing was completely out of the question I went into a stoppit. Don’t worry, it wasn’t a real one, it was just to impress them, which it did. The prince said gently, his gentleness even et cetera:

  “Can’t you see you’re frightening her? She’s trembling.”

  Another one who thought I was a slut, I suppose he was going by my inflations and I told him so with my eyes.

  “Mister mine inspector, I would ask you not to get mixed up in this. Go back to your poems.” It was the officer who said that to the prince.

  “Precisely. As mine inspector it seems to me that it does concern me just a little, don’t you think?”

  Those two seemed not to like each other, to put it in black and white. I must also point out that the officer had in common with my brother the fact that he looked like someone who never sticks his nose in a dictionary, which fills such people with jealous contempt for those who make a bookmark with a finger, and I thought to myself that even though he’d called me a slut, in the event of out-and-out warfare I wouldn’t make a big fuss, I would side with the mine inspector, all daggers drawn. What can you do with someone who never sticks his nose in a dictionary?

  The priest and the mustachioed officer concluded that it was a case of force majeure and that it was their duty to advise the mare, who had been prevented from following the grocers funeral by the flu, and I told myself that they definitely knew nothing about what words mean, but then I realized that no doubt they meant mayor and not mare, because watch out! — the secretarious is a reader. They told the mine inspector to keep an eye on me in the meantime and then they were off like gushes of piss.

  I’ll tell you, had I been able to foresee that I’d be having a tete-a-tete with the mine inspector before the day was over, I think, all things considered, I’d rather have hanged myself with papa’s rope, because I was a little frightened by the urges of my heart, to say the least, and according to the dictates of nature and religion it’s obviously my brother I should fittingly be in love with, not another man.

  THE FIRST THING THE PRINCE did once we were alone and given over to his mercy was ask me if I wanted a coffee or a cup of milk or a glass of cider or god knows what, I only admitted that I was as thirsty as a sponge in the sun, those were my very words.

  “How old would you be? Sixteen? Seventeen?”

  Then, since I’d rather have let myself be chopped up fine than answer him, he added with a taunting little laugh:

  “You’re the same age as your heart, I suppose?”

  I couldn’t help myself: “At the age of my heart I’d be ninety or more.”

  “Do you know what you’ve just done?” he asked as he put some water on to heat. “Without knowing it you’ve just made an anapestic tetrameter.”

  I’ve spent my life amid crud and mud and let me tell you, I had no idea what you measured with a tetrameter. But I’m just reporting what was said to me, I’m not trying to understand. To tell the truth, I don’t know exactly how long I’ve been on this earth, but it seems to me that it’s been a long time. I have more memories than if I were a thousand. To heat the water, the mine inspector had gone to the other side of his desk, I’m not sure I remembered to tell you that, and as he was speaking quite quietly and abstractedly I couldn’t always hear exactly what he said, but it didn’t seem to be very important either to him or to me. For me his voice was enough. I mean that it was like music, and it turned me inside out the same way, causing me exquisite suffering, I had an urge to lie on the ground on my belly and have him stretch out motionless on my back and go on talking to me.

  I say abstractedly because, while he was fussing with the cups and the coffee, he kept darting a worried and reflective glance at an open notebook. I saw him pick up a pencil and correct a word or I’ll eat my boots.

  “Are you a secretarious?” I asked.

  He asked me to say it again. But too bad for him, I need words too much to waste them by saying them twice. I kept silent. Then he gave a little sigh tinged with a shade of disdain, similar to the one that I give when, flushed with emotion, I gaze at my reflection in water just dipped from the well in the spring, because of the colour of my eyes, and my brother catches me and makes fun of me and I tell him, feigning indifference: “How tiresome these mirrors are, how tiresome! …” That’s why I didn’t believe in the inspector’s indifference when he let drop, after his sigh:

  “Let’s say that I try to write poems

  Poems, all right, I know what they are, there are lots of them in my dictionaries of chivalry. I was joking a while ago when I made believe that I thought a tetrameter was something to measure with. You don’t understand a thing about yours truly unless you understand his sense of humour.

  “I write too,” said I, sighing likewise.

  He stared at me in a way that made my inflations feel all warm, and my thighs too, because the power of magic connects those parts. If my brother looked at me like that more often, I thought to myself, life would be an enchanted forest. That put words in my mouth:

  “You see, father made each of us in turn assume the role of secretarious. The onus of such a task falls to the sons, that’s what he told us in his stentorian voice (I don’t know what a stentorian is). Even though I did it willingly, without looking pitiful, and my brother’s stomach heaved at the mere thought of it, brother was required to put in his days with the book of spells too, days interspersed with mine, and just reading what we’d written would make us laugh if we were in a laughing mood because there are times, and I’m saying this in black and white, when all brother does is pretend, doodling lines with his pencil, my brother is an idiot, a real ninnycompoop. Despite the fact that when father checked in the book of spells it broke my heart, because he couldn’t tell the difference, humph. That didn’t keep me from being the more intel
ligent of his sons. But with father dead, people will have to walk over my body before they take away my book of spells, and as for brother, he doesn’t give a damn, he won’t look pitiful, he’ll go on living a life of dissipation.”

  The inspector had approached me with the coffees and I think I can say from the way he was behaving that he thought I was someone who deserved to live. He hesitated before a fair number of his sentences, his lips moved but the words didn’t come out. Finally he said:

  “Why do you always talk about yourself as if you were a boy? And your accent, where on earth did you get that… Don’t you know you’re a girl? And even, I’d say,” — his lips uncovered all his teeth, which made me think of the sunshine when it clears a little path for itself between two clouds on our estate — “and even, I would say, a very very pretty one.”

  And I swear, he said that second very in italics.

  “Maybe a little grimy,” he added, because nothing is unalloyed beneath the salt of heaven, not even kind words, and he took out his handkerchief and wiped my cheek with it, but I jerked my head back. I tell you, I abhor that handkerchief and I would love to have it in my hand right now, I think I’d squeeze it very hard between my legs, but since he still thought I was a slut I felt obliged to explain, it’s my own personal cross that I’m always having to explain myself in great detail to those I love, as horse is my witness:

  “And does mister priest who hit me also have inflations under his dress? Once upon a long time ago a true calamity happened to me, I think I lost my balls. I bled for days and then it healed over and then it started up again, it depends on the moon, ah la la, it’s all because of the moon, and I started to get inflations on my torso as well. My brother laughed because my father made me wear this skirt so the blood wouldn’t overflow and leave a stain, and I got angry when my brother laughed and I’d chase after him so I could flick fingers full of blood at his face. Even when I was little, what I remember is that father and brother pissed standing up but I always crouched down, because I never wanted to touch my balls or even just look at them the way my brother does all the time, I didn’t actually feel them till the day I lost them, if that makes any sense, and then I started bleeding. But it makes no difference, father knew I was the more intelligent of his sons, and shoo. Balls or no balls.”