The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

by Gaetan Soucy

  And one time when papa came out again, I don’t know what was going through my noggin but I was planted there in front of the door, and he had an attack of surprise at the sight of me. He raised his hand and I my elbow in front of my cheek, thinking I’d be contending with you know what, but contrary to all expectations his palm settled gently onto my skull and he said in a voice that was tight but tranquil, as he pointed inside the vault: “It’s a fair punishment,” whence its name, which has stayed with me.

  And that was how the Fair and everything inside the vault became familiar to me, I often went there with papa, those memories are sacred. I helped him look after the glass box, I even got to be on first-name terms with it, talking to it as if it were a full-fledged neighbour the way papa did, like a truly deranged noggin. Finally we would extirpate the Fair Punishment from its box, unless we’d left it out the time before, that happened too, and we would dust it with our gazes. Afterwards it was not uncommon for us to spend long hours sitting there in silence, holding hands, my father and I, as true as I’m, those memories are sacred. It’s strange what happened inside me then, I want you to know that. I had the impression that rememories were coming back to me of a time when nothing on our blasted estate was as it is nowadays. First of all, the sun: it was everywhere. And it was always following me, as sure as I’m suffering. I would fling myself here and here, and there it was clinging to my heels and souls, ah la la, it was tiring in the end, not to mention that it shined my eyes. The moon was the same. I’d go to the other end of my legs, if that’s how you say it, then I’d play at retracing my footsteps, and pop! There it was again, between the summits of the trees, even though I’d been running. Even today. I sometimes think that I’m not just anyone after all, living as I do with two stars on my buttocks. Same problem with the pompom clouds. Tss.

  And it also seems to me — to go back to that unthinkable time, the time I dreamed about when I was holding my father’s hand in the vault — that back then my size didn’t even come up to papa’s knee-bone; he seemed as high as a wall to me, and always laughing and smiling, as if it were possible that at a certain era in my life I’d had two little wings on my back, bambino-style. And always accompanying this vision, this picture of a slut, if that’s what she was, who smelled as good and fresh and tender as the wild roses along the edge of the pine grove. I have an even clearer imagination from that period when I didn’t come up to my father’s knee, which is this. There was a cherub at my side and she wasn’t me but we were as much alike as two bubbles, from as brother keeps trying to convince me, and papa had a magnificat glass in his hands, that’s what it’s called, and through the power of magic that magnificat glass allowed him to capture the rays of the sun, which made black lines accompanied by little curls of smoke when they landed on a wooden plank. Papa smiled as he formed letters with those concentrated lines of lightning, but I’ll have more to say about that small plank at the proper time, and you’ll see why.

  To finish with these memories, if that’s what they are, I’ll tell you that they agitated me for a long time, especially during my dreams and again last winter when kid brother was trying to persuade me, against all reason, that we had a small sister somewhere in the mountains god knows where, a discussion that I very clearly remember having already brought up elsewhere. But in the end it didn’t stop me from sleeping, it was too bothersome. I would shrug a shoulder, I’d flick some blood at him if I had some. And the rest of the time, I mean when papa and I weren’t in the woodshed, papa was as usual — taciturn as the billy goat when he comes to us in spring, deep inside his bonnet of dark thoughts, commanding everything from the bedroom upstairs as he’d done just the day before.

  As for my brother, it’s as if he just has an idea of the Fair Punishment’s existence, it scared him so badly he pleated his pants; I think he bad-dreams about it still.

  But, well, I was there facing papa’s mortal remains and rememorying all that, pointlessly of course, because I wish someone would tell me what use memory is. I’ll try my best to put those things into a corner and not think about them any more, and instead to reflect through understanding, as ethics teaches us. I gathered my ideas together so as to get a bearing on the present state of the universe regarding my brother and me. Father had become nothing more and nothing less than a thing, because there was no one inside now, and I felt that even this thing with nothing inside no longer belonged to us. Hordes would come to us from the village, ignorant of our customs, respecting nothing, understanding even less, frothing at the snout, agitated and stupid as flies, and they would dispossess us completely: of our estate, my dictionaries, the Fair Punishment too, quite likely, and consequently of the power of speech and of the very mortal remains of papa, which they’d bury where they saw fit, in the dung and the mud.

  What was cruel was that even if they left my brother and me in peace, we were no further ahead. Had we continued to respect father’s rules, to repeat the rosary of his deeds after a fashion, we’d have only agitated the void, if you want my opinion, because outside the living body of papa those rites made no sense whatsoever, and all the fragile meanings I’d up till now hung here and there on the great remnants of the world, the way I saw bambinos hanging christmas-coloured balls on a fir tree in my illustrations, I watched them shatter one by one in little puffs, in the manner of soap foam, from the mere fact of my father’s awe-inspiring death. Which filled a gap on the “horizon-of-our-life. “

  I’ll have you know, though I don’t dare admit it, the temptation was strong to let myself be pushed around, to give up, to wait for our neighbours to arrive and submit to their sticks, because my brother and I no longer had any code or law to oppose theirs. I forbade myself to dream that a handsome cavalier would come and take me in his arms and carry me away on his white horse to bounteous lands, above all I tried not to think that the handsome cavalier would have your smile and your eyes and your brackmard sword gleaming like a spoon.

  I sensed that my only chance, if that’s the correct term, was to bear witness, and I took my courage in both hands, that is to say, my book of spells and my pencil, and I traced this first sentence with tears stinging my eyes: We had to take the universe in hand, my brother and I, for one morning just before dawn … — or something close to that, because I was short of time, I was short of everything — so that I could read myself over again.

  I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I was able to write at top speed and with my heart pounding the pavement, because there was no moon and the sky was covered with limbo, but I must have filled a dozen pages at one go without stopping, speeding through sentences and words like a bullet through the pages of a bible. When the secretarious got it into her head to pedal through the words, clear the tracks, it’s coming fast, strewth, at a speed that can break necks. I was interrupted by a sound my stomach made, it’s called a gargoyle if I remember correctly, and all at once I recalled the vow I’d made to my reluctant bird-belly to eat a potato or two before dawn, which I hadn’t kept. As I closed the book of spells it seemed to me that papa’s knees had moved. His legs had been as stiff and straight as sticks when we took him down from his miserable mast this morning, and now they were slightly bent, like a dead spider’s. But we’d finally got to where we were. To ease my conscience, I should note here that his bare feet strangely resembled two mouldy loaves of bread, in shape as well as in colour. We’re not much in the eyes of death, either before or after, that’s a news flash from yours truly.

  From among the scattered sacks I plucked a potato and also a beet I’d encountered before, I went to the bucket to wash them and then I wiped them with the saturn ring of my skirt. A third of the beet, which was already soft, had been gnawed away. Beets are like us, and so are the rats that gnaw them. Whether they’re devoured or left to rot, they won’t stick around very long here below, not for anybody, and don’t try to tell me otherwise. I crouched under the table where father was and began to chew. I had picked up the book of spells, and as I went on writing with a migh
ty hand and an outstretched arm the strangest sounds could be heard from upstairs. Horse, who was lying on the floor not far from me, sat up on his feet and looked at me with his walleyed gaze. A commotion of panic, of racing feet coming from all the bedrooms. It seemed to be heading for the veranda, which served as a belvedere and gave onto the bedroom where papa et cetera just the day before. Alarmed and in the grip of an evil omen, I huddled around the friendly book of spells. Brother burst in noisily from the staircase. He sped to the cupboard, knocking over everything in his way, and in a spurt of impatient anger he reached out his arm and knocked over a chair that had committed no crime aside from being in his way, and it bounced off papas belly. That was when I realized that brother had just been touched by grace.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, not daring to emerge from beneath the table.

  Brother was battling with the headgear on the nail jar, trying to unscrew it. He made an irritated gesture at me that meant, be quiet. Then went back upstairs, taking along the handsaw and the hammer. The commotion started up again, more threatening than ever. I pressed my fists over my ears, I thought I was screaming. What I wanted to do was leave then and there, flee to the village and throw myself at the feet of the sly devils, so fed up was I at that moment with brother, with corpses, with burials and I don’t know what all — with a life as black as soot. But I couldn’t abandon kid brother. I felt perplexedly that just now he was tumbling down a slippery slope hell-bent for leather, and that I ought to fling myself across his path like a chair to stop him, to say the least about the way things looked to me. So I went upstairs in my turn, using the staircase where, just this morning, papa had exited like a piano.

  The halves! I never knew where they’d come from, but do we ever know where anything whatsoever comes to us from on this blasted estate? There must have been almost as many of them as there were portraits in the portrait gallery, and I’d been quite fond of them for a day of yore. Often I would deck them out, bah, in this and that, but always prettily, and I behaved with them as if we were with saint-simon at the court of the sun king, abounding in handsome cavaliers and counts in their dreamy outfits and tales of chivalry that were like visions, as you can imagine, and in the secrecy of my heart, so much was I my father’s son that I pretended to be their countess. We called them halves because they had only a body, made of wax and wood. They lacked the portion of their insides that allows one to suffer and so to call oneself a full-fledged neighbour, if I’m making myself clear. We can also name them dummies, that’s allowed, although it’s not as strong and not as accurate, and you don’t do speech any favour to associate with words that rattle around in your sleeve after the handshake.

  Brother had lined them up on the belvedere, along the railing, and plunked them onto seats. One had a broom in its hands, one had a big piece of tree branch, one had a pick or a rake — at a distance you might have thought it was a guardroom, and that was what my brother had in his idea box. Never before had I seen him in such a state of exaltation, it was as if sparks were flying out his ears and out his hole.

  “Brother,” I said, “surely you don’t expect to drive the villagers away with halves armed with broomsticks?”

  Brother had lit half a dozen oil lamps which produced a glow which was hardly reminiscent of paradise, I assure you. While he was thrashing about from one end of the belvedere to the other, arming his soldiers in the aforementioned manner, at regular intervals he was gulping fine wine directly from the bottleneck. Ah la la. And then he said:

  “I am the master of the estate. Let them come! I’m not afraid to talk to them! I’ll answer them through the asshole of my cannon!”

  “Your cannon? What cannon?” I tried to reason with him. “Papa is nothing but mortal remains, his body will never move again!”

  “I’m the one who is papa now!”

  And he thumped his chest with pride, drumming it with his fists the way papa used to do, in the manner of gorillers.

  In summer it often happened that I would try to keep a straight face while telling a butterfly that had been standing for half a turn of the clock on the summit of my knee: “I am your master,” just to see, but our mandibles no longer sufficed and we’d burst out laughing, I mean my friend would fly away, because just try explaining to a butterfly what it means to be master of an estate! Something even a butterfly can’t understand must not be very important, as it’s sometimes my opinion to think. But I hasten to add that opinions on the matter were divided in my family, I mean when papa was still breathing like one man.

  Be that as it may, I left brother to his mad brain, that’s the right word for it. I picked up my oil lamp and rushed to the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” he howled, in a voice that sounded as if he had just been thrown naked onto burning coals.

  I said nothing and ran outside to rush into the living night. I went in the direction you can imagine, towards the woodshed, also known as the vault. I knew I would be relatively safe there, since brother was cretinous about going inside, because of you know what. Leaning against the stone table where the Fair Punishment reigns, and I had to elbow it aside to make room for myself, I began to write, forging straight ahead, as is my devastating custom. I only broke off my composition to go to the door with a shudder and cast a glance at what brother was accomplishing under the tyrannical influence of grace. In a sense he hadn’t failed because really, from this distance, you might have taken them for standing soldiers, the kind you can see in my dictionaries. At times he brought his hands together in a megaphone and shouted: “Let them come! I’ve got a few things to say to those neighbours!” I went back to my stone table, shivering and sad. How I wished I were at your side, under your protection, all tiny and terrified with admiration. But I pushed my hair back on either side of my shoulders and, sighing, I plucked up the courage of my pencil.

  Two or three times, balls of fire that were pretty in their own way crossed the sky, launched from the belvedere. What he’d made them from I hadn’t the slightest idea, nor did I know how he’d been able to catapult them all the way to the middle of the field. One ended up so close to the woodshed that I nearly cried out, but after due reflection I refrained. Such ingenuity in an individual with as few brains in his bonnet as my brother could only be due to a state of grace, as I’ve said, and no doubt it was the sudden feeling of intelligence, after years of mental darkness, that had driven his brain mad.

  On top of all that, brother was striking the hammer against a long rectangle of tin and making a noise like thunder, to make people think, I suppose, that he was on first-name terms with the elements he claimed to command, but who would be taken in by that, I ask you, except himself, scattered in the wretched pieces of his mind? Humph.

  Suddenly I understood that those balls of fire I’d seen against the sky were in fact marking the return of the flaming partridges that jupiter junior had made from a turpentine tree, if that’s the right name for it. In any event, poor birds. The author of deeds has no pity or shame.

  And so the whole night passed. I gave it the part of myself that uses words to keep going. I covered some twenty pages of paper with my minuscule, crowded writing, and shoo. By the end, my head was useless. My brain was melting through my eyes, they burned so much, and the pencil escaped from my hand and ran away.

  And I’ll have you know that the situation struck me as being so fenced in on every side that I reached the point where I wondered if it might not be better to follow the ari-adne clew of father’s rope and hang myself too, to resolve all the problems in one twinkling of an eye, that’s what ropes are for, my pet. But then what would become of brother? And would I ever see you again, o my fiance? And what a bereft-ment for the birds who dance with me in secrecy, even those at the other end of the earth, and my manikins of light and the wrappings of the Fair Punishment?

  Dawn was beginning to point its rosy finger. I took a last look outside, because I could hear a murmuring of hammers. My brother was nailing a seat to the sum
mit of two stepladders that he’d joined together with belts. And he was doing that at the edge of the vegetable garden, hardly a dozen legs from the house. You can check, they’re still there, those accursed stepladders. It was then that I saw a shape appear at the other end of the field, along the pine grove, among the wild roses, and I couldn’t make up my mind as to what it was. I believe I noted this strange apparition earlier, here in my last will and testament, when it first occurred some fifty pages ago. But I finally knew what the silhouette was in the dawn: it was nothing less than our neighbour standing on his fool’s bauble, making his way across this earth by hopping like a magpie. It was the beggar.

  THE MENDICANT, IF YOU WANT. He was wearing his houp-land, grimy is the word for that coat, as is neverending, and let me tell you, we sorely needed that in the midst of this turmoil, ah la la. As he drew near he was travelling at his affluent senator’s pace. He would sometimes interrupt the rhythm of his cane, which might have been called a happy leg drunk on independence and liberty, to stand on his central joystick, which was faithfully present at every step of his rendezvous with the grass and the hard-packed earth, and like a peacock fanning his tail he spun his stick in cartwheels before setting off again, the syntax is courtesy of saint-simon. He was a neighbour in a carefree mood, our mendicant, I don’t know if I remembered to note that. Those who are fretful beneath the salt of heaven don’t lodge at his inn, I guarantee.