The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

by Gaetan Soucy

  “She doesn’t have any skin behind her wrappings, I don’t think. It was the great calcination, everything underneath burned. I say she because you can say either one. We say he or she when we talk about the Fair Punishment because, on the very very rare occasions when papa talked about it, he’d get all tangled up in the gender of his pronouns and say she, and he passed that habit on to us.”

  You need a huge silence to hear it but sometimes a very faint lament comes from the throat of the Fair, and since there is nearly always silence in the vault we heard the faint lament being produced. I moved the bowl of stagnant water closer but the left eyelid came down as slowly as molasses. She doesn’t have the gift of speech, you have to understand her, so she closes her left eye like that when she wants to say no, it’s only human. I moved the stagnant water away from her teeth.

  The inspector leaned over towards the Fair, circumspectly and fearfully, and no sooner did she move her little finger than he jumped back, the way my brother the cretin does at dawn when he’s afraid of the bats returning to the fold above our hair, friendly though they may be.

  “She can’t stand up,” I went on, hitching up one end of a wrapping, “it’s as if her legs are a joke. But sometimes we lie down beside each other and I make a game of unwrapping her the whole length of her body, and what I see is that we’re exactly the same size. From what I could understand of my father’s explanations — he was never explicit about this kind of thing, with him you always had to guess, to sew little bits of sentences together — apparently the Fair burned the dead thing here at my left in the glass box, but it must have happened before brother and I were on earth for I’ve never had a memory of the event, if it is one. I presume they’ve been here, I mean the defunct and the Fair, as long as the world has existed, and now that papa has disappeared without a by-your-leave, you’ll have to settle for what I’ve just provided by way of light on the matter.”

  I placed my hand on her head, smiling at her, I think, so she’d know I wasn’t angry at her.

  To the inspector I went on to say: “The Fair Punishment, that’s what it is called. Without it, I wonder if we’d even be able to use words. That came to me once when I was thinking about it. Perhaps all the silence that fills the life of the Fair allows my brother and me to be on first-name terms with speech, especially me. I mean, it’s as if the Fair had taken all the silence on herself to free us from it and enable us to speak, and what would I be without words, I ask you. Hurray for the Fair, that was a fine piece of work. Can you see? You could say this is suffering in the purest state, all wrapped up in a single package. She’s like pain that doesn’t belong to anyone. We don’t know if there’s even a hint of understanding in her bonnet. I myself would be inclined to think yes, there is, a little bit at least.”

  The mine inspector had something like an attack of annoyance, and he raced over to the wall and he grabbed hold of the Fair’s chain, pulling harder and harder as if he wanted to yank it out of the wall, but have no fear, it held fast. The Punishment curled up even more because of being fearful deep down. As for me, I went on talking while mechanically picking specks of dust off the glass box.

  “Kid brother never comes here because the Fair always gives him the fright of his life. Papa and I, on the other hand, used to spend long hours here at night. He would rest his forehead against the glass box and treat himself to tears. Believe me if you want, I never cried, not there and not anywhere else in my whole bitch of a, it seems I don’t produce tears. Papa would hold his hand in mine as he wept, the syntax is courtesy of saint-simon. And then — I don’t know why, it’s been a golden age since then — papa stopped wanting to come here, and I was obliged to tie a string around my finger so I wouldn’t forget to feed the Punishment, who eats nothing but porridge, and dust her off and change her wrappings now and then the way papa taught me, such is life, they have a tendency to rot a little, they smell of medicine. At the end of his earthly time father didn’t want to hear the Fair mentioned any more. When I ventured a word on the subject he’d serve me up an earbox, if you know what I mean. So I’ve kept on coming here all alone, especially when I was sad or if I just had a burden of melancholy. It seemed to me that there was more love in the vault than anywhere else on our whole estate, because of the way papa had spent long nights holding his hand in mine.”

  Of course, I’d lied to the mine-inspecting poet a little when I told you I’d never cried in my bitch of a, because there were the times when papa made us fasten him to the door in the portrait gallery with chains and forced me to flog him with a wet cloth, as well as the times when I pumped the organ with my legs or, more generally, when I was besieged by music, but I’d told the inspector that to show my independence as well as my dignity, so that he’d find me fascinating as well as intensely pretty.

  The inspector closed his eyelids and shook his head with a look of pain and despondency. When he opened them again and spoke, still in the tiniest voice, it did something to me that you no longer used the carefree way of talking you’d once used for the little goat: “And what about that? Who did that to you? Your brother …?”

  As I was wearing a big sweater, you cant get an accurate idea about my belly, but yesterday, when he was having an effect on me by holding me against him, the mine inspector must have felt it.

  “Yes, I know, my belly is swollen. And the more it swells, it’s been a good two seasons, the more it seems to me that the loss of my balls is scarred over now, on my body if not in my soul, which sets me apart from my brother’s poor soldiers, because I haven’t bled now for, soon it will be more than two seasons. My belly is swelling and the strange thing is, I have a feeling there’s someone other than me inside, as if I’m beginning to be something and a half. It’s doing that in my belly right now, here, touch.”

  I saw that I’d have to grab your hand, which you’d taken away from me, it was all soft and now I placed it on my belly and its surprises.

  “At first it made a quiet buzzing, as if a baby bumblebee were travelling in my belly from right to left, drawing a line, very softly, very very softly, and I know what a baby bumblebee is. Can you feel it moving inside me right now? It’s starting to be more like punches, like gentle whacks that the life deep in my belly is giving me. Every time that happens, no matter where I am or on what page or in what sentence, I write these words in my book of spells: and shoo. I much prefer these little punches of life I can feel inside me, shoo, shoo, to the blood I flick by the handful, I tell you, or the whacks of my late father.”

  Again, all this put in such a way that you’ll think I’m cute and charming enough to drive a person crazy, but the inspector looked at me as if he couldn’t understand how I could laugh at a time like this. And what was so special about this particular moment? Why should it leave us speechless more than any other? For mine was an innocuous laugh, you see, not like my brother’s, it was more a bee’s laugh, which is the most innocent thing on earth, because thinking about that vibration inside me put sweet thoughts into my noggin, and given the number of sweet things that come to me on this blasted planet I wasn’t about to throw gobs of spit at it to ward off spells.

  “Yesterday I could feel that you’d detached yourself from me because you’d felt that my belly was swollen. And you ran away crying: We mustn’t! We mustn’t.”

  We heard a shot. The shed window went flying and a giddy whistling sound passed over our heads.

  “That monster is firing at us!”

  A second detonation. This time the bullet must have got lost in the stones of the wall outside. The Fair had huddled into her little heap with a kind of moaning sound, her head tucked under her wing like a partridge. The inspector knelt down and ventured a look out the eviscerated window. I can’t say what it did to me to see you on your knees like that, with just your face lit by the daylight falling from the window, how majestic I thought you were and all the rest, it was like joan of arc receiving a flash of the holy ghost inside her head, deep in her dungeon cell. Then y
ou leaped at me and, in a whisper that sounded like a cry:

  “He’s out of ammunition, I think. He’s gone to the house for more. Hurry! You mustn’t stay here. We’ll escape on my bike!”

  We left at top speed. I fell in the mud as I was running towards the bike, for the book of spells is cumbersome and I didn’t want to leave it behind, as you may well imagine. But you picked me up, my prince, you picked me up. You propped me against you, right against your belly, to make me safe from my brother’s muskrat, and all at once it started to get warm and vibrate between my thighs, it felt good, and as your steed was backfiring I felt myself being swept away in a magnificent fit of exhilaration, with the gates open wide in the direction of your kingdom.

  There were two more detonations, if my memory is reliable, which we could barely hear on account of the humming of your steed, then there was a third, a final one, and then, I don’t know how I was able to see it, it was so quick, you brought your hand to the back of your neck the way a person does when a fly bites, and your steed lost its head, everything flipped over and my skull crashed into the ground, don’t ask me how. When I could finally pull myself up, the wheels of the bike kept spinning in the air all by themselves, because it was lying on its side, and the noise it made, you’d have thought it was howling in despair. And I saw you on the ground nearby, your hand on your throat, I saw the blood spurt rhythmically between your fingers and I don’t know how long it may have been before you stopped looking at me altogether with those eyes of a creature that doesn’t understand why it’s being struck with blows, at once surprised and pleading, then all at once frozen there like holes, but I laid my forehead on your chest and I cried, I cried.

  When I finally lifted my head, I tell you, the steed had stopped howling and I had lost my innocence about all things. I had understood definitively that our dreams come down to earth just long enough to thumb their nose at us, leaving a taste on our tongues like blood-clot jam, and I picked up my book of spells just like that, in the middle of the field, and my pencil followed like the day the night, because a secretarious, a real one, never shrinks from the duty of giving a name to things, that’s his role, and I thought I’d already been disarmed enough by life that I didn’t wish to deprive myself further, in the manner of franciscans and soft-eyed mules, and to go so far as to divest myself of my dolls of ash, I mean words, so true is it that we are bereft of everything we know not how to name, as the Fair Punishment would put it, if she knew how to speak.

  AS FOR MY BROTHER, I cant deny it, he went on bustling about as if things were perfectly normal, as if they still made sense, that’s because of his balls I think. Humph. Now and then I would glance at him, not scornfully but taking pity on him with his poor head charred by grace and all smeared with religion. A while ago he went away to dig a pit along the pine grove, that’s done now. Then he came back and moved restlessly around the house. He took a knife and severed the cord that was wrapped around horse like a girth, so that he could grab hold of the sack containing papas corpse, I’m well aware of it. And then I saw the first curls of smoke rising from the library, where my brother had been attending to I know not what no more than twenty minutes earlier. I bowed my head and went back to writing. At the point we’re at now on this earth.

  Hardly more than a few moments later I saw him approaching again, but this time he was approaching me. I can’t say I was actually afraid because there’s no longer much to keep me here below, where to put it bluntly everything is a chain, and existing no longer matters much once those chains are lost, the Fair wouldn’t contradict me on that. If I still had any chain myself, it was the one inside, the one that had linked me to my belly for what would soon be more than two seasons. I thought to myself: As long as that one holds …

  As for what brother could do to me now, humph, and I sent him packing with my eyes full of little thunderbolts. He did something with his arm that told me to go to hell, then he took a small piece of the universe that was flaccid and sticky out of his pocket and threw it in my face. I looked in the grass to see what it was. Oh my. Even our only toy the frog has reached the stage of mortal remains. Brother took off again, in the direction of papa’s. And lugged them away with difficulty, because a body is heavy with no one inside it, and as promised he sank them to the bottom of the pit he’d just dug, then on top he planted the cross that I constructed yesterday in the morning. And that’s that. All has been consumed.

  Or so I thought. For whom do I see turning up behind me out of the blue with a smack of his cane on my back? That’s right, the beggar. Ah la la. With his snickerings of depraved lust and the sounds from his throat like a dog, which as we know are his way of expressing himself. I still had my nose inside my book of spells, not far from the remains of my fiance with his eyes staring like holes, and the beggar started tickling my ribs with the blasted tip of his cane. What have I done to the good lord, holy mother? He flattened himself on top of me, true as I’m standing here. I had his ugly mug in my face, and the powerfully musty smell of his food sandwich, some meatish filaments of it still hung from between his teeth. Grimacing, he started to pull at my eyelids and my lips the way papa made us do to him in the belle epoque, you’d think it was to make fun of me and to get his own back. Finally he lifted my skirt and started trying to squirm on top of me like brother with his balls, so I cried out to ask for brother’s help, but you can imagine. Kid brother had come back to the vicinity of horse, I could see him, and let me tell you, kid brother will roast in hell, if he hasn’t already, because listen to what he did. He picked up his rifle, stuck it under the jaw of horse, who was half lying down, and made it blow up, bedlam! For one very brief moment I spied a bouquet of yellow, red, and blue smoke in a sheaf all around him, with a sound like hailstones. Horse collapsed like a sack. And that was the moment the sly devils chose to turn up at the end of the road, one big, tight-packed heap of neighbours who had come directly from the village, how typical.

  Brother fired his rifle in their direction, by way of panic. Then, leaving his muskrat behind on what remained of defunct horse, he decamped the site at breakneck speed and shoo. And the beggar pulls up himself and his pants, fortunately before he could do the slightest damage to me, glory be to god for a favour granted, and there he was hurling himself onto his joystick, waving his arms at the sly devils, playing the innocent and acting as if he were happy as a demon to see them, wily to the core, the coyote. While I took advantage of the situation to speed away and hide in the vault with the Fair.

  Who seemed to understand something about all the catastrophes that were happening to us: I told you there was some brightness in her bonnet. She was beside herself, meaning that she was swinging her heavy head very very slowly to the right and left while emitting a long, dreary, uninterrupted aaaaaaaaaah that just barely emerged from her throat. Only once before had I seen her in this state and it had been no laughing matter, it was the time papa was cutting her wrappings and he let the scissors slip so that a little bit of blade landed on her absent skin, and she started to make a dreary and uninterrupted aaaaaaaaaah like that while swinging her noggin right and left by way of pain, and papa cried, it gave him so much remorse in his chest, and for two minutes he kept gently and cautiously smacking kisses on the Fair Punishment’s forehead. Through the window I was watching where the sly devils were, and the beggar in their midst, who was hopping on the spot and growing animated and playing the hero. There must have been a good dozen of them, I wouldn’t take the trouble to count them, humph. One had been scraped on the thigh by my brother’s rifle bullet, if I understood rightly, and he too was playing the hero, showing the others his thigh. They were looking towards the bookhouse, that’s the pet name we gave it, yours truly’s bookhouse, and wondering what to do about the fire, which was starting to catch the wind in its sails, and great puffs of reddish-brown smoke. There was some panicking and milling in circles among our neighbours. The cure was there too, the little priest from the day before who’d given me a taste of his ea
rboxes and was now pretending to pray over the remains of what had once been a knight in armour as well as the great love of my life, and that gritted my teeth and knitted my brows a little, I’d gladly have given that soutane a kick in the inflations, but. In the end my brother came back of his own poor initiative and, let me tell you, it was out-and-out surrender. Kneeling at our neighbours’ feet, with his shoulders on the ground and his hole in the air, he was protecting the back of his skull with both hands and shaking like the mint jelly we occasionally used to garnish the Fair’s porridge, I know what I’m talking about. The officer from the day before, with the pistol of dizzying proportions, seemed to me to be talking softly to my brother, to avoid frightening his panic beyond the proper degree, and encouraging him to stand up, but as you can imagine, with his hole still in the air and his hands on the back of his skull there was nothing to be done. They had to kneel to snap on the handcuffs. Ah la la, if you want my opinion.

  And there it is, everything draws to a close, it’s a universal law, beginning with this book of spells, no more than another few pages before the grand sacrifice. I have very little time and I won’t have had enough to recount everything, you can see that I’m at a loss. To the string of my disappointments I would just like to add this, namely that I’ve been wondering for a few scant seconds whether everything we’ve experienced since the morning of the day before, the failures, rages, panics, and humiliations we’d thought were completely outside any paternal orbit, as it’s called, whether in fact all those things weren’t exactly what papa would have wanted them to be. I fear we’ve done nothing but continue to obey him, without knowing it, unable to do otherwise, the two of us swept away by an inevitable movement that emanated from him and continued to drag us in its wake, forever and always. I’m saying it the way it appears to me. Maybe we’ve never stopped being his dolls of ash. I mean that from deep down in his death he was still toying with us, chuckling at our angelic noggins with the same worrisome assurance that I myself display by using words. Father was not a man whose power stops so short. Perhaps his own mortal remains were merely some plaything to delude us, ourselves as much as the universe in its pensive totality. I was thinking of this as I looked at the pit where brother had buried father’s bombastic death next to the pine grove, and I told myself that if someday people started saying that something underneath this cross with no name or date could still, with hidden irony, stir the earth in one way or another however feebly, I wouldn’t be surprised, you see. I mean that our neighbours tend to astound in the presence of whatever has disappeared nowhere, because of their human essence; it inclines them to ruminate on the grass of the dead, which makes them imaginative. And the first sun of any religion, if I’m not mistaken, is always a corpse that moves.