The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

by Gaetan Soucy

  BUT NO THANK YOU, no more for me. I’ve lost interest in the sly devils’ show and I’ve started to pack my bags with all my little belongings that lay scattered in the vault, beginning with the wooden plank, which I’ll surely find time to talk about again, there’ll be other opportunities before the last words rain down. I also took my favourite picture of my handsome cavalier and wedged it against my belly under my skirt, and an old dictionary of the memoirs of saint-simon that was falling into selected parts. From the Fair Punishment’s expression as she watched it was easy to see she had some brightness, because she was no longer moving her noggin slowly to right and left, she was observing me intently as I packed my bags, and that placed some berefted mist in her eyes. But what can I say, are we put here, I mean on this blasted earth, to be sentimental?

  I drew closer to the little heap of her and crouched down so she’d be within reach of my hands and my mouth. I smiled at her while I stroked her skull and pointed to the chain on the wall with a sad shrug of my shoulders, to make her understand that, all things considered, I’d rather bring her with me, but there was nothing to be done, blame it on impossibility. I even used words to tell her that in any case our neighbours would find her eventually, and perhaps a new life would begin for her then, with sunshine, outside her dungeon. Poor Fair Punishment, how she looked at me. Really, her eyes, I swear, they’re a bubble to mine, it was as if I were looking at my own face in the well bucket in summertime. She started again with her long, dreary, uninterrupted sound, but I put my hand over her teeth, gently, with a smile and a look in my eyes, which were now laden not with little thunderbolts but with salty water that would have the good fortune of reassuring her, at least such was my prayer to heaven, if there still is one. As for the glass box, I said to myself, let the dead bury the dead, and I was gone, shoo, out the back door. The sly devils didn’t see me.

  Deep down, to be honest, I’d always known, in a way, that I was a slut, I didn’t have to wait for a cavalier to call me a wild little goat before I suspected it. But my father had treated me as his son, and that had put a rod between my legs, figuratively speaking. I mean that I was forbidden to move around freely within myself, I was all boxed in, stifled, unable to proceed calmly towards my own simple truth, namely that just because I didn’t have balls like you know who, it didn’t make me abnormal in my future mortal remains or inside my noggin. Now, from there to having a little sister, that’s some margin, as well as a small plank, which I’ll say more about later. As for my brother, you’d have thought that he was the first person ever to have balls, and that he was discovering them with wonder for the first time every morning the good lord brings us, but jupiter junior has never worked out the connection to what the kitten kaboodle is for. There are things that never set foot inside his noggin, you see, and he was sincere, I believe, when he introduced his finger into papa’s sensitive orifice just the day before, to see if it was possible that he and I had emerged from there, even when he saw the sausage arch its back through the power of magic, that was a big surprise for kid brother, he never would have expected that from the mortal remains of a defunct. For a long time I too thought papa had kneaded us out of mud, because of religion. But the things we believe through religion and the things we believe period are two different matters, and I’d been seeing since I was knee-high to a grasshopper how and from where calves and piglets arrived, and I never saw myself as an exception. The strong point is that kid brother too was well aware of what went on among those pensive creatures but I don’t know, he never worked out the connection. What can I say, intelligence is like inflations, its not something you can just decide to have. In any case, that’s what was rolling around in my bonnet as I made my way, with no haste at all, towards the ballroom of my dreams, inhabited by the most amiable ghosts.

  If I had time I’d have something to say about what the pigs in their wallow looked like, yike! Skin and bone, if that, and that’s only the most affluent. And they trembled and they dripped a greenish liquid from their snouts, and then the cows and the sheep, if you can still call them that. We were a little negligent all the same, I confess. We’ll burn for it somewhere, someday, I’m afraid, and when I get ideas like that, let me tell you, I don’t give a fly’s fart about the ethics of Spinoza. It’s no help whatsoever, and shoo. As for the stables, you’d need cannon just to open the doors. Tss. How dreadful. To say nothing of the hens.

  And then, phoo, I stepped into the ballroom, climbing stairs that were like petrified clouds, because of the marble. I headed for the cupboards, like a gadfly going to the only flower in the garden, to stuff myself along the way with an orgy of light. With my little arms and my little legs I opened the tall, heavy glass doors that look out in all directions over the mirrored plain, and watch out for your dresses because I know you won’t believe me but there was sunlight! A lot of sunlight, even, and it was falling over the countryside through a hole in the clouds. I took a long bath in it to console my heart. The mountain begins here and goes to the horizon, making leaps along the slight slopes and little jumps, and streams that you can hear hissing and falling. It was in that direction that papa let off the cannon shot on the days when the billy goat arrived. The spinach in the forests is slowly turning yellow and hot-pepper red as autumn sneaks up. Not the evergreens, of course, they don’t even know what a season is, the sly devils. But the other trees, because there are some even here, leafy and tousled and as round as mushrooms. And I asked myself, what have we done with all that, thinking about ourselves as much as about our neighbours in their pensive totality. Sometimes you might think I’m the only one on this earth who loves it, life I mean. But if you try to love, everything becomes complicated, because not many people have the same imaginings of it inside their bonnets. Would there be enough room on the earth for each of us to take a little white pebble and mark every one of our disappointments in love, I tell you those pebbles would be visible from the moon, along with the chinking wall. Take my brother. I have no idea what love meant for him, aside from squirming on top of me, which filled me full of rage and desperation but, well, with the pillow over my head and get your ass over here little goat, endure, endure it, until finally when the sausage went soft I could start breathing with my lungs again. When my mortal remains disappear I may go to the blazing coals because of this, but I record it here in all honesty and simplicity, I don’t think I love my brother any more at all. Too bad. Disappointed me too much, too often. He promised me this, he promised me that — to wash his feet, to stop drinking fine wine on the sly. As for my father, what can I tell you, someone who spent long hours holding his hand in yours while he cried in a vault… He never squirmed on top of me, in any case, which is all to his honour, I declare that to the face of the author of things, without shame or pity. The Fair too I was fond of, but that… Because of her silence, which gave me the gift of words.

  Be that as it may, I was on the mirrored plain and the smell of burned wood was coming to me on gusts of wind because I tell you, the library was burning fiercely, all twisted in its smoking and flaming. The same for the portrait gallery. With the tip of one eye I could barely make out a neighbour or two, who at this distance could just as well have been flies on a dunghill and weren’t worth much more, if I’m any judge. I think they were carrying buckets or something comparable, fools that they are, because with such a fire they might as well have tried to put it out with spit, that wouldn’t have changed a hell of a lot if you want my opinion. As for the kitchen of our earthly abode, god knows I didn’t give an owl’s hoot about that. I was taking advantage of the bright sunshine to scribble to my heart’s content, with the wind at my stern, my bow planted in the horizon, the page is a blank caravel, and I’d placed the small wooden plank under my book of spells, intending to make the connection between the two. I mean I wanted very much to talk about that plank in this book of spells, because I wanted, so to speak, to marry them together for the great sacrifice I’m preparing to commit.

  I’m talking
about the plank, which dates back to before I had any memory of whacks, if not longer, when there was sunshine all day long, and the little cherub next to me who was a bubble to me. Papa, who through the power of magic captured the rays of sunshine that ran aground in his magnificat glass, had written on the plank in letters of fire these words, which are there still, and though they may look like nothing they reverberate in my head like an oath: Ariane and Alice, age 3, Underneath there was a heart outlined in black soot, which was also drawn with concentrated thunderbolt, and from merely scribbling this the secretarious gets the impression that she can hear behind her the voice of that slut who smelled so fresh and pure, a grande dame, as the due de saint-simon would have said, he still wrote in vulgate, and in my memory the laughter of that grande dame was like a stars reflection in a pool of virgin water.

  After I’d written the preceding caravels I went back inside the ballroom. Having folded the wing of the grand camel, if that’s what it’s called, and then deposited the book of spells on top of it, along with the small wooden plank, I began to arrange my cutlery on the floor in rows under the glare of the chandeliers, which glittered in the sun like tsoulalas, for one mustn’t let oneself be beaten down by trifles in this life, and I was ready to dance again, let the party begin!

  But suddenly my belly let out a howl and there I was on my knees, as if I’d been gunned down, stunned and dazzled by an abrupt flash of pain. I felt as if someone had just torn my inner depths like cloth. And all around my skirt, what’s this? A puddle of the nastiest jelly, with glimmers of water, don’t ask me what hole that came from. Calm down, Alice. I got up. I walked like a heron on the fragility of my legs, stooping a little, my hand held to my belly of surprises with a kind of concerned tenderness that no one has ever shown me, but I was no longer all alone inside myself, I had someone to caress. For I was beginning to understand what was happening, you see, I didn’t need to consult a dictionary, it was calves and piglets again. It wants to come out, but I’d never have thought it would want to come out so soon. Relying on what I’d gleaned here and there in the course of my reading, I had given myself three seasons, and it’s true of course that we are approaching that number, I stopped bleeding for the first time when we were still in the snows of winter, as my recollections testify. Yet my belly isn’t all that big, and that’s what’s bothering me now. Everything in nature’s works confounds us, it seems that the author of all things enjoys this kind of game.

  So it was with agony that I reached the grand camel, where I’d put the book of spells. I stayed on my feet because merely bending my legs to sit down set off a scream in my depths. It was all the same to me, I would write standing up. In any case the pain had already calmed down a few minutes later, though the little goat felt strongly that she hadn’t seen the last of it, that it would be back with others of its kind. In the meantime I would cope by scribbling, with my hand in the hand of patience. One does not escape oneself, in one sense or another, even through fear there’s no escape. For even joy, especially joy, makes me afraid of myself, I don’t know if I’ve made myself clear, and while I waited for life to explode in my body, for the true lacerations inside me to begin and for the child howling its name to demand its portion of this wreck of a planet, I took refuge in my pencil as is my wont. For what is there to do in this life but write for nothing? I know, I know, I said, “words: dolls of ash,” but that too is misleading because some of them, when they’re well ranked into sentences, give you a genuine shock when you come in contact with them, as if you were laying your palm on a cloud swollen with thunder at the very moment when it’s about to let go. That’s the only thing that helps me. To each his expedients.

  FOR ABOUT HALF A TURN of the clock now, I’ve been writing while standing hunched over the grand camel’s wing. The afternoon’s last sunbeams are pouring onto the slabs beneath my feet in warm puddles, and I feel as if I’m standing in a stream up to my knees in sunlight. By dint of saying that I’m nearing the end, I intend to finish this blasted last will and testament. After that, if the tearing in my waters isn’t too harsh, I’ll make an out-and-out attempt to burn these pages in the same flame as the small wooden plank, and that’s that. The camel’s entrails will serve as the firebox, I can’t wait to hear the music that wells up. I’ll use the matches I brought from the vault, where papa always left some lying around, out of the Punishment’s reach, of course, but where she could still see them as symbols, and remember them and draw a lesson from them, and feel remorse. And if any sly devil should stumble upon this book of spells he wouldn’t understand a thing, because I write with just one letter, a cursive it’s called, I string them together page after page, caravel after caravel, nonstop. For I’ve finally done the same thing as my brother, what else is there, I’ve adopted his method of scribbling, the writing goes faster that way and it’s the real reason I can’t reread myself. But still, by lining up these cursive Is I can hear all the words inside my bonnet, and that’s enough, it’s no worse than talking to yourself. Besides, what difference does it make?

  And so I shall immolate this book of spells, just as papa used to sacrifice the billy goat for the renewal of spring. I can see us again, all three of us, with fife and flipple flute and tambourine. At each return of the season when father punished jesus for dying forever yet again, we’d slay the billy goat, at least papa would, and he and brother would even dip into the fine wine by drinking a toast from its horns, ugh. I myself drank from the bottle, taking pity on the poor beast, on his splayed carcass that had been stripped to the viscera and opened like a dictionary, while those two guzzled the scarcely boiled innards. We drank till our skulls burst, bottles and flasks, starting with me, it had to be done, and horse too. Once he was drunk, Papa would stagger like a cursed monk with the flipple flute in his hole for heavens sake, and, laughing all the way, he’d drag my brother by the leg and shut him inside the vault by force. Kid brother blubbered and bawled and screamed that he wanted to be let out at once and, the Punishment, what would you expect, it put her in a terrible state. But the alarm of my brother, who was pounding on the door from inside, ah la la, distraught and his health in a panic, you’d have thought it was a bird in a turpentine suit, I myself never laughed so hard, because of what fine wine does to our heads, against which we are powerless. But in my heart, without its showing, there were tears and weeping because of the Fair.

  Be that as it may, my own billy goat will be this gospel of my hell which I shall burn along with the small wooden plank, that sacrifice will have the virtue of doing no harm to any beast, for the beasts are as immaculate as the palm of the clouds, which are innocent to the core. For I too find myself dreaming about renewal. I understand that a new existence, a springtime in autumn’s midst, may be about to begin for me and I never should have let myself go, dreaming is risky for my self-assurance, which is fragile. It seems to me that I could live here with the child that will emerge in a few hours from my body. I can see that if I want, I can close my eyes, which are the eyes of the Fair, and see it as clearly as I can see my hand as it writes, with my lids open. We would form a big family, just the two of us alone. We would live so much together and so close to one another that a smile that began on my lips would end up on hers, for example. I would comb her little wings while we waited for them to moult. I would make her swaddling clothes of butterfly wings, and pillows of tenderness, with the love that was never given to me, any more in fact than it was given to the billy goat that we stunned with a stone while I danced around it with my tambourine, and no one would come and stick his dirty paws in our existence with his balls. We would nourish ourselves with the milk of goats, with the vegetables and grasses that are peace on earth, or with mushrooms that I’m acquainted with, we wouldn’t spend our time murdering animals to gorge on their corpses when they’ve never done us any harm.

  And we would live here in this ballroom, and in the towers too, and in whatever outbuildings we chose, because tell me, will you, what right has anyone to tear th
e countess of soissons away from this land that belongs to her through all the nooks and crannies of her fiery flesh?… I seem to be scooping up clouds, I know. But you can’t blame any of that on impossibility. She would learn to read with me. From the dictionaries we’ll fetch tomorrow from what’s left of the charred library, where some, I dare believe, will have been spared — you wouldn’t think so but dictionaries are tough, they have the calm obstinacy of the wood from which they’re born, trees could give us no gifts more beautiful. And we’ll read, we will read! Till we fall to the ground ecstatic because after all, what does it matter if stories tell lies as long as they stream with brightness, as long as they spangle with stars the bonnets of children who’ve tumbled from the moon and lie together side by side, two by two, she and I? I think I have a fever, my temples are oozing and throbbing like the flanks of a dying basset hound, if my opinion is still of any interest to you.