Three
At the end of November, the weather changed, the waters froze. The flooded fields froze, tufts of bulrush stood frozen over the region. It was the time of year when vehicle registrations were renewed; it was around three, a Sunday. Snow had fallen during the night, these little flakes, dense and reticent, that one sees only in the coldest periods and that don’t accumulate very much. It froze solid, the sky was rigid, pure. The light seemed green; another hour of daylight remained. The Tabac was full of unhappy customers waiting impatiently, tapping the toes of their shoes; they grew tired of waiting and left: Yvonne wasn’t there; little Bernard was watching the store as he often did, but while he could sell newspapers and cigarettes, he was ignorant of the complicated maneuvers necessary to dispense the tags. I left the store into a gust of wind: I don’t know what came over me as I lumbered down la route des Martres; beneath the pungent walnuts, I had to keep myself from running: the pure cold was biting into me, the world was a frozen stocking, a fabulous surface beneath which beat, and I knew not where, a boiling flesh that I felt compelled to seize, that would make me burn; I wanted to peel it back and hear it crackle. My ears were buzzing, I was out of myself. Just out of town is a long straight stretch surrounded by wide fields, beyond the walnuts but not quite to the forest; I stared into these fields as if eye to eye with them, peering to their borders with the trees and back again, all the places where a thousand times Yvonne had manifested in her stockings, all white, her hips naked in the cold, bitten, thrown far from the forest for the benefit of winter and my soul. This big game a thousand times lost. Far in the distance I suddenly saw a few specks coming out of the underbrush that were making their way to the edge of a meadow; as they moved closer, I was able to see the red stain of a hat that danced gently around the uneven terrain; and around the red hat were others, in ponchos, arms that moved brazenly, four or five skimpy lads proceeding with resolve, like little old dwarves. The dwarves were carrying something; they followed their path the length of the field toward the main road without straying from the browned lip of frozen trees. Sometimes Yvonne would take the high road through the fields while on her enigmatic outings; and the dwarves doubtless were there to announce their queen, were dancing around her: and without giving it any further thought, I stepped over the fence and made my way toward them.
They were children from school, those who lived in the Martres commune; so it was I recognized them from far away. What two of them were carrying on a pole resting on their shoulders surprised me greatly, and at first I didn’t believe it; but no, it was indeed a fox, suspended by its paws in the old or barbaric manner, and I had no idea why they were taking this thing that way through the cold. Apparently, the animal was dead, the big, abandoned tuft of its tail hung down to the feet of the children, heavily red beneath the green sky. I hurried toward them. This trophy from another age that these little hunters were carrying toward me — the offering they were making me, this fine carnivore borne by back-country tykes, the bright red bonnet, the ponchos from an earlier age, the clodding bustle of those who were carrying and the drunken dances of the others who were gamboling around them — all this inflated my wickedness, cracked it, honed it with the uneasiness that gives it meaning. I was in an obscene fable. An invisible hatchet swung mightily and shook a tree nearby. The woods filled with the woeful cries of wolves gorging themselves on beautiful victims dear to you; the pole across their shoulders seemed suited for other prey: in place of the red fox, I thought I saw bound there — in icy stockings pushed up by the odd position, all black and raw, foam-ing — the thick haunches of this bitch. I ran outright, with reason; bulrushes cracked beneath my feet; the air in my ears deafened me; exiting the woods via a little footpath, straight ahead and perhaps terrifying like Constable Ysengrin, and as fierce as his she-wolf — there she stood, just a few feet from me. I could easily have collided with her. I stopped short.
There wasn’t a breath of wind along the edge of the woods. She was in her Sunday best, in one of those ample brown car coats that one imagines draped from the shoulders of haughty young ladies from the turn of the century who, with a little finger raised skyward and a cherry red mouth, look through a lorgnette at jockeys weighing in; underneath she wore pearls that despite winter she left bare at her neck; earrings, as always, and fine icy stockings beneath which a tormented whiteness had begun to blush pink in the cold. All this chic at the edge of a lost wood was as out of place as a pornographic doodle on a jockey’s pristine shirt. I tried in vain to catch my breath, what cut it short now came from below, sharp as a razor. I believe that she had run as well, her heavy breaths sweeping through her throat, her car coat, her pearls; the scene shook; moreover, the frost revealed these brief breaths, spoke of her willingness or her upset. The cold had slapped her in the face, her lips were raw, chafed, but lipstick covered the gash. She watched the children approach and turned away as if she hadn’t seen me: this bit of coquetry moved me more than if she had been naked. Her breaths ceased; she turned toward me slowly, and with a look of rapture more moving than her earrings or the raven diadem or the bursting mouth, her eyes bored into me from a face that floated as if lost at sea, her boiling cheekbones, her steady stare; her nostrils flared; she turned her head a little to the left as if to look toward the woods, but with an affected slowness and without breaking eye contact: and so I saw her right side, and there — highlighting her beauty spot and holding her right cheek in view, budding amply on her neck, flowering lower beneath the car coat and grazing her cheek with this abject petal — was the thick mark, bloated with black blood and more bruised than a black eye, more devoured than her lips — a mark left radiantly by the tail of a whip.