The fire that this vision made circulate through my veins should have made me cry out. Nothing could have equaled the unveiling of this face upon which suddenly had leaped something like her other lips, like the strawberries of her breasts. Her glorious face bore into mine, and as I held onto it she reddened ceaselessly. Arrogance and shame fought for that face, like a piece of meat between two dogs; and like a piece of meat, she resisted. The children were upon us; would she lift up her dress right there and reveal the rest, in front of them? She was drunk. They were upon us, they passed, with loud, boisterous hellos; the dwarves that brought me stones looked at the queen with round frank eyes, the tobacconist; one of them carried a little basket filled with white eggs; the fox swung at the rhythm of their steps, its mouth open upon and full of little bones set in black gums; the stiff tail was frozen. I saw this in a flash, our eyes did not leave each other. The she-wolf hadn’t looked at anything. “What is it?” I said, out of myself. I don’t know what I was talking about, what unsayable red or crimson trophy I meant, but these words were strangling me, they had to get out: I still heard them whistling in the frozen air, fogging the mirroring metal of the hatchets echoing around us. I was a tree. “They are carrying it,” she said, “to the houses, to show it off. People give them a little money, eggs. At night they’ll skin it against a door.” Her voice was too sharp and lashing, with a sort of precocity that made it crack; she curled her lips and lisped a little. By now her face was well beyond red and her words were pure shame, like the fresh mark that burned in the cold. “What do they do with the body?” I continued with the same elation. She hesitated, her sharp voice springing forward and breaking off cleanly, her mouth dry; and in one breath, she at last lowered her eyes and said: “I suppose that they give it to the dogs.” The piece of meat ripped apart, her hands stiffened in the pockets of her coat, she shuddered. Her chin was trembling.
And once again she was the woman who sold Marlboros to the young instructor and made the best of things in Castelnau. She existed. The callipygian Venus was only a woman. She turned away as one does when one is about to cry and without a word left me there in the field and moved toward the village where she would sell tags, one of her own on her cheek. She had another one on the fat of her calf; it looked astonishing beneath the black nylon. She walked slowly, immoderately. She swayed as she walked. The little hoods were disappearing beneath the walnuts. At their shoulders in the shadows, the emblematic animal — the coyote or the dingo, the fox, the cunning trickster of old cosmogonies, red and sly, the fabulist’s flatterer — had long since been invisible, and was doubtless swaying too. Night was falling, the sharpening stars pinned themselves on high. The hatchets struck dully at my back, echoing around me. A tree collapsed in a crash of barn doors opened and closed by the wind. Lights came on in Castelnau. Still along the great night a pure white hand held out in the west. The queen was at the bottom of the field, high-heeled like a crane, naked beneath her furbelows, like a scaled fish. Her hips were moving. I thought about what had made them move even more a little while ago. I thought about her vivacity, her cruel elegance; the arrogance of beauty; the shame that crushed her high-pitched voice; the sound of her cry. I tried to imagine her as Bernard’s mother. The dry bulrushes caressed her ankles, ran her stockings, cut. I felt this in my stomach. Beneath the shadows, beneath the coat, beneath the skirt, beneath the nylons, the earrings, the pearls and the Sunday best, beneath Milady’s braids and gathers, hugging the dark stockings, lay this dazzling daylit flesh where at its whitest I imagined, twenty times over, beaten, received during intense thrusts and punctuated by sobs, the heavy, unanswerable phrase that remained forever redundant, forever jubilant, suffocating, black, the absolute authorship she wore on her face.
Four
That night I learned of an old custom, surely long since abandoned, that held if a hunter were to kill a fox, he should entrust the pelt to innocents, so they might walk from village to village and rejoice in the ostentatious defeat of this pest while earning some coin off its skin: the animal, they said, carries rabies. Long ago it was said that it stole eels, hunted down she-wolves, and devastated vineyards. I always relate it to Yvonne’s defeated and devastated flesh, to her soul that had been flayed one deep cold night.
I should mention that I had a girlfriend in Périgueux. She was a student there and came to visit me in her little old Renault, often on the spur of the moment as her schedule allowed. She adored Hélène and I think the feeling was shared: sometime they would spend all day in the kitchen of the auberge while I was at school, or at a table in the main room where Madelaine, or Mado — that was what I called her — drank from the same cup of coffee that had long turned cold, and during the course of her daydream made circles with her cup on the polished wood, bringing Hélène’s wrath down upon her. They talked and exchanged recipes for jam, passed photos, and showed off pieces of their wardrobe; Mado complaisantly sang the praises of her stockings and then displayed them; occasionally, she looked upset when I returned from class, the old woman was dreamily easygoing, perhaps more elegantly so than usual, her gray forelock tucked under her scarf; they had talked about men, about what made Jean the Fisherman hunt for eels, about the late innkeeper who was as good as any other when she’d had something under those pretty old clothes and he’d had hands to remove them, about me, always evasive, touching her lightly, almost caressing, but pushing away at every turn, toward the Beune below, toward the fox above, the fiery weight that crushed us, me, the innkeeper, Jean, and the others. These back-kitchen councils gave me a feeling men have from time to time: irritation mixed with a vague fatuity prompted by the sudden certainty that knives were being sharpened in preparation for one’s return. They smiled at me, made me coffee, cut me big slices of cake. All of this was too clear; I took refuge in some corner with my papers to grade, while I listened to this complicated jumble coming from my Wallachian drinkers darkening into their beers, seeing something in the black and trying hard to talk about it, the ghost of Jean the Fisherman scrutinizing the deep black outdoors, poaching, looking for meaning in every puddle of the great bayou where we were. I waited for all this to end, these stories of nets and stockings: the council eventually tired of brushing gently against the unspeakable; Mado suddenly noticed I was there; we left. We took the old Renault, stopping along a sunken lane, and I seized her roughly across the stick shift, in this little toy car that in this instance seemed more like a prison. She was more turned on by her conversations with Hélène than by my maneuvers: I didn’t say a word, did her with my eyes closed, without preamble, giving everything to Yvonne, into her smooth hand that bore my cigarettes, onto the distant gathers of her Sunday best, all along the black gash a scarf had hidden for a fortnight. Mado was easy, she made the best of it, as most do, I suppose. She was a brunette too, thinner, Mediterranean, as they say. In the Renault, she made little cries like a mouse, as when one enjoys a meal. The excessive preparations and the total defeat, the leaps and the tears, the great hatchet at the tiny conjunction of two sexes, love, in a word, wasn’t her thing. I should say that I wasn’t of very much help, I had this elsewhere: on the square hung a consecrated blade.