Obscene is the word that I repeat. Obscene the sight of Amélie Bonnard, at noon still a child who probably put her hair behind her ears in front of the mirror before smearing her mother’s rouge on her face, by evening a dead child-woman in a wedding dress. Her shoes seemed not to fit, to be too loose around her heels, the gloves too precious, the rosary too pathetic, the veil that we had drawn over her head and the bandage too ethereal in the light of the candle. We stood at her feet. My mother took off the apron that she had worn the whole time, straightened her shoulders and gave a sigh that was like a suppressed sob. There was another knock at the door. Véclin. My mother indicated with her eyes that it would be best for us to go now. Monsieur Véclin came in, cap in hand, servilely nodding greetings; next to my mother he suddenly seemed to shrink. We left him with Madame Bonnard.
I walked ahead of my mother and the maid Madeleine, towards the steps at the end of the cellar passageway. I heard my mother say: “Keep an eye on things, Madeleine. If he dares charge for so much as one plank of ours, I’ll knock his brains out with his own hammer.”
THE EVENING FELL, the day dawned. Madame Bonnard kept vigil in the cellar with her dead daughter. Sometimes people came to pay their respects, but as the morning wore on it became quiet. My mother bent over the tub with the maid, Madeleine, and washed the blood out of little Amélie’s clothes, the child had wet herself as she died.
“Do go and sit in the shade,” she called to me. “It’s far too hot, Hélène. You’ll be getting heatstroke next.”
Noon was approaching. The sun heated the inner courtyard and forged it into the sacrificial dish for the cult of its stasis at the zenith.
Only animals could look the afternoon straight in the eye, blind to what it had melted, deaf to the deathly quiet tumult of things that the middle of the day unleashed and that in my ears sounded louder than the roar of cannon on the horizon, that increasingly was only heard when it subsided. The afternoon exposed the world’s nakedness; it showed its arse, the obscene — the word continues to haunt me — grimace of its blunt indifference. It tapped in the joins in the stones, it rustled on lizards’ feet over the vines of the ivy against the side of the house behind my back.
Doves cooed, claimed silence for themselves, the din seemed to fall silent. In the cellar Amélie Bonnard, who hour after hour merged more with her own dead self, drew the darkness towards her and dissolved in the amniotic fluid of the great nothingness, however white she was in her robe, however palely she might lie there under her veil of lace blossoms.
“When death comes,” I say to Rachida, “I’ll stretch out my arms to him and he will find me as you left me, with hair brushed and a necklace on.”
“He’ll want to dance with you, Mrs Helena,” she laughs.
It is she who takes me from the chair to the bed, lifts me up for a second with her arms under my armpits to let me rest on the mattress, and takes my legs by the ankles and lays them on the sheet, and then plumps up the pillows and arranges them behind my hips and back — and finally closes the curtains. I don’t like the afternoons any more, not like I used to.
“Have a good nap,” she whispers, and goes downstairs into the kitchen. Perhaps she rests on a chair in the back garden, and lowers the long, wide trousers to show the sun her knees and lights up a cigarette — the small sins she allows herself in silence, beneath the leaden grin of the devil of the afternoon.
In hidden spots, on the side of the house, somewhat camouflaged, I tried to absorb the heat and stay so quiet that the lizards, which always shot away into the wide gaps between the bluestone paving slabs, would overcome their fear and crawl out of their crevices, first sticking their emerald heads above the shadow of their accommodation and then, in the twinkling of an eye, re-emerging in a flash from their hiding places and coming to a halt before my eyes on the boiling stone.
The indifference of those tiny reptiles could make me jealous. Their divine inertia was like an elixir whose occult formulas I just couldn’t crack in my own fibre. I was only a postulant, there was too much rodent left in me, too much mouse-grey industriousness for me to be able to embrace the strict doctrine of motionlessness — and if I lower myself in my former shape, there on the bluestone in that afternoon, then I find in the motionlessness I was trying to achieve the core around which, in the years since, has grown the bittersweet flesh of the being that I was to become despite myself: a creature with a soul without warmth that wants to sleep without budging on a hot stone in the long afternoon of history, unaffected by horrors or glories. I wanted to shake off tissue that had worn out, slough off layers of dead skin, shed my skin in sentences so as never to have to resign myself to a definitive form — hungry for the ability of those lizards, which could leave their tail behind in the mouth of a predator. So don’t think that this thrashing lump of language on your tongue betrays anything at all of the true beast.
In a side shed Monsieur Véclin was finishing Amélie’s coffin. The hammer blows that resounded from the workshop across the inner courtyard had something apprehensive about them, as if the silent presence of the maid Madeleine, who had taken my mother’s hint to keep an eye on things quite literally and went to look every few minutes, made such an impression that he was very restrained in handling his tools.
Only Madeleine could “stand” when she stood. She can stand still like the sun over the walls of Jericho. “She’s ‘standing’ again,” we would say when, passing the window of the dining room or walking across the yard with two buckets of kitchen scraps for the pigs, she suddenly stopped, the buckets in her hands swaying to and fro on their handles. No one could say with such relish as my mother that the maid was “standing” again. It wouldn’t surprise me if we had first heard the saying from her mouth, since it was as it were a concentrated tautology, the pinnacle of her mirror definitions. She could say “Madeleine is ‘standing’ again” with a subtle emphasis that was able to detach the verb from the sentence for a moment, so that it spread the echo of unsuspected meanings. She didn’t need metaphors. She could let the words “stand” as mysteriously as Madeleine could “stand”.
Now the maid is “standing” in a corner of the work shed, very close to the open doorway and the yard beyond, while she watches as Monsieur Véclin planes the rough planks, her rough hands in the pockets of her apron, and although she doesn’t appear to be paying attention to anything in particular, I’m certain that she registers every curl that the carpenter’s plane pushes ahead of it over the plank, from which rises the sharp smell of dry wood, the smell of the patience of trees.
Véclin wipes the sweat from his face with the back of his hand.
Madeleine “stands” and watches. Soon she will report everything to my mother.
“A person feels like a big mug of cold coffee with a good spoonful of sugar,” mumbles Véclin, and adds hopefully: “…in this heat.”
Madeleine wakes from her ceramic inertia, swallows back, behind the vertical wrinkles that form a kind of throat sac between her lower jaw and her collarbone, a mouthful of spittle and from the sound of it very tough mucus, and says: “It’s too early. We don’t have coffee until later here, after the midday break. Go on working, copain. Help us bury the poor child quickly. It’ll taste twice as good.”
I wait until death dawns in objects, the naked hour when things lose their leaves and all becomes leggy and dumb, not able to clothe themselves with the habits or meanings in which we usually drape them — as if a short moment of symbolic weightlessness occurs in which the world forgets its coherence and God Himself washes his hands of creation so that everything shudders, eye to eye with itself. I wonder: is everything we do or don’t do ever anything other than modulated desperation?