The Life of Elves (17 page)

 

The desolation was immense in those lowlands, where for nine decades darkened by two wars Eugénie had lived, haunted by two deaths and honored by innumerable acts of healing. The mass held two days later was attended by every able-bodied man and woman in the six cantons. Many of them had to wait outside the church until the end of the service, but all of them joined the funeral procession to the cemetery, where they posted themselves among the graves to hear the priest's prayer. In the terrible cold of noon, high black clouds hurried above the mourners, and they began to hope that those clouds would bring some fine snow and restore some of winter's more gentle side, instead of this relentless ice that wearied hearts with its endless burning; and all of them, in coats, gloves and black mourning hats, secretly invoked the snowflakes, thinking that this would honor Eugénie better than any words the priest would waste in his Latin of crypts and naves. But they all remained silent, and prepared to listen to the truth of faith, because Eugénie had been a pious woman and they too were pious, however bred for wild freedom the folk in these lands of powerful nature might be. They looked at the priest as he cleared his throat, and in his immaculate chasuble, his fine tummy offered to the cruelties of winter, he paused for a moment of inner contemplation before beginning to speak. His mass had not digressed into a liturgy of texts and sermons, but he had known how to honor an old woman gifted with the science of simples, and everyone had been moved for no other reason than that it rang true.

 

Father François was fifty-three years old. He had devoted his life to Jesus and to plants, without ever considering them to be anything other than a part of the vows he had taken at the age of thirteen. He did not know how the vocation had come to him, or whether its Christian form, which seemed the most natural, would also be most appropriate. For the sake of this mission he had agreed to a number of sacrifices, not least of which was to give up the intuition that had made him speak to trees and paths in a language other than that of the church. He had endured the absurdities of the seminary, and the dismay of a servant of the Lord who can find no one in his hierarchy who might reflect his own way of feeling. But he had gone through it all as if walking through a sudden rain shower, finding shelter in the faith he preserved toward the rough men who were his responsibility. And if he had not suffered from the incoherence he detected in the speech of authority, it was because he loved both his Lord and those to whom he preached His word.

Now on this day Father François looked at the community gathered in the modest cemetery, where they were laying to rest a poor old woman who had lived all her life on a farm, and he felt something was welling up inside him, demanding to be said out loud. He was not unquiet, yet troubled by a feeling that was similar to the one that had kept him from writing to his superiors after the miracles of the rosary and the letter from Italy, and which had shown him that it was preferable to speak to Maria; she had repeated the same words as her grannies with impenetrable ingenuousness, and this convinced him that although she might know more, there was no place for evil in her crystalline heart. The priest looked at the little wooded cemetery, with the rows of graves of so many ordinary people who had only ever known the country and its labors, and the thought suddenly occurred to him that the people who had lived in this land of forest and silence, where one could hope for no other abundance than that of rain and apples—these people had never suffered from the terrible isolation of the heart that he had witnessed all around him as a seminarian in the city. Thus, beneath the omen of clouds as big as oxen gathering above the cemetery more crowded with people than with linden trees, Father François understood he had been blessed with the gift that people of little means give to those who accept their sorrow and pain, and that there had not been a single evening when, as he consigned to paper the day's work on lemon balm and mugwort, he had not felt the warmth of men who, with their hands in the soil and their brows to the sun, have nothing more and can do nothing more than know the simple glory of being among others.

The memory of Eugénie took on another dimension, as if it had been multiplied to infinity, inscribed in unknown spaces and times which his spirit now probed through the prism of the old granny and a land as harsh and limpid as the skies of the beginning of time. He did not know how his perception had changed, but he had never viewed the world from such an angle as on this day of Eugénie's funeral, an angle that was vaster and more open, imbued with the ruggedness of a terrain both barren and full of grace.

 

Yes, everyone was there, an entire village, an entire region, an entire canton; they had put on their mourning clothes, which cost more than the wages they gleaned from the land, because it would have been inconceivable that day not to wear their kid gloves and their dresses of fine cloth. André Faure, in a black hat, stood next to the grave, hard-dug in the frozen earth, and Father François saw that the entire region was there behind him, that he was one of those men who embody the spirit and who are steadfast, through whom a community feels more sure of its existence and arrives more easily at pride in itself than through any decree or edict handed down by those on high. Maria stood to his left, in silence. He felt a corolla spread through his entrails. He looked around him in this February light, so severe even for a land that was used to the hardship of winter; he looked at these proud but humble men and women who stood in unspeaking contemplation, paying little heed to the hostile wind, and the corolla continued to bloom until he began to explore a new continent of identity, a dizzying extension of himself about to be born despite the confines of this primitive country cemetery. An icy gust swept through the enclosure of the dead and caused a few hats to go flying, and the children scurried to catch them as quickly as they returned to their elders' sides, and Father François intoned the beginning of the ritual prayer.

 

Show us the way out, dear Lord,

All through the day of this tormented life,

Until the shadows grow longer and evening falls,

And the restless world grows quiet

And the fever of life abates

And our task is over.

 

He fell silent. The wind suddenly dropped and the cemetery was silent along with him, in a rustling of piety and ice. He wanted to speak, to go on with the prayer—
Thus, Lord, in Your mercy / Grant us a quiet dwelling / Blissful repose and, finally, peace / In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord—
but he couldn't. By all the angels, he could not, for the simple reason, which will also show what sort of man that priest was, that he could not remember what the Lord Jesus Christ and all the saints together had to do with the story he owed his departed sister. There was only this corolla, expanding and rippling and eventually filling an entire place in his flesh that was both tiny and boundless, and all the rest was empty. Father François took a deep breath and searched inside himself for the anchor dropped by the corolla. He found a perfume of violets and resin and a wave of sadness so intense that for a moment he felt nauseous. Then it was over. Finally everything was mute again. But he felt as if he were looking at the cemetery, the people, and the trees without a screen, as if someone had washed a windowpane for him, where previously there had been all the dust of the road. It was marvelous.

As he was silent for an unusually long time, people began to look at him, astonished. André, in particular, grasped something in the priest's physiognomy that made him stare for several seconds with the unfathomable gaze of the taciturn. Their eyes met. They had little in common, these two souls whom fate had brought together in these austere parts: the smiling pastor who loved Italian and wine had little in common with the heavy, secretive peasant who spoke only to Maria and the earth in his fields; nor finally, was there a great deal in common between the religion of the educated and the faith of country folk, for they only understood each other out of their need to weave together the fabric of their community. But this day was different, and their eyes met as if for the first time. Now they were simply two men, one who brought together the earthly souls whose destiny was in this place, and the other who understood this, today, and was preparing, with his words, to honor the bond of love. Yes, love. What else do you think it was about, in this hour of fierce wind and black clouds, what else could carry a man so high above his roof? Because those who love do not show much concern for the Good Lord, as was the case on this day for the priest, who could no longer find either his Lord or his saints; but by the grace of a magic he knew nothing about he had just discovered what the world is when it is illuminated by love. One last time before he spoke he gazed out at the tide of humble souls who were waiting for him to give the signal of farewell; he looked at every face, every brow and, finally, he returned to himself and found a trace of the little boy who used to play in the tall grasses by the stream—and he spoke.

 

“My brothers, I have lived with you in this land for thirty years. Thirty years of work and troubles, thirty years of harvests and rain, thirty years of seasons and mourning, but also thirty years of births and weddings, and of masses at all hours, because you lead a virtuous life. This is your region, and it was given to you so that you might know the bitter taste of effort, and the silent reward of labor. It belongs to you without any title deed, because you have sacrificed the sap of your life for it, and entrusted it with your hope. It belongs to you unquestionably because your loved ones rest here in peace, and they paid tribute before you through their work. It belongs to you without a cross because you lay no claim to it, but thank it for considering you its servants and its sons. I have lived with you in this country and now, after thirty years of prayers and preaching, thirty years of sermons and services, I am asking you to accept me among you, and call me one of your own. I have been blind and I beg your forgiveness. You are great, while I am small, you are humble, whereas I am poor, and you are courageous while I am cowardly. You have little, you are people of the earth, you till the soil at dawn, along many furrows, and in hailstorms. You are the soldiers of a noble mission, for you feed others and make them prosper, and you will die beneath the shoots of the vine that will give your children a good vintage—as we stand by the grave of the woman who would have me embrace dust and stone, as you would, too, I beg you one last time to take me with you, because this morning I have understood the true intoxication to be found in serving others. And so once we have mourned Eugénie and shared our sorrow, we will look around us at this land that is ours, and which gives us trees and sky, orchards and flowers, and paradise here on earth as surely as this time belongs to us and it is possible to find in it the only consolation to which my heart can aspire to from now on. The time of man is coming, and
of this I am certain: neither death, nor life, nor the spirits, nor the present, nor the future, nor the stars, nor the abyss, nor any creature: nothing will keep from love
those who live in our land, and by our land. The time of man is coming—men who will know the nobility of forests and the grace of trees, men who will know how to contemplate and heal and, lastly, how to love. May they know
glory, for the centuries of centuries. Amen.
”

 

And the congregation replied
amen.

 

They looked at each other, trying to digest the eccentricity of the prayer. They tried to remember the words in the right order, but it was scraps of the usual refrain that came instead, and they had trouble making up their minds about what had actually gone on during that unexpected fantasy. And yet they knew. Like every word that draws on the beauty of the world for its syntax and its rhymes, the priest's homily had caressed each of them with a powerful poetry. For all it was fearful cold amid the linden trees, they warmed themselves at an intangible fire that contained the blessings of their life there—the streams, the roses and the sky's sorcery, and it was as if the lightest of feathers were gently stroking a wound in each of them, a wound they had grown used to living with but which they thought might some day be healed, when the skin closed over for good. Perhaps . . . At least now they knew a prayer that was anything but Latin, it was like the warm landscapes they each held tenderly locked away inside themselves. There was a fragrance of the vineyard and a few crushed violets, and there were skies washed with ink above the solitude of the hollows. This was their life, just as this time belonged to them, and as they began to disperse, and struck up conversations, and greeted one another, and hugged, and made ready to head back home, for the first time they felt they were standing more firmly on their feet—because there are not many men who understand right from the start that there is no other Lord than the benevolence of the land.

 

Father François looked at Maria. The corolla finished spreading deep into the innermost recesses of his heart, and confirmed the news: it was thanks to this little girl that they had flourished and known their good fortune, thanks to her that any obstacle obstructing the flow of the stream could be avoided, and thanks to her, finally, that there were seasons that wound around her in a spiral of transfigured time. He looked up and saw black clouds moored to the wharf of the sky as surely as any ship's cordage.

When André placed his hand on the priest's shoulder Father François felt a magnetic current go through him, and through it they agreed that events were occurring to which their reason could attribute no meaning, but their hearts could, without a doubt, and all their love as well. André withdrew his hand, while the stunned crowd of peasants looked at these two brothers who had just found one another, and they waited, trembling, to see what would happen next. They, too, took a good look at the clouds, and to all of them it seemed that the clouds were saying something unfriendly, but what was happening at the cemetery was worth any danger they might face. And yet it looked as if it were all over, because Father François was blessing them, and motioning to the gravediggers to begin shoveling in the earth. Maria, next to her father, was smiling; he had removed his hat and was looking skyward, his eyes half-closed, like a man whose face has been warmed by the sun when there is still a hard frost. Then the little girl stepped toward the grave, and from her pocket she took some pale hawthorn flowers: they fell slowly onto the coffin, and the wind did not carry them away.