The Life of Elves (23 page)

“The ghosts are alive,” she murmured.

And for the first time in twelve years spent with neither tears nor laughter, she began to laugh and, at the same time, to cry. Petrus noisily blew his nose into a giant's handkerchief, then the two men waited in silence until she had dried her tears.

“In all these years, I have been so sorry that your mother never knew you,” said the Maestro. “I watched you grow up with that crystalline quality and courage that many brave men would envy, and I have often thought of how fate had prevented two of the most remarkable women I have ever had the fortune to know from meeting. I saw the legacy of her strength and her purity, and I have found it in you again, so many times, but I have also seen what is yours alone, and I know it would have left her spellbound.”

Clara saw her mother sitting in the half-darkness of the garden in Umbria. She was laughing, and the crystal teardrop earrings sparkled in the evening. In the ten o'clock light, a silver languor passed over her face, slipping down her cheek like a glinting river fish.

“If it's a girl,” she heard her say, “I want her to love the mountains.” Someone must have replied, for she smiled and said, “The mountains, and orchards in summer.” Then she vanished.

“Alessandro told me that the orchard at the presbytery was the place in Abruzzo he liked best of all,” said the Maestro. “This story taught me to trust the signs left in our path. To trust the poems a father has written in the hopes that his daughter will read them; the calligraphy of the mountain, traced by an unknowing brush. I knew that you would come back to me from Abruzzo some day and, just as I sent you there because of the sign of the orchard, you took the road to Rome because of the sign of a forgotten piano.”

She heard Sandro saying,
there are transparent plums there, and cascades of shade.
But what was as luminous to her as fireflies in the night was her mother's voice, in which a faultline opened up to let other voices pass through. There were women and graves, there were letters from the war and gentle songs in the evening. All these voices and graves and women with their mourning veils murmuring of love along the stone walkways of graveyards . . . She saw a garden of irises and a young man with bright sad eyes, while a voice was murmuring tenderly,
Go, my son, and know for all eternity how much we love you,
and she felt a tightness in her heart when she recognized old Eugénie's voice. Then she saw Rose, sparkling, diaphanous, smiling through the wings of the tempest, and her smile said,
We are mothers beyond death and the mystery of births.

And so, for the second time in twelve years, she wept.

C
lara is the link.”

“Her powers of empathy are magnificent.”

“In spite of the years of drought.”

“Even in years of drought.”

“Because of the miracle of who she is, able to overcome the years of drought.”

“All the women are with her.”

W
hat evil is.

The first to fall was one of the little messengers assigned to the rapid relaying of information between Marcelot's farm, the clearing, and the church. They sent him because they had noticed movement to the east, where André had said there were some strange horsemen on unfamiliar mounts. They sent him off just as the winds began pounding the hillside. Because the others were not moving, they were safe, but the young boy's speed precipitated him into the storm's tentacles, and he was tossed instantly into the icy ridges of its currents, then flung like a bundle against a wall of hard stone.

Everyone saw the messenger fall, and two men tried to hurry to the unfortunate lad's side, creeping close to the ground to avoid the gusts, but fate played its hand, and the enemy's horsemen appeared in the downpour, surrounding the two farms. Their appearance was terrifying. They were gigantic, made of a pallid substance that merely suggested the outline of deformed, faceless men. But it was the way they suddenly appeared all around the farm, ghostly, immobile, a weave of silence and rage, that made everyone's blood run cold. As for the mounts . . . truth be told, there were no mounts. The horsemen were straddling a void, and if all those brave souls had had the slightest knowledge of physics, they would have realized they were in the impossible presence of a source of anti-matter that reversed the mechanisms of the known world.

Still others fell. At the church, the arrows were coming thick and fast once more. There was no respite, and stones flew, while tremors laid waste. The rain shattered against the world, and the wounded crawled beneath torrents of water resembling bundled needles. Three men perished, crushed by rubble that came loose from the base of the church steeple, and two more succumbed to the swift flight of the arrows that zinged and shattered with renewed vigor. The five men who were in charge of the refugees from the church watched helplessly as everything around them was ravaged, and with the first deaths all hope was lost that Maria's magic might be enough to protect them from the abyss. The priest and Léon Saurat ordered their flock to close ranks yet again, while the others crawled over to the victims and tried to help them as best they could. Alas, there was little they could do. And their helplessness was searing.

 

Oh, helplessness . . . The helplessness of human animals is boundless, as is their bravery in the final hours of defeat. The aforementioned sky of snow was gathering behind the zone of combat and seemed to be waiting at the edge of the clearing, and the men from the church could feel it, as could those who were defending Lorette's farm or waiting with André in the forest, because that sky of snow, in that moment where everything was faltering, conveyed to each of the men the fragrance of an old, long-forgotten dream.

Naturally it was Gégène who was first to call the men's hearts to arms. It should be said that his dream, as will be revealed anon, was hardly the least significant of all those ephemeral and sublime dreams, but the fact remained that on that day he was still the same man of duty and derision as always; and once his initial stupefaction at the enemy's raging fury had subsided, along with his dismay at discovering how powerful and vile they were, he felt that they had wasted too much time prevaricating with fear, and now they must pay their tithes to a life of good wine and love. Moreover, the prospect of drowning or being crushed by a stone from the steeple was hardly to his liking: he was prepared to die honorably, but could not see where any honor was to be found in slithering like a snail under the clouds. Therefore, whether it was the devil or the hand of some other evil power that was arming the storm was of no greater concern to him than his wife's recipes when she was serving up his dinner. In addition, he was beginning to grasp what was more and more obvious: behind the mountain, there were archers firing the deadly black arrows. He motioned to Riri and Ripol to go with him to join Léon Saurat and, cupping his hands around his mouth he yelled, “Everyone to Chachard's workshop!”

It will soon be told what he intended to do there, but you see, already their helplessness has moved on and will not return. And there were other reversals up there, outside the farms surrounded by a hundred varmints stuffed with shadows.

 

So it was Rose who was of the sky, when all the others were of the earth, and she fed off the waves in the air and the streams in this land of pastures and reaping—whence her unassuming manner that was stronger than steel, and that evanescent texture as transparent as flowing water. When Maria kissed her mother good night, she could sense the sadness that, in her father, had become a sediment of silt and clay, but in her mother flowed like a river sweeping its dead along until it dissolved in her liquid breathing, and no one suspected the force of its flow. But while André slept peacefully, although he had a premonition of his daughter's destiny, it was because he knew the nature of Rose's power, however fragile she might seem at first.

You could stare at that self-effacing peasant woman, and neither her face nor her gestures nor her voice nor the texture of her skin aroused the slightest interest, and you would be endlessly surprised that such an absence of verve could give birth to such a whirlwind of beneficial, amiable impulses. The only word of love that André had ever said to her, early one morning in winter when they still lay in bed looking at the stars, was like water one could hold in one's hand like a pebble or a flower. Naturally, it had been exceptional, because André Faure was not accustomed to making pronouncements, and he always shared matters of moment with his wife with an economy of means that bordered on genius and which was facilitated, it is true, by the genius which love confers on gazes and gestures. But nestled at the heart of this parsimony was a name that had escaped the scarcity of his utterances, and when he looked at her he simply murmured
Rose
, because he alone could see the blade sharpened on a crystal thread as it sparkled, deeply and terrifyingly beautiful, in moments of love.

 

Thus, together with Jeannette and Marie, Rose had gone out earlier onto the steps in front of the Hollows with the intention of joining Lorette at the neighboring farm. But the tempest had already unleashed its frontal attack and it was impossible to cross the courtyard where loose flying boards and terrified hens were dancing the tango. Rose and the two old women retreated to the south wall of the stable which, for the moment, was withstanding the gusts, and she waited there while through the gale she could sense Maria's dismay, and her entire life came back to her upon the wind.

 

It all began with the fact that her parents, who were illiterate, had wanted a better life for her. But the little her mother had seen of cities had convinced her that there was no virtuous life to be had there, and while she accepted the fact that they were poor, it was on the condition that they belonged to themselves alone. So while others from her village found positions in town as nannies or maids, she did not want to see her little girl lost in some big manor house. Instead, they took her once a week to the convent near the neighboring town, and it was there that, along with their dogma, the sisters taught the poor girls from the canton how to read and write. It took two hours to get there, and at dawn Rose's older brother would seat her in the cart and drive her to her lessons, then wait for her in the kitchens until they were over.

As the weeks went by, Rose stopped listening to the litanies and sermons because she was completely absorbed, euphoric, in the books the sisters handed out after Vespers. She wept as she read the poems of streams and skies, which showed her the only world that was truly her own, or the tales that lay beneath clouds more palpable than the clay in the fields, where one could make out the word of God in a beguiling reflection. Later, Father François gave her travel tales to read, where mariners navigated by the stars and sailed the pathways of the wind, more intelligible than any network of roads, and the call of sea voyages and constellations was even more precious to her than God's celestial scriptures. But as far as Rose was concerned, this natural symbiosis, which enabled her to identify with the liquid elements, had little to do with an awareness of the physical universe, and one would have to look beyond the tangible world for the principle that connected her to currents and clouds.

Certain women possess a grace given them by virtue of an increase in the female essence—as the result of an echo effect which, by making them simultaneously singular and plural, allows them to be manifest both in themselves and in the long lineage of their kin; if Rose was a woman of sky and rivers, it was because the river of those who had come before her flowed inside her, through the magic complicity with her gender that went beyond mere blood relation; and if she dreamed of travel, it was because her vision cut through space and time and connected the border territories
 
of the female continent—whence came that transparency rendering her light and elusive, and that fluid energy whose source was somewhere far beyond herself.

Through an inexplicable mechanism of memory she could see herself as she was on the morning of her wedding, wearing a white skirt and bodice and, in her hair, a gauze veil embroidered with lace. Her brothers had escorted her because all the young people had come to André's village, taking shortcuts the carts could not manage, and for that reason she still had her clogs on her feet, holding in one hand the immaculate shoes she would put on once they were at the entrance to the church. The men were making their way along the path in their suits of black woolen cloth, their brows pearling with sweat, and they picked flowers from along the path that they would give to the girls in the village. All the while, Rose's heart was beating wildly in the splendor of the sunshine.

She had met André only once before he'd come to ask her father for her hand. She had seen his gaze from a distance, as she was going through the gate on her way to the Saint John's Day bonfire, and the feeling of evanescence she experienced when she withdrew into herself was transformed into a brilliant cascade that he, too, could see. Similarly, she could discern how his awareness of the earth had left dark ridges in his soul. They did not add up like parallel furrows, but were elevated, and elevated him in turn, toward the sky, and she knew then that it was his power amid the fields and the earth that made her own language of water and sky decipherable to André.

Then the wheel of memory turned and she saw Angèle again with a newborn baby in her arms, wrapped in white swaddling clothes. She had parted the folds of embroidered cambric and taken the infant as her daughter, with a joy that resembled an ether shot through with indecipherable traces of light. She received the message from these glimmerings, just as, in the crystalline lapping emanating from the child, she had read of an annunciation: that two worlds would coexist. Which worlds? She did not know, and yet they existed.