The Life of Elves (5 page)

 

Maria sat thinking, while the adults conversed. The wine from the
arrière-côte
had loosened up the men, and the black smoke and fantastical creatures no longer seemed quite as threatening, but they were discussing them all the same, to decide whether they should send for the constabulary or the exorcists, or place their faith instead in the ancient wisdom which says that the countryside protects us from evil if our hearts are pure. All the men had to do was look at Auntie Angèle in the rocking chair where the women had firmly placed her; Angèle, her aged countenance aglow with stew and wine, wearing a new headpiece with ribbons the color of forget-me-nots, seemed to be sculpted from a fine smooth wood with noble veins, and all the men had to do was glance over at the dear old thing to contemplate the courage with which our lands are blessed. And there were even a few of them who thought that it was these very lowlands that had made the women like this, in their armchairs of old age, women who, in spite of the stove, the garden, the hens, the cows, the remedies, and the prayers, would take up their headscarves and their rosaries without a moment's hesitation to go off and rescue an innocent life in danger. They are good companions to us, thought the men as they sipped their wine, and our land is a fine one. And while the chanterelle pie may have had something to do with their assertion, this did not contradict its basic sincerity, for the men from the lowlands loved their land and their women, and they knew that the land and the women were connected, as surely as they themselves belonged to their acres, as surely as they saw the toil of harvest and hunt as a tribute to be paid to the magnanimity of fate.

 

The priest, who disapproved of talk of exorcists, and ordinarily did not miss an opportunity to take his flock to task, sensed the battle against superstition was drowning in the honey pear he had been served along with a full glass of excellent wine. But he was a decent sort, who liked fine fare because he was of a kindly nature (whereas others are only tolerant because they are forever indulging in the sins of the flesh), and no sooner had he left the seminary and arrived in the village than he learned that people of the land rarely drifted from their faith, and that a man had to choose his battles if he wanted to find his place among them. So this was exactly how he thought of his ministry: he wanted to be among them, not against them, and this subsequently entitled him not only to the consideration of those he ministered to but also to certain generous secular gifts in the form of the hare pâté and quince jam that Eugénie could transform into provender fit for a king.

And so in this pleasant atmosphere, with everyone well imbued with the sweetness of thyme honey and the tannins of our vines, Marcelot broached a topic that seemed timely to him:

“Since the little lass has been here, we've had our finest seasons, wouldn't you say?”

In the well-heated room where the old women were nodding off, and the men were tilting back their chairs as they savored the evening brandy, and Maria was thinking, looking at no one but noticing everything, there came a long sigh as if the very farm itself were inhaling and exhaling a lungful of nocturnal air before holding its breath in anticipation. A heavy silence fell, filled with the din of fifteen bodies diffusing in the air an elevated flow of alertness and concentration. And yet you could sense a powerful rush of desire in this sudden petrifaction, and you knew that everyone there was only sitting still in expectation of a long-awaited burgeoning. Only Maria seemed to be absent from the events in the room, but the others held themselves as tautly as the bow of a Cheyenne Indian (or so the priest imagined the scene, for he was reading a book written by a missionary in Indian territory) and in that moment of complete tension, you couldn't have said how matters would be resolved.

Finally Marcelot, who didn't expect such a reaction, cleared his throat and looked at the father a touch more insistently. This was a signal for the thaw, and everyone began talking in a feverish jumble of words.

“Eleven summers we've had these golden harvests,” said the mayor.

“Snow always comes just at the right time and we've been showered with game!” exclaimed Jeannot.

And it was true that the forests in the lowlands were the richest in the region for game, so much so that we had trouble keeping the forests to ourselves, because the folk in neighboring regions, deprived of similar bounty, came here regularly to alleviate their frustration.

“And aren't the orchards lovely,” added Eugénie, “with peaches and pears like in heaven!”

At which point she glanced nervously at the priest, but that was indeed how she imagined the garden of Eden, with golden peaches as velvety as the kiss of an innocent being, and pears so juicy that when you cooked them you'd only think to add wine out of a guilty weakness (the true sin of the matter). But the priest was otherwise preoccupied than with the aspect of peaches in paradise according to some old granny, who in any case was so pious that she could have imagined peaches that were blue or gifted with speech and it would have been all the same to him. He saw above all that his flock were still in possession of arguments that tended quite frankly toward magic. And yet he was troubled. He may have been a country priest, but he was unusually cultivated for a man of such modest function. He had a passion for tales of exploration, and he could often be found sobbing under his lamp as he read of the suffering endured by his brothers who had gone to spread the word of God in the Americas. But his greatest passion was medicinal and aromatic plants, and every evening, in his fine seminarian's handwriting, he would note down his observations about desiccation or the therapeutic use of simples, on the subject of which he owned an impressive collection of precious engravings and erudite tomes.

This culture of his, because he was good, and full of good intentions and curiosity, meant he was a man who was capable of doubt, who did not approach every unusual event with a brandishing of his missal but displayed, instead, reasoned circumspection. And when it came to the prosperity of the lowlands over these eleven years, he had to admit that it was fact, and more than just fact, it was enchantment. One need only stroll down any of the region's by-ways to see how fine the trees were, how well-tilled the soil, how plentiful the insects as they worked to gather and spread the pollen; and there were ever more dragonflies for Maria to watch in summer, dense vibrant swarms of the sort you would see nowhere else: because this cloud of blessings, this surfeit of amber fruit and superb harvests was concentrated in the village and along its pathways and in its communal woods, and it clearly came to an end at an invisible border that was more tangible to the inhabitants in these parts than any drawn up in a grand European treaty.

That evening they recalled a spring morning two years earlier when everyone emerged onto their front steps and cried out in astonishment and delight at the sight of a huge carpet of violets that adorned the fields and banks with its gossamer drapery; or of one dawn hunt some four winters earlier when the men went out into the frosty air with their thick scarves and their caps with ear-flaps, and were amazed to find the streets of the village packed solid with hares all bound for the woods. It had only happened the one time, but what a time it was! The men had followed the hares to the woods, and no one would have dreamt of firing at them along the way, and then the animals had scattered and the hunt had begun in the normal fashion. But it was as if the creatures had manifested their own abundance before things went back normal.

 

Thus, the priest was uneasy. Like a dog sniffing out its prey, a primitive voice inside him could sense that Maria was an anomaly, an envoy from the world that owes nothing to God, and this secret side of himself, which the man of the Church could express only in his pages on the curative decoction of mugwort or the application of nettles in an unguent, also sensed the connection between the appearance of the infant in the snow and the astonishing mildness that had enveloped the region. He looked at the child: she seemed to be sleeping, but he perceived a palpable vigilance in her, and he understood that she could hear and see everything around her, and that her apparent distraction came from one of those states to be found in the trance of prayer, when the mind may be detached from the body yet still registers the world with greatly enhanced acuity.

He took a deep breath.

“There's some mystery here that must be brought to light,” he said, raising the little snifter of brandy which a charitable hand had placed next to the remains of his honeyed pear. “The little girl has been blessed, and we will find out how.”

And after resolving not to lecture these good folk, who would have liked to see fantastical creatures spread their mist all the way to the Morvan hills, he also resolved to have a word with Maria when next the opportunity arose. His words produced the desired effect: everyone was quite satisfied that their spiritual authority had acknowledged the mystery; for all they enjoyed stuffing him with headcheese, he nevertheless remained above his flock, aloof. They were also quite satisfied that there was something reassuring about his words, because it meant that sooner or later they would find out, and from the Good Lord Himself, what it all meant. So everyone, therefore, was
more or less
satisfied with the conclusion the priest had drawn from a remark they were all relieved had been made in the first place, but no one was
deeply
satisfied, the priest least of all: this was merely an acceptable pause in the enlightenment of the riddle, they would catch their breath and calmly await the next stage, but everyone knew that one day they would have to enter a circle of life that held considerable surprise and commotion in store. True faith, it is a well-known fact, has little regard for chapels, but it does believe in the communion of mysteries, and with its unworldly fusion of beliefs, it crushes any temptations that prove too intolerant.

A
t the beginning of September, two months before the events on the French farm, Clara arrived in Rome, escorted by Pietro.

 

Leaving her mountains behind had been a source of pain, which the glory of the landscapes through which they traveled failed to appease. For as long as she could remember, she had been unhappy when it was time to go home to the presbytery; every time, she would go through the enclosed garden before opening the door to the kitchen; and as that vestibule planted with magnificent trees was as vital to her as the air she breathed, she dreaded the walls of the city more than any scourge in her nightmares. Clearly, no human being had ever managed to touch her soul the way the mountains had, and therefore the snow and the storms lived inside a heart that was still equally open both to happiness and to the sortileges of misfortune. And now, the further they went into the city, the more her heart bled. She was discovering not only a terrain that had surrendered to its interment under stone, but also what had been done to the stones themselves: they now rose to the sky in straight, dull walls, having ceased to breathe beneath the onslaught that had defaced them forever. Thus as night fell upon the joyful crowds drunkenly celebrating the return of the warm breezes, Clara saw only a mass of dead stone and a cemetery where living people went willingly to be buried.

 

The carriage made its way to the top of a hill; here, there were fewer people, and Clara felt she could breathe more easily. During the entire journey, Pietro had attended to her comfort, but he did not try to speak to her otherwise, and she had fallen silent, as she did every day, her mind full of mountainsides, staves, and notes. At last they came to a halt outside a large dwelling with high brown walls, where slender pine trees emerged from an inner courtyard patio, rising above the walls like a motionless fountain. Honeysuckle cascaded down the walls in perfumed bursts toward the cobblestone street, and in the twilight the windows let loose their long transparent curtains.

They were ushered into a vast vestibule: there Pietro left them, and Clara was guided through gigantic rooms whose walls and surfaces were crowded with paintings and sculptures. Clara looked at them with a trepidation that quickly yielded to hope when she understood that this strangeness might bring consolation for the loss of her mountains. Finally, a door was opened that led to an unadorned white room with a single painting on the wall. They left her alone, telling her they would come back soon to draw her bath and bring her some dinner, and then they would all go to bed early, in view of the tiring journey, and would come again at first light to take her to the Maestro. She went up to the painting, feeling a curious mixture of reverence and fear.
I know you, but I don't know how.
A long moment passed. Then something changed in the air in the room, and a slight trance came over Clara, also enhancing the layers in the painting, which she no longer saw in two dimensions but with a new depth that opened the door to the realm of dreams. She did not know now whether she was sleeping or awake, only that time was passing with the same momentum as the clouds high in a sky of black ink and silver. She must have fallen asleep, because the scene changed and she saw, in a summer garden, a woman laughing in the evening. She could not make out her face but she was young, surely, and very cheerful; then she disappeared and Clara saw nothing but the shimmering ripples of moving ink before she lapsed into a last visionless sleep.

 

“We are going to see the Maestro,” said Pietro the next day. “He's not an easy man, but you will play, and that will be enough.”

The practice room of Maestro Gustavo Acciavatti was located on the top floor of a fine building, with high casement windows that let the sun transform the parquet floor into a lake of liquid light. The man seated at the keyboard seemed both very young and very old, and when she met his gaze Clara thought of a tree she used to go to when she felt sad. Its roots reached deep into the earth but its boughs were as vigorous as young branches, and it seemed vigilant, which allowed it both to observe and to radiate all around, and it listened, although Clara did not need to speak. She could have described the shape of every stone along her walks, and drawn from memory every branch of every tree. Faces, on the other hand, passed her by as if in a dream before they melted into a universal confusion. Yet this man who was gazing at her in silence was as present and alive to her as her trees, and she could discern the texture of his skin and the iridescence of his eyes, so dazzling it almost hurt. She stood before him.
I know you, but I don't know how.
The revelation that he knew who she was flashed through her consciousness then vanished instantly. Suddenly she noticed a form slumped on a chair in the corner of the room. Her eye had detected a movement and she thought she saw a short man who, as far as she could tell, had a little round belly. He had ginger hair and he was snoring, with his head on his shoulder. But as no one paid him any mind, she ignored him, too.