Three Women in a Mirror (5 page)

All day long she had run from danger.

Now that the light was fading, Anne stopped by a stream and plunged her arms up to her elbows in the cool water, refreshing her burning muscles. She drank for several minutes.

What could she eat?

For the time being, she wasn't hungry; she would find something tomorrow.

The blue tits stopped chirping.

The sun had vanished.

The sky was emptied of blue, congealed into a dull gray. From the depths of the woods came the mournful cry of a solitary wood pigeon.

Anne shivered.

The darker it grew, the more the beech trees seemed to close ranks. The cold was biting.

She saw a majestic oak tree that had kept the other trees at a distance. It seemed to beckon to her, offering a mossy carpet for a mattress, its roots for a pillow; its foliage was like the canopy of a royal cradle.

She crawled over to it and, turning her neck, studied the tree.

It had such presence! It emanated vigor, inspired respect. Although it was silent, the oak tree spoke to her. This was surely no ordinary plant! The tree standing there was powerful, hypnotic, a tree that had lived through centuries, that contained so much experience.

Did she even dare to touch it? The wind rustled in the foliage, causing it to hesitate; this whistling sounded like a
yes
. So Anne pressed her palm against the bark.

She was overcome with immense happiness. A warm strength emerged from the tree's knotty depths to penetrate her skin and flow into her flesh. “I can teach you so much,” said the tree. Anne nodded. The tree added, “I will begin this evening with the virtue of immobility. Do not move.”

And so Anne, at peace, let her body melt against the tree while she began to say a prayer; she got no further than the first three words then fell asleep.

 

At dawn she was not disturbed by the fact of waking in a strange landscape: unknown forests are always more familiar than new houses.

For a part of the morning she was in torment. What would she decide? Should she continue on her way? What would be the point? She would come to a town, a village, a port. Should she return to her aunt's? If she went back, what would have been the point of escaping? Her goal had not been to refuse Philippe; she had gone looking for something else . . . But what? She didn't know.

She paced to and fro along the river, thinking, and finally reached her conclusion: she would stay here. Perhaps she would eventually find what she was looking for.

Restless and feverish, she went back to the tree and put her arms around it. Once the calmness of the oak had washed over her, she gave up her wondering, and merely told the tree that she would be staying.

She set off that day to explore nature, happy to spend her time in a way she had never before been able to, either in her former life as a peasant girl or in her recent existence as a city dweller.

She went deeper into the whispering forest, along corridors of shadow and light. Hopping balls of fur—wild rabbits—were everywhere. Sometimes the grass sprang up so delicate and fresh that Anne did not dare to step on it. Beneath the brown ferns, old and crushed, pale new shoots appeared, extending their little curly fingers. The buds overhead were bursting, stems growing thicker as the branches adorned themselves.

A breeze rippled through the undergrowth; leaves and flowers, like thousands of wings, rustled, expanded, prepared to soar; the forest dreamt of flight. Like a ship at its mooring, wishing for the breath of the wind to bear it away into the blue.

Anne felt the world fill with slow, persistent energy. Springtime was taking over, rejecting dead twigs, burying rotting growth; it filled the trees with sap and the plants with juices. Inhaling their fragrance, she felt herself transported.

The thicker the copse, the taller the clusters, the sharper Anne's awareness. A desire . . . for what? It was difficult to define. A desire for something grand and essential: she, too, like nature, was emerging from a wintry torpor; she was like the birds ruffling their feathers.

Anne opened her eyes onto a world that was different from that of humankind. A world that was true. While cities buried the earth beneath cobblestones and crushed it with their houses, the forest let the earth prosper. While cities felled the trees for roofs, imprisoned the air inside their walls, dirtied the sky with smoke, the forest let life go free. Anne quivered now in the midst of a marvelous harmony, so new to her that she did not yet understand what it was made of; the forest magic immobilized her with the faintest of ties, captivated and enchanted her.

Twice she shivered. Twice she thought she saw a shadow move in the distance. She lay against the ground and waited. Nothing happened.

Perhaps it was a doe?

It was difficult to eat. With no ripe fruit, she had to make do with chewing on grasses and nibbling bark. By the river, which snaked through the poplars and thick willows like a vein through the black earth, she drank her fill to calm the grumbling of her stomach.

Flies buzzed beneath the willow trees, drawn to the catkins. The atmosphere was dancing, weaving, shivering.

Then the sun set with a clamor, a sky of copper and dazzling lights, golden echoes reverberating from cloud to cloud.

At nightfall she returned to the oak tree. The moment she saw the stars in the glimmering vault she fell asleep, exhausted.

The next morning, she found a big hunk of bread on top of a root.

She liked to think the tree had left it there for her. She thanked her plant protector for this gift, which relieved her of the worry of searching for food and enabled her to devote her day to exploring—she had so much to discover! She nibbled on the crust, saving the soft dough for dinner.

She strolled through the forest, listening carefully to the sounds: the yapping of hunting foxes; the whiplash of an animal's tail in the thicket; a lizard's scurrying; the fluty croaking of a tree frog; the furtive steps of the fawns. She would look up, trying to find out where the birds were hidden, because the branches rang out with intense song during this nesting season. A woodpecker tapped against the bark with his beak. Raucous magpies scolded one another. A cuckoo was making himself hoarse, and the closer Anne came, the further he retreated, taking his plaintive song to the horizon.

Bemused, she recalled how only yesterday she had thought of the forest as a silent place. In fact, a continuous vibration and relentless agitation ran through her. No, it was not tranquility she heard, but the harmonious music of nature sprouting, growing, living. Thickets and brushwood, in the space of a day, were animated by a wealth of living creatures. Between the rustling of wings and the snapping of twigs there came the echo of the quiet beasts, the whispers of plant life, the clear murmur of the stream, the teasing of the wind. These sounds added to the peacefulness, did not disturb the pure water of its serenity: silence welcomed the rabbit's surprise, the squirrel's fall, absorbing them no less than the carpet of moss welcomed the pine needles.

When night fell she went straight to her oak tree, took sustenance, and drifted to sleep.

 

On awakening she found a new chunk of bread enthroned beside her.

And likewise on the days that followed.

The more often the miracle occurred, the less it intrigued her.

Rarity makes for miracles; repetition erases them. Anne viewed this daily arrival of her means of sustenance as a gift from the generous forest, and she ceased to wonder about it.

She had placed herself in fate's hands. She lived on air. She forgot about mankind. There were times she would have like to be naked, the way she had come into the world, but the wind and the cool bite of the air prevented her from removing her clothes.

Every evening she returned to the fatherly shoulder of the tree and curled up against it to go to sleep.

This is where I have come from. This is where I shall return.

The forest was her mother and the great oak her father. Anne had found the innocence of birth, of a time before her heart was poisoned by worry; contemplation filled her soul with gratitude.

And every morning the bread was waiting for her.

Once or twice, to be sure, she had wanted to stay awake, but had drifted off in spite of herself. Because she fell asleep with the question,
where has this food come from?
, her dreams were filled with the most fantastical answers: a red gnome brought it, or a giant dressed in black, or a white horse with a sparkling golden horn.

Then dawn surprised her, pouring its gentle light onto the hunk of bread; Anne received it, broke it, chewed it gratefully; then she devoted herself solely to the forest.

On three occasions she felt she was being watched. While thousands of creatures constantly observed her—from their burrows, behind the thickets, deep in the brush—this was another form of attention altogether. A different awareness was spying on her. She detested the sensation. The third time she felt this unpleasant apprehension beneath her skin, she caught a glimpse of an animal in the distance. A noble stag was staring at her, deep-chested, with a gleaming gaze and pale throat, his hide steaming from exertion. There was something sylvan about his splendid antlers, as if he were the moving brother of the oak.

He galloped away.

Troubled, Anne hurried to her refuge and lay beneath the muscular branches.

A squirrel was peering at her from the top of the tree, clinging to the bark. She envied his ability to cling to the centuries-old trunk.

A fluid green light dripped from the boughs.

High above, its wings immobile, a sparrow hawk floated in the sky, coveting the fledglings in their broods.

Her eyelids grew heavy.

 

“There she is!”

That afternoon Anne had drifted off with her ear against the moss, and she had not heard a thing.

“She's here!” said the voice again.

Ida, wrapped in her shawls, stared at her cousin, who lay on the ground, covered in her dirty, worn dress. Ida's eyes sparkled with hostile glee.

“Look!”

She turned to her escort. Philippe appeared, thrashing the branches out of his way with a stick.

Anne, as embarrassed as if she had been disturbed naked at her bath, instinctively drew her legs to her torso and encircled them with her arms, resisting the young man's presence by keeping her body closed and compact.

“I knew she hadn't run away,” said Ida triumphantly. “I knew she was hiding.”

Inwardly Anne corrected her:
No, I'm not hiding, I did run away
, but she kept her thoughts to herself.

Ida and her fiancé gazed at her.

The prospect of being able to explain herself to him came as a relief to Anne.

“I am happy to see you,” she said.

“Why did you run away?”

“I mean you no harm.”

“Why?”

“I must have made you sad, or upset you . . . ”

“Why?”

She looked at the squirrel: with his round black eyes he was watching the scene unfold, his little paws gripping a fork in the tree.

“I cannot marry you.”

“You don't want to?”

“I do.”

“Well?”

“Not enough.”

Philippe received her reticence like a fist in his belly. Ida spoke on his behalf, indignantly: “What a nightmare! ‘Not enough.' Who does she think she is? Turning your nose up at Philippe, you ought to die of shame.”

“Yes, I am ashamed.”

Anne had answered so sincerely that Ida was confounded in the expression of her own bitterness.

Philippe approached her and asked, pale and tense, “Why?”

She lowered her head.

He screamed, “
Why?
”

Anne's eyes filled with tears. It was painful to her to inflict this torment on the boy.

“I don't know. But it's nothing to do with you, Philippe, it's not your fault.”

A meager consolation, her declaration: he discovered that Anne thought him unimportant. He stepped forward, fell to his knees, and took her hands. Humiliated, he became insistent. He wanted Anne to give in. Was it because he adored her? Or because he was frustrated by failure? It was impossible to tell whether his stubbornness was guided by love or conceit.

“Then if you don't know, marry me! You will see . . . ”

Behind him Ida was biting her lips with rage when she saw how stubborn he was, although he had sworn loud and clear not to go back on his decision!

“Oh, men,” she grumbled to herself. “To think people say that girls are always changing their minds . . . ”

Anne was explaining something, incomprehensible to Philippe: “I will not get married. To anyone. It is not my destiny. I cannot say why, but I must not. I am sorry . . . ”

“I'm not good enough for you, is that it?”

“You are worthy of any woman.”

Saying this, Anne looked straight in Philippe's eyes. He believed her. She went on: “You are far too good for me!”

“I agree with you there,” interrupted Ida. “For goodness' sake, Philippe, can't you see what she is like, this former fiancée of yours? She's a slut! She hasn't washed since she ran away, she's been sleeping on the ground . . . She must be sucking on roots. A sow would have more self-respect. You want to have children with such a woman?”

“No!”

He retreated. He suddenly seemed to hate Anne. His last hopes had shattered. His neck turned purple with rancor.

“What will we do?” said Ida, wincing.

“What we decided this morning!” said Philippe.

They narrowed their eyes in delighted complicity.

Anne sensed a connivance that excluded her: they were talking in front of her as if she could not hear them. Was she no more than a beast?

Pulling a rope from his satchel, Philippe rushed over to his fiancée, followed by Ida. In a flash they tied her up. Philippe wound the rope around her joints and Ida pulled it tight, delighted to torture her cousin.