The Life of Elves (12 page)

But when it struck two o'clock, there came from Angèle's room, which she had given to Marcel and Léonce, an unholy racket that awoke the entire farm. People groped their way through the dark, lit candles, and hurried to the room, where they found Marcel writhing in pain from a liver attack and a violent fever, and they feared he might be taken from them that very hour. Eugénie had lain dreaming continuously of deep caves where the sediment of a sticky yellow substance was collecting, and her relief upon awakening from one nasty situation was soon erased by the discovery of another one. She staggered slightly, and tried to adjust her nightcap, which had slipped down over her ear, but the sight of the sick man on his bed of suffering woke her with a start, and she stood bolt upright in her thick woolen socks. She had already treated the entire lowlands for various ills, prescribing a considerable array of potions, dilutions, tinctures, syrups, decoctions, gargles, ointments, unguents, balms and poultices of her own confection, some of them for patients whose chances of recovery were slim, and whose funerals she subsequently attended, much saddened. But however strange it might seem, this was the first time she found herself in the presence of a sick person at the fateful hour. The crisis was all around them and there was no getting away from it. And in any case, she had no intention of fleeing. On the contrary, she was fully convinced that all the paths she had taken in life had been leading her to this little room full of suffering.

 

Unlike Angèle, Eugénie was not a woman with a rich inner life where the embers were gradually dying. She saw the world as a collection of tasks and days whose existence alone sufficed to justify them. She got up in the morning to pray and feed the rabbits, then she made up her remedies, prayed again, sewed, mended, scrubbed, went off to pick her medicinal plants and hoe her vegetable garden, and if she managed to do it all in good time and without impediment, she would go to bed content, without a single thought. But acceptance of the world granted to her had little to do with resignation. If Eugénie was content with a thankless life that she had not chosen, it was because she lived in constant prayer, inspired in her at the age of five by a mint leaf in her mother's garden. She had felt the green and fragrant sap of the plant running in her veins, and it was not just a substance that was marvelously attuned to the texture of her fingers and her sense of smell; it also told a story without words, and she gave herself to that story as she would to the flow of the river. It had brought her incredible clarity, commanding through images a series of actions that she carried out, her heart pounding; only the exclamations of the adults who sought to prevent her from continuing interrupted her—until they discovered that she had been stung in the cheek, and they understood that by rubbing her face with the moist peppermint leaf she was applying the very remedy that could quell the pain. She had not been aware of it, she had not even suspected that others might not be lulled by the same prayer, which had initially come to her in the form of delightful songs she heard during her contact with nature, and which then was filled with meaning when she was taken to church, where the spirit of these psalms was given a face and words; she had simply written the words onto the stave of the score she already knew, and the splendor of the mint had conquered there both its doctrine and its God. In a way, this perception of nature's hymns came closest to Maria's own perception, and if Eugénie had been struck by the composition with the cloves of garlic that had rendered the room in the farmhouse so sublime it was because she had already been initiated into the order of invisible reasons that made her happy, even though she was born poor.

But the greatest tragedy in her life had been the loss of her son to the war: his name was carved on the village monument. During all the battles that rent the skies of France with their poisoned wound, it crushed her to see the violets continuing to wither as exquisitely as ever, and when she lost her son, it seemed to her that the beauty of the woods was an inexplicable disgrace, even in the pages of the Holy Scripture, because it was inconceivable that such a magnificent world could exist alongside such agonizing pain. The death of her husband, while it had greatly afflicted her, had not been a comparable tragedy, because he had departed as all the living depart, as the irises fade and the great stags die. But the war set the lines ablaze and burned reality to the bone; everywhere people were coming up against walls as high as cathedrals that elevated death amid the beautiful plains; and the fact that all this was happening amid the limpidity of spring blossoms was a paradox that touched her in the very place that hitherto had made her live, the place of sacred osmosis that brings together the living and their earth. Prior to her son's death she had already lost her appetite; but once they informed her that he would never return from the faraway fields, and that they would not send his body back to her because there had been so many losses and such terrible fires that they could only draw up lists of those who had not returned, Eugénie could not even recall the meaning of desire.

 

But one morning not long before the end of the war they brought her a child from a neighboring village who had been sick for months, coughing to exhaustion from morning to night. The boy had such a wrenching, racking cough that the pain she felt could only be assuaged by placing her hand on his torso and try to feel the passage the illness was taking; when she discovered that his lungs were clear, she understood in a flash that he was suffering from the same ailment she herself was slowly dying from. She increased the pressure of her palm on his poor naked chest, where the powers of war were hollowing out a crevice of sorrow and rage, then she caressed the boy's cheek, applied a bit of clay sprain ointment and said with a smile, overwhelmed to be feeling the floodgates opening inside her and releasing a rush of suffocating debris, opening inside her and finding the dawn again in spite of all the wounds and the hatred—she said to him with a smile,
It will be fine, my angel.
Two days later the mother told her that the cough was gone, and while the little boy didn't speak, he smiled all the time, and Eugénie was able to resume her familiar life flushed with the singing of the pastures and the oaks. But she had incorporated the knowledge of evil in the form of a wound, and henceforth she would feel its black hole every day, devouring her allotted amount of substance and love. Oddly enough, it meant that she was better able to detect the deep origins of illnesses, but she also felt that part of her gift was blocked, and the accuracy of her diagnosis was in inverse proportion to her ability to heal. Something had grown, something else had fallen away, and although she was no philosopher, she felt this cross she constantly had to bear impeded her activity as a healer.

Why do the paths of destiny suddenly appear like letters forming of their own accord in the sand on the shore? After the conflict, life went on, and the men returned to the fields where, during the massacres, only women and old men had worked. There were new harvests, new winters, and more autumnal languor, and the survivors mourned their dead while the horror of the carnage left them forever inconsolable. And yet they were alive, and they smiled at dragonflies in summer, while the countryside crumbled beneath the weight of gray stones carved with one word doomed to condemn them all.
Remember! Remember! Remember that crushing fate still begging for alms of remembrance, through the curse of love that was lost to steel!
Upon entering the little room where Marcel lay dying, Eugénie felt Maria touch her shoulder, before withdrawing silently into the shadows. And only then did she return from the war. The paths of fate: a garlic clove is moved one millimeter and the world is utterly changed; the slightest shift disturbs the secret position of our emotions and yet it transforms our lives forever. Eugénie sensed all this as she observed the sick man's ordeal, and was astonished to discover that thanks to the little girl's touch she had crossed a trifling space, but found herself far removed from the suffering she had just left behind. Several decades of struggle swept to one side of her old woman's shoulder—and a dying man who was not belligerent but merely made of flesh and blood; Eugénie went up to the untidy bed and placed her hand on her godson's forehead.

 

In fact Marcel, who rued the guinea-fowl and the bad things in his life—in particular a duck he had once stolen—was little more now than a colossal infection. The contamination had begun in his stomach and in two hours had built a little mound of pus; then, pleased with what it had done, it had called on its legions to advance at once. His body had begun to undergo the ordeal that the gangrene had restrained until such a time as it would be invincible, and in the sudden agitation of radiating pain, had spread the decline beyond his vessels and tissues. This was the principle behind all warfare, and it had become obvious to Eugénie for a reason she only began to understand when Maria, by touching her shoulder, stirred an awareness inscribed on the genetic map of her old peasant carcass, and which informed her that the only reason she could see the ravages of war so well was because her fate demanded she become a healer.

The world was growing older. After decades of evil, of constant invasion, there remained nothing more than one fortress amid the chaos of warring rulers, and each time it would confront the resistance of violets. Fleetingly, Eugénie felt sorry it had taken all this time for things to become clear, but she also understood that one cannot give orders to the battalion of gifts, that they must still learn compassion and love, and that the illumination of souls requires the work of grief and mourning—yes, solace is very near and we cannot seize it, it takes time, it takes years, and perhaps, too, the forgiveness of others.

It is after three o'clock in the morning at the farm and two women have entered together into a territory that requires still more magnanimity and sorrow, while the life of a man who only ever stole a duck lies in their twelve and eighty-seven-year old hands, hanging by the thread that joins them in the trance of battle.

 

Eugénie closed her eyes and, as if she were five years old again, lying intoxicated by her mint leaves, she watched as the succession of steps in the healing unreeled across the screen of her inner gaze. She opened her eyes again, and did not need to speak, because the little girl left for the kitchen at once, then came back holding a handful of garlic and thyme branches cupped in her palms, their pungent scent filling the room. Eugénie took the little ewer from Angèle's night table, crushed the garlic into it, added the thyme and lifted the preparation to the dying man's nostrils; he seemed to breathe more easily and half-opened one yellowed eye, shot with clotted, black blood. She brushed his lips with some of the sticky paste. He gagged once, then she gently opened his mouth and placed a small amount of the remedy inside.

 

Do you know what a dream is? It is not a chimera engendered by our desire, but another way we absorb the substance of the world, and gain access to the same truths as those the mists unveil by concealing the visible and unveiling the invisible. Eugénie knew that neither the garlic nor the thyme could heal an infection that had spread this far, but she had grown up with the wisdom whispered in the ear of those who have left the battle: there are no limits to our powers to accomplish and our natural spirit is stronger than anything. She also knew that her gift as a healer called forth another vaster and more awesome gift and that Maria—standing in the shadows because she was a steward of higher causes—was the realization of the miracle.

She turned and called to the little girl, who stepped forward to touch her shoulder again. Eugénie swayed, startled by the violence of the shock. She felt energy and rebellion surging through her, waves and tempests. She gulped in surprise as she sensed herself drifting away on the flow of energy the little girl spun around her, then she was restored to her healer's elation and set sail in search of the ebb and flow of her dream. She discovered it in an image that stood out against a hazy, shimmering background, and the rhythms and sensations slackened to let her move slowly toward a red span between two shores shrouded in mist. What a beautiful bridge it was . . . One could sense the noble wood beneath the deep velvety carmine paint, and before long there followed a procession of absurd, unintelligible thoughts, but they all led to the sense of peace yielded to anyone who cared to look at the red bridge between two clouds of mist. Yet this was a peace that Eugénie had always known, of the sort that united trees and people and caused plants to speak the language of human beings, and the bridge radiated a power of conciliation that revealed the ways of nature with an intensity and harmony she had never before experienced. Then the image was gone. It had lasted only as long as a sigh, and in that time she heard voices more beautiful than all of beauty itself.

 

Peace . . . What else had she aspired to all these years? What else can one desire when one loses a son, when his guts explode under the sky of honor? With a sharpness that would have still been painful that very morning and now felt like a caress in her memory, she saw again a summer evening in the garden, when they had set the table for the repast after Saint John's Day, decorating it with the big solstice irises. She could hear the insects buzzing in the warm air, sounds mingling with scents, the fumet of a pike simmering with little vegetables from the garden; and she saw her son again as she had not seen him in many years; he was sitting across from her and smiling sadly because they both knew he had already died in those same fields where so many of our husbands and sons had died; so she leaned forward slightly and, looking at him tenderly, said in a voice veiled by neither sadness nor regret,
Go, son, and know for all eternity how much we love you.
Eugénie could have died in that moment, in perfect, idiotic bliss, the way the poppies and dragonflies die in summer. But she had a godson to tear from death's clutches, and she was not one of those otherworldly souls intoxicated forever by a hymn. She knew that the vision and the singing had appeared to her so that she could accomplish her task—that was why she had adjusted her nightcap, crushed the garlic between her fingers, and seen her son again in the winter night.