Beautiful also the way her skin was singed a dark olive around the eyes and at the edges of her mouth, partly from the exhaustion caused by her many sleepless nights as a teenager, and some as an adult, but mainly because this trait had been passed down to Isabela by her Spanish-Hungarian mother, who in turn received it from her own Spanish mother, all three women prone to the same alternating bouts of irritable languor.
Yes and the way their hair fell dark and wild into the crook of their backs, a camber spotted with birthmarks arranged in mysterious shapes like some mangled alphabet, and leading to their buttocks where a crisscross of cane scars marked each side of the dark bisector, from which black hair escaped in wavelets radiating from the pink center of a soot-covered mountain flower.
No not beautiful with her long thin torso and flattened breasts, long black nipples, thick pubis, hips bulging grotesquely, rippling thighs covered in stretch marks, knees inflexed, a woman both flat-footed and shrimp-toed.
Yes beautiful in the way that she walked, graceful despite her shape, a form of improvised royalty.
The bright bar was filled with a mix of boisterous after-work drinkers, men watching football, barstool casualties hunched over their cloudy glasses of pastis. Isabela wore a low-cut blue dress that padded and swaddled her breasts, above which her smooth clavicles were visible. She sat across the table looking at Christophe, hands folded over his, the man she had learnt to love despite her worst instincts, despite years of abuse at the hands of sadists and addicts and even downright psychopaths. Perhaps he did not arouse in her the same desire as these other men, but with him she suffered less, and Christophe had a way of applying himself between the sheets. She loved him like a painting hung on the wall of her childhood home, Isabela changing fitfully while he remained eternally the same, a steady and reliable witness to her follies, seemingly incapable of treachery. But today Christophe seemed nervous and she watched him struggle to meet her gaze, the sweat on his forehead shining yellow in the side-cast bar light.
Lea sat across the dinner table from Christophe, his cold hands over hers, eyes jumping from thing to thing, the other children eating or staring at him in wonder, confused by this new development. The old man had served them the usual porridge and left his own untouched, drinking nervously from a glass of water and licking his upper lip repeatedly while he observed Lea as the child ate. Christophe had then slowly reached over the table to place his hands on the girl’s. She did not know what to make of the old man’s vacant stare, and despite having already eaten most of the warm oatmeal, her stomach remained cold and empty. Marc smiled miserably as he watched them from behind his wounds, which had reopened after the thorough scratching he had given them over the course of the morning.
It has been more than three years of shared life, Christophe told Isabela.
Lea looked at Christophe and said nothing. Marc turned to Sabine and touched her arm. She swatted his hand away. They both watched the old man.
Will you marry me, he said to Isabela.
Lea did not answer.
Tears welled in the old man’s eyes. All the children had finished eating and they stared at Christophe. Those facing the window could see slow moving clouds behind him in the grey sky, the old man’s face dark against that white glare.
I know I do not always express myself well. I know I never do. But I will be a good husband. I promise you, Isabela.
Christophe stroked the child’s ring finger.
Do you like it, he asked.
I do, she said. It’s a very nice ring. It really is.
He smiled and leaned over the table, kissing Lea lightly on the mouth, his tears wetting the child’s face. Everybody in the bar seemed to be staring at them. Christophe rose to stack the dishes, placing the spoons in the uppermost bowl, and carrying everything into the kitchen.
Marc’s nipples were now a visible path to his weakness, poking as they did through the cloth of his jumpsuit. He had tried to cut them off with a knife stolen from the kitchen, but the pain was overwhelming and the progress slow, and after a few minutes Marc did not have the courage to continue, his efforts leaving only a crescent-shaped bloodstain on the breast of his jumpsuit. The boy had failed again. There was blood on his face from the scabs picked and eaten, wounds from the younger boy’s nails, and now the public shame of these bloated cones of flesh which he decided to cover by folding his arms over his chest. Lea stared pitifully at him from across the spotless dinner table. The old man had shown with his servile tears that he had become the little girl’s puppet. Although he was weakening, there remained immense strength in those grey arms. This Marc knew from the swing of Christophe’s belt. No matter. Marc would take care of Rodolphe, who would be alone eventually, and this would leave him free to focus on the real threat: the girl and her grey workhorse.
The boy was monstrous. Lea examined the oozing crimson scabs, the bloodshot eyes, the thickening neck, the teeth pink with blood, the way Marc flared his nostrils and tightened the muscles of his forearms, clamping his fists. She wanted the old man to return from the kitchen. She wanted Florian to return to the farmhouse.
Redness was growing inside Marc, spilling through the openings in his body and creating an overpowering stench. Sabine could no longer smell his sweat, and for the first time she felt that he might be changing for the worse. Left to his own devices, he would surely be consumed by whatever force was at work inside him. She would have to reach through her revulsion and restore their bond, without which Marc could not survive. She stood up from the bench and he turned to look at her, eyes momentarily losing their cruelty as she placed her hand on his fist and gestured for him to follow her.
In the dimness of the grain vats Sabine brought herself to Marc like salve to a wound, finding that place of tightness between his legs, the place she had so viciously sought to harm. Feeling her cold hand over his weakness, Marc attempted to resist her, but she gently pushed his hands aside and continued to touch him until the pleasure overwhelmed him and Marc ceased fighting.
Sabine pulled from Marc a pale yellow rivulet carrying in its fluid the snarling mitochondria of the boy’s entire existence, and, open-eyed, the boy saw reflected in his ejaculate a series of jagged images, each replayed with agonizing slowness against a backdrop of absolute stillness from which it materialized and into which it disappeared.
Again father chose another boy, an older boy Marc barely knew. He watched father wrap the blindfold around the boy’s eyes, his stupid head jerking as father tied the knot. All right, son. Father called the boy son. Now pin the tail on the donkey. Father then placed his open palm on the boy’s back and pushed him forward. What the boy held was not even a pin, just a stupid magnet glued to a paper tail, and he staggered with his hand outstretched towards the refrigerator where on a piece of red paper the black outline of a donkey had been drawn. It was my turn, Marc said to the boy, and the look father gave him, one of absolute disgust, cut through Marc so deeply that Marc ran from the scene, up the stairs and into his bedroom, hearing father say to mother, let him go, for god’s sake let the boy go. He might learn a lesson. Marc slammed the door and cried into his bedcovers, hoping father or mother might come up the stairs to stroke his hair as he cried and tell him the other children were gone, and Sabine was gone from her crib, and happy birthday. Well boots on the donkey and boots on the boy and boots on mother and boots on father and boots pinning Sabine to the ground.
In its transparent crib the baby was built of bright red stuff. She almost killed your mother, father said, and smiled. Mother rested on the green bed with red string hanging from the red bag and father stood holding Marc and pointing to the baby. Strapped to its face a plastic tube keeping it alive. Part of the baby was pumping up and down. Say hello to Sabine, Marc. Your sister. Marc knew sister meant hurting place, ounce of flesh torn from Marc’s own, place where mother and father’s eyes would always rest. Sister meant instead. Boots on sister.