flight
leaping clumsily, all four wing? flapping, her fat, like sandbags, threatening to ground her, Matilde greets the air with arms spread wide open. A puff of wind lifts the hem of her skirts, seems to tickle her feet, and Matilde demands, Up, up, up! With a groan, the wind harnesses Matilde’s impressive buttocks and dangles her above the cobblestones, above the hungry dogs, above the dirty children with fat melting in their fists.
stirring
Madeleine stirs in her sleep.
hush
when Madeleine sleeps, Mother says, the cows give double their milk. Pansies sprout up between the floorboards. Your father loves me, but I remain slender and childless. I can hear the tumult of pears and apples falling from the trees like rain. Smooth your sister’s coverlet. Arrange her hair on the pillowcase. Be silent as saints. We do not wish to wake her.
madeleine dreams
ON dark mornings, when the church still lay in shadow, Saint Michel looked absent-minded, forlorn, penned in by the lead panes that outlined the sad slope of his jaw. She thought him by far the most heartbreaking of the saints, and occasionally yearned to squeeze the long, waxen fingers that were pressed together so impassibly as they pointed towards heaven. He had been a prince once, whose appetite was such that he could never quite keep his mouth closed. In defiance of medieval conventions, even his portraits attest to his hunger: his lips are always ajar, teeth wetly bared, as if about to bite into his tenants’ capons or cheeses or one of their firm daughters. In his castle’s feasting hall, he liked to stage elaborate tableaux vivants, resurrecting the classical friezes he had seen in his travels, himself always cast as the hero or the young god, a bevy of peasant girls enlisted as dryads, pheasants and rank trout imitating eagles and dolphins. Imagine the depravity, the priest whispers: women with nipples as large and purple as plums, birds molting, dead fish suspended from the rafters, and rising in the midst of them all, the achingly glorious Michel, oblivious to the chaos surrounding him. His vanity was unmatched!
penitence
and then a plague struck, a drought descended, and Michel found God. While outside his castle walls the pestilence raged, Michel was struck by the face of the crucified Lord, preserved in a primitive icon that hung beneath the stairs. His fair face had been obliterated by tears and blood; His perfect body was desiccated and dotted with flies. Wracked by self-reproach, the prince vowed to destroy his own beauty; he surrendered himself and his lands to the monastery at Rievaulx, where he spent the rest of his days inflicting torture upon himself. He suffered through flagellations, hair shirts, and fasting while the abbot meticulously chronicled his decline: Prince Michel can barely leave his pallet; his flesh has fallen away; repeated flaying has reopened and infected old wounds; his sackcloth has spawned monstrous lesions about his groin. It was as Michel wished. When he finally expired, his face was contorted in anguish, his loveliness effaced by tears and blood. The abbot washed the ravaged body and laid it upon its bier, but by morning the saint had been miraculously restored to perfection, his body whole and sound, his face flawless and somber. This is the Saint Michel depicted in the cathedral window. Even the devout find it difficult to remember the suffering he endured. I should have loved him more, she thought, if he had remained mutilated.
recognition
on A Sunday in summer, a blade of empyreal light illuminated his once melancholy face, and she instantly recognized it as her own. Why, it’s me, she said to herself, without wonder. I have been looking at myself all along. And the face was no longer lengthened in sorrow, but bright and fluid with color. She stood up from her family’s pew and walked towards the stained glass, her eyes locked with her own. At the altar, she pivoted on her toes and faced the congregation. Look upon me, she said. Stepping down from the altar, she approached a stout man sitting in the front pew, the collection plate balanced on his knees, and she touched his chest, with all the tenderness in the world. His stiff Sunday vest peeled away like an orange rind, and she grazed her fingertips against the polished, orderly bones of his rib cage. Beneath, she found a curled and pulsing bud, and when she blew on it, it began to unfurl its sanguine petals, one by one. His heart unfolded before her. She worked her way down each pew, gently touching and blowing as she went, and when she looked around she noticed, with pleasure, that the small flowers she had uncovered were of a heliotropic variety; their delicate heads nodded to her wherever she went, following her movements like those of the sun.
animals
the small, pliant siblings heed Mother’s bidding. Among the morning chores is the task that gives them most delight. First, you must sweep the walkway. After that, you must kiss grandmother’s forehead. You must also lug empty pails to where Papa is milking Only then are you entrusted with Mother’s heirloom, a hand mirror whose face you hold out to the morning dr like a butterfly net, catching the chill in midflight. Madeleine is as still as a mummy, but when they hold the mirror beneath her nose, ghostly shapes appear on its cold surface. The children shove to see the results. A rabbit! Madeleine exhales again: an anteater! A menagerie of vaporous animals escapes from her nostrils and instantly disappears: the mirror records and erases in the same moment. Jean-Luc captures a whale. Claude, a pregnant sow. Beatrice says that she sees only cows. Do not worry, Maman. Madeleine is still sleeping.
she dreams
when m. marais ordered a new viol, he requested that the instrument’s head be fashioned after the face of his neighbor’s youngest daughter, Charlotte. She sat diligently before the master craftsman as he whittled away her likeness, until M. Marais was pleased with the result and announced the portrait complete. With the beautiful viol nestled between his thighs, he drew the bow across the strings. It is as if you were singing, he told the girl. This is how I imagine your voice. That is not me, Charlotte declared. That is only my face. I think I will name her Griselda. From then on, whenever she heard the moan of the viol, Charlotte would trot next door and say hello to her face. Alio, Griselda! she would exclaim, putting M. Marais terribly out of sorts.
the marriage
as soon AS charlotte was confirmed, M. Marais visited her father and asked for her hand in marriage. Although the father argued persuasively in favor of Charlotte’s several older sisters, praising one’s graceful figure, another’s delicate needlework, another’s splendid hair, the acclaimed musician would accept none other than Charlotte herself. So the father relinquished her, ruefully, for she was his favorite and he had hoped to spend his old age watching her bloom into womanhood.
consummation
at the nuptial hour, the servants passed through Charlotte as if she were a shade, a ghostly emanation of her corporeal groom. For the ceremony, attended only by the master craftsman and her regretful father, she had been dressed in filmy white. She had reflexed, like the moon, M. Maraiss bulky and brilliant mass of figured silks, brocades, velvets, rocaille lace. Now, wandering alone through the corridors, she stopped a scullery maid and begged directions to the bridal chamber. The oaken door sighed like the entrance to a vault. Quick, quick! These garters are insufferable! Through the crack, she could see a naked sliver of M. Marais, flanked by two menservants he was swatting about the head. It’s me, Charlotte, she announced through the opening. How strange it sounded finally to say it. The musician shrieked and clutched himself, girlishly modest, trying to conceal both his breasts and his groin. Go away! he exclaimed, like a woman shooing hens. Go away this instant! Charlotte hurriedly shut the door and skittered back a few paces: she imagined that she should feel relief but instead was experiencing a peculiar sense of disappointment. Glancing down, she saw the gaping keyhole. It winked at her, wisely, like a friend. Charlotte knelt, and looked inside. The keyhole was like a telescope, unfolding before her the lush landscape of M. Marais’s body. She spied his mossy buttocks, their dark and moist ravine; his nipples peeking out from his breasts, like two rosy cherubs in a cumulus cloud. The menservants had stripped him down to an exoskeleton of garters and restraints, but the mote clothes he shed, the less naked he seemed, as if his flesh, freed from its constricting network of laces and stays, could finally embrace him in all its splendor. He stroked his voluptuous stomach and then settled himself, purring, onto the enormous bed. It groaned rapturously beneath him. Unseen, Charlotte’s bright brown eye flickered in the keyhole, wet with pity and desire, guttering like a candle.