hello
Claude is banished to the orchard, to say hello to his father I’m home! the boy cries. So you are, observes his father, arms high above his head, hands lost in the mottled ceiling of the leaves. When his hands emerge, holding apples, he offers one to Claude. And your trip, Father asks, it was pleasant? Claude nods, mouth occupied. And the horse did not complain? Claude shrugs his shoulders. Tell me, Father says, where is it that you went? As Claude struggles to swallow, Father apologizes. Your mother — she has a business, she’s thinking all the time— and with her mind so full, she sometimes forgets to tell me. Claude takes another bite, so he doesn’t have to answer.
underworld
AS I was saying, Beatrice perseveres. My husband seemed not at all surprised to see me, perhaps because he had grown so used to looking at my face. Where is Griselda? I demanded, and he merely shrugged, intent upon helping himself to a great quivering pudding. In the scrapheap, I suppose, is all my husband said. And then he considered: Or maybe burned as firewood last winter, when it grew so very cold. I watched as he carved off the glistening leg of a goose. On further thought, said my husband, it is most likely at the orphanage, because in my old age I have cultivated the habit of charity. Did you know that they are musical, orphans? I knew only that my husband was lying. For hadn’t I heard her raise her lament, heard her sobbing to me from across the gardens? And who better than I to recognize the sound of my own voice? See for yourself my husband told me. And off I ran into the dark passageways of his house, a black labyrinth of chambers and corridors that had remained, even when I lived among them, impenetrable to me. But now I moved through them with a strange clarity of purpose, as though a little lamp were burning before me, and the doors I remembered as locked now fell open beneath my fingertips. Room after room of his mother’s shrouded furniture; and my old bedchamber sheathed in white; and his libraries, the books risine untouched from floor to ceiling! and his practice room, spare as a cell, with sheets of music still spread on the stand-Don’t bother with all the rooms, says Lucie impatiently. Tell about the girls.
sylph
saway from his father Claude drifts, kicking at the apples on the ground, his neck bent, his gaze fastened downward. When at last he looks up, he thinks he sees, flickering at the edge of the orchard, a girl. But she moves so quickly through the crooked trees — is it two girls? Or three?
viscera
in the farthest corner of the smallest practice room, a room so small and nearly forgotten that even the curls of rosin on the floor had gathered dust, there was a little door, like one covering a cupboard, and behind this door is where my husband kept his failed compositions. If ever another human eye should see these, he once confessed, I would die of humiliation. And when he said this to me, I took pity on him, for indeed his eyes watered and his lip trembled, and for an instant it did seem possible that his huge distended heart might collapse upon itself in shame. So though I crept repeatedly into his practice rooms, I never once disturbed I that little cupboard door. But upon my return, I noted that the cupboard door stood ajar, as if opened from the inside by a very faint draft. And I was overpowered. By my own curiosity. My hands shook, my breath 1 faltered, and the door opened to reveal not sagging shelves but a passageway ablaze with light. And rooms, yes, more rooms (had | Lucie been present she would have received a deadly look, but Lucie, too, has been sent away), unlike those I had ever seen inside 1 my husbands house. Rooms without windows, but lit from within by such brilliant colors, the strange color and light that emanates I from expensive things: walrus tusks, snuff bottles, paintings so black that nothing could be discerned but a cheekbone or an eye, tapestries of rape, swords with sharkskin hilts, tiny jeweled boxes whose interiors rattled. I wanted to touch everything at once. When I reached out to feel the tapestry, I saw her: long neck, seven strings, melancholy face. She was turned halfway to die wall, as if in embarrassment, propped between a footstool and a glass case displaying postage stamps. And selfishly I felt only joy. it was not Griselda, trapped in this airless place. But who was she, with her weak jaw and her melancholy expression?
echo
wandering through the orchard, Claude wonders, What was she?
appetite
Why did she watch so sadly out of the comet of her eye? Following her gaze, I understood, for there was another, stripped of her body, who, together with a covey of umbrella handles, was peering timidly from a severed elephant’s foot. Prompted by their poor pleading faces, I went from room to room, finding more: those with gaping, half-finished bodies; those with their own string? twisted about their necks like a noose; also the decapitated, their heads turned to paperweights. It took no effort to imagine what had happened in these brilliant rooms. What hunger, on his part. What extreme terror on theirs. And my whole self trembled then: in pity for what they had suffered, perhaps, or in relief that my own face was not among them, but in truth I think I shook only with the cool exhilaration of being right. For I had known all along. I had known when I sat down to dinner with my husband, when I spent the afternoon by a window reading a book, or drifted down the dark corridors of his house, feeling my way to his bed. I had known of their terror, that they languished on the other side of the wall, yet I had moved through the corridors thinking only of my dinner, my book, his bed, my lovely face. I had known of them in their bright hidden rooms, and at last I was here, shaking in triumph, sick with my own acuity, sick with the pleasure of being right. It was with this sickness and elation that I sought out my husband, knowing now where I would find Griselda. For wasn’t the appetite of my husband as cruel as the wolf’s, as great as the whale’s? In one despairing gulp, he had swallowed her.
saboteur
the story is too long, Mother interrupts. All those dinners, those corridors. And where is M. Jouy? I fixed him something special to eat. Beatrice’s face, her hands, collapse: But I haven’t finished. I already know what is going to happen, Mother says. Claude told us at the beginning. Do you understand how difficult it is, to slice someone open with a carving knife? His intestines — his liver — his marbled heart— This is why I use the butcher, Mother says. Where is M. Jouy? Don’t you wonder if she found Griselda? I made him sausages! Mother and Beatrice stare at each other, white-lipped, ill-matched in their obduracy. The daughter relents. But this is the best part, she says mournfully. And seeking encouragement, she finds none, for Mimi has been exiled for coughing, Jean-Luc for looking bored, and the only audience remaining is her unimaginative mother. Blood everywhere, she murmurs as her audience stalks off, in search of an idiot. And when the curdling cries rise up from the shed, when the cart is found empty and the bridegroom missing, Beatrice watches in regret the woman backing from their gate, whose tragic story, it must be admitted, she somewhat mismanaged. If only her brothers and sisters were not capable of such sabotage! She had gotten rid of a useless thing, put a beautiful thing in its place, and yet they were, all of them, intent upon finding fault and thwarting her. Her sense of injustice is so strong that she stamps her foot against the ground and then, with the other foot, kicks her mother’s precious, pointless chest.