Fragments of Place Read online

  They poured each other tea in delicate porcelain cups. Or fine liqueurs in crystal goblets. They drank with the smallest of sips.

  Some began to hum songs, recite poetry, and play the flute. Others took a step or two, as if to dance. Then embraced one another, but it did not last. Suddenly they stopped, fell silent, and froze in their tracks, uncertain what to do next.

  One of them would free the long braids of another, then unhurriedly comb her hair out, then braid it again, decorating it again with tiny stars.

  Their hands slipped nonchalantly over the rounded surfaces of the vases, along the mahogany tables, the embroidery of the armchairs, the fabric of the dresses. Sometimes they caressed a face or a shoulder.

  They put on makeup. They arranged their hair. They dressed. They prepared for festivities that would never come.

  And they knew it.

  They removed their makeup. Rinsed their faces with rose water, took baths in sweet-smelling oil. Put their makeup back on again. Applied polish to their faultless nails.

  A single perfume of lily of the valley, ferns, and Spanish moss, like a magnetic fluid, brought their bodies together.

  The women tried to be calm even if, inside, they felt completely lost. They supported each other to avoid despair.

  They were what must never die, what must be preserved if life is to continue.

  Outside, the madness of men, already so great, had gone beyond all limits in its fanaticism, cupidity, barbarity, and indifference. Nothing could appease their greedy gaze.

  When the other women came to ask asylum and protection from them, the three sisters decided to stop spinning the silky thread of life that was their gift to men. They ceased spooling it across fields of time, then cutting it off, when the hour was right, to preserve the world’s harmony. It just wasn’t worth the trouble anymore.

  Since that day, on the outside, the cradles have been desperately empty.

  Despite that obvious sign, men continued to strike out blindly and tear each other apart in time that had ceased to exist, that generated nothing but terror endlessly sowed, everywhere, nothing but a growing sense of greed, and misfortune never before seen.

  Death, until that day, did not appear to deliver those who could not stand being sick and old anymore. Nor those who could not brook this world of pains. Now, no one died anymore, and neither was anyone born. Men had entered the eternity they had always wished for, but that turned out to be hellish. The hell they had created.

  In the spacious room, the youngest of the women came to sit at the feet of the oldest. She was crying.

  In a lengthy plea, she asked for grace for men who, outside, had forgotten how precious the fleeting and precarious measure of life was, the length they had been granted.

  She wanted to return with the others to that universe, though they had been harried out of it with violence. For she knew that, down below, the majority of humans tried to resist the best they could the madness of the all-powerful, pitiless minority. They needed the women to believe that their resistance was not in vain.

  But for that to be, the three sisters would have to take up their work again.

  The time had not come, and may never come again.

  TAKING SHELTER

  They were waiting for the night, or the rain, in this country where it never rains, where the desert stretches on forever, deadly in its sameness.

  They wanted to emerge from the narrow, burning shadow where they had sought refuge. To escape. Leave behind this hell and return to their reassuring place of origin where you can breathe the air and walk out in the open without fearing flash desiccation or massacre.

  The sand and the scorching air were burning them alive. Their dehydrated eyelids scraped against their dry eyes every time they blinked. It was too painful to keep their eyes closed.

  The two men hardly moved at all, crouching under what remained of their desert vehicle, dragging themselves out of the sun’s rays that tracked them down, slowly, turning endlessly around the metal carcass, trying to slip underneath it and reach them with its fiery tongue and incinerate them alive, with all the patience in the world.

  They waited for the night, but it had stopped gracing them with its visit some time ago. The sun no longer went down, obsessed with the men it was hunting pitilessly, wanting to strip the flesh off their bones and turn them into fossils, for remembrance.

  These photographers had come here to be faithful witnesses to the dreadful events in this country that others preferred to forget.

  They had been doing this for years now. At the beginning, they had believed in their work. They returned devastated from their travels, traumatized by the images they had brought back.

  They believed in what they were doing, but with time, something had changed. It wasn’t visible, but they felt it. They never spoke about it together, or with anyone else, but they were stricken with the same malaise and they knew it. The more horrible and unspeakable the scene, the more excited they felt, indecently, like an ever-growing greed for horror, because its effect had dulled over time and they needed ever stronger doses.

  Sometimes, in situations of extreme tension, they secretly wished the worst would happen. That a rocket would shred human flesh, that the carnage would begin, that heads and hands would be torn away, right now, in front of them, as they trained their telescopic lenses on possible targets.

  Fortunately, several times they were lucky enough to be at the exact spot and exact time to capture the unspeakable. In front of a child bursting into fragments in full sunlight as he stepped on a mine. Or that other person they didn’t even see in the images, buried under tons of rubble deep in a tin mine; they saw only the mother digging through the ruins with her bloody hands, her mouth open with screams you could not hear. Thick, ashen dust covered her face that had become a stiff mask where only her eyes burned like glowing coals.

  These were legendary photographs like others they had taken, and had travelled the world.

  I, too, stared at those photos with real emotion, in that magazine I often bought despite the high price, because I wanted to be well informed, I wanted to look reality in the eye, its raw truth as I sat comfortably in my leather armchair among the flowers, a glass of aged port by my side.

  I was so absorbed in the profound reflections those images awoke in me that at first I did not notice that evening was taking its time to settle, and strangely so: the daylight was lingering in undue fashion.

  Little by little, people stepped out into the street, amazed by the presence of the light and the sun’s unusual warmth at this late hour in the season.

  I went out and joined those people.

  Then amazement gave way progressively to concern, then fear, then terror as we faced the pitiless violence of the sun.

  We fled the daylight and sought shelter in endless artificial night. We put on sophisticated survival suits. We barricaded ourselves in inviolable safe rooms.

  We would not be touched.

  And we will stay there, secure, behind our armour, prisoners of our shelters, our hearts completely desiccated.

  PLAYING KNUCKLEBONES

  Hidden under a pile of thick blankets, François, ten years old.

  It’s three o’clock.

  His father was yelling again. And hitting him.

  “I’ll break that nasty streak of yours, I swear I will!”

  With a nutcracker, one by one, François broke the knuckles of his right hand.

  THE GIRLS’ ROOM

  Through her memory, the woman kept the room inside a hermetic bubble. It was a sacred territory defended tooth and nail by powerful spells, ingenious constructions of down from blue chicks, marbles, cat mustaches, fairy tales, and barley sugar drops.

  But a few years ago, that idyllic image had failed. Too many cracks brought down the fragile structure.

  Deep down, she knew that one day, without anything being visible from outside, the girls’ sacred room had been devastated forever.

  Neither she nor
her sister managed to discover what had caused such disaster. They remembered nothing, except that everything had changed, and that afterward, the damage could not be repaired.

  They researched, and they asked questions. The documents they found explained nothing, but did confirm that something very serious had occurred. The people who might have had something to say preferred silence. Later, they disappeared.

  The current owners of the old residence where the woman once lived had remodelled and repainted the ceiling with its flowers made of plaster, and repaired the room’s crumbling walls. They shored up and sanded the floor. They stripped the paint off the woodwork and replaced the old sashes.

  But the cracks in the plaster quickly reappeared. At the angles, the wooden window frame broke into constellations of fine mould that was a downy rose colour, and the floorboards pulled away from one another all over again. Here and there, you could look down onto an underground world.

  After their vain attempts to combat the resurgence of the past, the occupants decided to domesticate the hidden part of their dwelling. Instead of turning it into the guest room as they had intended, they set up their bookcases there, and their reading chairs, and a few paintings they particularly liked.

  They got more and more attached to the house where past lives had taken hold over time, in the wood floors worn down in certain spots by the steps of everyone who had, as they had, walked back and forth, over and over again, without end. As if a large part of a life’s secrets could be found in this ordinary, intimate coming and going, a few familiar people in an enclosed space, for they continued to walk there long after they had departed from this place.

  The two men saw stories everywhere in filigree form, like a rich high-warp tapestry, outmoded now, the image faded to the point of being unreadable, where, in a succession of tableaux, the life that once flourished between these walls, and death as well, was recounted.

  The woman had no trouble distinguishing certain patterns, here and there.

  Like the paper with the long-leaf motif, on the walls of the long hallway, pasted there by the mother and the grandmother with a wide brush dipped in flour glue that they had vigourously stirred on the stove the evening before.

  Or the fake fireplace in the living room and the mother sitting by the window, late in the evening, waiting for the man to return. Sometimes the girl would wake up and come and count cars with her mother so she would stop crying.

  Maybe there was crying in the girls’ room as well, and the younger one didn’t know it. Maybe she should have stayed there, with her sister. But who can tell now?

  The woman pictured the girls’ faces pressed against the screen door, at the back of the large kitchen, as twilight fell. They were watching the alley, sensitive to the slightest sound.

  During the day, the alley was their playground. They turned into princesses along with their girlfriends who came out to play with them, running through the yards where spiral stairs alighted and clotheslines hung. When the sun lowered, their mothers appeared on the back balconies and called their names into thin air. The girls dropped their games and went home without dragging their feet. When evening fell, the alley belonged to the Ogre.

  Once they were inside, they stood quietly behind the screen, listening for the squeaky old rickety carriage of the Child Stealer. He went by every evening. If he caught a child, he would stuff her in the back of his carriage, and tape her mouth, then carry her off to someplace unknown.

  Some girls had seen it happen. But they couldn’t describe it; their lips were sealed.

  Everything from that lost world returned pell-mell in the woman’s memory. Fragile glass bubbles that held a living fragment of the past issued from her mouth. They rose into the air and floated there, then burst with a sound like tinsel.

  She could still hear the reassuring tic-tic-tic of the sewing machine in the kitchen. She felt the smell and the crackling of the laundry stiffened by the cold when it was brought inside. And the irregular beating of her mother’s heart as she tried to lull her youngest to sleep in the big rocking chair.

  The woman gave her memories to the two men without caring to make a coherent, finished story. The story was full of holes and hermetic chambers.

  She would never find the missing or hidden pieces. She knew as much. When she left here, her quest would end. Once and for all, she would give up on finding what, one day, had destroyed the little girls’ room.

  The men followed her through the house, quiet, and attentive.

  Thanks to the woman, they could reach down to one of the strata of this place, and add their own chapter to it. Their cries of love, of pain, of anger, their periods of silence, their happiness, and the difficulty they had living together, those things added a layer and joined what everyone who had preceded them here had experienced. How many times had they lain down in beds like theirs in the big room and made meals, every day, as they did, in the same kitchen, no matter how much the décor had changed?

  They knew that death slipped into this house, the way it had many times before. They heard its discreet footsteps in the night, patient and polite, awaiting the youngest of the two men it would soon claim.

  The woman stood in the middle of the room where the two men liked to sit and talk, and enter the stories locked in the books around them, that had seemingly nothing to do with them, but in which they discovered themselves all the same.

  She turned her eyes in their direction as if to make sure they were still there, with her, in the present, so she would not slip between the floorboards.

  Before she rang the doorbell, the woman reached into her bag and took out the photo of the two girls sitting on the front steps. The big copper doorknob that she and her sister liked to shine to a polish was still there.

  The man who opened the door listened to the woman, then took the photo she held out. The second man, clearly weakened with sickness, appeared and both examined the picture of the two little sisters, three and four years old, sitting very close together, the younger one’s head leaning on the older one’s shoulder.

  The photo had been taken back when the little girls’ room was an enchanted world away from everyone.

  Even if the arrival of the youngest had not been easy.

  She was born quickly and almost without pain. Everyone was amazed, as if the baby was in a hurry to see the light of day.

  Not long after she came home in her mother’s arms, she began to cry, and never stopped, or so it seemed, for weeks on end.

  She was hungry. No one knew that. She was starving. Her need was so strong she could not learn how to suckle. Each time, she flew into a rage and her feverish, useless agitation exhausted her.

  Late in the evening, after her mother had tried one last time to give her the breast, after she had set her in the cozy crib, then taken her again and rocked her a while more, humming her another song, the fateful moment would arrive when her mother, beyond fatigue, would disappear, she, too in tears.

  On those evenings, the little girl’s frenetic cries lost the power to draw her mother to her side.

  And after an eternity, the child’s strident cries grew weaker and slowly turned into a sound like a puppy’s futile whimpering.

  Then, there was silence.

  In the other rooms of the house, people breathed easier. The kid had finally fallen asleep.

  But nothing was further from the truth. Her eyes were wide open. Her body had turned to stone. She stopped moving, and hardly breathed at all, petrified by emptiness.

  One night, like all the others when the little girl seemed to be dead, something magical happened. The girl felt a luminous presence in the sinister room. There was another little girl there, not much bigger than she was.

  From that moment on, her nights and her days were illuminated. The other girl made her terrible thirst tolerable.

  Then there were two.

  Some time later, the real problem of the child’s hunger was resolved. The child and the mother stopped crying and ever
ything went back to normal.

  The girls’ room was an enchanted place for another few years. But little by little, toxic air began to saturate the atmosphere in the rest of the dwelling.

  Then, without the girls knowing how or why, thick smoke filled their room and everything went black.

  The room seemed the same, but the younger girl had lost her way. Everything looked the way it was before, but that was just a trap, a snare that would catch her limbs and bring her down.

  Her big sister was there, but entirely absorbed in fighting, with desperate energy, an invisible but pitiless predator. As if something or someone was slowly bleeding her of her substance, surreptitiously sucking away her life.

  The big sister who had once been all light was slowly darkening, but without dying, though locked in a block of silence.

  Beneath her pretty cotton embroidered dresses with the bees’-nest pattern, she was burning alive. Her body twisted with pain and she fell in convulsions to the floor. Her mouth was deformed by screams, but no one heard, or wanted to hear.

  She had to be calmed. Her lips sewn shut. Her memory burned clear. Made inoperative.

  This was done, without explanation, with the help of powerful drugs.

  The games were over. The dolls, massacred.

  Nothing had ever happened. Everything was fine.

  And that was the tragedy.

  The youngest spent her days and nights looking in vain for her big sister in the ruins of their room. But she had disappeared.

  In the house, the denial concerning her disappearance was so complete that it seemed as though the younger girl had invented everything. Not just her sister’s absence, but her very presence in the first place – everything.

  Her sister was replaced by a clone that looked so much like her you would be hard pressed to tell them apart. But the exact replica did not speak, did not laugh, did not sing. She knew nothing of their sibylline language, their secret alliance, and the way they shared everything.

  For a time, the room became an optical illusion that made the younger girl doubt all that she saw, including her own existence.