Madeleine Is Sleeping (3 page)

When Madeleine wiped M. Jouy off her hands, she left glistening mollusk trails in the underbrush.

WHEN AROUSED
, even the bucolic village moves with unforgiving swiftness, its machinery oiled and eager. Sophie was eating oatmeal when she decided to tell her mother, and by the time she finished her bowl, her mother had already told her father, who told the priest, who told the mayor. And then it was too late to recant. The mayor puzzled for an afternoon, and by supper had sent his oldest son to fetch the gendarmes. The gendarmes arrived before the sun rose, were directed by a hundred silent fingers towards the barn and apprehended M. Jouy with hay sprouting from his hair, his smile still heavy with dreams.

Madeleine's hands were thrust into a pot of boiling lye.

CAN I HAVE SOME MORE
? Beatrice asks. She has scrambled down from the bed and planted herself in Mother's way. I prefer the burnt part.

Doubling over to stoke the fire, Mother grunts before she gives her permission. Save some for your father, she says.

Beatrice sidles up to the sleeping princess and surveys the devastation: one leg lost, from the knee down. The open wound looks tempting and buttery, but she likes the acrid edges best, where the dough has blackened, and breaks off an entire hand. Before biting, she examines it. It looks exactly like the hand of her sleeping sister: shiny and tempered and mitten-like. The fingers are no longer articulated because baking has sutured them all into one.

Why did only the hands burn, Maman? she asks through a mouthful of crumbs.

Because only her hands were wicked, Mother says.

This makes Beatrice pause and consider. Finally, she objects: She will never be able to sew or play the piano!

It is no great loss. Mother pats her on top of her head, leaving the floury trace of her five fingertips. And, she adds, they will always remind her of her childhood. As you grow older, it is often easy to forget.

Mother hitches her skirts up to her thighs. See. Scars are remembrances. This slender, sickle-shaped one—she runs her finger along her shin—reminds me of my best friend, of stealing eggs, of a shard of glass glinting in the sunshine. And these here—she caresses
the white piping that striates the back of her knees—put me in mind of your grandfather.

Beatrice nods, but secretly she disagrees. When she deposits the last bits into her mouth, she keeps her back turned to Mother. She lowers her eyelids and sticks out her tongue as she has seen the older girls do in church.

IN AN OLD HOUSE
in Paris that is covered with vines live twelve little girls in two straight lines.

Madeleine is the twelfth girl. The smallest and the wickedest. Sister Clavel has been instructed to take special care of her.

How the sisters wept when they first saw her! Her hands swaddled in snowy strips of muslin, Mother picking absently at the invisible insects that she feared were infesting the poultices. The sisters gave Madeleine a brand new prayer book and a straw hat strangled by a broad brown ribbon. She went with them happily.

The other little girls stroke her bandages as if they were touching the hem of Christ. Their eyes grow enormous and glassy and she can hear the prayers escaping beneath their breaths, a slow hiss of perforated air. At night, as they lie in their two rows, the moon rises and she shadows it from her cot, her arms arcing like a ballerinas, her milky fists rising like two false moons, like two spectral dollops of meringue.

She takes pleasure in her helplessness. Everyone must wait on her. She cannot even pee by herself. Bernadette, the eleventh girl, would like eventually to become a saint, so now she is practicing on Madeleine. She has made it her special duty to clean her when she menstruates, her little holy hands becoming sticky with the blood.

Bernadette's fingertips are warm when she parts Madeleine's knees and passes a damp rag between her legs. From her cot, Madeleine can hear the plash of water against the bowl, the
trickling of fluids as Bernadette wrings the cloth. She waits for the firm hands that will pat her dry, tuck a clean rag against her wound, press together her splayed thighs. She wonders if the abbot at Rievaulx, when ministering to the bloodied Saint Michel, was as unflinching as Bernadette.

M. JOUY HAS NOT
forgotten Madeleine. On Christmas Day, a brown paper package arrives from the hospital at Maréville; out of the package spills a fluttering array of drawings and charts. No message or holiday wishes enclosed. Mother walks into the village and asks the local chemist to decipher the contents.

Ahhhh, he murmurs. They have measured M. Jouy's brainpan! And he holds up the diagram for her to see.

It looks like the moon on its back, Mother observes.

His anatomy is quite regular, no signs of degeneracy, the chemist continues, peering at a new sheaf. Oh, but look! His scapula is protuberant.

Shuffling through the papers, the chemist hums to himself, his spectacles propped on the bald crest of his head. Mother furtively examines a bottle of whooping cough remedy that within days, it was rumored, could miraculously resuscitate even the most exhausted breasts.

So, she interrupts, are they ungodly or not?

Ungodly? the chemist echoes. He frowns briefly. Why, not at all!

Are you sure?

He clutches the drawings: These sketches are the work of medical professionals! It seems as if M. Jouy would like her to have them. As a keepsake, perhaps. This picture—he picks out a physiognomic chart—is a very good likeness.

THE DRAWINGS ACCUMULATE.

The small brothers and sister discover that they make buoyant kites. Jean-Luc ties one apiece to the posts that support the pasture fence, and on gusty days, the kites swell into the sky, dodging and nodding to one another as if in conversation.

Mother begins to enjoy the delicate swirls of the cranial diagrams, so she cuts them in quarters and decorates her pots of preserves.

WHEN SISTER CLAVEL
lays out her tidy uniform, Madeleine slips it neatly over her head, and then, with exuberance, her bulky fists burst through the careful seams, like twin whale snouts breaking the surface. So it is decided that she must have special dresses made for her, with long and liquid sleeves like those of an Oriental concubine. The diminutive tailor clangs the convent bell and Sister Clavel ushers him up the back stairwell and into a sunlit room, where Madeleine awaits him, perched on a tiny embroidered stool, wearing nothing but her stockings. Crouching, the tailor spreads out his tools, and with an irritating air of indifference, goes about measuring Madeleine's dimensions. She wonders if she can be seen from outside. She pictures the next-door neighbor trodding home, miserable, and then, by chance, he looks up. His smile spreads: from across the square, the schoolboys let out a blissful, unanimous sigh in the middle of their verb conjugations. The nursemaids who perambulate the park peer coyly from beneath their bonnets, squeezing each other's fingers and giggling naughtily. And the degenerate man, the one who waits by the rhododendron bushes, swivels his eyes up to her window, his neck supple as an owl's, and his cock rises triumphantly out of his breeches. Meanwhile her bare buttocks warm in a sunbeam and the tailor's deft fingers slip and alight upon her skin. Madeleine feels, this is divine.

But when the dresses arrive, cocooned in crisp tissue paper, they
are not the gossamer confections that she has imagined; indeed, they make her appear even more uncanny: half-child, half-beast. The bodice and skirt are indistinguishable from the convent uniform, austere and shapeless and busy with buttons, but the arms: they droop like two flaccid elephant ears.

PERHAPS IT IS THOSE
unwieldy arms that make the gypsies love her so. They pluck her from the crowd as if she were the roundest and ripest fruit, and the eleven other girls squirm with envy. A disappearing trick! Sister Clavel wrings her hands; outings make her perspire and she is happy only when her charges are praying or asleep. Madeleine smiles at them from the center of the ring as the gypsy mama unspools, from one of her several and cavernous pockets, an endless piece of string.

Displaying it for all the crowd to see, she secures the greasy end between Madeleine's fists and circles around her with the swiftness of a spider until Madeleine looks like a well-wrapped fly. Can she breathe? Sister Clavel worries, while Bernadette steels herself, preparing to make the rescue.

The little package is raised aloft by the gypsy mama, and then tossed, with a series of shouts, from one epicene acrobat to another. Firecrackers hiss and the sickly, frail animals begin to fret inside their cages. The audience stomp their feet like tribesmen, join in the chanting of the gypsy words, and suddenly, from out of the cacophony, there rises a wounded wail; the midgets scurry, brushing aside a velvet curtain, behind which sits a beautiful woman, who saws upon her own tautly stretched hairs with the energy of the devil. Her costly dress gapes open, her fingers jig up and down her elegant neck, and her bow bobs back and forth across her belly. The faster she plays, the more her face glows: she is self-illuminating, ecstatic, and her strange, discolored song makes the gypsies dance
with the desperation of a bear on a chain. They gravitate towards her, yelping, and Madeleine comes flying with them, shuttling over their heads as they reel in tightening circles around the stringed beauty, whose bow moves so quickly it blurs. She scrapes harder, faster, more frantically, her knees atremble, and then: the bow clatters to the ground, the strings jangle, and the player gasps. The spell is cast.

Cuddling it in her arms, the gypsy mama returns the ball of string to center stage. A hush falls over the tent. Is the little girl propped on her head or on her feet? By now it is impossible to tell. Shhhhhhhhhhhhh! the mama commands. See and be amazed!

After a peremptory wiggle of her fingers, she grabs the frayed end of string and yanks it.

OFF THE BUNDLE GOES
, spinning like a top. It leaves a trail of string in its wake, tracing a desultory pattern across the floor. When it skitters out to the edges of the ring, Bernadette swoops down and opens her arms, but as soon as she can feel its whir, away it goes in the opposite direction, obeying a gravity of its own. Its progress is dizzying; heaps of string litter the stage. The bulge unravels into a ghost of its former self, until all that is left is a latticework of twine, suspended, still quivering, in midair.

Madeleine has vanished.

MOTHER IS STARTLED
by a thunderous thump, and Madeleine moans in her sleep. Looking up from her cauldron, she sees Papa, cheek flattened against the warm flank of a cow, arm extended and pointing placidly at their roof. Matilde has alighted there, and left droppings beside their chimney.

Mother bustles outside and gestures at Matilde with her spoon: Not today, Madame, please! Madeleine is sleeping.

The wings of the fat woman swell: I am conducting a scientific experiment. I should not be long.

She stoops down and sniffs her droppings. Roses! she announces. It smells like roses!

How wicked! Mother gasps and seeks shelter inside, her head protruding from the door so that she can remind Matilde: Only the saints' bones should smell like roses. You must have made a mistake.

MADELEINE IS AWOKEN
by the reek of roses, and when she opens her eyes, she sees the gypsy mama, swabbing off her dusky complexion with a handkerchief soaked in rosewater. Beneath, her skin is tuber pale and porous.

So you are not a real gypsy? Madeleine asks, extracting herself from the depths of a flabby divan.

Heavens no! the woman exclaims. I was only acting.

Then please take me back to Sister Clavel, Madeleine says with decision.

The woman laughs, and her voice pirouettes in the air like one of her willowy acrobats: You may call me Marguerite, she says.

And then she resumes at the mirror.

IT IS NO MISTAKE
. Matilde has made a survey of her own droppings, keeping assiduous record of her mood, the direction of the wind, the sun's position in the sky. Since she has taken flight, she is most often seen scratching away in the leatherbound diary she keeps stashed between her breasts: leaning up against someone's chimney, or resting in the crotch of a pear tree, her stubby legs dangling cheerfully. In the left-hand column, the data: a loaf of bread and half a pot of preserves; buttermilk; leg of lamb with mint sauce; beer; feeling melancholy; a moderate breeze from the southeast; sun barely past the church spire. In the right-hand column, the results, which are inexorably the same: chalky color, pasty to the touch, and redolent with roses.

The scientific spirit has infected Matilde; like her, these droppings are the product of inexplicable change. Atop the village's roofs, which now serve as her laboratory, she hitches up her skirts and relieves herself. She contemplates the evidence and is puzzled by the enormity of the transformation—the seedy strawberries, the marbled side of ham, the bumpy rind on a wheel of Camembert—all reduced, distilled, made uniform: nothing is left of them except this puddle of excrement, white as an eggshell, and fragrant as June.

Jean-Luc, who has been waiting for her visit, climbs over Claude and slides out of the bed. Before Mother can catch him, he has rushed out of the house and hoisted himself onto the trellis. He trembles on the highest rung, but only his forehead rises over the edge of the thatching.

Pardon me! he cries.

Matilde leans over the edge to see him better. Her bulk casts a shadow over Jean-Luc's upturned face.

My kites got tangled, he says, and jerks his head towards the pasture, where a fragile forest of kites has knotted itself into a skein. They flap fretfully against the sky.

Will you please untangle them? he asks.

Matilde squints at him. She recognizes his froggy voice, remembers that he could throw far and accurately. She suddenly misses her slow and suety processions. Astride a rooftop, above the hubbub of those bound by gravity, she longs for the market days when she paraded down the street.