A Beast in Paradise Read online

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 by L’iconoclaste, Paris

  First publication 2021 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Tina Kover

  Original Title: Une bête au paradis

  Translation copyright © 2021 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Book design by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  Original cover design by Quintin Leeds

  Cover image: Istockphoto.com/tbratford

  ISBN 9781609456481

  Cécile Coulon

  A BEAST IN PARADISE

  Translated from the French

  by Tina Kover

  A BEAST

  IN PARADISE

  Her lips touched mine

  And I felt a vague burning in my heart.

  —JULES SUPERVIELLE, “The Portrait”

  On either side of the narrow road snaking through rich green fields, the green of storms and of grass, flowers—enormous, pale-hued, fragile-stemmed flowers—bloom all year round. They run alongside this ribbon of asphalt until it joins up with a path marked by a wooden stake, capped by a sign reading:

  YOU HAVE REACHED PARADISE

  Below this, the path, pocked with brown puddles, leads into a large yard, a rectangle of beaten earth, weeds nibbling at its slightly rounded corners. The barn is spotless. A tractor and a little blue car are parked in front of it, both regularly washed. On the other side of the yard, chickens, geese, a rooster, and three ducks waddle in and out of a long shed perforated with low openings. The ground here is thickly strewn with golden grain. The henhouse overlooks a steep slope flanked by a brook that dries up each year in the summer heat. On the horizon, the fields of Bas-Champs ripple in the breeze, frogs and herons stirring the dark waters of Sombre-Étang, nestled in its fern-filled hollow.

  A centuries-old oak tree stands in the center of the yard, its branches high enough to hang a man or a tire swing, its shade so cool and pervasive that in the autumn, when Blanche comes out of the house to make her daily round of the property, the masses of dead leaves and the deep crimson hue of them make her feel as if she’s walking on ground that has been bleeding all night. She passes the chicken coop, the barn, the dog—perhaps the twelfth or thirteenth one she’s known here; it has no name, they just call it “Dog,” like the others before it—and makes her way quickly to the pigpen, a circle of boards with a swinging door whose latch sticks in the winter cold. The ground is leathery here, packed hard by years of trampling and now abandoned, untouched by feet or hooves.

  In the pen itself, so vast for a place no longer sheltering any animals, in the pen Blanche stands straight-backed, despite the eighty years that weigh heavy on her heart, etching deep lines in her face and transforming her fingers into broken twigs.

  The pen is empty, but at its center lies a bouquet of the same flowers that line the asphalt ribbon leading to Paradise. Some of them have wilted already; others—like Blanche herself—are on the verge of losing their last traces of color. It’s a small, wild bouquet in a large earthen circle. Shoulders swathed in a scarlet cardigan, redder even than the dead leaves beneath the hanging tree, she kneels tremblingly before this little bouquet, like one that a child might gather to mark her first communion, pulling out the brown stems and throwing them aside in a movement that is startlingly quick, almost violent. From the pocket of her red cardigan, redder than the blood of Paradise, she takes a few fresh blossoms, breathing on them very softly before placing them with the others. She stays there, unmoving, before the little wild bouquet, so lovely in the middle of this pen that her grandmother, Émilienne, had dug for her pigs. It was a long time ago. She remembers everything.

  Because even though no animals live in this ring of boards and dirt anymore, one beast comes here each morning, to mourn.

  Blanche.

  HURTING

  Blanche and Alexandre made love for the first time while the pig was being bled in the yard. They’d closed the windows without drawing the curtains. Downstairs, the party was in full swing. The animal shrieked like a torture victim, the neighboring farmers gathered round, the blood forming large dark poppies in the beaten earth. Under the big tree in front of the door, Louis had set up tables covered with cloths embroidered with the initials of the Émard family. Forty people had come for the bloodletting, the little ones watching, wide-eyed. Émilienne, at the head, called out, “Careful now, careful! The blood, save the blood.”

  Upstairs, Blanche and Alexandre clung together, naked, intertwined, knowing what to do without knowing how to do it, knowing it would be painful without knowing how to make the pain more beautiful. The odor of blood from the yard competed with the scents of Alexandre’s skin and Blanche’s sex; they didn’t smell anything but each other, didn’t hear anything but their mingled breaths, filled with both fear and relief at finding themselves alone together, at last.

  Alexandre explored the girl with just his hands and his mouth at first. She lay with her head on the big blue pillows, watching him. He gripped her waist, his tongue and fingers sliding down her stomach like mountain climbers thwarted by a slope. Before he buried his lips between Blanche’s thighs, he lifted his head, his gaze resting on the dark auburn curls of her pubic hair. Smiling, he nodded toward the leaves of the tall tree out the window and murmured:

  “They’re the same color.”

  She gave a nervous little gasp of laughter. Alexandre caressed her gently, the way you calm a jenny about to give birth, and then his face vanished between her legs. Blanche’s hands gripped the boy’s shoulders, her fingers digging into his skin, keeping him between her thighs.

  “Are you okay?”

  He held her close, his arm beneath the nape of her neck. Blanche seemed to be asleep against his shoulder, but her eyes were wide open. She didn’t seem sad, or angry. Her deep green eyes were simply fixed on the wall across from the bed, and as hard as Alexandre looked, he did see anything but a wall, with a tiny spider in the corner, very thin, almost elegant, weaving a web.

  “Blanche? Are you okay?”

  A shiver rippled through her body.

  “I’ve felt nicer things,” she said, her fingertips playing around her navel.

  “Was it that bad?”

  Alexandre sat up. He thought he’d been gentle. She hadn’t cried out, or sobbed, or asked him to stop. He’d thought he’d managed pretty well; men had told him the first time always hurt, so it was better to do it quickly.

  Blanche sat up too. They leaned back stiffly, almost formally, against the pillows, their cheeks creased with the imprint of the sheets. Blanche drew up her knees and wrapped her arms around them. Suddenly she looked like a little girl.

  “Does it hurt?”

  She looked up at the ceiling. Her lips moved in the indistinct murmur Alexandre had grown used to hearing. Blanche always chose her words carefully before she spoke, arranging them in order so that her sentences would be clear. She did the same thing in French class. But no one ever made fun of her for it; she was Émilienne’s granddaughter.

  “Last winter, I stepped on an ember that had popped out of the fire, onto the hearth.”

  Blanche’s voice had changed. It wasn’t the voice of a young girl in pain anymore, but the voice of a woman explaining the pain she had suffered once.

  “It h
urts like stepping on an ember,” she said.

  Then she kissed him quickly, several times, on the nose and the corners of his mouth. Alexandre tried to take her in his arms again, but she pulled away, slipped out of bed, and went to the window.

  “The yard’ll smell like blood for three days.”

  The pig’s blood permeated everything, its odor suffusing the air of Paradise until the southerly wind drove it away. A thick layer of entrails, excrement, bristly hairs, and dirt coated the fodder. Anywhere you put your hand, your fingers dipped into a pool of hot blood. For three days, or longer if the breeze didn’t pick up, Paradise would be covered with the splattered remains of dead animals. Scrubbing and washing were no use; you just had to wait, and eventually the smell would drift away to pervade some other place.

  “It never used to bother me, but it makes me nauseous now,” grumbled Alexandre, sitting on the bed.

  He put his clothes back on very slowly. How long had they been in this room? An hour? More? He had no idea.

  Blanche and Alexandre had picked the day and the place for their first time a few weeks earlier. Alexandre’s mother was a cleaning lady for both the village school and the local notary; his father, a ticket agent at the train station in the next town over. Their son left the house before they did in the mornings, and came back late in the evening, hours after they’d gotten home. On weekends his parents kept firmly to their living room, and in summers to their postage stamp of a garden, kept up as meticulously as some eighth wonder of the world, at the end of the little dirt path that veered at right angles off the main road. Impossible for two teenagers to be alone there. Likewise, at Paradise, somebody was always around: Émilienne, busy in the kitchen, entertaining in the dining room, asleep upstairs. When she went out “to the animals,” Louis, her farmhand, kept a close eye on things to make sure all was in order. Occasionally the two of them were out of the house at the same time, but never for very long. And anyway, Blanche hated it when both of them were gone. Aware that she would inherit the whole place one day, being there alone filled her with anxiety. She was afraid she wouldn’t know how to manage it. At sixteen, she still needed to watch Louis and Émilienne at work, to memorize their movements and store up their strength for the day when Paradise would be entirely dependent on her. Whenever her grandmother and the farmhand left the farm the cows would moo at the other end of the Bas-Champs, the snipes on the banks of the pond flapping off across the water, away from Blanche. After the haying, the bales seemed to mock her, lying there motionless on the stubbled ground.

  Even though Blanche loved Paradise, it made her feel very small. The ghosts that inhabited the place took up all the room.

  It had been her idea to do it on butchering day.

  “We’ll stay for the beginning, and when everyone’s watching the pig die, we’ll sneak upstairs. We’ll just have to get back before the guests leave.”

  Alexandre hadn’t said anything. It was there, or the barn, or waiting.

  They went downstairs, Blanche first. Louis was busy with the pig’s carcass. Watching her walk among the farmers, her complexion rosy and fresh, smiling left and right like a Madonna bestowing blessings, the farmhand was suddenly overcome by an unpleasant sensation. He gripped the animal’s feet, bound together by a thick rope, watching the girl who, on this day, had not stayed to witness the pig’s death, but had slipped away upstairs to melt into the flesh of a man other than him.

  PROTECTING

  Louis had worked at Paradise since Émilienne lost her daughter Marianne and son-in-law Étienne in a car accident. The grandmother had found herself alone with Blanche and her brother Gabriel. She had needed someone there at the farm. Not for the children; for all the rest of it.

  At the time, Louis was skipping school to work on the sly, delaying as much as possible his return to the family home, which was a sort of bungalow on the edge of a pond filled with sludge rather than water. His father beat him regularly. At first, he’d hit him for no reason, simply because he was one of those men who used his fists instead of his mouth and punches instead of words. But gradually he had begun finding excuses to beat him more often and harder. Louis came home too late, he said, or he wasn’t trying hard enough in school, or he was hanging around with a bunch of good-for-nothings. Louis had let the dog get out and now they couldn’t find it. Louis had let the potatoes get cold, the fire go out. Louis was stupid, and, worst of all, Louis didn’t fight back. He allowed himself to be hit. He was quick, and ran and hid. When night fell, he had no choice but to go home, but his father had never calmed down by then. Quite the opposite. His mother watched them, standing against the kitchen sink, shuddering. Every beating suffered by her son was torture for her; she squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth, compelled to remain silent, broken by years of avoidance, of blows, still in the grip of a hideous love for this husband wracked by torments she didn’t understand. He transferred his pain to the bodies of others, his wife and his son, his dog and his trees.

  When Blanche and Gabriel’s parents died, Louis had turned up at the farm and offered to help Émilienne “until things calmed down.” The grandmother, with two children underfoot and no one to support her, assigned him all the duties a farm boy should know how to perform and more. For a month, Louis worked himself to the point of exhaustion at Paradise. The hay pitched into the manger, the heavy blow on the stake to drive it straight and true into the ground, the arms waved overhead to herd cattle or slipped gently beneath the calves to inspect their bellies and throats and jaws. The kilometers walked between fields and barn, barn and pond, pond and kitchen. Back home in the evenings, as the red glow of twilight dipped beneath the horizon, the boy sank into sleep like a fly in a glass of milk.

  One evening, as Émilienne was putting the children to bed, he tapped on the dining room window. The night was pitch black. Émilienne let him in. Before she could ask what he was doing there so late, Louis swayed forward. His nose was broken, his lips split.

  “I didn’t know where else to go.”

  Émilienne didn’t say anything. She wrenched the young man’s nose back into place, dabbed at his lips, took off his clothes. His legs and back and stomach were covered with purple bruises fading to pale yellow.

  “You’ll sleep in the parents’ room,” she breathed.

  “Are you sure?”

  “You have a better idea?”

  Louis gestured toward the barn, lifting his chin. “I can bed down in the hayloft tonight.”

  “You’re either very tired or very stupid,” she scoffed, gently.

  She pulled him up from the chair into which he had collapsed, bare-chested in his drawers and a pair of dirty socks, his face ravaged by his father’s rage, and took him upstairs.

  Louis had never seen a bed so big, or a floor so clean, or a quilt so thick. Nothing seemed real. For him, this room belonging to the departed daughter and son-in-law stank unavoidably of death. And yet, when Émilienne helped him to lie down, he felt as if he’d arrived at the end of a long journey. Here in this bedroom of the dead, his life would begin again.

  Louis woke up the next day at two o’clock in the afternoon, his nose and mouth and cheeks feeling as if they were being stabbed by enormous needles. His body creaked in protest. He tried to stand but toppled to the floor. Suddenly, he heard hurried steps and the door was flung open to reveal a pair of tiny feet. Blanche, aged five, stood there looking at him, her eyes those of a curious child, but one already familiar with the horrors of the world.

  “Why’re you on the floor when there’s a bed there?” she inquired, gravely.

  Louis tried to answer, but the pain was so paralyzing that he couldn’t speak. Blanche came closer and took his hand, and a few seconds later, as he was slipping into unconsciousness, strong arms lifted him and put him back in bed, exactly as they had the night before. He smelled Émilienne’s clothes, a smell of damp earth mingled with grain, and fell
back to sleep until the evening.

  At sunset, on the nightstand, a steaming bowl of soup formed little rings of moisture on the wall. Émilienne sat with a spoon in her hand and fed him very gently. After she had finished and tucked the quilt around him again, she said in a firm voice:

  “As of today, you live here. We’ll talk when you’re feeling better.”

  Louis made a strange gesture, like an injured monk, dipping his first and middle fingers toward her like a benediction, and drifted to sleep again.

  The young man never set foot in the family bungalow again. His mother came to Paradise, just once. Guardedly, Émilienne invited her into the kitchen, served coffee and madeleines, then called Louis. When he spotted his mother through the window, he froze.

  “Your father isn’t here,” Émilienne said, rising to open the door for him. “Come on. She’s brought some clothes for you.”

  As she left, his mother tried to embrace him. He pushed her away.

  “Louis is working here. He won’t be coming back to live with you, unless he wants to.”

  The old woman spoke bluntly, in the firm voice of those who refuse to yield in the slightest to the violence of others.

  “I was the one who looked after your son that terrible night.”

  The disgraced mother choked back a sob.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Apologizing is the very least you can do,” Émilienne replied.

  She stood up, squeezed the boy’s shoulder, and left the room. Louis wanted to follow her, but she turned and gestured for him to stay, the way she would have ordered a dog to sit down in front of the fireplace. The mother looked at her son, whose mouth and nose were still faintly discolored.

  “Why don’t you leave?” he asked, scratching at the tablecloth with a fingernail. “He’ll kill you.”