JOËLLE WINTREBERT
Translated from the French by Kim Stanley Robinson
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ORNING. She lifts her left foot. With deliberate care. And the utmost in determination. Today she will be in a bad mood. That’s how she is when she feels blurred. She doesn’t like things vague, floating, indefinite. A contained rage allows her to construct clean boundaries; and too bad if the angles are a bit sharp.
She walks past Thomas, chin high, eyes blank, not responding to his cheery hello, not allowing herself to be trapped by the huckster smell of toast. She will breakfast alone, scrounging currants and heart cherries, their acidity a perfect match for an irritation unable to deal with the stickiness of jam and amorous gestures.
She looks out at her garden, and finds it drowned in a fog so dense that all points of reference are gone. She hesitates, but the sound of Thomas’s voice thrusts her out. Walking randomly, afraid he’ll catch up with her, she moves between the tall silhouettes of the silver birches, the thickset purple masses of the hazel trees.
Suddenly it seems the charcoal-sketch shapes form an unfamiliar pattern.
And then she’s lost.
Surely the garden isn’t this big? It’s disorienting, therefore exciting. How, after all this time, can such a familiar place have escaped her? Milky dampness falls on her face, like sails sewn with minuscule pearls; her arms grow taut, her steps groping; she stares, wide-eyed, and recognizes—not a single thing.
Far away, at the end of a long tunnel of cotton wool, Thomas is calling her. She traps the grasping parasite sound under her eyelids, and suffocates it.
* * * *
When she reopens her eyes, it is watching her. It is suspended in the fog, ringed by a halo of light that crackles, diffracts, explodes. It has a serene, surreal face, which awakens a kind of religious awe in her… But its smile reveals the jaw of a beast, and in its eyes strange keyhole pupils contract to tiny slots, exposing orange-colored irises, as liquid and turbulent as waves on a beach.
Stomach all knotted, she takes a step back. Then another.
The mask of the predator breaks apart, then recomposes in a new face. Because of the contempt in the new eyes, and the brutal rictus of the new lips, she doesn’t immediately identify this face; but when she does, she groans with terror. Her face. This other self and its incomprehensible savagery frighten her more than the thing that preceded it.
Centuries pass. Her fear pours her out in a long viscous flux, until she is nothing but a kind of glue. Finally the sap runs dry; but by then she’s been captured. Fertilized.
A strange process distills the wine of fear into a brandy of perverse fascination; but then her other face explodes in a thousand splinters, ending the centuries’ stillness, and suddenly it’s as if she were transfused into a better body. As if she had been turned inside out, displaced, her atoms wrenched about to conquer her from within. To imprison her. A violent shiver of revolt runs through her, but fails to stop the creation of her new atomic structure. Why struggle against the force that fills everything?
For her unencumbered heart, for living in the cracks, for feeling the secret sorrows hidden in every corner—for all that, it’s the end.
From now on, she is without refuge.
But full. Compact. Sleek.
* * * *
The fog lifts. She tastes earthy saliva at the back of her throat.
Thomas appears, and she strikes him with a dangerous look; she can feel its impact. Thomas shudders, defends himself with a laugh that instantly fossilizes. He pales, turns his head aside. She knows she can break the orbit he moves in, for she is its centerpoint. Vertigo spins her as she discovers the power of cruelty. She straddles it, rides it, until it becomes a kind of ecstasy.
“Who’s there, Barbel? You or the other one?”
The question devastates her. She’s helpless before it; she can’t keep her hands from trembling. She thinks, Am I possessed?
* * * *
Thomas puts his lips to her forehead, as if sealing a final letter. He whispers the proof of his frailty: “You frighten me, Barbel Hachereau. That’s why I’m leaving. I lied—I haven’t been at a conference. Someone will be by to get my things.”
He drifts off, a being without boundaries, nothing but a shape, loose, soft, shifting. She watches him disappear with an astonishment that contains no regret. Two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time; it’s only possible if one of them becomes blurred, vague. Transparent to the point of fading into the other.
* * * *
The vapor that called itself Thomas will finish dissipating as it reaches the gate at the end of the garden.
* * * *
From now on, Barbel is alone. An intense sensation, this liberty. She dilates, she opens wide, becomes a plump darkness, feverish, gasping, waiting. Standing in the blue milk of the sky, she hopes that some extraordinary seed will fill her. Languid but alert, open hands just barely trembling, eyes closed to better seize… what? She’s not sure, and yet it’s here, it’s waiting for her to sense it, she feels it in the rusty smell of the earth’s breath, in the heavy, slow acidity of vegetable rot, in the sugars and salts of her skin, touched by the relentless sun.
She falls into herself, discovers the blood’s red alchemy, the effervescent flux of atoms; she dances the crazy ballet of the molecules… and then in the secret moisture, in the center of her being, its face reforms.
It’s inside me, she thinks.
Inside, from now on. Inside, and looking at her; and its alien eyes are an orange sea, rising to engulf her.
* * * *
For a long time she circles a stone, insistently rubbing impudent bumps, grainy pleats. Endlessly she polishes her body. She stops when it takes on the sheen of a pebble, ground in the millwheel of time. Dust with a rainbow edge coats its surface; wrapped in this thin silk, the body is ready for the ceremony.
Barbel leaves the garden through a hole in the privet hedge, and sinks into earth. Three days of rain have softened the silt to perfection. The dense and supple mud takes the precise shape of the arch of the foot, then shoves up and tapers out between the toes: three steps more and she’s in it to her ankles. Why not abandon herself to the warm, voluptuous suction? All that was dry, immaculate, white as mother-of-pearl—all that can surrender to the clay’s annealing.
Barbel lies down. Her nostrils quiver, her body inhales a thick saliva. The slow embrace of the slime closes over her. Gravity. She couldn’t move even if she wanted to. Bubbles burst, freeing the giddy scent of vegetable rot. Flush with the earth and its plants, she sees an odyssey of iron browns, greens, minuscule swarmings, crystals of captive light, snares of sticky thistle: a furtive, pitiless universe.
Seal your eyelids. Feel the aquatic kiss on your mouth. Open up wide. Taste. Clay plasters your tongue? Swallow. Let it settle inside you. Don’t think of it as armor; it’s the body of nature itself that fills you. You must accept the numb, confused stirring, the abrupt sensation of the outside pulsing in you—also the fiery needles, the phantom needles, being placed with sure precision, to bum you.
Don’t move. You are an open notch to another universe, which invites you to share its force. Are you going to refuse the power of the gods?
But what are gods when you can’t name them? Complete strangers. Fabulous brocades, turned into snarls of yarn. Barbel reaches out, pulls the tatters of her instinct around her. She wakes up, chokes, vomits muddy water.
Behind the blurry screen of her tears it smiles at her, bound to her by a cord of pure energy. “Rub it entirely away, Barbel Hachereau. Perhaps it’s not too late.”
The mouth and its bronze fangs grow and contract horribly. Around the mouth skin cracks and peels, then detaches in rotting shreds, rags that are caught in flight by busy insects.
Barbel feels no triumph at the sight of these scraps of her predator’s flesh. She shuts her eyes: the horrible vision is more than she can stand, especially as it contains within it a wild buzz of anguish, of lament. The cord snaps; but glittering fragments of it begin immediately to reassemble.
A streaming ochre golem, Barbel exhumes herself from her shroud of mud. As she returns to the garden, the glistening supple coating on her body becomes dull, rough, gnarled; pieces of it flake off. Just the way she feels. A little less than living. Half-petrified. Worn away. The defeat inside victory.
* * * *
A thunderstorm pelts her naked body with rain. She runs and dances and runs, in the fat field by the river. She is far from the garden.
Caught again by the demonic face, she spreads her arms, throws back her head, tastes the intoxicating fizz of ozone. A thunderbolt crashes down: encircling flash of blue, hair standing on end, crackling. The storm lessens, washes the twilight. Tirelessly Barbel dances the demon’s dance. Her arms unfurl invisible tapestries, the capricious flights of her fingers weave strange embroidery, her head cuts the sky to ribbons, and suddenly four boys are there to assist at the scene.
Strangeness sparks fear in those who don’t know how to dream. Trying to defend themselves, the four boys stare at each other and laugh. An identical desire darkens their eyes; they can’t see her sensuous movement as anything but a naked body, offered to their lust.
They move in, mouths spewing a puree of insults: the vomit of contempt, the bile that eats at the other. But Barbel is deaf, Barbel is blind, Barbel is entirely in the dance. She doesn’t see the four boys circling her, she doesn’t hear the words tying her up, she awakens only when she feels the contact of hands, tossing her to the ground.
Her back hits the grass. A superhuman twisting stops the fall, brings back up the body of the demon inside her, growling, curling its lip.
The boys retreat, bewildered as if by an acrobat’s trick. They have misjudged their victim, who stands so much taller than before. They gather and flee. Barbel discharges the energy she collected in the storm, and with a roar the sun swoops down and blows the boys to fragments.
Crazed, she will stare until dawn at the four blasted bodies.
* * * *
Back in the garden, she feels so weak it seems the demon must have left her.
* * * *
On the stained carpet of the bedroom, her back against a cascade of soiled sheets. She eats a bit of uncooked meat. The blood runs down between her breasts. She wipes at it with an automatic gesture. Compare the Vermillion on the hand with the coagulated purple marking the thighs. Touch the source and sniff. The blood of the beast and her blood in her. Smell and taste both rusty, an oxidized dullness. She raises an arm, breathes in the bitter exhalation of her armpit, rubs her fingers in the sweaty elastic hollow, smooths the humid fur, licks her fingers, abandons herself to the strong saline taste.
Later. Night has fallen. Intense green light and flashes of bronze cut through the darkness. Barbel kneels before the standing mirror with the baroque cupids carved in its frame. In the somber blue of the glass, two orange circles regard her; within them the strange pupils are dilating.
“A glimpse of the other world, Barbel Hachereau. These are not your eyes.”
Barbel turns on the light, returns to the mirror, searches in vain for the demon; finds instead that her skin is a strange color, the gold-green of a scarab. To the touch, it is dry, cold, scaly.
“You are not here, Barbel Hachereau. The other one has taken your place. These stripped features are just a sketch of your real face. Your teeth aren’t so pointed.”
In the mirror, the other contracts its pupils.
Tilting her head, Barbel hears a melody from the deepest depths. A prism of pure crystal is ringing, and hearing it she feels herself dispersed to all the bands of this sonic rainbow. But there is just enough of her primal being left to resist the rush of frozen color trying to carry her off; and the crystal shatters.
A triumph over the abyss.
But now she knows. She is the prey of an implacable fate. The demon will confront her, again and again, until she no longer has the strength to resist.
She finds her feet filthy, her room filthy. She who was once vitrified like quartz, clear and with perfect edges, now feels her being leaking away, seeping out of invisible fissures.
Eventually she realizes how to stop the slow hemorrhage of her self.
* * * *
It is easier to die when it is an act of resistance. It turns the tables; now it’s she who floats above the demon, bound to him by a cord of energy which thins at the same pace as her life. The demon lodges in a mental cylinder, attached to a complex little apparatus. The orange of its eyes is tarnished. Its mouth exhales bubbles of music, which float away and burst. At times the teeth show through the sound.
A language made of cries, Barbel thinks.
Although they’re flecked with foam, trembling like a wave about to break, Barbel can distinguish forms everywhere. They rise, they vibrate around the cylinder; into it the suffering beast shrinks, unable to transfuse, unable to receive transfusion.
Closer. It’s Barbel’s turn to penetrate the alien body. Spread out in it. Understand then where she is. Somehow she has done the impossible: she has swept the demon into her death. The immortality of the demon—of all demons—seemed to her an unchangeable fact, a privilege absolute and irrevocable. How could a little Earthling change something like that? How could she have created a world where the transfusees know how to turn their deaths against their invaders?
A thick ooze wells out of the bloated flesh of the being with orange eyes. In the bloodless loops of that strange consciousness, the living essence desperately fights the imminence of the abyss.
In the instant that the too-taut thread of her existence snaps, Barbel smiles. Her torn body will claim the victory.