The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (5 page)

That year, the letter—opaque and implacable—arrived in May, the month of birdsong that I have always since associated with weeping and the stony silence of the world's refusal.

I had gone to her, knocking on her locked door. The flickering
caleu
lamps were all lit and my mother sat before the mirror in her underdress and camisole. In the glass her pale face was dark-haloed by her hair; her neck, ivory, gleaming. She had a shawl embroidered with roses—red and gold and purple, amid winding green thorns; it was spread on her lap. The room smelled of the eau de vie my uncles drank, as though a bottle had spilled. She turned to me absently, as though she had forgotten who I was; and I realized that the odor came from her, was on her breath and her skin; I breathed and took a step back.

“How lovely the colors are,” she said, almost to herself. “See how they gleam in the lamplight? Ah—if only to capture that. Before the impression fades.”

Later, alone in my room, I entreated the heavens to let my mother paint as she wished; to grant her her triumph, her redemption and, somehow, my own.

But my mother put away her paints and ivories. She dragged out her rosary and began to attend the village church, which she had held in some contempt; took longer trips to Auch, to my grandfather's house; but ceased speaking of her old teacher. My mother, who had sat behind her magnifier by the hour, who had laughed away the gossips and mocked the villagers' adages
(“You think your eggs are on the fire!”)
—who in a certain mood took out her rings, her lace, her silver candlesticks, legacy of her Auscitain blood, and said to me,
“Someday these too will be yours—”
That Berthe disappeared; and another took her place, tight-lipped and with a temper like the wind.

The next year my brother, Charles Jean-Louis, was born. His infant boy body, wrapped and bowered with linens, was upheld over the baptismal font, cupped in the palms of the curé while the bells pealed and I shifted from foot to foot in splintered sabots. Berthe stood, and kneeled: her back straight as a rod. My uncles came and we had meat on the table for a week, salt and potatoes and wine. But the weight of things had changed. Tables and chairs came unmoored; cups and plates hovered over the tabletop or crashed to the floor. Winds grabbed the shutters and banged them against the stone no matter how many times they were secured. My occupations now consisted of sweeping up and standing by; shelling beans and feeding fowl, helping the wet nurse and the
bonne,
swiping cloths at the baby's soil. This was to go on (Berthe said the words as though she had a mouthful of dust)
until such time as I should marry.

My father, the next spring, won what he had so long desired, his seat at the
mairie.
But there was less air between us all; we walked in circles around one another. And I learned to loathe “art,” or at least what was done in its name.

***

My throat caught, and thickened. My soul, unmoored, came back to rest; toes tingling against the slatted wood once again; my arms aching in their uncomfortable position. From a few paces away, Chasseloup rustled behind his easel. Why was I here,
why was I here at all? Twenty, nineteen .
.
 . seventeen,
I counted . . . At fifteen, boots clattered on the stairs; at ten, the door of the studio swung open. A tall man in a long dark coat stepped in. Behind him was a woman in a full black skirt, with a black lace mantilla covering her face. I smelled smoke, a whiff of tobacco, perfume.

Maman—? I gasped. It so looked like her. And in that moment, I forgave her almost everything.

Chasseloup leapt up and threw his pencil across the room; it hit the wall and fell to the floor with a clatter. “What are you doing? Really, Vollard—”

The man in the doorway started to laugh. He let his cigarette fall to the floor, stubbed it out with the toe of his boot.

“Chasseloup. I'm glad to see you working.”

The woman threw off her veil and shawl and strode around the studio, peering out the windows, pulling up cloths that covered, as I now saw, various cameras and lenses and instruments. She was younger than Berthe, with a sharp eye, and it was because of her presence that I retreated behind the screen and scrabbled into my clothes.

“I have just today found my model.”

“Excellent,” said the woman, who had circled back around. She was frank in her manner, and now I could not imagine how, even for a moment, my mother—silent or double-tongued—had come to mind.

The men stared at the easel. “You'll need an acceptance this season, Chasseloup, or you'll be wearing striped trousers yourself. Standing with a tripod in front of Notre Dame, taking
cartes de visite.
Do you think you'll be ready? As for the jury I'm nearly certain to secure a couple of the critics, maybe Théophile and Fleury—so really—unless you'd rather be putting down Moslems in Algiers for Badinguet and your father—”

Chasseloup was cradling his bad arm with the other. He looked up when I came out from behind the screen, his glance bleak, as it had been at the Trap.

“Lovely,” said the woman. “I've not seen her before.”

“Chasseloup,” said the other man, musing at the easel, “have you seen Courbet's studies for
The Dreamer
? This new Gabrielle he found is a miracle.”

“Tilt your head just so, mademoiselle? To the right, three-quarters profile.”

“She's a good subject. Who is she?”

“Damned if I know,” said the painter.

“Call it
An Unknown Girl,
then,
”
said the woman.

“It will be
called
nothing, and will
be
nothing, until it is begun and finished. And unless you want her to look like a dressmaker's dummy I will start with the body
beneath
the drape. Mademoiselle, will you come back tomorrow and leave your modesty at your
hotel
?”

“Hotel?” said Vollard drily.

The artist shrugged and turned away. Vollard removed a clip of bills from beneath his vest, thumbed a stack of them, and passed them silently in my direction. He paused. “How long will it take, Chasseloup?” But the wolf only growled and stared out at the chimney pots.

A sickish, giddy nausea scattered my thoughts as I walked all the way back to the Tivoli, Vollard's money wadded against my bodice lacings. At the desk, I informed Madame that I would require my room for a few days more and passed most of them over to her.

Upstairs in number 12, my scant belongings—combs, spent quills, a few candles, the bottle of spot remover—looked lonely and cold. From outside, the bells of Notre Dame de Lorette began to ring: three . . . four . . . five.
Five.
Idly, I picked up the bottle of cleaning fluid. It was made of blue glass and contained a milky, strong-smelling liquid. In fact, I had used it only once, for mud on my hems—not the purpose for which it had been purchased. My underthings, when I had taken them off and laid them on a chair behind the screen in the artist's studio, were as white as they could be when the laundry was missed. But—something was wrong.
What?
Notre Dame de Lorette pulled like an irate mother, like a headache, like thunder rolling across the mountains. Then, as the bells pealed out, insistent and gray, I began, for the second time that day, to count: days, this time—for a different reason.

L
ATER I WALKED
a long way, across the Pont Neuf to the Luxembourg Gardens, the only spot in Paris that for me held any consolation. Trees branched bare to the sky in the silvery late-afternoon light; their fallen leaves still strewn, damp and blackened, on the ground. Stone urns held frozen sticks that had been flowers, and iron chairs were lined alongside the fountain. At its head stood a sculpture of white stone: a woman arched in her lover's arms, her face turned upward into his embrace. The light shifted, a shaft of wintry light-against-light: dove gray, pink, bluish. Nearby an old couple dozed in two chairs, pooled in the circle of pale sun. Winter light, light of Saint Nicholas's Day; the pure clear light that had diffused through diamond panes. With a finger of my being, I reached for my lover; cautious, beseeching. Like the vine torn from its supporting wall, I wavered. Drew my knees up to my chest and hugged them, rocking slowly, forward and back, on the iron chair.
How does a woman learn to doubt herself? By way of which events, what consequences?

In the eye of my memory, I traveled back to the place from which I had come. Watched, again, as a dark smudge expanded on the far horizon. Felt the dry, stiff breeze against my face, bringing it closer. I squinted down; the smudge looked like Stephan.
But it was not he—not yet.

 

The summer before I left Tillac had been one of wells gone dry, springs stopped to a trickle, and ponds showing their marshy bottoms. Berries shriveled on their stems; I had choked on the dust from the road and longed for the rains, for a change in the wind. It was unbearable, the blood-pounding sleepless nights; my body a giant, overbudded flower, begging to be ripped from the earth. I took down my hair and opened my shutters just to feel a breath of a breeze, humid and full, at night. When the rains came that year—
soon
—I would lean into the cold slap of wind. Lie out in the fields, and let the downpour pound me into the ground. To be pummeled, buffeted, flayed by hail, and the peals of the bells . . . poured out, finally, into the earth.
Released.

On an early September morning when the storms were due to break, we did not hear the usual peal from Tillac's bell tower, but a hurried, clamorous tocsin. It was not the particular pattern of rings that announced a thunderhead, nor that for a birth, a death, a mass, or a summons to the church square, but an anxious and irregular clamor of the oldest and greatest of the bells, the one that had survived the Revolution. We shaded our eyes and turned; then squinted and stared. The heavens were grayish green, storm-charged, pregnant with rains but unyielding, settled on a sullen, torpid watch.

From the north, the direction of Nérac, a black smudge rose against the sky. It grew larger and darker; some said they could see plumes of flame. We stood and scanned the horizon, gauging the wind's speed and direction, then hurried our feet over the cracked and thirsty ruts. Goose-girl first and always, I hauled feed buckets across the yard from the boiling pots to the pens; chased down fowl and pinned their huge wings against my body, struggling to get them into neck-hole boxes. I had always been a careful
gaveuse,
trained by the fingertips of my aunt, who could calm a bird to stuff it with feed, and leave it preening. But that day my hands shook as I tried to stroke the boiled corn down soft, sinewy gullets; my fingers were damp and my nervousness set the birds squawking and nipping.

To slaughter, harvest, prepare; to sell the result—
foie d'oie, foie de canard,
the fattened livers of geese and ducks; and
confit,
the preserved meat of the fowl—this was the life of our province. To beat the storms, then return and prepare for the cold; to load our carts and return with fatter purses—to this end, every back was bent. That season we had been driven by the news from the north and from Mirande, of higher prices being paid for
foie d'oie
and
foie de canard.
But fire brought fear, and if the towns barred their walls and the markets closed, our fattened flocks would die, with their useless livers inside them.

. . . You see, we knew so little. Whether it was a lover's grudge that set the spark, a pipe carelessly dropped, or inflamed tempers, bad politics, revenge—once started, fire could spread with the winds, those rogue gusts that harried our days and nights. Fire brought fear after it: the settling of old scores. Over the course of the day, the smudge darkened, and the wind brought an acrid burning odor.
The harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved—

I could still taste it in my throat, that smell.

 

The afternoon shadows had lengthened. The Luxembourg fountain no longer reflected the naked branches of overhanging trees; its pool was a dark rectangle. The woman still arched back in her lover's arms, frozen in stone, but time had not stopped with her; the hard little hands of the Paris clocks ticked on. The old couple had gone to their supper and the air held a gelatinous dusky chill.

My last summer in Tillac had brought a drought of affection, as well. When Berthe gave up Art, the great wheel of the days, months, and seasons turned against itself. Life lost its familiar rhythm, for a hopeless woman is more powerful than she knows. I, as her daughter, was to be comrade and first lieutenant of her suffering, enforcer of the new order:
If I cannot live, none after me shall live!

So Papa took no happiness in his hard-won mayoralty; my aunt and cousin displayed no pride in their glossy, fattened flocks. And I—I kissed the black-haired boy who stood guard at the Tour de Rabastens, the stone tower that watched over the western gate of our village.

The burned began to arrive by the Nérac road. Clothing charred; sticks of furniture on their backs. Sober adults and sooty-faced children with pale rivulets down their cheeks. They were starved, singed, and burned because they had stayed to try to smother the fires, to gather provisions or help neighbors, drive their flocks to farther fields. To bury their dead. Tillac's
mairie
and church were given over to lodge the burned until we could take no more. And then our walls too were closed.

With the harvest stalled, the birds remained bloated in their pens. Useless, with their fattened livers—
worth their weight in gold
—my cousin muttered, angry and helpless, as if the birds themselves were to blame. Stupid and oblivious, too heavy to move on their useless spindly legs, they preened themselves with their big orange beaks. As the feed progressed, they all grew too heavy to run. At last, burdened by their size, they just fluffed down on straw—flapping fighters turned into complaisant creatures. During their last days they could not even stand; just swiveled their necks and opened their beaks for the corn buckets, like children begging for sugar syrup.