The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (6 page)

“It is like the Fear, again,” said my aunt, who could still remember. During the Revolution, there had been fires, and much else; and the local economy foundered; sans-culottes did not want to eat foie gras, the dish of kings.

 

My parents quarreled, that night the smoke was rolling in. Berthe said the mob would set upon us and wanted to safeguard us in Auch. Papa, who had grown up in the countryside, assured her that our roof was made of good, fireproof tile and that no one under a modern, prospering empire wanted to make belts from the guts of the well-off or set the tax office on fire. As Tillac's mayor, Papa would douse the flames with the logic of local prosperity—roof tiles, roads, and rails; our markets supplying foie gras for a flourishing empire. Berthe pressed her tongue between her teeth. In the morning, he rode off toward the smoke-darkened sky.

That autumn, my last in the place I was born, Berthe waited by the window; Charles wailed; and Virginie, his wet nurse, gave suck. The feeding of the fowl did not reach its yearly finale; we did not—my aunt and cousin and I, our village neighbors—hover over the slaughtering table with our stones and scales. No
sanguettes
were fried up in bubbling grease. Affection, goodwill—did not return. And my father was not among those who returned to the safety of our village walls.

. . . My brave papa. Gone to the Lot province with his pistol, his sharpened quills, and steady hand—and I ready, myself, to burst into flame. Ferrying rags and embers to the church—small fire in an iron pot to warm the burned on nights that had suddenly turned cold. He did not return by the Nérac road, or by any road, my father. His body was borne back to the village in a cart.

And still, no rain.

 

Berthe looked neither to the left nor the right, but straight ahead, under a long mantilla of Spanish lace. Under it, her face was pale as an orchid. My uncles Charles and Louis were tall as towers, silk hats covering, then revealing, their egg-bald heads, which gleamed under the gray-green sky. They had come from Auch for my father's burial, cocking their pistols at the roadblocks, claiming their Auscitain right of passage. With colorful cravats and gold watch chains, they were a sight against the dry landscape, the dull-hued country garb. Their watches, whose shiny lids popped open, were an insult to those who told time by the sun, the color of the mountains, and the bells. The curé stood to the side as pallbearers lowered the casket. The weather had turned frigid; the crowd was thin.

My father's body had been found on the Agen road; the cause of his death uncertain, a subject for whispers among the black hoods on the town square. The slab was lifted over the tomb, slid into place with a hollow, scraping sound; unspoken questions stirred the air. My brother, Charles, whimpered and pulled at my skirts, and I lifted him into my arms.

Berthe's dress had devoured ten bolts of silk crepe; black gloves went up to her elbows. She had never played the part of the provincial wife, and never less so than on that day.

“Berthe has a lover in Auch.”

“The boy hasn't a hair of her husband—!”

“No good from the start, was she, with her assuming ways? A curse, she was, to that family.”

“And the daughter!”

My cheeks burned. The black-haired boy clutched his cap and stared at the dust.

Afterward, my mother was to take Charles and Virginie back to Auch with my uncles. My responsibility was to make myself useful: expedient to my aunt and cousin and the fattened and unbartered flocks; useful to the curé and the church and the burned. Useful to the fields and the ruts.
Useful to stone and straw.
My stomach was a rock, heavy with the confusion of the day. I hurried after Berthe, carrying Charles on my hip. She walked ahead, her back stiff in her widow's black.

“Maman?”

“You!” Her voice rattled me to the bone. “The whole village is talking.”

“Berthe,” began my uncle Charles, taking her by the arm. “It has been a difficult day.” Louis took her other arm.

“
Petite salope.
”

“Maman.” I gasped. “You can't believe what they say about— that boy.”

“The girl is just like her father, with his peasant blood,” she said; and her voice was a thunderclap. That voice, the understanding—the confused questions—
had she not loved him, did she not love me—?

I fell back, stunned; tears beginning; but I wiped them furiously, so the gossips would not see me weep. Once my mother had made up her mind—about which way the wind would blow, whether radishes would sprout in March, if a certain village girl had fallen, or if she herself would no longer paint for Paris—no appeal was possible.

 

The traveler arrived at Tillac's gates, a stranger from the north. The bells did not ring out a warning, Marie-Thérèse did not open her throat, and the tower guard allowed him entry, for he was expected. (From where? “Tours?” said one old villager. “No, it is
Tulle,
” said another with certainty, lighting his pipe. “
Toulouse,
” said a third, chewing on his pipe stem.)

Tillac's makeshift duck-and-goose market had been set up amid cooking pots, straw beds, piles of bandages, and the Nérac refugees. The traveler, come to buy the fowl in a lot and ship them north under arms, had set up his ledger and fine-nibbed pens; his Paris ink and his weighing scale with brass weights—and when he smiled, he cut through Tillac's gloomy skies.

“My aunt's birds have been fed with corn mixed with lavender,” I said in French, as my aunt's interpreter. She had had slaughtered one of her beloveds and extracted the liver, pale and trembling, a glistening fatted treasure. Simmered it over a small fire with a bit of Armagnac. I bore it across the square in a clay bowl.

This traveler had never weighed a goose in his life, despite all his fancy accoutrements; nor had he any instinct to judge the prize inside. Sometimes the smallest and least likely revealed a liver that would save the winter. Until those feathered bellies were slit open, though, you could only guess whether the harvest would be thick or thin; the stones in the scale pan few or plenty. This stranger, bringing with him the heady perfume of cities, was just a messenger; what he knew about fattened livers was limited to what they would fetch in Paris. His errand was to buy them for less.

“Walk with me,”
he said. He was a pillar, a birch; white as salt, supple in the buffeting winds. “Come and see where I'm keeping myself.” Everyone knew that the stranger had declined our simple village hospitality—though after the fires, it was scarcely that—to make camp in the chateau outside Tillac's walls. An old place, with its windows boarded and nailed shut, its lands leased out.

The sky turned from pink-streaked to lavender; then violet, then indigo. Gray to black; then stars. Bats flittered, tree frogs chirruped. The scent of smoke still lingered in the air. We passed the black-haired boy and I experienced a small, ignoble flicker of triumph. My sabots felt their way along the familiar ruts of the path; lights from a farmhouse flickered in the near distance. Heart in my mouth; battering against my ribs. Fabric of my dress pulling tight, the bodice too small—it was a girl's, and unfit for me now. The wind gusted in small bursts, carrying a cuckoo's call, the sound of laughter, a voice from somewhere else. Louder—as Gers winds go—setting up a roar in the trees, storming up and falling back. On summer days it blew away the flies and bees and beetles; and when it died, the insects buzzed again in your ears and resumed their lazy circles. Stephan was my storm, my wind gusting up on a still night.

 

My neighbors, tongue-tied and timid, their patois not understood, were suspicious of him, and so my role in the business became that of an interlocutress. For the moment, I was flush with youth and eloquence—the former mayor's eldest making good on her father's promise; Berthe's daughter with French on her tongue, able to guess at what this stranger didn't know. A girl who had risen beyond gossip and a black-haired boy.

“Walk with me,”
he said, amid the ink pots and goose feathers and clay pots and spoons; his fine coat splotched with goose fat. He stepped past the sooty rags, the piles of straw. His nails were smooth manicured ovals, mine ragged-edged and dirty when he took my hand in his and turned it palm up
.
 .
.
“Travels, I think. Broken hearts. Not a destiny of the goose yard, I don't believe
.
 .
.
”

“And what does yours say?” I asked. A wild, ticklish, intoxicating laugh bubbled up and the seething whirl began; soon we were both choking with laughter, giggling and rolling in the pine needles and dust. Little bits of quartz from the soil jabbed into my back through my thin dress and, breathless, we rolled apart.
His knee, bony and hard, could split me; his body arc and cover; faces flushed—lips that just brushed; scalding, ticklish, unbearable
.
 .
.

“
Mine is a palm of narrow escapes.
”

In the evenings, at my father's table, I counted out the money, and my neighbors were shy with gratitude—though later, I believe, they told the story a different way. Mornings, I threw open the shutters and the scent that came across the Pyrenees was rich, fragrant with loam, perfumed with mysterious currents. And something in me had wakened and was rising fast, an errant planet in the autumn sky, past the tears and scraping of Papa's gravestone and my mother's rancid, bewildering scent, eau de vie and fury and perfume. It was a touch on my temple; an invisible kiss—some ghost of my life-to-be; a wild, aching, deep-abiding yearning.

“Come with me
.
 .
.
”

 

The village square was silent for once, its familiar bustle quelled in the darkness before dawn as I hurried across, passing through the gate and the Tillac walls. Our mule stood ready, cases already strapped to his flanks. I climbed up and wrapped my arms around Stephan's waist.

We rode past the forest edge, the stand of pines, branches heavy-boughed and thick-needled. An hour's journey out, nearer the fires; the trees were blackened spires, rising jagged against a bruised sky. I tightened my arms; inhaled the scorched, befouled air.

Beyond the boundary of Gers province we dropped into the mists of the Lot Valley, where the morning cool turned sunny as midsummer by noon; rows of vines sweltered in the sun, and old men weighed bunches of grapes in their palms as they glanced at the sky. We changed our mule for a horse at Quercy and wandered in the market, where the summer peppers and fruits and salad greens were passing into a fall harvest of orange pumpkins, mushrooms, and beans; figs and braids of lavender-colored garlic. We stuffed ourselves with walnuts and later fell into a town banquet, a harvest celebration with a sheep roasting on a spit and small birds six to a stick, so you crunched down their tiny bones. We had plenty of wine and then a bed (or rather, two beds) at a whitewashed cottage that was a roadside inn. We were shy with each other; Stephan took my hand, so softly. Soon after that we were on a better road, a strange one; and the beats of the hooves made me sleepy, child that I was—but not for long.

We followed the flocks in the carts as far as Cahors, a two-day journey, and by then they were just birds in crates—not my aunt's fine-plumed flock that I had hand-fed, nor the Widow Nadaud's or those of two-fingered Stanis. Their marks of distinction blended amid the rough-and-tumble negotiation that was the weighing and selling of them.

After that first hurried leg, we took the railroad spur from Agen, and Gascony gave itself up to territory unknown. At Limoges we boarded a coach, crossing the Vienne River to approach the ancient city at night, when the sky was red from the glow of the porcelain ovens my father had told me about. We did not stop there, but carried on by railway. Second class; Stephan's boot heels resting on a trunk as he told me about his family's chase of fortune and misfortune; speculations good and bad; tales of women and roulette and cinnamon and coffee; defections to the Americas and some recent luck under the empire. My own stories seemed small by comparison, but we had a common bond: a kinship with the defiant of our clans. We had only kissed, but already we traveled as one, as though we had done so for lifetimes. I did not ask myself what I was doing. I simply knew.

From the Tours platform we took a conveyance pulled by horse. It was past midnight and inky black when we arrived, the two of us creased and grainy-eyed, identically rumpled, like stained laundry rocked along in a cart. Bare curved outline of a drive; crunch of wheels on stone, an expanse of velvety blackness beyond
.
.
 . “La Vrillette. The roof is falling in, the gardens overgrown, the gas is off, and the help has left, save a single girl.
We are always in need of golden eggs in this family!”

Tawny owls nested on the ledges and in the attics, he told me, and what was left in the cellar was vine rot. As for the books, they were soon to be packed up and sold by the kilogram to an empire businessman who wanted to flaunt a library of old leather spines.

A jolt, and our movement ceased; the scent of late roses swelling into the closed warmth of the carriage. The night air smelled like mown hay, flowers, and rushing water all mingled together.

Stephan levered his boot against the door; gravel crunched as he stepped down.

In the front hall, he fumbled for the gas lamps, cursed and plunged through the darkness, then returned with a dining-table candelabra. The chateau smelled of old silk and cork and wood, dusty velvet and polish; the air felt thick with ghosts. It was not quite a ruin; a fire had been laid in the bedchamber hearth and cast a flickering glow. In front of it stood an enormous tall-sided vessel, long and slipper-shaped, with a brazier at one end—a boat like that would soon sink, for it stood filled with water. Steam rose from the surface like fog over fields. I dipped in my hand, swirled my fingers through the silky warmth. What curious thing was this, and what absent soul had set the fire, carried enough water up a dark stair to float a small ship? Such bathing as I had ever known was a quick summer dousing in the river, or done quickly with a bristled brush and cold water in a trough, swiping beneath my chemise.