The Life of Elves (2 page)

 

Let them head uphill through the blizzard.

 

As for the little girl, she has reached the clearing. It's snowing. She's not cold. The creature that brought her here is speaking. It's a majestic, tall white horse, its coat steaming in the evening air, spreading a light mist in every direction on earth—to the west, where the Morvan is turning blue; to the east where the harvest was brought in without a single drop of rain; to the north where the plain stretches for miles; and to the south where the men are struggling through the snow up to their thighs, their hearts twisted in fear. Yes, a fine tall white horse with arms and legs, and dewclaws too, a horse that is neither a horse nor a man nor a wild boar but a combination of all three, although not wholly assembled—at times the horse's head turns into a man's while its body expands and is fitted with hooves that shrink to the paws of a wild pig then grow again until they are those of a wild boar. This goes on incessantly, while the little girl contemplates the dance of essences greeting and mingling as they trace the steps of knowledge and faith. The creature speaks gently to her and the mist is transformed. And she sees. She does not understand what he is saying but she sees a snowy evening just like this one in the same village where she has her farm, and on the porch there is a white shape against the whiteness of the snow. And she is that shape.

 

Who can help but recall the event whenever they meet that little girl, vibrant as a chick; you can sense its pure life beating right up to your shoulder and your heart. It was Auntie Angèle who, when the time came to go and round up the hens, found the poor thing staring at her with her all-engulfing black eyes and her little amber face, so visibly human that Angèle stood poised with one foot in the air, until she got a hold of herself and began to shout
a child in the night!
and lifted her up to take her inside, this little girl whom the snowflakes had spared even though it was still snowing a blizzard. Not long afterward, that same night, the auntie would say:
'Twas as if the Good Lord was speaking to me
, then she fell silent, troubled by the sensation that it was impossible to describe how the shape of the world had been distorted by the discovery of the infant swaddled in white, the dazzling splitting of possibilities into unfamiliar pathways howling in the snowy night, while time and space retracted, contracted—but still, she had felt it, and she left it up to God to understand it.

 

One hour after Angèle had come upon the little girl, the farm had filled with villagers who stood deliberating, and the countryside with men who were following a set of footprints. They were tracing the solitary footprints that left the farm and went up to the east wood, scarcely sinking into the snow, although the men were in up to their hips. What happened after that, we already know: once they reached the clearing, they stopped their tracking and headed back to the village, their minds heavy with dark thoughts.

“So long as . . . ” said the father.

No one added anything but everyone was thinking about the poor woman who, maybe: and they made the sign of the cross.

The tiny girl observed all of this from deep within the fine cambric swaddling decorated with a sort of lace unknown in these parts: there was an embroidered cross, which warmed the heart of all the old grannies, and there were two words in a foreign tongue, which terrified them. They all focused their attention on those two words, in vain, until the arrival of Jeannot, the postal employee, who, because of the war, the one from which twenty-one of the village men did not return, and the reason for a monument opposite the town hall and the church, had once descended deep into that territory they called Europe—which was located nowhere else, in the mind of the rescuers, than in those pink, blue, green and red patches on the map in the community hall, for what might Europe be when strict borders separated villages only three leagues from one another?

So this Jeannot, who had just come in wearing a bonnet of snow, and had been served a coffee with a big splash of brandy by the mother, now looked at the embroidered inscription on the satiny cotton and said, “Upon my word, it'll be Spanish.”

“Are you sure?” asked the father.

The lad nodded vigorously, his nose clouded with brandy.

“And what's it mean?” asked the father.

“How am I supposed to know?” answered Jeannot, who didn't speak barbaric tongues.

They all nodded, and digested the news with the help of another encouraging shot of brandy. So the little tot came from Spain? Well, I never.

Meanwhile, the women, who weren't drinking, had gone to fetch Lucette. Lucette had recently recovered from her confinement and was now nursing two little lads nestled against her bosom as white as the snow outside, and all those present looked without an ounce of spite at that bosom as fine as a pair of sugarloaves—they could just lap it up!—and they felt that a sort of peace had come over the earth because there before them were two little babies clinging to those nourishing breasts. After she'd had a good feed, the little lass let out a sweet little burp, as round as a ball and clear as a bell, and everyone burst out laughing and gave each other a fraternal tap on the shoulder. They relaxed, Lucette buttoned up her bodice, and the women served up some hare pâté on big slices of bread re-heated in goose fat, because they knew that this was the priest's favorite and they'd gotten it in their heads to keep the young miss in a Christian home. What's more, it didn't cause the problems they'd have had elsewhere if a little Spaniard suddenly showed up just like that on some fellow's porch.

“Well, well,” said the father, “I'm of the opinion that this little girl is at home,” and he looked at the mother who smiled back at him, he looked at every one of the guests, whose satiated gazes lingered on the infants settled on a blanket to one side of the great wood stove, and finally he looked at the priest who, in a halo of hare pâté and goose fat, stood up and went over to the stove.

They all got to their feet.

We shall not repeat here the country priest's blessing; all that Latin, when in fact we wish we knew a bit of Spanish, would be too confusing. But they got to their feet, the priest blessed the infant, and everyone knew that the snowy night was a night of grace. They recalled an ancestor who had told them the story of a cold spell fit to make you die as likely of fright as of frost when they were fighting the last campaign, the one that left them victorious and forever damned with the memory of their dead—the last campaign, where the columns were advancing in a lunar twilight and the ancestor himself no longer knew whether the paths of his childhood had ever existed, and that walnut tree in the bend in the road, and the swarms of insects around the time of Saint John's Day, no, he couldn't remember a thing, and all the men were just like him, because it was so cold there, so cold . . . it's hard to imagine such a fate. But at dawn, after a night of misery where the cold struck down those brave souls the enemy had missed, it suddenly began to snow, and that snow . . . that snow was the redemption of the world, because among their divisions it would not freeze again, and soon on their brows they felt the miraculous warmth of the flakes signaling the thaw.

 

The little girl didn't feel the cold any more than the soldiers of the last campaign, or the lads who had reached the clearing and who were gazing at the scene, soundless as pointing dogs. Later, they could not recall what they had seen clear as day, and to each question they would reply with the vague tone of someone searching within for some confused memory. Most of the time, all they said was, “The little lass was there in the middle of a bloody blizzard, but she was warm and alive as could be and she was talking to some creature that made off afterward.”

“What sort of creature?” asked the women.

“Ah, some creature,” they replied.

And as in these parts where legends and the Good Lord, etcetera . . . they stuck to that reply and went on watching over the child as if over the Holy Sepulcher itself.

A singularly human creature, that's how each of them had sensed it, looking at vibrations as visible as matter whirling around the little girl, and it was an unfamiliar sight that gave them a strange shiver, as if life were suddenly splitting open and they could look inside it at last. But what do you see when you look inside life? You see trees and wood and snow, perhaps a bridge, and landscapes slipping by before your eyes have time to grasp them. You see the toil and the winds, the seasons and the sorrows, and you might see a tableau that belongs to your heart alone—a strap of leather in a tin box, a patch of meadow where the hawthorn blossoms run riot, the wrinkled face of a beloved woman and the smile of the little girl telling tales of tree frogs. Then, nothing more. The men would recall that the world suddenly landed back on its feet in an explosion that left them weak and drained—and after that they saw that the mist had been swept from the clearing, that it was snowing so hard you could drown in it, and the little girl stood all alone in the middle of the circle where there were no other footprints save her own. Then they all went back down to the farm where they sat the child in front of a bowl of scorching hot milk, and the men hastily stored their rifles, because there was mushroom stew with headcheese pâté and ten bottles of their wine for laying down.

 

There you have the story of the little girl who held the paw of a giant wild boar tight in her hand. Truth be told, no one can really explain what it all means. But there is one more thing to say, about the two words embroidered on the edge of the white cambric in an elegant Spanish with neither object or logic, and which the little girl would learn about once she had already left the village and set in motion the wheels of fate—and before that there is one other thing to say: we all have the right to know the secret of our birth. This is how you pray in your churches and your woods and how you go off to travel the world—because you were born on a snowy night and you inherited two words that came from Spain.

 

Mantendré siempre.
*

 

 

 

*
I will mantain.

A
nyone who doesn't know how to read between the lines of life need only remember that this little girl grew up in a remote village in Abruzzo between a country priest and his old, illiterate housekeeper.

 

Father Centi lived in a tall building, and below the cellar was a garden with plum trees where they would hang the laundry in the early hours so that in due time it would dry in the wind from the mountains. The house was halfway up the village, which rose straight up to the sky in such a way that the streets twisted round the hill like the strands of a tightly wound ball of wool, dotted with a church, an inn, and just the right amount of stone to shelter sixty souls. After a day spent running around outside, Clara never went home without first slipping through the orchard, where she would stop to pray to the spirits of enclosure to prepare her for her return within four walls. Then she went to the kitchen—a long low room adjoining a pantry that smelled of plums, the old jam maker, and the noble dust of cellars.

From dawn to sunset, the old housekeeper recounted her stories. She had told the priest she'd inherited them from her grandmother, but she told Clara that the spirits of the Sasso mountain had whispered them to her while she slept, and the little girl knew that this shared secret must be true, because she had heard Paolo's tales, and he got them from the spirits of the high mountain pastures. But if she valued the figures and turns of speech of those tales, in truth it was for the velvety chanting of the storyteller's voice, because that coarse old woman, whom only two words rescued from complete illiteracy—all she knew was how to write her name, and the name of the village, and at mass she could not read the prayers but recited them, rather, from memory—that old woman had a manner of speaking that contrasted with the modesty of the remote parish on the escarpments of the Sasso; in actual fact, one must imagine what the Abruzzo was like in those days, in that mountainous region where Clara's protectors lived: eight months of snow interspersed with storms over the massifs set between two seas where it was not uncommon to see a few snowflakes in summer. Add to that real poverty, the poverty of regions where people till the soil and raise their flocks, herding them at the peak of summer to the highest point on the gradients. Not many live there, consequently, and even fewer when the snow comes and everyone has left with their beasts for the sunshine in Apulia. The only ones who stay in the village are those peasants who are tireless workers, growing their dark lentils, for lentils only grow in poor soil, and valiant women who in the cold weather look after the children, the farms, and their attendance at church. But while the people of this land might be sculpted into jagged rock by wind and snow, they are also fashioned by the poetry of their landscape, which makes shepherds compose rhymes in the icy fog of the high pastures, and storms give birth to hamlets that dangle from the web of the sky.

Thus, the old woman, whose life had unfolded within the walls of a backward village, had a silkiness to her voice that came to her from the splendor of the landscape. The little girl was sure of this: it was the timbre of this very voice that had awoken her to the world, even though people assured her she was only an infant at the time, lying in hunger on the top step outside the church. But Clara did not question her faith. There was a great void of sensations, an absence festooned with whiteness and wind; and there was the melodious cascade that pierced the emptiness and which was there again every morning when the old housekeeper wished her a good day. The little girl had learned the Italian language with miraculous speed, but Paolo the shepherd had grasped that it was something other than her facility with Italian that had left a scent of prodigy in her wake, and one evening he whispered to her,
It's the music, little one, isn't it, it's the music you hear?
In response, she looked up at him with her eyes as blue as the torrents from the glacier, with a gaze in which the angels of mystery sang. And life flowed down the slopes of the Sasso with the slowness and intensity of those places where everything requires effort but also takes its time, in the current of a bygone dream where humankind knew languor interwoven with the bitterness of the world. Labor was intense, and prayer along with it, and they protected a little girl who spoke the way others sing, and who knew how to converse with the spirits of the rocks and the combes.