Juan Gabriel Vásquez - Lovers on All Saints' Day

“ Allô? Allô? Madame Lemoine, are you there? Madame, I need to know, I need to speak with you. You’re the only one who might know.”

Georges realized that revealing his presence would be like surrendering. Accepting that Charlotte formed part of that small tragedy, that she’d had power over the life of a man who was not her husband, would be to discover that he and his wife had not lived alone all these years, that there had always been a specter between them. Then he also realized that all those precautions were futile. It was naive or ingenuous to believe that the past was capable of burying its dead. From this night on, Moré would appropriate part of the house: he would be a permanent lodger, someone Georges would see by just turning his head while smoking a cigar or brushing his teeth, someone who would watch him and his wife sleep, standing next to their bed wrapped up in his father’s green hunting jacket, until the end of time. Georges hung up the phone; he immediately unplugged it, yanking with such force that he broke the socket, leaving blue and red wires sticking out of the wall. He didn’t stand up; his legs would not have done his bidding. He thought he was unable to go upstairs, to confront Charlotte’s sadness, her silent tears, her likely guilt and perhaps her accusations. So he would stay faintheartedly downstairs, as he’d read about wolf hunters doing centuries ago in the Black Forest: parties of armed men who would allow night to overtake them among the trees, unable to return to the village without the body of the beast that had stolen their hens, dismembered their goats, and disturbed the slumber of their defenseless wives.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED when Madame Michaud got out of prison. It happened at Les Houx, the Michaud family estate, and was not written up in a single Belgian newspaper. The oldest episodes of the story occurred thirty-nine years earlier, and were much commented on at the time, but now there is probably nobody outside the family who remembers. I’ll tell the story as it was told to me.

Les Houx is a piece of land of about three hectares, acquired by Madame Michaud’s great-grandfather toward the end of 1860, when the country was young and, in the principality of Liège, property changed hands without any formalities. Madame Michaud’s grandfather grew up and lived his whole life there, and so did her father. Madame Michaud and her younger sister, Sara, were born and raised there, and both lived there until, shortly after turning forty, in September 1960—a century had passed since the family took ownership of the property, which was their emblem and their pride — Madame Michaud was tried for the murder of Sara’s fiancé. She was found guilty of having fed the man rat poison used in the stables of Les Houx, and given a long prison sentence.

Madame Michaud’s first name does not matter, but a clarification regarding her surname and civil status is in order. Michaud was her family name and the one on the sign at the entrance to the property: LES HOUX, PROPRIÉTÉ PRIVÉE. FAMILLE MICHAUD, 1860. Until that September, Madame Michaud was still Mademoiselle Michaud; she’d never been known to have a beau, and very few men visited her more than once, but no one ruled out the possibility that, even at forty, she might marry, for a piece of land like Les Houx was worth as much as the richest dowry and made either of the daughters a good catch. But when it emerged that Mademoiselle Michaud had been sentenced to forty-five years in prison, the Madame started to slip into people’s conversations. There was in the title a mixture of respect and pity toward a person who could not now marry, and whom it was going to be impossible to carry on calling Mademoiselle while she grew old in prison. Madame Michaud was released six years before the end of her sentence, and the first thing she’d do, as everyone surely knew, was to visit the house at Les Houx.

Her love since childhood for the house and stables, the crops and woods, and even the bare fields that led out to the road, that boundless love, would be her undoing. Since she learned to walk, her favorite pastime was wandering through all the nooks and crannies of the house on her own. There was not a single corner of the immense building she did not know or would not have been able to find with her eyes closed. This might not seem such a great feat to those who don’t know Les Houx. So I should say that the three-story house has two stairways that lead to the first floor (one from the kitchen and one from the front hall) and one more that goes directly to the attic. Its perimeter was regular, a perfect closed rectangle like a safe; but the design inside was not at all symmetrical, full of unpredictable niches and alcoves. There was a doorless room entered by sliding the false back of a wardrobe: their grandfather had hidden potatoes and cabbages there from his harvest to induce a rise in prices at the turn of the century, and their father had hidden a Jewish couple there during the war. Between the two events, the room had belonged to the girl. She was solitary by nature, and not even her sister knew where to look for her when it was time to sit down at the table or when she needed her for something. They’d know she’d been in the stables because she’d show up smelling of hay and manure; they’d know she’d spent the morning in the woods because her dresses would be torn by twigs and pinecones and completely ruined by sap from the trunks. When she grew up, her parents got worried: Mademoiselle Michaud saw doctors and the odd apprentice psychoanalyst, because it was incomprehensible to people that a nineteen-year-old girl would spend the whole day by herself instead of seeing her friends. No one understood why she could never be found in the same room of the spacious house; no one understood why she would squander her summers wandering around the three hectares like a cat marking her territory. The war broke out, and Mademoiselle Michaud gained sudden importance in the functioning of Les Houx: during the nightly bombing raids, when the whole country’s electricity was cut so the planes could not locate their targets, she was the only one who could find things lost in the darkness, or cross the property from one end to the other if the horses needed feeding or a message needed to be taken to the steward. All this determined that, in 1949, when the girls’ father died, their mother, who until then had taken little interest in such matters, entrusted the administration of the estate to the only person who could obtain satisfactory results; and Mademoiselle Michaud had the perfect excuse to forget or overlook the eagerness for marriage of the young men of Ferrières or Liège or even Louvain. In that state, which for her approached paradise, she was able to remain for several years. The house had never known — nor would it know — such splendor.

In 1958, Sara received a visit from Jan, a young man from Flanders whose surname no one could quite remember: neither her mother, due to lack of effort, nor her sister, due to self-absorption and indifference. Every Tuesday and every Saturday for two years he was seen arriving in a rosewood-colored Studebaker — which he parked in front of the house, where their father had parked since he bought his first car — and leaving as soon as night began to fall. He rarely crossed paths with Mademoiselle Michaud in the house: as soon as she saw his car come through the gate, she disappeared. She found the man unpleasant from the first moment, and frankly repulsive from the summer Saturday when he arrived, not in the afternoon but before midday, with a crew of assistants carrying measuring sticks. Mademoiselle Michaud, from various corners of the property, watched them taking inventory, measuring the side that bordered the road, the area of the woods and the fields on which nobody had built anything, or ever thought of building anything. The following Saturday, further measurements were taken, following the same routine; and when she came inside, that night, Mademoiselle Michaud sat down facing her mother, who was calmly reading The Red and the Black . That trivial detail would stay with Mademoiselle Michaud forever, because at no point in the conversation did her mother close the book or even rest it in her lap to talk. With the book open in front of her, the leather spine facing the anxious daughter, her mother explained that Jan (and she made an attempt at pronouncing his surname) had asked for Sara’s hand: she had found no reasons to turn him down and more than one to accept. Their father being dead, the decision fell to her and was not up for discussion. They would be married early the following spring. The first week of April seemed to everyone an excellent moment.