Juan Gabriel Vásquez - Lovers on All Saints' Day

Mademoiselle Michaud began a slow study, which she herself perhaps did not even notice and whose object was Sara’s future husband. This might be called intuition, but also mistrust: the mistrust of a woman (because by then, Mademoiselle Michaud was a woman) who had never had much to do with human beings; whose friendly connections, in essence, had always been with the objects of the house, the beams of a ceiling and the carpets, the whitewash on the walls and the gravel of the courtyard or the wood of the sheds. Things and their arrangement in physical space were Mademoiselle Michaud’s company; it was logical, then, that the presence of the betrothed and his measuring men should perturb her. She followed and spied on the couple; her knowledge of the terrain allowed her to go unnoticed. She saw without caring that, when they found themselves alone in the living room, they didn’t just kiss, but his hand disappeared under her sweater, and hers among the folds of his tweed trousers. She saw, toward the end of August, that the fiancé began to arrive earlier, and he and Sara would take advantage of her mother’s afternoon nap to hide in the room behind the wardrobe, from which the odd shy moan would escape. And at the beginning of September she saw Jan using the upstairs telephone to make a business call. He spoke of the time when half of all this would belong to him; he spoke of the necessity of putting so much unused land into production. The details he mentioned worked on Mademoiselle Michaud with the force of a catapult. Around that time she had to go to the border, where prices were lower, to purchase a large quantity of woodchips. Some merchant was able to supply the small grinder she was looking for. She returned home after dinner, and blindly emptied the contents of a little bag, a coarse, heavy powder, into the suitor’s pousse-café . Jan did not survive the night.

Her mother, wisely, sent Sara to the house of one of her friends, in Aix-la-Chapelle. The trial was held swiftly, for the malice was obvious and the evidence overwhelming. A truck came to take Mademoiselle Michaud to the women’s prison, near Charleroi. Her mother did not come out to say good-bye. I imagine the woman who until the age of forty had lived in the world of a little girl, and then had murdered someone, looking for the last time at the family estate. Two days later, Sara, still feeling sick, returned to Les Houx. She could not sleep, but that was the least of her woes. Before anyone noticed, she was bedridden with anorexia, a doctor had come to save her life, a therapy begun and punctually carried out; with time, her sadness became no more stubborn than any other sadness, and bit by bit her appetite returned. An accident occurred one day: her mother tried to force her to taste a gâteau de macarons she’d bought for her from André Destiné’s patisserie, which had always been her favorite; Sara refused and in the face of her mother’s insistence lost control, gesticulated too close to the table beside the glass door, and smashed a ceramic vase, which had belonged to her great-grandmother. Sara noticed the space on the table, the circle that shone like a moon where the vase had stood, unmoving, for so many years. It might be said that this moment marked the beginning of her recovery. She said that the dining room was now brighter; the next day she moved the table to a different spot; a week later, hired three workmen who, along with the steward, widened the frame of the glass door two meters on either side, and ended up replacing it with a large window from the parquet floor to the ceiling.

They never received any news of Madame Michaud — this was how the public now referred to her — and Madame Michaud had no news of them. People commented that it was as if she’d been sentenced to the harshest exile from the start and, in time, that exile had turned into plain oblivion. But that was not true: Sara never forgot that her sister was living in a cell for having poisoned the man who was going to make her happy. Madame Michaud, for her part, could not feel the guilt they attributed to her, or any repentance for her actions: her universe did not allow for such possibilities, because it was not a human one; things are not guilty, and constructions do not feel repentance. It’s a cliché to say that she lost track of time; but the prison guards said she rarely went out into the yard and hardly ever associated with the other convicts, and that she lived, in all other respects, at the margin of any evolution, ignorant of the routines of the world inside and the revolutions outside. Enclosed in the minimal space of her cell, Madame Michaud did not hear that her mother died of natural causes during the winter of 1969, and never found out that, on her deathbed, she’d forgiven her. Would this pardon have made her glad? It’s impossible to know for certain. Her cellmate, who very soon exhausted her longings for conversation, tells that Madame Michaud (whose hair turned gray, whose transparent skin dried and peeled like birch bark) spent the days rolling and unrolling a piece of paper over the floor of the cell. On one side of it was printed an old calendar brought from France: 1954—DIXIÈME ANNIVERSAIRE DE LA LIBÉRATION was the caption set above the months and days. On the back of the calendar, Madame Michaud had drawn a pencil sketch of Les Houx in such detail that her cellmate exclaimed, when she saw the plan for the first time, that she knew the place. It was not true, but the perfection of the details had prevailed over her memory. The illusion, momentary for the other convict, was complete for Madame Michaud; and she lived her years of imprisonment within that plan, oblivious to her increasing old age. It’s not difficult to imagine her bending over windowsills that were a simple thick line, or thinking she was hiding behind walls that were made not of bricks and concrete, but of the careful shading of a slanted pencil.

I imagine it was prisoner Michaud’s good conduct that, paradoxically, caused the distraction of the directors of the Charleroi prison. No one, during the final years of her imprisonment, seemed to remember her; and it’s easy to believe that many more years would have been commuted had she submitted an official request before. When it was decided she deserved early release, she was six years from completing her sentence. But ten years earlier, the same pardon would have been conceded: her behavior was the same during that whole life within a life that is a murder conviction. In December 1998, Madame Michaud was summoned to the César Franck room of the prison, where she answered a series of questions meant to confirm her willingness to return to and be a useful member of society. At the end of the session, they asked her if she would prefer to get out before or after the holidays: on the brink of freedom, Madame Michaud did not want to spend one single day more in jail. The prison officials placed among her belongings (the toilette she’d arrived with and a calendar on the back of which was the plan of a house) an envelope with three thousand francs in five-hundred-franc notes. On December 19, Madame Michaud spent the night in a Charleroi motel — nobody had been waiting for her outside the prison gates — and before dawn she was ready to return to Les Houx. (At seventy-nine years of age, Madame Michaud no longer slept much, and always awoke with the first light.) She didn’t have to explain to the taxi driver where her family’s property was.

The taxi drove slowly up the drive, for it had snowed and a layer of ice made the surface slippery. Madame Michaud wiped the condensation from the car window to see the house, her house, and must have thought she’d open the main door and it would be as if not a day had gone by. She didn’t dismiss the driver as soon as she stepped out of the taxi, perhaps because she felt that it wasn’t gravel beneath the snow but pebbles. But she kept going, and her hand moved instinctively to the place where the large door knocker had always been: her hand fell on emptiness. It must have seemed implausible to her to have to look for the latch, and to have to try twice before being able to get it to open. She had to imagine the possibility that she’d not been paying attention on her way there, that the taxi driver had brought her to someone else’s house. She looked around. On her face was confusion. Madame Michaud felt disoriented.