Sarah Bynum - Madeleine Is Sleeping

when aroused, even the bucolic village moves with unforgiving swiftness, its machinery oiled and eager. Sophie was eating oatmeal when she decided to tell her mother, and by the time she finished her bowl, her mother had already told her father, who told the priest, who told the mayor. And then it was too late to recant. The mayor puzzled for an afternoon, and by supper had sent his oldest son to fetch the gendarmes. The gendarmes arrived before the sun rose, were directed by a hundred silent fingers towards the barn and apprehended M. Jouywith hay sprouting from his hair, his smile still heavy with dreams. Madeleines hands were thrust into a pot of boiling lye.

CAN I HAVE some MORE? Beatrice asks. She has scrambled down from the bed and planted herself in Mother’s way. 1 prefer the burnt part. Doubling over to stoke die fire, Mother grunts before she gjves her permission. Save some for your father, she says. Beatrice sidles up to the sleeping princess and surveys the devastation: one leg lost, from the knee down. The open wound looks tempting and buttery, but she likes the acrid edges best, where the dough has blackened, and breaks off an entire hand. Before biting, she examines it. It looks exactly like the hand of her sleeping sister: shiny and tempered and mitten-like. The fingers are no longer articulated because baking has sutured them all into one. Why did only the hands burn, Maman? she asks through a mouthful of crumbs. Because only her hands were wicked, Mother says. This makes Beatrice pause and consider. Finally, she objects: She will never be able to sew or play the piano! It is no great loss. Mother pats her on top of her head, leaving the floury trace of her five fingertips. And, she adds, they will always remind her of her childhood. As you grow older, it is often easy to forget. Mother hitches her skirts up to her thighs. See. Scars are remembrances. This slender, sickle-shaped one — she runs her finger along her shin — reminds me of my best friend, of stealing eggs, of a shard of glass glinting in the sunshine. And these here — she caresses the white piping that striates the back of her knees — put me in mind of your grandfather. Beatrice nods, but secretly she disagrees. When she deposits the last bits into her mouth, she keeps her back turned to Mother She lowers her eyelids and sticks out her tongue as she has seen the older girls do in church.

IN AN OLD HOUSE in Paris that is covered with vines live twelve little girls in two straight lines. Madeleine is the twelfth gjil. The smallest and the wickedest. Sister Clavel has been instructed to take special care of her. How the sisters wept when they first saw her\ Her hands swaddled in snowy strips of muslin, Mother picking absently at the invisible insects that she feared were infesting the poultices. The sisters gave Madeleine a brand new prayer book and a straw hat strangled by a broad brown ribbon. She went with diem happily. The other litde girls stroke her bandages as if they were touching the hem of Christ. Their eyes grow enormous and glassy and she can hear the prayers escaping beneath their breaths, a slow hiss of perforated air. At night, as they lie in their two rows, the moon rises and she shadows it from her cot, her arms arcing like a ballerina’s, her milky fists rising like two false moons, like two spectral dollops of meringue. She takes pleasure in her helplessness. Everyone must wait on her. She cannot even pee by herself. Bernadette, the eleventh gpl, would like eventually to become a saint, so now she is practicing on Madeleine. She has made it her special duty to clean her when she menstruates, her little holy hands becoming sticky with the blood. Bernadette s fingertips are warm when she parts Madeleine’s knees and passes a damp rag between her legs. From her cot, Madeleine can hear the plash of water against the bowl, the trickling of fluids as Bernadette wrings the cloth She waits for the firm hands that will pat her dry, tuck a clean rag against her wound press together her splayed thighs. She wonders if the abbot at Rievaulx, when ministering to the bloodied Saint Michel, was as unflinching as Bernadette.

M jouy has not forgotten Madeleine. On Christmas Day, a brown paper package arrives from the hospital at Maifivitte; out of the package spills a fluttering array of drawings and charts. Ho message or holiday wishes enclosed. Mother walks into the village and asks the local chemist to decipher the contents. Xhhhh, he murmurs. They have measured M.]ouys brainpan! And he holds up the diagram for her to see. It looks like the moon on its back, Mother observes. His anatomy is quite regular, no signs of degeneracy, the chemist continues, peering at a new sheaf. Oh, but look! His scapula is protuberant. Shuffling through the papers, the chemist hums to himself, his spectacles propped on the bald crest of his head. Mother furtively examines a bottle of whooping cough remedy that within days, it was rumored, could miraculously resuscitate even the most exhausted breasts. So, she interrupts, are they ungodly or not? vaBB Ungodly? the chemist echoes. He frowns briefly. ‘Why, not at all! Are you sure? He clutches the drawings: These sketches are the work of medical professionals! It seems as if M. Jouy would like her to have them. As a keepsake, perhaps. This picture — he picks out a physiognomic chart — is a very good likeness.

the drawings accumulate. The small brothers and sister discover that they make buoyant kites. Jean-Luc ties one apiece to the posts that support the pasture fence, and on gusty days, the kites swell into the sky, dodging and nodding to one another as if in conversation. Mother begins to enjoy the delicate swirls of the cranial diagrams, so she cuts them in quarters and decorates her pots of preserves.

wHeN sister clavel lays out her tidy uniform, Madeleine slips it neatly over her head, and then, with exuberance, her bulky fists burst through the careful seams, like twin whale snouts breaking the surface. So it is decided that she must have special dresses made for her, with long and liquid sleeves like those of an Oriental concubine. The diminutive tailor dangp the convent beU and Sister Clavd ushers him up the back stairwell and into a sunlit room, where Madeleine awaits him, perched on a tiny embroidered stool, wearing nothing but her stocking^. Crouching, the tailor spreads out his tools, and with an irritating air of indifference, goes about measuring Madeleine’s dimensions. She wonders if she can be seen from outside. She pictures the next-door neighbor trodding home, miserable, and then, by chance, he looks up. His smile spreads: from across the square, the schoolboys let out a blissful, unanimous sigh in the middle of their verb conjugations. The nursemaids who perambulate the park peer coyly from beneath their bonnets, squeezing each other’s fingers and giggling naughtily. And the degenerate man, the one who waits by the rhododendron bushes, swivels his eyes up to her window, his neck supple as an owl’s, and his cock rises triumphantly out of his breeches. Meanwhile her bare buttocks warm in a sunbeam and the tailor’s deft fingers slip and alight upon her skin. Madeleine feels, this is divine. But when the dresses arrive, cocooned in crisp tissue paper, they are not the gossamer confections that she has imagined; indeed they make her appear even more uncanny: half-child, half-beast The bodice and skirt are indistinguishable from the convent uniform, austere and shapeless and busy with buttons, but the arms: they droop like two flaccid elephant ears.

perhaps it is those unwieldy arms that make the gypsies love her so. They pluck her from the crowd as if she were the roundest and ripest fruit, and the eleven other girls squirm with envy. A. disappearing trickl Sister Clavel wrings her hands; outings make her perspire and she is happy only when her charges are praying or asleep. Madeleine smiles at them from the center of the ring as the gypsy mama unspools, from one of her several and cavernous pockets, an endless piece of string. Displaying it for all the crowd to see, she secures the greasy end between Madeleine’s fists and cirdes around her with the swiftness of a spider until Madeleine looks like a well-wrapped fly. Can she breathe? Sister Clavel worries, while Bernadette steels herself, preparing to make the rescue. The little package is raised aloft by the gypsy mama, and then tossed, with a series of shouts, from one epicene acrobat to another. Firecrackers hiss and the sickly, frail animals begin to fret inside their cages. The audience stomp their feet like tribesmen, join in the chanting of the gypsy words, and suddenly, from out of die cacophony, there rises a wounded wail; the midgets scurry, brushing aside a velvet curtain, behind which sits a beautiful woman, who saws upon her own taudy stretched hairs with the energy of the devil. Her costly dress gapes open, her fingers jig up and down her elegant neck, and her bow bobs back and forth across her belly. The faster she plays, the more her face glows: she is self-illuminating, ecstatic, and her strange, discolored song makes the gypsies dance with the desperation of a bear on a chain. They gravitate towards her, yelping, and Madeleine comes flying with them, shuttling over their heads as they reel in tightening circles around the stringed beauty, whose bow moves so quickly it blurs. She scrapes harder, faster, more frantically, her knees atremble, and then: the bow clatters to the ground, the strings jangle, and the player gasps. The spell is cast. Cuddling it in her arms, the gypsy mama returns the ball of string to center stage. A hush falls over the tent. Is the little girl propped on her head or on her feet? By now it is impossible to tell. Shhhhhhhhhhhhh! the mama commands. See and be amazed! After a peremptory wiggle of her fingers, she grabs the frayed end of string and yanks it.