Sarah Bynum: Madeleine Is Sleeping

the small brothers and sisters receive a letter from Madeleine! The envelope is bedecked with bright, mysterious stamps. After gingerly prying open the seal, Beatrice smoothes the contents against her chest, delighting in the crackling fragility of the paper, and then lifts it above her head as the others clamber about her. Mother quiets them in the folds of her skirts so that Beatrice can read the letter aloud: She is happy at the convent, she says. The other girls like her very much and she has a bed of her own to sleep in. Bernadette is the name of the girl who is kind enough to write this letter for her (Beatrice exclaims over the loveliness of her handwriting). She gives each one of us a kiss (Beatrice delivers kisses) and she prays for us every night before she goes to sleep. Love, Madeleine. Very good, Mother says, and heads out to the shed to tell Papa that everything has turned out as it should. Once alone, the children huddle together while Beatrice brings down a candle from the mantelpiece. The wick flares, and they are breathless in their conspiracy. Madeleine has taught them the secret language of siblings, the head flicks and eye rolls and coded words, and now, true enough, she has buried another letter beneath the surface of the first, a letter meant especially for them. Beatrice holds the parchment up to the flame and the effaced writing becomes translucently visible. Written in lemon juice, of course! She sighs at her sister’s cleverness. So she tells aloud the second story, the one inscribed in invisible ink, and the children sit around her, rapt. I do not miss anyone at all, she says. I live with gypsies. I have learned to stretch my feet back behind my head and waddle about on my bands. Yesterday a photographer appeared and asked to take our portraits. He stood me between the dog girl and the flatulent man and told me to display my hands as if they were the crown jewels. What a fool, his buttocks sticking out from behind his machinery. In the picture, we will all be laughing.

Charlotte pauses in mid-Bourish. Are you going to tell about me? New paragraph: I know a woman who looks like a viol Madeleine dictates.

boxing jean-luc s ears, Mother is struck by an idea. She hurries off towards the pasture, where Matilde is wrestlingwith kites. Madame! Mother hollers up to the sky. Please share some tarte aux pommes with me. Matilde disentangles herself: Happily! She sails down from the heights like a mighty barge, then politely collapses her wings and strolls alongside Mother: The two take their tea outside, on a stone bench warm from the afternoon sun. Matilde asks after the children. I am so busy now, Mother sighs. My children are growing wild like weeds. I can’t read them as well as I used to: Jean-Luc crept out from right under my nose! In earlier days, I would have known his wicked thoughts before even he did, and been waiting for him, arms outstretched, when he slid out from beneath the covers. Please forgive him for interrupting your experiments! Matilde tsks: I wasn’t bothered. She pats Mother’s hand. You are a woman of science, Mother ventures. Matilde nods. Then perhaps you can help me! Mother says. Matilde gestures for her to continue. “When Madeleine sleeps, Mother explains, she smiles. Sometimes she sighs. Sometimes she is as still as a log. But these signs are so small and faint, as if coming from a great distance, and I cannot decipher them. Matilde extracts her leatherbound diary from deep within her le petomane cleavage. As she opens the book, its pages fen out like a peacock’s tail. I have filled a volume, she says, describing small and mysterioug signs. I have yet to see the pattern, but I know that it will emerge. She presses Mother’s hands against the pages: One day I will be leafing through my book, and suddenly the signs will become sensible. They will reveal themselves as a language, a story. That is what I am waiting for. She lifts Mother’s hands from the pages. Shutting the diary, Matilde tucks it back between her breasts.

THE mouth of the ink bottle still gleams wetly, but once the moaning begins, Charlotte shudders and finds that she can write no further. Poor M. Pujol, she sighs. Madeleine nods solemnly. The flatulent man, pale and elegant and tall, suffers from bad dreams, owing to the sordid company he kept during his reign in Paris. A modest and elegant man, he never speaks of his former brilliance, but once, when Madeleine was practicing her contortions, he gently unfolded her and grasped her paddle in one of his warm hands. Behind the nearest caravan, he bowed slightly, lifted the tails of his well-cut coat and produced the most melancholy sounds she had ever heard: that of the nightingale, the grasshopper, the cuckoo. And though Madeleine was a child who rarely cried, the strange and unearthly emissions reminded her of her home, and she wept. Charlotte, too, is crying. She hears in the nightmare moans of M. Pujol a voice that she misses.

m. pujol finds it strangely fitting that his performance should now excite tears, when once he could reduce an entire theatre to gasping and painful hilarity. How could such a simple and surely familiar act produce such paroxysms of laughter? On stage: a sad pale-faced man; a large basin of water; a candlestick sitting atop a stool. In the seats: gentlemen and their wives, their mouths flung wide open, their hands clawing at the velveteen armrests. M. Pujol believes that his art is akin to that of the oboist, or the bassoonist: a matter of shaping the lips around a stream of air. The fact that his lips should belong to his lower regions, that his should be endowed with unusual agility and musicality, does not strike him as remarkable. But the pleasure that his gift brings to others! Due to the tightness of their corsets, and the violence of their laughter, women often lose consciousness altogether. They are carried out by swarthy nurses, whom the manager Oiler has stationed in the aisles — cunningly — for this very purpose. The little boy who sweeps the floor finds it strewn with discarded collars, shredded handkerchiefs, pearly buttons trailing bits of thread. It is a phenomenon that M. Pujol has witnessed from the stage: this peculiar compulsion to disrobe, to rend from the body its restraints. He lifts his tailcoat, he farts; the whole house convulses. Le Petomane watches, aghast, as below him bodies burst forth from their envelopes. The audience stretches before him, a field in late summer, crackling pods splitting at their seams, releasing into the air armies ofweighdess and dancing spores.

the gift revealed itself to him when he was only i child, and visiting the seashore with his family. His younger sister had been possessed by a growling cough all winter; it was thought that the air might restore her. Joseph, as he was then called, was the first to venture into the water. The sea licked at him like an icy tongue; his skin prickled; his genitals retreated. But inside he felt the warm thrumming of his own small body, the quiet roar of his blood, at if he had swallowed a wonderful litde engine that kicked up its own heat. I am still warm in here! he rejoiced silently. Joseph! his mother cried. He saw her, beautiful and slim, silhouetted by the bathing hut. Joseph! she cried. Do not swallow the seawater! It will burn your nostrils terribly! It will go right up into your brain! He pinched the tip of his nose firmly between his fingers. He expanded his lungs, he puffed out his cheeks. He counted to seven. Then the water closed over him, sealing him inside its cold and sally mouth. The little engine panted away, and Joseph could hear the quickening thumps as the men, caps pushed back and sweating, heaved more coal into its radiant belly. I’m warm! Joseph crowed. It’s working! He held the sea at bay; he curled up beside the hot, vibrating machine. And then the unthinkable occurred. A gasket burst, perhaps, or a valve failed. The unreliable sphincter! Joseph felt the icy water enter him, felt it storming down his narrow corridors, felt it surging into the hold. The chamber flooded; the engine’s glowing belly was extinguished; the engineers’ caps bobbed sadly atop the cold and salty sea that had invaded him. His abdomen contracted in a series of agonizing and colicky spasms. On shore, behind an outcropping of white stones, squatting above the sand, he expelled a stomach’s worth of sea. It bubbled briefly, then disappeared.