Pierre Michon: The Origin of the World

My hair was still dripping on my forehead. This woman, her lips lightly parted, benevolent and mildly surprised, patiently considered my silence. She was waiting to hear what I wanted. I spoke in a dream, in a voice nonetheless clear. She turned around, her armpit appearing when she lifted her arm to the shelves, and her hand, smooth and beringed, opened under my eyes with a red-and-white box of Marlboros in its palm. I brushed it while taking the box. Perhaps to see this gesture again — the coins resting in her palm, painted nails joining and separating — I also bought the postcard of the arrowed saint. She smiled, broadly. “Would you like an envelope?” she said. Absolutely I did. Her voice was generous as well, words like gifts. Once more the white arm plunged, her fingers joined, her earrings caressed her cheek. When I left, the sky was just beginning to clear; the cobbles shone, rejuvenated; the rain had ended. Along the slope toward the auberge, toward the Beune, the sun appeared, the sky opening and the pale trees appearing indelibly against the sky; in my throat, in my ears, something plaintive remained, something powerful, like an unending cry cut short, modulating, full of tears and invincible desire, a desire that rises from nocturnal throats, cinched tight but strangely free, like the word honey in a blues tune. In the bar chez Hélène, the sun could be seen setting over the Beune, dark black clouds bending over like maidservants, approaching; love that moves stars stirred the stars, dolled them up, made them look like Esthers, stripped them bare to white, instantly; sunlight caressed the red fur of the fox, little children in the countryside saw a rain-dipped pebble and it would be in a fist they would offer me tomorrow with something like love; up above, on the square, the tobacconist was already shivering from the brutal festivities of the night to come, her hand perhaps trembling briefly on a packet of Marlboros, her skirt caressing her thighs. Honey: when the sun goes down, when night comes, when the souls of women are as naked as their hands.

Did I dare think she could be mine? Of course, and feverishly, but only by some miracle, no more shocking after all than the miracle by which she existed in Castelnau, and that from her divine hand she could birth packets of Marlboros. I was of an age when one believed that one had nothing to offer, nothing one could exchange against such wealth, such thighs and breasts, gold earrings and the call from her skirts, nothing, and especially not that incongruous thing that grows magnificently from our groin. And what’s more, I was of that ridiculous generation embarrassed by everything, that imagined a woman’s desire was subject to one’s ability to talk about notable, serious matters, pop songs or paintings, politics, some blob of nothing; or, if you can’t talk to them, at least make sure that they think you can. And I was a good-looking kid, charming enough, and I had enough in my pants to convince her — or would have, it will soon be clear, had she not already belonged to another, as they say. So I didn’t try a thing, I made no more move for her hand than to collect the little red-and-white boxes; and I added a dash of loftiness to the part by buying Le Monde every day, which I didn’t read — she also sold newspapers — the copies of which piled up in my room above the great tangled hole of the Beune, and of course she didn’t witness anything in my actions that would have won me any points, she couldn’t have cared less. I went to the shop every day, out of my real passion for tobacco and my feigned passion for undigested newsprint, which were justification enough: we exchanged a few words, she always offered her smile and the warmth of her voice, she was patient, her skirt rustled, occasionally I saw her legs, and her heels, always high.

I had noticedthat often, on Sundays and certain afternoons, she went by foot along la route des Martres, always in high heels no matter what weather, all dolled up, returning much later or not at all — unless she had come back via a shortcut I didn’t know. I didn’t need to ask what she was doing there: the sky was my answer, to see her beneath it was enough. This road soon became my passion. There were great meadows, and dark walnut trees at the edge of the village, and farther along were woods crisscrossed by footpaths leading to various hamlets; the road followed the lip of the cliff, sometimes climbing steeply, with hiding places lost behind masses of fallen rock, hollows in the sides of hills from which one could only see sky, secret resting places beneath beeches. There, on my free afternoons, most often beneath the rain, I pretended to get some air and to take a profound interest in plants and pebbles — instructors are allowed their eccentricities — but of course I was pacing the paths and was waiting, tensed, consumed by a painful image that flowed through me, her image, as if she were in my blood, images of a woman in her Sunday best, then naked and dressed again and naked again, a rhythm of stockings, of gold and of skin, a thousand silks beating this silken flesh. With such thoughts I made my way to the Beune; I watched it flow through its hole down below, dirty waters beneath a dirty sky in which unseen fish were spawning, eyes wide open and doleful: and yet this world was beautiful nonetheless, if stockings could fill my soul, could strip it bare while I stripped imaginary flesh. I returned beneath the shelter of the trees. I stopped suddenly; I imagined her mouth; I imagined her neck; at the thought of the rest of her I trembled with a feeling well beyond desire. At the sight of you, I told myself, perhaps she will wordlessly let her head fall back, will tremble as you tremble, will seize you where you want to seize her, and with her skirts in her hands she will give herself over, against this birch, in these puddles into which her earrings will have fallen, where she will paw the ground, where you will see her breasts, and, more shaken than a tree in the wind, her great tumbling cries will scare the crows away. I heard a sound, my heart collapsed. I resumed the bearing of an attentive botanist; it was nothing, a spooked animal: but other times she was there, in the foliage, the mud, with her high heels and her perfect makeup, all of her, sometimes in gloves, her hands in the pockets of her raincoat, her head high, a queen, stopping near me, talking about the bad weather, sweetly telling me that I smoked too much; I responded from the same script, I fell into her smile, I wanted to hold onto this drop of rain clutched in the down of her cheek, hesitating, flowing. The pale violet rings beneath her eyes tore at me, her perfume in the woods pressed into my stomach. She moved off, her skirts rustling louder than the trees, her heels piercing fallen leaves. Her hands were in her pockets. The raincoat flared out around her hips. I was suffocating. The world was white flesh, a nice piece at that. The arrows that pierced and burned Jean-Gabriel Perboyre collapsed on his tree stump burned no more than those that pierced me, collapsed upon my own, receiving pleasure from hands no longer my own, but hers: the delights that she filled me with, that, in a way, she gave me herself, because I’m certain that she wasn’t unaware of them, are the most pointed I have ever felt. Sometimes she wasn’t there at all.

I would return only near nightfall. Through the walnuts my Wallachian village loomed up above, the school perched there since the three Jules reigned, the drowsing arsenal, the panoply of old men who had felt desire in the woods; and the church below with its little Jean-Gabriel within who had wished to be tortured on the Yellow River, had been so and had so been thankful; and the eternal auberge. The branches and the rain threw themselves at the windowpane. A kettle was singing, the percolator was smoking. I was soaked through but was boiling in all this wet. I sat down dumbfounded beneath the familiar fox; there were a few drinkers in smoldering oilskins, boatmen taking long draws on their beers as if stuck to the counter and yet seemingly transported to some other side, another bank that looks just like this one, where there are the same people, but that is softer, hotter, more alive; Jean the Fisherman wasn’t with them — he didn’t live there and he didn’t come by every night — I’d seen him leave before dawn to catch eel or who knows what, he’d winked while turning away and had disappeared with his hoop nets, his spider over his shoulder, toward the Little Beune. Hélène served me more of her endless ham, her musketeers’ pâtés; my desire hadn’t waned, it weighed on my stomach while I ate. My thoughts roamed the landscape, I was drifting away. In this blood red room that smelled of cigarette butts, of rotten wine casks, of saltpeter, I was imagining that all the drinkers were making for the black, for night, toward what they couldn’t resist, the tobacconist giving herself over to this call, sitting up in her bed, throwing her raincoat over her shoulders and rushing to the auberge, twisting her ankles on her high heels, this queen, coming in like the wind, opening her raincoat with two trembling hands, throwing herself naked onto one of the sticky tables, onto the silent pinball machine, shedding her earrings, her eyes white with ecstasy, all for my unique use, beneath Hélène’s thoughtful eye, behind her counter, watching Yvonne move through every position, knowing her raven hair, her orgeat thighs, her mother-of-pearl ass, all shining immoderately beneath a fox, her cries tumbling out like an eagle’s, hurtling over the cliff, startling poachers crouched along the Beune. I gutted her.