As I bleed into Marielle’s grave, I can smell her, or believe that I can, which by now amounts to nearly the same thing, for the rain has softened the new earth beneath my cheek into a black, mucilaginous paste smelling of roots, worms, crushed grass, and flowers already beginning their small putrefactions, yet through that common cemetery effluvium there persists another odor, impossible and unmistakable: orange blossom warmed against skin, stale powder, unwashed hair, old smoke caught in wool, and beneath all of it the faint animal sweetness which collected at the hollow of her throat and which no quantity of soap or lavender water ever entirely abolished.
The knife lies somewhere beside my right hand, half submerged in mud. I had carried it beneath my coat throughout the funeral and, after the last carriage withdrew and the cemetery emptied into rain, I climbed the low wall, found the raw mound beneath which they had put her, and drove the blade beneath my ribs. The first wound seemed insufficient, not from courage but from an almost bureaucratic mistrust of my own body, and thus I struck myself again before the pain had properly arrived. Thereafter came heat, astonishing in its quantity, spreading beneath my shirt and into the waistband of my breeches; then the slower cold, once the cloth had saturated and the rain began thinning whatever reached the ground. I folded myself over her grave and remained there, bleeding into earth which had been closed above her only hours before, possessed by the irrational conviction that if enough of me entered the soil above her the distance between us might diminish by some measurable degree.
Her funeral had taken place that morning. I had not been invited; her mother had seen to that. Thus I watched from beyond the low wall, half concealed by the yews, while the rain soaked through my coat and down into my stockings, and Madame Valette wept into a square of lace and displayed the peculiar efficiency of a person whose grief had inconvenienced but not disorganized her. Between paroxysms she corrected the placement of flowers, reprimanded a servant for allowing mud upon the hem of her dress, drank ratafia, and reminded her sister that several guests would still be arriving afterward for chocolate and cakes. I felt a residual resentment toward her for this facility, for the obscene competence with which she continued existing; Marielle had scarcely been lowered into the ground before her mother was once again concerning herself with pastry.
Perhaps this was unfair. Marielle herself had possessed an appetite under almost every conceivable circumstance, and she had laughed while dying. That, more than the foam, more than the grotesque enlargement of her lips, more even than the convulsions, was what everyone remembered.
She had eaten very little that afternoon: preserved quince, part of a pigeon, a green marchpane perfumed with orange-flower water, several candied violets, and something small and nutty which I cannot now remember and which nobody considered worth remembering at the time. There was no reason to. Marielle herself had apparently never known there existed anything in the world capable of provoking such a rebellion from her own flesh.
Her mouth began to itch. She complained of it once, almost idly, scraping her tongue against her teeth while continuing the conversation; then her lips began to swell, her breathing acquired a damp and narrowing whistle, and within minutes the soft tissues of her face had altered so grotesquely that she appeared to be disappearing beneath a badly made likeness of herself. The physician, when at last he arrived, blamed the humors, then the heat, then some corruption of the stomach, and thereafter suggested that something poisonous might have entered the food. He could no more identify the offending morsel than I could. It might have been the marchpane, the fruit, the confectionery, or something else entirely. Whatever it was had passed harmlessly through every other person at the table and encountered in Marielle some minute, invisible peculiarity which transformed supper into execution.
Albuminous froth gathered at the corners of her mouth. She clawed at her throat until crescents of blood appeared beneath her fingernails. Her heels struck the floorboards with such violence that one shoe flew beneath a cabinet, and the room immediately filled with useless activity: chairs dragged aside, servants running, someone praying, somebody else crying for water, the physician shouting for objects which arrived only after he had forgotten why he wanted them. Through this, Marielle laughed.
Not continuously, for she soon possessed insufficient air even to cough, but in ruined little expulsions between the spasms, wet and strangled noises which everyone else mistook for choking until I saw her eyes and understood that she was genuinely amused. Perhaps she found the physician ridiculous. Perhaps she found all of us ridiculous. Perhaps the absurd spectacle of her own body, which had served her so obligingly in appetite and mischief, suddenly deciding that some negligible ingredient constituted grounds for annihilation appealed to precisely that region of her mind which had always delighted in catastrophe.
I knew her laugh even in that mutilated form. Nine months earlier, she had touched my foot beneath a school table.
Our academy occupied an old house in Paris whose upper rooms had been converted into classrooms, with long scarred tables, copybooks, slate boards, shelves of neglected texts, maps curled brown at the edges, and plaster saints gazing down upon us through generations of chalk dust. We passed our mornings beneath masters who instructed us in Latin, rhetoric, mathematics, drawing, scripture, and such portions of natural philosophy as they themselves could remember, moving from room to room at the sound of a bell and spending an extravagant quantity of our lives amid the composite odor of ink, lamp smoke, sealing wax, wet wool, chalk, and bodies made restless by compulsory stillness.
Marielle sat two places from me. At a distance she possessed a face of almost offensive innocence. Her hair was dirty blond, neither properly gold nor properly brown, with the dull color of straw after rain; her eyelashes were pale, her mouth small, her cheeks round, and she had a baby face which caused strangers to lower their voices around her and older women to presume softness where there was principally appetite. This error generally survived until she spoke.
That morning our master was declining a Latin verb when the toe of her shoe touched mine. I moved my foot aside. Her foot followed. I moved again, supposing that accident had become clumsiness, and again she pursued me, slowly now, deliberately, rubbing the edge of her shoe against my ankle while staring toward the front of the room with such exemplary vacancy that I nearly laughed.
She shifted backward in her chair and gathered a little of her skirt beneath the table, not enough to attract the notice of anyone else but enough that whatever misunderstanding I had been preserving became impossible. A few minutes thereafter she requested permission to leave the room.
I remained at my desk long enough to preserve some nominal appearance of possessing a will independent of hers, though I heard nothing further of the lesson and the letters in my copybook had begun to resemble insects drowned in ink; then I excused myself, crossed the corridor, descended the narrow rear stair, and made my way toward the small privy reserved for the female pupils, where I knew she had gone, and where the air was close and mephitic with damp plaster, lye, old urine, and an heroic quantity of rosewater poured upon the boards in the belief that one odor might assassinate another.
Marielle was waiting against the door, and she quickly seized the front of my coat and pulled me inside.
There was no grace to what followed and very little hesitation. Her mouth struck mine almost painfully; one of my teeth caught her lip, and rather than retreat she bit me back, first softly and then hard enough that the metallic taste of blood entered the kiss. Her fingers worked impatiently at my collar while I pushed aside the satin of her bodice and slipped my hand beneath her chemise. She was slight beneath my hands, her breasts small and unexpectedly soft, the skin there warmer than the rest of her. I bent and drew one nipple between my lips, touched it with my tongue, then caught it lightly with my teeth. A minute sound escaped her.
“Be quiet,” I hushed. Marielle immediately pressed one finger to my mouth instead, as though I were the one making too much noise, holding it there with exaggerated seriousness and mocking the instruction back at me.
My hand then moved beneath her skirts. At first I touched only the inside of her thigh, where the skin was hot and almost indecently soft; then my finger traveled higher and found her already wet. She drew a short breath through her nose as I touched her more deliberately, one hand gripping my shoulder while I worked my fingers against her until her breathing became uneven and she had to press her lips tightly together to keep from making noise.
Then I felt something warmer and more viscous across my fingertips.
I withdrew my hand at once.
Blood.
For an instant I thought I had torn her somehow. The sight of it upon my fingers produced such immediate alarm that Marielle, seeing my expression, looked down and began to laugh.
“It is mine,” she whispered.
The blood had already darkened the linen between her thighs. She took my wrist before I could wipe my hand and examined my fingers with an almost scholarly curiosity; then, without explanation, she pressed them against her own cheek.
I drew the red downward.
There she stood with her baby face flushed, dirty-blond hair loosening at the temples, one side of her bodice disordered and menstrual blood drawn across her cheek with the solemnity of rouge, and the contradiction was so complete that she resembled one of those little painted virgins in country churches after vandals have got at them: innocence preserved in the features and profanation applied afterward.
Whatever restraint remained between us became largely theoretical.
I pressed her backward against the partition and gathered her skirts higher. Up close there rose from her that peculiar sickly sweetness I would thereafter associate with her body—powder and perspiration, stale perfume, something faintly sour beneath it, like fruit kept one day beyond ripeness. When I entered her she tightened abruptly around me, and for an instant both of us became completely still.
Then she shifted her hips toward mine. I began slowly, conscious of every betraying sound: leather moving against the boards, our clothes rasping together, the slight percussion of the partition behind her, and above all our breathing, which seemed impossibly loud in that little room. Marielle gave a small involuntary moan and immediately covered her own mouth. I thrust again. She breathed through her nose, quick and shallow, trying unsuccessfully not to make another sound.
Caution deteriorated rapidly thereafter. My thrusts became harder; she caught my hair in one hand and bit the cloth at my shoulder, producing little muffled breaths whenever the movement drove her more firmly against the wall. Once, the boards knocked loudly enough that we both froze. Footsteps passed somewhere beyond the corridor. Marielle looked at me, eyes wide, and began silently laughing. Then she pulled me back against her.
The confined air became rank with us. Her menstrual blood slicked my hand and the inside of her thighs; its metallic odor mingled with sweat, damp linen, old urine, the useless rosewater on the floorboards, and the warm animal smell of our bodies until nothing in that little room possessed a separate scent any longer.
Near the end, her breathing changed. The small suppressed sounds became quicker, almost irritated; she caught my shoulder between her teeth while her body tightened rhythmically around me. I felt her climax begin and, almost simultaneously, lost whatever control remained to me. I ejaculated inside her as she contracted around me, both of us attempting absurdly to remain quiet through it, her forehead pressed against my neck and one final little moan escaping before she could swallow it.
For several moments afterward neither of us moved. My hand was sticky with blood; between us, sweat had mingled with it, and the smell of iron persisted most strongly, though beneath it remained the cloying sweetness of her skin. Marielle looked down at the mess between us and smiled with evident satisfaction, then she straightened her clothes with astonishing composure.
She washed her face badly. A rust-colored crescent remained beneath one ear throughout the next lesson, which I found so distracting that I was twice reprimanded for staring at her.
Our courtship, if one insists upon calling it that, thereafter proceeded largely by the destruction of ordinary distinctions. We stole for one another, lied for one another, disappeared into empty classrooms, stairwells, gardens, borrowed chambers, and carriages, and interpreted almost every attempt at correction as evidence of a general conspiracy against us.
Once Marielle concealed a bottle of eau-de-vie beneath her cloak in a wine merchant’s shop and had nearly reached the street when the proprietor seized her wrist and called her a thief, then a whore, then several further things which were probably accurate only in spirit.
I was standing beside a large cask raised upon wooden trestles. Its tap projected toward the aisle at about the height of my knee, and before I had considered the consequences with any seriousness I wrenched it loose.
The wine came out with astonishing force. It struck the floorboards in a thick red stream and spread almost immediately beneath the merchant’s shoes, running into the cracks between the planks and gathering in dark pools around the legs of tables. For one peculiar instant the shop appeared to have been wounded. The color was too rich, too bodily; it moved with the sluggish shine of blood, carrying dust, cork fragments, and bits of straw along with it as it advanced toward the doorway.
The proprietor released Marielle with a cry and lunged for the cask, both hands attempting uselessly to force the tap back into place while the wine continued pouring over his wrists and cuffs. I shoved a narrow rack beside me and sent several bottles onto the floor. Glass burst everywhere. One bottle shattered against the wall and left a red fan across the plaster; another broke beneath a customer’s shoe, scattering green splinters through the wine so that the floor glittered beneath the spreading crimson. Someone slipped and caught himself against a shelf, which sent still more bottles crashing down. The noise multiplied obscenely: breaking glass, shouting, the hollow knocking of casks, the merchant swearing as the wine ran between his fingers faster than he could stop it.
Within seconds the whole shop had become a small catastrophe of red liquid and broken glass. Wine soaked the hems of skirts, darkened shoes, splashed the legs of chairs, and ran in narrow rivulets toward the street. The smell was enormous—fermented fruit, wet wood, spirits, smoke from the lamps, and the sharp mineral odor of shattered glass and dust. People were trying simultaneously to save the stock, avoid falling, and determine who had caused the destruction, which meant that nobody was accomplishing any of these things particularly well.
Marielle remained where she was for perhaps half a second, watching the ruin with a look of almost devotional attention. Then she remembered that she was the reason any of it was happening.
She clutched the stolen bottle more tightly beneath her cloak, stepped directly through the red wash flooding the floor, and disappeared into the street.
I followed a moment later with wine soaking the soles of my shoes and fragments of glass cracking beneath them.
I found her several streets away, bent almost double against a wall and hiccupping with laughter, one hand still wrapped around the stolen bottle. There was a splash of red wine across the pale front of her dress which, at a distance, looked very much like blood.
Thereafter her family concluded, not without evidence, that she required correction.
Madame Valette came to the academy herself. She did not make a scene there; she reserved scenes for private places. She took Marielle home in a closed carriage, and two days later arrangements were made for her confinement in a private house beyond the denser streets of the city, one of those establishments in which troublesome sons and daughters, melancholics, blasphemers, people afflicted with visions, people afflicted with inconvenient appetites, and persons whose families had simply ceased knowing what to do with them could be subjected to physicians, clerics, cold water, discipline, confinement, and the improving influence of locked doors.
I endured twelve days without her.
On the thirteenth I concocted a plan to join her.
The matter required some study. I could hardly arrive at the gate and request incarceration on romantic grounds, and therefore I first learned what accusations had persuaded Madame Valette to surrender her daughter: agitation, impiety, nocturnal wandering, violence, certain “unnatural excitements” which the physician declined to describe in respectable company. Thereafter I began manufacturing my own derangement with care.
I stopped sleeping where servants could observe me. I refused meat because I claimed slaughtered animals continued speaking from the plate. I informed our priest that Saint Denis had taken residence in the chimney and delivered instructions whenever the wind came from the east. I spent an entire supper staring into a candle because I said another sun had been imprisoned inside the flame, and at three in the morning allowed my mother to find me barefoot in the courtyard kneeling before a dead shrub which I addressed as the Virgin.
The performance disturbed my parents principally because they could not determine when it had begun. My father questioned me; I answered him with fragments from scripture rearranged until they meant nothing. My mother touched my forehead repeatedly, hoping perhaps that fever would make the entire affair ordinary.
Finally a physician was summoned.
He asked whether I heard voices.
I told him constantly.
He asked what they said.
I informed him that God had entrusted me with certain instructions concerning the churches of Paris, though I had been forbidden to reveal them before the appointed hour.
The physician leaned forward.
“And what is to happen at this appointed hour?”
I told him that I could not say without placing both our souls in danger.
“Do they command you to harm anyone?”
I lowered my voice and told him that the saints had not yet decided whom God required.
His pen began moving at once.
I understood then that my madness was becoming credible.
Within the week I was sent to the same house in which Marielle had been confined.
She did not know I was coming. I first saw her across the chapel, separated from me by an aisle and several attendants. She lifted her eyes during prayer, found me among the figures opposite her, and thereafter held her thumb beneath her lower lip so hard that the flesh whitened around it. Her expression otherwise did not change.
That night somebody scratched three times against the wall adjoining my room.
Thereafter the institution became merely another building in which we were obliged to discover one another. We met behind the laundry, beneath staircases, in storage rooms and unused corridors, and most often near the bathing rooms after the attendants had gone, where steam remained trapped against the stone and the smell of soap, minerals, and damp skin lingered in the air. We kissed beside the great copper tubs with our clothes still half wet from washing; we passed notes through cracks in masonry; once she folded a ribbon she had worn around her throat into one of my clean shirts in the laundry, knowing I would recognize it by the orange-flower perfume and the faint smell of her skin.
There was also Odette. Odette belonged to the women’s side of the house and had black hair so glossy it appeared almost blue beneath lamplight. She fastened it tightly behind her head, giving her otherwise handsome face a severe, somewhat wounded expression. I had spoken with her perhaps half a dozen times, generally after chapel or while waiting outside the physician’s room. She was clever in a dry way, and I laughed with her easily enough.
Marielle noticed every conversation, and she soon began referring to Odette as your widow, a phrase whose origin neither of us could explain, and watched her thereafter with the meticulous hostility ordinarily reserved for an insect one intends eventually to crush.
One night I woke and found Marielle standing beside my bed. Her linen chemise had been torn loose at one shoulder. Blood had dried beneath her nose and across her chin in almost black scales; one eye had begun to swell, her bare feet were filthy from the corridor, and her hands shook without cessation. From the wet linen between her thighs came the acrid ammoniac odor which told me, before she admitted it, that she had pissed herself. She had fought Odette.
The quarrel, as Marielle later related it, had begun because Odette caught her staring and finally asked whether she intended to glare at her until one of them died. Marielle replied with something obscene. Odette laughed and told her that perhaps she ought to worry less about other women and more about whether I would eventually grow tired of being guarded like stolen property.
Marielle told her to be quiet, and Odette did not.
She said I came to speak with her willingly when Marielle was elsewhere. She said I laughed with her. Then she claimed that I had once told her Marielle would exhaust herself, and probably me as well, before winter.
Whether I ever said precisely this I cannot now remember. I may have said something near enough to it that Odette found the alteration irresistible — Marielle struck her.
Odette, who was taller, stronger, and apparently more competent at violence, struck back with greater effect. What followed was an ugly confusion of fingers, hair, teeth, linen, blood, and panic. By the time the attendants separated them, Marielle had split Odette’s lip with her teeth, torn a black handful of hair from somewhere above her ear, bitten through the inside of her own cheek, and become so frightened by the violence she herself had initiated that her bladder emptied down her legs. She recounted all this with a curious precision, almost as though giving evidence against herself.
Then she asked whether Odette had told the truth.
“Which part?”
“That you like speaking to her.”
I told her that I sometimes spoke to Odette because we lived in the same building and possessed language.
Marielle stared at me.
I told her, more plainly, that I did not want Odette.
“And did you say I exhaust you?”
I considered lying, decided uncertainty was safer, and told her that if I had said it I had meant only that loving her required more energy than most occupations.
This was apparently acceptable.
Some of the rigidity went out of her body at once. She looked suddenly exhausted, very small beneath the torn linen and dried blood, and embarrassed now in a way I had rarely seen her embarrassed by anything. The bravado had gone out of her. She would not look directly at me; she kept rubbing one dirty bare foot over the other and tugging uselessly at the wet linen clinging between her thighs, as though she might somehow conceal from me the fact that she had been frightened enough to piss herself.
I loved her terribly then.
Not because she had attacked Odette—there was nothing especially admirable in that—but because beneath all the spectacle she had come to me frightened and ashamed, carrying the childish certainty that one conversation with another woman might cause me to cease loving her. Marielle, who could steal without remorse, lie without preparation, bite through another person’s lip and laugh while adults shouted at her, had been reduced by jealousy to this trembling, sweet, mortified creature standing beside my bed and waiting to learn whether she had finally made herself unbearable.
She had not.
I pulled her beneath the blankets with me.
For a while she resisted being held, principally because she was conscious of the smell of urine and kept apologizing for it in increasingly irritated whispers. Eventually exhaustion defeated embarrassment. She folded herself against my chest, put her face beneath my chin, and permitted me to hold her there.
I remember the weight of her more clearly than almost anything else from that night. Her body gradually ceased trembling; her breathing lengthened; occasionally she made a small congested sound because the blood drying beneath her nose made breathing difficult. I stroked the dirty-blond hair away from her face and watched the swollen eye darken by degrees. She looked very young in appearance when she slept, the babyish roundness returning as soon as her expressions stopped interfering with it, and this made the dried blood across her mouth seem somehow more obscene.
I held her until the urine-soaked linen had gone cold against us, until the blood from her cheek had transferred itself to my pillow, and until the institution settled into that peculiar nocturnal silence belonging to places where many people sleep behind locked doors.
We were discovered at dawn. Marielle received the punishment first. Two matrons took her to the disciplinary room, removed her outer clothes, leaving only her linen chemise, bent her across a padded bench, and birched the backs of her thighs and buttocks until the skin rose in parallel welts. I heard several of the strokes from the corridor. She refused them the satisfaction of crying loudly. My own punishment was three days in isolation on bread, broth, and water, with the shutters fastened and every removable object taken from the room.
When I saw Marielle again, she lowered herself into a chair with exquisite caution and informed me that we were leaving. We had already spoken for weeks about running away together, though our plans possessed approximately the economic sophistication one might expect from two people who believed sheets tied into knots constituted transportation. Marielle proposed Lyon once and Rouen twice; I preferred anywhere reached by enough roads that nobody could retrieve us before supper. We imagined cheap rooms, false names, mornings in which neither of us would be accounted for by anybody, and possessed not the slightest sensible notion of what any of these things cost.
Thus escape ceased to be one of our private fantasies and became an undertaking. We stole sheets from the laundry and spent two nights knotting and testing them. On the third, while evening prayers occupied most of the attendants, we fastened the resulting rope to an iron bedstead beneath an upper window and began descending.
The operation was humiliatingly difficult. The knots tightened beneath our weight until they burned the palms; lime and stone scraped skin from my knuckles; Marielle lost one shoe somewhere between the second floor and the ground, and halfway down an attendant opened a neighboring window, understood at once what the dangling sheets signified, and began shouting that two patients were escaping. Other windows opened. Faces appeared against dark glass and between shutters; somebody began ringing a bell; doors slammed somewhere inside the building. Marielle, hanging below me with her hair loose and one stocking torn, looked upward and began laughing so violently that I had to hiss at her to keep moving before she brought us both down. We reached the ground, crossed the garden, climbed the wall badly, and ran until neither of us possessed enough breath for speech.
For several hours we believed ourselves magnificently free. By the time darkness had properly settled, however, the defects in our plan had become difficult to ignore. Between us we possessed a handful of livres and smaller coins, my coat, one stolen comb, Marielle’s remaining shoe, and no dependable means of acquiring anything else. A room required money. Food required money. Coaches required quantities which seemed personally insulting. We walked until the streets became unfamiliar and then discovered that unfamiliarity itself was expensive. By morning we were wet, hungry, exhausted, and arguing over whether purchasing bread constituted extravagance.
The grand scheme of another city contracted first into another district, thereafter into the possibility of sleeping in a stable, and finally into the humiliating recognition that we had prepared admirably for leaving the house and scarcely at all for remaining gone. We returned separately.
Marielle’s return produced the greater spectacle. Madame Valette had learned of the escape before midnight. The house of confinement had dispatched a messenger almost as soon as the alarm was raised that patients were escaping, and by morning she had servants, acquaintances, and one particularly useless cousin searching roads in several directions. Consequently, when Marielle finally appeared at home in one shoe, mud to her knees, and with the expression of somebody returning late from an inconvenient errand, her mother had already passed through terror and arrived at fury.
She seized Marielle by both shoulders, kissed her forehead, struck her once across the cheek, then embraced her so violently that Marielle complained she could not breathe. Wicked, diseased, ungrateful, beloved, impossible—Madame Valette called her all of these things in such rapid succession that the words ceased to contradict one another. Marielle was confined to her room for several days, deprived of visitors, watched by servants, and thereafter permitted downstairs only under supervision. Yet beneath all the punishment there remained unmistakable relief. Madame Valette had recovered her catastrophe. The household could once again arrange itself around her.
My own return was considerably less theatrical, though the news had preceded me as well. A messenger from the institution had arrived at my parents’ house during the night with the information that I and another patient had escaped by an upper window. By morning the story had already enlarged in transmission: we had stolen horses; we had assaulted an attendant; Marielle was pregnant; I had set fire to the laundry. None of these things was true, which scarcely mattered. Servants had heard. Neighbors had heard the servants. Relations began making inquiries with the false delicacy peculiar to people who already know the answer and wish chiefly to hear you lie about it.
Thus when I came home, wet, hungry, mud dried to my stockings, I did not encounter surprise. I encountered the exhausted aftermath of several hours in which my parents had already imagined my corpse in every ditch between Paris and whatever imaginary province Marielle and I had intended to conquer.
“Was any of it true?”
I knew immediately what he meant.
I told him no.
My mother stopped eating.
He asked whether I had fabricated the voices, Saint Denis, the messages from God, the business with the candle, the kneeling in the courtyard—everything—in order to be sent to the same institution as Marielle.
I admitted that I had.
My father looked down at his plate.
My mother asked whether I understood what I had done to them, though by them she did not mean merely herself and my father. She meant the family entire: the name, the household, the servants who had seen physicians coming and going, the acquaintances who now knew their son had been shut in a madhouse, the relations to whom carefully incomplete explanations had been supplied, and now the additional humiliation of my having escaped from the place in company with a young woman whose own family was already spoken about with sufficient interest. Madness, had it been genuine, might at least have been pitied. There were prescribed expressions for misfortune. One could lower one’s voice, mention illness, permit people to call the whole thing tragic. Fraud offered no such courtesy. One could hardly send calling cards explaining that the family lunatic had only been pretending.
They had already paid the physician, endured the humiliation of my confinement, received notice of my escape, and spent a night wondering whether I had drowned in a ditch somewhere between Paris and whatever imaginary province Marielle and I had intended to conquer. Added to this was the slower injury of gossip, which had already carried the story beyond our household and would presumably continue improving it in our absence. My mother seemed less frightened by any single rumor than by the prospect that our name might remain attached to all of them after the truth itself had ceased to interest anyone.
My father asked what precisely I imagined would become of me if I continued arranging my life according to Marielle’s catastrophes. I had no useful answer.
For several days they addressed me with baffled caution and a sort of mortified civility, as though I were both their son and an embarrassing guest whose departure date remained uncertain. My mother asked whether I had eaten. My father asked whether I intended to return to the academy. Neither asked whether I regretted anything, perhaps because the answer was visible enough.
Then the disturbance simply thinned out. Meals resumed. Servants stopped watching me. My father returned to his papers. My mother ceased examining my face for evidence of another religious revelation. They did not forgive me so much as grow tired of maintaining the degree of attention required for anger. This was considerably less satisfying than punishment.
Marielle’s family punished her because they remained furiously invested in what she might become. Mine appeared chiefly relieved that I had returned alive, ashamed of the spectacle, and thereafter anxious to make the entire affair socially nonexistent.
Marielle and I resumed seeing one another secretly.
Nine months is not a long life when measured by ordinary arithmetic, yet ours seemed to contain an extravagant quantity of existence. There had been a world before Marielle and then a world whose geography had reorganized itself around her: school corridors, wine shops, the house of confinement, alleys, gardens, all acquiring significance according to whether she had once stood there, laughed there, bled there, stolen something there, or dragged me by the sleeve into some new stupidity.
Then came the afternoon with the preserved fruit and the green confectionery and the physician who arrived too late.
Now, lying upon the grave with rain entering my collar and my blood sinking through the new earth, I remember not merely her face but the succession of odors by which I knew her: powder in her hair, smoke caught in her sleeves, the iron sweetness of menstrual blood in the school privy, wet linen beside the bathing room, urine and dried blood on the night she came to my bed, orange-flower water her mother insisted she wear, and finally that strange saccharine breath in the minutes before her throat closed.
I press my face farther into the soil until grains collect against my teeth.
The physician called her death an internal corruption because he possessed no better language for it. Perhaps explanations are frequently no more than this: respectable names applied afterward to events which have already refused to be understood. He had his humors, his stomach, his poison. I have a green confection, an unremembered ingredient, and Marielle laughing through a throat which was killing her.
What actually happened remains disorderly. She ate something harmless to everyone else; her lips swelled; her tongue became useless; she clawed crescents into her own neck; foam collected at her mouth; she laughed because something about our horror amused her; thereafter men put her into a coffin, Madame Valette organized refreshments, and I spent the afternoon carrying a knife beneath my coat while pretending not to know what I intended to do with it.
By evening I knew.
The blood beneath me has grown cold enough that I can no longer distinguish it from rainwater except when another little warmth escapes the wounds. I think of all the places into which I followed Marielle simply because she had gone first: a privy, a wine shop, a madhouse, streets for which we possessed no money and no plan. There was, in retrospect, very little in our nine months together which I had not treated as an invitation to follow.
Her grave merely presented the first invitation for which there was no ordinary entrance.
