Jeanne Benameur
TRANS. BY Bill Johnston
The Child Who
In your head of a child there are sudden bright skies wrested from a low, lingering, unfathomable sadness. Your mother has disappeared. Never mind that she was never entirely present, it was her smell, her warmth, her silent hands that you relied on to feel that you truly existed.
Now you get by as you can. Astride a ridge. On one side, your father shouting. On the other, silence. A sheer drop.
Your whole life from now perched on the brink of something that has no name. Your place in the world has contracted. Will it shrink even further? Will you have to reduce yourself to a line, to a single point, in order to stay there at all? You don’t yet know the paintings by the Chinese masters, the ink laid down by the brush, barely a stroke, only emptiness besides. If you’d seen them you’d know that now, that is you.
Yet there’s your body. Even if you’re learning to breathe while letting the least amount of air possible enter between your ribs. All your bones are in there. As long as life is in there, they will resist. You can’t do anything about your bones. You sense this failure, and you sense dully, even deeper within yourself, that it was your mother’s failure before you.
Stand still, don’t be afraid of the abyss. Time will pass. You can rock slowly, gently. Sunlight won’t enter the kitchen till midday, until then you can stay in the brightness filtered by the tall trees, with part of the night still about you, calming you. I see you, standing at the window, your gaze elsewhere, or sitting at the table in front of your little blue bowl.
You’re alone the way someone in a painting can be.
I’d like to lay my hand on your hair. If I close my eyes I can feel its softness, even though no comb can cope with your tangled curls. The palm of my hand grazes against them. You might think it’s just a draft blowing through the ill-fitting windows.
You continue your contemplation. A leaf brought all the way to earth by a gust of wind, the dust hovering in the light, which reaches right to the corner of your eye. With your fingertip, on the windowpane you follow a path that only you can make out.
The unhurried movement of things calls to you.
And I know that, soundlessly, you’re about to set out.
Your grandmother is singing to herself behind the house, in the yard. Your grandmother is always singing, and you like the sound she makes. Clinging to her hip, you let it enter all the way into your chest. Her humming joins with your own breathing, gradually opening up your gaze, your chest of a child. Then you can hear the river flowing far over yonder. Even if everyone says it’s impossible to hear the river from so far away, I know you can hear it. You hold on tight to the apron.’
All at once you feel the insistent call. Run. Quick, quick. Your feet dash out onto the path and you’re gone.
Your grandmother is taken aback. She can no longer feel your head under her arm. You’ve flown. She’ll never manage to grasp the exact moment. You leave her standing there, her arms dangling. It takes her by surprise every time. Jostling in her head are the words Don’t be home too late. Where are you going now? Watch out for your father if you come back covered in mud! So many things that have to be said to children. But you.
You’re running. You’re running. So no eyes should have the time to see you, so your face should not be captured by anyone’s gaze. How long has it been since your mother’s eyes last rested on you? How long since there’s been no mother? The calendar counts in days in months in years. But you, you don’t know. You exist only with darker moments and brighter moments. In your head, time finds a place where it can, the way that space threads its way among the trees in the woods.
Sometimes you lose your mother’s face. You haven’t yet learned to find it in a faraway icon, near a deep blue sea, looking up tenderly in a painting of the Italian Renaissance. You’re thrown into a panic. I hear your breathing. It bumps up against something hard in your chest. You run. You struggle against the hard thing in there, a rock. Between your ribs the air is constricted, it whistles. At such times you feel you’re still alive. From the pain. It’s a tough method, but it’s the only one you possess.
Your grandmother’s eyes are still turned towards where you disappeared. The words she didn’t manage to say to you flutter about her, disperse, find nowhere to settle, go astray. And she’s no longer able to return to her chores.
She needs a little time to find her head again, as she puts it.
You’re already far away.
How can a child like you be protected?
When you come back your father will again shout What’s to be done with him? Eh?
Then he’ll bang something on the wooden tabletop, his fist or the tobacco tin, so the sound will continue to resonate when he stops shouting. He needs that. After that he’ll mumble some indistinct words, let his rage make a ball of sound closer and closer to his mouth. Then no more. He’ll get up, slam the door. The sounds of outside will be enough for him to put away his shouting. When he walks, his silence will weigh heavily.
Where have you run to?
Will he lose you, too, one day?
You stop running only when you hear, right by you, the panting of the dog. The dog always finds you, you don’t know how. You’ve no idea where he comes from. He has no leash, no collar. Quite simply, at a certain point he’s there. He walks next to you and you sense his presence even without having to look. You don’t stroke him right away. You wait. When the dog passes you and sits down in the middle of the path, that’s the moment.
You drop down to his level, and you stare at him, eye to eye. Time is needed for the dog to enter your head of a child. The second you feel him quiver, sometimes as lightly as the faintest breath of air, you stand up again. You’re no longer alone. And your body no longer weighs you down.
It’s not you who strokes the dog, it’s the dog that slides his big head beneath your hand of a child.
The two of you walk on.
It’s as if you were holding hands with someone.
Anyone who saw you, though, would see a child walking all alone, one hand stroking the shadows.
Now your grandmother is watching the clouds as they pass on their strange journeys just above the house.
She breathes in the fresh smell of the laundry that’s not completely dry, just right for ironing. She hugs it a little closer to her chest. The freshness of the fabric mingles with the freshness in the crook of her neck, with the journey of the clouds above her. Now they’ve passed the roof of the house. They move away. She tells herself that she’ll do the same, one day.
Your father’s calves are are heavy from work. He moves incautiously into the day as it repeats its chores, one by one, the same as always. The child that you are is a puzzle to him. He was unable to keep your mother. She was a stranger. He may not even have wanted to, deep down.
Let her be uprooted from his life the way she’d entered it, all at once! Let this desire that keeps him caged in be uprooted too! Her absence doesn’t even set him free. It growls like an animal. The opaqueness of his own desire scares him.
A vagabond, she was. But do vagabonds leave traces? He still has the strange drawing she scribbled before she left. He’s never shown it to anyone. Sometimes, when he’s all alone he unfolds it again, studies it. Nothing. It’s no use turning the paper this way and that. He doesn’t understand what she left him. Then, each time he sees once more the moment he met your mother.
One day the truck driver who delivers your father’s fine carpentry to his clients had suggested they ride together with the latest order as far as a fair in a town some way away, that he’d never even heard of before. He hesitated. But the other man pressed him, and your grandmother nodded her approval. Your father had been too much alone since the death of his fiancée, a nice girl from the village who’d been carried off by a bad sickness the previous winter. Your father had stopped going to dances, to social gatherings. He needed new activities, that’s what everyone thought. The truck driver urged him again. He got in. He spent the whole journey gazing at the changing landscape. The trees were no longer the same.
So that’s what fate is? A person climbs into a truck at dawn after drinking a strong coffee and sets off. Then, on a market square ten times bigger than anything he’s ever seen before, he finds himself in a crowd of people milling about and talking and shouting, slapping each other on the back, fingering the merchandise, sizing up the workmanship, haggling over prices. He couldn’t make head or tail of it. The truck driver had gone off on his business. Your father walked around at random. It was a bad idea to come, he was saying to himself. He wasn’t used to this.
Fate wore a long faded red skirt, and her hair was pinned up on one side only, as if she hadn’t had time to finish the job. She was walking along with others like her, hips swinging slowly, with a bold gaze.
Traveling women. Women with no name that can be pronounced. And maybe lives that cannot be pronounced either.
He didn’t pull back his hand when she took it, palm upwards. The other vagabond women stopped other men here and there, looked in their hands too and said things in return for coins. They laughed among themselves or with others. This woman though, she didn’t laugh, she didn’t smile.
Perhaps that’s what fate is, a woman who isn’t smiling, who’s silent in the midst of all the noise. An island.
The hand of the woman who’d taken his hand, had turned it upwards, was like touching snow the first few times it falls. Icy and burning. It’s impossible to tell one kind of burning from the other. His own hand was trembling. Since the death of his fiancée, this was the first time another woman had touched him; he wanted to run away as fast as possible and he wanted just as much to keep feeling the double opposing sensations of burning. Two insistent desires at the same time. Was that what it was to be alive? His stomach was aching and he could hear the blood beating in his temples. His blood that weighed so heavily. He could rely only on his legs, which were still steady, as if his legs alone were still capable of bringing him back to the safe world of before. But he remained motionless. Like a tree.
For a long time she studied the hardened palm, the hard calloused fingers, their shape fitted for the use of tools. She didn’t once raise her eyes to look into his face. And that was good. Her eyes, the color of dark clouds, he’d discovered later, when she took him aside under the trees in a wood, and he’d suddenly smelled the sap and felt a burning sensation, this time inside his belly, his sex, his head. His heart was not bold and had not budged. But his entire body had wanted the woman in the faded red skirt. And that was how she had entered into his life. He hadn’t made any decisions, not at all. It had happened and that was that. He had no explanation to offer. Not to the truck driver, who asked no questions but stopped making jokes on the return trip, with the woman in the cab next to them, nor to the people in the village who would always move aside as she passed, nor to his own mother. Not to himself.
The shouting had entered the house along with the woman. He’d started to shout, as if at moments his entire being rejected her. Because no, he hadn’t chosen her. He’d just wanted her. Because he understood nothing of this desire that had overcome him, yet he wanted her all the same. Again and again.
As for her, she didn’t know the language of these parts and didn’t even try to learn it. She kept silent but she stayed. He didn’t know why she stayed.
That was how you were born. Torn from your father’s shouts and the silence of your mother. In your mother’s belly you learned the violence of living.
Since she disappeared you’ve felt the need to run.
The dog is trotting next to you. No one aside from you can see him, this dog. But you don’t know that. His presence by your side sets your mind at ease. He’s strong, and can smell things that you can’t see. You can push ahead with your journey. Your woolen top always hangs down on one side, “you’ve buttoned Monday with Tuesday,” your grandmother says. You don’t entirely understand what that means. It’s just that the days no longer know how to follow one another. You’re a child who leans. The dog restores the balance.
At times a burst of joy moves through you. You don’t know where it comes from. It’s the morning lark that finds its rising flight in you. From your feet to your head and much higher than your head, an irrepressible surge lifts you up. There’s no reason for the joy. It carries you. And you move forward.
The dog goes on ahead, runs among the trees, comes back. The dog lives with every blade of grass. Then he sticks his big head under your hand again. You smile.
At such moments you even forget that you’re breathing; you’re free, so free that a song rises to your throat. To begin with it’s like a dull growl. It might sound frightening. An animal, perhaps, unknown to humans. One that had never allowed any sound to reach the air. The sounds contained in its body, just beneath its skin its plumage its scales, which might suddenly be searching for an exit. Your whole being is quivering from this growl that comes from the earth from roots from all that life and death have buried so deep and that is rising within you.
You come to a halt. Your breath expands. Your belly your lungs your whole body no longer has any age. A song like this cannot be endured by a child’s chest. You steady your feet against the earth. Then you stamp on the ground slowly. Right foot. Left foot. Hard. Again. And again. You’ve seen your mother do this. She took you into the woods and she danced. Your whole body remembers that of your mother and her long faded red skirt. She spun around. Your mother spins still behind your eyelids.
The rhythm of all those who have breathed on this path on all paths enters through the soles of your feet.
Nothing that has once been human is lost. Ever.
You form one body with the dust of all paths. Your head is a drum resounding from a thousand strong, agile fingers. You tip your head back. Eyes wide open, you see the highest branches of the trees. You see every detail of their leaves as if they were an arm’s length away. Your gaze loses itself amid all the greens and then, higher still, the blue of the sky.
Your singing grows in strength.
Your singing relieves you of all gazes all shouts all silences.
Your life can join together with any other life. You merge with all that lives all that dies. You form a part. Time no longer exists.
You’re not aware that one day someone heard you. A hunter who was tracking a beast for its skin. At first the hunter thought it was one of those little-known birds that arrive then leave again at the secret signs of the first cold. Birds that had never been seen before were sometimes spotted in that region. They were talked about at the café afterwards.
Your singing brought him to a stop. It was like something calling to the deepest part of him, in a wild, unfamiliar place in his own being. And he was afraid. Afraid in a way that still makes him ashamed today. He thought it isn’t human.
Yet he saw that you were merely a child on the path, head tipped back and eyes lost in space. A child all alone in the woods. Singing. He’d recognized the carpenter’s son, otherwise he would have thought it was an apparition. He fled.
What had happened? He’d been filled with turmoil. He forgot that he was holding a gun, that he was tracking a beast which had almost been within range. His dog pressed silently against his leg. Its coat had bristled as if another, more powerful animal had been near, but he hadn’t growled. He’d only pressed against the hunter’s leg, forming a single body with everything that within him was sagging toward the earth, meeting roots and entrails of beasts and men deep, deep down.
The hunter had turned around, disappeared toward the village.
That evening he’d wanted to tell his wife about it, in the darkness of their warm bed. But something had held back his voice. A sense of shame that was at once deep and sweet, like we have as children when confronted with the proof of what we will never attain, when we feel that the dreams of the world are much too vast for us to carry them on our heads. That we’ll never manage it. For certain. And that deep down we know that our parents couldn’t carry them either, nor our parents’ parents, and so it goes on this earth.
But you, you bore everything on your head. Alone. Because without knowing it you’d come to terms with all the darkness beneath your feet.
The man has never spoken of it but sometimes, at night, when he’s unable to enter into sleep, he again hears you singing deep inside himself.
Jeanne Benameur is a French novelist, playwright, and poet. She has received numerous prizes, including the UNICEF Prize for her 1999 novella Les demeurées (The Idiot Women) and the Jackie-Bouquin Literary Prize for her 2015 novel Ôtages intimes (Intimate Hostages). L’enfant qui (The Child Who, 2017) is forthcoming in English from Calypso Editions; the excerpt published in this issue marks Benameur’s first appearance in English.
Bill Johnston translates from Polish and French. His awards include the 2012 Best Translated Book Award and PEN Translation Prize for Wiesław Myśliwski’s novel Stone Upon Stone, and the 2016 Found in Translation Award for Tomasz Różycki’s Twelve Stations. His most recent translation is Julia Fiedorczuk’s Oxygen (2017). He teaches at Indiana University.