«Blood», extract no. 9

Le Regard Libre N° 33 - Sébastien Oreiller

Chapter II: The son's arrival (continued)

When he was back home, in the mother's pen, lying on his bed with the window open, asleep in the night currents, he thought about what he had to do. He thought back to the last few days he'd spent in their company, what he'd endured for her. How, to please her, he had accompanied the two detritus on a walk, how she had settled on the grass by the pond, in a white suit, almost transparent on the shore. The shade of the trees had drowned her. While she watched them, while the girls wandered around, collecting bunches of small orchids and gentians to decorate their rooms, they had bathed in this cold pond that descends from the mountains, soaking their impure flesh with the limpid current, under the mother's gaze. This water, he sensed, would soon stain the mountain slopes in a swift torrent, until it flowed into the river below, flooding the plain with their filth. The little people would quench their thirst with it. A germ would spread across the land, the germ of their contempt for her, while she buttered their toast and peeled their hard-boiled eggs. How could she love him without hating them? He who breathed the air of forests and bark, moss and field animals. He looked away into the depths and saw her reflection, beneath which lay, drowned, the youth he had sought.

So she had fled from him, climbed the steep slopes to the snowy solitudes where the sun is warmer. The thought made him shudder. Perhaps she'd thrown herself into that icy water, anesthetized by the cold, to drag herself into the abyss. He'd disgusted her. He would never see her again. Winter would soon make an icy coffin for her, and she would disappear into the mountains. It had all been his fault, ever since she'd arrived. Her presence, like summer perspiration, stuck to his skin, the pitch of needy flesh. He plunged into the water, his feet in the mire, to cleanse himself, but the poison of the other two, spilled into the pond, had already ravished his soul, and he emerged dirtier than ever. He wanted nothing more. He wanted to go home, with his brothers and sisters, his mother waiting for him, simple and strict, and get on with the last chores before winter. He wanted the smell of the fire, and the soup on the hearth, and the hard bread. But his youth was gone, in the water they had soiled. Surrounded by this impure race, always needy and endearing, she as much as the other two, locked up in this cold house with impenetrable walls, with the dead in their cellar. Meanwhile, while he sighed, she continued to peel eggs. Then night came again, and he remembered that he was home, sleeping in his old sheets washed by his mother's laborious hands at the fountain, that he would be putting on his father's old shoes the next day to go out to the fields, that he was home, that soon the strong smell of coffee would rouse him from his waking hours, and the cries of his brothers and sisters. He rolled over and went back to sleep.

When he woke up, his mother was dead.

Write to the author : sebastien.oreiller@netplus.ch

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