A Perfect Hatred
CHAPTER ONE: Where I Sit, and Where I Rise
They lit bonfires up on the hills when I was born, up on the hills east of the house where cattle were grazed in summer and where at that time of year there was nothing but dry cold earth that crunched underfoot and left the skeletons of grass roots exposed waiting for rain. It was the time for bonfires anyway, but the women lit them the day I was born, and it was branches of lemon and bergamot and dried bay leaves that were burned instead of garden rubbish. My mother couldn’t see the bonfires from her bed, so they fixed up a sofa on the terrace, and my father and eldest brother carried her there suspended on a dressing gown, and then Nanny came and dumped bear furs on her, and then they discovered she couldn’t see anything from the sofa anyway because of the sycamore tops. The smoke wasn’t even burning in the direction of the house -- it snaked south towards the stables, heavy enough to make the horses’ eyes water. Tom told me this. For the next baby, they had the bonfires down in the courtyard right below Mother’s room, but the lemon trees hadn’t grown back enough to make a large fire, so Mother’s eyes didn’t tear and the new baby didn’t cough. I don’t remember. I wasn’t at home then.
Mother had an arrangement with a collier’s widow named Bellmarie, who had a number of grown daughters, one of whom was likely to be in milk at any given time. Each of us children spent the first few years of our lives up there along the timberline, high in the cold air. My father’s stable master, a man named Aubin, came to fetch me home a week or two before my fifth birthday.
I was chasing Bellmarie’s goat around the well, a little gray one with a milky blind eye and a habit of tossing her head like a nervous girl -- I suppose she must have felt like things were sneaking up on her. A stranger stopped at our gate and called Bellmarie by name. The goat and I scrambled over each other to get out of sight. Aubin was very crooked from being kicked by so many horses and cattle, so he looked good against Bellmarie’s fence-in-progress, which was being made from many kinds of wood supplied by her sons-in-law and nailed together herself on days she was angry. She came out of the house at a dead run and was complaining at the man before she reached the gate to let him and his mule into the yard. The mule surprised me, since I hadn’t seen it with him in the lane, and he didn’t seem a big enough man to hide a mule behind his back. He tied it to one of the poplars and followed Bellmarie into the house. When the door closed, I pushed the goat out of my lap and ran up the back slope, intending to hide in the fir plantation behind the nearest neighbor until the visit blew over.
Instead, Bellmarie sent Martin after me. Martin was fourteen then, the last of her children at home. He caught me on the back fence and dragged me flailing and biting to the poplar stand. The mule carried two big wicker baskets, one on each side. Martin heaved me over the lip of the nearest. I roared and kicked but couldn’t get righted -- the basket was too narrow. Outside, Martin was laughing fit to strangle himself. The mule eased sideways, and my heart leapt at the thought it might kick -- kick Martin, in the mouth if there was a saint in heaven to hear me. Two hands, hairy and spotted ginger, reached in and pulled me up to sit. “Come now, Mademoiselle Magdalena, you’ll make us all think you don’t want to go home.” He had moved me quite gently, but the shock of the big hands under my arms so sudden, and seeing Bellmarie so close but not picking me up or scolding me or getting me something to eat -- for the first time I became genuinely afraid. Since I’d already been screaming with all my might, trying to cry louder made me choke and bark with the effort to keep my throat open enough for breathing too. Then Bellmarie seemed to shake herself awake, chased the goat out of the bucket and brought back a dipperful of water to sprinkle in my face. Aubin disappeared to the far side of the mule.
I don’t know why I stopped crying, but it pleased her so much when I did. She cupped my hot swollen face with one hand while the other worried at the mule’s bridle buckles as if they were weeds. “Are you sure there isn’t time to give her a bath, Monsieur Aubin?”
He had already untied and turned the mule’s head. “I suppose if they had wanted to get back a princess, they would have sent her to a castle.”
When we had passed out of the range of Bellmarie’s house, Aubin began to sing to himself, or to the mule, in a dialect I didn’t understand. It was hot, very hot for that time of year, and no other creatures moved but us. The road was white and chalky, with all the stones that had tumbled from the verges through the summer littering the lane. My head ached, and I was thirsty, but I was too tired to cry more -- it was all I could do to keep the dazing, crisp landscape in focus. We passed some little stone huts, all dark inside, with clumps of firs standing well away from the road. Aubin wore a clay-colored hat that had an uncanny resistance to dust -- the wicker basket, the mule, my clothes and skin, all were coated with it. My arm looked like the moon.
Aubin switched to singing in Navarrese, out of politeness, I guess, or because he’d exhausted his repertoire in the other dialect. At a cowgate, he stopped and gave me a mouthful of hot red wine, not watered at all, which I liked, but he wouldn’t let me have any more. The mule tilted back its head to let Aubin squirt from another wineskin into its mouth. When I clamored, he gave me a mouthful of that wine too -- white halfway to vinegar, the stuff a sensible person cleans windows or shoes with. Aubin paid no attention to my screams, bending down to check the mule’s feet one by one. He straightened and cricked the bones in his back and neck. “There’s home, Mademoiselle,” he gestured into the haze that covered the valley. “Home and supper, not too far now.” I couldn’t see a thing.
I fell asleep before long and woke with my head aching worse than ever. The mule was clumping down an avenue of sycamores with the hopeful swing of an animal within scent of its bed and bucket. The curly heads of the trees caught the evening damp rising out of the ground and knit it into a thin mist. Nearby was a sound of water and the cries of waterfowl sporting in it, which sounded both ghostly and homelike at once. The sycamore lane opened into a paved courtyard, fronting a long building beamed with Palestinian cedar and plastered drab green in the Italian manner. Of course I didn’t know anything about Palestinian cedar or Italian plaster then; I didn’t know Mother had brought Italian decorating, Chinese cloth, Basque cookery and a Mussulman bathhouse to Les Malineux, giving scandal to every family in the valley until they realized how pretty and convenient it all was. What I saw was a big dark house, the biggest building I’d ever been near, and decided it must be a cathedral. I felt very pleased and excited. At Bellmarie’s, I’d often been told that I would go home one day, but somehow her fluster about how to get down into town for communion before year’s end had stuck with me better.
Aubin wavered for a moment at the front door, but then led us around to the back. All the lower rooms, from entry to pantry, were one-colored, the color of the inside of a drinking jar, with some darker woods among the furniture, and somber Franciscan and Moorish brocades -- very dignified, and every afternoon in the world cool as a cellar. Through the upper windows you could hear laughter, and the trample of feet, and the squeal of instruments being handled by mischievous hands.
How much of this day I truly remember, and how much I was told of or remembered from when Francoise or Charles came home when I was older, I can’t say. Monsieur St. Demain and his wife were there, I’m sure, for their three half-grown daughters came down with Anne to the kitchen to watch me bathed. Jehanne took a wad of old serge and my head, and the scullery girl took a wad of serge and my feet, and between them they scoured every inch of me. Lord, how I screamed. The bath basin had been brought very close to the hearth so I shouldn’t suffer any change of temperature, but I must have been certain I was headed for soup. Jehanne sang as they dried me. It started out to be a song about the Christ child in Egypt, but as she went on and forgot lines that the scullery girl wasn’t able to supply, Jehanne filled in with curses about a cat she schemed to kill because it kept kittening in the flour sacks. (For some years after, I held some unusual notions about Herod and the Holy Innocents.) Jehanne had a loud voice and sang with a great deal of expression, which is what children like, so the scullery girl was able to untangle my hair without too much bloodshed.
A red walking dress with linen pantaloons had been sent down to dress me in. All I needed, Jehanne said, was a tasseled cap and a bristly moustache to be a perfect miniature Turk.
Anne and her friends had long ago wandered off, so Jehanne took me up herself. A brown wiry woman in a deerskin coat was chivvying guests and servants up and down the upper passages like a mountaineer’s dog. When she saw us, she wheeled back and raced to meet us at the head of the stairs. In a moment I was engulfed in her orange scent and lappets of black hair. “Oh, it’s Magda! Magda’s arrived! Look how big and lovely she is! Welcome, my daughter, come in and know us all.” This was when I realized where I was, and who she was. I had been told that my mother was beautiful, but never that she smelled so good.
She herded us in, stamping her high wooden pattens like hooves to block Jehanne’s retreat toward the stairs. First she introduced me to my brothers and sister -- Tom, all affability from the height of sixteen years and possession of one’s own guns and dogs; Gerard, cool and quiet, dark like me; then Anne, summoned up again like a genie in white and yellow ribbons. Without any visible cue from Mother, she held out her hand, politely ignoring my scruffiness, but I shrank back onto Jehanne’s skirts. Nanny and the housekeeper each had a few words of welcome. Then there were guests -- the St. Demains, a great-aunt on her way to Perpignan, friends of Mother -- schoolfriends from Pau, young mothers mostly, with advanced ideas and two or three fleshy Breton girls per infant bustling in the background. Precieuses, you’d call them today.
It was decreed that I would be put down for an hour or two before dinner, but I couldn’t have slept to save my life. Jehanne, who had by now obtained the character of my oldest and dearest friend in the house, was kept from the kitchen long enough to see me settled in my room. Aubin had brought up the sack of things Bellmarie sent with me. While Jehanne tried to interest me in some wooden toys, Mother examined each garment stitch by stitch. Very little of it survived scrutiny.
The trampling and laughing noises continued after they left me. I tried to lie quietly, but finally got up and tiptoed out into the hall. All the windows on that side of the house were low and wide. I pushed open the nearest one, northeast where the bulk of Les Malineux lay.
A darker slit of trees marked where the Gave ran, cutting swift and deep through the limestone soil. Its underground veins fed the pavement of green that stretched miles in three directions.
Most of the wealth of our land lay in timber -- fir, for the most part, but also some fancy woods for carpentry -- laurel, cedar, spicewood and the like. Someone told me the army – God knows which one – burnt the orchards all to the ground, the same year we left France. When I remember them, my first day at home, I remember how endless they seemed, an ocean of green. Beyond them, there was some grazing in the hills south of Tressoeurs, but we didn’t raise much more cattle and sheep than for our own household and dependents -- the hills wouldn’t support it. Still, there were plenty of pigs in the forests and fowl along the river grass, and a very dazzling, highly honored collection of white hens behind the kitchen gardens. Father liked fine horses too -- he imported them from Spain. “Vain as women,” he said when they minced and coquetted with the wind of a morning. “Vain as Spaniards,” Tom retorted. It was he who found me there at the window and brought me down to dinner.
The meal was truly magnificent. There was a shiny roasted pig, half a hind, a huge platter of plaice and oranges, very cunningly arranged and very beautiful, but no one touched it since the fish had come overland from the coast without salt, and they reeked. The St. Demain girls performed some dances. I sat on the lap of the schoolfriend to Mother’s right, so she could feed me with her own hands -- which she did until I couldn’t open my mouth, and the front of my dress was splotched like a leopard skin with pig grease.
I fell asleep several times during the meal and the music that followed; by the time I was carried up to bed by one of the servants, I was getting wakeful again. I began to feel that I hadn’t explored the room enough while it was light, though I was too frightened to get off the bed now.
The room was on the darker, cooler north end of the house, with two long narrow windows in the northernmost wall. My bed was pushed up under one of them. Under the other was an empty bed, where Francoise would be installed next year. (Being supposed to be more delicate, she was at nurse down the road with the woman who organized the hens -- Annette was her name, I think -- instead of up in the mountains as the rest of us had been or would be.) The mattress on the empty bed was rolled up and naked, which I found unsettling. The sheets on my bed were older linen, thinner and less rustling than the sheets on Bellmarie’s bed. Over them was a blanket of blue Berber wool; a rug of the same fabric, undyed, lay on the floor between the beds. The furniture -- table, chair and cupboard -- had been recently made from pine, so if you searched the joints very carefully, you could sometimes find a little knob of half-resinous sap to poke and roll with your fingertips. On the table was a dairy can of water and a little Moorish bowl with a black enamel pattern for washing. Another enamel bowl lay under the bed. Its use had been explained to me, with gestures, by Jehanne. I was quite disgusted and couldn’t imagine how I was going to manage until I learned to pass in and out of the house unnoticed. (Two weeks of winter, and the cold of the stone flagging on the ground floors, convinced me of the bowl-under-the-bed’s usefulness.)
That end of the house was very quiet, practically uninhabited, Mother preferring the livelier aspect of the southern rooms for entertaining, and the other older children vying for the remaining eastern rooms. Nanny didn’t sleep near us; she was Mother’s nanny, and looked after us as she’d looked after Mother’s underthings, cleaning and mending as necessary, though of course we required more looking after than laundry does. Tom had the nearest bedroom to Francoise and me, with an eye towards escaping the trample of Mother’s guests and their raptures over the morning views. So if I had a bad dream or a cough or an unfair scolding during the day, it was Tom who looked in on me at night. I suppose he checked me sometime that first night, but it was after I slept, because I heard nothing while I was awake, and I’d been listening hard. It may seem strange to think that, once visitors were in bed, a great estate could be so much quieter than a mountain cabin, but it was so. The animals were so close at Bellmarie’s, you could hear all their shifting and nocturnal grumbling to one another. Here I lay under the Berber wool in my fresh new nightdress thinking. My skin had got a little burnt on the journey downward today, and it was only now that I had leisure to notice it. The moonlight washing down onto my bed from the window will cool me, I thought. It was a good thought for sleep.