went again to the village fair. I conceived of the notion that I should never get away from here, and oddly enough as my despair deepened, so my usefulness increased.
I alone put the fear of God into the servants or tenants by the time I was eighteen. I alone provided the food for us. And for some strange reason this gave me satisfaction. I don't know why, but I liked to sit at the table and reflect that everyone there was eating what I had provided.
So these moments had bound me to my mother. These moments had given us a love for each other unnoticed and probably unequaled in the lives of those around us.
And now she had come to me at this odd time, when for reasons I didn't understand myself, I could not endure the company of any other person.
With my eyes on the fire, I barely saw her climb up and sink down into the straw mattress beside me.
Silence. Just the crackling of the fire, and the deep respiration of the sleeping dogs beside me.
Then I glanced at her, and I was vaguely startled.
She'd been ill all winter with a cough, and now she looked truly sickly, and her beauty, which was always very important to me, seemed vulnerable for the first time.
Her face was angular and her cheekbones perfect, very high and broadly spaced but delicate. Her jaw line was strong yet exquisitely feminine. And she had very clear cobalt blue eyes fringed with thick ashen lashes.
If there was any flaw in her it was perhaps that all her features were too small, too kittenish, and made her look like a girl. Her eyes became even smaller when she was angry, and though her mouth was sweet, it often appeared hard. It did not turn down, it wasn't twisted in any way, it was like a little pink rose on her face. But her cheeks were very smooth and her face narrow, and when she looked very serious, her mouth, without changing at all, looked mean for some reason.
Now she was slightly sunken. But she still looked beautiful to me. She still was beautiful. I liked looking at her. Her hair was full and blond, and that I had inherited from her.
In fact I resemble her at least superficially. But my features are larger, cruder, and my mouth is more mobile and can be very mean at times. And you can see my sense of humor in my expression, my capacity for mischievousness and near hysterical laughing, which I've always had no matter how unhappy I was. She did not laugh often. She could look profoundly cold. Yet she had always a little girl sweetness.
Well, I looked at her as she sat on my bed -- I even stared at her, I suppose -- and immediately she started to talk to me.
"I know how it is," she said to me. "You hate them. Because of what you've endured and what they don't know. They haven't the imagination to know what happened to you out there on the mountain."
I felt a cold delight in these words. I gave her the silent acknowledgment that she understood it perfectly.
"It was the same the first time I bore a child," she said. "I was in agony for twelve hours, and I felt trapped in the pain, knowing the only release was the birth or my own death. When it was over, I had your brother Augustin in my arms, but I didn't want anyone else near me. And it wasn't because I blamed them. It was only that I'd suffered like that, hour after hour, that I'd gone into the circle of hell and come back out. They hadn't been in the circle of hell. And I felt quiet all over. In this common occurrence, this vulgar act of giving birth, I understood the meaning of utter loneliness."
"Yes, that's it," I answered. I was a little shaken.
She didn't respond. I would have been surprised if she had. Having said what she'd come to say, she wasn't going to converse, actually. But she did lay her hand on my forehead -- very unusual for her to do that -- and when she observed that I was wearing the same bloody hunting clothes after all this time, I noticed it too, and realized the sickness of it.
She was silent for a while.
And as I sat there, looking past her at the fire, I wanted to tell her a lot of things, how