Free The Life of Elves by Muriel Barbery, Alison Anderson Page A

Angèle may have presumed very early on that Maria was cut from a magical cloth, since the events in the cluster of trees, Eugénie had, with growing intensity, also perceived as much. Early one morning as she was going down to the kitchen after her first prayers, she stopped short next to the big wooden table where they had their meals. The room was silent. The other old women were feeding the hens and milking the cows; the father had gone to inspect his orchards and Maria was still sleeping beneath the big red duvet. Eugénie was alone next to the table; on it there were only an earthenware coffee pot, a glass of water for a thirsty soul in the night, and three cloves of garlic left over from dinner. Her efforts to concentrate only conjured the very vision she wished to put out of her mind, then she relaxed and endeavored to forget what she was looking at.
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    She can see the table now as it was the night before; she was the last to leave, after snuffing out the lamp; she enjoys the silent peace of the room, still warm, where a happy family had its dinner not long since; her gaze lingers in the dark corners which the dim lighting adorns with a few jewels of light, before it returns to the table where there is only a glass of water next to a coffee pot and three forgotten cloves of garlic. And then she understands that Maria, who sometimes walks past the hearth at the darkest hours of sleep, came this night and moved the cloves of garlic—by a few inches—and the glass, too—a few millimeters, rather—and that this infinitesimal transference among five trivial elements has entirely altered the space and created a living painting from a kitchen table. Eugénie knows that she lacks the words, for she was born a peasant; she has never seen a painting, other than those that decorate the church and tell the Sacred History, and she knows no other beauty than the flight of birds and the dawn in spring, or the paths through the clear woods and the laughter of beloved children. But she does know with iron-clad certainty that what Maria has accomplished with her three cloves of garlic and her glass is an arrangement for the eye that pays tribute to the divine, and she now notices that in addition to the changes in the disposition of objects, something has been added, as revealed to her that very moment by the shaft of sunlight, and that something is a fragment of ivy placed just next to the glass. It is perfect. Eugénie may not have the words, but she has the gift. In the same way as she
sees
the effect of medicinal plants on the body and the quiddity of gestures on healing she can see the equilibrium in which the little girl has placed the elements, the splendid tension that inhabits them now, and the succession of filled and empty spaces against a background of silky darkness through which a space has been sculpted, now enhanced by a frame. So, still without words but through the grace of innocence and gift, alone in her kitchen beneath the ribbons that crown eighty-six years of hawthorn tea, Eugénie, her heart full, receives the magnificence of art.
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    That morning, Maria went down early to cut her chunk of cheese in the storeroom. But instead of spending her time among the trees before study, she came back to the kitchen where, at her battle station, Eugénie was stirring a mixture of celery tops, periwinkle flowers, and mint leaves in a copper saucepan, to make a poultice for a young mother afflicted with breast engorgement. Maria sat down at the big table, where the cloves of garlic were still in their place.
    â€œDid you add celery?” she asked.
    â€œCelery, periwinkle, and mint,” Eugénie replied.
    â€œThe celery that grows in the garden?”
    â€œThe celery that grows in the garden,” echoed Eugénie.
    â€œThat you took from the garden?”
    â€œThat I took from the garden.”
    â€œWhich doesn’t smell as bad as the wild celery?”
    â€œWhich