Our possessions are the dross of our future death. Only the soul should matter

 When typhoid fever struck Susan and Austin’s lastborn child on October 5, 1883, their house collapsed into the invisible province where its true foundations lay. Austin wandered half-mad through the rubble of his soul, disgusted by his erstwhile rage to live. He once had the powerful jaw of a wild beast: the risk was great if one tried to wrench one’s hunk of meat from him. Now the marble blow of death had obliged him to drop his imaginary prey.

Emily and the dying child had more than a usual complicity. Gilbert was Emily’s double. They had the same crucifying sensibility. When one of his friends moved away from Amherst, the boy could not bear to see his portrait; to suffer less from his friend’s absence, he asked that the picture be turned to face the wall. Life was an uninterrupted flow of wrenching loss, causing aunt and nephew to know the same trembling, the overwhelming grace of never getting used to anything.

Little Gilbert, in a photograph taken when he was alive, seems painfully intelligent. He has a girl’s long blond hair. He is seated on an armchair that has been draped with a slipcover of the kind one finds in houses deserted by their owners. His hands are slightly tense. Our hands do not know how to hold onto anything on this earth. Our possessions are the dross of our future death. Only the soul should matter. Little Gilbert’s would never be older than eight years of age.

“Open the door, open the door, they’re waiting for me!” raved the child, in a language that seemed to have been borrowed from one of his aunt’s poems. He was more richly accompanied in his dying than Louis XIV, whose servants bellowed the king’s name to stop the courtiers’ cackling as he approached. An angel in ethereal livery announced the child’s goodness to the invisible, opening the doors of heaven to him one by one until he reached the golden room. The body drained of its soul is nothing more than a rag doll. The useless, reassuring bustle of mourning began. Emily felt nauseous at the smell of disinfectant and returned to her home at three o’clock in the morning; she was sick, could not return to the funeral wake, and stayed in bed, her head engulfed by a burning migraine.

Two weeks after the funeral the Amherst Record, the local newspaper, painted the portrait of a little saint on a bicycle who went up to all those he met as he rode through the village and spoke to them with the utmost gravity. “The best in people he brought to the surface” the newspaper tells us; those he met were able to air out their Sunday soul, the one that almost never leaves the house.

All saints have some secret sin. This child loved to steal roses from his aunt’s garden. One day Emily came upon his footprints in a border; from God she borrowed humor and from her father the demeanor of a man of law. She went discreetly to find the child’s boots, polished them, put them upon a silver platter, filled them with fresh flowers, and had them carried over to the rose thief in the house next door, along with her calling card.

As he died Gilbert clung to Emily’s soul—the way one clings to a tablecloth to slow one’s fall, pulling everything off the table. All Emily’s joy fell to the floor.

“Each of us takes heaven into our body or removes it, for each of us possesses the talent for living.” But talent is nothing more than courage. Henceforth everything would be wrenched from an encroaching silence. In speaking of her mother, Emily said that on dying she “slipped from our fingers like a flake gathered by the wind, and is now part of the drift called ‘the infinite.’” This drift entered Emily’s room in her lifetime; her handwriting became more and more airy, streaked with emptiness. Words were split ever farther apart by this whiteness, then the letters between the words. Judge Lord’s death a few months after little Gilbert’s perfected the void. By wrenching from her those she loved, God left in Emily’s soul a poison that she neither wanted nor knew how to expel. Depression set in, a kidney ailment. The lady in white turned to face the darkest night, “sitting,” said Susan, “in the light of her own fire.” She removed heaven from her body.

From The Lady in White

(La dame blanche)

Christian Bobin

Translated by Alison Anderson