Navarre
Water in a silver mixing bowl, no food. Poor old collie, tied to a post. The house looked abandoned for good. All the shutters closed. I knocked and called. A shutter opened a crack, then all the way. Chantal leaned on her walker to peer out at me. She resembled a very old child when she smiled. She had little, extremely white stubs like baby teeth in her gums.
I told her I’d heard her dog barking. I was in residence at the château, working on a translation, and the barking disturbed my concentration. Oh, she gasped, You’d better come in. She beckoned me to climb through the window then led me to the kitchen very slowly, sliding her swollen slippered feet along the floor. They made a shhhh shhhh sound. I asked if she had any dog food. She had the gaze of someone who couldn’t fathom anything anymore. We looked around but couldn’t find any kibble. Or much of anything edible. She was clearly no longer capable of caring for the animal. I asked her the dog’s name, and she told me Navarre. I could walk Navarre every day, I said, if she wanted. But you’ll bring her back? she asked. Of course. She was afraid I’d take Navarre away, which I wanted to do, immensely, but was not in a position to do. I was only a guest in my host’s château, in which seven cats roamed freely.
I heard from my host, her longtime neighbor, that Chantal had always been a bit moonstruck. She took after her absentminded father, who had designed her tomblike house, but never possessed his ambition.
The detail my host liked to add about the house, a weird white box with asymmetrical windows, was that the father had forgotten to draw up plans for a kitchen. They had always had domestics. He’d never thought about where dishes appeared and disappeared from. The kitchen, added on later, was a cramped black box protruding from the larger white one. This is where Chantal spent most of her time, drinking Lipton tea.
My host said Chantal had a younger man, the worst kind of gigolo, who was emptying her bank accounts and stealing her father’s art collection. A shame because there were some very good modernist paintings, worth money. Chantal must have told the young man that or, according to my host, he would never have known. He was dumb, without culture or charm, a money-hungry, slimy, good-looking boy. He’s capable of anything, my host said. You can see it in his hollowed-out eyes, too shiny and empty all at once. The gigolo’s name was Derek.
My host lived in a sprawling, dilapidated castle his parents had inherited and never finished renovating. Not quite a ruin, but not quite a living home either. It existed somewhere between decay and regrowth. The rooms were frozen fifty years ago, in the midst of being gutted. We sat in broken chairs at the dinner table and lit candles while bats flew over our heads. He’d invited me here in a purple-inked letter after reading an academic essay I’d written about the obscure local author, a distant relative of his, apparently, that I was translating, whose poetic encyclopedia he too believed should be lifted from the catacombs of forgotten history and elevated into the light of a wider, English-speaking audience.
One night I saw a strange light coming from my host’s bedroom in the tower. I rushed up the stairs. A small fire was burning in his room, a candle had fallen, and the drapery that covered his bedside table was aflame. I dumped his pitcher of water on the fire, luckily still small, and then beat at the smoke with a rolled carpet from the floor. The wind must have knocked the candle over. My host was moaning in bed in a state of half sleep. I shook him awake and helped him downstairs to his favorite chair by the immense fireplace. The firebox was filled with unburned newspaper, dried flowers, letters, and used tissues throughout the summer. You must be more careful, I told him.
In the afternoons I walked up the hill to the incongruous white box, at once overly modern and dated in the farming village’s medieval landscape. The little car I assumed belonged to the gigolo always sped off from Chantal’s drive around noon.
We developed a routine. Navarre no longer greeted me with terrifying barks when I arrived to walk her. Chantal began to leave her shutter open. I passed Chantal some leftover lunch, sometimes a few boiled eggs and some cheese or fresh cucumber from my host’s garden. I freed Navarre, and followed her through fields of wildflowers, around crops of corn, then into the woods, filled with French and Virginia Maple. All the way to the Palombière and back.
Navarre stopped her incessant barking. The hills returned to their quiet humming. I began to make progress on my translation. Some of the tension I’d been holding all winter began to leave my shoulders. I detangled sentences that had eluded me for months. Words appeared without having to open my dictionary. My womb hummed with new purpose. When I took a bath in the château, the slackening flesh of my stomach and breasts no longer reminded me what I’d lost that Halloween night in New York, the masks at the party, my costume made of rotting leaves, the next morning’s biting hangover, the broken paper bag dropping all my groceries on the stairs, the oozing broken egg on the faded red carpet that made me vertiginous with fear.
One afternoon, I was sitting in the garden, cutting matted hunks of fur off Navarre with kitchen scissors, when Chantal, sitting above me in her dark room, told me a story about her mother and aunt.
Her family was Jewish. During the war this region was on the border of the German occupied territory. Fearing deportation, the girls’ father had paid a farmer to take his daughters across the mountains to Spain. The man had a cart and a donkey and the girls were only allowed small suitcases. Before they crossed over into Spanish territory, they asked the man to stop the cart so they could change into their high-heeled shoes as to not look undignified in front of their new neighbors.
I forced a laugh and conspiratory smile , and Chantal looked pleased, as if we were now accomplices with those aristocratic girls in the mountains. She seemed to want to tell me about the nature of the world she’d been raised in; its rules and priorities. There was something romantic, brave, even noble about the dissonance of high heels sinking and slipping through a muddy terrain of rocks and roots only fit for goatherds and their flock. This walk had to be another jaunt in the countryside or else it would be too horrifying. That fatal absurdity, the reliance on outdated codes in the face of terror, was echoed by Chantal’s pin curls and coquettish grooming. Now the charm of youth had left her, and she sat imprisoned in her father’s house. Shutters closed on a world she’d never recognized, her childlike smile trembling in an old woman’s face. Perhaps that’s why she had let the ‘gigolo’ in, and perhaps as a woman I understood that? I was contemplating whether I should ask her about him, or whether it would be more appropriate to wait, when a car pulled in and Navarre shot from my hands.
He was neither tall nor short. Neither conventionally handsome nor extremely young, though much younger than Chantal. He was balding. He wore a stained T-shirt and dress pants. The most remarkable thing about him were his eyes, which were not empty, as my host had said, but dark and warm. The dog clearly adored him, but she was starved for attention.
He smiled and reached for my hand. I had to drop the scissors. Then he kissed it. Oh, it’s you! he said. How kind of you to visit with dearest Chantal. She could use another woman around.
Of course she had told him about me. There wasn’t much in her life to tell. He conducted very amicable introductions, as if the dog and the old woman weren’t his starved and half-mad prisoners. He asked me about how my stay in France was going, about America and my life there, and the kind of work that I did. Chantal smiled and cooed along with Derek, lapping her tea. His voice was reassuring and he listened with intensity. His manners were so subservient, nephew-like, that I didn’t notice he had picked up the scissors from the ground until he began distractedly cutting dead leaves from a vine that snaked around Chantal’s window. I soon excused myself.
I felt sticky and covered in sweat and silt. I decided to bathe in the river. I took off my clothes and swam toward the deepest part. In the center, I passed a bumble bee that was more than halfway drowned. I swept my hand over the surface of the water to inundate it faster and reduce its suffering. I’d heard drowning was a terrible way to die.
When I came back my host was preparing dinner. He was already a little drunk, as he usually was by this time, since he began by drinking an aperitif before lunch and only stopped for his nap. He poured me a glass of white wine. It was cold and I drank it quickly and he refilled my glass. He said I seemed a bit nervous. It was because there was a new moon. He felt it too. He probably wouldn’t sleep well. The sky would be unusually dark, though, so later we could see the stars.
He gave me a knife to chop garlic and onion as he prepared the fish. When the meal was ready, we lit candles on the balcony and ate there. My host, a retired professor, slipped comfortably into monologue. He was an unapologetic gossip, though most of the people he talked about were dead or in retirement homes.
In the flickering darkness, the panes of his cheeks and forehead smoothed and the hollows softened around his eyes. He looked quite delicate and sensitive. Age, erased now by a trick of candlelight, had made him look more intelligent, wary, and resolved. Unlike Chantal, whose face life seemed only to have slackened and softened, as if she’d never had any experiences at all.
He told me he had once organized an exhibition in the village about the occupation, and during his research in the archives he’d found a document he decided to burn. It was a list of names, all the women who had slept with German officers, and all the children born of these liaisons. The worst epithets and insults were scrawled underneath each name. He had a photographic memory. He knew which of the villagers were of German descent, whose great-grandmothers had their hair shorn off. He told me Chantal’s mother was on the list, but since she was wealthy her head wasn’t shaved.
I told him that Chantal had told me her mother and sister were Jewish and had hidden in Spain during the war. He said Chantal must have gotten it confused. That was another family who lived nearby. Perhaps she was told that story as a little girl.
We walked into the garden. He showed me the hole in the wall where the wasp nest was burned. You have to burn the nest at night while the wasps are asleep so you get all of them at once. You burn it entirely and leave nothing behind. In the charred remains of the complex architecture a few suffocated white larvae hung upside down from the top where the fire missed. My host told me that the seeds of certain trees were encased in shells that could only open through fire. That the cycles of forest fire over millennia in dry terrain had become part of the trees’ reproductive cycle. The older generations burned at the moment the new generation was born. He said that right before a tree dies it produces the most flowers. That the dying reflex to reproduce was the reason the hanged man ejaculates against his will, why strangers in cellars sheltering from bombs copulate in the dark, why during a great plague Greek peasants held orgies next to corpses and the crawling, moaning bodies of the contaminated. We were helpless to this last shudder in the face of death.
Later I helped him apply a sliver of a fentanyl patch to his chest—he was always in pain now. We collapsed on the tattered leather sofa in the drawing room, side by side. I pointed to a portrait above the mantel of his great-aunt who seemed to look down at us disdainfully over the fringe of her ruffled black dress. She thinks I’m a plebian degenerate, I said. And shouldn’t be allowed inside her home.
My host answered that she was only judging him, her heir, and not me, and instructed me to watch the expression on her face change after he got up to pour us some more cognac. I did, and it was true, her gaze seemed to shift slightly. She no longer looked judgmental but bemused, as if she were not frowning but smirking down on me, and then, when my host returned, she reverted to her previous expression, haughty and frowning, without anything moving in the painting—it was all the same but the mood was different. He told me she had been a strict Catholic, and disapproved of him for being a homosexual and a junkie. But she didn’t mind much what I, or anyone outside the family, did. She was one of many ghosts here, and the new moon excited them all.
I woke from an uneasy sleep to the sound of soft music emanating from the garden. I was alone on the couch. When I looked out the cloudy glass doors, I thought I glimpsed the silhouette of a couple embracing. I walked barefoot toward the stone wall that overlooked the river. The grass was wet with dew. There was no one. The river was loud and rushing, and the new moon was a tiny sliver. I stood for a moment, listening to the strange music. I felt something warm and wet land on my neck. My nose filled with a familiar smell of herbs and sweat. I turned around. It was too dark to see a face. The person kissed me, deep and forcefully, holding my arms. A dense liquid like sap ran down my throat.
They lowered me to the ground. I felt a snail shell crunch under my back. Foreign hands stroked me everywhere. Hips hooked into my hips. Something pressed against the fabric that separated us.
The swollen glassy face of Chantal, her cataract stare, rippled for an instant before my eyes. Her face was ancient and slack and grinning, then she was Derek, bald and wet-eyed, then she was a young woman, beautiful, shining. She ran a soft palm over my face. I screamed. The creature shoved me by my shoulders and pushed itself up and off of me. I heard the garden gate swing. Footsteps galloping up the gravel road.
I went to check on the burnt wasp nest. A swarm of ants were hard at work, carrying off the carcasses and ruined architecture. A few layers of the nest had fallen to the ground. I poked at them with a stick. That’s when I heard Navarre howling. It was worse than the barking I’d heard that first day. It sounded mournful and tragic.
Navarre was tied to her post. She began to lunge at me as I approached, gnashing her teeth. There was a huge crash, like an explosion, and the roof of Chantal’s house caved in. Flames licked out. The glass from the windows shattered. The shutters were burning.
I dove to Navarre, untied her rope, and tried to drag her by the collar but she refused to move. I took her in my arms and carried her down the hill, running, as she bucked in my arms.
It was only after we arrived home that I remembered Chantal. I called the fire department. As I told the operator what was happening, Navarre threw herself against the garden gate frantically.
The fire department and, later, the police came. Smoke surrounded the hills. They questioned my host. He looked exhausted and frail. He said he thought the fire was another scheme invented by the gigolo to collect insurance on the remaining paintings.
No bodies were found. Derek’s car, which I hadn’t looked for in my panic to rescue Navarre, had vanished. The police asked a few questions about Derek and, bowing to my stooped host, soon left us in peace.
I imagined the couple speeding toward some ruined hotel on the Riviera, then I imagined them drinking sparkling wine, Chantal’s vacant eyes reflecting the glass mirror of the sea, her face shimmering from old to young, her curly white hair shorn off to regrow wild and brown again, while Derek watched over her body as its flesh tenderized, melting into slender youth, his warm wet eyes smiling, his hand reaching for hers to kiss. Then I saw Chantal writhing atop Derek. Derek bowed his head to be consumed. Chantal arched her back, her belly round and firm.
After dark the next night I wandered the garden sleepless, Navarre at my heels. As soon as I opened the gate, she ran up the road. She circled round and round, digging and sniffing and rolling in the debris of her old home. She nosed her old post, her rope, the empty mixing bowl, looking everywhere for her mistress. I stroked her long fur until my hand was black with soot.
Then I saw what looked like an animal. Navarre began to growl. The animal ran. Standing on its hind legs it looked like a man. Slowly, deliberately, Navarre moved toward him. Her prey bowed his head, and she sunk her teeth into his neck as I shouted at her to come back. The animals fell to the ground together. They rose and fell as one from the ashes of the burnt house, solidified soot, like a golem with two heads. A cry echoed in the woods. Then Navarre stood, returned to my side.
The cats scattered that night. They slept in the shadows of the closed rooms. Occasionally we heard a warning growl or hiss from a far-off corner of the château, the scampering of paws on wood floors. I covered my host with a blanket and brought him a glass of water. He shivered and his hand trembled as he lifted it to his mouth. His lips puckered like a five-year-old boy’s and then he closed his eyes. Navarre nudged my thigh, whimpering. I brought her to my room. She took position near the door, wary, guarding me. She was unused to sleeping indoors, but she would adapt. And it wasn’t really indoors here, it was some mix of indoors and out, of flowering and putrefaction. I dreamt that night of babies. A gaggle of babies floating down the river around the ghost couple. A rushing red sky and a silver spoon. Derek waltzed Chantal among the babies. Her slippered feet dragged softly on the river’s surface. Her legs were blue with varicose veins, but her face was young and new. A giant silver spoon fished the babies out of the river’s mouth, carrying them safely ashore.
Cameron Darc lives with her husband, stepson, and cat in Paris, France. Her fiction can be found in Fence, Post Road, X-R-A-Y, Hobart, and elsewhere. She is currently finishing her first novel and researching her next novel.