Lovers on All Saints' Day

The Return

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED when Madame Michaud got out of prison. It happened at Les Houx, the Michaud family estate, and was not written up in a single Belgian newspaper. The oldest episodes of the story occurred thirty-nine years earlier, and were much commented on at the time, but now there is probably nobody outside the family who remembers. I’ll tell the story as it was told to me.

Les Houx is a piece of land of about three hectares, acquired by Madame Michaud’s great-grandfather toward the end of 1860, when the country was young and, in the principality of Liège, property changed hands without any formalities. Madame Michaud’s grandfather grew up and lived his whole life there, and so did her father. Madame Michaud and her younger sister, Sara, were born and raised there, and both lived there until, shortly after turning forty, in September 1960—a century had passed since the family took ownership of the property, which was their emblem and their pride — Madame Michaud was tried for the murder of Sara’s fiancé. She was found guilty of having fed the man rat poison used in the stables of Les Houx, and given a long prison sentence.

Madame Michaud’s first name does not matter, but a clarification regarding her surname and civil status is in order. Michaud was her family name and the one on the sign at the entrance to the property: LES HOUX, PROPRIÉTÉ PRIVÉE. FAMILLE MICHAUD, 1860. Until that September, Madame Michaud was still Mademoiselle Michaud; she’d never been known to have a beau, and very few men visited her more than once, but no one ruled out the possibility that, even at forty, she might marry, for a piece of land like Les Houx was worth as much as the richest dowry and made either of the daughters a good catch. But when it emerged that Mademoiselle Michaud had been sentenced to forty-five years in prison, the Madame started to slip into people’s conversations. There was in the title a mixture of respect and pity toward a person who could not now marry, and whom it was going to be impossible to carry on calling Mademoiselle while she grew old in prison. Madame Michaud was released six years before the end of her sentence, and the first thing she’d do, as everyone surely knew, was to visit the house at Les Houx.

Her love since childhood for the house and stables, the crops and woods, and even the bare fields that led out to the road, that boundless love, would be her undoing. Since she learned to walk, her favorite pastime was wandering through all the nooks and crannies of the house on her own. There was not a single corner of the immense building she did not know or would not have been able to find with her eyes closed. This might not seem such a great feat to those who don’t know Les Houx. So I should say that the three-story house has two stairways that lead to the first floor (one from the kitchen and one from the front hall) and one more that goes directly to the attic. Its perimeter was regular, a perfect closed rectangle like a safe; but the design inside was not at all symmetrical, full of unpredictable niches and alcoves. There was a doorless room entered by sliding the false back of a wardrobe: their grandfather had hidden potatoes and cabbages there from his harvest to induce a rise in prices at the turn of the century, and their father had hidden a Jewish couple there during the war. Between the two events, the room had belonged to the girl. She was solitary by nature, and not even her sister knew where to look for her when it was time to sit down at the table or when she needed her for something. They’d know she’d been in the stables because she’d show up smelling of hay and manure; they’d know she’d spent the morning in the woods because her dresses would be torn by twigs and pinecones and completely ruined by sap from the trunks. When she grew up, her parents got worried: Mademoiselle Michaud saw doctors and the odd apprentice psychoanalyst, because it was incomprehensible to people that a nineteen-year-old girl would spend the whole day by herself instead of seeing her friends. No one understood why she could never be found in the same room of the spacious house; no one understood why she would squander her summers wandering around the three hectares like a cat marking her territory. The war broke out, and Mademoiselle Michaud gained sudden importance in the functioning of Les Houx: during the nightly bombing raids, when the whole country’s electricity was cut so the planes could not locate their targets, she was the only one who could find things lost in the darkness, or cross the property from one end to the other if the horses needed feeding or a message needed to be taken to the steward. All this determined that, in 1949, when the girls’ father died, their mother, who until then had taken little interest in such matters, entrusted the administration of the estate to the only person who could obtain satisfactory results; and Mademoiselle Michaud had the perfect excuse to forget or overlook the eagerness for marriage of the young men of Ferrières or Liège or even Louvain. In that state, which for her approached paradise, she was able to remain for several years. The house had never known — nor would it know — such splendor.

In 1958, Sara received a visit from Jan, a young man from Flanders whose surname no one could quite remember: neither her mother, due to lack of effort, nor her sister, due to self-absorption and indifference. Every Tuesday and every Saturday for two years he was seen arriving in a rosewood-colored Studebaker — which he parked in front of the house, where their father had parked since he bought his first car — and leaving as soon as night began to fall. He rarely crossed paths with Mademoiselle Michaud in the house: as soon as she saw his car come through the gate, she disappeared. She found the man unpleasant from the first moment, and frankly repulsive from the summer Saturday when he arrived, not in the afternoon but before midday, with a crew of assistants carrying measuring sticks. Mademoiselle Michaud, from various corners of the property, watched them taking inventory, measuring the side that bordered the road, the area of the woods and the fields on which nobody had built anything, or ever thought of building anything. The following Saturday, further measurements were taken, following the same routine; and when she came inside, that night, Mademoiselle Michaud sat down facing her mother, who was calmly reading The Red and the Black. That trivial detail would stay with Mademoiselle Michaud forever, because at no point in the conversation did her mother close the book or even rest it in her lap to talk. With the book open in front of her, the leather spine facing the anxious daughter, her mother explained that Jan (and she made an attempt at pronouncing his surname) had asked for Sara’s hand: she had found no reasons to turn him down and more than one to accept. Their father being dead, the decision fell to her and was not up for discussion. They would be married early the following spring. The first week of April seemed to everyone an excellent moment.

Mademoiselle Michaud began a slow study, which she herself perhaps did not even notice and whose object was Sara’s future husband. This might be called intuition, but also mistrust: the mistrust of a woman (because by then, Mademoiselle Michaud was a woman) who had never had much to do with human beings; whose friendly connections, in essence, had always been with the objects of the house, the beams of a ceiling and the carpets, the whitewash on the walls and the gravel of the courtyard or the wood of the sheds. Things and their arrangement in physical space were Mademoiselle Michaud’s company; it was logical, then, that the presence of the betrothed and his measuring men should perturb her. She followed and spied on the couple; her knowledge of the terrain allowed her to go unnoticed. She saw without caring that, when they found themselves alone in the living room, they didn’t just kiss, but his hand disappeared under her sweater, and hers among the folds of his tweed trousers. She saw, toward the end of August, that the fiancé began to arrive earlier, and he and Sara would take advantage of her mother’s afternoon nap to hide in the room behind the wardrobe, from which the odd shy moan would escape. And at the beginning of September she saw Jan using the upstairs telephone to make a business call. He spoke of the time when half of all this would belong to him; he spoke of the necessity of putting so much unused land into production. The details he mentioned worked on Mademoiselle Michaud with the force of a catapult. Around that time she had to go to the border, where prices were lower, to purchase a large quantity of woodchips. Some merchant was able to supply the small grinder she was looking for. She returned home after dinner, and blindly emptied the contents of a little bag, a coarse, heavy powder, into the suitor’s pousse-café. Jan did not survive the night.

Her mother, wisely, sent Sara to the house of one of her friends, in Aix-la-Chapelle. The trial was held swiftly, for the malice was obvious and the evidence overwhelming. A truck came to take Mademoiselle Michaud to the women’s prison, near Charleroi. Her mother did not come out to say good-bye. I imagine the woman who until the age of forty had lived in the world of a little girl, and then had murdered someone, looking for the last time at the family estate. Two days later, Sara, still feeling sick, returned to Les Houx. She could not sleep, but that was the least of her woes. Before anyone noticed, she was bedridden with anorexia, a doctor had come to save her life, a therapy begun and punctually carried out; with time, her sadness became no more stubborn than any other sadness, and bit by bit her appetite returned. An accident occurred one day: her mother tried to force her to taste a gâteau de macarons she’d bought for her from André Destiné’s patisserie, which had always been her favorite; Sara refused and in the face of her mother’s insistence lost control, gesticulated too close to the table beside the glass door, and smashed a ceramic vase, which had belonged to her great-grandmother. Sara noticed the space on the table, the circle that shone like a moon where the vase had stood, unmoving, for so many years. It might be said that this moment marked the beginning of her recovery. She said that the dining room was now brighter; the next day she moved the table to a different spot; a week later, hired three workmen who, along with the steward, widened the frame of the glass door two meters on either side, and ended up replacing it with a large window from the parquet floor to the ceiling.

They never received any news of Madame Michaud — this was how the public now referred to her — and Madame Michaud had no news of them. People commented that it was as if she’d been sentenced to the harshest exile from the start and, in time, that exile had turned into plain oblivion. But that was not true: Sara never forgot that her sister was living in a cell for having poisoned the man who was going to make her happy. Madame Michaud, for her part, could not feel the guilt they attributed to her, or any repentance for her actions: her universe did not allow for such possibilities, because it was not a human one; things are not guilty, and constructions do not feel repentance. It’s a cliché to say that she lost track of time; but the prison guards said she rarely went out into the yard and hardly ever associated with the other convicts, and that she lived, in all other respects, at the margin of any evolution, ignorant of the routines of the world inside and the revolutions outside. Enclosed in the minimal space of her cell, Madame Michaud did not hear that her mother died of natural causes during the winter of 1969, and never found out that, on her deathbed, she’d forgiven her. Would this pardon have made her glad? It’s impossible to know for certain. Her cellmate, who very soon exhausted her longings for conversation, tells that Madame Michaud (whose hair turned gray, whose transparent skin dried and peeled like birch bark) spent the days rolling and unrolling a piece of paper over the floor of the cell. On one side of it was printed an old calendar brought from France: 1954—DIXIÈME ANNIVERSAIRE DE LA LIBÉRATION was the caption set above the months and days. On the back of the calendar, Madame Michaud had drawn a pencil sketch of Les Houx in such detail that her cellmate exclaimed, when she saw the plan for the first time, that she knew the place. It was not true, but the perfection of the details had prevailed over her memory. The illusion, momentary for the other convict, was complete for Madame Michaud; and she lived her years of imprisonment within that plan, oblivious to her increasing old age. It’s not difficult to imagine her bending over windowsills that were a simple thick line, or thinking she was hiding behind walls that were made not of bricks and concrete, but of the careful shading of a slanted pencil.

I imagine it was prisoner Michaud’s good conduct that, paradoxically, caused the distraction of the directors of the Charleroi prison. No one, during the final years of her imprisonment, seemed to remember her; and it’s easy to believe that many more years would have been commuted had she submitted an official request before. When it was decided she deserved early release, she was six years from completing her sentence. But ten years earlier, the same pardon would have been conceded: her behavior was the same during that whole life within a life that is a murder conviction. In December 1998, Madame Michaud was summoned to the César Franck room of the prison, where she answered a series of questions meant to confirm her willingness to return to and be a useful member of society. At the end of the session, they asked her if she would prefer to get out before or after the holidays: on the brink of freedom, Madame Michaud did not want to spend one single day more in jail. The prison officials placed among her belongings (the toilette she’d arrived with and a calendar on the back of which was the plan of a house) an envelope with three thousand francs in five-hundred-franc notes. On December 19, Madame Michaud spent the night in a Charleroi motel — nobody had been waiting for her outside the prison gates — and before dawn she was ready to return to Les Houx. (At seventy-nine years of age, Madame Michaud no longer slept much, and always awoke with the first light.) She didn’t have to explain to the taxi driver where her family’s property was.

The taxi drove slowly up the drive, for it had snowed and a layer of ice made the surface slippery. Madame Michaud wiped the condensation from the car window to see the house, her house, and must have thought she’d open the main door and it would be as if not a day had gone by. She didn’t dismiss the driver as soon as she stepped out of the taxi, perhaps because she felt that it wasn’t gravel beneath the snow but pebbles. But she kept going, and her hand moved instinctively to the place where the large door knocker had always been: her hand fell on emptiness. It must have seemed implausible to her to have to look for the latch, and to have to try twice before being able to get it to open. She had to imagine the possibility that she’d not been paying attention on her way there, that the taxi driver had brought her to someone else’s house. She looked around. On her face was confusion. Madame Michaud felt disoriented.

In the front hall, where there had always been a stone angel stationed under the staircase, there was now no staircase, but rather a solid oak bookcase, and the stone angel was an armchair for reading. Three rooms shared the space that thirty-nine years earlier had been the living room: one for the hunting weapons, one for winter clothes, and another that Madame Michaud did not verify, because it looked dark and perhaps deep (she thought there was a banister descending to a cellar), and she was afraid of getting lost. The main floor was unrecognizable; Madame Michaud was consoled by the fact that she could not go upstairs — she didn’t know how to get there — thus she avoided having to feel her way blindly again and the unfamiliarity, the painful unfamiliarity.

Madame Michaud was not alone in the house, but the other presence would not have given herself away for all the gold in the world. From the rose windows of the attic, Sara saw her leave, and it was as if she could feel the cold that stung her older sister’s face. Sara did not miss out on a single detail: before her anxious gaze, Madame Michaud saw that a sort of hut without walls stood on the spot where, as she remembered, the barn for the Lusitanian horses had been, and then, with a hand to her forehead, she discovered that the distant garden with its sleeping plants had once been a dense grove of trees. She was grateful that the taxi was still waiting, because she wasn’t sure she’d be able to find the way out among so many new lanes leading to so many new outbuildings, to the many recent constructions that Sara had planned and erected with the patience of an artist over the course of thirty-nine years, in many cases not even yet occupied or serving any purpose, because their only justification was to replace a memory or an affection in the mind of Madame Michaud so that now she, in the backseat of the taxi, would be wondering where she might go, what place remained for her in the world.