gabrielle of the spirits
by Douglas Messerli
Denyse Delcourt Denyse Denyse Delcourt, Gabrielle au bois dormant, translated from the French by Eugene Vance as Gabrielle and the Long Sleep into Mourning (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2007)
As an adult group, they remain cordial to, if slightly at odds with one
another. They do not share the lifetime interconnections of the friends
gathered around the dying Rémy of the 2003 movie, and their conversations and
interrelationships, accordingly, are less intense than the 60-year- olds of The Barbarian Invasions. Yet one cannot
help but note the kinship of the two works, for like the later movie,
Delcourt’s lyrical fiction is centered upon love and death—in this case the
mysterious loves and death of the fifteen-year-old Gabrielle in 1951.
The survivors’ conversations and walks into the nearby woods occasion a
series of memories as, one by one, they come to terms with Gabrielle’s and
their own lives in the Palus, which came to a sudden end by a government
decision to buy their homes and cover the back waters they describe as a lake
with concrete. In this sense, Delcourt’s short masterwork is a work aimed at
digging up the past, another kind of “unburying” and “reburying” of the dead.
Growing up in a home where their father is seldom in residence, Mimi,
Marc, Gabrielle, and François live a life very different from most of the other
children around them. Their mother, Éveline, hates housework and cooking
equally, and although she is socially likeable, often leaves the family to its
own means:
…the children often ate alone
or together the dishes that they them-
selves, or else Mimi, had
prepared. Their father, an absent-minded man,
sometimes joined them. On the
tablecloth, traces of jam, butter or
molasses formed mottled
patterns. You could see leftovers of the
previous night’s supper
lingering on the counters. There were breadcrumbs
everywhere.
When Éveline is unable to pay a
traveling salesman for her purchases of children’s clothing, she pays by
staying “shut up” for the salesman in a room “for a long time,” a source of
confusion for Gabrielle and her friends, but an act bringing only a shrug from
the elder Marc and a blush to Mimi’s cheeks. Later in the fiction, it is
revealed that Gabrielle’s father may have another family, and that his wife is
having an affair with a man—who also sexually flirts with Gabrielle—whom they
call Uncle Georges. We later discover that her brother Marc’s night wanderings
may be related to his trafficking in drugs. In short, it is the kind of family
in which neighborhood children delight and about which their parent’s gossip.
One day while riding in the woods with another girl (Jacqueline),
Gabrielle falls from her bicycle, scraping her knee. Suddenly a man, Walter
Black, appears out of nowhere and offers to take her in his large, black car to
his house in the woods. There the girls meet Walter’s sister, Maria, who
bandages the wound and asks Gabrielle to return in three days. As the girls
prepare to leave, a headless bird flys out of the window from the second storey
of the dilapidated building. Soon, we discover that Gabrielle is also
disappearing on long journeys each night.
If this event has the sound of a fairytale, it is clear that
Delcourt—herself a specialist in medieval French fiction—intends it to call up
various tales, as within her realist construct she projects a magical world
where the young Gabrielle nightly travels to the house in the woods, where she
is welcomed by Maria, a black snake, and her courtier, Walter. As the other
children get word of her adventures—some clearly imagined, others perhaps
embroidered versions of real events—the tale of Gabrielle’s descent into a
relationship with these figures gradually becomes intertwined with tales of
wolves and underground chambers, calling up a number of childhood fables, from
the Brothers Grimm to Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s early version and Jeanne-Marie Leprinces de
Beaumont’s retelling of “Beauty and the Beast.” Certainly some of the elements
of that latter tale—the missing father, the beast-lover, and the final late
return of the young girl—are similar; but other elements of Delcourt’s story of
Gabrielle remind one of elements of “Sleeping Beauty” and similar fables of a
young girl lured to her death within a woods. All represent various versions of
adolescent sexuality, and the author of Gabrielle
allows these concerns to emanate throughout the book, as we witness Gabrielle
and her fifteen-year-old friends entering into a world of sexuality that is
always potentially dangerous.
In a letter from Walter—or perhaps a romantic epistle from Gabrielle to
herself—the wolf-lover warns his princess of just those possible dangers:
Gabrielle of the Spirits,
At eleven o’clock this evening you will go down the stairs
covered with moss—you know
them: there are wildflowers in the cracks. Be careful not to
fall. Remember that you must
lean against the wall beside the steps, but watch out for
the plants creeping along the wall,
making for a confusion of stone and vegetation. Beware, the
moss offers no sure footing and
there will be no hope if you miss a step and reach for a
hold to save yourself. Then push
the worm-eaten door, but remember: it will creak as soon as
you touch it because the hinges
are rusted. You will enter the vault. The darkness there is
total, but do not be afraid,
Sweet Thing. On each side of the door there are niches in
the walls with oil lamps darkened
by smoke and by the years. Light them and wait for me, my
beloved. I will soon be there.
W.B.
Like Beauty, Gabrielle arrives too late and cannot find the entrance to
the magical vault. And in her rush to reach it she has aggravated her asthma;
unable to breathe, she falls to the forest floor, dead.
For the survivors, life in the Palus,
ending with Gabrielle’s death, has served almost as a mirror for the many
possibilities of love in their own lives. From Éveline’s desperate affairs to
Mimi’s almost secret wedding (the bridegroom refusing to participate in a
public ceremony and the sharing of wedding rings), from Gabrielle’s
romantically conceived encounters to Paul’s sexually-acquired illness, love is
always a spirit to be reckoned with, a spirit to be brought into the light,
just as Jacqueline, sitting in the night, finally sees her long-dead friend:
The lake is flat.
Night. A white dress. Gabrielle is on
the beach. She
runs. Her hair is flowing. She glides
through the tall
grass. Oh, the snow of her dress. She
speeds toward the
wood. Faster, faster. She is barefoot.
She seems to be
flying. It is night. She is free. The
shadow of her
dress bathes her like cool water. Faster,
faster. Her dress,
the ribbons, diaphanous. Gabrielle.
And now, she has
disappeared.
In their gathering and their various
retellings of events, these friends have laid the past to rest. It is the even
more terrifying future which they now must face.
Los Angeles, August 19, 2007
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (December 2008).
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