There was once a child who had grown accustomed to playing with Monelle. It was in the old days before Monelle had left. He spent every hour of the day beside her, watching her eyes flicker. She would laugh for no reason, and he would laugh for no reason. When she slept, her half-parted lips would silently speak holy words. When she would wake, she would smile to herself, knowing that he would soon come.
It was not a real game they would play: for Monelle had no choice but to work. So small, and yet she sat all day behind an old window covered in dust. The wall across the street was blinded by cement under the sad northern light. But Monelle’s little fingers ran over the linen, as if scurrying along a road of white cloth, the pins on her knees marking the post houses. Her right hand would curl up like a fleshy cart rolling forth and leaving behind a hemmed furrow; and scratching, scratching, the needle would dart its steel tongue, dive down and emerge, pulling the long thread through its golden eye. And it was nice to watch her left hand because she would stroke the new fabric and ease out all its creases, as if she were silently tucking a sick child into fresh sheets.
And so the child would watch Monelle and rejoice without speaking, for her work seemed like a game, and she would tell him simple things that did not make much sense. She laughed in the sun, she laughed in the rain, she laughed in the snow. She loved to be warm, soaked, frozen. If she had money, she laughed, knowing that she would go dancing in a new dress. If she was poor, she laughed, thinking of how she would eat beans, a big provision for a week. And she thought, having a bit of money, of the other children she would make laugh; and she waited, her little hand being empty, until she could cuddle up and nestle in her hunger and her poverty.
She was always surrounded by children who watched her with wide eyes, but she liked perhaps most of all the child who came to her side throughout the day. Even so, she went away and left him on his own. She never spoke to him of her impending departure, except perhaps by becoming more serious, and looking at him for longer spells. And he also remembered that she stopped loving everything around her: her little chair, the painted creatures the children brought her, and all her toys, and all her clothes. And she would dream, her finger on her mouth, of other things.
She left on a December night when the child was not there. Carrying her sputtering lamp in her hand, she went, without looking back, into the shadows. When the child arrived, he glimpsed at the dark end of the narrow street a short, sighing flame. That was all. He never saw Monelle again.
For a long time he wondered why she had left without warning. He thought that she did not want to be saddened by his sadness. He convinced himself that she had gone in search of other children who had need of her. With her dying lamp in hand, she had gone to offer them relief, the relief of a laughing spark in the night. Perhaps she had thought that she should not let herself love him too much, him alone, so that she could love other young strangers as well. Perhaps because the needle with its golden eye had carried the little fleshy cart to the end, the very end of the hemmed furrow, Monelle had grown tired of the coarse fabric path along which her hands would trot. But without a doubt she had wanted to play forever. And the child had not known the way of the eternal game. Perhaps she had wanted at last to see what lay behind the old, blind wall, all the eyes of which had been covered for years with cement. Perhaps she was going to come back. Instead of saying: “Goodbye, wait for me—be a good boy!” so that he would keep his ears open for the sound of her footsteps in the hallway and the jingling of her keys in the locks, she had remained silent and would come up behind him by surprise, put two warm little hands over his eyes—ah yes!—and shout “coocoo!” with the voice of a fledgling come back to the fire.
He remembered the first day he saw her, leaping like a frail, burning whiteness, all shaken by laughter. And her eyes were the eyes of water, where thoughts move like the shadows of plants. There, at the bend in the road, she had come, simply. She had laughed in slow bursts similar to the dying vibration of a crystal glass. It was at dusk on a winter night, and it was foggy; the shop was open—just as it is now. The same night, the same things around, the same droning in the ears: just a different year and the sense of waiting. He moved forward cautiously; everything was exactly as it had been the first time; but he was waiting: was this not reason enough for her to come? And he reached his poor, open hand through the fog.
This time, Monelle did not emerge from the unknown. No little laugh disturbed the mist. Monelle was far away and did not remember the evening or the year. Who knows? Maybe she had snuck into the empty bedroom in the night and was spying on him from behind the door, trembling softly. The child walked in without a sound to take her by surprise. But she was no longer there. She was going to come back—O yes!—she was going to come back. The other children had had enough of her happiness. It was his turn now. The child heard her mischievous voice murmuring: “Today I am a good girl!” A little absent word, distant, faded like an ancient dye, worn down by the echoes of memory.
The child sat patiently. The little wicker seat was there, marked by her body, and the stool she loved, and the little mirror, loved all the more because it was broken, and the last shirt she had sewn, the little shirt “that was named Monelle,” broken in, a bit stretched, waiting for its maker.
Every little thing in the room was waiting for her. The sewing table was still cleared off. The measuring tape in its round box stretched out its green tongue, pierced by a ring. The unfolded fabric of handkerchiefs lay in small white hills. Needle points stood behind like lances waiting in ambush. The finely wrought iron die was an abandoned soldier’s helmet. The scissors were lazily open like the mouth of a steel dragon. And so everything slept in waiting. The little fleshy cart, flexible and nimble, no longer moved about, pouring its mild warmth into this enchanted world. The whole strange castle of work was sleeping. The child was hoping. The door was going to open, slowly; the laughing spark would dance; the white hills would tumble; the sharp lances would clang together; the soldier’s helmet would find its pink head; the steel dragon’s mouth would chatter, and the little, fleshy cart would trot all over, and the faded voice would say again, “Today I am a good girl!”— Can miracles not happen twice ?