For instance, it happens that a sperm whale beaches and dies without water. It lies there for hours and nothing transpires; at the end of the day, Noé leaves her cabin, her arms laden with blades and pails, hooks and sticks. The children have lost interest in the cachalot. To begin with, they climbed it, touched it, their clothes in need of a wash now, given the cadaver smell. Abel wanted to scrape the inside of its eye to know its texture; with Seth, he propped the huge mouth open with a stick and they slipped inside, grabbed its teeth and shouted down its throat, hoping to hear their echo return from its belly. Afterward, they returned to their hideout.
Noé never speaks unless she feels the need. Sometimes, words push against her lips and so she utters them; they are addressed to no one, or perhaps to herself, but not even that is certain. Mie sticks close by, always, not wanting to miss out on those moments.
On the day her mother prepares to skin the whale, Mie plunges her being into the head of a crab — her little crab legs barely touch the ground when she scuttles — but she can still make out Noé’s clear, low voice and her characteristic accent, “The ogre in his castle loved the Queen of Saba.” Immediately, Mie leaves the creature to its sand nests, her departure so quick that she staggers for a moment and swings her arms in circles to keep from falling. She regains her balance, then approaches her mother, sits by the fire. Noé is bent over a knife as long as a child’s thigh. She scrapes the metal against rough rocks, then cleans it, moistens it, whets it again; she pinches the blade between her thumb and index finger, measures its sharpness. When she decides it’s sharp enough, she attaches it to a shaft, wraps the handle with strips of cotton, pulls the fabric tight, and tests the sturdiness of her spear. She has no thought for the daughter she doesn’t even see, absorbed as she is by the smells of carcass and iron.
The ogre in his castle loved the Queen of Saba.
And though each night, young girls he’d eat,
He’d never lay a finger on the kingdom’s queen.
Mie’s young siblings come running. Whenever she listens to Noé, their sister’s posture changes. She’s less guarded, her shoulders broaden, her head sits taller on her neck. They can read her stance from afar, her straight back announcing a story. They move in — Noé’s voice carries, they don’t need to sit too close, and though they want to hear, they also want to be able to run away because often their mother’s stories frighten them. They separate, each sitting in a spot of their own, Seth as far as possible from the cadaver, Abel half-hidden in a thicket between the beach and the woods. The sounds they make help Mie locate them, but she doesn’t turn around: she’s busy observing her mother. Noé has raised the spear above her head and, with one great thrust, sinks it into the beast’s hide.
Silently the Queen watches as he
Seduces damsels; the pretty ones you see
“Look then on my treasure chests!
Brocades, furs, sumptuous fabrics,
Moonstones, diamonds, rubies shining,
The crown with every sapphire glowing!
My fortune, my gold, should you give
yourself to me,
Will henceforth adorn your body and your
sheets!”
Soon Osip is there, he who never ventures onto the beach; as soon as the triangle of children has formed around Noé, he appears; he comes down from his tower and approaches, always standing too close, his fat man’s shadow swallowing hers. Today, the beast sickens him, the stench of raw flesh, the bubbling blood. He stays behind Seth, torn between the lighthouse and Noé.
But to the Queen he never spoke thus
For she had no need of any king’s riches.
Only maps and globes, Far Eastern parchments,
It was for the maps and only those maps
That one grey autumn day, the Queen of Saba
Ventured out and set foot in the ogre’s castle.
Before she starts skinning, Noé has extracted the teeth of the whale. They have the shape of an adult’s fingers, are thicker than thumbs; she throws them haphazardly into a cardboard box. Blood from the gums has crusted on the ivory. The Old Woman, without saying a word, has brought out a cooking pot, a brush, and soap. She sits on a rock by the fire and begins to clean them. One by one, she polishes them until their yellow-white is smooth, then lays them out on large cloths to dry. She rocks Dé in his basket, smiles; she even suffers through Noé’s stories without her customary sighs. The Old Woman knows how much ivory is worth; soon she will send her son to sell the teeth to Seiche’s merchants.
As for Noé, she holds her spear in both hands, gouges the ridge from the tail to the head, the thick skin, the blubber and, underneath, the cachalot’s flesh. She chants the story, her voice following the movement of her hands: when the blade thrusts, she recites a verse, when the blade retreats, she breathes in, readies herself for the next.
The Queen lived naked, the ogre oft caressed
Her necklaces, boots, earrings, and bracelets.
But never on that gold-sequined skin had he
dwelt,
Nor on her figure nor hair: her body too sacred.
He told her, “I love you,” and behind him left
His young wife in white and her entire cortège.
Noé finishes the first cut and lays down her spear. Blood has sprayed and spattered everywhere — at her feet, on her skirts, on her hands, her face — and runs in rivulets to the sea. The waves turn crimson, the white sand turns black. The stench of decaying carcass, iodine, and iron catches in throats. Mie shudders. She doesn’t understand everything her mother says, doesn’t know what an “ogre” is, what “sequined,” or “brocades” means, Noé’s stories are full of strange words that speak of neither animals nor the sea.
But the Queen of Saba continued to ignore
His supplications, overtures, the way he fawned
ever more;
And left in her train, by returning to her globes
The ogre, his newlywed, and their sinister
banquet orb.
Noé stokes the fire. The flames surge in a gold dust high above the beach, sparks take flight and land: on her clothes, where they burn a hole then vanish, on the whale’s carcass, in the Old Woman’s hair, even on the children’s arms whenever the wind turns in their direction. The smoke masks the stench of blood, its white column stands out against the red of the sky.
Noé pauses for a moment, stops speaking, watches the glowing embers, nothing more. No one moves, all that remains is the sound of lapping waves and the brush polishing ivory; the little ones imagine a palace like the lighthouse only bigger, with sails stretched over the windows instead of dirty, threadbare sheets. Chairs with matching legs, pillows full of stuffing, and dozens of pink duvets.
Then Noé picks up the blade again, follows the same route from tail to head, cuts into the left flank, eight metres of skin to carve off, the spear slicing through the hide as though it were butter.
They ate pheasant, mutton, venison,
On wine and mead they soon were drunk,
Devoured profiteroles, flans, then candies,
Turkish delight and August’s strawberries.
Enclosed in the thicket, Abel’s jaw drops. He once tasted a caramel Sevastian brought back from Seiche and relives the sweet taste of sugar on his tongue, dreams of platters of candy just like that caramel, tempting in their wax wrappers; now he understands the ogre’s good fortune: there is no one richer than a man able to eat all the sweets he desires.
At last, he undressed her and looked long
and hard
On her skin, her white thighs, her belly,
her breasts,
Then he sliced her in two and cupped in
his hand
Her bloody intestines and her still-beating
heart.
Almost imperceptibly, Seth shifts closer to Osip. Mie hears the sound of his bottom sliding across the sand and his quick, scared child’s breath. Night falls and Noé’s expression is frightening with its dancing shadows, blood, and blaze of light: Seth mustn’t cry, says Mie to herself over and over, “Seth mustn’t cry.” Her brother curls into a ball, bites down on his knee, but holds his sobs inside.
Day after day, for what seemed like forever,
Desperate for love, unhappy, and violent,
The ogre married at dawn and killed
come sunset.
Soon, all kinds of scavengers draw near to the carcass. Mie worries when crows from the woods begin circling overhead. They caw in the dark and gather in greater and greater numbers, and her first thought is “the wolves will be next.” She imagines being devoured by the pack, their fangs boring into her the same way Noé’s spear dug into the whale. Her blood mingles with the cachalot’s; her mother turns into a she-wolf, eats her child. Mie feels sick, she’s dizzy, she has to clutch at the sand to stop herself from toppling over.
The day arrived when the Queen did quit
Consulting her maps and books and globes.
Then announced her departure forthwith.
Noé has finished the second cut, lays down her spear, finds a hatchet and grabs hold of it with both hands; she strikes the tail again and again, blood spattering — a fine rain — and she continues until the last vertebra gives way and the flukes fall to the ground. Then she wipes her face with the back of her sleeve, rubs her eyes with her arms; all she manages is to smear blood over her skin and the fabric, now saturated with blood like everything else.
The ogre, driven mad, threw himself at
her feet,
He clutched at her legs and embraced
her knees,
Promised her travel, jewels, the earth and
the sea.
For the hide to be secured it must be separated from the blubber. Noé lodges a large hook in the severed flank where, barely five minutes before, the tail hung limply. She hoists herself up on the carcass then, using her body as a counterweight, tugs on the skin that separates into a single unbroken pink strip. Once she reaches the end, she uses her blade to detach the epidermis — a tissue eight metres long and two metres wide — from the blubber. In a few days, she’ll scrub it in the sea to remove the residue, attach it to a wood underlay, remove all the flesh, melt the whale’s brain in water, tan its hide, wait another week, then beat it, smoke it, and ultimately nail it to the cabin floor to keep the cold and the winter at bay. With whatever’s left over, the Old Woman will make shoes, bags, belts.
The beauty refused both a halter and a
wedding,
While the ogre blocked each exit, made a cage
of his dwelling.
He bolted the Queen in a high, white tower,
Visited every day, tried his luck by the hour.
For the time being, it’s the fat that interests Noé: she carves it into chunks piled away from the fire, then sets a large cauldron on the flames and liquefies the blubber inside.
The air smells of smoke and melted cachalot. Around the blazing flames, it’s the blackest of nights. The children are frightened and hungry, too.
At last, one fine July morning, the Queen
Did greet him and bid, “Have a seat.”
She caressed his shoulders, his belly, his
maypole;
Her breasts swung loose, her thighs bare
and blond;
She kissed the ogre who could hold it
no more.
Blissful, ecstatic, and sated with delight
He fell asleep beside her and started to snore
Then woke like a goose to a skewer through
his side.
Mie breathes quickly, breathes loudly. Osip takes a step back. Abel quakes in the bushes, their leaves have been rustling and shaking for some time. Seth’s teeth are still embedded in his knee, he rivets his gaze on the blood that dirties the waves, can’t stop watching it trickle. Dé sleeps in his woven basket. The Old Woman, her polishing of ivory finished a while ago, scowls as Noé stirs the blubber in the pot, then empties it into tin pans and leaves their contents to harden far from the tide’s edge.
Around them, crows, rats, foxes, and flies have started to feast on the exposed flesh; they’ve approached without a sound, the fire keeps them far from the children.
Noé melts the last chunk of lard. She doesn’t speak for what seems like an eternity. She stares at the waves reflecting the flames and shimmering gold; blood stains her face, her arms, her clothes.
I know all this for I was there too.
I saw the treasure, the furs, the girls sliced
in two,
The ogre’s huge mouth, his belly full of brew.
When back to front he felt the thrust of
a dagger
The silver blade was mine, a weapon forged
in Saba.
Without warning, she bends over, scoops up a pot of wet sand and throws it onto the embers. The entire beach fades to black. Seth sobs so hard, the crows flap their wings and caw.