The Black Virgin

My mother's embraces were rare, as were her words of kindness and affection. But I collected those that she gave me over the course of my life and made a sort of nosegay that I take out sometimes, on November nights when the wind rattles the shutters. I examine these flowers, one by one, incredulous. Feeling a candle light within me, I fall asleep, my anxiety assuaged.

We're not born to be happy. My countrymen knew this from experience. Their lives, even in the mildest cases, were hard. And so my mother, "since it had to be done," married my father—she nineteen years old, he forty—without loathing or love. A beautiful brown-haired Occitane, robust looking despite her fragile health. Of her husband, dead shortly after my birth, I have not a single memory. The color-touched photo, framed behind glass as was proper, showed me a man not handsome, but with an honest aspect, as the country folk saw: a hard worker well versed in the ways of raising goats and sheep to be as content on the karst as they were in the nourishing grass.

My mother often told me, "All our troubles came because you were too young." Indeed, I came into the world too soon, at seven months. "This poor little thing—you are going to lose her," the midwife said. My mother fashioned a sack from lambswool and placed me in the cradle, warm under the covers. Into my mouth that did not even know how to cry, she poured a blend of sheep's milk, water, and honey.

The first misfortune: I lived. Not only did I live, but I quickly gained weight and strength.

In the final year of his life, my haggard father sought a shepherd to help him. Good shepherds, skilled in animal husbandry, were almost impossible to find by then. But finally a certain Boivin appeared, a young man of eighteen, handsome, tall, able in everything, and above all, an expert in raising livestock. To top it all off, he was the picture of politeness.

All seemed, then, to happen for the best. However, the ornery messieurs from our police station claimed that Boivin wasn't his real name, that he came from God knows where and didn't speak like a Christian—that is to say, Occitane.

The man who went by "Boivin" demanded high wages, room, and board—in addition to limitless liters of wine and sacks of flour (in a region where neither vines nor wheat grew). But what can you do? Father had to take it or leave it. Boivin was hired under a signed contract and lodged in a lean-to near the hay barn with his belongings: two shirts and four pairs of hole-riddled socks. He'd sit outside with the herds and eat food wrapped in a handkerchief. At night, he'd sometimes eat at the bosses' table.

________

When my father died, I was still too young to find it strange that Boivin had the nerve to move out of his bedbug-infested lean-to and into our house, and that he even dared to take my father's place in the marital bed. Despite knowing what the neighbors said—three kilometers away from our property—I understood nothing of it, all the more because they spoke in proverbs and cloaked words. I liked Boivin and had fun with him. What pleased me even more was the fact that he settled me into a room under the sloped roof—a room all my own that I shared only with the cat. Boivin, who could do everything, painted it all white. The cat would prick up its ears when the swallows whistled, coming and going to feed their ever-hungry hatchlings, who were becoming my playmates. I never knew any other children. My only companions were the big red cat and the donkey—named, God knows why, Eusèbe.

When I reached school age, I was too petite to make my way to the communal school down...