Beatrice and Virgil - Yann Martel [52]
"It was then that Virgil and Beatrice saw that their bundles were swaddled babies. The women pushed their babies underwater and held them there. Even after the few bubbles stopped popping at the surface, there was no hesitation on their part, no flexing of the arms. On the contrary, the women continued to move deeper into the pond, kicking at their skirts and losing and regaining their footing. The men lining the edge of the pond--there must have been ten or so--far from offering any kind of help, jeered the women on.
"When she was certain that her baby could no longer be alive, yet still clutching it beneath the surface, one of the women, now past her waist in the black water, plunged headfirst and immediately was drowned. Neither she nor her baby broke the surface again. They both sank to the bottom. The other woman tried to do the same but could not manage it, even when it was obvious that her baby, like the other, was dead. She kept coming up for air, coughing and snorting, which provoked laughter among the men, who shouted advice on how best to drown. Whereas the first woman's death had proceeded with the swiftness of gravity, the second woman's took longer. For minutes she stood in the water, shivering and staring at its surface and looking at the men on the shore and attempting again to drown herself, all done without any show or any effort to communicate, only with the grave look of someone trying to kill herself. Her baby was gone and she was determined to follow it close behind. Finally, with a glance up to the sky, lifting the soggy mass of her baby out of the water and pressing it to her chest, the woman forcefully threw herself forward and managed to end her days. A hand clawing at the surface of the water, a muddied boot kicking up awkwardly, a bubble of skirt briefly floating--then she was gone. Ripples faded and the pond was still once more. The men cheered and moved on."
"And Beatrice and Virgil in all this?" Henry asked quietly.
"They neither moved nor made a sound the whole time and they remained unnoticed. As soon as the men dispersed, they fled the village. Images kept pressing upon them. Beatrice could see the face of one of the babies, the first one to be drowned, a fleeting, expressive pinkness, with a small escaped hand reaching up to its mother. Another face harried Virgil: that of a boy--he could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen years old. In his pursuit of the women, he slowed and kicked the ground in their direction, throwing up a cloud of dirt and pebbles, his kicking leg raised high in the air as he hopped on the other to a stop--this done with the easy, elastic vigour of youth, accompanied by a whoop and a holler. Then he started running after the women again. He was one of the loudest and most excited at the pond's edge."
"And he's the one they run into a few days later?"
"Yes, as I just read to you," the taxidermist replied.
"It's after they flee the village that Beatrice and Virgil come to the spot where they have the conversation about a pear?"
"That's right."
There was silence, that silence the taxidermist was so comfortable with, in person and in his writing, that silence in which things can grow or rot.
The taxidermist spoke first. "I need help with the games Virgil and Beatrice are going to play."
The words games and play --but said in the gloomiest voice and with the darkest expression. Henry felt a throb in his head.
"Tell me, the boy in your play--what happens to him after he kills Beatrice and Virgil? Is that covered in your allegory about animals?"
"No. I stay with the animals. I don't want games that need a board or dice or anything like that."
Henry remembered the story the taxidermist had sent him, "The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator". Henry now understood the taxidermist's keen interest in the Flaubert story: Julian