The Life of Elves Read Free

lingered on the infants settled on a blanket to one side of the great wood stove, and finally he looked at the priest who, in a halo of hare pâté and goose fat, stood up and went over to the stove.
    They all got to their feet.
    We shall not repeat here the country priest’s blessing; all that Latin, when in fact we wish we knew a bit of Spanish, would be too confusing. But they got to their feet, the priest blessed the infant, and everyone knew that the snowy night was a night of grace. They recalled an ancestor who had told them the story of a cold spell fit to make you die as likely of fright as of frost when they were fighting the last campaign, the one that left them victorious and forever damned with the memory of their dead—the last campaign, where the columns were advancing in a lunar twilight and the ancestor himself no longer knew whether the paths of his childhood had ever existed, and that walnut tree in the bend in the road, and the swarms of insects around the time of Saint John’s Day, no, he couldn’t remember a thing, and all the men were just like him, because it was so cold there, so cold . . . it’s hard to imagine such a fate. But at dawn, after a night of misery where the cold struck down those brave souls the enemy had missed, it suddenly began to snow, and that snow . . . that snow was the redemption of the world, because among their divisions it would not freeze again, and soon on their brows they felt the miraculous warmth of the flakes signaling the thaw.
    Â 
    The little girl didn’t feel the cold any more than the soldiers of the last campaign, or the lads who had reached the clearing and who were gazing at the scene, soundless as pointing dogs. Later, they could not recall what they had seen clear as day, and to each question they would reply with the vague tone of someone searching within for some confused memory. Most of the time, all they said was, “The little lass was there in the middle of a bloody blizzard, but she was warm and alive as could be and she was talking to some creature that made off afterward.”
    â€œWhat sort of creature?” asked the women.
    â€œAh, some creature,” they replied.
    And as in these parts where legends and the Good Lord, etcetera . . . they stuck to that reply and went on watching over the child as if over the Holy Sepulcher itself.
    A singularly human creature, that’s how each of them had sensed it, looking at vibrations as visible as matter whirling around the little girl, and it was an unfamiliar sight that gave them a strange shiver, as if life were suddenly splitting open and they could look inside it at last. But what do you see when you look inside life? You see trees and wood and snow, perhaps a bridge, and landscapes slipping by before your eyes have time to grasp them. You see the toil and the winds, the seasons and the sorrows, and you might see a tableau that belongs to your heart alone—a strap of leather in a tin box, a patch of meadow where the hawthorn blossoms run riot, the wrinkled face of a beloved woman and the smile of the little girl telling tales of tree frogs. Then, nothing more. The men would recall that the world suddenly landed back on its feet in an explosion that left them weak and drained—and after that they saw that the mist had been swept from the clearing, that it was snowing so hard you could drown in it, and the little girl stood all alone in the middle of the circle where there were no other footprints save her own. Then they all went back down to the farm where they sat the child in front of a bowl of scorching hot milk, and the men hastily stored their rifles, because there was mushroom stew with headcheese pâté and ten bottles of their wine for laying down.
    Â 
    There you have the story of the little girl who held the paw of a giant wild boar tight in her hand. Truth be told, no one can really explain what it all means. But there is