“There’s something we’re missing. We’ve got to find out what it is,” said André, “It’s obviously serious if it’s disturbing her so...”
It is too late for that. She already knows.
Small she may be, but she now knows that all over the earth children are launching their breath into the world. She knows in the desert sand a mouth covered with flies screams in hunger, and the sound is swallowed up by space. She knows in the snows of the far north, the lips of a newborn are cracked by cold, freezing its first call into its last silence. She knows on the warm sand a beloved child sees only the wings of birds.
Each child has a sky of its own: a sky of flies, a sky of lethal snow, or a sky full of birds, depending on which side of life you are born, the good or bad side of things, the world, other people’s hearts.
Being on the right side, she wants to share it!
Like them all, she launches her breath into the world, in her own way.
With each breath she draws, she invents a unique design, creating bubbles and balloons.
Created with every breath love has brought her. Designed with all the colours of the looks that light on her, giving wings to the soul of this fulfilled child.
The little one she sees out in the cold inspires a warm breath to take the chill off. The poor children get shiny bubbles as playthings. Far off, her balloons burst to chase away the flies gathered ‘round the starving ones.
She is convinced the bubbles penetrate the clouds, mixing with the magic beauty of the cumuli dancing in the sky. Migrating with hope, they can surely chase away misery as soon as they arrive.
Nothing else interests her any more. Not toys, not anything.
Since that birthday, that terrible videocassette, that mistake. Out of the watchful eye of the adults. That horrendous vision of hunger, where Lysandre came from. She wants to become like the ones who stayed behind. She no longer wants to eat. Unconsciously, she becomes a living reproach, a Third World child in a land of the rich.
It was the one thing her parents didn’t think of...
The immense eye opening on the world of dying children on the placid consciousnesses of others.
Lysandre can still see the slanted eyes of her crying mother, crying right there in front of her. Her mouth is forming words that hurt, words like goodbyes, her face submerged in her long dark hair. Lysandre dimly remembers an infinite pain lodged in her newborn body. She is torn from warmth of the arms of the crying woman. A chill shiver runs through her. She is emerging from this woman a second time: once from her belly, another from her arms and her cries. She too begins to cry. It hurts. A part of her is torn away and remains behind in someone else dissolving into the retreating countryside. A face so round and a mouth calling to her, getting smaller and smaller, barely as large as a balloon, then a bubble, then a dot lost on the horizon.
She had forgotten all of this: a row of other slanted eyes shut in a straight line, a row of other lips no longer rooting for the nipple. All it took to shatter her happiness was images on a screen. She seems to hear them cry out to her: “Let me borrow your life!”
All had been forgotten. With infinite tenderness, she had been placed in other arms even warmer, before two other faces also crying – though with joy – her cheeks covered with kisses, wrapped in a blanket as soft as her newly perfumed skin, carried away into a sky full of birds and put in a nest of flowers, surrounded by a new family come from far off for a breath of new life, a reason to live and rejoice and satisfy her every whim. She needed only wish for something and her parents became her obedient servants, blinded by love. Nothing was too good for her. Meanwhile, her sisters suffered in an orphanage or lay abandoned by the roadside: “Let me borrow your life!”
Her parents fed her on lies and illusions. Plant flowers in the sun as they may, she will always see the open lips of thirsty, hungry children in those petals.
Lise and André are looking at her and wondering, seeing only too well that adult despair has taken over this child’s soul. How could they free her? What is it she has understood before she should?
One day, the answer comes to them.
This time, they have deliberately mixed too little soap with the water, and all the bubbles burst on the child’s lips.
She chokes as though strangled. Then begins to howl and cry and speak:
“Quick, the other children are waiting!”
“Where?”
“There, under that other sky”
“What children?”
“My sisters.”
“What other sky?”
“Back there, where I came from.”
She is telling them everything, more with tears and drawings than with words. She sketches what she has seen, felt and suffered: the mother she remembers, the moment of parting, her sisters – it has flooded back to her memory all at once – and most of all, the bubbles of hope launched to that other sky... signs she wants to send to those who are not a lucky as she.
“If you get strong again, we’ll go see your sisters at home.”
“First, though, we’ll go see the migration, the new children landing at the airport.”
Then they begin once again the story of migrating birds following the seasons of each country so as to guide their departures and assuage their hunger.
“There is a film we want to show you,” Lise says.
There on the screen she sees herself arriving, and many other children too, also in the arms of parents prepared to give them a new life.
Tonight, Lysandre is eating her supper, but she is the only one. It is her parents’ turn to stare at the sky through a double window of helplessness and hope.
Dreamother
You’re lying, Amélie, you’re lying! Don’t you know that children should always speak the truth? In the corner and on your knees!”
I don’t know why she sends me there every time I tell her what’s going on in my head!
It’s the truth! My Grade One teacher has had me tied to this bench for the last four days. I’ve told Mama, but she doesn’t believe me. O.K., I forgot to mention she holds me down with that look of hers and nothing else. Really riveting, though. A look so stern and cold I just can’t move. Today, I ran away. I just followed the falling leaf out the window. I saw it run out of breath in the wind, just like my teacher in her attempts to keep our attention. Both of them sliding slowly to the ground, like a slow-motion movie, with a rustle like a dress, fainted away.
“Why must you always lie, Amélie?” My mother asks, wanting, no matter what, to convey a sense of honesty to me. “Nobody else saw your teacher faint, just you!”
Alternating sighs, her voice really hurt me. I love my mother, and I wouldn’t want to disappoint her for all the world.
“You lie with every single breath”
She hurts me so badly sometimes! I stop myself from answering:
“You’re the one who’s been lying Mama, Mother, mouthing lies about your mother-lie love. Ever since I was in your belly. You didn’t want a child to come along and disturb your life, but you were too afraid to have an abortion. I heard you tell one of your friends that. You tried all the old-fashioned ways of getting rid of me: warm red wine, falling down the stairs, but still I hung on. With dreams that had wings stuck right in my skin. My body made it through, despite all that, but you had got rid of me for yourself and myself too. I’d just flown away. So you could have your space. I’m your biggest lie of all! But I’m not blaming you. I’m not the one who wants to break you. I don’t lie either, I just disappear. With all the speed my legs and wings can muster,