Madeleine Is Sleeping Read Online Free PDF Page A

contortions, he gently unfolded her and grasped her paddle in one of his warm hands. Behind the nearest caravan, he bowed slightly, lifted the tails of his well-cut coat and produced the most melancholy sounds she had ever heard: that of the nightingale, the grasshopper, the cuckoo. And though Madeleine was a child who rarely cried, the strange and unearthly emissions reminded her of her home, and she wept.
    Charlotte, too, is crying. She hears in the nightmare moans of M. Pujol a voice that she misses.

Performance
    M. PUJOL FINDS IT strangely fitting that his performance should now excite tears, when once he could reduce an entire theatre to gasping and painful hilarity. How could such a simple and surely familiar act produce such paroxysms of laughter? On stage: a sad, pale-faced man; a large basin of water; a candlestick sitting atop a stool. In the seats: gentlemen and their wives, their mouths flung wide open, their hands clawing at the velveteen armrests. M. Pujol believes that his art is akin to that of the oboist, or the bassoonist: a matter of shaping the lips around a stream of air. The fact that his lips should belong to his lower regions, that his should be endowed with unusual agility and musicality, does not strike him as remarkable. But the pleasure that his gift brings to others! Due to the tightness of their corsets, and the violence of their laughter, women often lose consciousness altogether. They are carried out by swarthy nurses, whom the manager Oiler has stationed in the aisles—cunningly—for this very purpose.
    The little boy who sweeps the floor finds it strewn with discarded collars, shredded handkerchiefs, pearly buttons trailing bits of thread. It is a phenomenon that M. Pujol has witnessed from the stage: this peculiar compulsion to disrobe, to rend from the body its restraints. He lifts his tailcoat, he farts; the whole house convulses. Le Petomane watches, aghast, as below him bodies burst forth from their envelopes. The audience stretches before him, a field in late summer, crackling pods splitting at their seams, releasing into the air armies of weightless and dancing spores.

Invasion
    THE GIFT REVEALED ITSELF to him when he was only a child, and visiting the seashore with his family. His younger sister had been possessed by a growling cough all winter; it was thought that the air might restore her. Joseph, as he was then called, was the first to venture into the water. The sea licked at him like an icy tongue; his skin prickled; his genitals retreated. But inside he felt the warm thrumming of his own small body, the quiet roar of his blood, as if he had swallowed a wonderful little engine that kicked up its own heat. I am still warm in here! he rejoiced silently.
    Joseph! his mother cried. He saw her, beautiful and slim, silhouetted by the bathing hut. Joseph! she cried. Do not swallow the seawater! It will burn your nostrils terribly! It will go right up into your brain!
    He pinched the tip of his nose firmly between his fingers. He expanded his lungs, he puffed out his cheeks. He counted to seven. Then the water closed over him, sealing him inside its cold and salty mouth. The little engine panted away, and Joseph could hear the quickening thumps as the men, caps pushed back and sweating, heaved more coal into its radiant belly. I'm warm! Joseph crowed. It's working! He held the sea at bay; he curled up beside the hot, vibrating machine.
    And then the unthinkable occurred. A gasket burst, perhaps, or a valve failed. The unreliable sphincter! Joseph felt the icy water enter him, felt it storming down his narrow corridors, felt it surging into the hold. The chamber flooded; the engine's glowing belly was
extinguished; the engineers' caps bobbed sadly atop the cold and salty sea that had invaded him. His abdomen contracted in a series of agonizing and colicky spasms.
    On shore, behind an outcropping of white stones, squatting above the sand, he expelled a stomach's worth of sea. It