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In the village, they said Phainon had been born to be loved.
His hand was ever quick to help, his shoulder broad and steady, his voice gentle, and he possessed that rustic goodness which people mistake for proof of purity. He carried water to the elderly, mended fences split apart by frost, chopped wood before anyone had to ask, brought back stray goats, and sometimes guided the youngest children as far as the school path when the mud grew too thick or the snow-wind blew too hard across the hills. He was thanked with warmth, his patience was blessed, his uprightness praised. In the eyes of others, he had that plain honesty found in boys raised among beasts, soil, labor, and sundays at church.
The mothers looked upon him as one looks upon an ideal son, the men as upon a trustworthy young neighbor, and even the priest, who ordinarily mistrusted anything that shone too brightly, granted him a calm esteem.
No one knew that beneath such spotless docility, something rotten was blooming with an almost sacred grace.
In the evening, when the chores were done, when the buckets had been put away, the fire stirred back to life, the animals fed, Phainon remained alone with a hunger no meal could soothe. It was not the coarse hunger of the belly, nor even that of the loins. It was a deeper appetite, paler, perhaps more religious, one that did not merely wish to touch what it desired, but to absorb it, to reduce it to so perfect an intimacy that no boundary would survive. And then he thought of the primary schoolmaster with the constancy of the diseased. He thought of him as one prays to a forbidden idol, with fervor, with shame, with that exquisite trembling of the soul that already knows it leans toward blasphemy.
Anaxa was not loved by the adults. They found him too distant, too refined, too dry. The women said he did not possess the warmth a schoolmaster ought to have. The men judged him too educated to be frank, too beautiful to be simple, too silent to be entirely honest. The priest could not bear the way he listened to sermons with that impassive face that suggested neither devotion nor disdain, but some more troubling form of lucidity. Without ever saying so outright, they reproached him for his exact politeness, his clothes always clean despite the village dust, his accent from elsewhere, and that strange way he had of looking at people as though he guessed in them something other than what they offered the world.
And yet, the children loved him.
They loved him with that true, instinctive love with which only children know how to love those who do not take them either for ornaments or for animals to be tamed. Anaxa knew how to handle them. He did not have easy tenderness, nor the grand reassuring displays that mothers admire, but he possessed a rarer, deeper art, that of taking them seriously. He spoke to the shyest among them as though they were beings worthy of attention. He could tell when one of them lied out of fear rather than malice, when a mistake came from pride or weariness, when a silence concealed shame. He delivered his lessons with such vivid clarity that even the most restless would end by listening. He almost never raised his voice. He had no need. An inflection was enough, a glance, sometimes a mere pause, and the tumult subsided. In spring the little ones brought him crushed flowers, in autumn chestnuts, awkward drawings in which his long figure stood before a blackboard like a severe saint watching over a cloud of grimy cherubs.
That childish affection lent his solitude something even more painful. He was better tolerated for it, without ever being truly loved. They said he had a gift with the little ones, as one speaks of a strange, almost animal aptitude that is not enough to make a man agreeable.
Phainon, for his part, had no need of any excuse to look at him.
He often passed by the school under honest pretexts, too honest to be innocent. He brought logs for the stove, repaired a shutter, cleared the path after rain, righted a fence. He always had a good reason to present himself, and every one of those reasons was true, which made them all the more dangerous. Sometimes he entered the empty classroom after lessons had ended, when the little chairs still stood askew, the smell of chalk, ink, and damp wool still floated in the air, and Anaxa, at the back, was correcting exercise books beneath the gray light of day’s end. Then silence itself took on the shape of a snare.
Phainon watched the bent nape, the fingers faintly stained with ink, the thin mouth tightening at some clumsy mistake, then softening almost despite itself at the careful sentences of the youngest. He also saw, and perhaps that was the worst of it, the way Anaxa became someone else among children, no longer merely cold or superb, but precise, patient, strangely attentive. That restrained tenderness, which no one in the village truly cared to notice, gave rise in Phainon’s heart to an even darker violence. He did not desire Anaxa’s body alone. He desired what that body contained of secrecy, of modesty, of involuntary delicacy. He wanted to reach the exact place where mastery gave way to weakness.
Anaxa had understood that there was something abnormal in him. Not everything, never everything, but enough to let that intuition live between them like a beast lying down in the shadows. He knew how to recognize glances that lingered too long, presences that returned without true necessity, acts of devotion whose purity was too carefully fitted a mask. He saw Phainon arrive before he had even been called for. He saw the excessive docility, the inhabited silences, that almost pious intensity with which he received the slightest words.
Then the village entered that lean season at winter’s end, when provisions fall low, soups grow thinner, and the frozen earth seems to hold beneath it all the dead of the season. In church, the priest spoke more often of sacrifice, of purification, of the lamb given for the salvation of men. The candles burned with a sickly pallor. The women folded their hands. The children repeated the prayers Anaxa had taught them with a grave, almost touching diligence. Phainon, however, no longer heard those words as he ought to have done. They descended into his mind like a poison of ineffable sweetness. They gave his madness a holy tongue. They adorned his hunger with liturgical gold.
One afternoon, in the nearly empty classroom, he found upon the desk a lesson notebook lying open to a page where Anaxa had copied out a line from one of his poetry books. The letters were neat, upright, without ornament, despite a few small blotches here and there. At the center, like a naked truth, these words lay sleeping in the still-fresh ink : « take and eat, this is my body ». Phainon remained standing before that sentence so long that he nearly ceased to breathe. It seemed to him that all the hidden things of the world, desire, devouring, the blackest tenderness, suddenly came to arrange themselves within that single plain line like penitents entering a church.
When Anaxa returned, he found Phainon motionless before the notebook. He merely stopped, laid upon him a gaze too calm, then resumed his place as though nothing deserved to be said. And yet that silence was in no way neutral. It was laden with the knowledge of another soul, with that terrible manner some beings have of not naming what they perceive in order to let it grow all the more.
In the days that followed, Phainon slept badly. In his dreams, the classroom changed into a chapel, the blackboard into an altar, and Anaxa’s voice, which ordinarily explained rivers, numbers, grammar to the children, became the voice of an office, almost sung, almost funereal. He saw the little schoolchildren’s hands joined as if for communion, and amidst that regulated innocence there remained nothing but Anaxa’s body, pale in the cold light, offered without being offered, exposed defenselessly beneath a collar marked by two dark bands. That throat haunted him with atrocious fidelity. He thought of it while cutting bread, while fastening gates, while feeding the animals. He thought of it with his hands, with his own throat, with his teeth, as if his whole body wished to learn a prayer his mouth alone did not yet dare to form.
Then came the morning when a lamb had to be slaughtered.
The sky hung low, a gray of damp ashes. The snow had begun to rot in places, letting black, greasy earth rise through it, staining the hems of skirts and the sabots. Phainon agreed to help the saigneur and took one of the young beasts, the palest, almost the most beautiful, with that white wool that gives lambs something unreal, something almost eucharistic. He led it behind the barn, far from prying eyes, far from the kitchen where his mother was already preparing the meal, far too from the voices of the village. The lamb walked docilely, sometimes brushing against his leg with a light movement, as though it still believed itself to be following a friendly hand.
Phainon had taken a knife. Yet he set it down against the stone. He knew well enough what he ought to do. Be swift, be clean, be efficient. But that day he wanted neither cleanliness nor haste. He wanted to feel. He wanted the gesture to speak to him in a tongue older than labor. He knelt in the cold mud, ran his fingers through the warm wool, and the contact of that living, supple, vulnerable body completed the troubling of whatever within him had been waiting for a form.
Then he thought of Anaxa. He did not think first of his face, nor his mouth, nor even his fine schoolmaster’s hands. He thought of his throat. Of that long, pale line he glimpsed whenever Anaxa bent over the children’s desks. Of the delicate skin beneath which life throbbed so visibly. Of the way so measured a voice might break if it were hindered a little. Of that fragile, splendid column which bore too lucid a mind, too sharp a pride, and which filled Phainon with the mad desire to lay his hands upon it not wholly to kill, but to know the instant when grace begins to tremble.
His fingers closed around the lamb’s throat.
At first the creature shivered only slightly. Then it understood. Its legs scraped against the mud. Its little body struggled with such touching weakness that it became obscene. Phainon tightened further. Beneath his palms he felt the ridiculous struggle, the warmth of life, the panic groping for an escape. And in that same motion, as if the two gestures had become one, he imagined Anaxa beneath his hands, not crying out, not fleeing, but looking at him with that mute intensity he reserved for the things he refused to confess. The name came to his lips like a spoiled prayer, a murmur breathed against the white wool.
The lamb convulsed once more, then yielded.
The silence afterward was immense. Phainon remained bent over the little corpse with an expression of sick rapture, like a man who had at last touched the visible form of his blasphemy. He felt a sacred nausea rise within him, a mingling of ecstasy, disgust, and desire so profound that tears almost came to his eyes.
It was then that he noticed the presence behind him.
Anaxa stood near the barn, motionless in his black coat, his bare hands exposed despite the cold. His face expressed neither horror nor surprise. He was watching. Watching in that insufferable way of his, without haste, as though every thing must first be understood before it could be judged. His eyes slipped from the lamb’s body to Phainon’s hands, then slowly rose to his face. In that contemplation there was not only lucidity. There was also, a form of fascination so discreet that it might have passed for mere attentiveness.
Phainon stood up. His knees were soiled with earth. His fingers still held the memory of the strangled throat. He wished to speak, to defend himself, perhaps to deny, but no lie came to him. Everything he had hidden for months now trembled in the air like a cord stretched too tight.
At last Anaxa moved closer. He had that slowness possessed by those who know that the slightest gesture is already an answer. His eyes came to rest upon the lamb, then upon the unused knife.
He said almost nothing. He did not need to. When his voice came, it was gentle to the point of cruelty. He merely observed that a knife would have been simpler, swifter, less intimate. And that final nuance opened in Phainon’s chest a wound made radiant.
Then, stripped of all real adornment, the truth stood between them.
Anaxa’s mouth parted only slightly, as though after a long run or a long prayer. One might have believed that the old mask of denial still passed through his gaze, that elegant way of pretending he was there only as a witness, that he was merely watching over a dangerous slide, that he was keeping his composure. But that mask was no longer there. Beneath reason, beneath mastery, beneath the dry modesty of the schoolmaster, something more troubled was already answering. There was in him a curiosity too sustained, a stillness too offered, an almost solemn way of remaining within reach.
Phainon raised his hand.
That gesture should have made Anaxa draw back. He did not.
Phainon’s fingers reached his throat with a harrowing slowness. The skin was cold at the surface, warm beneath. The pulse beat against his thumb with an offensive delicacy. There was in that place all the beauty he had dreamed of, all the fragility he had adored, all the tender horror of his desire at last made real. Anaxa closed his eyes for a moment, not out of fear, but as one inclines the head before a word one has long known one day must be heard.
Beneath that hand, which had not yet begun to tighten, the whole world seemed to narrow into a liturgy of breath. The dead lamb lay in the mud like a fulfilled parable. Far off, the church bells began to ring, slow, funereal but majestic. The village, with its trusting children, its busy mothers, its pious old men, went on living without knowing that behind a barn, on the gray morning of a sacred day, the most helpful boy in the country was at last touching the exact place where his love became crime, and that the man who ought to have recoiled from it was inclining his head instead, almost as though toward a forbidden communion.
Ultimately, Phainon released the pressure before it became full violence. He released it with a gentleness more terrifying than the strangling itself. And yet his fingers remained there, resting upon that beloved throat like a threat that had assumed the form of a caress. Anaxa opened his eyes again. His gaze no longer possessed quite the same cold sharpness, but now bore that secret fracture of beings who have glimpsed within themselves a truth they had hoped never to recognize.
Then they took up the lamb and brought it back to the house. It would have to be prepared, carved, cooked, served. Its flesh, too, would have to be blessed before it was eaten.