Free Day

by Inès Cagnati

  •

  Because of all the issues surrounding these dead person’s clothes I wear, I have to steal to make myself a wardrobe. Afterwards, I’ll burn all my old clothes. How happy I’ll be when I’ve burned them all! Nobody can know. If, because of my dead aunt, I can’t burn them up, I’ll bury them far away, deep in the earth, or drown them in a hole in the marshes. I don’t know yet. Before I’ve stolen everything I need, there’ll be plenty of time to think about it. I can’t take the other boarders’ clothes, they’ll be recognized right away. I have to go to Prisunic. Anyway, that’s better. There are so many objects in bulk in each section that, if I take one, there’s no real change. And then, because they haven’t been sold yet, they don’t really belong to anyone. You can’t call that theft, I’d say. In any case, it’s not like I’m stealing from another girl. That’s important. I do steal from the other boarders, obviously, but only every other Saturday, right before I get on my bike and pedal really fast towards home. I take a little money from the day students on Thursday mornings, to buy things on Thursday afternoons. I never have any money. At home they don’t give me any. They don’t have any.

  At the high school, money is pretty easy to steal. I only take coins, ones that the day students leave deep in the pockets of their jackets or their coats. All they’d have to do is pay a little attention. But they don’t, and the proof is that, so far, not one of them has missed a single coin. No doubt they don’t even know how much money they have. Their parents give them some every day, they can’t count it all. For the boarders it’s different. They only get money once a week and after that, they have to make it stretch six days. Better to leave their pockets alone.

  On Thursdays, I ask to go to the bathroom, no big deal, and I go to the cloakroom and check out the clothes. I shake them a bit, if there are coins in the pockets, they clink, and all I have to do is take them. I’ve noticed that there are very dirty girls whose pockets are full of old breadcrumbs, or handkerchiefs hardened into a ball. That’s disgusting.

  I came up with this method of stealing because, at the beginning of the year, the headmistress told us over and over, I don’t know how many times, that it’s officially forbidden to leave money in the cloakroom. The girls are breaking the rules, and so much the worse for them if I take their money; if only they’d listened to the headmistress, there’d be nothing for them to complain about. That’s pretty good, I think.

  From Fanny, I don’t steal. She’s my friend, even if she’s rich. I’m very happy she’s rich. She’s so beautiful that you can’t imagine her poor, like us, for example. If she’d been born poor she’d be less beautiful, or not beautiful in the same way. At the high school I’ve noticed you can tell the rich girls from the poor girls by their faces. They don’t have the same aura, or allure. This is absolutely true, and I can prove it because I’ve gone through the pockets of practically every girl in my class.

  I put my smock down and stood up. Daisy didn’t even wake up. She was deep in sleep, miles away, no doubt. I wondered what she was dreaming about. I often ask myself foolish questions. That’s how I am. In class, the professors get angry. They think I’m doing it on purpose to annoy them. It’s not true, of course. But they get very angry and that bothers me. Especially the French teacher, the day she spoke about racism. She loves talking about racism. She says it’s a topical subject, a burning subject, words like that. And it’s true. In class there are Vietnamese girls who are more intelligent than the other girls, and black girls who are less. This causes a lot of problems and sometimes we fight. That day, while everyone else was arguing, I was telling Fanny about Daisy’s adventures and the dogs who come from far away to court her when she’s in heat. Daisy is a beautiful dog, all tawny and slender, and she has great success with all the male dogs in the area, they fight for her. I was telling this to Fanny, and above all how Daisy always chose the ugliest dog, a malingering, dirty dog, really quite ugly. But that’s what Daisy liked about him. You never know. We laughed, talking about these things, Fanny and me. I was calm and contented, and then, all of a sudden, I started thinking about red ants and black ants. I’d read a story about red ants in a magazine at the library. I asked Fanny if red ants mate with black ants. Fanny didn’t know. I raised my hand to ask the professor. At that moment, in a voice thick with emotion, she was telling the story of the awe-inspiring black man Toussaint Louverture, who wrote to Napoleon, even though he was black. The professor broke off and asked me what I wanted, and I asked her if she knew whether red ants mated with black ants. I understood at once that I should not have spoken because a silence fell over the classroom that was so cataclysmic that I sat down in fright. And then the girls started laughing like savages. The professor rose to her full height, red in the face, and shouted in her shrill voice, “This is unheard of. Unheard of.”

  After that, she made me copy out a ridiculous sentence five hundred times. She said, “An imbecilic task for an imbecilic mind.”

  I was very angry that she said that to me. I never said things like that to her, and because she’s a professor, she can say anything she wants to us. I didn’t respond. I thought she might think I’d been making a stupid joke. She didn’t know the stories about Daisy and her canine admirers that had made me think of ants, and I really did want to know whether red ants and black ants could mix, and what kind of young they’d produce, and all that. But I said nothing, and copied out the five hundred lines, paying attention to my penmanship. The other girls were furious with me. Even though they were only given a hundred lines to copy—for having laughed in class. The profs hate it when anyone laughs or is happy in class.

  •

  I had difficulty standing up on my swollen legs. All the same I walked toward the house. It was freezing. The hardened earth cracked under my feet. That made me happy. I hate the mud so much. It was very cold out, with a sky full of stars that gave the house a creamy sheen.

  I put the shopping bag by the front door. Poor Maman. She was sure to be so terribly sad that I’d left without seeing her. I began thinking about that, and all at once I started to cry, I who never cry, for the most part. I went back to Daisy’s bed at a run and I cried hard, so hard, my head in my dirty smock so as not to wake Daisy and her puppy.

  5

  I WOKE with a start. Clanking noises everywhere. In a moment, I understood. My father was milking the cows, and the pails and the cream strainers were colliding. Knowing that my father was so near made my heart beat even harder. I have a completely crazy heart.

  Daisy stretched, barked loudly, and was up in a bound. I felt a surge of tenderness for her and once again I felt like crying. That was stupid. Nonetheless, I was happy that at last the night was over.

  I asked myself what I was going to do. I no longer wanted to leave as much as I had before. My mother must be making coffee in the kitchen. In a little while my father would join her and they’d drink their coffee in silence, and my father would add a little brandy to his because he said it gave him strength. Then my father would go back to the barn to see to the cows and the calves, muck out the barn floor, and all the rest. My mother would stay by the fire, waiting until it was time to go look after the poultry and the pig. That’s how it goes every morning, since always.

  So I thought I could take advantage of the time my dad was working in the barn to go see my mother. I love my mother, I have to say; and just then thinking about her made me feel so terribly sad, a sadness you could cut with a knife. I would have liked to see my mother for an instant only, and then leave immediately. All alone in the dog’s bed, I was so very sad. And then I remembered it all. My mother would start to cry, to beg, to beg again, and I would stay, and maybe my father would throw me out again. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want that any more. Better not to see my mother.

  I decided not to see anyone and to leave. When my father went back to the kitchen to drink his coffee, I’d leave Daisy and head off on my bicycle.

  Daisy came back. I rested my hand on her muzzle. With
her cold nose, she snuffled all over my hand then took it in her mouth and nibbled it, without hurting me or anything. She’s extraordinary, Daisy is. She pretended she was eating me and having a feast. What an actress! In the meantime, the puppy nursed, making greedy noises.

  •

  Suddenly my father left the barn. I hadn’t been thinking about him at all anymore. I was afraid. I was afraid he’d come here, that he’d find me in Daisy’s bed. And if he felt like beating me with a stick, I wouldn’t be able to defend myself, burrowed into this hole. My heart got crazier and crazier.

  I remembered something I did when I was still little.

  My father and my mother were shifting bales of hay in the barn. Mice were fleeing, running all over the place in a frenzy. I caught one. I took it to the meadow, by the bank of the stream. With a stick I dug a deep hole in the earth and carpeted it with grass so it would be soft. I put the mouse there. I wanted her to make her nest there. But the mouse didn’t want to, she wanted to get away. I pushed her back into the hole with my stick. But she didn’t want to stay. Suddenly she started making unhappy little squeaks. I don’t know what happened. I got up, and with the tip of my stick, I crushed the mouse. In the end, nothing was left but a pink and gray sludge. I went to sit on the bank of the stream and threw up into the water. I stayed there a long time, sitting there surrounded by sturdy mint plants, staring at the dirty water.

  Seeing my father, I thought about that again. My crazy heart went wild and I felt like throwing up.

  My father went into the kitchen. I got up, took my green smock and ran behind the barn, towards my bicycle. I didn’t even say goodbye to Daisy. I couldn’t take it anymore.

  •

  My bicycle was waiting for me. I reclaimed it with incredible joy. If it had been a person I would have rushed into its arms, carried away by tenderness, even though I don’t like to show my feelings, which is something my mother always reproaches me for. But my bicycle is better than a person.

  Amid all the grayness gripping the earth, I could see how poor and worn out my bike was. It’s so old and so rusted that I feel worse and worse every time I use it, it’s as if I were forcing a really, really old animal to keep on going when it’s about to die: to keep on going, keep on going. If I didn’t really have to use it, I wouldn’t, because the frame is flaking so badly, you’d think it was going to crumble to dust. It’s ridiculous to say, but my bicycle is in such a broken-down condition that I think about it like a person, I can’t help it. I worry about it just like I worry about my little sister Antonnella, who’s so sweet and frail. When it rains, it’s terrible for me because I know rain could kill it, rusty as it is. Some days I can’t bear having so much to worry about. Other people are lucky. Fanny has never had to worry about a blind, frail sister and a bicycle devoured by rust. You can tell from her shining face. Fanny is bright as the sun in springtime. Me, I’m like a well in the marshes. It’s terrible to be like me.

  •

  I took my bicycle and carried it up to where the path begins, behind the barn. It’s a downward path, bordered with thick hedges full of old abandoned nests. No risk of my father seeing me.

  The wheels of my bike were crusted with mud, and the mud had frozen during the night. I laid the bike down on the slope and sat down on the ground. My green smock bothered me. I rolled it into a tight ball and put it in my dead aunt’s raincoat. At least the smock would be safe. Incredibly green and ugly as it was, I felt sorry for it, too. It’s not the smock’s fault. I lingered there a while, with the thick grayness of the world everywhere, and the mist from the marshes. It was very cold.

  •

  When I stood up, my feet and hands were numb with cold. I had nothing to wait for, not even the sun, which wasn’t coming up. I hate how dark it is in these parts for months, day and night. Later on, when I’m grown up, I’ll leave; I’ll go to the land of wild sunshine, and there I’ll be beautiful, too.

  I found a stick in the hedge and started prying off the encrusted mud on the wheels of my bike. It came off in fat, rocky chunks. I’d promised myself that the next time I came home I’d take the back mudguard off of my bicycle because there was no way I could keep this up. Once the mud was off, I lifted up the front of the bike and then the back, spinning each wheel, making sure they turned smoothly. They screeched a little, but when I sat down it got better. When I’m sitting on my bike and we’re moving, it squeaks. It squeaks, and that suits me, because it’s got no bell to make our presence known when necessary. Also, it always reminds me of the story of the salamander.

  This is a story from a long time ago, when I was still very little. One day my father went to hunt frogs in the big pond in the meadow. Whenever I remember this, and it’s when I’m on my bike that I tend to, I can see that sunny spring that we’d had up till then, and all the vines and the marshes beyond them rustling with wild tulips, the fields and the ditches gone wild with flowers and all their mingled scents. And then, that Thursday, my father went to hunt frogs in the pond. He was fishing for frogs when, all of a sudden, a salamander appeared. He didn’t want to take it off the hook because they say salamanders burn you if you touch them. He went back to the house with his sack of frogs in one hand and his fishing line in the other, held out at arm’s length, with the little salamander dangling from it. He put the line on the pear tree in front of the farm. I didn’t know. And then, just like that, I heard a cry, a kind of prolonged one-note squeak. A tiny little cry that seemed like it would never end. I looked around, and when I understood, I begged my mother to detach the salamander or at least to kill it very quickly. She didn’t want to. She forbade me to touch it, it was a dirty beast, it’d burn me if I touched it. I sat under the pear tree near the squeaking salamander so it wouldn’t be all alone. It squeaked continuously for a day and a night. It died all of a sudden in the morning.

  I started walking along the path, pushing my bike, which was as yellow with mud as if it had been dipped in a slimy bath. That made me laugh—because of my grandmother. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, had such bad rheumatism that she couldn’t walk anymore. But Maman told me she went to take mud baths that totally cured her. What makes me laugh is the thought of someone holding my fat grandmother, stark naked, by the hands, dipping her in the muddy water, hauling her out, dipping her again, over and over for a long time, while she went on chanting her prayers. I would have liked to see that. I don’t like my grandmother.

  White patches of ice had filled the ruts in the path. I put my bike down again and entertained myself by breaking the ice with my foot. When I was little, I liked to do that a lot, to see what was underneath. Of course, there was never anything but emptiness. I didn’t understand why. Most of all, I didn’t understand why, when ice forms, it leaves a pocket of empty space between the ground and itself.

  I took a piece of ice and rubbed my hands, cheeks, nose, and chin, which were very cold. That warmed me up a bit, but not much. When you’re cold, you’re cold. I walked to the stream to get a drink. I was thirsty, in spite of the cold. The stream was flowing quietly, the way it always does. I cupped my palm and drank a little water from the stream, like the time I was so thirsty on my way back from the village school, and stopped in the marshes to drink, among the tuffets of wild grasses, my heart racing a little because of my fear of leeches. I was sorry that the stream wasn’t frozen over. In books, they talk about frozen lakes that you can slide and walk on as if you were on solid ground. Me, I’d be afraid of the ice breaking—that I would die from being drowned or frozen, trapped in the ice. I don’t want that. Often, as I head to the high school on my old bike, I imagine how I will die. I thought about that in the past, too, but a lot less.

  Sometimes on the road, when it’s dark in winter, and in winter it’s always dark, I make believe that the passing cars can’t see me. My bicycle has no headlamp or bell to make us stand out. One day, at a bend in the road, a car will come that won’t see me. It will hit me without even knowing it, throwing me into the air, a
nd no matter how much I scream, nobody will hear. Everything will be like that. The car will come around the bend very fast, won’t see us, my bicycle and me, and will hurl us up in the air, without even knowing it. We’ll fall back down. There’ll be a little bloody heap on the road. Nobody will ever know it’s me, and I will have disappeared completely, once and for all, just like that, for nothing, like a bit of mud.

  When I start thinking like this, everything becomes unbearable.

  I was so full of sorrow all of a sudden that I wanted to go home, to go into the kitchen to the warmth by my mother and the scent of coffee. Maybe my father wouldn’t say anything. I looked toward the house. Nobody was there. I waited to see if my mother would come out. Ordinarily, when it’s very cold, my mother comes out with a pail of hot water for the chickens. But she didn’t come out. All the shutters stayed closed. True, it was still early. Then I felt so sad, so sad, that I gave up the idea of going back to the house. Too bad.

  I picked my bike back up and walked down the path, pushing it along the stream.

  I crossed the wooden bridge over the stream. The sound of my steps and the squeaking of my bicycle mingled, and suddenly I had the impression that another person with another bicycle was crossing the old bridge the same time I was, and the four of us would meet there by accident. I liked this idea so much that I walked back across the bridge, then back again, several times in a row, and every time I ran into somebody. Eventually I stopped believing that. Since there was just me, it was stupid. Still, for a while, I was so happy.

  I really like this stream. When I was small, in summer, there wasn’t much water in it, and I would kill time walking up it. I wanted to know where and how it began. I never found out. It was too far away. But what I loved best was the sound of my voice echoing under the bridge. I’d pretend to be two people, I’d speak to the other person, who’d say the same thing back to me, and I would answer, and so on. I liked that a lot. Fanny laughed when I told her about it. I also liked to dance on the bridge, singing the song, “They Give a Ball on the Bridge of Nantes,” because I believed it really was the Bridge of Nantes. That’s still my name for our old bridge. I didn’t name the other bridges, but I should have. It’s important for every thing to have its own name. I should think about naming the other bridges. There are three, one for each path and the stream it crosses. It’s good that there are all these bridges. At our place you’d think you were in a fortified castle surrounded by drawbridges. The bridges aren’t drawbridges, but the planks are so worm-eaten that they’d fall to pieces if a stranger ventured on to them, he’d find himself in the water, drowned before he even knew it. Anyway, nobody comes to our place. You’d have to be out of your mind.