‘Whenever you’ve got a woman who won’t let go of her son’s balls, you’ll always end up with a faggot. And if she dies, he’s screwed for good.’
‘I’m telling you,’ says Georges, ‘faggot or no faggot, he’s pretty dodgy.’
‘It’s not an illness, being a faggot. And it’s not something you’re born with. It’s more subtle than that. If you want to know what I really think,’ her father continues, ‘faggots are super-nice people, especially with kids. What on earth do you think he could possibly do to my daughter? He changed her nappies, just like he changed his mother’s nappies. If he ever saw my daughter’s pussy, all he’d see is a disgusting crack.’
She figures that, anatomically, it’s quite logical; intellectually it makes sense; when she thinks clearly about it, it adds up: men have a bit that hangs out, girls have a hole. They fit: one into the other.
In A Life, by Maupassant, she reads: ‘All of a sudden she was gripped by a sharp pain; and she started groaning, writhing in his arms, while he possessed her violently.’ Rose’s mother is the one who makes them read it. André Sallenave says it goes in the belly button, but that’s completely stupid. Except that, from what she’s seen, like in old paintings, it will never fit. Not in hers anyway. It must hurt like hell, and there’s no way she’s being possessed. You possess an object or a house. Her intelligence is coming to her rescue.
She pushes the sentence round in all directions—‘he possessed her violently’. Something clicks in her head and she’s electrified: what she has between her legs will impel her to possess the world.
Concepción is having a party, a New Year’s Eve party. The shutters are closed and the music is loud and Concepción’s mother is smoking in the kitchen and her daughter is screaming at her in Spanish (apparently she has to stop coming into the living room). Everyone on the couches is kissing.
The music is saying: everybody’s gotta love some time, doum doum doum, everybody’s gotta to love some time. Not her. It will never happen to her. No one will kiss her. She’ll never go out with anyone. Doum doum doum.
Raphaël Bidegarraï and Nathalie are kissing, with their tongues, as if they were eating slugs out of each other’s mouths. Concepción and one of the Lavinasse boys are at it. Even two young kids from Grade Five. Rose and Christian aren’t kissing but they’re sitting side by side and they’re talking. And all the others are dancing, turning slowly, heads on each other’s shoulders, arms around waists.
She is standing near the record player, rocking from one foot to the other. The music is enticing, but she’s better off stopping herself, better off drinking a tenth glass of orange juice, than dancing all by herself with the invisible man.
Her father’s dick, that’s what they’re talking about right now, everyone there is whispering into each other’s hair about it. Her father’s dick sticking out like his nose in the middle of his face. The world is spinning around this dick, microgroove by microgroove. Everybody’s gotta love some time, in a spiral around the little spindle in the centre of the turntable, everyone, everyone, no one is looking at her but everyone is thinking about it. The little spindle finds its way into her retinas and covers the wobbling, impossible, white spot of her father’s dick at the carnival at quarter to twelve under the church tower, to the sound of the oompahpah music, everyone, everyone but you.
The only thing left is to go into exile or to disappear. Far from this ridiculous village that is spinning right now, while it’s stuck so ridiculously in this place on the Earth’s crust. Far from her ridiculous body that no one would want even if she put it up for sale, even if she swapped it for a dog’s body, no one would bid for it just to get the ball rolling.
‘Mr and Mrs Fark have a son. What is his name? Roland. Roll and Fuck!’ Raphaël Bidegarraï is telling the joke and Roland Boursenave is laughing so much that his face is all crinkled, his eyes are like a furious cat.
‘Faggot!’ hiccups Roland.
‘Fuck you! Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!’
There’s also that rhyme that she heard at the carnival: Keen to do the deed, I’m all out of luck, All I need, all I need, Is the chance for a fuck.
What is fuck?
Monsieur Bihotz is busy weeding the corner under the canna lilies, where the moss keeps coming back, like alien moss, no matter what he does, whether he digs it over, burns it, pours boiling water on it, covers it with salt, acid, bicarbonate of soda or weedkiller.
In the Nouveau Larousse universel there is just a line space between fry and fudge.
‘It’s a very vulgar word,’ Monsieur Bihotz explains.
Just what she would have got from her parents.
‘Especially from the mouth of a young girl,’ he adds.
Up until now, when he spoke about her, he said ‘a little girl’. She remembers a fairy tale in which, instead of words, pearls came out of the mouth of a princess. She can feel the little hard beads, like cherry pips, ptt, ptt, ptt, between her lips.
She sits on his knees so they can play Giddey up, Horsey and he can jump her up in the air.
Today he says, ‘Stop.’
What does fuck mean?
‘Stop.’
She puts her arms around his neck, watching out for his teeth, for that scary wolf thing he does with his teeth.
But Monsieur Bihotz gets up; he’s strong and heavy and she nearly falls. He goes into his bedroom and she thinks he’s going to have a coffee meltdown. But no, he comes out again with a little cup and ball game in his hand. He holds the ring delicately between his thumb and index finger, an egg about to crack.
‘This is fucking,’ he explains. He throws the ring up in the air, and in precisely one go, only one, it lands on the pin.
Sometimes dogs stick their muzzles between her legs. She pushes them away, her hand on their hard little skulls. They are like small children, harmless and a bit crazy.
Another summer day in the hills outside town. There’s a pack of dogs. They come and go as if the road belongs to them, roving around in a world without humans, a world on four legs and itinerant ears. She is invisible and odourless, she calls to them but they don’t answer to names anymore. She is just an obstacle between them and what’s under a tree over there.
Lulu is under the tree. Big Yellow is on top of Lulu. Some of the other dogs want to climb on top of Lulu but Big Yellow growls and bares his teeth. They are all panting and whimpering. Most of them have a big, glistening, red dick under their bodies. The dogs are circling, stalking, and Big Yellow won’t stop, and the panting and the tongues, and the paws are scraping on the ground and on top of Lulu, and everywhere the same staring, glittering eyes. Lulu groans and her back legs give way. She sits but keeps struggling to get up. Big Yellow is bigger than her, and the smaller dogs have a go at her with their little dicks, and Lulu looks like she wants it and doesn’t want it, swept away in her panting by something that has possessed them all and has lodged itself in all their eyes—it’s like a giant eye under the tree.
She throws stones at them. She kicks them. She screams but nothing happens, they continue to be dogs, without her, with whatever it is under the tree that sweeps them up and envelops them, something terrifyingly adult, ancient, something that is no longer about playing a game.
There’s no sign of dogs in Rose’s house. Behind the hedge, there are afternoon teas with buns, music and elegant boots. There is no blood, no pubic hair and no dicks. It’s as if Rose lives in a different housing development, in a parallel world, to which she has no access, even though it is right there within earshot. You can hear the loud splashing and the squeals of summer, and Rose’s bubbly laughter, and the high-pitched voices of the boys from school. The gunshot explosions when they jump in the pool.
In her house, the shifting shadows, and the doorbell that tinkles, without the wind.
She’s in pain and it won’t go away. Her mother makes an appointment with the gynaecologist.
Kilometres of ripe corn. An advertisement with a woman
holding a bottle between her breasts. The incandescent white of the co-op silos. The open windows let in four blasts of scorching air that whip around their heads with a roar.
‘Your reproductive system is gearing up,’ says the gynaecologist. She makes her lie down naked on a metal bed and open her legs. She should relax, it’s a virgin speculum. She feels a cold pain and she wants to close her legs but the gynaecologist tells her that the examination will soon be over, oohh but it’s so tight in there.
As she writes out the prescription, she talks with her mother about the arrival of the holiday-makers. About Georges’ girlfriend who’s expecting a baby.
Her mother rents two deckchairs on the promenade. They lie there; her mother’s in a bikini and she’s in shorts. Last year she was making sandcastles down there in the sand. Her mother has put on her dark glasses; her gaze and her mouth are set in the direction of the invisible distance. Blinding light. The hotels and casinos are cut out against the sky like big blue stickers.
She puts on her Vuarnet sunglasses, a present from her father. The red-and-white bathing boxes, the strip of sand, the bodies, the sea. The boys jump off the low wall with their surfboards under their arms. Their legs in skin-tight black pants, muscly torsos, long blond hair, creatures from a different species, unattainable. The air they breathe is not the air she struggles to get into her lungs.
The women on the beach, all with different bodies, have they got it? Not now, not right away (or perhaps with a tampon), but in general, in their everyday lives? How is it possible for women to get this thing, and for everyone to act as if nothing was the matter? It must be dangerous to be bleeding with sharks around. Anyway, you’re not supposed to swim because the salt water triggers haemorrhages.
Can I have an ice-cream?
Her mother turns to her. ‘From now on, everything you eat will go straight to your hips.’ She flings herself back onto her lilo. Still fed up, she yanks down the straps of her bikini top so she won’t get any marks.
The horizon is empty. No shark fin, no whale spout, no giant octopus. And yet, right now, in this very ocean, in these very molecules of water, unheard-of beasts are coexisting with swimmers.
It’s her turn to tilt her head in the direction of the sky. Her lilo is whirling towards the yellow disc of the sun. Something is unwinding and rewinding, superimposing other skies over the sky, something that is slowly tipping her into empty space.
Time is a long, wavy, blue ribbon, with wide stripes for the years to come—middle school, Grade Six, Year Seven, Year Eight. The stripes get narrower towards high school and become pale and blurred towards the year 2000 mark. Then they get even thinner, less and less clear: a fleecy, infinite sky.
She is watching a western with Monsieur Bihotz. A squaw is tied up in the dust. Cowboys with hats on, yelling, riding horses that are missing her by a hair’s-breadth. The ropes wound around her thin body are tied tight across her fringed dress. She would like to be able to stop the picture, turn it into a photograph and keep it forever, to look at it when she’s alone.
The squaw has been hitched onto a horse; the cowboy whacks the horse’s rump with the flat of his hand, yee-ha! It’s not the TV she’d need to be able to stop, but the galloping inside her, this horse which is gaining speed and thrashing along, endlessly thundering. How to react to being swept away like that?
Or perhaps it’s all about Christian? In an issue of Jours de France, there is a drawing of a woman lying down and the caption says: ‘Dreaming about him, an exquisite shuddering overwhelms her.’ That’s exactly it. Dreaming about Christian, an exquisite shuddering overwhelms her. She can spend ages dreaming about Christian.
About how she will go on outings with Christian. About how their house will be (with a fireplace). About the names of their children (Coralie, Aurélie, Athéna, Jennifer). She snuggles up against Bihotz, her arm around his waist, her head in the hollow of his pillow, her arm tenderly draped over the bolster of the bed.
She rubs the flat of her palm just below the hard bit, where her bony part stops, at the top of the soft flesh like puff pastry, thick and hot. She stays on the edge of it. She doesn’t push and especially not lately when there’s been blood there. She rubs, in little circles. A knot swells and tightens, a mechanism that perks up simply and effectively, at the junction of the bones and the flesh, as if the skeleton was designed to carry at its centre this budding plump heart. Images flash past, the squaw on the horse, and a naked woman, on her knees, in her mother’s France-Loisirs shopping catalogue, on the ‘adults’ page. The pressure becomes almost unbearable, she holds herself back as much as she can, to let it erupt in one go—then, a familiar numb drowsiness. She wipes herself with the sheet and lets the vision of a horse carry her off to sleep.
Rose invites her to the beach with her three cousins from Paris.
She’s discovered the relaxing sensation of being covered only in skin, dry and dependable right into its creases, a sealed bag that moves around with the body and that you can wash in the sea, and undress in the sun.
The two mothers have lowered their voices in an alarming way. She swears they’re talking about it, and Rose’s mother gives her a sweet, anxious smile.
Actually there’s a car problem: Rose and her mother and the three cousins, and her as well. Whoops, it’s too many for the Renault 16.
‘I’m going to ask the Bihotz lad, he’s so obliging, the Bihotz lad solves all our problems.’ Her mother’s sentences skate over the world. Right there in the narrow house, she seems to engage in a short ballet sequence followed by a few acrobatic moves.
‘What fun it will be in Monsieur Bihotz’s van!’ chants Rose’s mother, revealing herself to be another champion skater, international standard, in her red boots.
Even though they were ready at eleven o’clock (ten o’clock at the latest, Monsieur Bihotz had said), the beach already looks like the quilt on mother Bihotz’s bed: little squares of colour butting up against each other. ‘How long did it take us, Monsieur Bihotz?’
Monsieur Bihotz would rather stay on the promenade. ‘Come with us,’ Rose’s mother insists, ‘the more the merrier.’ She points to the tiny spot where she thinks they’ll all fit.
‘How great that Maman could bring us to the beach,’ says Rose (and she and her mother do that annoying thing of kissing each other on the mouth, a little peck).
‘We,’ says one of the cousins, the oldest, it must be Sixtine ‘don’t have the sea, but we have the Seine.’
When my father flies his plane to Paris, he has dinner on the Champs-Elysées.
‘You’re so cute,’ says Rose’s mother, in a funny voice, like she’s apologising for her.
‘My father is a radiologist,’ says Meredith. ‘Do you have a swimming pool?’
The three Parisiennes have spread out sarongs, Rose and her mother have mats, and she has her Snoopy bath towel. Monsieur Bihotz has brought out a ghastly floral towel, the one from the downstairs washbasin. Even though she sits as far away from him as possible—perhaps it’s because of the fabric, the terry towelling—it still seems to her as if she smells like him.
He is wearing his blue shorts and has kept his T-shirt on, which is a mercy. He’s sweating profusely, and his little towel barely extends beyond his buttocks, like blotting paper. She avoids looking in his direction.
The triangles over Rose’s bust are more filled out than she would have imagined. As for Sixtine, who has kept on her pedal-pushers and is wearing a very pretty bikini top, her breasts are almost as big as Rose’s mother’s, but she’s in Year Eight. Rose lifts up the elastic band on her buttock to compare tans. Sixtine coats her sisters in the new Ambre Solaire Totale. She says that monoi oil doesn’t do anything except make you smell of coconut. ‘Coconut, coconut!’ yells Alma, roaring with laughter, but she’s in Grade Two. ‘You’ve got to peel,’ contradicts Rose’s mother, ‘that way your skin gets used to it.’ She undoes her bikini top so she’s topless.
Monsieur Bihotz heaves his big bo
dy as upright as possible, so he doesn’t tip onto anyone, and says something inaudible. So she repeats it for him, as if she was translating: He’s going to buy an ice-cream. Monsieur Bihotz goes red and repeats his sentence louder, too loud, like he’s speaking to the whole beach—so loud that the people next to them turn round to listen.
‘I’m going to buy some ice-creams.’
‘Not for me,’ says Sixtine. ‘Méré, Alma, do you want one?’
‘That’s so kind of you, Monsieur Bihotz,’ gushes Rose’s mother. ‘Wait, I’ll get my purse.’
But Monsieur Bihotz has got his stupid Roman-emperor look, standing on his dignity again, he’s already heading off in those ridiculous shorts, stepping over the mats. Now they have to yell out their flavours. Two scoops of vanilla for Rose’s mother. Apricot-pear for Alma. Cherry-nougat for Méré. Licorice if there’s no nougat. She runs after him. Pistachio-chocolate for Rose. Same for her.
That’s going to cost you a fortune.
And he’s already paid for the petrol.
‘You can talk about that when you’ve got your own money.’
He doesn’t head for The Ice-cream Palace, but for Monsieur Lopez’s truck. Monsieur Lopez recognises him and lets them both go to the head of the queue. They chat. The sun’s shining. ‘You came together?’ Monsieur Bihotz waves his arm, but Monsieur Lopez sees the four cousins and Rose’s mother. ‘You don’t muck around, do you, Bibi?’ (Apparently Bibi is Monsieur Bihotz’s nickname.)
Bibi buys vanilla-strawberry gelati for everyone (but a double vanilla for Rose’s mother). By the time they’ve stepped over the crowd again, the ice-creams are already melting. They have to stop and lick them, quickly, quickly. And they’re laughing just like at home, as if they were alone in the sunshine, as if (she reminds herself) he was her big brother, say, and not this gawky yeti.
‘It’s absolutely fabulous here,’ says Sixtine, refusing an ice-cream. ‘You’ve got everything in the one place. In Paris you have to go for miles to get the best ice-cream, and then even further to get the best tea. Here everything’s in the same street. Do you have a Cacharel boutique?’
All the Way Page 4
