by Fleur Jaeggy
Micheline went too. She kissed and hugged everyone, a great, emphatic goodbye to the school, to the time she was leaving behind, to her laughter, which perhaps would generate other laughter. Her hair fluttered in the wind. She ran to me to kiss me too, folding her arms round me like wings. And I mustn’t forget her great ball, the most fantastic extravagant party in Europe, and her daddy. Her daddy would flirt with all of us, in Belgium. ‘C’est promis.’ ‘C’est promis,’ I answered. And it was goodbye for ever, dear Micheline.
Daddy didn’t come to get her. As with the black girl, a dark limousine and a driver arrived. He put her suitcases in the boot, handed her her beautycase, opened the door for her. And off went Micheline like the others. The Scandinavians were the first to go, like their sun that sets soon after midday. Silent and pink they slipped away. Then it was Marion’s turn. Again a dark car, the door opened for her. She rolled down the window and didn’t deign to give me so much as a glance. Every time someone went, Frau Hofstetter came down into the yard, was dignified with the drivers, and a little disappointed that the gentlemen fathers hadn’t come. She too gave her boarders a last kiss and they did a slight curtsey. My room-mate, the German, was taken away by her father in person in a black Mercedes. We had said goodbye in our room, a doltish goodbye, a brushing of cheeks. Goodbye, you’re another person I shall never see again. The limousines grow scarcer. The rooms are empty, the windows abandoned to the landscape, the beds unmade, the soap bars still damp, covered in suds.
I’m the last. The gym, tennis and geography master takes me to the station. I’ve said goodbye to Frau Hofstetter, Herr Hofstetter; the marks on my report are modest. The Italian girl is leaving, she’s tall, erect, has thick lips. Her father is the spitting image, the same thick lips, same thin nose, shortsighted, as if the eyes weren’t there. He’s wearing a dark striped suit. He tries to kiss Frau Hofstetter’s hand, a clumsy proffering of lips. Walking between mother and father, the latter carrying the bags, with flat shoes and raven hair, the Italian girl heads for a taxi. Father and daughter with the heels of their socks threadbare. The shoes are new. They’re a little confused, a little contrite, worried for that only daughter, the big strapping girl is so tall and her chin disappears when her mouth mimes a conversation. Heaven knows where they’ll send her next year. A Swiss school is a reference for them.
Some time later I saw photographs of a young woman not unlike her: standing up, as if hanging. And aren’t they our forerunners too somehow, these anonymous people we find in photographs? At least for those of us who spent our best years as boarders. We find our sisters in their faces. A strange familiarity binds us together, a cult of the dead. All those girls we knew have infiltrated our minds, become a tribe; and they come back to us in a sort of posthumous flowering. Perched like stylites on our brows, sleeping in a row of beds. I see my little companions from when I was eight years old, in bright white sheets, with their smiles, their lowered eyelids; their gaze has slipped away. We shared our beds with them. In prisons too, the prisoners don’t forget their cellmates. They are faces that both fed and devoured our brains, our eyes. There is no time, at that time. Childhood is ancient.
From St. Gallen I took the train to Zurich, first class. Herr Dr., my father, was waiting on the platform. He lifted his hat. We go home. To a hotel. It’s almost summer. At Easter there was the same blue sky, and the cock on the spire of a protestant church. There is something immobile here. ‘Bist du zufrieden?’
‘Ja, mein Vater.’ Are you happy? Yes, Father mine. Something immobile about the things we say too.
A year later I heard that Frau Hofstetter and her husband had died in a car accident. In the Appenzell. They were killed outright. And a son with them. They were the first of our teachers to die. But then our teachers are generally blessed with longevity.
They live a balanced life, for the most part in areas with a good climate, and I can’t imagine that our education requires too much effort on their part. Maybe they, like the Hofstetters, will have experienced the occasional crush on a pupil. It is not unbecoming for a member of staff to take a fancy to a girl. It would be almost unthinkable that after years and years of self-denial and conscious satisfaction a Frau Hofstetter should not have felt a little unselfish love for one young lady at the expense of the others. Our teachers are certainly not without their sourness, a sourness to be found on the surface of their skin and in the tone of their voice, a sourness, one might be so bold as to say, directed at humanity in general. It is perhaps thanks to this sourness that for the most part these teachers of ours are good teachers.
When she went down to the village of Teufen, or when she took us to a concert in St. Gallen, Frau Hofstetter had a worried, rather dark look about her, in the foyer, amongst the crowd. She was too hot and the heat flushed her cheeks. Beneath her nose, a shiny wrinkle. Certainly she wasn’t free to appreciate the concert, she had to look after the girls.
The world she came from, indeed that we all come from, the world beyond the sign Töchterinstitut written on the wall, didn’t seem to be a friend to her. Even in the best of circumstances Frau Hofstetter always feared the worst. That evening in St. Gallen, for example, there was a terrible thunderstorm. The sky turned on us. The hailstones bounced on the street and we were obliged to wait. These atmospheric convulsions were great fun for us, they kept us out longer. Frau Hofstetter, with the impassivity of the condemned, scanned the horizon, the unknown land, whence at any moment catastrophe might strike.
We were malleable, she moulded us. But how could her gaze keep away a thunderstorm, a storm that perhaps had meant to play a trick on her? The teachers of this world, or at least those we knew, don’t have a double life. During the year they teach, then they rest. They never venture out into the world. We don’t miss our teachers. Perhaps sometimes we respected them too much, but that is part and parcel of the education we had, and if I kissed Mère préfète’s hand every evening, without ever once protesting, it was because, quite apart from the rules, I took pleasure in it. The pleasure that comes from obedience. Order and submission, you can never know what fruits they will bear in adulthood. You might become a criminal or, by attrition, a normal conventional person. But one way or another we have been branded, especially those girls who spent from seven to ten years in boarding schools. I don’t know what has become of us, I’ve heard nothing of the others. It’s as if they were dead. Just one of them I looked for everywhere, her, Frédérique, because she goes on ahead of me. And I never stopped expecting a letter from her. She is not one of the dead. I was sure I wouldn’t see her again, and that partly thanks to our education, which taught us to renounce the good things in life, to fear good news.
My education was still not complete. After the school on the island where being happy was the first rule, a last college smoothed out my seventeen years. A domestic management school. As ever the orders came from Brazil: I was to learn to keep house, to cook, to bake cakes. I had already learnt a bit of embroidery, at eight. It was now expected that I prepare myself to become a housewife. They found a school near a lake, Lake Zug, renowned for its cherry flans.
I had a nice room all to myself and four windows. It was a religious college. For once I spoke to the mother superior without pretending to be submissive and briefly explained my aversion to the training I was being offered. I didn’t want to keep house, nor, I dared to tell her, did I want to be a wife. Over the idyll of my education resentment was dawning. Resentment towards that idyll, towards nature, the lakes, the floral compositions. The mother superior listened. I remember neither her face nor her body. ‘Ich verstehe,’ she said. ‘I understand.’ And she left me in peace.
I read all day, I took walks, I went round the lake, and the other young ladies were in the kitchen learning. I spoke to no one; of the girls, like the mother superior, I recall no faces, no bodies. The one thing I remember with some precision is the geometry of my room. As far as Brazil was concerned, my education was complete. She, maman, had planned out my l
ife, and my life had obediently followed her plan. I was finally free.
I received an invitation from Micheline to go to her eighteenth-birthday ball. I danced with her father. All fifteen girls from the Bausler Institut danced with Daddy. And Daddy flirted with them. Hadn’t Micheline promised he would? There are promises which come true. Not just forebodings. Micheline was radiant. She put her eighteen years behind her that night.
The orchestra, the young people, the taffeta, the congratulations – you draw closer to old age. To the nightmares of promises. Hurry up, Micheline. Her father was tired. A well-preserved man, he’d been dancing with us for hours. And we who wanted to see this father, we who had old fathers and who suspected our parents of making orphans of us on purpose, spun in his arms, detesting this fun, this keeping of promises.
Micheline’s dress was lace and silk and seemed to have been cut from time itself, so well suited was it for the ball and, Micheline fantasised, for her death bed. After dancing, she walked among the tables arm in arm with Daddy. Who was a fetish, with tanned skin and high cheekbones. Frédérique did not come to the party. I neither looked for her nor tried to think of her. What are the girls thinking of? At least half are nostalgic for death, and for a temple, and for all those clothes.
Another guest came in from the park. In a tight-fitting black dress, blacker than her hair, slim waist tied with a ribbon, back straight as an officer’s. She had only just got off the boat. Her eyes were violet, like painted wax. She came at a measured pace, on high heels, trailing a shawl of black velvet that seemed alive. On her wrists were two black enamelled bracelets. Her smile didn’t fade. She darkened our pastel-coloured dresses, which were roomy and tame. She looked like a widow. You could just sense her breasts and her determination. It was Marion. We stopped dancing. We gathered round her. Everybody touched her. Micheline bent forward to pick up the shawl that had fallen to the floor. At once a heel stopped her. ‘Leave it there.’ Imperious and cold. Now Marion is kissing her friend. She hugs her tight to herself in front of everyone. ‘I’m sorry if I’m in black. My parents died in a plane crash. But it would take more than that to keep me away from Micheline’s dance.’
I saw Frédérique again. By chance. At night. She looked like a ghost almost. Her head was hooded, hands in her pockets. She greeted me, calling me by name, and it was as though her voice were reaching me from far away. She had been at the Cinématèque too. We had never spoken of films at the Bausler Institut. Until now I had hardly ever been in a cinema. I wasn’t allowed. There wasn’t much I was allowed to do during my holidays from school. The summer before the orders had been: holidays by the sea. I hated the light and fell ill.
Hence if I had been allowed to choose, I would have proposed a dark place. And cinemas are dark places. After my illness they were the first place I went to. On the screen I saw everything I had missed. My first friends were friends from the cinema, the unknown viewers who bowed their heads, overcome by sleep and drowsiness, tramps. They sleep in tidy hedges. Their fingers are gloved in thick wool and lie still. Nervous ticks twitch their knees or necks. They wake. They’ll come back tomorrow. To the same place. Some meet late in the evening. Pale navigators on the brink of life, of Hades.
I grabbed her arm, I was afraid she might disappear. Meek and sarcastic, Frédérique let me. Without taking her hands from her pockets. She had seen me getting rid of a boy, like a moneylender hiding cash. I pretended to be alone. Years later the boy was stabbed to death in a hotel room in Cairo. He had blond hair, round, boring cheeks with no hollows for the eyes, his hair just beginning to thin.
We walked without stopping. Apparently aimlessly. I had found her. It was her. She had been the most disciplined, respectful, ordered, perfect girl, it almost made your flesh creep. Where was she going? I followed her. She could even tidy the shelves of the void. ‘Tu viens chez moi,’ she said. The gardens outside the Louvre were ice, the city the colour of ash, all the signs of commercial empires, clothing stores, funeral parlours and pastry shops, seemed blurred. Having walked by shop windows, mirrors and gates – and it was cold – she pushed a heavy door. Barely open, it closed with a bang. We climbed the stairs. I followed her footsteps. The walls seemed high. She said it was a block with nothing but offices. No one was there at night. At the top of the stairs she opened a wooden door that led to a corridor. In the corridor was a small washbasin. And toilets. We went on down the long narrow corridor. It seemed we must be a long way from where we’d started, the entrance from the street. Then we stopped in front of another door and she gestured for me to go in.
I found myself in a room carved out of nothing. I felt the icy cold. It’s a rectangle, a window at the far end, yellowing walls. ‘J’habite ici.’ I was standing. She picked up a saucepan, poured in some alcohol and lit it. We stood watching the fire on the ground, the struggle, then death throes of the last darting flames. She told me she had seen some cockfights in Andalusia. ‘La chaleur ne dure pas longtemps.’ And she had something Spanish about her, something ancient, something ecclesiastic. The blaze of heat died and the cold of the mountain tops and the glaciers swept down.
A bulb hung from the ceiling. She offered me the only seat. Under the bulb. She picked up a gnawed candle (was she living on wax?) and lit it with a match. The wick was buried. Her eyes, which took no light from the trembling flame, were bright, calm beneath, lacquered, alien. Her face was partly hidden by her hood, it could have been a veil of marble wrapped around her. Her beauty hadn’t left her. Nor her determination. She looked at me with irony, challenge almost.
I thought of this destitution of hers as some spiritual or aesthetic exercise. Only an aesthete can give up everything. I wasn’t surprised so much by her poverty as by her grandeur. That room was a concept. Though of what I didn’t know. Once again she had gone beyond me. I tried to understand. She sat on a couch, on a bed that could have been made of stone, it didn’t give, the way she didn’t give. I looked around at all four walls, into the corners. The room was almost entirely in shadow. My eyes went from her face to the void. She was calm. Something very banal came to mind: we hadn’t been educated to live like this. I was full of admiration. I felt cold. I put my woollen gloves back on and twisted my scarf a couple more times round my neck.
Frédérique was about twenty now. She dressed as she always had. A dark zinc grey over her body, narrow hips, long neck. The jugular was pulsing. She had pushed pack her hood. The pale oval of her face, legs crossed. The perfection of school days had taken up residence in this room of hers. A cynical expression crossed her face, her eyelids trembled. Then she was as before. Calm. Mocking. ‘As tu froid?’ ‘Pas tellement.’ She had no more alcohol to warm us. She lives, I thought, as if she were in a grave.
The cold bit into the bones, it was pure highland air. But I was beginning to get used to it. I took off scarf and gloves. Perhaps, with a little more practice, I would see a waterfall like a snake coming down from the wall, and a midnight sun. I struggled to open a window. She came across to me and we looked at the sky, arms folded. I thought of the toilets in the corridor. Were they abandoned or was someone using them? She didn’t know, she only came at night, there wasn’t anyone in the building at night.
Sometimes while she was speaking she would break off. ‘Je cause avec eux.’ And she saw them. They came to see her. Sometimes they sat where I was sitting now. She laughed, like a bird in the night, shrill and sharp. So Frédérique speaks with the dead. I was the only ‘living’ person who had come to this room. Will I see you again? I asked. The new day was dawning, a cardboard dawn. I could come when I wanted. I wanted to come this very evening, and the next day, every day. She smiled, calm. After that night I couldn’t find her again. I don’t remember how I got out of her room, nor the corridor, nor the stairs. The stones and walls closed up behind me. In the room, when night began to grow pale, the shadows gathered in a tangle on the floor, until the light poured in. The only thing missing there was a rope.
Some years later,
Frédérique tried to burn down her house in Geneva, the curtains, the paintings and her mother. Her mother was reading in the lounge.
That was when I got to know Madame. She was around sixty, everything about her was soft: her complexion, her skin, her dress, her calves, the pink, vulnerable fattiness of her chin. Her eyes were a faded blue, serene and incorruptible as they weighed me up, then propelled me toward the lounge. Immaculate white curtains covered the windows, the lace was like icing sugar. Madame sits down. I’m still on my feet. I’m overtaken by a general feeling of indecision. I’d like to get out of here. I do as Madame does and sit down. A number of portraits hang on the walls, immersed in shadow and sleep.
The sun was shining brightly over Geneva; Madame had commanded dusk. The filtered light brought out the surfaces of things, the fervourless indolence of cushions and upholstery. On an oval table stood a clouded silver teapot and some teacups. A few petits fours had been scattered on a dish. White napkins bearing the initials of the dead. Perhaps the initials of those in the portraits, watching from lidless eyes. On another round table, where centuries, or hours before someone had leaned an elbow, a vase proffered a floral composition, Flemish. A butterfly would have been too extravagant, it would have interfered with the meditation of the petals. No breath of wind was to spoil their ephemeral blaze.
The air was heavy, an atmosphere of drowsy convalescence. The stillness of a desk in a corner, its stack of little drawers, ivory knobs, conjured up an invisible scribe with neither pen nor paper, dictating his letters to no one. Madame’s hands had composed the objects, both living and dead. The living included herself, the rings on her finger, wedding rings, a golden charnel house, oases of widowhood and betrothal.
