Aren’t we taking the highway?
No, remember, we would’ve had to leave even earlier.
That’s a pity.
And, anyway, you know very well there was just the dent in the rail, that’s all.
Yeah, it’s sad.
A few days ago, I made some enquiries about the construction site on the cliff face. This time the company that has landed the job is the one where my brother has found a temporary job. I walked over to the telephone, a book in my hand. I waited there for hours, I read several books, in fact, but my brother did not call me.
Last year, I was already keeping a close eye on the corbelling. I thought then that they needed reinforcing, for sure. I told the kids there was no way there’d be a landslide, and I was hopeful, but I feared the worst. I want to see my brother. If he’s going to be here for a few months, he’ll contact me.
My brother all alone above the ravines, for weeks, months, sleeping in a hut onsite. He would rather stay hanging up there, working on the mountain all by himself, than call his big sister. Joking without laughing with workmates he scarcely glimpses, all still roped together during lunch break. Stunned by the distinctive silence of thin air, by the noise of that solitude—of hundreds of metres of rocky escarpments above and below. His balance keeping him safe. I try to imagine him by remembering the letters he wrote me. He used to write to me a lot before my operation. I would illustrate his letters in my head, or sometimes on little pieces of paper.
I’d doodle a stick figure on the end of a rope: it was him.
Perhaps that’s what she does, the witch? Illustrations, little storyboards based on tales she’s read in her books. Perhaps they’re tiny drawings that others think are just scribbles, or spells.
In my sketches, I never managed to portray the way my brother swung there, the movement of his arms and legs, nor his grimacing face.
I’m scared I’ll forget his face. I haven’t seen him for ten years. My brother all alone, like a fish up high there, quivering inside a steel creel, restless but safe, repairing an anti-submarine net, in order to secure the large, unstable fragments of rock above the roads, and to support the hundred-year-old corbelling. I think about the potential conflicts, about the averted military engagement implicit in these huge metallic bras on the mountain. Without giving it a second thought, my brother would install those anti-submarine nets that had been salvaged from the ocean after the cold war (and that’s what he wrote to me, also without giving it a second thought). Now the nets are brand new, manufactured for peacetime landscaping. We still call them anti-submarine nets, but instead of being filled with deep water they overhang high-altitude roads that are almost aerial. Dynamic, high-impact ropes, with cable clamps, to subdue the mountain the way you’d hold back an insidious weapon of war that was advancing through the atmospheric waters. When the helicopter is not an option, the workers coil the ropes around their torso, so they can hoist themselves up high, thrown a little off balance by the load. Lopsided men suspended up there.
They climb up and empty the nets regularly, getting rid of stones that have accumulated after storms. They change the nets every ten years. Yes, it’s ten years since I’ve seen him.
My brother would make fun of me—if I could see him, and if we were still children. He would persist in sticking his face through the mesh of the netting until I was terrified. My brother, so proudly mercurial. Oh, she can drop dead, that stupid bitch, he must say to other people, without mentioning that I am his sister. My brother keeps quiet, but when he speaks he’s always got it in for me. Only rarely does he talk about his big brother, when that was still what I was for him, the older brother. He has never had a sister and he never talks about other women, I’m sure of it, and anyway he wrote to me about it: Because of you, he said, knowing that you’re going to do that, there’s no way I can look at a chick without wanting to throw up.
My brother is a man whose feet are not on the ground, a man fixed in the air, he goes up and goes down, all roped up. When he’s working, he flattens his body into the creases of the rocks, he forgets, his face is abraded by the elements, marked like the rock walls. He’s a man with a plan, my brother, but a man without memory, no memory of me for ten years. A man who does not know himself or feel safe unless he is alone in the middle of nothing, resting with his expanded aerobic capacity, before launching himself into space once again, his arms loaded with motion sensors and tubing to install, and cables with which to attach the webbing. A man who is loaded up.
I remember him bringing in the wood with Papa: he pushed the door open with his shoulder, he threw the logs on the ground and Maman grumbled while I ran off to get a broom. He would smile, twigs on his jumper, which he brushed off as he watched me (and as he put his finger to his lips in complicity). I swept the twigs towards me.
The local council has issued a categorical order: there are to be no vehicles in the gorges until further notice, despite them being open on weekends and for tourists. (When I was a little boy we used to call them summer holidaymakers, even in winter.)
If I want to go there, it won’t be in the bus. I won’t be able to pretend I have to go there for the school run.
If I want to go there, it will most likely be specifically to see my brother.
(on the way to the primary school)
Lise gets in, and in the rear-vision mirror I notice immediately how much she too has changed. She settles Minuit in his seat, he’s still tiny, golden-tinged, fidgety, but slightly less clingy. She fastens her little brother’s seatbelt with gestures I haven’t seen her use before, gestures I know so well. That curving of the right arm in order to avoid budding breasts—when I was a very young boy, I figured that out from girls who were older than I was. I copied it straightaway, and my brother noticed.
Instead of making fun of me he took me aside, concerned—he was only eight or nine, he didn’t really understand—he just said, but why are you doing that? I lied and said I wasn’t doing anything, leave me alone. Yeah, right, why don’t you do things normally, yeah, so you hurt your arm, say it, tell me. Axel, it’s not there, it’s my torso that hurts, the pain goes all the way to my shoulder, that’s why I do it. I had started to say torso instead of chest.
Lise hasn’t said hello to me.
She sits down and I keep driving.
The primary-school kids are very different from the high-school kids; even the Year Six students are a world apart from the Year Sevens, or from the kids repeating a year. So many things are different. The change of educational institution, family and friends, other students, the peer group, the teachers, the classroom assistants, the attitude of the parents, the physical changes that make your head spin, the particular gestures girls make with their arms. And for me driving them, there is the difference between the day and the night, especially in autumn.
The younger kids don’t get to experience a night-time drive. They see a darkish dawn for a few minutes in November and December, but that’s all. By the time we reach school, it’s daytime for them, or almost. The older kids, on the other hand, have those two months of pick-ups entirely in darkness, and they scarcely see daylight from October to January.
But whether they’re picked up or returned home by day or by night, whether they’re children off to bed early, or adolescents shaken awake from a deep sleep by the demands of the pick-up, of high school, of the adults, there are daytime kids and night-time kids. Those who have their eyes open when they say hello, boisterous in the mornings and in the mists. Those who mutter morosely, exhausted when they say goodbye, and who are quick to bundle their bad tempers under their hoodies so they can make their black moods blacker. What I like most is not the wondrous and lively laughter of the little kids, laughter embellished with snowflakes, metallic and tinkling, no, I like the moods of my big kids: obnoxious, crude, filthy and so wickedly infectious.
They hang on to their night-time right up to the summer solstice, and they carry it through to the summer holidays.
With
them, the night-time kids, we can glimpse from November on, and from a fair distance, the solitary blinking of the wind turbines.
In the morning, we can tell how much time we’ve got before high school starts from the barn lights, because only the barns are lit up, along with a few sections of road, illuminated by the headlights.
Some evenings, we have to stop and get out of the bus to return dazed calves to the fields, after they’ve got under the electric fence without realising, and can no longer work out what’s what, because of the noise, the scent of their mother, and the headlights of the bus. They are distraught and already so heavy and muscular that we need two or three of us to push them. We laugh about the athletic stupidity of the calves, about the darkness, grumbling for the sake of it.
On the outskirts of the forest, we watch as baby goats take fright, their velvety bums reflecting the moon or the low-beam headlights like the flickering light from a mirror.
Sometimes we see apparitions of unrecognisable animals, or of supernormal meteorological phenomena. I love my teenagers for this too, I like that about them, those nights together.
Lise is like them, it’s strange, she has already entered the night, perhaps that’s why she hasn’t said hello, or else it’s because of her arm gesture. I can imagine how embarrassed she is about her new asymmetrical breasts. I’m getting everything mixed up in my zigzag bends and thoughts. Her gesture is one that marks the beginning of adolescence, but also the end, because it’s the gesture of a woman. There’s a kind of premonition in the movement of the arm.
One evening, my two Loire kids and I saw a lunar rainbow together. I was running a bit late and, at the foot of the mountain, I really wanted to slow down, the moon was so huge and full in the still-damp night after all the rain during the day. Just before the second-last stop, just before dropping off Nielle, after a slight rise, we passed beneath a lunar rainbow of infinite splendour, its bows arching up from the plateau. I had never seen one before. Majestic, grey, strange, no sappy colours, half on its side like a solar rainbow, but with those beautiful vertical colours: greys, blacks, whites. A lunar rainbow, rising above us, and we passed beneath it.
(on the way back from the high school)
The last of the logging trucks are heading from the other direction, pulling out wide into the oncoming lane on the corners, which forces me to slow down. They let out their bullish blasts of air along these uncomfortable, scarred roads. I let one, two go past, then I move the bus back into the middle of the road.
The setting sun on the dirty windows bothers me and makes me feel unnaturally tired. I always feel weaker in the sun than on overcast days, or in the night. When it’s dark at dawn, I’m at my best.
My big kids are quiet. I think they’re exhausted too. It’s often like this on the first day—after the excitement of the morning, it’s as if they’re sick of it all, disappointed.
Seeing them sad every year on the evening of the first day back at school makes me feel uneasy, disconnected from myself. I can’t escape the feeling that I have led them away from their own expectations.
When I was a little boy, I wanted to go to Sunday school, and it wasn’t even just to be like the others. I wanted answers to my questions, I was a bit mystical, ill at ease in my body, and above all I loved the rituals of the mass. I couldn’t stop thinking about communion, I wanted to receive the body of Christ, to swallow it, drink his blood. My brother made fun of me, but he was prepared to go into the village with me.
Maman tried to respond to my obsessive questions, to which I had still not received answers after Sunday school and the priest’s explanations. Why is it us inside our bodies? What is the after that comes after death? Where does the infinite world finish? And, for that matter, where does it begin? And how do you eat the word of God? Maman had her own ideas on the question of miracles, for example. According to her, the loaves were not multiplied by Jesus, but distributed under his influence. All he had to do was to convince people to share. If someone gets out the crust of bread they’ve hidden away and offers it to others, everyone will do the same thing, everyone has a little bit of something to share. See, it’s simple, it’s human nature. God is human. And you know the word companion, well, that’s what it means, the person you eat bread with.
Except that the priest got angry with me when I came back to class with these interpretations. He wasn’t as intelligent as my mother, so it wasn’t worth going anymore. My brother, who used to escort me to the door of the presbytery, told me to drop the whole thing. Come and see, he said. He took me by the hand, walked me to a nearby porch and pushed me inside. Don’t be frightened, he said. Through the archway, we entered a vaulted cellar and in the centre, on the beaten-earth floor, was an enormous ossuary. A pile of bones bigger and taller than we were. For weeks we kept going there, in secret. (We said we were going to Bible study, which was almost true.) We revelled in the mysteries of the ossuary, intoxicated by our extravagant speculations, by doing what we were sure was forbidden—crossing the threshold of the cellar—and by the lie we shared.
I’m through the pass and Nielle sees him first. Nielle who is always away with the fairies, his head in the clouds, on Mars, anywhere else but in the here and now. Adèle, that guy over there, is that him?
There, right after the pass, just where the highway narrows dangerously between two vertical rock faces, leaning against a buttress-shaped boulder the size of a human body, but very close to the narrow road, was our old crazy guy from five years ago, our reckless idiot with the balaclava.
(on the way to the high school)
The autumn you read about in books doesn’t last. The flamboyant colours, the lyrical oranges of the beech trees, the brilliant ochres of the willows, the sun-speckled acid greens on the birches, the deep reds bleeding into scarlet of the maple forests, or conversely the sparkling, pointillist reds of the individual maples standing out among the yellows of the other trees—there’s just time for me to describe it, time for the wind to send a few leaves back to the ground, and two or three more trips with my kids, and it’s over. It’s over on the ground as well as on the branches.
By the side of the road the colour scheme of the leaves is reduced to a narrow range of browns, and the trunks are already greyish pink. Not a romance-novel pink, no, a dull pink, and then higher up in the twigs and branches are the dirty purples. The higher up we go, more of those recessive violet shades appear, dirty, violet hues, along with sickly pinks that are simultaneously pale and dark, but so muted that our pupils dilate in order to see them there.
On my trips, autumn is soon enough a display of dreary colours that match the fog. Fog everywhere, from the soil right up to the trees, infiltrating the bark. When the fog is a blanket all around us, our pupils become enormous. I have the reassuring impression that everything is in place, that the forest is finally as it should be, once the sun and those pitiful pinks have been dispelled.
After driving through the forests of fog, we reach a high, flat plain with scraggy shrubs. At the end of the day, a perfectly horizontal band of light shoots out at ground level and extends to the edge of the plateau, but the rest of the time the sun is grey. The peaks intersect with the plains, which are drab, slate-coloured and almost dusty, almost silvery, but in the end never anything other than a sad greyness. Except, except for a strange phenomenon, a swift silvery flash, when the undersides of the leaves, before they darken, appear shiny and remain in the mind as a jewel-like exception to the misfortunes of the plateau.
We dive down along the bare plateau, climb up again, and then head into the far-off distance. So far that the people in the fields look like flickering emotions of the earth, so far that it’s beautiful, but not because of nature. Nature is like all the rest, it’s no more beautiful or more pure than a city, than shopping centres or industrial areas, than the haughty wind turbines soaring over the spruce trees. Sometimes even nature is just that: irritating and overwrought, so ugly and dirty in autumn, muddy and slimy in spring when the
snow gets sticky, arrogant with winter’s flawless sun, and ridiculously green in summer. Difficult, annoying, like all the rest.
If, nevertheless, I often find the plateau around me so beautiful, it’s only because I live here. It’s stupid, but the place where one lives is magnificent. It depends how you get up in the morning, the way you look outside; it depends on whether you do look outside. There are some days, mornings or evenings, when the weather in the landscape, the atmosphere in the trees, is exactly, in an almost crass way, in harmony with the weather in our bodies, with the atmosphere in our moods: we’re gloomy and it is outside too, moisture is palpable everywhere, from our bodies to far in the distance as well, further than we can see, since the drizzle obscures our vision. It even takes us by surprise in the kitchen, and we were especially looking forward to being there. That the rain is cold on our necks does not take away our desire to cry, but it makes our depression almost sweeter.
Yesterday, oddly enough, it was a huge transparent sun that appeared through my tears, and it worked the same way: my tears were clear, luminous. To duplicate our own moods with the climate of things is a relief for us everywhere, as long as everywhere is here where we live.
To my right, on the front seat, Sébastien is bending over to rummage in his schoolbag. Nadège is lost in concentration, her head leaning against the fogged-up window. She is sitting up front, next to him, but she is in another world, far away from us. This morning the weather is abnormally mild, with warm mist carried by an almost unbearably fierce and acrid-smelling south wind. Two days ago, though, it was minus twelve at the beginning of the trip, too cold for snow. The old people have already begun cutting broom shrubs in order to insulate the roofs of the chicken coops. When I picked up the little kids, Hugues carried into the bus with him the smell of hay and cold cream, as he told me proudly: I helped Maman feed the heifers.
One Day I'll Tell You Everything Page 3
