One Day I'll Tell You Everything

by Emmanuelle Pagano

  We are used to that temperature gap, and to the wind, but still it worries me.

  I don’t think the condensation on the window today is either cold or hot on Nadège’s cheek. I also know that at her age things often work in reverse: nowhere is the place where you live. Nowhere, because of that difficulty in adolescence of being so suddenly and so violently sexualised. But perhaps it’s easier for her. Yes, I think it must be easier, when your gender is more or less unequivocal. She sits up suddenly, comes back to earth, and smiles at me over the top of Sébastien, because his whole head is now in his bag (I forgot my history homework: the teacher’s going to kill me).

  I’m not absolutely sure it’s easier. I remember just a bit too much about my own adolescence, about the misery I had to endure, how it seemed insurmountable. I would like to tell this to Nadège. But how can I talk to her? It’s impossible to talk, even to Nadège, who either spreads her legs or keeps them squeezed tight. I would like to say to her: No one’s stopping you from spreading your legs, but no one’s making you do it. I can’t explain to her how I could neither spread my legs nor keep them together. In order to become who I was, a girl, I locked myself in the bathroom. I had only limited time to myself. During the rest of the time, and space, I had to carry my genitals in front of me in order to look as if I was what I wasn’t, a boy, and there was the added irritation of being attractive to girls because of my idiotic romantic appearance, the same air that Sébastien is trying to adopt now as, resigned, he closes his schoolbag and looks at Nadège, then turns to me, then back to her.

  See, Adèle, Nadège couldn’t care less about my suffering, she’s thinking about something or other, but I’m going to be killed by my teacher, she couldn’t care less, look at her. Whispering, he turns to her. And yet the other night, while the stags were rutting, she wasn’t playing hard to get…you haven’t forgotten already, have you, my doe-eyed darling?

  I keep looking straight ahead at the road, but I smile at him, and I understand that in his mind Nadège is a little bit like me.

  Nadège sighs as she wipes Sébastien’s nose. She rubs the specks of dirt off him, and tells him to blow his nose in clean leaves next time. Sébastien addresses me as he turns round to Joël to make fun of him:

  You know, it’s ecological, Adèle? They’re autumn handkerchiefs, they come in all different colours, you’ll like the softness of the new oak-leaf handkerchief, and the velvety quality of our new collection, Feels Like Cashmere, autumn handkerchiefs, disposable handkerchiefs, disposable anywhere. The Maries laugh, everyone laughs, and I realise that the wind has dropped.

  The wind is the worst thing about here. The wind is almost always here, gusting, and never from the same direction. The wind turns, loses its bearings, and doesn’t settle. Wind without snow is not quite wind, yet it’s not a blizzard, it doesn’t count for as much, but it is part of our domain, part of us. When the blizzard arrives, it will be almost the opposite, we will be part of the wind, snowed in and stormed.

  The rest of the world is there, in motion, with a noise that silences all other noise. Ocean fronts, abysses, cities, unimaginable borders are here, in the wind. Waves of wind furrow the fields, smooth out the colours of the heather and blow away all the acidity of the ferns. The wind lays down ridges on the new beech branches, on the flat expanse of the lakes, on the grey bark of the thirty-year-old ash trees. There are creases everywhere, even on people’s cheeks.

  Nielle, who hardly ever speaks, comments on this particular silence, or rather on the absence of noise. I see him in the rear-vision mirror, sitting up to look out the window. Sylvain removes his hood and Sébastien whispers: It’s stopped. Everyone knows that the two or three seconds of nothing that follow the halting of things, of wind, of time, are an expansion, no, a retraction of the world before catastrophes—so-called natural—cliffs that collapse onto ocean beaches, earthquakes, oceanic rifts, floods, volcanic eruptions.

  A painful cramping of landmasses.

  I remember my birth. I’m not the only one, almost everyone remembers their birth, but almost no one cares much about it, that’s all. I know about it because, when I recover the sensations that accompanied my birth, I find it unbearable. There’s not much to go on, only a few things: the memory of the birth canal. My whole body crushed, vibrating with the contractions, quite literally a panic attack, reverberating all over, returning now, still—when I’m in the gorges, in the fog, but also in full sunlight, in a gust of wind, in the middle of intercourse, when a man doesn’t hold himself up properly on his elbows and crushes my breasts.

  In one of his letters, my brother was telling me about custom-made components designed according to the shape of the rock, formwork moulds, reinforced-concrete supports to retain the slabs of rocks. I made a drawing of the mountain’s corset.

  Oddly enough, being squeezed, held, makes me feel good, as long as it’s not by a person. I don’t like loose-fitting clothes. Almost every night, I crouch in a narrow bathtub (when I moved to the village, I was so happy to find a bathtub like that in the apartment—my size, I told myself). I sleep wedged between the bed and the wall, my right arm and leg under the mattress. When I was a little boy, I used to ride my bike for kilometres through the plateau overflowing with fireweed. My tyres caught in the bulky purple stalks; in some spots they were taller than I was, but I didn’t want to go all the way around on the road. I would extricate myself, and climb back on my bike. Sometimes I would carry it so I could reach the open fields, where I pedalled as hard as I could in order to shake off my brother and feel the huge, thick stubble left from the haymaking scrape against my tyres. I used to hurtle along towards the volcano to swim in the icy lake, my lake, my break, to have the sensation of my body cramping, to let my skin, gripped by the cold, be lashed by the water. I would swim towards the centre, let myself sink a bit (and my brother would yell out, terrified, standing up on the pedals of his bike—we’d be killed if Maman found out). But I was the one who was terrified if he got me in a headlock when we were playing. He used to have fun wrestling me to the ground, and winding me with nothing more than his body weight. I would run, suffocating, to get Maman. Baffled, my brother would declare that we were just play-fighting.

  When what is holding me, confining me, is someone else’s body—instead of my own, or water, or things—that’s when I get frightened, I feel sick, I get cold, stressed.

  As a woman now, I hate being held by someone else. As a boy, I always found it painful to be sodomised, and I already thought it was because of my harrowing birth. And yet I enjoyed, I enjoy, vaginal penetration, even with the new scar tissue on my labia. I enjoyed it straight away, a few weeks after the operation. (I didn’t follow the medical advice to wait four months, I’d felt ready for such a long time.) I enjoy it, and feel no pain, until a man orgasms and collapses on me. Then it’s not the same thing at all. Get off, I’m suffocating.

  I often let myself be sodomised, because I like men, but it always left me feeling cold. As a boy I felt cold, as a girl I felt cold. As a girl, I was in some pain, torn of course, but most of all I felt cold, my whole being retracted, frozen several times over, as if through several layers, as if deep inside myself, like, ah yes, like the mountain stream beneath the caves two years ago: the water froze gradually, deeper and deeper, slowed and stopped flowing, until the currents in the depths froze. In the end there were series of haphazard layers of motionless waves.

  When, as a boy, I was sodomised, I felt, as a girl, both assaulted and misshapen, I felt dual, and it made me want to vomit. I have no idea why. I couldn’t manage being conscious of myself as a girl, a girl being penetrated from behind.

  One day, I thrashed about as if the guy was raping me. He stopped immediately, amazed, but gentle. He tried to reassure me, but I had no idea what I was frightened of, what was causing me so much pain, what was making me feel so cold. As a boy I felt inexplicably knocked about; as a girl I felt brutalised. As a boy I felt forsaken and as a girl I felt subjected to an indec
ent intimacy. I was also bothered by something strange: I was distressed about staying pressed against this guy like a brother, a Siamese sister. It was ridiculous, excessive, and this time really horrendous, and yet my penis became erect, I got hard, disgusted as a girl by my boy’s body.

  As a boy, I put my clothes back on, and, as a girl, I sat down, to tell this guy a story I’d heard on the radio. It was the story of two Siamese sisters, one body and two heads. One of them got married and the other one pressed charges against her for rape, indecent assault, false imprisonment, aggravated procurement. The guy lost his temper. What a load of rubbish, that’s got nothing to do with anything. He called me crazy, sick, sexually disabled.

  No one is speaking. Through the window, the earth looks like a closed fist.

  Perhaps I’m over-interpreting the silence as I drive, the bus rolling along on a surface that doesn’t seem quite normal to me, but I’d like to pull over for safety’s sake. I decide to park the bus. But perhaps the catastrophe will happen while I’m trying to find a spot. I know it, and my big kids, who remain stubbornly silent, know it too.

  I turn off the motor, as if the silence were not already too vast and oppressive.

  The gorges are not far away, but the noise took a while to get here. Perhaps five or six seconds.

  Joël is the first to react, one sentence:

  Shit, the one time I remembered to bring my art materials.

  (on the way to the high school)

  The wind only started back up this morning, nineteen days after the landslide. Almost three weeks without wind, it’s so rare. More than ever, gossip gathered about the weather. There were several hypotheses: volcanic mountains of words not said, breath stifled, the windless mountain’s silent remorse; some suggested climate change was the cause; the old people shrugged and the same tired line came out of their mouths, so hackneyed that its currency is universal. They shrugged: There are no seasons anymore.

  Just before it was time to leave, the wind dumped piles of swirling snow, and with the snowstorm came the same old fears of the people here, the same century-old expressions, and straight after that the snowdrifts start to form, in the same places as last year, and I wonder why I haven’t been told to take an alternative route.

  I get a bit irritable on the mountain, the bus gets bogged, but my Loire kids remain calm, and their calmness settles me. Nielle warns me about the snow plough just behind us. I let it pass and then steer the bus into its tracks.

  On the Friday of the accident, the noise of the choppers echoed around the mountain until late into the evening. All that racket for a single casualty.

  This Sunday, when I entered the warmth and calm of the hospital room, I couldn’t help making fun (my turn now) of my brother, of how ludicrously exhausted he looked, of that oversized splint on his index finger.

  He defended himself by explaining slowly, very slowly, in order to demonstrate to me properly what a stupid woman I was, that several more operations were still needed on his fingers.

  And I’ve already been operated on twice, he said. Just because the finger took the brunt of the injury doesn’t mean that it’s not serious. Without my hand I can’t work, it means at least six months off work. I’m going to have to go to the physio every day for I don’t know how long. If you haven’t figured that out, you’re a really dumb bitch. And if I try to wiggle my thumbs and index finger, ah, very funny, whatever, there’s no way I’m going to put up with being paid to do nothing, not me, I’m not just some chick driving the school bus.

  He paused. How come you’re only visiting me now?

  He was asking me the question out of left field, because I only came to see him three weeks after his accident, and we haven’t seen each other for over a decade.

  I love it when my little brother is in a bad mood. And my smile told him that I had noticed—noticed that during his argument with me, for the first time, without being pressured to, naturally (he who used to say to me, what you’re going to do is not natural, it’s sick), he had made the correct gender agreement, several times.

  He had already done it before, of course, but only under social pressure, when he couldn’t speak to me as a male without provoking a lot of questions.

  One day he will call me by my new name; one day I’ll be his big sister Adèle.

  We were living together when they flooded the bottom farm. We were teenagers, and already old orphans. Maman had been dead a long time, and Papa continued to live (and would eventually die) in a sort of asylum, rest home, where time dragged on forever, and even more so during the Sunday-night card games of coinche.

  After burying my mother, after selling up all the cows, my father rented out the land, then caved in very quickly to the electricity company’s haggling. He accepted their deal without fuss, and then fell into a ferocious depression. His voice was ravaged by years of tobacco and silence. He could scarcely utter a word anymore. So the three of us were living off that money without doing anything with the bottom farm. There were still a few chooks as well as the pig, just for Papa to have something to do. We also took five or six draught horses on agistment when the snows melted.

  My brother and I were only there on weekends, then only one weekend in two—we were boarders from high school on, as if we were on agistment too.

  For a long time I had been thinking of myself in the feminine, making all the grammatical gender agreements in my mind. But as I was well and truly the only female in this situation, I felt both lonely and not in agreement with myself.

  We arrived home late on Friday nights (two, then later three, bus changes). Papa hugged us, clasping bits of paper, which he slipped hesitantly into our open hands. It reminded me of when Grandma would slip money to us in secret, trembling. First she reprimanded us: Well? Take it, I’m giving it to you! And don’t go telling the others, and make sure you don’t spend it on rubbish. Papa would scrunch up the bits of paper as he stuffed them into the palms of our hands; warm, damp scraps like worn-out promises.

  They were lists of things to do. Maman used to write them for us every Sunday for the week to come, lists of chores that weren’t really chores. But there was almost nothing on Papa’s lists, which meant we invented tasks for ourselves so that he wouldn’t notice, so that he would never find us lost in thought, idle.

  If he approached me, his eyes brimming with tears, I would get up, answer his wordless pleas. I’m coming, I’m coming. And when I didn’t know where, where to go, I always went to see the horses, our agisted horses.

  I really loved going to see the horses, hearing them well before I saw them. Not just hearing them, but all the senses in my body tuned to the sound and weight of them, through the ground, for hundreds of metres all around. I liked walking on the ample, elongated vibrations they made. I let myself shudder in their hoofmarks, brushing aside the clumps of soil that were heavy, too, and rough.

  I was reading a book that I couldn’t get out of my head. I had borrowed it from school because it was about battling a mountain flood. I was obsessed with the book and had decided never to return it. There was a wonderful passage in which an old woman was gored, shaken, disembowelled, ripped to shreds, trampled on by a huge bull clambering out of the waters that had inundated the fields. I don’t know why or how, but the violence of that death was a comfort to me, a part of me felt better. At the sound of the horses, that passage resurfaced in my body, and one night, in earshot of the horses, I vowed to myself that I would choose the name of that old woman when I was reborn, hoping to end up all wizened like her, tiny, in a wild hand-to-hand embrace with the shifting landscape.

  I would daydream, make up amazing films in my head, all the while pretending to help Papa.

  I was in Year Twelve when we had to come to terms with the fact that my father was no longer even washing himself. By the time social services got involved, and we pretended to resist for a bit, it was all arranged. The family said they wanted to take him, but we weren’t sure exactly who; no one really volunteered, and
the waters were already rising slowly around the farm. The asylum was really the most practical solution, avoiding any domestic issues. It was down below us, in the city, so my brother and I just had to move nearby, there you go, it’s all sorted, hey, boys, it’s for the best. Near Papa, near school, near uni.

  Yes, it was convenient, except that I had never been a boy, and this city, so far away from our farm, from the hamlet, from the village, meant only one thing for me: I could become who I was, without anyone noticing, or telling tales on me, or making a big deal about it.

  I was thrilled. It felt indecent because of Papa, but I was a happy girl.

  With the money from the hydroelectricity company, we moved into a place in the centre of the city. We set ourselves up like a student couple. It was a minuscule furnished apartment, cluttered with countless bits and pieces, knick-knacks, and the owner’s doll collection. It was kitsch and bordering on squalid, with only one bedroom. We took it in turns to sleep on the couch, week about, and we shared the chores, just like on the farm. I swept, washed the dishes, did the cooking, the laundry. Honestly, I quite like doing the laundry, you do it alone, even the sorting. (I don’t know where I read it, but it was a character in a novel who called these chores the handiwork of angels, domestic gestures that get performed automatically.)

  After school Axel tinkered at home, he fixed leaks, anything that was falling apart, and there was a lot of it. One day he drilled a groove along the walls so he could rewire the electrics. I told him he was crazy, there was dust everywhere, he was covered in it, all grey and white. He wiped his hand over his eyelids, and the look that emerged from this gesture was mysterious and alive.

  I loved our life together. I started to change my body like a blouse, every morning and every night. I spent hours on it. When we were due to visit our father, my brother reminded me days beforehand, as if I might not have time to take off my make-up and remove my splints and trellises. He always used odd words like that.