It’s true I took my time, but it was time out, time for me, time for me to get my bearings, to fashion myself the way I wanted to be, malleable time that gave me confidence as a girl. I tucked my penis beneath the hitched-up skin of my testicles, or in the cleft of my buttocks, determined to keep it absolutely in the middle of my body, rather than to the left or right. I was shaping myself into a girl, I had been doing it for a long time, but it was no longer in secret, quick and dirty, I was no longer terrified of being caught. So I took my time, I drew my penis back slowly and carefully. I stretched my skin the way you would cover a sleeping body with a blanket, out of modesty, not out of fear that it might catch cold.
My brother would get annoyed waiting on the other side of the bathroom door. We argued because he thought I was an indecent boy, when I was trying to be a suitably attired girl, in a corset and tight girdle. (I bought them in sex shops or in secondhand shops.) For him, I was too much of an indecent, old-fashioned boy to be a girl. He’d whisper: A bra is enough, even though you’ve got nothing to put inside it, your pads are empty, they’re just foam. He didn’t dare say it loudly—for once we had neighbours. Actually, for the neighbours we had to act as if I was a girl, and as I could not be my brother’s big sister (he had never had a sister and never would have one), without discussing it we had assumed the roles people expected of us, that of a young couple who happened to look like each other.
The visits to my father became less frequent, then his depression worsened, ravaged him, to the point that he no longer recognised us.
For three years, in front of other people, my brother made an effort to speak to me as if I was female, to be affectionate, attentive, and then, behind closed doors, when I was male in his eyes, he was insensitive, aggressive, sometimes violent.
I knew what to expect when I got home, but I didn’t care, I felt so good as a girl, almost happy. The hormone treatments were tiring but beneficial, they were bringing my body back to life for me—via a gradual wasting of my muscles that I used to measure eagerly in the big mirror in the hallway. The treatments restored that body to me, the body I had missed in every sense—I felt stabs of joy between my legs, in my emerging shoulder blades (I used to twist around to see them finally appearing), between my budding breasts. My brother would push and shove the woman’s body swivelling in the hallway. I had missed that body for so long that sometimes, even now, I still feel reverberations of missing it, a throbbing.
When I was a little boy, I often dreamed that I had a slit, and then I would wake up disappointed. I was too young to understand, I thought it was like what Maman used to say when I was clumsy: You don’t have any legs. In my little boy’s mind, I imagined myself as a mermaid, the little mermaid whose story I begged for every night, who, for the sake of love, allowed her tail to be split and become human legs. I had my mother read it and explain it over and over, until sometimes she lost patience. I’d ask: So do you have to be a woman to be in love? Do you have to have a slit?
Oh, you’re so stupid, my mother would reply. You can still love with a willy. You’re a little boy, she’s a female fish, do you understand?
But later, when I’m a bigger boy, I’ll be split into a girl too, won’t I?
No, not at all, my darling, don’t be afraid.
I didn’t want to disappoint her, so I made myself visualise my penis before going to sleep, so I would dream correctly. One night, I managed to have a girl’s dream in which I was a girl, but a girl with a penis, a girl’s penis, not a clitoris, a long, slender, translucent phallus, a young girl’s penis. I knew much later that it was a girl’s dream when girlfriends—girls by birth—told me about similar dreams.
In the apartment in the city, I was taking shape, I had lovers, and most importantly, most importantly for others, I was my brother’s wife. And I loved him intensely, even though the whole business was madness. He was frightened. With all the pointless and puerile arguments he could muster, he resisted his mates’ invitations. Come on, you and your girlfriend, come and have a drink. What revision, the exams are over, don’t be an idiot. The worst or the best was when his mates invited themselves over to our place, and we had to pretend to sleep together.
I loved him so intensely, I was so happy and he was so miserable that one night I begged him just to tell everyone what the situation was. Through his tears he told me he would rather people thought we were a couple—that they didn’t know the rest of it. He said that, the rest of it, because he was never able to talk about my transvestism, or my trans-sexuality, or my real identity, because that rest of it was unthinkable, he’d rather die, rather die than talk about it. His crying was so unrestrained it made me feel nauseous. He was furious about being made vulnerable.
One evening I took him in my arms, and noticed that he stopped talking. He buried himself in my foam puffs, as he called them, and then he resumed his furious sobbing:
You’ll never be my sister, no, that will never happen, but you know I love you—you know that when I don’t speak to you, when I don’t say anything at all, that’s what I mean. When I press against you now and there’s something missing, I understand that it’s you I miss. I miss you, you have no idea. I miss my big brother. You’ll never be my sister, but I will always be your little brother, so I don’t mind kissing you on the neck in front of other people, because that’s what I did with Maman, so it’s no big deal, it doesn’t mean anything else.
We separated because Axel went back to his passion for rock climbing. He changed cities, he enrolled in adult-education classes to obtain his certification and to take the medical fitness test for rope access work. I stayed for a short while in the apartment that had been rewired by my brother. I dropped out of uni, I did odd jobs in order to save enough money for the operation. I had all the tests, I went to the shrinks, and I took the train alone to Brussels.
When I had my new identity card in my hands, I stared for ages at the little f and at my new first name. I could have wept with happiness. I wanted to go back and wander around the bottom farm for a day or two, my legs walking on my own soil, go back with my slit to the lake where I had been my mother’s little mermaid.
I did go back to the plateau. I drove up and walked down until I reached the bottom farm. They had drained the lake in order to get rid of the stones. It was unimaginable, dangerous, terrifying. I took my time walking down, I had brand-new walking shoes that must have made me look like a tourist. The weather was unusual: no sun, no rain, no wind, no fog, no snow, but all of them lurking in the motionless clouds. The sun shone through fissures in the clouds—it must have been sunlight—and more than fissures, the clouds were opening up, opening up along a seam that was simultaneously wispy and distended, as if the skin on the clouds that day was taut, had been grazed repeatedly, and was bleeding a sort of luminous, sweaty, almost viscous lymphatic fluid that hurt your eyes when you looked at it.
There were a few walkers, hikers and fishermen along the sandy banks of the newly emerged river. Dusty sand, not even silt, instead of our peat bog, instead of our mud brimming with smells. I sat down on what was left of the trees on the shore and I breathed in memories. But they didn’t really come back to me. What did resurface was a single image, like a photograph, of our gumboots left in a jumble in the entrance hall of the house. Perhaps also some physical sensations, fleeting sensations of our indefatigable and foolhardy footsteps in the peat, in the snow, in the waterlogged fields. In pockets of stagnant river water there was sometimes a layer of ice crammed with leaves and shadows. I used to walk in, so that I could hear the screech, the melting, and so that the feeling of the mud squelching beneath my boots would reach up my calves.
My brother preferred climbing up above the tide pool and hurling himself into the skating rinks of ice that formed in autumn before the snow, when it was too cold for snowfalls. The contours of the fields retained the late-September rain, frozen by the icy weather and sprinkled with sleet. We used to run around, ignoring the cows, and the time, only coming
to a skidding halt at the metal hay racks, panting like wild animals, then the two of us started up our stampede again, Maman’s fears gone from our minds.
I stood up when I saw one of our old neighbours. He greeted me. (I felt as fractured as the clouds.) He came over. Like all old people laden with memories, he started talking, and talking…He had a bellyful of memories, sorrows and joys heaped together, so crowded that they overflowed into my own past. First he pointed out the clouds, interrogating me about the weather forecast, then he told me the story of my family, going back to a time I thought I had forgotten. He mimed, with emphatic, exaggerated gestures, the way my father used to roll the logs from the upper valley down to the farm.
We used to call it the bottom farm well before the waters rose, you know, because, look, the farm is right in the middle of the crater.
I could tell that he hadn’t recognised me. I savoured that accent, his accent, my accent chewed over by this old man, I wanted to open my mouth wide—to drink it in, gulp it down, take it back.
You see, the tractor couldn’t drag the tree trunks all the way down to the bottom, it was too difficult, it got bogged in the mud, wretched thing, so he unloaded them on the side of the path up there (he pointed to the path, where I was already looking). He gave them a shove, and they rolled with one hell of a roar, you can imagine it.
I didn’t imagine it, no, I remembered it. I remembered the mighty low-pitched rolling of the naked trunks, then the chainsaw’s shrill echo, and the enormous piles of stacked wood under tarpaulins along the walls. But I had no memory of ever having an axe or a wood splitter in my hand; doing the wood was on my brother’s list. Cutting, splitting, carrying, stacking.
My father would sometimes even take him along to the wood harvesting, to cut down the trees and chop up the trunks. But not me, I was too clumsy, and Maman needed me in the house.
Ah, yes, just like that (he kept on with his dramatic gestures).
And then afterwards the logs had to be chopped again, split, carried and stacked in front of the house. A wood fire is a warm fire. There were three wooden stoves to fill, then the kitchen fireplace, the kitchen range. (The logs had to be re-split into kindling, I was allowed to do that.)
In front of the blue-grey barn door, the sawdust mixed with mud froze at the first frosts, and our dirt courtyard ended up with a brittle and gritty surface like papier-mâché, which I used to try to flatten out with my boots when I got bored sulking outside. In a calm fury, I trampled our ice-encrusted ground, and it sent me into a soothing contemplation, of what I have no idea now.
You don’t understand, you young people, you use oil for heating, but soon there won’t be any more oil, I’m telling you, he said (with the accent).
He regained his composure and pointed to the blue-grey door of the barn, the door my father had made out of bits of an aeroplane. He asked me if I knew what it was made out of. I lied and said no, just so I could hear him tell the story we were so proud of.
During the last war a plane crashed right next to the farm, it wasn’t yesterday, eh, it was when his grandparents were alive. The grandparents spent weeks chopping up the plane, and no one touched the pieces for years.
He told me how my father, almost inadvertently, had patched up an old door with bits of the aeroplane. He looked pleased with himself, as if he admired my father, even if it was reluctantly. He went quiet for a few moments before telling me that there were plenty more stories about this house, plenty more, oh yes, my dear, you have no idea.
He wanted to tell me more: you deserve a drink for listening so well, yes, come on, I’d like that. On the way back to the hamlet by car with him, I looked people in the eye, and no one, no one at all, recognised me. I went into the bar. I came face to face with almost everything and everyone I’d known, and that world of my past looked at me as if I was a stranger, and as if I was a woman, but with a sort of benevolence that I never knew existed there.
I went back to get my car and drove to the village.
No one in the village recognised me either. I checked into a hotel and played the role of the new woman in town. I played the role of the woman who liked the mountains and was looking for a job, and I still had a bit of the local accent, and a name that reminded them of another name. (Are you related to the people from the bottom farm? No?) The municipal association gave me a job, and even found me somewhere to live, almost immediately, near the local park. A month later, as planned, I returned with my suitcases. I moved into an apartment above the swings.
Every morning when I went to buy my eggs and yoghurt, the woman at the grocer’s was anxious. The snow? The snow’s nothing, it’s the wind, my dear, that’s the problem. Every morning she began by calling me a brave woman, and she even, often, called me an early bird (and when she said it, it was with admiration).
I’ve been driving the bus ever since. Among themselves, hardly ever in front of me, the kids call me driver, but it’s not even pejorative. I am the local driver, their big brothers’ driver. It’s already been about ten years. I’m alone up here. When I have problems, or affairs, flings, lovers, it’s always down in town. Up here I’m alone, but content.
Once again, the landscape has filled up my whole being. My countryside is contained within me, it fulfils me, it is enough.
For ten years I’ve been living a lie, a secret kept by the mountains, but not really. It’s been a long time since those first sideways glances and the latest tittle-tattle. I feel accepted, I go by the first name I chose all that time ago, from the book about the old woman in the flood. I am the woman I have always been, except that I can’t say it.
At the hospital the day before yesterday, I was wondering about all that, and I thought everyone would start to speculate now, ten years later, that they would ask questions, about my relationship with Axel, about the orphan child of the plateau who came back and got injured in the reinforcement works (it’s written here, in last week’s newspaper).
I put away the newspaper. My brother seemed really tired.
Everyone is going to know immediately that I came to see him in the hospital and, because our surnames are the same, I know people will put two and two together in no time at all and the news will spread everywhere.
Yesterday the kids didn’t mention anything about it to me, but it won’t be long, I’m sure. I look at Nielle and Sylvain, half asleep, silent. I can’t see the snow plough anymore, but I’m in its tracks, I’m feeling confident.
On Sunday, my brother was falling asleep. I kept vigil like a real big sister. He nodded off the way you sleep in hospital, in time with the odd rhythm of a clock that’s out of sync. I love hospitals, I find them comforting, I’ve always felt calm there, even when Maman died. It was here, as a matter of fact—and I was ashamed by how reassured I felt. I’ve never been conventional. That’s what my father used to say, when he came across me putting on Maman’s clothes, or even Grandma’s clothes, he said that I deserved a beating, but Maman said, Let it go, he’ll get over it before it’s a problem, and he never hit me.
My brother opened his eyes, I asked him how he felt, he smiled and blushed as he told me that he felt at ease without knowing why, and when I smiled too, he reminded me of what I already knew, that Maman was dead and she died in this hospital.
We should go and see Papa a bit more often, don’t you think, Adèle? How long since you’ve been?
I paused. Every now and then, when I felt disoriented, I couldn’t be sure anymore whether my father was still alive. Axel stared at me, a look verging on terror. Perhaps I was going to take it the wrong way, whatever he was about to say. But considering how long it had been on his mind, that baby…
It was not an embryo like all those others, he said, all the ones she lost, don’t you remember how big it was?
No, I don’t want to talk about that at all.
Oh, yeah, that’s taboo for you, you’re such a liberated woman.
Stop it, Axel.
No, I’m not going to stop, I won’t
stop, and for once it’s you who’s going to look at things squarely, see them for what they are.
He went quiet all of a sudden, because I’d shivered when he said things instead of bodies (embryos, foetuses)—of our little brothers and sisters, of our little brothers or sisters, of Maman’s body, her womb that was so fluky (flexible, floppy). We never knew exactly how many pregnancies she’d had, there were some before us and some after us, there were so many of them, and only two children who lived, only us.
My brother started talking again, quietly, his tone almost affectionate:
You know, for a long time I thought that was why you…well, you know what I mean, but then I realised that wasn’t it, that had nothing to do with what you did. I’m not that stupid, you know, I’m not like those morons with their simplistic pop psychology, now I know perfectly well that it has nothing to do with it.
He stared at me; there was both complicity and mistrust in his gaze.
But you can’t say all that didn’t form us, deform us, I don’t know, it made us who we are, in any case, that’s what we’re made of, you and me, and I want to know, yes, I want to know if that one, the last one, was a girl or a boy, because that’s the one that killed Maman, and him too, or her, who knows, it died too, when I’m certain the foetus was viable. Why don’t we know whether it was a brother or a sister? Why didn’t we bury it? Why didn’t we ever say that it wasn’t his or her fault? That it was nobody’s fault, that it was because of that wretched bottom farm, because of the snow, the snowstorm. Don’t you remember the storm that day, in that hillbilly hole, that shithole of a plateau held together by nothing more than anti-submarine nets. For fuck’s sake, we lived too far from everything, we should have called a chopper, there were three of them around for me on Friday, for a finger, didn’t you hear the damn noise they were making in the gorges and all over the plateau, you must have heard it, were you deaf?
One Day I'll Tell You Everything Page 5
