One Day I'll Tell You Everything

by Emmanuelle Pagano

  I like him.

  When he was bottle-feeding them, he would hold the wolf cubs right up close against his body, so they could smell him, as he told them all about the fucking human race.

  They didn’t gulp down water, they lapped it like dogs. Shendo was already holding his tail in the air whenever he went near Nil. With a big clumsy paw, Dryad begged for pats on her tummy, and Paule would sprawl on her belly.

  But the wolf—not a wolf holding its tail erect, not one of their wolves—had been spotted early one morning, near their house, in front of the bus stop.

  The tracks of a large deer ahead of the wolf’s tracks meant there was no doubt about it. The wolf was on the prowl, otherwise it would never have come so close to the hamlet, wild wolves are too fearful. And a pet wolf would never have bothered to chase a deer.

  The reactions to this apparition were extreme and contradictory. The hunters and the tree-huggers came to blows, while Nil and Paule tried to keep up at school.

  The trouble started one Friday morning around seven-thirty, right at pick-up time, as I was arriving. Ten police officers and four federal wildlife officers with poles and syringes turned up to remove the wolf-cub twins.

  My twins were crying over their favourite puppies. I managed to get them into the bus, without attempting to comfort them. I know children are inconsolable at that age. I felt ashamed, sitting in my bus not knowing what to do or what to say. The other children kept quiet, we all kept quiet together.

  But a few days later the wolf was still loitering, dragging its tail through the mist on the plateau, its fur no doubt barely ruffled by the rumours or the dew.

  The controversy took on surreal proportions, my kids recounted fairytales and old-wives’ tales their parents had twisted in the telling. We were off in the realm of White Lady legends, and our crazy guy on the road, who had been eaten by the wolf, or else just the sight of the wolf, yes, when the guy saw the wolf it unhinged him. Paule and Nil wouldn’t stop crying.

  Their exasperated teacher tried to tell them a different version of the fairytales.

  He told the school council, and all us adults, that he was going to lodge a complaint with the public prosecutor about the graffiti on the stone wall that borders the road through the gorges, because, being clearly visible in a public place, it constituted a provocation to racial hatred.

  Some idiot had written, in large capital letters, like in kindergarten, DOWN WITH ARABS, HOMOS, JEWS, COMMUNISTS, GREENIES, WOLVES, BEARS.

  So Nil and Paule kept sniffling.

  In the beginning, Tony didn’t want us to see each other in the village for fear of gossip. He told me about a hotel in town. No, actually he didn’t tell me about it, he took me down there one weekend: he pulled me by the arm and sat me in his pick-up truck. We didn’t say a word the whole way. He parked, we got on a tram and headed to the first cheap hotel we could find.

  I was embarrassed about going to a hotel, but I would have agreed to anything to be with him. It was raining. Raining nonstop, and in our room there was a picture of a rainy scene stuck on the ledge above the bathtub. In hotels there are always paintings that are not real paintings, just decorative knick-knacks. And there were plenty of tacky paintings in this hotel. In the bathroom, however, it was different: the painting seemed to serve no purpose other than to be itself, the image, the texture, the rain. It was beautiful, a single plane, blocked out in blue. There were people standing waiting, scarcely visible, umbrellas swallowing their silhouettes from the shoulders up. They were on the margin of the picture, as if reduced to the outer limit of the figurative form, and only the blue rain, blue, blue and grey, emerged clearly at the surface of the painting. The canvas was simply stapled onto a flimsy stretcher. It was not particularly hygienic, I wondered how the cleaning woman dealt with it. I imagined her lifting the picture up quickly, giving it a wipe with the sponge, then putting it down again. I stayed in the bath, curled up on my side, my face up against the painting, contemplating it sadly, listening to Tony moving around in the bedroom, as if he were a long way away.

  I put on a dressing gown and went to join him, my vision filled with blue, blue, blue and grey. He turned around. I’d never felt such a powerful urge within me, and yet I didn’t want to make love in the hotel, and not right then. I lied to him and told him I had my period, trying in all honesty, or as a game, or I don’t know what, to imagine what sort of pain it would be, uterine contractions and sharp pain all the way down my back. He said it was no big deal, and I didn’t know what that meant—if he wanted to fuck anyway, or if not fucking was no big deal. I suggested that we go for a walk in the rain. I said I liked the rain, even in town, and that it would help me to put my abdominal cramps out of my mind.

  I got dressed quickly. Since my operation, I no longer wear make-up, and I’ve given up the corsets (but I do wear tight-fitting bras, otherwise I don’t feel good).

  As we were walking towards the town centre in the rain, wandering around, I ended up getting stomach cramps—those sort of cramps—for the first time. It was exactly what I thought it was, and it was for the first time, but I knew this pain from somewhere. I tried to persuade myself that it was impossible. I didn’t have a uterus, ovaries or fallopian tubes, and yet I could feel a fistful of flesh writhing inside me above my vagina, with a regularity that felt both relentless and excessive.

  I was experiencing pain in that unthinkable spot. I was experiencing pain in an organ I didn’t have. And I was bleeding. I was aware of the blood. I was bleeding without shedding a drop.

  In the throes of a contraction, I remembered having felt pain like that, as strong as that, when I was still a little boy, well before I had the operation, but sometimes things happened, hardly anything actually, a flash, a few words, certain films or stories, things that overwhelmed me because of Maman. I was watching some stupid movie on television, for example, and something made me think of Maman’s miscarriages. I didn’t really know what it was, but I got stomach cramps. I wondered if it was because I was already a girl that the flow of memories of my mother’s miscarriages was so heavy and regular.

  I found unexpected answers to my speculations, and I re-remembered private conversations between Maman and Grand-mère, who had also had countless miscarriages, and no doubt her mother before her.

  From within that pain I knew that not having a child was what it meant to be a woman. It’s not about having a child. To be a mother is to lose a child, to carry a burial vault where brothers and sisters will be clinging on. I felt pain right there, with a raw, violent awareness, I felt pain in that cavity that was a mortuary, the cavity that belonged to my mother, where I come from.

  Apparently, in the past, it wasn’t the same, they just slipped out. I know that’s not true, I know that’s just bullshit spouted by historians, clichés people repeat, in order to keep going, to deny the truth. Grand-mère lost three children to whom she had already given birth, one of which was stillborn, another died as an adult. Grand-mère cried easily, but through her tears she maintained that she also suffered a lot with the others, perhaps even more so. The others were all the ones who never made it to full-term, whose fragile cords were snipped with a fingernail, and whose features were often only hinted at in an outline on a body, those who had one.

  We went into a café because the rain was coming down in sheets, almost solid. I was certain my brother had never had abdominal cramps.

  If I had been born a girl, I would already have got pregnant. I would already have lost those scraps of foetuses, tiny, minuscule, but sometimes already so well formed that the eyelids flickered, the lips quivered, ever so precisely, just below the surface, on the verge of taking shape.

  Tony said, Hey, what are you thinking about? You look so sad. I vowed to myself that, one day, one evening, I would tell him everything.

  I sleep with him amid secrets. The village secret, the secret between us, but also the secret of myself, that I have never shared with anyone, except Axel.

  (on t
he way back from the primary school)

  All the beautiful sunshine has disappeared behind the clouds.

  I’m happy being with Tony. He is still cautious when he comes to my place. He stays silent, as if to talk would be to risk getting caught. We don’t do anything bad, but whatever. He gets undressed in silence in the bed, so carefully that the cold flows into his movements. When he pulls his T-shirt up over his shoulders, his torso makes the sheets whisper and billow, and I shiver.

  Below the wind turbines, right at the spot in the landscape where the artificial lake appears, treeless in my memory, I see something in the mountains. The clouds depositing their mist all the way to the ground are not thick enough to block my vision, even in the distance, but in some places they obscure the transparency of things, while in others places they enhance it. Right opposite me, right opposite us, sunlight is filtering through a rectangle of vapour, yes, an almost perfect rectangle. I wouldn’t call it a filter like, I don’t know, a water filtration system by the sea, for example. No, it’s like one of those filters you screw onto the lenses of old cameras to alter colours. In a rectangular frame of landscape, all the colours have changed, but only inside the frame. It’s the first time I’ve witnessed a poetic weather event with the children. Lise says to me: Look! But the preschool children, standing up in a group together, are all worked up, like tablets fizzing in water, which spoils everything.

  The twins are still in a bad mood. They’ve been carrying on some big quarrel, just the two of them, since this morning. The reason for the quarrel will remain a secret, just like everything that doesn’t concern others—that is, everyone else, even their friends, their parents. Their sibling bond is stellar: an evening star twinned with the morning star. They are both night stars, but do not shine at the same time. They are different and inhabit the same sky, a sky that no one can see, and where no one can be admitted. In the bus they’re arguing about some place or other in that black sky. Because we’ve stopped in front of that other sky, the landscape in front of us, they’ve used the opportunity to leap up like the preschoolers and attack each other more vehemently with their insults. They’re unbearable. And yet they’re nine years old. Every day they swap personality traits, physical quirks, until we’re all confused. I think that’s precisely what they’re after. They’re non-identical twins who seem more identical than identical twins, non-identical and of the opposite sex, but possessing one mind, one set of responses, along with strangely androgynous games, wrongly cast, violent games, which I find shocking, and which in particular, against all the odds, always fail to demonstrate any evidence of a difference in gender. Their favourite game is to pretend to kill each other. I wonder what will happen when Paule develops the body language and curves Lise has, that all girls have. Right now she’s grabbing her brother around the neck. Nil says to me: But Adèle, we’re playing. They’re unbearable. And as soon as you reprimand them, they close ranks, inseparable. We’ve fallen into their trap: we refer to them as a pair, the twins, or the children, we almost never call them Paule and Nil. I understand why their parents raised wolves: it must have been soothing for them.

  Meanwhile, Hugues, Minuit, Bruno and even Tom are having the time of their lives, playing annoying games extremely loudly. Thierry and Lise are keeping quiet, the only ones to give me a bit of a break.

  When they grasp their children, by the arm or the hand (depending on the age) as they get off the bus, the mothers tell me that it’s always worse an hour later. If you only knew, you have no idea about that witching hour between six and eight o’clock, when they’re hyper. Well, you don’t know yet, Hugues’ mother says to me, so that I’ll understand she already knows about Tony and me. Nice of her.

  Around here a proper couple is bound to have children.

  (on the way to the high school, by myself)

  When I think about that mother’s words, the subtle nod and a wink, I realise that the complicity inherent in what she said has shattered my confidence. I don’t want a child—that’s not the problem. But I lie to people, I lie to my own life, my life itself is a lie, and if Tony finds out, and if everyone finds out, I’ll have to go away, Tony will leave me, exile will be like a punishment.

  I try to stay calm by making the most of this space I’m in now, all by myself, in the silence, which will last until the big kids arrive. But I can’t. I don’t have space inside myself, only the echo of the excited little kids, like a permanent, inexorable ringing in my mind. I’m no longer able to shake off the reverberations of my kids.

  They always work my uncertainties over. I can’t think when I’m with them.

  They are my noise, my life, my lie.

  (my break)

  I’m waiting near the high school for the big kids, in the car park, leaning against the wire fence, eating a mandarin. Shards of ice have broken off the nearby roofs and are crashing next to me. I jump every time it happens. It feels warm beneath the clouds, as if they had retained and cossetted the day’s sunshine, whereas during the day it had been so cold out under the clear sky. I throw the peel through the fence into the ditch.

  My place is on the ground floor. You enter from the street, there’s a sort of lobby area where you take your shoes off, like at school (around here you put slippers on to go into class), and further back is the kitchen, which looks out on a small courtyard, closed off by a wire fence. Behind the wire fence is the park, which I can also see from the window of my bedroom on the first floor (the bathroom and toilet face onto the street). I live in a council house, there are a few of them, all the same, in a row. On Saturday and Sunday, and on Wednesday afternoon when there’s no school, I can hear and see all the village kids, the ones who don’t take the bus. They know me anyway, they say hello, and so do their parents. Some evenings, and even some nights, well after the park’s closing time, I see the kids from the high school, and on the weekend it’s older kids from the high schools down below. I don’t say a word when they clatter their beers and talk too loudly, but my neighbours sometimes complain. Some Saturdays, I see my big kids from the bus. I have no idea how they manage to get there, they must organise a lift with an older guy from high school, or a big sister. They drink and flirt gently, they laugh, even when it’s snowing (but not hard).

  Especially during the thaw you can hear them.

  They were often there during the Christmas holidays this year, because the weather wasn’t that cold. Nadège was there late one night, I wasn’t sure who she was kissing (I don’t know the guy—he was around eighteen or twenty, I reckon). I could see very clearly under the full-moon blue sky, magnified by the snow. I didn’t want to be a stickybeak, so I closed my shutters. It was almost midnight. When I opened the window to close the shutters, Nadège startled like a little flurry of snow, before saying good evening to me, her laughter heightened by being caught off-guard so stupidly (she knows perfectly well that I live here). She was also a bit drunk. Because of the beers, because of her youth, because of the phosphorescent snow, because of that translucent blue of our nights. Behind the shutters, I remembered what I’d heard recently on the news about the curfew imposed on the outskirts of Paris. I realised that Nadège was probably not even fifteen and that, if she had been living there, she could have got herself arrested by the police, dobbed in by one of my neighbours, just for an evening of tipsy kissing in the moonlight. I also caught sight of something else, but I couldn’t quite work out what exactly—a detail I’d noticed about Nadège. But whereabouts on her had I glimpsed it? And what was it?

  Tony was asleep, incognito (as if) in the bedroom. I went upstairs and lay down next to him. I felt all the more in love with him knowing that down below, right near us, Nadège was experiencing her life of hugs and kisses, of flutters of excitement in her belly. It was nothing to do with voyeurism or some kind of perversion, no, it was just that, once again, I had the out-of-sync feeling of being the same age as her.

  Nadège comes up and leans against the wire fence. She asks me what I’m dreaming ab
out. I reply, no, no, I was thinking. About who? About you. Oh, really. She climbs in the bus, I follow her, she takes off her scarf, goes and sits up the back. I sit down behind the wheel. The others file in. Then I stand up, head down to Nadège and ask her to lift up her hair. She sighs as if I’m going to tell her off, but she does as I say. Almost in the middle of the nape of her neck, at the hairline, there’s a tiny tattoo, the little detail I had noticed the other evening. She’s got to be kidding. I’m a bit worried about her. Last year she got a piercing in her lower lip. It didn’t heal properly and no one dared to make fun of her: we all felt sorry for how disgusting it was to look at her with her infected mouth, unable to smile. Her parents, who had not been in favour of the piercing, were almost happy about the result. I was appalled to see Nadège all swollen, withdrawn and punished in such a painful way. The tattoo is not too bad, but I thought you had to be over eighteen to get one. And I wonder under what circumstances she bent over, bowed her head and offered up her nape. I also wonder if her parents know about it.

  The others all want to see it. Nadège refuses, acts like a celebrity, plays the innocent, then changes her mind, stands up and leans over to reveal her little bug to the boys and to Marie. I tell her to sit back down because it’s time to leave. What Nadège did by showing her tattoo to everyone was to hide from them the importance and mystery of that little bug, a type of potato beetle that is climbing up her head. And I’m intrigued, because I’ve seen that same silly mark everywhere, on benches in the park next to my place, and also on the back of road signs, on doors in the village, discreetly drawn above a seat in the bus (on the edge of a window) and even on one of the security fences on the construction site in the gorges. I can’t fathom the insect’s itinerary.