I hope she knows what she’s doing, that foolish girl.
(on the way back from the high school)
I change the radio station, they won’t be happy, but I need to hear something else. I turn off the musical compromise that normally accompanies our time together. We settled on this compromise years ago: neither a young people’s station nor an oldies’ station, instead we either have silence or tune in to a local community radio station with a broad musical program, but no crap, no young people’s crap, no oldies’ crap. I come across a classical music station. They object. I let their little protest flair up then die down. I need to turn things over in my head. Think about my life, about Nadège’s life, the path I’m on, the one she’s on, about my past as an adolescent, about her future as an adult.
I don’t manage to think, but at least I clear my vision a bit while listening to this music.
For no apparent reason, the music fades, stops, starts up again. In clearing my vision, I’ve lost sight of the road a bit, but, in the empty field of my thoughts, I end up, despite myself, venturing a glance back at my big kids. I see them in the rear-vision mirror, next to me, everywhere. They’re not playing up, no one is speaking, almost no one is moving. They seem intent on something I’m not aware of. An authoritative voice is talking over the music. A man’s voice repeated, or rather dubbed, inside a false echo. Eventually, I grasp that it’s the voice of an annoyed conductor, a foreign and unfathomable voice, using everyday words, dubbed in two dimensions and in French, another man’s language. The conductor’s tantrum is being transmitted in a simultaneous translation, but his angry tone is not being duplicated, the translator’s words fall flat; there is no texture to his voice. The two voices overlap each other, one full of intonation, perhaps in Polish, the other monotone, in our language. Too short, too short, says the second voice, translating. Too short, again. Both voices are silent, the music swells. Nielle seems fascinated. The music dies down again, no doubt in response to some invisible signal. The Polish conductor launches into his outburst again, chastened by French words. These discordances, this impossible mingling, this muffling of the music, is both annoying and thrilling. Because of the music, the conductor is silencing the musicians. The conductor deadens the music for the sake of the music. Because, as the other voice tells us in dubbing, the music does not exist as long as it is like that. He holds it back so that it can come forth. The language he speaks is strange, made up of unusual words, a musical vocabulary that is beyond us. But we understand what is happening, what is not happening. We can almost hear the terrified and respectful musicians, breathing as imperceptibly as possible. We’re holding our breaths too. The music picks up again. The conductor gives it one last whack with his silent baton. And the big kids and I snap out of our strange hypnosis and burst out laughing. And the music finally finds its place, within our laughter, and no longer fades out. It swells, powerful, an expansive sweep that carries our laughter along with it.
I saw the potato beetle on the security fencing when I went down into town to see my brother. As if on some sort of unconscious pilgrimage, I had stopped near the construction site, which was closed on the weekend. I wanted to see the site of the accident, I wanted to cry. I walked along the fence, without having a clue where my brother had landed. I remembered the other landslide of five years ago. I had a particular memory of the flowers left by the family of the guy crushed inside his car. Still wrapped in plastic, they were stuck in a crack between the rocks, and no one dared to move them. They remained there for several months, getting rained on, then snowed on, ageing faster than the rock. After remembering that, of course I thought about the guy on the side of the road, our crazy guy. I thought about the way he always looked surprised, and I thought about all the stupid stuff the kids said about the White Lady. The White Lady stories made me think about the blue cows. I looked in the other direction, and they were still there. It was so beautiful, everything was so good, and I was proud to be from this place, with all the crackpots on the plateau.
In the spot usually reserved for signs warning tourists about the risk of pickpockets, there’s a sign alerting people to the cows: Herd of Cows—Beware! It’s the normal triangular shape, except it’s clearly not a professional sign and a white cow with blue stripes is poking out of the triangle. When you look over where the sign is pointing to, on the other side of the road, in the middle of the cliffs overlooking the gorges, there are blue cows, roped together, their heads angled into the fold of the rocks, their large wooden bodies jammed into horizontal crevices, and decorated with stripes, or love hearts, or flowers. The primary-school teacher got the kids to make them last year for the Pansy Flower Fete. The kids couldn’t stop telling me about it for weeks (Mine’s the cow with the love hearts, Mine’s the one with the stripes, etc.), and when their teacher abseiled down to wedge them into the gorges, they were so proud of their cows and of their teacher. And therefore I was proud of my kids.
Years before that, a Citroën 2 CV that had been sawn in half was cemented directly onto the vertical rock face. It loomed out from the escarpment into thin air. We all pretended not to know who could possibly have conceived of a thing like that. We all pretended to believe it had nothing to do with the tunnel project.
I was smiling as I returned to my car. I had completely forgotten my brother’s accident. I’d parked up against the security fencing and it was as I got into the car that I noticed Nadège’s little creature (I didn’t know then that it was hers). I’d already seen it in the village, in the bus, and thought it must have been a sort of tag, a tag used by one of my kids, but, hey, nothing more than that. A kind of harmless, funny signature, and so much less vulgar than the inscription in capital letters on the stone wall up the mountain.
I continued further down memory lane as I drove, to a morning last year, in October, when my Loire kids and I headed along the lower road in the valley, past the mountain.
There was a construction site there as well. I’ve known about reinforcement structures forever. There are people around here who are the great-great-great-grandchildren of men who came from Italy to build the roads through the gorges using the system of roping up the workers. They were often badly roped together and many died during these impressive construction works that took place, who knows, at least two centuries ago.
We were following the security fence, all daydreaming as I drove, just as I was now. It was dawn on a hot, windy Indian summer’s day. The lulling motion of my driving was disturbed: I braked suddenly and Sylvain popped out of his hoodie. Five or six fenceposts were lying on the road in front of us. I turned round to Nielle and Sylvain and they got up at the same time. You could smell the wind outside. It was the smell of summer in autumn. The weather was mild, incredibly gentle, and that’s what they were too, incredibly gentle in the way they moved and in the way they remained quiet. We picked up the fenceposts without saying a word to each other, apart from laughing a bit. It was hard work, and yet it was easy. It took us a good quarter of an hour, alone in the dawn wind. I was helping them or they were helping me, I don’t know which. What I do l know is that I felt safe with them.
(on the way to the high school)
Beneath the corbelling along the road through the gorges, stalactites of broken ice are lying in messy piles on the ground. I have to weave around them. The guys from the Department of Environmental Management are still shooting them down with rifles. They haven’t cleared the ground, so I pull over while they finish blasting the ice, the noise of the gunshots made even louder by the echoes. They wave me through, and Sébastien and Julien turn around in their seats to watch them reload.
Rifles are customary around here, part of the landscape, what with hunting and the biathlon of cross-country skiing and shooting. For me, it’s out of the question, I’m not the slightest bit interested.
Nadège sighs. Marie and Marine look down the gorge as they take their seats again. They had stood up in order to see even further down, their hands on the win
dow, their eyes staring, trying through the half-light to make out the depths of the steep rock faces. Sébastien and Julien are swapping stories about the next shooting match in the stadium not far from here (in a huge clearing set up for the world championships).
It’s reassuring to see Sylvain back under his hoodie and Joël and Nielle asleep, daydreaming at first light—so sport and firearms are not simply a gender-related thing.
One morning three weeks ago, Tony took me hunting. I said yes to getting up early, to walking through the night next to him. I said yes to please him, because he was keen, because I trusted him, because walking less than a metre from him made my stomach gurgle (still does), and the snow would mask that, all crunchy and hard at dawn in the forest.
I said yes so I could release the low pine branches stuck under the snow and, like when I was a little boy, enjoy the sudden wet slap as they sprang up. So that, simply by the absence of undergrowth, I could locate the old paths—forest paths that are thinned out at eye level. So I could walk out there where the trees no longer grow because of age-old footsteps in the ground. I said yes so I could walk on the scarcely forgotten footsteps of others. My brother and I had a game we used to play: we’d look for paths that had been all but entirely forgotten, old municipal roads between abandoned hamlets, places that only old people have names for now.
I said yes because it was the last Sunday of the hunting season, and it was clear that he wanted to mark the occasion, somehow make our relationship official (the words used by Hugues’ mother, now that they had done the rounds on the plateau). I said yes because by now everyone knew I was going out with Tony, and Tony is not just anyone, he’s one of a kind, both loathed and adored.
Farmers offer him a coffee or a glass of red, hoping to negotiate the price of their meat. He replies that he can’t give them more, I mean perhaps for a bull but not for a cow. Oh, you’ve got to be kidding, who do you think we are, eh? All this time we’ve been doing business together, Tony, the females are worth as much as the males. Not that one. What do you mean, not that one? She’s a real beauty. How dare you say she’s not a beauty. The debates are endless, the woman of the house hangs back, her backside against the sink, and only comes over to fill up the glasses again. Do you want this cheque? Tony says. No, not under those conditions.
I laugh when Tony imitates the accent of the old people—so familiar to me—mixed with his own—he’s from mountain country, but not from around here (and that’s another thing to hold against him). Otherwise, Tony is a volunteer firefighter. Respect!
I said yes to this wordless outing in the forest because I like his voice, I like his accent, I like what he says, but I also like his silence. I said yes because he describes to me so often and so well the patient focus needed and the tracking of the animals’ emotions on the bark of the trees, that scent they leave clinging there, sometimes made more noticeable by a few hairs left as well. I said yes so he’d explain to me all those tracks in the snow, often mingled with my kids’ footprints.
When they climb into the bus, they know perfectly well if they’ve stepped on and rubbed out the tracks of a wild boar on the run, or a hesitant deer—they tell me (as their news item of the day). White snow, virgin snow: that only exists in books.
I said yes so I could hear our footsteps crunch, fall silent when we stopped walking, then start up again, and so I could focus on one of my favourite silly ideas: the notion of being followed by things—when branches, tree trunks, frozen bushes, all the things from the winter forest set forth with us, and at any slight break in our rhythm come to a halt, almost after we do.
Invisible shooters shattered the stillness. That ruined it for me. Tony smiled every time I flinched. He held me in his arms until I buried my head in his shoulders. Hunting is really not your thing, is it? Do you want to go home?
(on the way to the primary school)
The day is blue enough to loosen the creases in the sky. The weather is so beautiful and so cold that the air seems to be cracked in places. It looks impenetrable. But we’ll soon have to drive into it.
The cold even seems intensified in the sunshine. At the big kids’ pick-up time, it was minus seventeen, and I’m numb enough to feel that the temperature is dropping.
I can’t grasp why I’m feeling so anxious in this blinding brightness. I can see the road, and I’m used to the cold. And yet I seem to have lost my way, or my memory of places, or perhaps of the pick-up schedules.
Last year in April, I’m not sure how I managed to do it, but somehow we got ahead of the snow plough, and we arrived in front of some huge snowdrifts. I was with the little kids, we were warm inside the piles of snow, the sun was already high in the sky. We had almost reached the village, the school, but I was feeling happy-go-lucky and decided not to wait for the snow plough. I parked the bus a bit further away, so it wouldn’t block the road, but was still clearly visible (so they’d work out we were here). The kids were thrilled to walk the rest of the way, to climb up and down, up and down, on the mounds of snow. Sometimes the snowdrifts joined together two fields normally separated by the road. Sometimes they had stopped disgorging snow and it had stopped cascading in waves from the drifts and was left suspended in the air, which created tunnels underneath, gaps the size of Minuit and Hugues, who disappeared inside, then jumped out shouting peekaboo at us.
But even during the fun I was filled with anxiety—nothing at all to do with the possibility of the snow plough suddenly appearing (you can hear it coming from a long way away, and see the powder spurting). The kids were running around like crazy things, like animals held in captivity for a long time and then released, like winter calves the day they leave the stable for the first time once the thaw begins. They were crazy and beautiful, all red-faced in their scruffy snowsuits, I loved them so much, but I was unexpectedly terrified, to the point of being unable to smile.
We heard the plough, so we headed off to school and arrived via the field at the back. (Y’know, Adèle, the little kids said, there are donkeys here in summer and autumn, and they go hi-han while the teacher’s talking.)
My paralysing terror disappeared once I thought about the donkeys, but I still didn’t know what had triggered it. I only understood once I was on the way back from the school, returning on foot, alone, along the freshly ploughed road. It was simply because a few hundred metres of the road had been closed for a few hours, because there hadn’t been a road there anymore. My extreme anxiety was due to the brute physical shock of the devastating and yet harmless loss of my bearings, of my route, of my trip, of my particular spatial habits.
Today I feel the same anxiety, and yet everything is in the right place: the road, the cold, the mountain, my memory.
I stop to pick up Thierry. He’s all red in the face and smiling. Hmm, he doesn’t sit next to Lise.
I try to drive smoothly, so that the oil doesn’t freeze and flakes of ice don’t get into the motor. I should have put a bit more petrol in there.
After the wind turbines I slow down to speak to the kids. I want to be sure that the little ones have lots of cream on their cheeks. The big kids check on them, and on the kids from Years Five and Six. Yep, all’s good, okay. At twenty degrees and below, delicate skin can get frostbitten, and it’s not just red cheeks, but full-on, extremely painful haematomas. Lise points out to me, kindly, but she says it nevertheless, that mothers, even her own, know all about frostbite, and about undergloves and snow-boot socks, they’re on it. I apologise; Sorry, I say, I don’t know why, but today I’m frightened of the cold.
The wind rises, stirs up the snow and hides the sun. It gusts under the bus, bears down on the windows, buffets us a bit. It settles almost immediately.
The road seems longer than usual, but it’s not. Time seems to be slowing down, but it isn’t.
I know that, if there’s a high wind, the snow plough will come and bore into the snowdrifts, and this time I’ll wait for it.
I don’t trust the sun today, everything seems artific
ial.
Today is the last day of school before the winter holidays.
I’ve already been forced to take detours in the past because of the fog, when even the lights of the wind turbines couldn’t penetrate the darkness. I’ve never panicked before, so I try to get a grip on myself: we’re all tired in the lead-up to the holidays. I’m battling the feeling of being in some banal and childish dream in which the road goes on forever and I make no headway. The snow is good, firm in the cold. But the road is so long, and the school is so far away.
Back in the day, as we say, there were lots of schools. They were more or less everywhere. We all still walked a fair way to get to school, but not all in the same direction.
Back in the day, or rather back in my neck of the woods, before the artificial lakes and shuttle buses, we used to arrange with the neighbours to go to school by tractor whenever there was a snowstorm. But the schools were nearby, none further than ten kilometres, whereas I travel a good twenty with my little kids, and still more with the big kids. Schools used to be part of the landscape, just like farms, scattered around, dotted here and there. Each village, each hamlet had its own school, but there was no need for a village or a hamlet to justify a school’s existence. If you visualised a circle containing three farms or ten houses, spread out over the mountainside, you would be bound to find the school in the middle, on a road. Some of the schools constituted official localities in themselves and had their own name.
One Day I'll Tell You Everything Page 9
