Free Day

by Inès Cagnati

  Sometimes I’m tired and upset, like tonight. Not because of my bicycle and the twenty miles. Not at all. But it’s dark as hell, and it really was raining very hard. I’ll forget about it as soon as I go inside the house, with my mother and maybe all my sisters, who always make such a dreadful noise. In the past, when I didn’t know that one day I’d be going to the high school, I couldn’t stand all the noise. Now, it almost makes me happy. It’s the sound of home.

  I left my bike against the old wall of the barn for a number of reasons which guarantee that it will be totally safe. I’m certain of it. In winter, the house is so far from any walkable path, so far from any other house, behind the woods, the streams, and the wild waters of the marshes, that nobody’s going to pass by here tonight. If anyone did, it would have to be a madman, and if it’s a madman, my bicycle wouldn’t be any safer in the courtyard in front of the house than against the wall of the barn. So.

  Plus, nobody, that is, no one with any sense, would have any reason to want my bicycle. A thief who took it would only be throwing himself into the arms of the police, and in my village, everyone knows that thieves don’t think it’s at all funny to end up in the arms of the police. An ignorant thief from out of town might pass by, but on a night like this, that would be pretty astonishing. Except for the old Spaniard who lives with his goat, anybody would get swallowed up by the wild waters of the marshes before he could get here. And even if someone did get here, by some freak chance, and steal my bicycle, he’d soon be caught.

  My bicycle, the most precious thing I will ever own, is also the most extraordinary object in our area. I don’t know where it came from. I only know, because my father repeats this to me all the time, that it had a particularly glorious past, even if that was a long, long time ago, because my father got this information from his father.

  In truth, the only original part of my bicycle that remains is its frame. The rust that’s eating it up and piercing it through makes it clear that I’d better hurry up and finish my studies if I want it to carry me to school until the end. It has a frame with a crossbar that forces me to lean the bike to the side and lift my leg very high to straddle it. What remains of the seat is leather as hard and dry as stone, but I’ve wrapped it thickly in rags to make it harmless. The handlebars are remarkable for their grips, which are really high and allow me to sit up straight as I ride my bike. That’s a great advantage. My back never hurts and I don’t risk becoming hunchbacked like most of the girls at my high school. Let them laugh at me, I’m laughing at them. She who laughs last, laughs best. And if they are the last to laugh, as I suspect, they’ll be laughing under the humps on their backs. That consoles me. Only a little. They’re stupid and mean, the girls at my school. I hate them all. Except for Fanny.

  My bicycle has skinny wheels with solid tires. I’m at no risk of getting a flat, I don’t have to pump them up and re-pump them, like everyone else. I don’t know if these are the original wheels, but my father says they’re very rare, and that they must be treated with respect. He often says things like that, my father. At the back, I have a mudguard, but no rack. In front, I have neither a mudguard nor a headlamp. That’s why I struggled so much in the dark, just now. The mudguard is very troublesome. The mud accumulates there and, after a while, my bike can’t move anymore, and I have to either clean it off or carry it. The advantage is that nobody can steal it, and I can leave it against the wall of the barn without any fear. The mud around here is harder than cement.

  •

  I stayed quite a while, leaning against the wall, near my bicycle, thinking about all of this as I caught my breath. I needed to. I don’t have a lot of breath. During the medical checkup at school, they told me I have a hypertrophied heart. That means too big. I thought that was funny. Usually it’s less stressful when I return home. My mother comes to wait for me at the side of the road, at the corner by the woods. She brings a storm lamp so we can see where to put our feet, and avoid the ruts and holes of the marshes as much as possible. With my mother, I’m not afraid of the dark. Alone, I’m afraid, because I never know if it’s dark because I’ve gone blind, or if it’s dark because it’s dark.

  My mother helps me carry my bicycle through the water holes of the marshes. She never fails to come wait for me. She says I’m her favorite, that she would await my return for fifteen days and fifteen nights. She didn’t want me to go to the high school, my mother. Not at all. She wanted me to stay near her always. I explained that I would come back soon, that I would earn a lot of money and that we would finally be able to buy good land, land without stones, where the wheat and the grapevines would grow up to the sky. Land far, far away from all these marshes. But she said no, that would be too late, it would take too long, she wanted me to stay near her. She wanted me to stay with her, and there would never be good land, never ever, unless I were there. Me, I went to the high school all the same. So now, my mother waits fifteen days and fifteen nights. Nobody can know. It’s awful.

  Tonight, my mother wasn’t at the edge of the woods. She didn’t know. I came back without warning. I wanted to bring back the things I’d taken from the high school. If they were found on me, I’d be expelled. I didn’t have money to buy stamps and to write my mother to alert her to my arrival. Besides, it would have been useless. No letters ever come to our place.

  At last I’d caught my breath. Time to go into the house. My troubles with my breath, my reflections and all of that were nothing more than ways to put off a little longer the moment when I would go inside. I’ve known myself for some time. I’ve often noticed: I’m excited to see someone, I hurry, I pedal my old bicycle for four hours, and I sing while crying from exhaustion in the rain. And then, when at last I get here, I don’t know what to do. I do everything I can to put off the moment when I’ll go back inside the house.

  Because of all this, I’d wasted a fair amount of time. I had to go inside at last.

  I took off the hood of my raincoat. It’s a terrible hood. It has a cord that I can pull to gather the border, and then the hood envelops my head and leaves nothing exposed but my eyes and nose. When it’s raining, when I’m on the bike, I appreciate its usefulness and its comfort. Only my nose gets wet. That’s no big deal. You don’t catch colds through your nose, my mother is firm on that subject. The only disadvantage of my raincoat, apart from its incredible ugliness, is that with my entire head wrapped tightly in that hood, I’m deaf. Though that’s not really much of a disadvantage, it’s true. Nobody ever calls for me, anywhere. And even if someone who wanted to pass me on the road called out, they wouldn’t recognize me, disguised in this green thing that I use as a raincoat, which my uncle gave me when my aunt died. My aunt died this summer. I didn’t tell Fanny where my raincoat came from. It would have horrified her and I don’t want to do that. She’s my friend and she’s so beautiful. She hasn’t asked me anything about my raincoat, which has helped me avoid lying. When people ask me questions, I often make up lies. I’ve gotten used to it, and it doesn’t bother me anymore. But with Fanny, I would prefer to avoid lying. As for the raincoat, I figure she hasn’t asked me about it because most people just assume that, if you have something, you simply bought it. Fanny can’t know that with us it’s almost never like that. Anyway, it’s kept me from having to tell lies to Fanny.

  •

  I took my bag, which was tied to the handlebars of my bicycle. For once, it held no books, and was back to serving its original function. It’s a black waxed canvas shopping bag. They’re all over the place in the countryside, but you never see them at the high school. The girls have school satchels or proper travel bags. They laughed when they saw me with my old shopping bag. But it’s fine with me if they laugh. I consider myself lucky to have it. Maman went to great difficulties to give it to me. I understand why. She used it a lot. With no trouble she can fit two pairs of chickens into it to take to the village and sell. For two months I begged her to let me have the bag. I believe she hoped, by refusing, to keep me from going to the
high school and abandoning her. My mother came up with lots of tricks like that to keep me near her. I saw right through her. When she saw me making a bag from one of the jute sacks we use for wheat, which I’d taken from the hayloft, she gave up. She gave me her shopping bag. I flew into her arms and hugged her hard, telling her how much I loved her, how deeply I loved her, and always would. But she kept crying, she cried nonstop. She wouldn’t stop crying. So I left her and went to dig potatoes as my father had told me to do, because they really had to be harvested.

  Now, still, after the months I’ve spent in the company of this bag, I think of my mother every time I see it; and I always see it because I use it every day. So, on Thursday I stole a school satchel from Prisunic. It’s easy at Prisunic. That way I would be able to give my mother back her shopping bag. I know very well that that’s not what she was crying about.

  •

  I made up my mind to head toward the house. It was getting darker and darker, but I don’t need to see to find my way to the house. At home, I can navigate with my eyes closed, I’ve gotten used to it. With Antonnella, my little sister, I do it all the time. I walk up the vine-edged path alongside the barn, I enter the yard in front of the house, paying attention to the pond that’s right there, with its big pear tree that I used to climb in the past, when my father wanted to beat me. I’d climb so high that he couldn’t reach me with his cattle prod, so high that, if he climbed up himself, the branches would be too weak to bear his weight. But my father never came after me when I was up in my pear tree. Though he climbed well, my father. I remember that, back in the days when he still hoped to buy good land without stones or marsh weeds, he’d climb the cherry tree, the one behind the house, whose branches are nearly all dead now. Because of the cold, my father says. At our place, the earth is cold. He would pick the ripe cherries from the branches that reached highest to the sky and throw them down to us on the ground. We were happy as could be. We made ourselves earrings with the cherries to make them last longer. We would end up eating them. Or else, one of us would take some cherries from another of us, and we’d all start shouting and fighting, and my father would come with a stick and beat one of us girls, it didn’t matter which, usually it was me, because with so many girls, he couldn’t be sure which one to beat. It wasn’t very important. The victim would seek revenge on her own. Anyway, in the end he stopped interfering in our business. I mean, what else could he do, with so many daughters being born year after year, who wouldn’t stop coming.

  I didn’t tell Fanny how many girls there are at home. My father thinks it’s a curse. I told Fanny, “All my sisters are dead. One summer evening while they were sitting by the fire, a storm came, lightning struck, and all my sisters died.” I thought it was a good story. It’s a lie, obviously. But it could have been the truth. The night the lightning struck, my sisters were singing in a circle around the fireplace. My father, my mother, and I were working in the barn. A cow was calving, and was having a lot of trouble because it was the first time this had happened to her. We had to help her. That’s normal. I told everything in detail to Fanny. And it’s true that I’ve often helped birth the little calves. Sometimes they’re born in the meadows, and I have to look after the cow if she needs me. By necessity, I’ve had to get used to it. I get by very well. I even prefer helping the cows to helping my mother. It’s prettier to see. All the cows are happy with their little ones. They don’t ask questions afterwards, they lick them gently, for a long time. It’s pretty. My mother, when she has little ones, screams because it hurts. Afterwards, she cries because it’s a daughter again, and she doesn’t want more daughters. I understand, of course. But the baby can’t do anything about that. My mother refuses to feed it, and me, I have to take care of it and everything if I don’t want it to die. The baby is happy. It doesn’t know yet that it’s a girl and that it will regret it.

  But this I didn’t tell Fanny. I only told her the story of the cow’s first little calf, which we gently pulled out by its front hooves to help it leave its mother’s belly. When you’re in the middle of doing that, you can’t think of anything else, so much so that we didn’t even hear the storm arrive.

  When we went back into the house, we saw all my sisters silent and motionless, their mouths open in song. We buried them all together in a box made from the wood of a poplar my father chopped down for the purpose. Now, on windy nights, when there has been a lot of sun, and the strong fragrance of syringas and flowering vines fills the countryside, you still can hear my dead sisters singing. Fanny said that one day she’d come to my place to hear it. Me, I said nothing in response, because all that, it’s lies. It could have been true but it’s not true. Besides, I don’t want Fanny to come to our house. Ever. I don’t want to go to her house either, on the Sundays when I stay at the high school and she invites me over. Her place and my place, it’s not the same thing. I don’t want her to know how we live at home. And I don’t want to go to her place because of my clothes. My clothes are so pathetic that people laugh when they see me. So I will never go.

  •

  I advanced along the path with my bag that weighed on my arm, whose straps cut into my hand. It had lost its handles and I’d replaced them with string. In the path, the mud stuck to my boots so terribly that I wondered for a moment if the pond had overflowed. That can happen in winter. I remember even more astonishing floods. For instance, once, a long time ago, I was still little, it had rained heavily for days and days. A rain to end the world, for days and days. And one afternoon we were all in the kitchen making a lot of noise as usual, talking about nothing, arguing, fighting, in short, the usual. All of a sudden, we heard an extraordinary boom, as if a plane had shaved off the top of the house. The dog began to howl and we all ran outside, silent for once, we were so impressed. Then we saw a sort of enormous lake of water moving at top speed, carrying away with it everything in its path. It was truly the most impressive thing we had ever seen. The lake passed just to the side of the house and went on to rejoin the streams and the marshes. What happened after that, I don’t know.

  If it had touched our house it certainly would have carried it away, and us with it, and the cows, the dog, the fowl, my mother’s two pigs, in short, everything. Really it would have been a strange journey. Thinking about it moved us so much that we kept quiet the whole rest of the day. And it’s true that when even the water stops following a normal course, nobody knows what to do.

  The pond hadn’t overflowed, and that made me happy. I wouldn’t like to die of drowning. That must be an unbearable way to die.

  •

  I entered the yard. The shutters of the house were closed, but a little light filtered out through the slats. Everything was silent. My sisters must have been sleeping, even that great big pest Maria. I know the habits of the house well. I could picture my mother by the fire. She would be knitting, or maybe reading one of Aunt Gina’s romance novels, or maybe thinking of me. When she thinks of me, she cries as if I were dead. As for my father, either he was sleeping, or he was tinkering with one of the gadgets he’d made, which save him a lot of money because he does everything himself, which is necessary if he’s ever going to buy good land and make a living. My father invents a lot of these gadgets—he dreams them up on his own. My mother says he has talent as an inventor. It’s true. No doubt that’s what was going on in the kitchen. And the day must have been a reasonably good one since my father and my mother weren’t arguing. I was happy about that. They often argue, my father and mother. That’s normal. Sometimes they fight. I can’t stand that.

  •

  I thought of the moment when I would open the door. Maman would rush out shouting Galla! and crying. She’d clasp me very hard in her arms, begging me never to go away from her again. Never again, Galla. Never again.

  Every time, it’s like that. Always like that. Every time. I don’t want to get there, ever.

  I longed to return for a moment to the old wall of the barn and to stay there quietly. I could do that be
cause everything seemed normal at home. From seeing my mother cry, I’d become afraid of all the terrifying things that might happen while I was away. For example, the house and the barn on fire, the animals burnt to ashes or falling into unsuspected holes in the marshes. Sometimes, at the high school, fears like that took such hold of me that I actually expected a phone call informing me of the dire news. Whenever I come back home and find out that everything is in order, I could leap for joy, leap with intense joy, and leave straightaway. Because, on the Sundays when I’m home, Maman cries from morning until night, and the crying gradually increases as she realizes that I’m going to leave again all the same. I love my mother. Nobody loves her more than I do. But everything is unbearable. Unbearable. So, last Sunday, all of a sudden, I felts overwhelmed, so desperate with this sorrow, these entreaties, threats, everything, and that she was going to die, finally, everything, really everything, I was so beside myself that I shouted, “I wish you weren’t my mother! That you weren’t my mother!”

  I didn’t mean it. I swear on my honor I didn’t mean it at all. And on Antonnella’s honor. But it’s just that I couldn’t take it anymore, I want to go to the high school, I couldn’t take it anymore.

  I was sorry for having said that. All week long I felt more afraid than usual. So I took a school satchel from Prisunic and some things from the high school, and tonight I came back to see how things were. My mother will understand that I love her, that I didn’t mean what I said at all, about wishing she wasn’t my mother. She knows it, but I have to tell her. Me, I would love for anyone to say that to me, except for my mother.