Free Day

by Inès Cagnati

  Afterwards, on winter nights, I’d tell the story of the little match girl to my sisters. They got to know it by heart, too, and fell into the habit of pretending to be the little match girl. When I found out about that, I told them to stop it and slapped them. They started up again all the same, and I ended up leaving them alone. Little kids like that, they don’t understand. I often forget that they’re little. That’s the way I am.

  This year, they’ll be happy that we have a tree and presents. Fanny is helping me. She’s a marvelous girl, Fanny. She always understands everything, even when she doesn’t understand. And then, how beautiful she is, with all that golden hair that ripples over her shoulders. If I had been loved, maybe I would have been beautiful, too.

  Fanny and I are getting Christmas ready for my family. We’re knitting gloves, red for my mother, blue for my father. I’ll give that great big pest Maria the scarf Fanny brought me one day, a pretty, multicolored scarf with long fringe. For the little ones, it’ll be a rag doll each. Fanny, who doesn’t know that I have sisters, she still believes they’re dead, thinks it’s to decorate my bedroom. It makes me laugh to think about it. Because at home, we all sleep crammed into two beds, head to toe, and the walls of the bedroom are crumbling from the damp. My father says they’re tainted by the quarry sand they’re made with. Me, I don’t know. I like the sand a lot. It’s a nice pale gold, very soft to the touch. What’s for sure is that in that bedroom my dolls will soon be ruined.

  Fanny brought rags and scraps of cloth for the dolls. During recess and on Thursdays, we make the dolls. The other girls in class thought it was a good idea, and now they’re all making dolls. They’re stupid.

  Shuffling through the dead leaves, I found some old chestnuts. I shelled them and ate them. I like chestnuts a lot, raw or cooked. Maman cooks them at Halloween every year. In the past, when the grandmother that I hate with all my heart lent us her pierced pan with the very long handle, we roasted them on the fire. Now, my grandmother won’t lend us her pan anymore, I don’t know why. She’s so mean. We eat the chestnuts boiled. That’s good, too. Even raw they’re good. Me, I’m always so hungry that I would eat anything. That’s how I am.

  I found a cluster of little junipers, all covered in frost. I’ll make a pretty little Christmas tree out of them. At Prisunic, I’ll take some candles, that’s easy this time of year, there’s always a lot of people around. Everyone at home will be surprised and happy, even my father.

  I went back to my bicycle. It was wrong to abandon it like that, all alone in the bushes. One day someone’s going to steal it from me. There are always madmen. It’s inevitable, as my French professor says, who always uses the same words, so reliably that I entertain myself by counting how many times she says them in an hour. She says “do you understand” and “isn’t that right” close to sixty times; “inevitable” ten times; and when she’s angry she says: “it’s unheard of.” I think I’d be happier if she swore. Obviously, because she’s a French professor, she can’t. But I think it would be less sad. Too bad.

  •

  For a while I walked down the path, pushing my bicycle and listening to the crackling of dead leaves. The earth was hard with frost, even the trails in the marsh. I was afraid of running into the old Spaniard with the goat, so I ran through the clumps of frozen bulrushes and water irises. My bike bucked and squealed nonstop. For once, I would have liked it to shut up. Poor bicycle. It wasn’t easy running, because of the weeds and the holes that I was scared would make me trip and fall. But I didn’t fall. And in any case, I don’t think anyone was in the marshes, not even the sullen birds.

  By the time I finally reached the road, my heart was beating like crazy. Nobody was going by. It made me terribly sad, that lonely road. I thought that a road without cars or bicycles wasn’t a road anymore. It was lucky for the road that we were there, my bicycle and me, otherwise, what use would it have been? It used to be a gravel road, without tar. I was still small.

  Sometimes, I enjoyed coming up here just to see who was going by. If it was cars, I threw sticks at them. I didn’t throw anything at tractors or bicycles. Somebody could have seen me before I had time to run away. I went back home as proud as if I’d traveled all the way to the source of the Amazon. It seems nobody’s ever done that. When I was little, I thought everything beyond the marshes that protected our house was enemy territory, since everybody from there always chased me away as soon as they saw me. They know I’m the one who makes things disappear from their places. They never caught me, so I don’t understand how they found out. But I know they know, because as soon as they see me they throw rocks at me.

  Everything started after the terrible story of the cows and the cornfield, that year when they were so hungry and we were, too. I understood how hungry they were, and that you couldn’t reason with them or slap them or kick them like my father does to me when he wants to teach me a lesson.

  Those cows and me, since we were always together—me watching them, them trying to get away—we’d become friends in a way. We’d gone through some very hard times together, really hard. Through them I understood that every­thing my father said about honesty, and about how you must never owe anything to anybody and all the rest, was nothing but lies. Lies and nothing else. Once I understood that, I set about making things a little less unjust, without telling anyone about it. The cows had nothing to graze on but stones and earth, and there was no reasoning with them, so I went out to see how things worked in other places, over on the other side of the hedges and the marshes. I’d grab some cornstalks, or ears of corn, or beets—basically, whatever the cows like. In the meadow, together, we ate the beets and the fresh, creamy ears of corn.

  I did my runs at noon. At our place, meals went by fast. While the neighbors were eating, I’d hunt food for my cows. It made sense. That’s why none of my sisters got eaten. Because, more often than not, I had to take care of the littlest child when I was looking after the cows. I’d take her with me, her and the straw-filled box she slept in, and set it right in the middle of the meadow so I could see her from wherever I was. From time to time, a cow would approach and inspect the box. The little one would wail. The cow wasn’t all that hungry. She was happy to eat some of the straw sticking out around my sister.

  I’ve always thought that if I’d tended pigs instead of cows, everything would have been different. Sometimes pigs eat their own young, baby chicks, everything they can get. They’re always hungry. At our place there’s a pig or two, but penned up. Whenever you go by their sty, they raise their eyelids and stare. My mother says they think they’re at the theater. When she’s the one passing, they squeal so she’ll fuss over them. They know she likes them a lot. She’s always gotten along well with all her pigs, except for once, when she had a couple of serious run-ins with one of them. She’d gone to change its straw, and afterwards, she’d rubbed its stomach as usual, and up to then, all the pigs loved having their stomachs rubbed. Nobody could figure out why the pig did what it did. It turned around and bit my mother on the thigh, really hard. If she’d been passive, it might have eaten her up, along with the other pigs, there’s no telling. Me, I think this pig didn’t like being touched, and that day, it had had enough. Animals, like people, have their own personalities.

  My mother was so devastated by the pig’s bad behavior that when it came time to kill it that year, on January 21, she didn’t even cry, and she even came to see it get its throat cut. My mother is terrible. Sometimes she makes me laugh. In my opinion, she was sort of in the right. She always treated her pigs perfectly. For example, if she has a visit from my grandmother or my aunts, I hate them all, she never fails to take them to see the pigs. Afterwards, the visitor comments, compares her pig to my mother’s, the size of their rumps. In the end, my aunts always decide that their pigs are prettier than my mother’s and they’re loud about making that known. When they’re gone, my mother is angry, sometimes sad. She can tell that the aunts don’t love us.

  Me, what I would
have liked, every time, would be for my mother to throw my grandmother and all the aunts into the sty with the pigs and let the pigs devour them. That’s what I would have liked.

  •

  I straddled my bike and started pedaling vigorously to buck myself up and get the blood moving in my frozen legs. I tried to sing a little, I knew it wouldn’t work, my heart felt like a sack of gravel. I couldn’t sing. When I’m in a mood when I really need to sing, I can never find my voice. Things can be like that, you don’t have something at the moment you need it. My voice was a stranger’s, and I stopped trying to sing.

  Plus, there was black ice on the road. I knew that, obviously. But I’m the kind of person who never picks up on danger until I’ve jumped into it with both feet. Like, if I’d been a soldier during the war, I wouldn’t have figured out that a war was really on until the enemy blew up my head like a bloody firework. That’s me.

  So in this case, it was only when my bicycle slid and the two of us found ourselves sprawled on the frozen grass of the slope, me underneath, the bike on top, that I got it: black ice. Luckily, my bike didn’t break anything. Poor bicycle. I promised I’d be careful. My bike is like certain little old people: so frail that the tiniest thing can break it.

  I stayed there for a while, sitting on the bank beside my bicycle. We needed a rest and I was in no hurry.

  Eventually I decided to set out again. Maybe it was later than I imagined. Without a watch, under this gray sky on this gray land, how can you know.

  Once again I mounted my bike, taking care not to jostle it. I pedaled, and noticed that the right pedal had got a little twisted in the fall, and that my knee hurt. To avoid falling again, I decided to go slowly. If the patch of black ice was small, I’d go around it, if it was big, I’d stop, and get around it by walking on the bank. That way I’d be sure at least not to break my bicycle, which is so precious to me.

  This reminded me of the most recent composition I’d handed in at school. The subject was: “If you could take only one object with you to the desert, what would it be? Justify your choice.” It was a completely cretinous subject, as usual. As for me, if anyone were to demand that I go to the desert with only one object, I would ask to take nothing at all. But the professor absolutely insisted we had to take at least one thing. She’s a maniac. Of course, she expected everyone to say they wanted to take one of the books she talks about, or a record. The girls in class said that, to please her and to get good grades. They all wanted to take The Little Prince or Le Grand Meaulnes or The Old Man and the Sea with them. Books like that. I think that’s idiotic. When I love a book I’ve read, I remember it. There’s no need to take it to the desert, I can just tell the story to myself if I want. I can even make up stories without a book. It’s the same with records. When I sing it’s always like someone else is singing. My voice is a stranger’s voice. And when I see myself, I see a stranger, too.

  I wrote this in my composition, though I knew what the professor wanted. Professors always want you to talk to them about the things they like.

  Next, I thought about what I really could take, since I had to choose something. I had a lot of ideas. I thought of a big hat, because of the devouring sun, and then, I told myself that it would be good to die in the sun. Then I thought of a sheet to cover myself at night. I can’t sleep uncovered, especially not with my head uncovered. But a sheet is cumbersome, and also, in the desert, I would quickly die of thirst. Unless a caravan passes and picks me up on one of the paths where the camel merchants travel, at the edge of the desert. But it’s better not to count on that. Finally, the only good idea that came to me was my toothbrush. A toothbrush is useful, it’s not cumbersome. I can easily picture myself walking in the dunes of the desert, my toothbrush in my hand. In moments of repose, I would put it down beside me, it wouldn’t bother me. But on reflection, I rejected that idea, for very simple reasons.

  First, in the desert, there’s no water. I wouldn’t be able to brush my teeth. Not that this would keep me from taking my toothbrush. But the more serious thing, the thing that made me decide to reject the idea, was that I’d risk losing it whenever there was a sandstorm. To find a lost toothbrush, even a red one, under a sand dune, can’t be easy. The science professor explained to us that dunes shift during sandstorms. How could I know, then, which dune might have carried off my brush? And I know myself. I would never just go on my way, leaving behind an object I was responsible for, which had followed me faithfully. I’d be forced to stay behind for ages, turning over the sand, trying to find my brush. It would be a horrible ordeal. If I didn’t find it, I’d stay at the bottom of the dune indefinitely. The next sandstorm would bury me, too. Maybe it would uncover my brush, and then it would be my brush’s turn to wait for me. Things like that are awful.

  This assignment really annoyed me. So, because I’d had enough of these stories our professor tells, I said that if I had to go to the desert with one sole object, it would be my bicycle. That’s the way it was. I gave no reason. It was that or nothing. Furthermore, I hate this professor.

  •

  I pedaled very hard, determined to keep myself from thinking. I’ve noticed that as soon as I start thinking, I get upset. I was exasperated in the bitter cold, alone with my fragile bicycle, like in the desert, with all the houses locked up around their fireplaces. I wanted the world to break into pieces like the bitter pomegranates I stole from my aunt’s gardens, which burst into a thousand red sparks when I hurled them with all my strength against the wall of my aunt’s house because she didn’t want me to steal her pomegranates. I longed violently for the world to explode in bloody fireworks. It didn’t happen. Nothing you wish for ever happens. I know that all too well. It doesn’t matter. If the whole red smashed-up earth were to explode in the pale sky, it would not be enough to console me. I would need to explode, too; to splatter the whole world like tears of rain. Nothing.

  Then I pedaled. I pedaled and pedaled while listening to the little salamander squeak of my bicycle.

  I went on like that, sometimes pedaling, sometimes getting off to gently guide my bicycle, and I thought, I’m holding its hand. I would have liked to be able to sing to cheer us up, but I couldn’t. I was too tired. And filled with a sorrow that had no voice.

  I thought of Fanny—I’ll see her tomorrow. I repeated to myself: She’s a marvelous girl, Fanny. I told myself: Everyone loves her. And it’s true everyone loves her. I’m sure of it. Her hair and her green eyes are full of sunshine, you can’t not love her. You’d say she was born for it. Me, I would have liked to be like her. But I will never be like her. I am her exact opposite. I don’t even understand how she can like me. Me, if I were as marvelous as her, I wouldn’t like me, I would hate me for being so dark, with that black hair, those dark eyes, and that kitchen apron that’s so relentlessly green. Whenever I think about myself I hate myself even more than the others do. Much more.

  When I first came to the high school, everyone made so much fun of me, even the professors, that I was like a ball furiously ricocheting off the walls. Then, Fanny came along, and Fanny, everyone likes her. Me, they don’t like very much, but they don’t make fun of me too badly anymore. Once Fanny took me under her wing, they didn’t dare. That’s sad too.

  •

  There’s one thing I’d like to do, when I think about myself. Something unbearable, which I wouldn’t do to anyone else, not even to a toothbrush.

  It came to me one day when I was in town, walking to Prisunic. On the corner of the road that leads to Prisunic there’s a store with a big mirror that takes up an entire section of storefront. You can see yourself in it as you pass by in the street—as if from a distance, through a haze, because the mirror is so old. Everyone looks at themselves as they go by. Girls and boys often pause to fix their hair. Somehow, although I know the mirror is there, I never remember it. I don’t know why.

  One Thursday I glanced at the mirror, saw a girl approaching, and felt something like fear. Not exactly fear, more like a p
ain in my heart that hit me like a punch in the chest. I looked around. Nobody there but me. Again I looked in the mirror. The girl, motionless, looked back. Then I understood. It was me. Obviously. Who else could it be? Except I didn’t recognize myself. All at once, for no reason, I felt totally bereft.

  I gave up on going to Prisunic and got back on the road to the high school. While I was crossing the bridge across the river at the edge of town, the longing came over me. I violently longed to hurl that black-and-green girl into the river, that girl who stared back at me from the mirror and gave me such pain in my heart. I didn’t want to die, no. Just to get rid of myself, not to kill; to rid myself of that girl from the mirror, so I’d never see her again.

  I ran back towards the high school. I told myself it would be enough to ditch the girl in the mirror, not to drown her, to strand her somewhere. To pretend to forget about her, the way you forget about a dog or cat you don’t want anymore, that you abandon somewhere. And afterwards to go far away so she could never find me again. Sometimes, when you abandon a dog, it stubbornly comes back to the master who doesn’t want it anymore, and then you have to kill it one morning at dawn. If I went to the desert, I would leave the girl by the dune where the toothbrush was buried, to wait forever and ever.

  And then I would go far away. Alone at last.

  Ever since I started trying to lose myself, this is how it goes. I feel sorry for myself, like I feel sorry for my green smock or my bicycle or the toothbrush I wanted to lose. I think about myself and tell myself that nobody wants me, not even me. Then I feel sorry for myself because nobody wants me, not even me.