by Inès Cagnati
I said, “Yes.” But it wasn’t true, of course. That made me sad. I thought that, one day, someone like Fanny, someone who genuinely liked me a whole lot, and who hadn’t ever done anything to anybody, might think that much about me, and on that very day, terrible things would happen. But when nobody and nothing thinks about me, what will happen then? It felt like all my joy at being back in the high school next to Fanny was about to crumble away, leaving nothing.
•
I sat down at my desk in the back of the classroom. Fanny sat beside me—that’s her spot. Some desks were empty, because of the snow, no doubt. For no reason, I thought, so much the better. I often think dumb things for no reason. The professor kept her fur coat on. She has a rabbit fur coat. That disgusts me. At our place, rabbits die every year because of epidemics. The professor said, “Oh, it’s cold. Oh, it’s cold” in her high-pitched voice. Instantly, all the girls smiled at her. It’s the same every time. When she comes back, saying: “Some air. Some air. It stinks in here,” the girls smile at her, windmilling their arms. Always. I think if she said, “You are stupid little hyenas,” or “You are pink cretins”—which is true—the girls would still keep smiling. They are stupid and so is the professor. When I see that, I hate them all. In any case, I never smile. Except at Fanny, of course.
The professor took out her grade book and began making the girls do the recitations. The girls recited. It was boring because I know all those poems. When it was done, the professor said, “Who will volunteer?”
I hesitated a bit, then, because nobody got up, decided to do it. I wanted to say “Forehead on the windowpane like mourners keeping vigil,” again, and that way I’d get a good grade, which could be important if I got in trouble because of the pass. I went up to the podium. The professor likes us to recite at the podium, facing the others, whom she calls “the auditors,” because she doesn’t like to use the words everyone else uses. I did it the way she likes and looked straight ahead, at Fanny. Some girls recite with their eyes on the ceiling, others look at their feet. Me, I look at Fanny, who looks at me.
I was about to start reciting when a terrible silence seemed to swallow me up. All the girls were staring at me. They used to do that at the beginning, because of my green smock. But over time, they stopped, and now whenever I recite they just go on drawing on their desks or on a piece of paper. My heart began beating wildly. I wondered what was wrong with me. All the same, I looked at the professor, who said nothing, and I began: “Forehead on the windowpane like mourners keeping vigil.”
And then I couldn’t remember any more. Nothing. I searched for a moment and everybody watched and kept quiet. The only thing that came back to me was the ending. So I said it, very fast so it would end:
I look for you beyond waiting
I look for you beyond myself
And I love you so much, I no longer know
Which of us two is gone.
I waited. The professor said, “Thank you.”
She always says that. Whether you recite well or badly, she says that, in her high-pitched voice: “Thank you.”
And she gives us a six or a five. I can’t stand it, I really can’t. So I said, “I didn’t have time to learn a recitation. I had to help my mother work.”
It was completely idiotic to say that, but she annoyed me so much with her “Thank you.” And I couldn’t explain to her that I’d had to sleep in the straw with my dog. She wouldn’t have believed me.
She said, “I know, Galla. But it’s good that you wanted to recite. Thank you.”
I returned to my place angrier than before. I sat next to Fanny. Another girl was reciting. Fanny curled her hand into a shell in front of her mouth so nobody could hear. She said, “Why did you say that? She knows that your mother is dead.”
I looked at Fanny and I said, “My mother is not dead.”
Fanny looked at me too and said, “But your sister? She telephoned with the news. You had just left. She said that your mother died in the marshes.”
Me, I said, “My sister is a jealous pest. She wanted to play a trick on me. She wanted me to come back home.”
Fanny said, “That’s a terrible trick.”
I said, “My sister is a horrible, filthy pest.”
Fanny thought then said, “Did your mother know? What she said?”
I said, “She didn’t say anything.”
Fanny said, “What are you going to do now? Everyone thinks your mother died in the marshes. The supervisor warned the girls that if they behaved unkindly to you they would be sent to the principal’s office.”
I said, “What business is it of hers?” And then I lifted my head and tried to listen to the professor, who was reading aloud the story of Rodrigo and Chimène. Then I thought a little about my situation.
I thought about it for a while. In the end, I got up, and without saying anything to anyone, I walked out.
12
I WENT to the back of the courtyard to be with my bicycle. Not the courtyard with the nuns, another one that they call the courtyard of honor, because it’s in front of the high school. I like this courtyard because of the cedars, the beautiful cedars, very thick and very tall. Fanny says their name is cedars of Lebanon because they come from Lebanon, and endless cedar forests grow in Lebanon. I would have liked to know if the dead nuns in the courtyard had been permitted to stroll and sit beneath the cedars in the court of honor. We weren’t. But they, when they were alive, while they were digging their graves every day, did they walk slowly with the broad calm branches of the cedars spreading before them? If that was permitted, it must have consoled them a little for the graves they were digging to die in. It’s hard to know what the dead nuns thought when they were alive.
•
I found my bicycle where I had put it, surrounded by shiny bikes and mopeds. My bicycle looked completely miserable and lost. I grabbed it very quickly to get it away from all that. I walked across the courtyard to the gate. I was lucky, it was open. Delivery people were carrying boxes into the high school. The concierge was right behind them, looking at their buttocks. I went through quietly with my bike. I pictured myself on the first day I came to school, all alone with my old bicycle, my green smock that I’d just finished, and which I had ironed three or four times, and my mother’s big shopping bag. There were a lot of people, girls, parents, cars, lots of people, really, and lots of noise, and me, I didn’t know anybody, and I entered the place with my old bicycle, my green smock and my black bag. That was a really long time ago.
In the street, a truck was unloading sand onto the snow. Men were talking, because of all the white stuff, maybe. Cars passed, rarely and slowly. I walked, pushing my bike on the sandy road, and sometimes the cars had to slow to a crawl behind me while they waited for the car in the opposite lane to pass. That made me want to laugh. If they knew who I was, would the cars take such precautions? I don’t know. They don’t have the right to knock me down, of course. But sometimes they do it all the same. That happened to Maman one day when she went into town. There was no snow that day. The car simply bumped into her and my mother fell down. Nothing serious happened to her. Just a scraped leg and face. Maman went back home by bike as usual. A few days later, she gave birth to the baby she’d been expecting for five months. I’m the one who helped her, Maria never wants to do that, the dirty pest. Maman was in a lot of pain, she needed help. Afterwards, she told me to go throw the dead baby into the stream. I put it in a big pan to carry it into the marshes. It was very pretty, like a big doll, already finished, its little ribs tracing fine lines under its skin. I looked and I saw that it was a boy. That was funny.
I put it in a hole in the marshes in the middle of a lot of tall grasses. But the birds must have found it. When I came back to the house, Maman was feeling better. She wasn’t sorry about the baby, of course; she had had too many of them already. I didn’t tell her that it was a boy. I didn’t tell anybody.
When my mother told this story to that hyena, Aunt Gina, Aun
t Gina told her she could have asked for damages from the car. She said she would have got a lot of money because of the lost baby. My mother said nothing. When my aunt was far away, she said, “People like us can’t do that. Those aren’t things for us.” And it’s true that I would have found it weird to get money like that, all of a sudden, without working for it. We could have bought good land at last, far from the marshes and the mists. Me, I don’t know.
•
I stopped for a moment on the bridge. I watched the water flow. It had a beautiful color, a tranquil, creamy green. I thought about how pretty a landscape with water can be, except for marshes like ours, where savage waters lurk amid sullen grasses. I was sorry to miss the sight of the splintered light of the lampposts spilling over the water. They had turned off the streetlights. It was daytime, the light was all white and blue. At our place, the dawn light is often white and blue and creamy because of the mists that cloak the ghostly trees. My father says that all water rises to the sky as vapor. Sometimes at our place, the sky, the earth, and the trees blend together. You can’t tell them apart. The mad birds shriek, get lost, and drown.
•
After the bridge, I took side roads so policemen wouldn’t catch me with my bicycle. We can’t pass by unnoticed, the two of us, it always makes its sad little squeaking noise, even when I lead it by the hand. I would have liked to stop and look in the shop windows. I could stand motionless in front of them for hours, dreaming up stories. In front of the groceries and snack bars of my village, you can’t dream. But, for my bicycle’s sake, it was better to take the side roads.
The warmth of the high school was fading and I started to feel very cold. I’m always cold, but at the high school, I felt warm at last, as if by a miracle. My dead aunt’s raincoat had stayed behind in the dormitory cloakroom. I wondered what would happen to it. Would somebody take it and help themselves to it? Hardly likely. Surely nobody would take it, unless maybe to disguise themselves and pretend they were me. On this cold morning, it was sad to think about a raincoat so ugly that nobody would ever want it. Truly it was sad, on this cold morning.
There was nobody on the street, not anywhere. Even the dogs were dozing in the warmth of all those locked houses. The emptiness was so absolute that it seemed like nobody was alive anywhere. If I went into those houses, there would be nobody inside, even the basements and the attics would be empty. Yet trash cans stood like sentinels before the gates of the front yards. Here one trash can, here two trash cans. People had taken them out, other people would come to empty them. The thought almost made me laugh. The only sign of life in these deserted streets was the trash cans. Trash cans were the residents of these fine houses. I thought again of my father who always says that rich people produce a lot of garbage. As I walked past these houses with my bicycle I entertained myself by saying out loud “Rich,” or “Less rich,” depending on the number of trash cans. But maybe I was mistaken. There’s no telling. I would have liked to be a mad dog so I could bark in front of those doors, bark terrifyingly, to make someone come out.
•
Finally I reached the town’s last streetlight. It was unlit, useless. I felt sorry for it, and for my dead aunt’s raincoat. I looked at the long street that vanished into the town and it reminded me of Nicole. She wasn’t in class this morning. Had her mother succeeded in dying? And she, what was she doing? I wanted very much to return to the high school to find out. Was Nicole’s mother dead, and what would become of Nicole? It was unbearable not to know. Nonetheless, I didn’t go back to the high school. There were too many streets to retrace, with the trash cans guarding the houses, and the dogs shut up inside. I waited at the foot of the last streetlight, hoping somebody might come whom I could ask. Nobody came. I wanted to ask: When a woman dies and she has a child in her womb, what becomes of the child? Does it die too? Does it keep on living for a while, nourishing itself from the dead woman? What becomes of a living child in the womb of a dead woman?
I wanted to scream so somebody would come and tell me. Truly, I wanted to scream. But nobody would have heard me. There was nothing there, I knew, except for the streetlight, my bicycle with its squeak of a dying salamander, and me. None of the three of us knew. And if somebody did come and I asked:“What becomes of a living child in the womb of a dead woman?” would he start screaming and run away? I don’t know. I just don’t know.
I stayed there, on the road, with the unlit lamppost and the bicycle. I wondered: what do you do, for no reason, if there is nobody?; what do you do?, because I was so fed up with everything, and there was nothing to do about it. I know very well that that’s the way it is.
13
I LEFT the lamppost. My bicycle trailed its unhappy little cry all the way down the silent road. I straddled it and pedaled with caution. I was afraid. My knee hurt so much that I didn’t dare make my bike risk another fall. Poor bicycle, alone with me on this road, and poor knee. My bicycle and my knee seemed to carry all the weight of the sickly sky. I felt an irresistible urge to cry come over me, on this heavy road that stretched out everywhere. And so I cried.
I pedaled harder. I remembered Fanny and her laughing face. Me, on my old rusty bicycle, my smock so green against the white road, and Fanny throwing snowballs in the schoolyard, on top of the dead nuns trapped in tar. Fanny played, her face shining with laughter. The sobs escaped on their own, I heard them alongside my bicycle’s cries. It doesn’t take much. Lydia’s teeth, enormous, always flashing. Teeth that were too big and looked like peeled almonds. She couldn’t do anything about it. Teeth like almonds or a smock that’s too green. It doesn’t take much.
I stopped crying. It was ridiculous. Nothing was strong enough, not tears, not laughter, to fight horrible doomed teeth, a dying bicycle, the whole crumbled world. Nothing. Crying was so stupid that I felt like laughing.
I kept on walking in the cold. A long time after, when the road was about to pass beyond the river, I stopped. I picked up my bike and walked down the riverbank to the path by the water. I sat down, my bicycle lay in the snow beside me. On nice days, fishermen must sit there, calmly watching their lines. I would have liked to be a calm fisherman sitting in the sun, my line beside me, if only just once. But it was too cold, cold as ice, and even when I closed my eyes I couldn’t dream that I was a calm fisherman in the sun.
When I opened my eyes, I saw that my bicycle was slowly sliding down the snow toward the river. It had stopped making its salamander cry. I could have pulled it back. But no.
I watched it slowly sink into the water. There wasn’t even a splash. After a moment, the water rolled over it, as calmly as if it had never existed. I wondered if leeches lived in the river, like in our marshes. When I was little, my father told us about a man who’d been stranded in the treacherous waters of the marshes. Leeches had sucked up all his blood. Hundreds of leeches, as big as fists, my father said. Their cold mouths, stuck all over his skin, had sucked out all of the man’s blood, and afterwards they couldn’t save him. I would have liked to know if there were leeches in all the water holes of our marshes.
•
I walked. For a long time I walked in the cold of the earth and the sky.
Snow began to fall, tenderly, silently. I became a block of ice, thrown off balance by the drifting snow. It snowed without end and I walked without end.
And then, at the end of the night, I arrived at the edge of marshes stiff with frost under a cold, starry sky. I thought of Daisy, sleeping in her bed, the puppy in the hollow of her soft belly. I said to myself: she’s a good mother, Daisy. She’s a good mother.
AN INTERVIEW WITH INÈS CAGNATI*
Moderated by Pierre-Pascal Rossi
PIERRE-PASCAL ROSSI: Inès Cagnati, this year you brought out a very fine collection of short stories, published by Julliard, which is why you are here today: Les Pipistrelles. It’s your fourth work, and for the previous three you won three literary prizes. In 1973, you won the Prix Roger Nimier for Le Jour de congé, published by Denoël; i
n 1977 you won the Prix des Deux Magots for Génie la folle—again, with Denoël; and in 1980, Mosé, ou Le Lézard qui pleurait won the Prix Spécial des Bibliothèques—again, from Denoël. So, with Les Pipistrelles, do you expect to get a fourth literary prize for your fourth book?
INÈS CAGNATI: What a question.
P-PR: Would you like to?
IC: Everyone likes getting awards, but . . . if it doesn’t get one, it doesn’t matter.
P-PR: But to get three in a row for three consecutive works, that’s really impressive. Wasn’t that hard for you to deal with?
IC: No, no.
P-PR: It seemed natural to you?
IC: I wouldn’t say natural, but I was preoccupied by other things . . . There’s life and then there’s books.
P-PR: So, the prizes were just something extra.
IC: The prizes were just something extra.
P-PR: So, the basics: But you were born in France, you’re French, but your origins—
IC: No, I was naturalized French, that’s very different.
P-PR: But you were born in France.
IC: Yes.
P-PR: But your parents were Italian immigrants.
IC: Yes.
P-PR: Where were they from?
IC: My father was from the region of Treviso, my mother from the region of Vicenza. So both of them were from the north.
P-PR: In most of the stories in Les Pipistrelles, the narrator is a little girl who herself is the daughter of poor immigrant parents, peasants who settled in France. You get the impression, the feeling, reading these stories, that you yourself were very marked by this childhood, by the world of childhood, which is very much your universe.