The Book of Proper Names

by Amélie Nothomb

  His name was Mathieu Saladin. He found a seat at the back, near the radiator.

  Plectrude didn’t hear a word the teacher said. She was feeling something extraordinary. She had a pain in her chest, and she loved it. She kept wanting to turn around to look at the boy. Usually she gawked at people to the point of rudeness. This time she couldn’t.

  At last it was recess. Ordinarily, the little dancer would have walked up to the new boy with a luminous smile. This time she remained desperately motionless.

  The other kids, however, kept to their hostile habits.

  “So this new guy, did he fight in Vietnam or what?”

  “Let’s call him Scarface.”

  Plectrude felt anger welling up in her. It was all she could do not to yell, “Shut up! It’s a wonderful scar! I’ve never seen anyone so handsome!”

  Mathieu Saladin’s mouth was split by a long perpendicular scar, well stitched, but visible. It was much too long to suggest the post-operation mark of a harelip.

  She knew it was a fencing scar. The boy’s last name evoked the stories of A Thousand and One Nights, and, in fact, Plectrude was not mistaken in this, for Mathieu Saladin’s name was of distant Persian origin. Henceforth it went without saying that the boy possessed a scimitar. He must have used it to carve up some evil Crusader who had come to claim the tomb of Christ. Before biting the dust, the Crusader, in a gesture of revolting pettiness (because cutting someone into pieces was considered perfectly normal at the time), had thrown his sword right into his mouth, forever inscribing their battle upon his face.

  The new boy’s face had otherwise regular, classic features, pleasant and impassive. This made his scar stand out all the more. Plectrude marveled in silence at what she was feeling.

  “So are you going to welcome the new boy the way you usually do?” asked Roselyne.

  The dancer worried that her silence risked attracting attention. She summoned her courage, took a deep breath, and walked toward the boy, smiling tensely.

  At that very moment he was with a big loud kid named Didier, who was repeating a year. Didier was trying to impress Mathieu Saladin by boasting that he had a distant cousin with a scarred face.

  “Hello, Mathieu,” she mumbled. “My name is Plectrude.”

  “Hello,” he replied, politely.

  Normally, she would have added something kind along the lines of: “Welcome to our school,” or, “I hope you’ll be happy here.” Now she couldn’t say a word. She turned and went back to her seat.

  “A funny name, but a very pretty girl,” commented Mathieu Saladin.

  “Yeah, whatever,” murmured Didier, acting blasé. “She’s just a little kid. If you like chicks, come over here and take a look at Muriel. I call her ‘melons.’”

  “I can see why,” replied Mathieu.

  “Want to meet her?”

  Before he even got a reply, Didier took Mathieu by the shoulder and led him up to the girl with the developing chest. Plectrude didn’t hear what they were saying. She had a bitter taste in her mouth.

  * * *

  THE NIGHT AFTER THAT first encounter, Plectrude thought about her feelings for Mathieu.

  He’s for me. He’s mine. He doesn’t know it, but he belongs to me. Mathieu Saladin is for me. I don’t care if it’s in a month or twenty years. I swear it.

  She repeated this to herself for hours, like an incantation, with a certainty that she would not feel again for a very long time.

  The next day she had to face the facts: the new boy didn’t so much as glance at her. She darted her marvelous eyes at him, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “If he wasn’t disfigured, he would be simply handsome. With that scar, he’s magnificent,” she said to herself.

  Although she wasn’t aware of it, her obsession with Mathieu’s battle-scar was rich in meaning. Plectrude believed herself the real daughter of Clémence and Denis, and knew nothing of the circumstances of her birth, nor of the extraordinary violence that had accompanied it.

  However there must have been some place within her that had soaked in murder and blood, because what she felt as she stared at Mathieu’s scar was as deep as an ancestral wound.

  * * *

  ONE CONSOLATION WAS THAT if he was not interested in her, he didn’t seem interested in anyone else either. Mathieu Saladin was even-tempered, and his face expressed a neutral politeness that applied equally to everyone. He was tall, very thin, and rather frail. His eyes shone with the wisdom of those who have suffered.

  Whenever he was asked a question, he took time to reflect, and his response was always intelligent. Plectrude had never met a boy who was so far from being stupid.

  He was neither especially good nor especially bad at any subject. He reached the level required, which meant that he didn’t attract attention.

  The little dancer, whose grades had not improved over the years, admired him for that. She had gained sympathy and a certain esteem among her peers. This was a good thing—otherwise she would have had even more trouble enduring the reactions that her answers provoked.

  “What makes you say such nonsense?” some of her teachers asked, dismayed by the things Plectrude came up with.

  She wanted to tell them she wasn’t doing it on purpose, but had a feeling that would make things worse. If you made the whole class giggle, you might as well claim it was premeditated.

  The teachers thought she was proud of the way the class reacted, and that she sought it on purpose. The opposite was the case. Whenever her gaffes provoked general hilarity, she wanted to sink into the floor.

  An example: Once, when the class was discussing the city of Paris and its historical monuments, Plectrude was asked a question. The right answer was the Arc de Triomphe. The girl replied: “Joan of Arc’s dad’s house.”

  The class applauded this new piece of inanity with the enthusiasm an audience greets its favorite comedian.

  Plectrude was at a loss. Her eyes sought out the face of Mathieu Saladin. She saw that he was laughing uncontrollably but without malice. She sighed, feeling a mixture of relief and contempt: relief, because things might have been worse; contempt, because his expression was very different from the one she had hoped to provoke in him.

  If only he could see me dance! she thought.

  Alas, how could she reveal her talent to him? There was no question of her going up to him and telling him point-blank that she was the star of her generation.

  The worst of it was that he spent almost all his time with Didier. There was no reason this lout would tell him. Didier cared about as much about Plectrude as he did about the Treaty of Versailles. All he ever talked about was his stupid magazines, soccer, cigarettes, and beer. Being a year older than everyone else, he pretended to be grown up, claiming that he shaved—which was hard to believe—and bragging about his success with girls.

  One might have wondered what Mathieu Saladin got out of hanging around with such a loser. It was clear that he didn’t get anything out of it. He spent time with Didier because Didier was willing to spend time with him. One day she summoned up all her courage, and went to speak to her hero during recess. Her plan was to ask him who his favorite singer was.

  He replied that he didn’t especially like any particular singer, and that was why he had formed a band with a few friends.

  “We meet in my parents’ garage to make the kind of music that people would like to hear.”

  Plectrude almost fainted with admiration. She was too much in love to have the presence of mind to say: “I’d like to hear you and your group play.”

  She didn’t say a word. From this Mathieu Saladin concluded that she wasn’t interested; so he didn’t invite her to come listen. Had he, she wouldn’t have lost seven years of her life.

  “What kind of music do you like?” he asked.

  It was a disaster. She was still at the age when you listen to the same music your parents do. Denis and Clémence loved classic French chansons by singers like Barbara, Léo Ferré, Jacques Br
el, Serge Reggiani, Charles Trenet. Still, if she had managed to mention one of those names, it would have been a respectable answer.

  But Plectrude was ashamed of herself. You’re twelve years old and you don’t even have tastes of your own. You aren’t going to tell him that.

  She had no idea who the good singers were. She knew only a single name, and that was the one that she uttered:

  “Dave.”

  Mathieu Saladin burst out laughing. Man, but she’s a strange one! he thought.

  She could have extricated herself from this situation, but she experienced it as a humiliation. She turned and left. I’m never going to speak to him again.

  * * *

  IT WAS THE START of a period of decline for Plectrude. Her grades, which had always been bad, started becoming execrable. Her reputation as a genius, which had kept her teachers guessing until then, was no longer enough.

  She put her heart and soul into it; she chose educational suicide. As though intoxicated, she went crashing into the boundaries of incompetence and sent the pieces flying.

  Her only choice, she felt, was to stop holding back. From now on she would let herself go, she would say whatever her inner dunce dictated—no more and no less. Her intention was not to attract attention (although, to be honest, she didn’t mind that), but to be rejected, driven out, expelled like the foreign body that she was. Her answers to teachers’ questions turned monstrous—by turns geographical (“the source of the Nile is in the Mediterranean and it doesn’t flow into anything”), geometrical (“a right angle is ninety degrees Celsius”), grammatical (“the past participle agrees with women unless there’s a man in the group”), historical (“Louis XIV became a Protestant when he married Edith of Nantes”), and biological (“cats have nubile eyes and nyctalopic claws”)—and her classmates couldn’t help feeling admiration.

  Admiration that was, indeed, shared by the girl herself. In fact, it was with a degree of ecstatic astonishment that Plectrude heard herself coming up with such surrealistic pearls, and became aware of the infinitude of them within her.

  The other students had come to the conclusion that Plectrude was doing this from pure provocation. Every time the teacher asked her a question, they held their breath, then marveled at the natural aplomb with which she delivered her gems. They thought her aim was to ridicule the whole educational process, and they applauded her courage.

  Her reputation passed beyond the classroom walls. During recess, everyone in the school came to ask her classmates about “Plectrude’s latest.” Her heroic replies were like parts of an epic tale.

  The conclusion was always the same:

  “She’s pushing it!”

  * * *

  “YOU’RE PUSHING IT, aren’t you?” her father said angrily when he saw her report.

  “I don’t want to go to school anymore, papa. It’s not for me.”

  “It can’t go on like this!”

  “I want to be a ballet dancer.”

  Her words didn’t fall on deaf ears.

  “She’s right!” said Clémence.

  “So you’re defending her as well?”

  “Of course! Our Plectrude’s a genius at dancing! At her age she’s got to devote herself to it body and soul! Why should she go on wasting her time with past participles?”

  That same day, Clémence phoned the famous ballet school of the petits rats at the Paris Opéra.

  * * *

  THE TEACHERS AT the girl’s dancing school were enthusiastic.

  “We were hoping you’d decide to do this! She’s made for it!”

  They wrote letters of recommendation for Plectrude, speaking of her as a future Pavlova.

  She was summoned in by the Opéra to take an exam. Clémence shrieked when the letter arrived, even though it meant nothing at all.

  On the appointed day, Plectrude and her mother headed for the Opéra. Clémence’s heart was pounding even harder than her child’s when they reached the école des rats, the famous school itself.

  Two weeks later, Plectrude received a letter admitting her to the school. It was the most joyful day of her mother’s life.

  In September, she would start at the Opéra School, where she would be a boarder. A great future was opening up before her.

  This was April. Denis insisted that she finish the school year. “That way you’ll be able to say you stopped in the ninth grade.”

  The child thought that this was both mean and ridiculous. Nonetheless, out of affection for her father, she stuck with it and passed. Now she was in good graces with everyone.

  The whole school knew where she was going, and was very proud. Even the teachers who had thought Plectrude a nightmare declared that they had always sensed her genius.

  The students praised her daring, the dinner ladies lauded her lack of appetite, the phys ed teacher (she had been dreadful at physical education) spoke of her suppleness and the delicacy of her muscles, and to cap it all, those who had never stopped hating her right from kindergarten prided themselves on being her friends.

  The only member of the class whom the girl would have liked to impress showed nothing but polite admiration. If she had known Mathieu Saladin better, she would have known why his face was so impassive.

  In fact, what he was thinking was, Shit. I thought I had another five years to achieve my goal. Now she’s going to be a star and I’m never going to see her again. If she were even a friend, I’d have an excuse to meet up with her. But she and I have never really become friends, and I’m not going to be like one of those jerks who pretend they adore a girl because they know what it will get them.

  On the last day of school, Mathieu Saladin bade Plectrude a cold farewell.

  He’s glad I’m leaving. She sighed. I’m never going to see him again. Maybe I won’t think about him so much.

  * * *

  THAT SUMMER, THEY didn’t go away on vacation. The école des rats was expensive. The phone never stopped ringing: a neighbor, an uncle, a friend, a colleague, wanted to come over and gaze upon this prodigy.

  “And she’s beautiful, too!” they exclaimed when they saw her.

  Plectrude couldn’t wait to go to boarding school so that she could get away from all this attention.

  To escape the boredom, she ruminated on her amorous woes. She climbed to the top of her favorite cherry tree and closed her eyes. She told herself stories. The cherry tree became Mathieu Saladin.

  She became aware of how foolish this was. It’s so stupid to be twelve and a half, and for everyone to like you except Mathieu Saladin!

  At night in her bed, the stories became far more intense: she and Mathieu Saladin were trapped in a barrel that was going over Niagara Falls. The barrel smashed open on some rocks, and she took turns pretending it was herself or Mathieu who had to be saved.

  There was something to be said for both versions. She loved the thought of him diving to look for her at the bottom of the swirling water, wrapping her in his arms to bring her back to life, and then, on the shore, giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When he was the one who went over injured, she pulled him from the water, licking the blood from his wounds, rejoicing over the new scars that were going to make him even more handsome.

  She felt shivers of desire.

  * * *

  SHE HAD WAITED for the new school year as though for liberation. It turned out to be incarceration.

  She knew that the ballet school was run with an iron hand. But what she discovered there went far beyond what she had imagined.

  Plectrude had always been the thinnest girl in every group. At the école des rats she was one of the “nor-mal” ones. The “thin” ones would have been called skeletal anywhere else. Anyone who would have been considered to have commonplace proportions in the outside world was mocked as a fat cow within these walls.

  On the first day, a kind of thin, old sausage-maker examined the pupils as though they were cuts of meat. She separated them into three categories.

  “Thin ones, you’re
fine. Stay like that. Normal ones, okay, but I’ve got my eye on you. Fat cows, either you lose weight or you go: there’s no room for sows here.”

  These words were greeted with mirth by the thin ones. They looked like laughing corpses. They’re monstrous, thought Plectrude.

  One “fat cow,” a pretty girl with a perfectly normal figure, burst into tears. The old woman came and yelled at her.

  “There’s no point sobbing in here. If you want to go on stuffing your fat face while hiding in your mother’s skirts, no one’s stopping you.”

  Then the young pieces of meat were weighed and measured. Plectrude, who was going to be thirteen in a month, was five feet two and weighed eighty-eight pounds, which wasn’t much, especially since it was all muscle. Nonetheless, she was informed that her weight was a “maximum that should not be exceeded.”

  That first day at the école des rats persuaded all the girls that they had been brutally evicted from childhood. The previous day, their bodies had still been much-loved plants, watered and cherished. Growth was a marvelous natural phenomenon; their families were gardens where the soil was rich, and where life was gradual and nourishing. Suddenly they were uprooted from the moist earth, and replanted in a desiccated world, where the merciless eye of a hothouse plant expert decreed that a particular stem would have to be lengthened, a particular root would have to be lopped, and that this would happen whether they wanted it to or not.

  Here, there was no tenderness in the eyes of the adults, just a scalpel to slice away the last flesh of childhood. The girls had traveled through time and space: in only a few seconds they had passed from the beginning of the second millennium in France to ancient China.

  * * *

  IT WOULD BE AN understatement to say that the school was ruled with an iron fist. Lessons began early in the morning and ended late at night, with barely noticeable interruptions for a meal unworthy of the name, and for short periods of study during which the girls savored the relaxation of their bodies so deeply that they forgot the intellectual effort involved.

  Under this regimen, all the girls grew thin, including the ones already too thin. The latter, far from worrying about it, rejoiced. You could never be too skeletal.