Soft in the Head

by Marie-Sabine Roger

  We dropped off Marco and Landremont first, just outside the village. Then we made a U-turn to drop off Julien and his girlfriend Létitia, who’s not his girlfriend any more, but he didn’t lose on the deal dumping her for Céline. Because his old girlfriend was a complete bitch. We’re allowed to say it now, there’s a statue of limitations.

  So, we ended up outside my place. And Annette said:

  “Doesn’t that caravan of yours leak in weather like this?”

  “No, never. But I’ll be freezing my arse off tonight, I can tell you. The radiator is banjaxed and I didn’t get round to buying a new one. Why would I? It’s the beginning of May…”

  “Do you want to spend the night at my place?” she said.

  And seeing as how she put her hand on my thigh as she said it, and I was horny as hell from all the slow dances, I said yes. What would you have done in my position?

  I’d never been to Annette’s place before. I thought it was nicely decorated, but I wasn’t here to take the grand tour. Annette made us some coffee, then she came and sat next to me. I was wondering how I was going to lead up to things, but she made the first move. I wasn’t even shocked. Still, it’s something I don’t really like—girls whose way of saying hello is to throw themselves at you. It’s not very feminine in my opinion. Then again, I have to admit it’s very practical. Well, that’s the way I used to see things. I was pretty rough around the edges back then. There’s been a lot of polishing since. I don’t see things like I used to, and that goes for sex too. My brain is up here and my balls are down there and I don’t get the two mixed up any more.

  Annette is small and she looks really skinny. She’s thirty-six, but she really doesn’t look it. It’s stupid, but I was afraid of hurting her. I’m a big lunk, and I was worried about whether I’d suffocate her if I got on top, whether she was big enough to take me inside her, whether I’d tear her or I don’t know what. It was all in my head, but it worried me all the same. Overthinking ruins your performance.

  There are times when it’s best to be spontaneous.

  She’s really weirdly built, Annette: she’s got a tiny waist I could circle with my hands, and breasts pumped up with helium that are round and firm and fill your whole palm and can’t be squashed, you can take my word for it. And she’s got long legs for her height, a little arse as firm and round as a cabbage. She’s not pretty exactly, what with the dark rings round her eyes, her thin face and that hangdog look, but there’s something about her. Landremont says she’s got an arse that could make a fortune and a face that could lose one. He’s in no position to talk, given that his own wife was a horse-faced bitch. God rest her soul, may the Good Lord gather her to Himself, she was a hell of a decent woman.

  So, anyway, that night, Annette made the first move and I didn’t smother her or crush her or do anything else unforeseen. When I found myself inside her, it was all cotton, silk and feathers. So warm and soft, so perfectly snug I could have spent my whole life there. A bit later, we did it again. She devoured me with her eyes. She was gentle with me, she did everything she could to please me. She told me she had been dreaming of me for a long time. It’s weird, when a girl says that, especially if she says it with tears in her eyes and a quaver in her voice as her hand is gently taking care of you.

  It was almost embarrassing. But nice.

  WHEN I FIRST knew Annette, I’d never really taken much of an interest in women. I either thought of girls as friends and I didn’t touch, or I thought of them as Kleenex and I didn’t care. I’m not proud, but I’m not ashamed, that’s just the way I was. The Germain I was back then is gone, and good riddance.

  I’ve changed. Since I met Margueritte, I’ve been exercising my intelligence. I ask myself questions about life, and then I try to answer them, concentrating without cheating. I think about existence. About what I had when I started out, and everything I’ve had to work out for myself since.

  Of the words I’ve learned, there are two I particularly remember: innate, acquired.

  Without looking them up in the dictionary again, I’d be hard pushed to give you a precise definition, but I remember the gist. “Innate” is what people have when they’re born, and it’s easy to remember because it’s in your nature. “Acquired” is what we spend the rest of our lives struggling to learn. The stuff we’re supposed to pick up from other people along the way. But from who?

  For example, emotions are not innate, not at all. Eating and drinking, yeah, sure, that’s instinct. If you don’t do it, you die. But emotions are an optional extra, or you can do without. I should know. It’s a poor excuse for a life, you’re half-witted, not much different from a dumb animal, but you can go on living a long time just the same. A very long time. I don’t want to be always using myself as an example, but when I was starting out in life, I didn’t get much in the way of affection.

  In a normal family—from what I’ve seen—people cry sometimes, and they scream, but there are moments of tenderness, people ruffle your hair, they say things like, Would you look at the state of him, he’s the spitting image of his father! And they pretend like they’re angry but they’re just teasing because really they’re proud they know where you come from. I’ve seen it when Marco talks about his daughter or Julien talks about his two sons.

  Me, I don’t come from anywhere, that’s my problem. Obviously I had to come from some guy’s balls, it’s not like there’s an alternative. And from some woman’s pussy, like everyone else on this earth. But in my case, as soon as I was born, the good part was over. Done and dusted. That’s why I say that emotions are acquired, they’re something you have to learn. If it took me longer than it took most people, it’s because I didn’t have a role model in the beginning. I had to find everything out for myself. And it’s the same with speech, I learned to speak on building sites and in bars mostly, which is why I have trouble explaining things—I use too many swear words, and I don’t always explain things the right way round like educated people: first a, then b, then c.

  When Landremont, or Devallée, or the mayor (who’s also a secondary school teacher) talk about something, you can tell they’ve got a firm grasp on the idea. After that, all they need to do is reel it in, keep following it until they get to the other end. It’s called not losing the thread. You can interrupt them, you can butt in with From what I’ve heard… or By all accounts…, it makes no bloody difference, they still steer a steady course!

  Me, I always stray from the point. I start off with one thing, that leads to another and another and another, and by the time I get to the end of the sentence, I don’t even remember what I was talking about. And if I get interrupted, I get even more confused and end up in a complete muddle.

  When educated people lose their way while they’re explaining something, they go pale. They put a finger to their lips and they frown and they say, Damn it, where was I? What was I saying again?

  And everyone around them looks worried, they hold their breath as though this was something serious…

  The difference between them and me is that, when I lose the thread, no one gives a toss.

  Including me. In fact, especially me.

  BEFORE, I used to be functionally illiterate—Being unable to read or write; see also: ignorant—but I’m not ashamed. Reading is something that’s acquired. You don’t even need to go looking: when you’re little, you’re sent to school where they force-feed you, like they do with geese.

  Some teachers are good at it, they’ve got the skill, the patience, that kind of thing. They gradually fill up your memory until it’s chock-a-block. With others, it’s gobble or die! They stuff you full of information without bothering to worry where it’s going to end up. And what happens? A crumb of information goes down the wrong way, and you choke on it. All you want is to spit it out and starve rather than feel this way again.

  My teacher, Monsieur Bayle, was a vicious force-feeder. He scared the crap out of me. There were days when he only had to look at me and I’d nearly piss myself.
Just the way he said my name: Chazes! I knew he didn’t like me. He must have had his reasons. For a teacher, having a halfwit pupil must be a pain in the arse. I can understand that. So, he took out his frustration by making me come up to the blackboard every day. I had to recite my lessons.

  I had to recite my lessons in front of the arse-lickers, who elbowed each other and jeered with their hands in front of their mouths, but also in front of the dunces, who were relieved to see that I was dumber than them. Monsieur Bayle never helped, in fact he did the opposite, he made things worse. He was a real bastard. I can still hear him now, I don’t even have to try, his voice is permanently drilling into my ear.

  “What’s the matter, Chazes? Your brain still in bed?”

  “What’s up Chazes, too cool for school?”

  “It seems that young Chazes is up excrement creek!”

  This would make my classmates laugh.

  Then, he would add:

  “Well, Chazes? I’m waiting, we’re all waiting, your friends are waiting…”

  He would shift his chair just a little to turn it towards me. He would fold his arms and stare at me, nodding his head. He would tap the floor with the toe of his shoe, saying nothing. Tap, tap, tap… was the only sound I heard, that and the tick-tock, tick-tock of the clock on the wall. Sometimes it went on for so long that the other boys finally shut up.

  The silence engulfing the tick-tock and the tapping of the shoe was so great that I would hear my heart pounding in my head. Eventually, he would sigh and wave me back to my seat, saying:

  “Decidedly, my dear Chazes, I fear you’re a few cards short of a deck.”

  The other boys roared with laughter, enjoying the spectacle. Me, I wanted to kill myself. Or to kill him, if I could have. Killing him would have been better. Grinding the bastard’s head under my large boot like the chalk-dusted cockroach he was. At night, in bed, I would revel in these murderous thoughts, it was the only time I felt happy. If I didn’t grow up to be violent—or no more violent than necessary, anyway—it’s no thanks to him. Sometimes, I think that thugs learn to be brutal because people have been cruel to them. If you want to make a dog vicious, all you have to do is beat him for no reason. It’s the same with a kid, only easier. You don’t even need to beat him. Jeering and mocking him is enough.

  In primary school, there are kids who learn their conjugations and their multiplication tables. Me, I learned something more useful: the strong get off on walking all over other people, and wiping their feet while they’re at it, like you would on a doormat. This is what I learned from my years at school. It was a hell of a lesson. All that because of some bastard who didn’t like kids. Or at least he didn’t like me. Maybe my life would have been different if I’d had a different teacher. Who knows? I’m not saying it’s his fault I’m a moron, I’m pretty sure I was one even before that. But he made my life a misery. I can’t help thinking that other teachers would have given me a hand up. Something I could use to grab on to, instead of sliding down to the bottom of the hole. But unfortunately there were only two classes in the school back then, one for the babies and one for the bigger kids. We were stuck with Bayle from age eight to age ten. (Eleven, in my case.) I know I wasn’t the only one who got it in the neck. There were other kids whose lives he ruined with his meanness and his cruelty. He was full of himself just because he was a teacher. He looked down on us, which wasn’t exactly hard since we were only kids and didn’t know anything. But instead of being proud, of being happy about all the things he could teach us, he humiliated the weak, the dunces, all those who really needed him.

  To be that much of a bastard takes talent, I think.

  YOU CAN SAY what you like, but, for a kid, schooldays aren’t the happiest days of your life. Anyone who says different doesn’t like kids, or doesn’t remember what it was like to be one.

  What makes kids happy is fishing for gudgeon or building gravel barriers on the tracks to derail goods trains—even if everyone knows it never works. Or climbing up the strut of a bridge from the bank (which doesn’t work either, because of the slant). Jumping off the top of the cemetery wall, setting fire to a patch of waste ground, knocking on doors and running away. Making little kids eat ‘sweets’ that are really goat droppings. That kind of thing.

  When you’re a kid, all you want is to be a hero.

  If your parents aren’t standing behind you, banging on about how school is important, how you have to go, how you’ve got no choice, well, you don’t bother—at least I didn’t—or you go as little as possible.

  My mother wasn’t strict about stuff like that. She would have broken a brush handle over my head if I’d tracked mud into the hall, but I don’t think she gave a damn that I never learned to read and write. When I came home at five o’clock, she hardly even looked at me. Her first words were always:

  “Did you get the bread?”

  And the next words were:

  “Don’t leave your stuff lying around. Go and put your schoolbag away.”

  I didn’t need to be told twice. I tossed my bag at the foot of my bed and went out to play with my mates, or by myself.

  The older I got, the more I bunked off. When Bayle asked me where I’d been, I’d give him some lame excuse: my mother was sick and I had to do the shopping, my grandmother had just died, I’d sprained my ankle, I’d been bitten by a rabid dog, I’d had to go to the doctor.

  I trained myself to lie and look him straight in the face. It’s harder than you think, when you’re only ten and you’re not very broad in the shoulders yet. But it taught me about courage. That’s something it’s important to have in life.

  It didn’t matter, Bayle was happy to let me fool him. It was better than having me causing trouble in his class, and it gave him a bit of a rest from constantly yelling Chazes, can you repeat what I just said? knowing full well I couldn’t. What all this meant was by the end of primary school, I was more likely to be off fishing somewhere than warming my arse on a school bench. This meant that later, when I joined the army, I was classed as suffering from mental retardation, a phrase that neatly contains the word they really thought described me: retard.

  In the period I was talking about just now, the period when I first got together with Annette, life pretty much went right over my head. And it didn’t bother me. I didn’t ask questions. I did my business in the sack and elsewhere, I played cards, I got hammered every Saturday night and dried out during the week, I took jobs on building sites when I was strapped for cash, life seemed straightforward. I made no real connection between living life and understanding life, if you see what I mean.

  It’s like with cars: if someone asked you to change the distributor, the coupling, the drive belt—or even just top up the oil, it doesn’t matter—how would you fare? Because most people who can drive don’t know the first thing about how or why an engine works. That was pretty much how I looked at my life. I turned the steering wheel, changed the gears, filled up when I needed to, and that was all…

  When I met Margueritte, at first I found learning stuff complicated. Then intriguing. Then depressing, because learning to think is like getting glasses when you’re blind as a bat. Everything around was comforting, it was simple, blurry. Now suddenly you see all the cracks, the rust, the rot, you can see that everything is crumbling. You see death, you realize that you’re going to have to leave all this behind, and probably in a way that won’t be fun. You realize that time doesn’t just pass, every day pushes you one step closer to kicking the bucket. There’s no high score that gives you a free game. You do your circuit, and that’s it, you’re history.

  Honestly, for some people, life is a complete con job.

  MARGUERITTE SAYS that cultivating your mind is like climbing a mountain. I understand that better now. When you’re down in the valley, you think you see everything and know everything about the world: the meadows, the grass, the cow dung (that last example is mine). One fine day, you pick up your backpack and start walking. What you leave behin
d gets smaller the farther you travel: the cows shrink to the size of rabbits, to ants, to flyspecks. Meanwhile the landscape you discover as you climb seems bigger and bigger. You thought the world ended with the mountain, but it doesn’t! Behind it, there is another mountain, and another a little higher, and still another. And then a whole range. The valley where you were living a peaceful life was just one valley among many, and not even the biggest. Actually, it was the arsehole of the universe. As you walk, you meet other people, but the closer you come to the summit, the fewer are still climbing alongside you and the more you freeze your balls off! That’s just another figure of speech. Once you’re at the top, you’re happy, you think you’re clever because you’ve climbed higher than everyone else. You can see for miles. The only thing is, after a while, you realize something really stupid: you’re all alone. All alone and insignificant.

  From the Good Lord’s point of view, even we are probably no bigger than bloody flyspecks.

  This is probably what Margueritte means when she says, Do you know, Germain, culture can be very isolating?

  I think she’s right, and what’s worse, you must feel very dizzy constantly looking down at the world below.

  My plan is to stop halfway up the slope, and I’ll be happy if I manage to climb that high. Margueritte has got education. And I’m not talking about the piss-poor education and a piece of paper that everyone’s got (well, everyone except me), but the sort of higher-level education that takes so many years that you’re old by the time you graduate and don’t have time to make enough pension contributions to be able to retire.