Margueritte passed her doctorate, only she wasn’t a real doctor, she worked with plants. She researched grape seeds. Personally, I can’t really see what there is to research, I mean a seed is a seed, there’s not much to it. But that’s what she studied, so I shouldn’t look down my nose at it.
There are no stupid professions, only bad seeds.
Anyway, maybe that’s why she’s always talking about cultivating and cultivation. Another pair of words that sound the same but mean different things.
In cultivation, you till the ground, you mark out your furrows, you aerate the soil where you sow your seeds. And then there’s the cultivating Margueritte talks about where you just pick up a book and read. But that’s not easy either, quite the opposite.
I can talk about books now: I’ve read some.
When you’re functionally illiterate like me, you wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to read. You look at the first word, OK, you understand it, then the next, and with a bit of luck the next. You keep going, running your finger under the words, eight, nine, ten, twelve, until you get to a full stop. But when you get there, you’re not better off! Because no matter how much you try to put everything together, you can’t, the words are still jumbled up like a handful of nuts and bolts tossed into a box. For people who know what they’re doing, it’s easy. They just screw the right bits together. They’re not fazed by fifteen words, twenty words, that’s what they call a sentence. For me, for a long time, it was very different. I knew how to read, obviously, since I learned the alphabet. My problem was the meaning. A book was like a rat trap for my pride, a treacherous, two-faced thing that seemed harmless at first glance.
Nothing but ink and paper: big deal. Actually it was a wall. A brick wall to bang your head on.
So, obviously, I couldn’t see the point of reading unless I had to, like for tax returns and social security forms.
I think this is what I found most intriguing—see also: arousing one’s curiosity—about Margueritte.
Every time I saw her, either she was doing nothing or she had her nose in a book. And when she was doing nothing, it was only because she’d just put her book back in her handbag to chat to me.
That’s something I realized after a while. These days, if you asked me what was in her little back handbag, I could reel off everything with my eyes closed and not make a single mistake: a packet of tissues, a pen, a box of mints, a book, her wallet, her purse, and some perfume in a small blue glass bottle.
Every single thing is always the same, except for the book, that changes.
When I look at Margueritte, it’s funny, I don’t see a little old lady who weighs about forty kilos, all crumpled like a poppy, her spine a little bent and her hands all shrivelled; I see that in her head she has thousands of bookshelves all carefully catalogued and numbered. And you wouldn’t think to look at her that she’s intelligent. I mean how intelligent she actually is. She talks to me about normal things, she walks in the park just like an ordinary person.
She’s not at all stuck up.
But from what she tells me, when she was young, it was rare for a woman to do advanced studies. I still don’t really know what she did exactly when she was researching seeds, or what the point of it was, but I know she worked in laboratories with microscopes and bottles and test tubes, and just thinking about it amazes me.
That and the books she is forever reading.
Well, that she was forever reading.
WE RAN INTO EACH OTHER again, Margueritte and me, I don’t remember the exact date, it wasn’t long after that first time. She was sitting on the same bench and it was probably the same time of day.
Seeing her in the distance, I thought, Hey, it’s the pigeon lady, but I didn’t think any more about it. I went over to say hello. Her eyes were half closed, she looked like she was thinking, or she could just as easily have been dozing.
With old people, everything ends up looking much the same: thinking, dying, napping…
I said hello. She turned, she smiled.
“Well, well. Hello, Monsieur Chazes.”
Not many people round here call me monsieur.
It’s more, Hi Germain! Or even, Hey Chazes!
She nodded for me to sit next to her. And that’s when I saw she had a book in her lap. Seeing I was looking at it, trying to work out what it was from the picture on the cover, she asked:
“Do you like reading?”
“God, no.”
It just came out, like a bullet from a gun, there was no way to take it back.
“No?”
She looked astonished, did Margueritte.
I tried to smooth things over, I said:
“Too much work.”
“Ah, I see. It’s true that, in life, work takes up a great deal of time… Counting pigeons, writing one’s name on the war memorial…”
She said this like it was a private joke, she wasn’t being nasty.
“You saw me doing that? I mean you saw me at the memorial?”
She nodded.
“That is to say… I did catch sight of you at the monument one day. You seemed utterly engrossed, but from here I could not guess what you were doing. So—and I hope you will forgive my curiosity—after you left, I went over to see for myself. And that is when I noticed that you had added a name to the list of the departed: Germain Chazes… Your father, I assume? Because, unless I’ve misremembered, you told me that your first name is Germain, didn’t you?”
I said yes. But given it was a single yes and there was more than one question, she took it to mean what she wanted. And I suddenly found myself with a dead soldier with the same surname as me for a father, which should have felt weird. Chazes is my mother’s surname, she was single when she got knocked up and she stayed single when she had me on her hands.
Or “got lumbered with me” as she often put it. Because I was a burden to my mother. And she made no bones about letting everyone know. But, as Landremont would say, the converse is reciprocal—or something like that—which means that she was a pain in the arse for me too.
I didn’t want to disappoint Margueritte, to explain about the 14th July celebrations and my mother in the bushes learning about the birds and the bees from some thirty-year-old guy from the next village which left her with a bad reputation and a halfwit son. I got the impression that this wasn’t the kind of thing that happened in Margueritte’s world. That’s why I said yes. And suddenly, I was a poor unfortunate orphan whose dad had died in the war, which sounds a lot classier than the result of some random shag, if you want my opinion.
She gave a little sigh, like she felt sorry for me.
Sorry about what? I wondered. What was there to feel sorry about? My life’s pretty good, actually.
I remember she looked at me, all serious, and she said:
“I find it profoundly touching that you should be so passionate about righting what must seem a terrible injustice… In fact, when I think about it, it’s absurd: if your father died during the Algerian War, why is his name not engraved on the memorial?”
What could I say, what sort of convincing excuse could I come up with to explain why my old man’s name wasn’t on the list? Given that, from what I know, his real name is Despuis, he was a carpenter and he didn’t die in combat, he died in a car accident in Spain when I was about four or five. To say nothing of the fact that he’d never set foot in the Algerian War (1954–1962). And that if he’d died in the Algerian War, I’d never have been born—which would have been a relief for all concerned—seeing as how I came into this world in April 1963. The 17th, to be exact.
But however much I thought about it, I couldn’t find a way of piecing the truth together and presenting it for this little old lady. I sat there like a lemon, fretting over my version of the story, but I couldn’t find a way to tart it up.
It was at this point she said:
“I’m so sorry, Monsieur Chazes… I realize my question was deeply indiscreet, please forgive me. I did not intend
to make you feel uncomfortable. I’m sorry…”
I said:
“No harm done.”
And it was true. I don’t give a toss about my father. For me, he’s just biology.
THAT DAY, as I headed home, I wondered why I was so obsessed with adding my name on that stupid slab of marble. Because deep down, if I really thought about it—something I didn’t much like doing back then—I knew perfectly well I’d never committed war. And I knew that you had to be dead to be on the list. Even if I played the idiot for Devallée, the deputy mayor.
I, Germain Chazes, knew that only people who’d snuffed it had a right to be there, engraved in capital letters, being shat on by the pigeons from the park.
Why then was I so obsessed with being one of them? Maybe so I’d feel that I belonged, that I existed even just a little bit, even if I wasn’t really indelible on all surfaces. Or maybe so someone would say, Hey, who is this guy who’s always writing his name on the war memorial? I wonder why he does it?
I would have liked to talk about all this stuff to someone, but who? Landremont or Marco would be a waste of time, they’d have thought I was stupid, just for a change. Julien, I wasn’t sure about. Or Jojo, or Youssef. Maybe Annette?
Yeah, maybe it was the sort of thing you could talk about with a woman.
Women are funny: they don’t have a clue about anything, you just have to look at the way they let us take advantage of them, but for some things, they’ve got, like, a sixth sense. In two seconds flat, they can tell you exactly what makes you tick. And it’s not always wrong, the stuff they come out with. They talk a lot of sense sometimes.
All of a sudden, I noticed something incredible: here I was thinking about the way I think, the way I react, that kind of stuff. Bloody hell! I thought.
This was new to me, it made me dizzy. Because, before that day, I was either thinking or not thinking. One or the other. And when I was thinking, I didn’t think about it, it was like it happened outside me. When I thought, I did it without thinking.
OK, I realize that when you put it that way it doesn’t make much sense. But I wasn’t in the habit of trying to work out the how and the why of things.
By accident, Margueritte had triggered a burning desire for thinking, it was like my brain had a hard on.
So, that night, while I was barbecuing my steak outside the caravan, I remembered a whole bunch of things that happened since I was a kid. That stuff I told you about Monsieur Bayle for example. The screaming matches with my mother. That bastard Gardini—I’ll tell you about him later. The first time I snatched a handbag, but I was just a kid, all boys do stuff like that. The army. Boozy games of belote and bar fights. Getting legless and getting a leg over. All the arseholes who make fun of me and think I don’t notice.
And the years that went by so fast that now, as Landremont says, what with statistics and life expectancy, I’m closer to the end than to the start.
Later, I remembered all the things I wanted to be when I was a kid. Even the vocation—Inclination, penchant (for a particular profession or occupation)—I had when I was about twelve. Whenever it was open, I found an excuse to pop into the church. Not to pray—I didn’t give a damn whether the Good Lord in His mercy forgave me. I went in to look at the big rose window above the altar. I thought the colours were mind-blowing and the images were amazing. So I decided to be a rose window-maker.
When I said this during careers guidance, I was told that “rose window-maker” was not a profession. Not a profession? What the hell was wrong with these people? It’s the most wonderful profession in the world. Instead, they suggested I could apprentice with a glassmaker. I told them to go screw themselves, I said I wasn’t interested in making glasses. Why not somewhere that made Pyrex bowls while they were at it?
It was one word, just one word, to work out. But that day, no one bothered to explain that you had to be a glassmaker to make rose windows.
So, anyway, as I was chopping tomatoes and onions for a salad, I thought some more about me, but as though it wasn’t me. As though it was some guy I’d bumped into on the street, the neighbours’ kid, a nephew. A lad who hadn’t had much luck in life. A poor bastard who had no father and no mother to speak of, because if I had to choose between my mother or no mother…
I saw myself from above and it felt peculiar. I thought, Jesus H. Christ, Germain, why do you do the things you do?
By “things” I meant: counting pigeons, running until I was out of breath, playing belote, whittling bits of wood with my Opinel. I asked myself the question seriously, it was like I was someone else talking. The voice of God, maybe—with all due respect and reverence to Him. Germain, why do you do the things you do? It echoed inside my head. Why, Germain, why?
I think I had a sort of brainstorm that night. I’d had a couple of episodes like it before. When I was a kid, in fact. But, back then, someone would quickly cure me. Go out and play, don’t be such a pain in the arse, stop bugging us with all your questions!
When people are always cutting you down, you don’t get a chance to grow.
THE THIRD TIME I saw Margueritte, I arrived before her. I sat on the bench and scowled every time I saw a mother and her kids or some old guy with a walking stick heading in my direction. Pulling faces to scare passers-by so they would bugger off and find somewhere else.
This bench belonged to me and Margueritte. It was mine and hers, end of. The funniest thing was that I was waiting for her, my pigeon lady. And when I saw her at the far end of the path, tottering towards me on her skinny legs, wearing that flowery dress, the grey jacket, handbag dangling from the crook of her arm, it warmed my heart. Just like a kid of fifteen with his first girlfriend.
Well, not just like. But you know what I mean.
She gave me a little wave, wiggling her fingers, and I felt like laughing. And that’s just it—if I had to explain what we have, her and me, that’s how I’d describe it: a flicker of humour that makes you feel good. Happy.
She put down her bag and sat, carefully smoothing the creases in her dress. She said:
“Monsieur Chazes, what a pleasant surprise!”
“You can call me Germain, you know.”
She smiled.
“Really? It would be a pleasure, Germain. But I shall do so only on the condition that you agree to call me Margueritte.”
“Well… if you insist, I’d be happy to.”
“I insist.”
“OK, then, in that case…”
“Have you already counted our birds today?”
She had said “our birds”, and I didn’t find that strange. I said:
“I was waiting for you.”
The worst thing is, it was true.
She frowned as though she was thinking about something important, then she said:
“Very well. So, tell me, Germain, how should we proceed? Would you like me to begin, so that you can do the recount? Shall we count aloud together? Would you rather we counted in silence and compared our results?”
“We each do it in our head,” I said.
“Yes, you’re quite right… I think in that way we are less likely to hinder or unduly influence each other. You have a scientific turn of mind, Germain. I like that.”
And since she wasn’t pulling my leg, I felt proud, and that’s pretty rare.
We counted sixteen. I was able to introduce her to Fistfight, Little Grey, Klingon and two or three others she hadn’t met before.
She had me repeat the last name, she didn’t seem to know it.
“Klingon.”
“Pardon?”
“You know, like the Klingons in Star Trek.”
“No… no, I can’t say I’m familiar with that particular cultural reference.”
“Well, see, Klingons are aliens in Star Trek, but it can also mean an ankle biter, a little nipper, a crab. You know, cause they ‘cling on’.”
“A crab? Are you… ahem… are you referring to pubic lice?”
“No… well, yes, cr
ab can mean that too, but a Klingon is a kid, a child… didn’t you know?”
“Dear Lord no! Clearly I have much to learn from you.”
“Yeah, because they cling on, they don’t let go and they bug the hell out of you! And once you’ve got them, there’s no getting rid, d’you see what I mean?”
“Ah, yes… I see… of course. Hence the parallel with pthirus pubis…”
“Exactly,” I said. “Exactly like what you just said.”
I wasn’t too sure, but hey…
She giggled.
“Well, thanks to you, this will not have been a wasted day! I’ve learned something new.”
“You’re welcome. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.”
She sat for a moment in silence and then suddenly, as if she’d remembered she’d left a saucepan on the stove, she said:
“Oh, I almost forgot…”
And she took a book out of her handbag and said:
“You know, Germain, I thought about you last night as I was rereading this novel.”
“About me?”
I was completely shell-shocked.
“Oh yes, you. You and the pigeons. It came to me suddenly as I was reading a particular passage… Here, let me find it for you, wait a moment. Let’s see… Ah, here it is: How can one evoke, for example, a town without pigeons, without trees and without gardens, where one hears no beating of wings, no rustling of leaves, a non-place, in effect?”
She stopped. She glanced at me, pleased as Punch, with the look of someone who has just given you a beautiful present. Me, I felt intimidated. I’m not used to people giving me sentences. Or thinking about me when they’re reading books. I said:
“Could you say it again? Not so fast this time, if you don’t mind…”
“Of course… How can one evoke, for example, a town without pigeons, without trees and without gardens…”
“That’s there in the book?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a clever phrase. And it’s true. A city without trees, without birds. What’s the name of it, this book?”
Soft in the Head Page 4