Soft in the Head

by Marie-Sabine Roger

  And nothing wasn’t an option.

  THERE WERE BIG changes at Francine’s. With Francine, not the restaurant.

  I showed up one night at about seven. She was on her own, cleaning glasses behind the bar. I put both hands on the zinc counter and leaned over to kiss her cheek. I said:

  “Hi! All right?”

  I could tell it was the wrong question, because up close it was obvious that Francine was anything but all right. She had a red nose and eyes to match.

  I rephrased and started over:

  “Hi! Not good?”

  “Not great…” she said in a tiny voice.

  “You’re not sick?”

  She shook her head, No, no.

  “So what’s the matter? You look like someone died…”

  She burst into tears and rushed into the back room.

  I was completely discombobulated—see also: disconcerted—you could have knocked me down with a feather.

  Jojo came out of the kitchen waving at me to shut up.

  I whispered:

  “What’s going on?”

  “Youssef is gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “What do I know? He’s gone, that’s all there is to it. There was a row yesterday when they were closing up. Turns out he’s seeing someone else. Francine isn’t taking it too well, so best not to rub salt in the wound, you understand?”

  I understood perfectly, especially since we’ve spent the past three years taking bets on how long they would last. Francine still looks good, for her age. Problem is, that means she could have been his mother if she’d started young. She’s got sixteen years on him, imagine! And she’s jealous with it. She couldn’t stand another girl so much as looking at her man sideways.

  Now, Youssef’s not the kind to bang anything that moves, but it’s only human for a man to have close encounters of a sexual kind. As long as it’s hygienic, I’m not about to cast the first stone.

  Jojo added:

  “This is just between us, so you have to keep it to yourself, OK? The girl he’s banging is Stéphanie.”

  I said, Oh, shit!

  He said: Yeah, but shh!

  Stéphanie’s just a kid—she’s eighteen, maybe not even that. Francine has her help out behind the bar sometimes when the place is rammed. I’m not saying it’s her own fault.

  When Francine came back, snuffling, I comforted her as best I could.

  “Give it time, he’ll get tired of Stéphanie, you’ll see. Youss’ is the stay-at-home type, he’s a creature of habit. Besides, he knows the best wine comes in old bottles.”

  Francine looked at me like she couldn’t believe what I’d just said, then wailed and ran out sobbing.

  Jojo threw his arms wide and said:

  “Jesus, you’re really amazing, you know that.”

  I said:

  “Don’t mention it, just trying to help.”

  Later, I reassured Francine. I explained that even if the bodywork had seen better days, it was her inner beauty that mattered. As an example I told her about Monsieur Massillon and his black 1956 Simca Versailles, and how, even though it looked like a Sherman tank and some people laughed at him, he’d had an offer of €7,000 for the old wreck, so there!

  Francine sobbed some more.

  Women are like that, they need to pour their hearts out. In the end I left her with Jojo because the situation was getting to be awkward: every time I said something to cheer her up, it started her off again. Some people just can’t help it, they don’t know how to accept sympathy.

  Jojo said, Don’t come back for a bit, yeah, give her a chance to calm down…

  I told him not to worry, because I had shopping to do.

  “Good, fine, you go do your shopping. And take your time about it.”

  I left him to deal with Francine. The whole story had left me brooding and thinking and stuff.

  In a way, other people’s troubles are useful. You realize how lucky you are not to have the same problems as them and you freak out when you think that it could have been you.

  In this case, I was thinking that even though this had nothing to do with me, one day Annette and me would end up in the same situation. She’s thirty-six, I’m forty-five. Sooner or later we’ll be out of sync.

  I headed off to Super U with this thought stuck in my throat.

  ANNETTE AND ME, we never arrange to meet up, we don’t need to. Sometimes she’s there when I call round, sometimes she’s not. And it’s the same for me. We’re free agents.

  Freedom is something I value a lot, even if I don’t really know what to do with it.

  I’m very attached to my autonomy. Especially when it comes to my relations with women—and when I use the word relation I obviously mean it in the sense of relations between two people, but also, specifically (in a stricter sense): sexual relations. For a long time, I found women really annoying, always wanting to conduct a survey after sex when all you want to do is say nothing.

  “Do you love me? Do you think about me a lot? What do you think when you think about me? Do you miss me when I’m not around?”

  It has to be said that I couldn’t really see the difference between loving someone and getting my leg over. What more proof of love could they want when I’d just given them my best?

  “Do you love me?” was the one that really left me speechless. As you know, I’m pretty leery about words. Love is a very intense word, it takes some getting used to. If someone has said it to you every day since you were a kid, I’m sure it’s easier to come out with. But if no one said it to you until you were the wrong side of forty, it’s difficult to get the word out, it gets stuck.

  Women in general, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, are not the same as us. Their idea of love is clingy; whereas for men a cuddle is like a pair of handcuffs that makes them—well, me, in any case—want to get the hell out, pronto. That’s one of the reasons I appreciate Annette. She loves me, which is already a point in her favour given that I’m not exactly the type of guy who inspires passion. And she doesn’t expect me to be vice versa—see also: reciprocal, mutual.

  We’ve got no problems with reciprocality, her and me.

  One day, she said to me:

  “I’m really lucky that you exist.”

  I said:

  “Why?”

  She said:

  “Because I love you.”

  What was I supposed to do?

  There was a time I would have laughed it off. I would have joked about it with my mates in the bar. But the day she said it, I’d just started all my contemplations on life and everything else. I had felt new feelings and emotions, especially when she and I were making love. So I listened to her and I didn’t say anything. I didn’t laugh at all. I think I was starting to understand the difference between sex and love, to put it politely. And, incidentally, for anyone who hasn’t had the experience, it’s easy to spot: when you love, things are not as funny. In fact they’re serious. You think about the other person and it makes you go all funny and you think, Oh, fuck!

  And it scares the shit out of you, believe me.

  I should have cottoned on earlier when I started thinking the words “make love” to myself—in the sentence “I wouldn’t mind going round to make love with Annette”, for example—instead of a normal expression like “have it off” or “get my rocks off”.

  “Make love”, that’s the sort of sissy talk I never thought I’d hear myself say. Which just goes to show: never say never. Ever.

  Or just catching her unawares, seeing her at any time, the hair at her temples damp with sweat, the way she has of biting her lip when she feels pleasure, the little cries she makes, all that stuff. Thinking about her even when we’re doing it and still thinking how beautiful she is. The weirdest thing was when I stopped getting out of bed straight after we fucked. When I started lying there, all calm, her head on my shoulder, not even wanting to get out or to chuck her out of bed. That was the point where I knew I was in a bad way. I decided it
was best to be careful. Not make it too obvious that I felt good being with her. Not leave my weak point exposed, if you get what I mean.

  Landremont often says:

  “A man can’t fall any further than when he falls in love.”

  Me, I say it’s just verbal diarrhoea.

  For one thing, Landremont was madly in love with his wife. And for another thing, like I told you before, the guy’s an arsehole.

  I MADE MISTAKES with Margueritte too, at the beginning. I didn’t want to let her know straight off that I found her funny, that I was learning things from her. I didn’t want to seem too familiar either, which was just as well because she kept her guard up, too. She was friendly, you know? But polite.

  Usually I’m suspicious of people like that. People like Jacques Devallée or Berthaulon, the new mayor, who talk in a way so complicated they drown the baby in the bathwater of smart arsery. When guys like that make fun of you, they do it so politely that you end up thanking them.

  Me, I wasn’t “well brought up”. I was knocked into shape with sticks and stones like a stray dog in the street. (That’s a figure of speech. My mother was crazy, but she wasn’t that crazy.) Let’s just say my childhood was no picnic.

  The upshot is that I’m not exactly tactful sometimes, and I know some people find me a bit rude. When I try to express myself, I can tell I shock people from the way they twist their mouths a little or the way they wrinkle their noses like something stinks.

  The problem is that I have to explain what I think using the words I’ve learned. And that makes things difficult. That’s probably why I sometimes seem too direct, because I’m always talking in a straight line. But a cat is a cat and a twat is a twat. It’s not my fault these words exist. I don’t make them up, I just use them. It’s not worth flogging a dead cat over.

  At the same time, I have hang-ups about it. Not so much because out of every fifteen words I say, ten of them are swear words, but because fifteen words usually isn’t enough to say what I want to say.

  Landremont says that power will always belong to orators. And he makes a big deal of it, pounding his fist on the table, all smug, because he obviously thinks he’s one of them.

  “To orators, Germain! Do you understand? To or-a-tors!”

  He can lord it over me all he likes, no one’s going to die and make him king of the world.

  He talks better than me, I’ll give him that. But what use is that if he’s got nothing to say?

  All this to get back to the fact that even though Margueritte seemed completely harmless, with her little smiles and her sentences, I thought that sooner or later she’d end up treating me like a pathetic moron. But she always talked to me like I was a person.

  And you see, that can change a man.

  WHEN SHE TALKS about herself, Margueritte looks so happy you wouldn’t believe it. She’s so hungry to tell me about her life, it must taste like jam.

  My life tastes like a shit sandwich but someone forgot the bread.

  She’s been all around the world and back again. The deserts, the savannahs and everywhere in between. When you look at her in her flowery dress, her stick-thin legs and her goody-goody expression, you’d think she was a nun or a nurse or maybe a teacher. But no, she used to head off and camp out with tribes of headhunters, she slept under mosquito nets. It makes me laugh, thinking about it. I look at her and I think, This little granny is really someone.

  She tells me about these amazing adventures, she says everything that happens can teach us a lesson, serve as an example, help us to stand taller. When it comes to standing tall, I don’t need any help: I was at the front of the queue when they were dishing it out. But I think I’m starting to get the idea that what happens can teach us a lesson. If everything was piss easy, what would we do with all the happiness? Happiness needs to feel like a lucky break, either that or you have to earn it, but it needs to be rare or expensive, otherwise I don’t see the point. That’s not very well put, but I know what I mean and that’s the main thing. Being happy is all about comparisons.

  And on top of everything, for lots of people in the world, happiness is in danger of extinction just like the Jivaro Indians, or gorillas, or the ozone layer. Not everyone gets served a big dollop of happiness. If we did, I think we’d know.

  There’s nothing communist about luck.

  ONE DAY, I talked to Margueritte about all these questions that have been going round and round in my head lately—since I met her, I’m pretty sure, though I didn’t tell her that.

  I told her I couldn’t stop them, they repeated on me like a dose of garlic, these whys and wherefores that were doing my head in.

  Margueritte smiled.

  I said, Why are you smiling?

  “Because you’re asking yourself all these questions… It is the defining trait of man.”

  I didn’t dare tell her that the defining trait of man mostly applies to women, because, when it comes to questions, they’re capable of churning out a sackload at least ten times a day.

  Besides, I didn’t want to annoy her, so I just said:

  “I wouldn’t mind… if I had any answers!”

  “Oh, you will not always be able to find answers… It is posing the question that matters, don’t you think, Germain?”

  Oh dear, I thought, if my opinion matters then we’re really in deep shit.

  But at the same time—and this is what’s surprising—it’s impossible not to answer Margueritte’s questions. You should see her, the way she waits patiently, her hands resting in her lap, her back straight. Her way of saying: Don’t you agree, Germain? (or a different name if it’s you she’s talking to) and you feel you have to come up with something. Anything, so long as you can think of something, and fast. Because if you didn’t say anything, you’d feel like a bastard. Like Santa Claus showing up empty handed on Christmas Eve.

  So I said:

  “Well, the thing is, I don’t really see what good it does to spend your whole time asking questions and never knowing the answers, not that I’m trying to boast.”

  “And yet I’m sure it is something you have often experienced…”

  “What?”

  “Come, come… Surely there must be times when you feel you don’t completely understand? During a conversation, for example?”

  And I thought, Bingo! She’s finally realized I’m a brainless moron. And that knocked the stuffing out of me.

  She went on:

  “I know that whenever it happens to me, it makes me want to search for a solution. I suffer from spadework syndrome.”

  “From what?” I said, though it was only about the last word, because I know all about spadework.

  She laughed.

  “Spadework syndrome: when I come up against a problem, I try to thin things out.”

  I know a lot about thinning out too—I thin out my turnips.

  Margueritte went on:

  “That’s simply the way it is: I have a need to understand. It’s the same with words. I adore dictionaries!”

  “Me too,” I said.

  I only said it to make her happy. I mean, I’m not a barbarian. Only it was a barefaced lie, because if there’s one book that makes me queasy it’s a dictionary.

  She opened her eyes wide and said:

  “You too?”

  I was glad to have made her happy by getting the answer right.

  “Yes, yes…” I said, trying not to sound like I was bragging in case she asked me trick questions to see if I’d read it right through to the end.

  But she just nodded.

  Afterwards, we talked about this and that and finally came to pigeons and animals in general. One thing led to another and in the end I rummaged in my pocket and took out a cat I had whittled from an apple branch Marco gave me.

  Margueritte said:

  “Oooooh…”

  And then:

  “It’s so beautiful! It really is striking. So delicate, so natural…”

  I said, “No, no, it’s nothi
ng.”

  She said, “Oh, but it is, Germain, it is lovely.”

  So I said:

  “Go on then, you have it. It’s a present.”

  “I couldn’t possibly accept,” she said, holding up her hand, “It must have taken you hours…”

  I said:

  “Did it heck, I knocked it up in nothing flat.”

  Which wasn’t true, seeing as how I’d worked my arse off for two days solid to make that cat. Particularly on the ears and the paws.

  I only said it so she wouldn’t feel awkward, and it worked, because after that she didn’t make any objections.

  Sometimes, if you let people know you’re attached to something, it stops them from accepting it. It’s not what you give, it’s how you give, as my mother used to say, and she never gave anyone anything.

  I DON’T REALLY KNOW why I do it. Whittle pieces of wood, I mean. It started when I got my first penknife at about twelve or thirteen. I’d seen it in a display case at the tobacconist’s. A beautiful Opinel No. 8, stainless steel blade, beechwood handle. Thinking back, I thought about it all the time.

  It’s weird, there are things that become as important to you as actual people. I had that experience with a teddy bear when I was a kid. Patoche, his name was. He was ugly as sin, one eye had been sewn back on and most of his fur had come off. But he was my teddy. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep without him, I would have felt like a brotherless orphan.

  Sometimes I think that maybe it’s the same for Annette. That I’m her teddy and she doesn’t see me with her eyes, she sees me with her heart.

  Anyway, all I could think about was this Opinel, with the rounded handle and the rotating safety catch. I knew straight off what I could use it for. If I had it, I’d be able to take it fishing, for example. A knife can be very useful when you’re fishing. You can use it to cut back reeds, to look less of an idiot when you’re eating, to fight off snakes. And while you’re at it, you could use it to gut trout. But no matter how many times I counted the money in my piggybank, I knew I’d never have enough to buy it. But as the Good Lord said (or maybe it was one of His apostles): God helps those who help themselves!