PRAISE FOR MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ
‘There are few writers who may have changed my perception
of the world, but Darrieussecq is one of them.’ The Times
‘The internationally celebrated author who illuminates those parts
of life other writers cannot or do not want to reach.’ Independent
‘Shatters taboos, simplifications and affectations.’
Magazine Littéraire
‘I absolutely adored this account of sexual awakening.’ L’Express
‘This clever novel, Clèves [All the Way], is both personal and
universal—and without the slight trace of sentimentality.’ Libération
‘Tom Is Dead is powerful; when one has finished reading it one
feels it absolutely needed to exist.’ Nancy Huston
‘Tom Is Dead is mesmerising and deeply rewarding….impressive
in its evocation of vastly different worlds and lives.’
Australian Literary Review
‘Darrieussecq is as daring as she is original…
a singular new voice.’ Irish Times
‘She makes all those daring young men of letters
look very tame indeed.’ Herald (Glasgow)
‘Her gifts are dazzling.’ Observer
‘I love the way Marie Darrieussecq writes about the world
as if it were an extension of herself and her feelings.’
J. M. G. Le Clézio, Nobel Laureate for Literature 2008
‘Another astonishing work by Darrieussecq. All the Way
is a stunning achievement.’ M. J. Hyland
MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ was born in 1969 in Bayonne, France. Her debut novel, Pig Tales, was published in thirty-four countries. Four other novels have also been translated into English, My Phantom Husband, A Brief Stay With the Living, White and Tom Is Dead. Marie Darrieussecq lives in Paris with her husband and children.
PENNY HUESTON is a senior editor at Text Publishing.
A L L
T H E
W A Y
Marie Darrieussecq
Translated by Penny Hueston
textpublishing.com.au
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
Copyright © Marie Darrieussecq 2011
Copyright © Penny Hueston 2013
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published in French as Clèves by P.O.L editeur, 2011
First published in English by The Text Publishing Company, 2013
Design by WH Chong
Typeset by J&M Typesetting
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry : (pbk)
Author: Darrieussecq, Marie.
Title: All the way / by Marie Darrieussecq ; translated by Penny Hueston.
ISBN: 9781921922732 (pbk.)
ISBN: 9781921921537 (ebook)
Subjects: Teenage girls—Fiction.
Other Authors/Contributors: Hueston, Penny.
Dewey Number: 843.914
‘Is it possible that we know nothing about girls, who exist nonetheless? Is it possible that we say “women”, “children”, “boys”, and don’t imagine—in spite of all our education, we don’t imagine that it’s been a long time since these words…’
Rainer Maria Rilke,
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
CONTENTS
GETTING IT
DOING IT
DOING IT AGAIN
I
GETTING IT
‘Go on then, off you go to your carnival.’
Ten in the evening, June. Her parents have guests. They are drinking rosé. ‘Go on then, off you go to your carnival.’ Their friends whistle when she appears in her dress. Her mother kisses her and then rubs her cheek to remove the lipstick. Her father gives her a ten-franc note.
Solange skips along the road, a little hop with each step, a skidding noise, tchiff, tchiff. Her dress flaps against the backs of her knees. There are red dogs embroidered along the edge of the hem. It’s her favourite dress.
She passes Monsieur Bihotz’s house; she’s glad he’s not out the front.
The crowd surges and she hears ‘your father, your father’. She looks up at the church tower. The hands on the clock make an angle like an index finger and thumb, a pistol. A quarter to twelve. She was allowed out until eleven-thirty. Shit shit. Nathalie’s gaping mouth: a moist, red ‘your father’.
She can see him. Completely naked. A red scarf around his neck, his Air Inter cap on his head. With his mate Georges who is also naked. They’re singing a song about a priest and a nun. ‘You’re going to bless our dicks!’ shouts her father as he runs towards her. No, towards the priest behind her. Her father’s dick, a wobbling white willy, is very different from Monsieur Bihotz’s.
As if it wasn’t difficult enough at school already. Especially as she’s the only one who doesn’t go to Sunday school. Raphaël Bidegarraï from Grade Six, his hands cupped over his fly, asks her to bless his dick.
Nathalie’s mother has lent her a prayer book and she’s practising in her room. Baby Jesus, may you protect my parents and bring peace to their spirits. And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. She asks her mother: What does trespass mean? ‘It’s when you can’t express who you really are. For example, when I do housework while his job is to fly a plane.’
And deliver us from temptation. She recites twenty Our Fathers every night. She turns the bedspread down in folds of precisely equal width. Neither her feet nor her hands must touch the edges of the mattress, and her head must be exactly in the centre of the pillow.
Behind the church there is a statue of the Virgin Mary in a blue and white dress shaped like a tube, from which her hands, her head and her halo emerge.
Hail Mary, full of grace, our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of our death. Amen.
Ten times. Hands, feet, head exactly in the centre of the pillow. When she sleeps over at Monsieur Bihotz’s, he chucks everything on the floor when he comes to tuck her in.
Monsieur Bihotz says that her father just wanted to have fun and that’s a good thing in a person.
All children are like the children in that film, Village of the Damned, where aliens come one night and inseminate women who can’t remember anything about it afterwards. She saw it on television. The pale-coloured eyes of a pale child. The shock lasted only a second, that instant when she saw herself. Those eyes looking at her, that ashen stranger with the too-bright eyes who is her, pale as death, who forces her to truss up her bed in a thousand ways, and to cover any bit of her that is hanging out. Except when she slides in next to Monsieur Bihotz and his huge body protects her.
Nathalie says that you can tell the priest everything, and that actually you should, so you’re forgiven for your bad thoughts and your bad actions. But her father’s dick?
She’d like to know if she’s good or bad inside. Exactly what there is inside her. Perhaps she’ll swallow a spider. It’ll wriggle and wiggle and tiggle inside her. She doesn’t know why. Perhaps she’ll die!
The whole school is obsessed by sex. Raphaël Bidegarraï asks her if she knows what a whore is. He explains it to her, patiently, in a state of aroused pity.
Sh
e’s not quite sure about kissing. ‘We can kiss those bastards goodbye,’ says her father. ‘Give me a kiss,’ says Monsieur Bihotz. ‘I wonder what she looks like when she comes,’ says Georges, talking about an air hostess. She understands that those particular words have a direct connection to ‘whore’. She understands the word; she’ll always understand it, her whole life long. A before and an after in the understanding of the word whore. Inside a little girl, there is a whore.
Raphaël Bidegarraï, who’s always been the biggest of them all, makes the girls stand in a row with the boys facing them. The girls lift up their skirts and the boys touch their panties.
Peggy Salami already has a tricky name. The day he gets her naked, everyone sees (she’s glad it’s not her) the slit between her legs, marked out by a dividing compass, two halves of a sphere, from the base of the belly to the base of the back, two sections perfectly joined but slightly parted, neatly bifurcating the body, as well as the class, the village and the world, and anatomically much more rational than what her father and Monsieur Bihotz and presumably all men have.
Her mother’s body is the same. Pubic hair hides the front part, but her buttocks are there at the back. In summer she spends Sundays naked on the terrace, lying on one side then the other so she can tan without getting lines, and complaining that the sea is so far away. It’s a lot harder to imagine what happened at Madame Bihotz’s house. Madame Bihotz: a pyramid shape under a nylon smock. So fat that the slit, if there was a slit, must have closed up.
In the evening Monsieur Bihotz used to undress his mother and put her to bed. Beneath her smock she wore a giant petticoat. Under her arms it was like she had extra breasts. Solange used to climb up into the high bed where, bearded and scrubbed clean, Madame Bihotz would read her Tom Thumb, or Little Red Riding Hood, in the old versions that are really scary.
On Sunday mornings Monsieur Bihotz would take his mother to church in a wheelchair. He pushed her from their house into town. It took them half an hour because it was so steep. On the way back it was much quicker; he only had to be a counterweight. From the terrace, her father used to call them to watch the performance, mère et fils Bihotz battling the bulk.
On Sunday mornings her father sometimes took her driving. He let her sit in the front seat of his Alpine sports car. They had fun sputtering up the hills and hurtling straight down beneath the silos, vroooom, vroom. Then they drove back towards the river and the edge of town, and stopped to buy cakes. From there they had two choices: the sea, an hour away, or the marina, five minutes away.
They parked in front of the marina and ate their cakes. Her father told her stories about his emergency landings, about cumulonimbus suction drafts and about the time when the idiot air hostess had forgotten to release the escape chutes. He told her: ‘At Clèves we don’t have the sea but we have a pretty lake.’
He had a smoke with Georges at the Yacht Club. On the wall there was a calendar with naked pin-up girls. Every so often they parked in a vacant lot at the housing development. Her father would leave her with the cakes and the radio on and come back later.
She looked out at the still water. Gusts of wind shook the car. She opened the window a bit. The wind whipped steely grey scribble marks over the surface of the water. It brushed her cheeks. She moved across behind the steering wheel. She changed gears standing up on the pedals, then sat down again. The road stretched out ahead, crisscrossed with deer, lined with staring hares. Or she was on board a plane and she was flipping the little switches in the roof. The motors were roaring, she tilted the steering wheel and gained speed, the ground slipped away, she took off in a flash and the lake became smaller, a scrap of blue.
It’s amazing how everything changes, from one house to the next. What must it be like, for example, to go from a Mongolian yurt to an American skyscraper, if there’s already such a huge difference between her parents’ house and Monsieur Bihotz’s house (or Rose’s)?
Her mother brought her a stool from her shop; it was in the shape of a Coca-Cola can. And curtains with a Statue of Liberty print for her birthday. And Monsieur Bihotz gave her a poster that she loves, the word WHY? written above a dead soldier, but her mother says it’s not appropriate for someone her age.
Rose’s bedroom is completely different. It feels light, delicate. Even the walls are different, the shape of the bedroom is different. You’d need a completely new word, especially when you think about Monsieur Bihotz’s bedroom, with the poster of France Gall and the stacks of Sud-Ouest newspapers and the filthy coffee cups.
Her father says that Rose’s house smells like roses. The Bihotz house smells like dog and soup, or rather it used to smell like soup, when Madame Bihotz was there making it. Madame Bihotz’s bedroom smells like something inert. Perhaps dust. Close up, the dust looks like bits of fluffy wool, or ash. At the shop her mother is always dusting, because of the passing traffic. Her mother claims the dust is getting worse.
Her parents’ room is brown. The curtains are orange and floral. Two matching lamps sit on two velvet bedside tables. When her mother is home, she’s always in bed. On her mother’s side of the bed is a photograph of a little boy.
She puts her hand in front of her eyes and tries removing one of the items, the bed, a lamp, the photo, and the whole thing is transformed, it’s no longer the same room, one tiny thing changes everything. And when her father is there, everything is different again.
She is lying on one of the school desks, the ones with a hole for the inkwell. Raphaël Bidegarraï, Christian Goyenetche, Nathalie, Rose, Delphine Peyreborde, the two Villebarrouin kids, all the Boursenave kids, even the little Lavinasse kids, everyone is there. Superimposed heads, pairs of eyes like pinheads, and each kid sticks a pin into her body. Red pins like the ones the teacher uses to fix the map to the wall—carefully, one by one, taking it in turns. The pressure beneath her hand increases, the hard, hot spot that is the point of it all, from pinprick to pinprick, the whole class, everyone around her. She’s not tied down but it’s impossible to move, just as impossible for her to get away as it is for a naughty student to escape the corner of the classroom. She submits and the pins stick into her one by one, slow, deep, her hand rubbing the vital spot, her legs spread wide apart, the unbearable pleasure has to last longer, and when the teacher sticks in the final pin, the indescribable instant of climax—she can fall asleep, in her childhood bed, the sheets scarcely rumpled.
She used to open the big bottle of Bien Être eau de Cologne and Madame Bihotz would spring out, flamboyant, like a genie, along with her whole bedroom and her nylon blouses. Then, even though she took deep breaths, Madame Bihotz would disappear into the static memory of a fat, seated woman. She had to put the lid back on the bottle and force herself to forget. And then start again, and Madame Bihotz would spring out again.
‘You can have her bedroom,’ Monsieur Bihotz told her. Snuffling and hugging her tight. Hot and moist like a giant mouth.
On top of Madame Bihotz’s bed there were three soft-toy dogs. And the real live dog in the middle, called Lulu, a bitch. Lulu was looking more and more like Madame Bihotz.
Are dead people still nice when they’re dead?
She preferred Monsieur Bihotz’s bedroom, with its posters of motorbikes and France Gall.
At 11.30 p.m. exactly, her father’s plane flew over the rooftops. She snuggled up to Monsieur Bihotz. ‘It’s Papa’s plane,’ she whispered, sucking her thumb, and he told her to stop, she was too old for that.
Papa’s mother, whom we called Nannie, called her Nono, which has nothing to do with Solange unless you mean Soso. ‘Solange,’ corrected her mother. ‘Yes, Nono,’ repeated Nannie, and on it went. ‘How you’ve grown, Nono. What a cute little thing you are, Nono.’ Nannie was like Papa, prone to shocking fits of rage: ‘Oh, come on! I’m not making things up. I know exactly what I’m talking about.’ We were on our way back from her house in the Alpine sports car, complaining about how gaga Nannie was getting.
When Nannie died, Lulu st
arted to look like her too, her chin receding (if dogs have chins), her forehead bulging more and more, the crown of her head hanging over her absence of a nose.
‘My poor Monsieur Bihotz. It’s hard to lose your mummy. Young as you are. But it’s also a relief. You’ll have to pull yourself together, keep going. Our little girl is all upset, seeing you like this.’
When Monsieur Bihotz comes into their house, and sits there on the couch, so large and upright, it’s difficult to breathe: the molecules of air don’t know where to line up, the walls of the house wobble. The standard lamps, the pewter trinkets, the Toffoli lithograph: it’s like Monsieur Bihotz is going to turn everything upside down. You can see his sleeveless T-shirt under the shirt he has put on specially.
‘Thank you for the flowers,’ says her mother.
‘You cut your hydrangeas,’ says her father.
Monsieur Bihotz and her father in the same room, under the same roof, like animals from different species, you don’t know which one eats which, herbivore or carnivore, an ox in an anthill, a dog swimming between two herons—a catastrophe waiting to happen.
She asks if she can have the bunch of hydrangeas in her bedroom. ‘A real little housewife,’ says her father, smiling.
(‘We’re lucky’, he’ll say later, ‘if it’d been Christmas, he would have given them the gold-spray treatment and we would’ve been landed with them for six months.’ ‘The worst,’ her mother will add, ‘are the gladioli, you know, those red things he’s got under his balcony.’)
Monsieur Bihotz puts a single sugar cube in his mug, whereas at his place he puts two cubes in his teacup decorated with a bird. On his hairy face you can still see the marks from when she squeezed his blackheads. Through his shirt you can glimpse his tattoos, AC/DC on one arm, and a skull and crossbones on the other. On his chest he’s got a tattoo of a tiger with a rose, but that one’s hidden by his T-shirt.
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