‘He’s got them on his cock,’ says her father one evening, drinking rosé with his mates. ‘MY, it says, for MUMMY. I’ve got the same thing, GT for GET FUCKED AND GET FUCKED AGAIN TO EVERYONE WHO THINKS I’M A FUCKWIT.’
Stories of kidnapped children. Of mothers running behind cars, screaming ‘my baby, my baby’. He forbids her to go out without him, even into the garden. She waits for him to wake up. Climbs on a chair and looks at the chickens, the rabbit cages, the logs of wood under a black tarpaulin. The tree with the name of an island, albizia. The rolls of old wire netting. The tyres. The pond at the bottom of the garden. And, at the other end, the bushes trimmed into spherical shapes, and the canna lilies. Big red flowers that look like the heads of turkeys. And the corner stubbornly covered in moss that Monsieur Bihotz weeds obsessively.
One day I’ll build you a pool. You’ll be able to go swimming.
From this window she can see her house. She left a naughty doll under her little desk, hanging off the trestle.
‘Without you,’ says Monsieur Bihotz, ‘I would never get out of bed.’ He makes her soldiers of buttered toast, with helmets drawn in the butter. He dips a soup spoon in a kilo-sized pot of jam. He makes her eat an apple. ‘Your mother said you eat fruit.’ He pushes the peeler in and flicks out the core. He screws on the lid of the electric coffee grinder. There’s a terrifying noise, the coffee beans jump around and disappear in a black cloud, and Lulu barks and barks. A giant hand screws on the roof of the house and she, Bihotz and Lulu disappear, pulverised.
In the afternoon he would reheat the same pot of coffee, and say, just like Madame Bihotz used to, ‘Boiled coffee is ruined coffee.’ He also said, ‘The late Madame Bihotz.’ That’s what you say for dead people.
‘He’s a little bit odd,’ her mother used to say. ‘But what would we do without him.’
Given their timetables, it seemed just as easy for her to sleep at his place, during the week anyway.
After coffee, they would go down into the basement to shuck the ears of corn. Straddling the edge of the metal tank, scraping the corn cobs between their thighs. He pounded the grains with a mallet, for the ducks. She used to go home covered in splinters and with corn husks in her hair. ‘A real little farmer’s wife,’ her mother would say.
Madame Bihotz had been cremated. The late Madame Bihotz went up in smoke.
Madame Bihotz is in the urn. Monsieur Bihotz sleeps with it, she explained to her parents.
Her father sighed. ‘Isn’t there a proper nanny in the village?’
‘Well, you could always look after her yourself,’ her mother replied.
‘Extroverted,’ Rose says to her, ‘is when you laugh, you tell stories, you dance…Your father’s extroverted. Introverted is when you’re a bit sad, and you look mysterious. I’m introverted. My mother is extroverted. My father is introverted. Actually my family is the opposite of your family.’
It’s five o’clock, hot chocolate time; Rose’s mother is in the kitchen. ‘I’ve made a fruit loaf, girls! How are your parents? I stopped by the shop the other day. Your mother has some pretty things there at the moment.’
Rose’s mother wears boots that click on the wooden floor. She sits down at the table, between the bowls of hot chocolate, wearing her short, fringed skirt. She lights a cigarette. You can see her underpants.
She’s always doing disturbing things like putting a gentle hand on the back of her neck and whispering, ‘So, Solange, how are you?’
Yeah, okay.
Rose’s mother always wears knee-high red boots, even at home. Those boots hold her to the floor like a magnetic field.
Her father calls her a madwoman: ‘She’s a madwoman and an idiot.’
‘If there was a problem, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?’
Her head tilts beneath the gentle hand. And, inexplicably, she feels water pressing at the back of her throat and behind her eyes, as if she’s a jug about to spill over.
Monsieur Bihotz picked her up at six o’clock. Rose’s mother insisted he stay for a drink. Rose’s father came in for a minute to say hello. He always made the same joke, in a nasty voice, about her and Rose, the princesses of Clèves, and no one knew what to say. Especially Monsieur Bihotz, who looked like he was encased in a bell jar that muffled his occasional utterances, and squashed him smaller and thicker. But with Rose’s mother Monsieur Bihotz behaved more or less normally. He had a Ricard and she had a whisky, and they clinked glasses.
The others started in on her as soon as she arrived at school. It was inevitable. Everything was thrown off balance, tipped over. It was vicious: suddenly all eyes were on her. It didn’t happen every day, but every day it was a possibility, and there was nothing to be done about it.
A gang formed around Raphaël. The only day she cried was when they all cut a big strand of hair off the side of her head. She didn’t run away. They would have made even more fun of her. She examined herself in the mirror. What was the matter with her? Was it because she didn’t go to Sunday school, or was it because of her father’s extroversion?
And yet there were so many other crazy people. The Lavinasse family had nine children, two of whom lived with their cousins the Boursenave family, who had six children themselves, none of whom could read. On the topic of crazies, Madame Bihotz died enormous but respected by everyone.
The whole school was cascading over Solange like a liquid. When Concepción González turned up at school with her ringlets, her frilly dress and not a word of French, Solange had hoped that things would change. But Concepión González slipped on a pair of jeans two days later, spoke French by the end of the month, and became best friends with everyone. She had come to the shop for a communion present. ‘That little Spanish moppet is adorable. No silver spoon in her mouth. You’ll have to be nice to her.’
Of course there was Peggy Salami, but she actually was retarded. On one of her hands she had a sixth finger without a fingernail or bones. And let’s not forget the weirdest of the Boursenave sons, who clutched at his groin and rocked. Nor the Kudeshayan kids, who were called the Dogs’ Arses and were darker than Africans but you must be tolerant.
The Boursenave kid shouted ‘Faggot!’ to anyone who came too close.
She was waiting for Grade Six, to leave this dump. Leave primary school behind her like a lost world of dinosaurs and fossils.
‘You got scalped by the Indians?’ Monsieur Bihotz asked her. And at night when he put her to bed: ‘School’s not that easy.’ What would he know. A tiny lifebuoy in a huge flood.
Rose seemed different too, when she wasn’t at home. That rainy day, when Raphaël put Solange’s head under the drainpipe as Roland Lavinasse and André Boursenave each pinned back one of her arms, that day of deafening rain, Rose, of course, was not holding her head under the water nor was she in the cluster of girls egging the boys on and laughing over the sound of the rain. But she had seen Rose looking across at her, standing back a bit, looking at her as if she didn’t know her, or didn’t recognise her. A bit upset, put out that she had got to this point, to the extreme limit of what is possible to look at, or away from. Her best friend Rose.
‘I like you because you’re really intelligent,’ Rose had said to her over their hot chocolates. ‘Even my father says so.’ She was looking at her intently. ‘You’ve got that thing not many people have. My mother has it. I’ve got it, too. I can’t really say your mother has it; I’m not exactly sure what it is that she’s lacking. Perhaps she needs to leave your father?’ Rose always said the most alarming things in that incomparable syntax and elegant accent.
Was it sexual ? Did it affect people who, like her, thought constantly about things that others didn’t seem to think about?
Concepción, pretty now, a ponytail bouncing on her shoulders, was playing elastics with Rose and Nathalie. She imagined her tripping as she jumped and falling with her gob wide open onto a spoon that busted her brain. Crack.
There is also a photo in the living room. It is there jus
t like the curtains and the pewter trinkets, and a whole pile of things that don’t have a name precisely because they are just there, there from before, before her, Solange. The little boy belongs to the photo like the object hanging next to it belongs to the wall, and another object belongs to the mantelpiece. When people ask, they’re told that the object on the wall is a warming pan; it was used in the past when there was no heating. The thing was filled up with live embers and, thanks to the long handle, the beds were warmed. The object on the mantelpiece is a telescope, it belonged to a great-grandfather who was a sailor.
‘Go to the carnival all by yourself ? At your age? All by yourself. With so many idiot drivers zooming round those bends. And which dress? Well, we’ll see about that. The red dogs. At ten o’clock at night. Do you know what happens to girls who go to the carnival all by themselves in a dress with red dogs on it at ten o’clock at night? No, I was not sleeping. Why didn’t your parents telephone me? They didn’t think twice all the other times.’
Monsieur Bihotz is red, huge and swaying on his feet, but as soon as he gets too close to that topic, to her parents, he backs off. His muzzle has brushed the electric fence. He calms down.
‘Come over here.’ He hugs her very hard and, bending down, rests his big head on her neck. He’s got that ‘mystical’ look, that’s Rose’s word for when people get that look she finds ridiculous, like they’re on another planet, unhinged from ‘real life’. And he looks at the garden in silence, as if they were the only survivors on Earth. As if all that remained in the village was their house, and all that was left of humanity was the two of them.
What was worse, to go or not to go to the carnival, to risk it, hoping they all have other fish to fry, rather than stay in her room, in the shafts of the setting sun, with the blare of the brass band muffled behind the shutters, at ten o’clock at night in the month of June?
She tries to keep a diary, like Rose. Rose even gave her a Hallmark notebook for her birthday. But it’s fiddly. Life is boring. Nevertheless, says Rose, we mustn’t forget our youth, mustn’t forget what we used to be and become old farts.
Perhaps she should tape herself. She uses the same tape recorder her father used when he tried to learn English.
She presses Record:
I was allowed to go to the carnival. It was ten o’clock at night and it was hot. I put on my dress with the red dogs. I went on the dodgem cars with Rose and Christian. Rose is my best friend. Christian and I are in love. No one knows except Rose. Lots of kids from school were there but no one
She’s not sure about saying ‘pissed me off ’.
annoyed me. I’ve decided to keep this diary every day from now on. Signed Solange. Top secret.
She presses Pause. The tape emits a tiny sound, as if it was groaning with the effort. She releases the Pause button.
Get stuffed anyone who listens to this.
She presses Rewind. Then Play. The tape turns with a slight chchch.
‘It was ten o’clock at night and it was hot.’ A plaintive, mannered voice. Like her mother’s. Not her own voice. Rose told her that the skull is like a sound box and that the voice in your head is not the voice others hear. Oddly enough that seems to make sense to her.
In her father’s car there are magazines, copies of Jours de France and of Lui. Parked in front of a house at the end of a road, as the leaves of the poplars go poc poc on the hood of the car, she enters into a forest of naked women. They’ve all got the same slit between their legs, except that it has a different effect on her than seeing Peggy Salami’s slit. The women look at her straight in the eye, their fingers in their furrow, their legs spread wide. Some of them have pubic hair, some don’t (like her), or almost none (like her). She grasps a few words, panting and arched over, a bit unusual but immediately effective. The women’s gaze, and their fingers, and what else—the surprise, the need to wee from the moment she got in the car, the company of all these women, women just like her, she is just like these women, she plunges her hand inside her jeans and rubs, fast, it’s a bit dry, the women are looking at her and she’s panting and arched over and the relief is immediate, and something moist gets in her fingers, that’s odd, she didn’t actually wet her pants.
The Russians have invaded Afghanistan. Her mother buys kilos of sugar and flour, and bulk containers of water. ‘Here we go again, just like in sixty-two,’ says Georges, who’s come to sample more rosé. ‘The Bay of Pigs?’ asks her mother. ‘No, what a dimwit,’ says her father, ‘the Missile Crisis, but you bought sugar both times.’
She looks out at the terrace, and beyond, to Monsieur Bihotz’s, his shed, the chickens and further beyond to the wooded area. In its place, she imagines an obsidian valley. She read about it in a science-fiction book. It’s like black glass. Obsidian covers the whole landscape: the houses, the shed, and the crater of the dried-up pond, and the petrified tree trunks. The path up to the village is made of obsidian, and the church tower, and the people too, all in obsidian.
The missiles leave the Soviet Union and right now are heading towards the village. Georges and her father are drinking rosé and her mother is clearing up, uptight and upset as usual. Monsieur Bihotz must be watching television and all the others are tucked away in their houses too, the nine Lavinasse sons, and the six Boursenave children, and Raphaël Bidegarraï, and Rose and her family, tucked away in Rose’s house. And everything is going to vitrify. And by the time the Americans send their own missiles, they will be destroyed in turn, and the Russians will no longer exist but their missiles will still be cruising, like those vanished stars that still sparkle in the sky. And, just like the village, the entire Earth will have melted under lava that has cooled and formed into black glass. And if an extraterrestrial turns up, it will take him a while to recognise inside the glass whatever used to be alive—it will look like minuscule bees in amber, smaller than all that matter in which it is trapped.
And her mother is shouting for her to come and help her clear up, but if she stops visualising the obsidian garden it will actually happen. And they will all die, her parents, Monsieur Bihotz, Rose and Raphaël and everyone—statues of black glass.
Coupling n. The action of coupling or engaging in mating. || The coming together of two individuals of the same animal species, necessary for reproduction. (See encycl.) || Device used to connect two or more pieces of a machine. encycl. Coupling has not been identified in most marine animals (sea urchins, bony fish) but it is essential to all species that reproduce outside water (insects, advanced vertebrates). It can even be found occurring among hermaphrodites (snails, earthworms).
This is in the first section of the Nouveau Larousse universel—just after come v. (to come clean about her crimes); (to come the grande dame)—and before courage n. (it takes courage to stand up for your rights). This dictionary dates from a year before she was born, as if her parents, too, needed to resort to an entry on zoological cycles in order to understand something about the distinctions between things: water/ land, vegetable/animal, man/woman, dead/alive.
Sex [seks] n. (lat. sexus, from secare, to cut). Each of the two complementary adult divisions of a species, the union of which guarantees reproduction. (See chart reproduction and encycl.) || The organ of biological generation. || The weaker sex, the fair sex, women. || The stronger sex, men. encycl. The difference between the sexes can be almost negligible (mushrooms, algae, sea urchins, various fish, pigeons) or enhanced by secondary sexual characteristics more or less accentuated (deer’s antlers, cock’s spur, stag beetle’s mandible). Sometimes the female retains a larval characteristic (glow-worm) or, conversely, it may be the male that is the diminutive member (ceratias fish). A great diversity of appearance can be found among butterflies in particular. In hermaphrodite species (snails, earthworms) each individual creature is both male and female. The organ that develops the fertilising gamete (testicle in animals, stamen in plants) is called ‘male’. The organ that develops the fertilised gamete (ovary in animals, pistil in plants) is c
alled ‘female’.)
The REPRODUCTION chart, opposite the coloured plate of REPTILES, shows, in black and white, a couple of fish, a colony of aphids, algae, and an interesting-looking fleshy cap, fat and shiny, full of folds opening around a swollen knot: a coupling (slugs). In one corner there is a label AUTOFERTILISATION(‘very rare: Barberry plant, tapeworm’).
There’s no entry for faggot—just then her mother opens the bedroom door to bring in her clean washing.
Barberry n. Bush with thorns, yellow flowers and red berries (of the Berberidaceae family).
As for tapeworm, it’s totally disgusting.
Her mother leaves the room.
Between peninsula and penitent is ‘penis n. Male mating organ’, which cross-references ‘rod [rod] n. A thin straight metal bar || A silver-tipped staff, or wand, insignia of vergers. || A stick or bundle of sticks used for punishment. || Male organ of copulation (rod, cylindrical, ending in the glans, where the urinary meatus opens). [Syn. penis.] || Nau. The straight bar of an anchor, at one end of which is another transverse rod, at right angle to the arms or claws of the anchor.’
There’s nothing for dick except ‘Spotted dick n. a British steamed suet pudding containing dried fruit (usually currants) commonly served with custard. And glans only says it’s Latin for ‘acorn’, or beechmast, brown nuts, pairs of which are enclosed in a prickly case.
All was not lost. There were still some people who didn’t think she was a complete weirdo. Before her father’s dick burst onto the scene, the carnival had been more or less fun. Rose had taken her over to climb in behind Christian in his dodgem car. Music, lights, throbbing and spinning, their bodies tossed every which way. Rose, sitting up front, toppled onto Christian and the lights were blinding and Solange’s heart was pounding and in her belly it felt very hot and everything was spinning. ‘Keep your hands inside!’ yelled Rose.
Then she followed them to the shooting gallery. You have to be twelve or over to shoot but Rose looks older, she’s already got boobs. A little white ball quivers in a wire cage. It looks like a terrified ghost. There’s an ear-splitting explosion and the ball disappears.
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