by Fleur Jaeggy
Frédérique was beginning to look at me. I felt the weight of her eyes on my body. It was like a punch in the back sometimes, and I would turn. Sometimes, at table, I sensed her gaze on me, and then I held myself straighter and ate with the most refined manners, so that I hardly ate at all. But at breakfast, even if she was watching me, I helped myself to two or three slices of bread and butter and marmalade. And I have to admit that I thought of nothing but breakfast. When I dunked my bread in my coffee that time it was out of sheer greed, without thinking. I seem to remember Frédérique smiled, out of indulgence I suppose. Now she was asking me to spend time with her, and she kept her eye on me from a distance.
From the first day I saw her I wanted to be with her, and being with her really meant taking on her mind, becoming accomplices, disdaining all the others. Like blood brothers in a way, or sisters. And that from the very first day, from the moment she came late into the dining hall. Or I had to submit to a rite that she was celebrating. One day she told me that she had noticed me immediately, but she only said it to please me, even if she never said anything just to please. She may once have said that I was beautiful. Clearly I wasn’t as elegant as she was. She wore grey skirts, loose blouses, grey, dark-blue or powder-blue pullovers, all loose. I had a lot of tight pullovers and wide skirts with very tight waists. I pulled the waist as tight as possible with broad belts, as almost everybody else did. And that is not elegance. Her loose pullovers hung over her body, hiding it, just letting you glimpse an adolescent figure, narrow hips, flat stomach.
One winter afternoon – we were sitting on the stairs – Frédérique took my hands and said: ‘You’ve got an old woman’s hands.’ Hers were cold. She looked at the backs of my hands: you could count the veins and the bones. She turned them over: they were shrivelled up. I can hardly describe how proud I was to hear what for me was a compliment. That day, on the stairs, I knew she was attracted to me. They really were an old woman’s hands, they were bony. Frédérique’s hands were broad, thick, square, like a boy’s. Both of us wore signet rings on our little fingers. You might imagine that we found physical pleasure in touching each other like this. As she touched my hand and I felt hers, cold, our contact was so anatomical that the thought of flesh or sensuality eluded us. That winter I bought myself a loose pullover and hid my body. My old woman’s hands were all the more obvious.
Frédérique was always polite with everybody, she never let her moods get the better of her, she was never irritable. In this I couldn’t copy her. On the contrary, there were some rare occasions when I wanted to give my room-mate a good beating. She was submissive, she always said I was right. She had dimples. And she never forgot to show them. A little snub nose. I wanted to wring her neck. She stretched out on her bed like a slave in a harem, half naked, this German girl.
They made us recite François Coppée. I am disturbed as I realise only today that Frédérique’s initials were the same as the writer’s. ‘J’étais à ma fenêtre et je pensais à vous devant le ciel d’été’ That was how my part began. ‘Un rossignol chantait et ses notes perlées montaient éperdument aux voûtes étoilées.’ The teacher was a nun, she taught us how to recite in time to the piano.
Frédérique’s surname means ‘story’. And, since her name is a story, I’ll let myself imagine that it’s her dictating this story, or writing it, laughing in her caustic way. I also have an inexplicable premonition that the story has already been written. Is finished. Like our lives.
On Sankt Nikolaus day we spent a whole afternoon out of school. It was snowing. We were mute. We went into the cake shop in Teufen. The village seemed rapt, sleepy. I knew that Frédérique had, or had had, a relationship with a man. It went on snowing, the flakes hanging still at the windows. Frédérique told me she would be taking a trip with him, at Christmas. I watched the snowflakes, intrigued, Frédérique spoke softly. I knew about her relationship and I certainly did not wish her an idyllic time. And I told her so, taking a pastry. Wouldn’t she have another pastry? Another cup of tea. I didn’t want confidences, or confessions. I had the impression there was something tragic in her love; she looked stubborn, determined. For a moment it occurred to me there was no man. I took another pastry. The snowflakes hung still. It crossed my mind that Frédérique was inventing another life for herself. Fleetingly, as she was speaking, I thought I saw a strange light in her eyes, like the snowflakes, mad and pointless, hanging still in the air. I was afraid, I wanted to tell her to save herself, but I didn’t know from what. My thoughts were suspended halfway, I had the impression of danger, the danger of experiencing something which doesn’t exist. Then everything was relaxed again, that glimmer of disorder faded away. Frédérique repeated that they would be going to Andalusia, they’d been there before. She asked me if I’d ever been to Spain. No, never. I’d been all over Switzerland, by train, because my father liked trains and changing trains, trains in the mountains. Had she ever been to Rigi? No, never. I mentioned the names of a few other mountains. Gornergrat, Jungfrau, the Bernina train. No.
Frédérique spoke about her travels as if talking about someone else. In the cake shop in Teufen it began to grow dark, as if even the snow were a curtain of dark. Outside the winter night. Outside, the freezing air escorted us home. Our home is the school.
Every evening my room-mate and I stood by the washbasins. Once I had been friendly with her, her comb would drop and immediately I would bend down to pick it up. She combed her hair before going to bed as if she were going to a dance. And maybe she did go, in her sleep. Showing off her dimples to everyone. One canine protruded from her gums. She had a pink taffeta dress she took care not to crumple. Sometimes I was so sure she was going dancing I would see her pink dress over her chair at the foot of her bed where she had folded her little pile of underwear. Only on special occasions was there likely to be a room inspection. It would take place in the morning; you had to open all the cupboards; our little piles of folded underwear and pullovers must have looked like a great wall. Like the orientals, we were supposed to know the art of folding our things. Some time ago I went to see a Noh theatre company. At the end of the show I went backstage to say hello to an actor. He was packing his suitcase, or rather his bundle. He folded his clothes exactly the way we used to fold them in our cupboards. With the same discipline and a sort of submission toward the different materials. If I had agreed to become the protector of the little girl who had written me the note and left it in my pigeon hole, she would have kept things tidy for me. She would have considered it an honour to fold my pullovers. We were fetishists.
If I had given Marion – that was what the younger girl was called – a flower, she would have pressed it in a text book, it would have had to last forever. Of course it’s quite common to buy an old book and find petals between the pages, petals that crumble to dust as soon as you touch them. Sick petals. Grave flowers. Her love for me dried up in an instant, didn’t even leave any dust, she never spoke to me again. I tore up Marion’s affectionate note at once, just as I at once tore up the rare letters from my mother or father. My room-mate kept everything in an inlaid wooden box, a German box.
She re-read her letters stretched lazily on her bed. German smells rose from the box, and they can’t have been faint either, she was so avid to breathe in their essence. There was a gilded lock too, a tiny key. She would open the hideous thing with votive hands, the German girl.
I hardly got any letters. They were handed out at mealtimes. It wasn’t nice not to get much post. So I began to write to my father, mindless letters saying nothing. I hoped he was well, I was well. He answered at once, sticking Pro Juventute stamps on the envelopes. He asked me why on earth I wrote to him so often. Both his letters and mine were short. Every month a banknote would be enclosed, my argent de poche. I wrote to him because I knew he was the only person who did as I asked, even though it was my mother who was legally in charge of me and it was to her decisions I had to submit. She sent her orders from Brasil. I had to have a German
room-mate because I had to speak German. And I spoke to the German, she gave me presents, chocolates she was always eating, American chewing gum, and art books. In German. With German reproductions. Blaue Reiter. Even her underwear was German. And yet I can’t find her name in the pigeon holes of my mind; girls lost in my memory. Who was she? She was such a non-entity for me, and yet I do remember her face and body. Perhaps, thanks to some malign trick, those we didn’t pay any attention to rise up again. Their features are more deeply impressed on us than those we did give time to. Our minds are a series of graves in a wall. Our non-entities are all there when the register is called, gluttonous creatures; sometimes they fly up like vultures to hide the faces of those we loved. A multitude of faces dwell in the graves, a rich pasturage. While I write, the German girl is sketching out, as in a police station, her own particulars. What is her name? Her name is lost. But it’s not enough to forget a name to have forgotten the person. She’s all there, in her grave in the wall.
It was clear I would have to spend the best years of my life in boarding school. From eight to seventeen. Previously they’d left me with an elderly lady, a grandmother. One day she decided she couldn’t put up with me any more, she said I was a savage. And yet I resembled nothing so much as her portrait hanging in the dining room. That’s why she wanted me out of her sight. Now I look more and more like her. She too is in one of the graves. With her indigo eyes. Thanks to her I went to a lot of boarding schools, got to know headmistresses, reverend mothers, mother superiors and Mères préfètes, but none of them had the authority my grandmother had. I always felt I could fool them, that their power was temporary, even if I did kiss their hands.
That happened in Italy, in a school run by French nuns, where, as usual, I was a boarder. Every evening, before going to bed, in dormitories as always, I would climb a narrow staircase with my companions. At the top, Mère préfète was waiting. Every evening she held out her hand under the dimmest possible lightbulb in the glimmer of the narrow stairs, before you went through into the night-time glow of the dormitories. Queuing up, we kissed her hand one by one. Then to the washbasins, then to bed, in the becalmed dormitories. The sheets felt stiff. Outside, if the moon and stars were up, lay a visionary desert.
They had taught us to curtsey, if I’m not mistaken, in four stages when in the presence of the reverend mother superior. I don’t remember how the reverend Mère préfète’s skin tasted, but I made that gesture of submission in exemplarily automatic fashion; I found it natural and I liked to stop and take in the whole scene with my companions queueing behind. Though holding her hand between thumb and index finger, my lips did not touch the skin; a sort of repugnance at our shared carnality crept over me.
The Mère préfète’s eyes were blue as alpine lakes at dawn, childish and venomous. She was so much a fin de race that her eyelids had turned to white lead; generations of supplicants must have kissed the hands of her forebears, before the guillotine. She had an oriental look to her, her forehead was covered with a veil, and veils are becoming on women, even old women. They confer majesty and mystery. And treachery. There was something soft about her body, something faisandé. The imminence of her return to dust, to ashes, and her imperious cream-coloured robes, conspired with the stiffness natural to her status to make her look like some great dame of sepulchres. Her voice was querulous sometimes, and extremely young, the way you might imagine the voices of eunuchs.
There, with the French nuns, I beheld class distinctions in all their sharpness. There were the dark-robed nuns, they were the humblest, the ones with no dowry, the poor who had to do the heavy jobs for the others. We addressed them as ‘sister’, and we could show disdain if we so desired. The reverend mothers treated them with condescension and bright buttery smiles. And in that school we all knew which of us were poor or orphans. There was one girl who didn’t pay the fees, and she did favours and little kindnesses for the Mère préfète. And maybe she spied. We were kind to her, she came from a family that had come down in the world, her eyes were silky blue and yellow. She was blonde and she came from the south; but a bothersome flibbertigibbet, because she was a spy. A spy, we supposed, out of necessity. We could have given her much more than the very reverend mothers did, but she was naturally inclined to be submissive to authority. Some people are born like that. We tried to win her over, but she wasn’t interested. She should have been taller, her calves were close to her ankles, there was no lift to her figure. Seated she was very pretty, her complexion and the colour of her hair suited her small slightly rough pottery face. She was an older pupil, kept out of charity. She was over eighteen, and that was sad. She practised her vocation – to us it seemed a profession – of being poor very well.
She attached a value to her poverty, the way others might to their extravagance. She was truly possessed by her indigent state, all she had was herself, but it was more than enough, since the aromas of servitude bubbled up from her constantly, a natural predisposition. How small and slippery her feet were when she went quick as quick up and down the corridor, and how well she knew how to disappear when the reverend mother called her, barely whispering her name. Reverend mothers always speak very softly. And how she would genuflect sideways in the chapel! Her big eyes were well suited to contemplating the crucifix. If she hadn’t been an informer, we would have believed, generously, in her magnanimous devotion and obedience.
At the Bausler Institut you don’t kiss the headmistress’s hand. It’s Frau Hofstetter who sometimes pretends to kiss your cheeks. She touches your cheek with her own and, even though this gesture has nothing to do with kissing, it is monstrous all the same. I don’t know how the little black girl can put up with it. She gets real kisses, we’ve seen. And she doesn’t give the slightest impression of being in need of affection, the black girl. Her expression is changing. It no longer looks like a doll’s, it is losing that depth toys have, that impassive, fatuous rigidity, that stupor of good little children.
Almost all of us have been lured into a state of stupor. Especially one small group of older girls. In the first term they were lazy, slothful and could barely speak in German, they had already been together in Kiruna or somewhere, they were almost married already, too adult for the Bausler. In boarding schools, or at least the ones where I went, a sort of senile childhood was protracted almost to insanity. We knew why those big girls with their exhausted vivacity sat down throughout recreation periods, as though waiting, whispering to each other and looking after their complexions. They were the clique of the experienced; they had already given themselves to the world, or at least so they would have had us believe. The first round was over and the next rounds buzzed like halos round their golden heads. They were the old ones.
‘Couldn’t you let me change room? I’d like to sleep in the older girls’ house.’ Frau Hofstetter had greeted me kindly, asking me if I would be going for a walk with my friend Frédérique again today. Her voice seemed to dwell on the word, friend. So, in the eyes of the authorities, Frédérique and I were a pair. ‘We are happy that you’ve found a friend. But you won’t be changing room. That was settled at the beginning of the year. Your mother writes to us from Brasil, and she, like us, is satisfied with your room-mate.’ Satisfactions have to stagnate. Her ruined eyes, her face powder and blue tailleur with brooch came up close. She caressed my head with a vague gesture. In some women, the facial skin cracks with using make up. ‘Danke, Frau Hofstetter.’ You must always say thank you, even when they have refused you something. Part of your education is learning how to thank with a smile. An awful smile. There is a mortuary look somehow to the faces of boarders, a faint mortuary smell to even the youngest and most attractive girls. A double image, anatomical and antique. In the one the girl runs about and laughs, and in the other she lies on a bed covered by a lace shroud. It’s her own skin has embroidered it.
Marion, the most attractive of them, a girl with character, has a mean look now when she sees the girl who turned her down. She flirts with a lot of th
e others, but she still hasn’t hooked her protector. She’s aware of her beauty and has no scruples. She must be twelve, maybe more. She’s a pleasurable thing to look at. We are not. We already have our little adolescents’ problems. She doesn’t. She’s enamelled, Marion. We find her eyes in cemeteries by gravestones: there’s a stalk and on the stalk a violet iris. Frau Hofstetter has noticed too. Marion hasn’t made her choice yet, I got the impression she was talking to Frédérique. Frédérique is not well loved; but she is respected. She hardly ever talks at table, and after lessons, if she’s not on her own, she’s with me. It’s ridiculous for me to be sleeping in the house with the younger girls. It’s the house for those who aren’t considered adult, even if they only miss it by a few months. We are young up to fifteen. Frédérique sleeps on her own, with her cupboard in order, her underwear folded like altar cloths, her thoughts folded too, in their nightly starch. I say goodnight to her, she doesn’t come to my room, our room, mine and the German’s. Not even if the German girl’s not there. But the German girl is always there, stretched out on the bed, saving herself up for her future life, not straining her adolescence. If they’re happy about it in Brasil, so be it.