About The Book
Adèle and her younger brother Axel grew up in a hamlet in the spectacular mountains of the Ardèche region in south-east France. Ten years later, they have returned to their childhood home and Adèle now drives the school bus. Adèle is desperate to keep the secret of her past—of when she was a boy. No one recognises her here now, but teenagers have a way of getting to the truth…When a terrifying snowstorm strands the bus on the mountain, Adèle and her passengers take shelter in a cave, and that’s when the stories come out.
Adele’s body has undergone seismic transformations. Just like the landscape around her, the cliff faces scaffolded to stop rockfalls, she has been reshaped, inside and out—to become a woman.
A powerful and beautifully written story of a boy who wanted to be a girl, who became a woman, who lives intensely through her new body and through the physical world around her, of nature and the weather—all of which shape Adèle.
Contents
Cover Page
About the Book
Title Page
Thursday, 1st September
my break
on the way to the high school
on the way to the primary school
on the way back from the high school
Wednesday, 26th October
on the way to the high school
Tuesday, 15th November
on the way to the high school
on the way to the primary school
Monday, 5th December
on the way to the high school
Tuesday, 3rd January
on the way to the primary school
on the way back from the primary school
on the way to the high school, by myself
my break
on the way back from the high school
Friday, 17th February
on the way to the high school
on the way to the primary school
on the way to the high school, by myself
on the way back from the high school
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Translator
Copyright page
I walk in the footprints left by my brother until we reach the bus stop.
Lola, winter, 2004–05
(my break)
As usual I was soon sick of the fair, the commotion. I sneaked away, down the back road with the wind turbines, then along a path to the right, into the forest. I squatted for a pee in the sweet-smelling humus, and sat down on a cool, flat stone to rest.
Behind me, in the distance, I could hear the bass throb of the fair. Bending over gave me a slight headache, which did me a world of good. I scratched the moist earth and found a cracked acorn that was a bit rotten. I put it in my pocket, then rubbed my hands together. But there was not much point in wiping the dirt off my hands, because I felt peculiar as I stood up, and the whole time I was walking I clutched, almost crushed, that rotten half-acorn in my clammy palm.
I know why I felt peculiar: it’s because there was something about the fair that made me think of the start of the school year. With the change of wind, I could still hear the sound of the clay-pigeon shooting, even in the depths of the forest. And nasty big fluorescent-green flies, also carried by the wind, swarmed on the back of my neck.
I kept walking, more and more irritated. It was stifling in the clearings and my cheeks felt unpleasantly hot. But in the forest, in the shadows that were still purplish from the rampant columbine flowers, I had the persistent sensation of being almost too cold. There is no mean temperature on the plateau, no springtime, only deviations. It’s hot, and then it’s not; it’s summer, but it’s winter. Back to school already.
I know perfectly well today’s the day, but two weeks ago, during the Pansy Flower Fete, that wind and the racket from the fair turned my mind back to my kids again, and I didn’t want to think about them then, no, not yet.
It was just this morning that my affection for them returned, as it does every year, when I get up early, with a lot of time to spare, collect the bus from the garage, calmly get myself ready, and cruise through the early dawn, before picking them up, one by one, or almost, at the start of their first day of school.
Near the lake there is a median strip where I can park. Next to an apple tree. The rotten apples on the ground roll underneath the bus and stick to the wheels, all squashed and mushy. I climb out and pick up two that are perfectly ripe. The day is beginning; I can scarcely see a thing. I’ll have to leave soon, but I have time now. From my spot up here, you can’t see the water, but you can see the lake, see clearly that the trees are there below the surface, in the sinkhole in the middle. Early in the mornings, that empty space is full of mist. It’s the hole in the lake, the lake, my break, my sea, my time.
I often take this break on my commute, before I start, or at the end.
Even though the apples don’t know it, it’s not really autumn, we’re only at the beginning of September, daybreak is still early, but the start of school makes the leaves fall, anyone can see that, and my shoes are all damp with dew at this parking spot above the forest that surrounds the lake.
Soon daybreak will come later, and I will only see my kids while it is still dark.
I approach the trees lower down, closer to the sinkhole’s spindrift shadows. I take the path, this bit of track that I have forged myself, by dint of heading down here patiently, or helter-skelter, nervous, wanting to get there fast, pushing through the trees and the frost. It descends almost imperceptibly, with branches that scrape, patches of wet chill, water smells, and on some days the far-off sound of beavers, like on the river when I was little. Scratching noises that scuttle away from my footsteps, from my memory.
At the end of my path there is a weeping birch tree, tall, old, bent, and beneath it my shelter, oval, narrow but comfortable. I sit down. But, despite the calmness within me, despite the seclusion I share with it, the lake is noisy, dribbling cold between the roots, all grey and black.
This lake is never calm, it is a deaf volcanic crater, blind as well, a grey hole, the sound of its backwash a thousand years old. The less the lake sees, the less we see, the more thunderous its echo.
The artificial lake on the bottom farm is so much quieter.
At the base of my birch tree the lake continues its noise, a constant noise that often envelops me before I arrive here. It guides me in the first glimmer of morning. A low, full sound, as if the volcano were no longer extinct.
When I was a little boy, I would often pretend to be dead. I wanted people to weep over me. I wept for myself, usually near a tree, under it or up inside it, just like I’m crying today, a woman weeping, in my weeping birch tree, hidden by the slender branches.
Here I am, eating one of the apples, a woman sitting in my female tree, its hips full of water. I say that, but I’ve never looked. I’ve never picked a birch flower and opened it up to find out, and I’m not alone there—I really wonder who takes an interest in the sex of trees. I actually think the birch tree, unlike the willow tree, has two sexes: the female flowers are above, on the higher branches. I look up, but I can’t see anything; it’s not the right time, or the right season. All I can see is a deluge of drab branches; all I can see is whiteness that is almost blue, a dirty pale blue that has been immersed in the peat bog. My tree is more weeping, more bent and trailing than a willow.
I part the twigs that prevent me from seeing the silt at my feet. In a flash, the tree and I are blanketed by a surge of water that swiftly turns into rolling waves. The lake absorbs all the light, reflects nothing, neither face nor gaze, neither sunlight nor haze.
I toss my apple core, and I cannot s
ee, cannot even guess where it falls. My birch is blue like all the trees around the lake. Scarcely any orange, even in autumn, because of the dominant, towering presence of the conifers, and scarcely any green in summer either, because of the grey, almost black, gaping hole of the volcano, filled with sinkhole slosh. In winter, there is no visibility, or very little. This is my murky blue space. The trees are not altered by the seasons, and time and water erosion have barely knotted their bark even after decades. My birch, like the rest of them, is blue, covered in dirty bruises; leafless in winter, it takes on the blue marine of the spruce trees; ageless, it takes on the shape of water, of tears, straightens itself a little, then, with its glabrous, soft leaves, it lets itself be lapped by ultramarine mosses. But the lake only spills back into itself, and my birch bathes in the same spot in the lake’s water, in the lake’s air, and I am sitting beneath it. Snug. My break.
I stay here now because I need the lake and the shade in order to remember, to snivel over my memories like an old woman. Memory has to be washed and refilled every day.
When I was a little boy, I used to hide, I looked for places like this, where I could sort out my feelings, and my mother would call out my name, right near me, without seeing me: her voice blaring before it faded, then came back, faded again, and ended up far enough away for me to be able to start thinking.
In the forest, years ago, over the sound of my mother’s voice, I heard a bell right next to my hiding spot. I wondered what the hell that cow was doing there, so far from the main fields. I parted the bushes and looked around a bit. But I was looking up too high. Suddenly I saw her, lying down, the crushing mass of her, wallowing in the soft, damp leaves, and it made me sick to see those leaves coming out of there, out of that enormous body in a heap on the earth all swollen with water. But the cow was more distressed than I was. She wasn’t one of ours, nor the neighbours’; she wasn’t one of the cows I knew, and I really knew a lot, dozens of them. This one was white, dirty and panting, overcome with cramps, bellowing. She wanted to get up because I was there, but I knew how to calm her down by placing my hand next to the painful area, pressing just enough. The outstretched legs of the calf were sticking out, stuck there. The skin of the torn sack hung empty. Too late. But I pulled like a deaf person (deaf to my mother’s still audible voice), with all the strength of my eight or nine years or whatever I was, to help her expel her dead calf. It was enormous, and heavy, too big, a calf with sturdy hips, a calf for the agricultural show. My arms were slippery with blood and mud, and soggy dead leaves. I didn’t manage to get it out. I wanted to go and tell someone, but I didn’t; I wasn’t sure if I’d done the right thing. I didn’t tell anyone; I heard my mother’s voice again calling my name and I was scared she’d get cross with me. I headed slowly back to the farm, trying to diffuse the emotion that was making my whole body writhe and shiver. I could have borrowed the calf-puller, but I didn’t know how to use it or carry the huge thing, bigger than me: there was no way. I kept thinking; I dragged my feet.
My mother seemed annoyed because my clothes were dirty from the forest. She knelt down and said, I’m not going to get cross with you, I’m happy when you play in the forest, but please be careful, I won’t be able to find a way to dry the washing in this weather.
For my mother, the weather meant the drizzle, the mist, the usual dampness around there, on the bottom farm, the rain, the fog or the snow, or even rain, fog and snow mixed together by the wind, the fog made of fresh snow because of the snowstorm, but this weather also meant all the time it took to do the laundry, the housework and everything else. She kept telling us, you don’t know how long it takes, and it’s already milking time, your father needs help in the cowshed, Axel, and you, come and help me with the basket, please.
I took one handle of the basket, my mother the other, and we climbed up to the hayloft.
No one ever spoke about the cow that came to calve, and died, rotting in the forest near our place. I know how quickly big animals like that start to stink, but no one said a thing. Neither did I.
Perhaps I dreamt it up, to invent an excuse for myself, to explain my filthy clothes, my distress, an explanation for me alone.
I wonder whether the artificial lake, by covering up my childhood, brought up these bodies, or what was left of them. For me, what’s left is the memory of all that effort of blood and of mud, of the dead leaves I rubbed myself with and blew my nose on afterwards, sobbing.
I cried a lot when I was little, often, and I didn’t know why.
After my operation, it was the same thing: I dissolved into tears when the first thing I felt on waking up was a pain so strong that it flooded from my new, raw vagina all the way into my mother’s womb. I was woozy from the morphine and contemplating my memories from all angles. There I was, carrying the heavy body of the dead calf all by myself. I opened my eyes again. And there was the ever-so-light foetus, so slight in my terrified little boy’s hands, terrified by this minuscule, unfinished baby, by all the blood coming out, and the swashing pools of it still to come out, by the screams of my father, who was telling me, let go of it, as he was leaning with all his weight on my mother’s pelvis, trying stupidly to stop the haemorrhaging. She had already given up: she was emptied out. We lived too far from the hospital, and my mother had said to my brother, who wanted to call the firefighters, leave it, you know I’ve had experience with this, it’s not the first time, anyway the snow is too heavy.
In pain, and under morphine that could scarcely relieve it, I saw the two little bodies, the big calf and my little brother—my little purple foetus—swimming, alive, in the waters of the lake. The oversized calf went under. It was as if the scrap of flesh, my little brother, my little sister, was being cradled by underwater movements. It floated up. In my delirium, I reached out my hand, I touched a raised arm, a slender, bluish leg, both floating on the surface, a slight shoulder, hollowed out like a piece of driftwood.
I would never have a child, that’s what my brother kept saying: If you do that, you’ll never have a child. I had just done that, yes, and too bad, it was all well and good if I never had dead babies.
The different blues of the water are not the same as the blues of the trees, but in the shade of the lake they are impossible to differentiate.
(on the way to the high school)
I’m driving towards the teenagers, their shadows. They must be shivering a bit this first morning back.
I pick up the two who live furthest away first. They are odd boys, friends and yet separate. They never sit next to each other, and yet they’re always together.
The first one on my run, the one who gets up earliest, is the eldest of three children with big gaps in their ages. The family is indifferent to the local gossip surrounding them. They say around here that the mother is a witch because, instead of discarding nettles on the manure like old people do, she puts them in everything, in soups, teas, decoctions, and also because she has books all over the house, even in the kitchen. Her oldest boy is called Sylvain. His skin is soft (thanks to poultices for relieving acne), his eyes and complexion dark brown, like the forest. Then comes Lise, pale, translucid, and a much younger brother, Minuit, two and a half years old, tiny next to his schoolbag, golden-blond all over, even his skin. He wriggles around so much that it’s a wonder he ever sleeps (I still haven’t found the off button, Lise confided one evening, sighing).
When they told me, four years ago, about the dispensation for under-fives in the shuttle bus, I feared the worst. Disciplining toddlers, settling them. Finding booster seats. Buckling their seatbelts, wiping their noses, their cheeks, don’t cry, that’s enough, come on, that’s enough. But there were no horrible snotty-nosed kids. For a long time I only picked up older kids, and then after Easter last year two very young boys, but there has never been a problem.
Minuit is always with his sister; he holds on to her as if he were some kind of appendage, and Lise’s whole body is in tune with her brother’s. When they climb in, pressed toge
ther, bumping against each other, they look like a gleaming, coppery two-headed monster. Minuit flanks her, squeezed against her hip, and Lise pulls his little face to her belly in an older girl’s maternal gesture. I don’t know how you say a big sister’s gesture: fraternal doesn’t work, and maternal only just works, but not quite. I envy her those gestures, those postures, that warm mouth, still dribbling, against her jumper. My little brother would never have let me do that; my brother says that he has never had a sister, that he will never have one.
Minuit will have grown a bit since June; perhaps Lise will be able to sit down and unlatch him from her body.
This golden-haired youngest brother is so beautiful (and has long hair and an androgynous first name), but no one thinks Minuit is a girl. He’s definitely a boy, with the whole kit and caboodle: a boisterous manner, brusque gestures, square shoulders. After the Easter school holidays, he was still tiny beneath his mop of hair. He was like a lion—no, a tigger (already less frightened after a few weeks, but still clinging to his sister). Oh, sorry, tiger.
The other little boy is Hugues, who is almost three now, and who was already behaving just like a big kid last year. He’s a little peasant boy, like I was, or rather like my little brother was, sturdy and smart.
The teenagers set up the booster seats before getting off at school. If he has to remind the others, Sylvain does it in a voice that leaves no room for argument:
The seats for the little kids, hey, are you guys deaf, we have to get out the kids’ seats.
One morning he told me he had other younger brothers:
But they live in Germany, and I have more, too, older brothers, but they’re creeps. On the other hand, he said, smiling, I only have one sister. And you, Adèle, are you someone’s sister?
Then he slouched into his hoodie, without waiting for the response that I wouldn’t have given him anyway.
He lives with his mother and the two youngest boys on the other side of the mountain. I’ve only seen the mother once. She could be a witch; she’s certainly a recluse, greeting you as if it hurts her chapped lips to speak. She’s no chatterbox. I don’t like talking much either, but I’m not rude. Her face reminds me of something; I don’t know what, since she never speaks.
One Day I'll Tell You Everything Page 1