The second boy on my route lives on this side of the mountain; he gets on when I’ve driven back around. Because they make me do this circuit around the mountain, where the Loire River has its source, I call them Loire kids, Ligerians, I even say my Loire kids, my Ligerians. I should call them Upper Loire kids, Upper Ligerians, but it’s a mouthful, and as I only call them that in my head, it’s my business.
My second Ligerian has the name of a flower, I think. I think Niel is the name of a flower. Nielle, he says—he often has to correct me, as does Sylvain and the others who copy Sylvain: Nielle des Blés, corncockle flower, but it doesn’t grow above one thousand metres, that’s why he’s so small, so skinny, says Sylvain. Nielle never replies; he doesn’t even seem upset.
Nielle and Sylvain, like a lot of former townies, have eco-parents, bush types, rough as guts. The other kids make fun of them in a more or less amiable way. Their pants are suitably stained.
Oh yeah, former townies, I dunno (Sylvain gets a bit annoyed sometimes). I’ve always lived in the sticks, my mother has too. But it wasn’t strictly local, so for you guys that’s far away, just because it’s not right here. The others counter: Adèle, no one says that about you, you’ve been here a long time, it’s not the same, and anyway you know everyone, even the old people, so that means it’s okay to say you’ve always been here. Honestly, whichever old person we talk about, you know them, even the dead ones. Is it because you’ve got an old lady’s first name?
Before they run out of taunts, the boys put me at ease by insulting me, and laughing. They’re often two-faced like that: smiling or even sharing secrets when they’re by themselves, then sometimes going too far when they’re in a group.
The kids repeating a year have a chip on their shoulder. Sylvain cops it for being a smartarse jerk, a maverick in a hoodie.
Just because my mother has three thousand books instead of three cheap paperbacks you can wipe your bum with doesn’t mean she’s not from the country.
Oh yeah, books of spells, recipe books to turn you into a toad. But you’re already a toad.
Sometimes they stop there; sometimes they stand up, argue and scuffle, but not Nielle. When there’s a tussle, I brake and pull over. They know they have to be quiet and sit down if they want me to start the engine again.
They’ve never taken advantage of it to be late for school.
If Sylvain has stood up, he sits back down in his seat at the other end of the bus from Nielle. They stare at each other.
They have a close and tempestuous friendship, which has not changed in four years, not since their first year of high school, when their families arrived, almost simultaneously, on the plateau. They are joined at the hip and yet loners, silent when they’re together, sometimes bound by a complicity that nothing could undermine. Nielle and Sylvain, my Loire kids, my Ligerians. Two big boys, both the oldest of single-parent families. (In the beginning, tongues were wagging about the witch, but she didn’t let them push her around, or, rather, she just let them gossip.) Nielle’s father is a widower, so, respect.
Nielle says, Hello, Adèle, welcome back, and he goes and sits away from Sylvain, flicking Sylvain’s hood down as he passes. I’m happy nothing has changed.
The bus that has been my life for ten years is a small van, a four-wheel drive with sliding doors, nine seats. This is the first year all the seats are filled. Eight children, eight teenagers, morning and evening.
Sometimes the route changes in winter, when we have to detour round the snowdrifts. The commute with the big kids is not quite the same as the commute with the little kids. Even if a lot of the big kids have younger brothers and sisters, some of the big kids are still the youngest in their family. And some of the little kids are the oldest in their family, but you can be certain that none of those children will be an only child. I don’t know any only children around here, even among the in-law additions to a family.
When I was a little boy, there was one, but her parents had her very late, that’s why. She smelled bad.
I have to pick up the youngest and oldest children of the new families from other hamlets, other farms. My trip changes every time there’s a new fraternal regrouping.
No fights today. It’s normal on the first day back at school.
Joël is smiling, looking good, all dressed up; that’s not like him at all. Julien gets on a bit further down the road, the fourth pick-up on my trip (and, like Joël, starting Year Nine). He whistles when he sees Joël, shakes his hand and sits down, then gets up straightaway (jostling Sylvain):
Adèle, you too look splendid, but you always do.
It’s his way of saying hello, gently ironic, awkwardly polite.
Nielle turns around and belatedly notices the transformation in Joël’s appearance. He even seems to be more alert, but soon enough he returns to his separate space, the space he reserves for himself, right there, just behind that gaze of his, an angel in a daydream, enveloped by fantasies of girls, and by the girls’ dreams and fantasies, because of his freckles, his delicate build, his parchment-white face beneath his colourless hair. During the first few days of his Year Seven, I thought Nielle was going to vomit when we took the corners, but he has that sickly look all the time. And the girls are maternal, they go up to him and ask how he is. But they’ll never know: Nielle is a mystery that only Sylvain is allowed to get close to.
There she is, the first girl. She is also the first one to bring me, barely masked beneath a lemon-cinnamon synthetic fragrance, the lingering, benevolent odour of the stables. I inhale and I look at her. How she has changed. Over a single summer, teenage girls deviate: they don’t become adults, they don’t leave childhood either, but they deviate, uncannily, into an impossible age. How old could this one be? Anywhere from thirteen to fifteen, it’s impossible to know, impossible to understand.
Nadège looks at me. I’d definitely say she was sixteen or seventeen if I didn’t know that she’s never skipped a year. She’s in Year Ten, like Sylvain, Nielle and Sébastien. I’ve got a lot of big kids this year. She’s smiling, not at me, not at the boys, she’s smiling, but at no one, perhaps at someone who’s not there. The four boys are silent. Sébastien gets in after Nadège. He’s the fifth and final boy, the oldest. There are two more girls to pick up. It’s easy to keep count. I’m always told in advance, at the stop beforehand, when there’s one missing, because here everybody knows everything about everyone, except about Nielle, and Nielle is often absent.
I was also often absent in primary school and high school, but it was another time, another place—another place and yet the same; it was probably a whole other story.
Nadège turns around. Sébastien has nudged her. I look at Sébastien. He adores me, so he gives an apologetic gesture with his hands. Nadège sits down. I get going on the road again, and it’s the road that gets me going again, just like every year.
There are a lot of twists and turns on the trip, but it’s almost flat. It’s horizontal—my thoughts rise from there and descend no further, or rather they descend, descend, and rise no further. The kids, even the young ones, tap me gently on the shoulder when I miss a stop, but that doesn’t happen very often.
I’m thinking about the bewitcher, the mother of Sylvain, Lise and Minuit. No one knows what she lives off, or how she provides for her three children, or where the three fathers are. Despite the similarity between the two youngest, there are certainly three fathers, according to the rumour mill, which is never entirely wrong. Sylvain scowls inside his hoodie if anyone gets too nosy. Lise just shrugs and smiles. Her mother the witch, the wild one, her nose buried in her books.
Rumour has it, however, that she doesn’t know how to write, that she scribbles indecipherable marks, that she muddles through with Sylvain’s help when it comes to official documents. That’s what the postman says, anyway, and also that she won’t even offer you a coffee, not to mention a glass of wine, she stays there with her nose in her books, but she’s pretending, for sure, there’s no such thing a
s someone who knows how to read but not to write.
My brother used to make fun of me.
He called me the bookworm girl. I wasn’t yet a girl in the eyes of other people, no, I scarcely was in my own eyes, but coming from my brother, it was especially insulting to be called a girl. Reading instead of playing football was a girly thing to do. The bookworm girl was as bad as the fibber girl, the girlfriend (the worst name of all), the bratty girl.
We used to argue all the time, and the rest of the time we fought, or rather he fought me, wrestling me to the ground until I begged him to stop because I couldn’t move, and soon wouldn’t have been able to breathe, that’s for sure.
Afterwards, I didn’t say a word. I didn’t berate him at all. He should have called me the silent girl. Mostly I read in order not to speak.
As a little boy, until he was perhaps about five years old, he agreed to play tea parties with me, on condition that he could be Davy Crockett (Maman made us costumes). We dressed up in calfskin pants, the leather still rough, badly tanned and strong-smelling. We carried the saucepans, our rabbit-skin caps, all our bits and pieces, down to the riverbank, where I cooked up some grub using peat for fuel. It smelled good.
My brother grew faster than I did, and when I was nine or ten, he was stronger and taller than me (he was only about eight). He loved fighting, I didn’t, and I became aware of my difference by seeing myself as a kind of inverse female figure in his ever more brutal games. I came to understand myself as a girl slowly, implicitly, through my body and through my big little brother’s punches. He was Davy Crockett and I was everything else: the trees, the beavers, the solitude, the peat bog lapped by the river.
The river no longer exists, it’s a lake now—artificial, wide and flat, lying immense and still over the top of our farm. Our farm, our home, now a waterlogged phantom, a ruin, almost destroyed, reappears each time the lake is drained. And when the waters abate, the stables, the paths, and the river’s bridges reappear.
Nadège gets up to come and sit next to me (move over Joël, and Joël obediently heads to the back of the bus), the boys are annoying her, and anyway she wants to tell me that she saw me briefly at the Pansy Flower Fete: But why didn’t you stay, what’s the point of coming if you don’t stay for a while?
The irritating benefit of short trips in a bus is that two students sit up the front, on my right.
So you came to see someone, and then he wasn’t there, or did you come because you’d been invited by someone, some friends, and then you were really bored out of your brain once you got there, is that it, Adèle? No way, I’m sure you went to see a guy, and he wasn’t there. What’s he like?
I smile. They’re all used to my silence, I often reply with smiles, or not. Yes or no written on my face. Nadège is pleased to know that I’m in love, or something like that, well, something like that, right, Adèle?
Something like that, yes, but with a gap of a few years. When I was Nadège’s age, I used to go to the village fetes with my brother. We went there to be seen, to flirt and drink. Well, he went to be seen, to flirt and drink. I followed him. I was the older brother, but I followed him, always. I stuck close to him, he called me his little barnacle, laughing about it, and despite everything I liked his laughter. He often made fun of me, and often in public, as if conspiring to provoke something, fate, my future. And now and then he would make fun of me to my face, just the two of us, in an odd kind of complicity. I liked it, our private jokes, and his laughter, as if he was suddenly okay with me after all: Of course, my little barnacle, why not, one day you’ll be a girl, yes, you already are, come on, just in the body of a boy, tell that to Papa, you’ll see. He guffawed and grabbed my shoulder to knock me off balance. I lost my balance, of course, and in the same movement my body seized on my brother’s laughter. I toppled into his jibes, tempered as they were with well-hidden tenderness and intimacy.
He was the opposite, he always kept his balance, well, it was more like the balance that kept him. He climbed up anything, trees, rocks, cliffs, the barn wall, he was not the slightest bit afraid of heights—they gave him confidence.
Nadège stays close to me. I muster a meagre effort to say yes or no to her. You know, I add, I just wanted to see if it was still the same as when I was young. So she’s really happy now, thinking that as a young girl I used to go out and get hit on. Then she goes back to her seat.
Hit on: I can’t stand that expression. I picture myself being examined right to my inner core, a pole penetrating my bodily fluids, probed as if I was a corpse.
I stop to pick up the two little girls in Year Seven (no Year Eights this year), girlfriends, neighbours, almost sisters, who are never apart. Not friends like my Loire kids, who are never together. No, these two girls are like Siamese twins. And sometimes furious with each other, which is part and parcel of their relationship. Their names are Marine and Marie, I kid you not. I’ve been driving them around since they were in kindergarten. They’re very anxious about starting high school and when they get in the bus the others tease them. They sit up the front with me, next to each other, since Nadège has gone back with the boys (okay, okay, Adèle, I’m putting my seatbelt on, give me a second), and Joël is still there too. They both start talking at the same time to warn me that the gorges are shut. I tell them, I know, I’m going to go around via the saddle, don’t worry, girls, that’s why the timetable has changed. You know, Adèle, they say there’s going to be a landslide. Hey, no, there’s already been a landslide; no, there hasn’t; yes, there has.
Off we go with a shouting match, finally, the first for the year, the Year Ten and Year Nine kids join in. Stories about rockfalls. Around here, it’s like the White Lady stories, the woman in white on the side of the road. Everyone knows something and knows nothing. Everyone has seen some sort of rockfall, or their brother or their cousin has. On a bend in the road; no, it was where the white lines converge, that’s where people have been killed; don’t be so stupid. No one’s died this time, there was a landslide this summer. No, there wasn’t, not yet. Yes, there was. Oh, you’re such an idiot, it was years ago. I calm them down by reassuring them that it’s just reinforcement works on the cliff face, but it’s a major construction site, it’ll be there for a few months, so we’ll be taking the detour for a long time. Until the snow season? Yes, until the snow, perhaps even until after the snow.
Seen from above, the gorges look quite strange. The weather has been cold, and all the humidity rising from the river turned into frost overnight, so it appears bleached in the dawn light. It’s as if the frost is trapped in a demarcated area. It stops around the road level, overflowing on each side of the river without reaching the top of the rock face.
If we stared down into the whiteness, it could be dark grey when we look up, but once again the light shining in our eyes is bright and clear. It’s our new school term, our countryside, in black and white and grey.
And that guy, Adèle, you know, that guy, do you think he’ll be there this year? I look at Sébastien in the rear-vision mirror. He is the only student repeating for the second time, he remembers the first time we had to make a huge detour. I watch his eyes grow wide.
We had seen the guy after the first big landslide, more than five years ago. At the time, the firemen did mention someone dying in their car, but they never found the body, only bits of the wrecked car, weeks, months later, crumbled like mica into the surface of the rock. I had to drive a long way down below the plateau and head for several kilometres along a road that was three lanes wide and yet wedged against the mountains, all hairpin bends. About six o’clock in the evening, on the return run from school, on a bend, one precise bend, always the same, there was a man, his back against the crash barrier, perilously, facing the road, always around six o’clock and always in the same position. He was staring straight ahead, slightly to the left. We didn’t have time to get a good look at him as we drove past, but because he was there every day, same time, same bend, we had the weird opportunity to lo
ok at him in bits, a different part of him every day, until we knew his unchanging items of clothing by heart, his age, uncertain but at least fifty, his idiotic position. His suicidal gaze hidden by a tatty balaclava.
No one on the plateau knew him. He must have been from down below, and come up at the end of the afternoon to sit it out against the crash barrier, waiting for whoever or whatever. In any case, we speculated about all sorts of things. From first thing in the morning, the stories came thick and fast. The young Year Seven kids (including Sébastien) were hoping he was the guy who had disappeared in the landslide. The older kids gave a plausible but ludicrous response: it was impossible because the cliff had collapsed right up the top, and we were right down the bottom (so how could he have got down?). Every morning, we’d be discussing why, how and especially whether he’d be there that evening. And every evening, when the students climbed in the bus, they didn’t say a word until we reached that corner. Not saying a word meant whispering lots of things, but very softly, so as not to break the spell, the story, of our humdrum but extraordinary encounter.
One day the man was no longer there, but in the empty spot where he had been there was a distinct (Adèle, you’re our witness) dent in the crash barrier. So then my teenagers got their parents involved. They trawled through the news all weekend, as did I, and we called the hospitals down the mountain, the fire brigades at the top, but nothing matched up. One of the older kids decided then that he must have changed his timetable, and, oddly enough, that explanation was enough for us.
I silence the general excitement provoked by Sébastien’s question. (What guy? What the hell’s he talking about, Adèle?) No, we’re not taking the same detour, we’re not going that far down.
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