The rain is getting heavier, but I’m back on the highway, where the snow plough has done a better job. I can’t manage to separate a slight feeling of guilt, resurfacing from who knows where within me, from a sort of intense excitability, a heightened sensibility from another era, a backwards era when we were burdened with just as much suffering and just as many emotions, but when the conventions of the day forbade talking about them, to the point that young women would faint at the slightest physical sensation on their bare skin. I feel as if I am disappearing, like them, into my scars and their poisonous contractions, as I remember the sound of the tarpaulin being pulled down over a pathetic good afternoon or good evening.
No, it wasn’t pathetic, because he looked at me for a long time, because the reverberation of the tarpaulin is still pulsing through my thighs. And that reverberation makes me feel once again as if I don’t fit into my body, like when I was an adolescent, as if my skin was too tight.
Yesterday Axel was speaking too loudly, but I didn’t dare ask him to lower his voice. In the past he’s refused to speak to me, and since his accident I’ve become his confidante, so yesterday, when he smiled his odd, idiotic smile, I pretended I wasn’t looking, and when he started talking too loudly, I said nothing. I didn’t want to risk another silence of several months or several years simply because I really hate it when people yell.
All he could do was yell when, after a period or two of silence and vociferous letters, he came to see me, to harass me. Harassing me was his way of dissuading me from having the operation.
He had come back to the apartment without warning one afternoon just before I left for Brussels—even though I had written to him to say that I didn’t want to see him. I was frightened of him. I had warned my boyfriend at the time, who was standing by, ready to intervene if I telephoned him. My brother and I had not seen each other or talked on the phone for over a year. He would write me epic letters that made me feel completely insignificant, that reduced me to a state of pure, raw, unbearable pain. And yet I read them all, I inflicted on myself the reading of those long letters that arrived at regular intervals. They hurt me a lot, and yet sometimes they made me laugh, like when he rewrote the history of psychiatry to suit his argument. He wanted to put me into a box that suited his case a bit better. In some of his letters, he tried to get me to admit that I was a repressed homosexual, he found it impossible to separate identity and sexuality. When he wrote that—You’re a homo—I tried to imagine myself sleeping with a girl, which just confused me. Then I understood that he had completely missed the point: he pictured me sleeping with a boy, even though I already had such beautiful breasts, and the body language that goes with them.
The evening before my operation, he was fidgeting in the twilight around my little suitcase, which was sitting on the couch. He was begging me not to go ahead with it. He was preoccupied with his own life and his memories, locked into his useless reasoning, he talked about how Papa no longer recognised us, and how he wanted still to be able to recognise me. And yet he was the one who had never tried to understand me, to know who I really was.
I looked at him as if he was abandoning me.
The operation that was about to happen was aggravating a discord between us that had existed forever, a vague misunderstanding, the echoes of which I nevertheless heard as a residual whirring sound that, even now, after all this time, hurts me, terrifies me.
Our adolescence had not gone well, and not simply because of Maman’s death and Papa’s negligence. Things had not gone well between us. Adolescence drove us apart. I wanted to speak about my body that I hated so much, I couldn’t, so I stayed silent. He played the tough guy and that totally froze me out, it left me mute, helpless, deaf even when he tried to question me. I was terrified, paralysed by the fear of not being understood, and I think he suffered as a result of my silence.
That night he talked, and talked. He harassed me for almost ten hours. I had to sleep before catching the train. I was no longer listening, I was certain I had lost my brother a long, long time ago, I loved him so much, I loved someone who had disappeared.
If you do this, I won’t have a big brother anymore, he said.
Are you listening? I wanted to do this job so I could be alone, do you understand, be inaccessible, yes, that’s it, inaccessible, because when you are three hundred metres up in the air no one comes and hangs around you. But they keep tabs on you, from a distance, through binoculars. You can’t see them. That other guy was looking at us through binoculars and he knew what was going to happen. Well, no. Well, yes. You know, I’ve already had discussions with guys like him, I often talk to them, I need to understand what they’re making me do. I want to know everything, all the time, why, for example, is it only the wind from the south that knocks all those small stones down into the gorges, and how do they sweep the much bigger ones along in their wake? But those guys, not one of them goes up the mountain, not one. They take their photos from down below, or from a chopper, they stick them in their computers, do their little calculations, mark up anchor points. Well, a few points—the reinforcement points for the rockfall netting. As for the anchor points and the stud bolts, all the gear for the men to access the mountains, they don’t always provide that, in fact hardly ever, especially when it’s impossible to climb via the top of the mountain—that would be far too demanding for them. Here you go: printouts, diagrams, photocopies in the site logbook, you’ll figure it out. I only knew one geologist who was also a rope-access technician, he worked out his anchor points directly on the rock. But all the others just look at you through binoculars. In their research departments it’s worse, they don’t have a broad enough perspective, they scribble away, five cubic metres to be excavated here, ten to be buttressed there, whereas the whole slab is like fifty metres wide—they don’t notice the little crack on the left, they don’t see the connection between that and the instability of the slab, and do you know why? Because they’re not hanging face to face with it, because they’re not alone, in the cold, in the gusts of wind—when you’re not even sure if the rope is running through the anchor ring. When you’re worried about the lifeline you rigged up for yourself. Sometimes, you end up in places where no one has ever been before, do you understand that? The site managers are the worst, they’re just sales staff, selling their site, that’s all. The foreman wasn’t there and the other day, this little jerk, a young guy, he couldn’t be arsed, he wanted to save some time and energy, and there you go.
What are you talking about, Axel? What on earth are you talking about? Because, right now, for me, what happened the other day doesn’t matter. It’s dramatic, but it doesn’t matter.
Last year we lost a guy, it was fucking stupid, he got himself wiped out by a deluge of boulders, he passed under a full netting because he couldn’t be arsed going around, can you believe it? Yeah, sure, okay, it’s got nothing to do with the geologist, but when I record the eight-millimetre gap in the site logbook, he just laughs, it doesn’t make him evacuate the area. He picks up his binoculars again as if we were just birds.
Axel lowered his voice, he seemed exhausted, he stared at me, sullen because I was smiling, but I was so happy to be listening to him, and I found it strange to imagine my brother roped up, observed through binoculars by some kind of boss who was a bit of a voyeur, a bit of a caretaker, a bit of an ornithologist.
He was bare-chested, he looked magnificent. It was the first time I’d seen his upper thighs since the summer of the burning tree. The summer of our departure from the farm.
When we were adolescents, I was disturbed by his body, sometimes I even despised him for it. After he’d come back from the barn one evening, he pulled off his shirt in front of the fireplace. He leaned forward, as if about to fall into the flames, warming his shoulders as his skin-tight T-shirt stretched out of shape. He stuck his face further into the orange blaze and the back of his neck was exposed. I couldn’t stand watching him, seeing what I was going to become, what I should already have
been (Papa used to joke about the delay in my physical development). I remember getting up to set the table and pushing him aside as I walked past.
In the evening on the farm I always said goodnight to him when his back was turned, and I avoided turning over to face his bed. I never went into the bathroom at the same time as him.
I didn’t want to get used to his man’s body.
When I was finally ready to do it, in town, when I finally had mine, my body, he was the one who became fiercely prudish.
In our apartment, he would come out of the bedroom, throw me a bra I’d left there, and say, For fuck’s sake, don’t leave your dirty clothes lying around.
In boarding school, we were never in the same bedroom, and I dreaded the weekends and the holidays because of that childhood bedroom we shared.
During high school, we had other things to worry about. Papa was forgetting things. The more he forgot, the more Maman came back to us, because we remembered then that she wasn’t there. My body had developed, but I was determined to reject that body, so I stayed skinny, a daydreamer, as if I was in another world. We were more and more preoccupied by the memories of Maman that surfaced from Papa’s forgetting. We talked about it in secret. We hardly ever went back to the farm. I had almost given up my habit of distancing myself from Axel’s body, my panicky compulsion of remaining withdrawn, until the day his body reappeared before me—ablaze.
During that final summer, as the waters rose, just before we moved into our apartment, we wanted to have a party, a barbeque in front of the house, on the shore of the emerging lake. I had so many things to celebrate, some sad, some not so sad. My baccalaureate, our departure for the city, and what we discreetly referred to as Papa’s solution, a situation we were handling with kid gloves. We should have said the solution for Papa, but he had to remain the father, the one who made the decision, so we preferred saying Papa’s solution.
Along with some friends, a few distant neighbours and Papa, we had set ourselves up around trestle tables near the water—the rising, rippling water where we liked to dabble our toes.
Papa went inside to bed quite early, as soon as the night set in. He told us to be careful with the barbeque, because in his opinion it was too close to the dead tree. And as the dead tree was against the house, and the house was not yet under water, he didn’t want to see it going up in flames. Yeah, yeah, Papa, we’re big kids now. We were just ribbing him, but he didn’t seem very impressed.
My brother got drunk with the others. We let the embers die down. They all decided to sleep there, in sleeping bags, by the shifting edge of the water. I joked about their bodies washing up tomorrow. I sat absentmindedly watching lines of ants leaving a crack in the dead tree, then I went up to our bedroom. I felt a little uneasy in bed, and suddenly it hit me what the ants were doing. I ran outside.
The flames were already as high as Papa’s face, as he stood there in his pyjamas, motionless, helpless. I sent him back to bed and I went over to wake Axel. He hurtled out of his sleeping bag, stumbled into his jeans, yelling at me to go and get an axe, quickly. The others stirred, but they were far too drunk, useless and tangled up in their bags. They went back to sleep.
I had already uncoiled a hose, but all I was doing was dampening the flames, through which I could see Papa shaking his head in the window of his bedroom. There was only a preposterously thin trickle of water coming out of the hose, the groundwater catchment was almost dry. I started carrying buckets of water from the lake. My brother, who was trying to kick the trunk of the tree, yelled out again: Stop fooling around and get me the fucking axe!
He began attacking the tree with the axe and there was his body, looming right in front of my eyes.
I watched Axel’s shoulders heaving with the effort, his arms tensed. I watched the sparks at the end of his hands as they gripped the axe stuck in the charred flesh of the bark. I loved his firm arms, the colours straining under the skin. I heard the creaking of burning wood fibres as they tore apart. I loved the nape of his neck, the spot where the contractions of his muscles were firing. I watched as his sweat sputtered and sparks landed on his dark, glowing torso.
And then everything stopped, and with a weary kick my brother rolled the smouldering trunk along the ground to the water. The splattering and the sizzling woke up the others, who were soaked, startled, almost angry.
Yesterday in the hospital while he was talking, I was able to follow the shapes he made as he moved. His muscles are long and rounded. He has a labourer’s muscles, not muscles from working out in a gym, and I find that touching.
You know, he said, in order to be a rope-access technician, it’s not enough to be able to scale mountains and have confidence in your equipment, the anchor bolts tightened properly and all that, you have to have a hell of a lot of experience of the cold, of solitude, you have to be in peak physical condition. It’s not enough just to know how to climb, you have to have confidence in yourself and know your limits, and work—work on your limits, your weaknesses.
He was whispering, as if he was delivering secret information. As I studied his arm, his forearm, his taut wrists and his good hand, I felt as if I was dreaming about his manoeuvres on the rock walls. But he sat down abruptly and hid his head in his magnificent arms, his words muffled, his hands grasping his hair, the splint raised above the middle of his head.
He was looking at me through binoculars, he saw the rock face detach, he watched me fall.
It’s over, Axel.
No. The noise, you can’t imagine the noise it made, the pandemonium, and all around everything was shaking.
I arrive at the village and the high school looms up ahead, perched on the hill, with a panoramic view
from the boarding school.
My big kids grab their bags reluctantly. They still spare me a few words, like they always have. See you later, Adèle, have a good day, things like that.
I think yesterday was the day my brother came back to me.
(on the way to the primary school)
For a few days now, the good weather has refuelled the conversations. It’s good for winter tourism, cross-country skiing, skating, telemarking, skijoring. And the plateau is vast beneath the sun, artificially vast. The beautiful, immense barrenness of winter. The rock walls appear even steeper and more picturesque. In my mind, however, the plateau is never as seriously soul-stirring as in a snowstorm or in the fog: the plateau, our roads, our fields, our forests and our lakes, our volcanoes. Our footsteps muddied and dripping in the sunken paths. Our footsteps obstructed by the wind. The wire fencing at the edge of the summer pastures catches hold of the droplets of water in the fog. I’d rather they were swallowed up by a snowstorm than sucked dry in a flash by good weather.
I don’t like snow in the sunshine. It offends me. It’s nothing more than a tourist attraction, just there to dazzle.
The weather is extremely cold. Faint stars float in the air, wispy stars made of ice, tiny, living stars that fall onto the snow. Minuscule transparent spiders. It looks like the most incredible, sparkling translation of a Christmas carol.
Hugues is playing around with his boots, I can see him bobbing up and down in the distance, and when he lets go of his mother’s hand he leaps into the bus at full speed. He tries to explain to me as clearly as possible (except that he can’t, he’s too excited) how the snow today doesn’t seem to be the same as usual, if I understand him correctly, there’s a funny kind of frost on top, and it looks exactly, exactly, exactly (he pronounces that word perfectly, three times) the same as the grated coconut on the New Year’s Eve cake the day before yesterday. It’s like the snow has changed, like there wasn’t even any snow last night, and I just wanted to eat it, but my brothers and my sister, they say that you can’t because the snow, it’s like a filter. But I really want to…He stops to gasp for breath, and to put on his seatbelt like a big kid, next to Minuit, then the two of them start up again with their quirky kids’ chatter about the weather. Lise keeps an eye on them from
a distance.
Hugues’ words fitted exactly with my feelings. Despite the difficulty he had articulating them, he used words of terrifying precision to describe my loathing for this violently beautiful weather. When it’s fine, it’s like the sickening taste of a birthday cake, or a special occasion, which impels us to go out walking in groups. Walking with family, with lovers. You have that bad taste in your mouth, but you’ve got to hold hands, and smile, and say how lucky we are, oh yes, I think we can agree that things have turned out well (especially if you’re on holidays, what a splendid day it is).
I drive past the watershed between the Atlantic and Mediterranean oceans, two arrows on a signpost in a picture-postcard landscape. Shit, it drives me crazy. Bring on the evening.
Paule and Nil climb on board in a bad mood.
Non-identical twins, brother and sister.
They were born here, swaddled in their parents’ unfortunate reputation as tree-huggers. Roughnecks from somewhere else, carting around weird habits and ideas about outdoor education for the people. The neighbours still occasionally poke fun at their composting toilets: almost like back in the old days, when people shat in the cowshed, remember, their turds sprinkled with sawdust, or hay in the summer and dead leaves in autumn, it’s disgusting. The twins say they throw their mandarin peel in there too, and their hair after Maman has cut it. Papa says it all turns into compost afterwards. At least we aren’t wasting drinking water on shit. The others shrug: what difference does it make, since the runoff from the groundwater catchment overflows alongside the farms.
There’s no shortage of water.
The twins’ problem is not the smell of the dunny. It’s the sound of the wolf.
You can still hear it years later.
Soon after the birth of the little ones, the roughneck father took into his care another set of twins, Shendo and Dryad. A male and a female wolf. It was all illegal. He put them in the care of the leader of the dog pack, a big Siberian husky, and they immediately fell into line. The guy had gone to a zoo at night and taken the twins, in order to demystify the fear of wolves propagated by human stupidity: I’m telling you, hunters and also writers, storytellers, yes, the ones who wrote Little Red Riding Hood, they’re all complete idiots, even stupider than the cops. A wolf is like a caver’s rope, it allows you to go deeper, to arouse the spirit, do you get it, to damn well throw light on all those narrow-minded ideas, yeah, those idiotic fables. That’s how the roughneck talks.
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