It’s my mother who knows everything. That’s normal, she’s a witch.
And he begins to tell the story of my life.
He tells it as if he was summarising a book, as if he was talking about a film, bits missing, or made up, a bogus timeline, but almost everything is accurate.
I stay silent, stupefied, my head spinning, just like the others listening. When Sylvain finishes, no one dares speak. I want to slap him. I want to thank him. I don’t know. It’s done, I say to myself. Tony will be furious, he’ll leave me. Yes, but it’s done, everyone on the plateau will know who I am. I look at Sylvain. His expression is so serious, so calm.
In order to stop my tears becoming visible, and because he must have seen that soft, watery glistening in my gaze, a bit like the water moving beneath the ice on warmer days, he starts talking again, joking, urging everyone to back him up: Hey, I told you my story was good.
He turns to Nadège and reminds her that she promised to tell her story next.
She didn’t promise anything, she retorts. Anyway, Adèle, Sylvain shouldn’t have spoken for you, what he said doesn’t count. Everyone lays into her, but she says, No, no way.
Sylvain puts his arm around my neck, assuring me that they’re not all fascists on the plateau (with a wicked glance, he points at Sébastien and Julien). Besides, tomorrow you’ll be everyone’s heroine, the woman who had the idea of going down to the lake to turn her passengers into climate refugees, or I dunno, whatever line the journalists use. He gets all theatrical and pompous again. They’re going to put it on the front page, the headline: Teenage Troglodytes: Students saved by a school-bus driver. Hey, Adèle, do you think they’ll use the photos from our phones? Who knows, we might even get on TV.
Nadège is furious and tells him he’s a stupid jerk. Did you even think about her boyfriend? Tony’s like us, he probably doesn’t know, he’ll probably drop her now, you’re a real pain in the arse.
Sylvain doesn’t reply. He tugs his hoodie over his head again, then turns it inside out in a grand gesture, announcing solemnly: On the topic of the couple…He yanks at the fabric so we can all see the potato beetle, inked onto the inside of his hoodie, next to the label, near the back of his neck.
He stands up, heads over to get his jeans from the hay rack, and pulls something out of his pocket, a kind of applicator. He cleans the transparent partition with the back of his sleeve and sticks the object to it. He presses.
I haven’t marked my territory here yet.
He detaches it and there’s the little creature on the glass.
Or here, either.
He tattoos it onto the wooden table.
But I’ve already done it here.
He sweeps his hand under Nadège’s hair. She tries half-heartedly to extricate herself.
Other guys can always put their big fat paws on her, but I’ve put my stamp on before them.
She consents without smiling, with a look that is closed, resigned, but staunchly, resolutely complicit.
The yawns are contagious. It’s two in the morning. Julien walks around the glass case to reach the bedroom on the other side of the cave. He bends down opposite us and touches the bedspread. I signal to him: no. It’s too wet and is probably mouldy. Through the two glass partitions, his back looks like a mirage. He returns, picks up the blanket Nadège has left, and rummages in the hayrack to salvage some dry hay mixed with local alpine fennel, smothered in dust. I lift the baby doll out of the cradle so I can get to the straw. I give the doll to Marine. Nobody makes fun of her.
We spread the hay and the straw out in the back of the cave, against the manger, and my kids go to sleep cuddling up to each other. (You have the bed, Adèle, it’s for old people.)
I’m not going to sleep. I go back and sit down in the eating area and look across at them falling asleep. I don’t know who is lying next to who. I’m not sure I can make out which are the little kids among the shadows of the big kids. I couldn’t care less. There they are, in three heaps, near enough to both confuse me and reassure me. From a distance, the flames catch the silver and gold reflections of the space blankets, which crinkle with the slightest movement, and soon fall silent.
I turn back to the fire, I poke the embers to rekindle it a bit.
Nielle touches me on the shoulder.
Not asleep? I say.
He asks if he has to go to sleep.
Of course not.
Sylvain joins him. He’s on edge, he says apologetically, in a low whisper.
I ask him how his mother the witch knew anyway.
He smiles as he reminds me of what I should have understood.
There’s no magic about it. My mother sat next to you at the physiotherapist’s. She had those disgusting things done to her too, you know, with electrical probes, after she gave birth. She’d just had my sister, and already wanted to dump the father. We lived down the bottom, not far from the town. So she was alone again, like after she’d had me. She needed to talk. And there you were, you’d just had the operation. And you needed to talk too. She told me all about it, she told me your life story back then, I was four and I remember bits of it, because it was pretty weird.
Afterwards, we moved up here, to follow my mother’s new boyfriend. She got pregnant with Minuit and realised that she could never live with that guy, with any of our fathers. She didn’t say anything, he was the one who left. We started our life again by ourselves, the four of us. She didn’t recognise you at first, but then yes, if only just. And you, no, you didn’t recognise her. That annoyed her, she felt even more alone and isolated.
Actually, she hates you. Well, I don’t really know.
But, hey, I mean, that’s no excuse, I know, I’m sorry, I didn’t think about it, about all the shit that’s going to hit the fan. That stuff so doesn’t matter to me, I mean, I couldn’t give a fuck about it, about those sort of things. I’m sorry, Adèle.
He apologises again.
No, you did the right thing.
We just have to tell them not to say anything.
Are you kidding, says Nielle, it’s going to get around whether we like it or not.
It doesn’t matter, I mean it, I say. It gets me out of having to talk about it, it’s all fine.
I know exactly how the rumour will take over the whole countryside: like the thawing of the snow, it’s going to be dirty. But it’ll be good, it’ll be true, it’ll be very down-to-earth, one piece of ground after another, step by step.
The whole countryside will be striped in bands of green and grey-white. The whole countryside will be filthy and the plateau will look like what it is: harsh, muddy.
The rumour will travel across the plateau slowly. When the milder weather arrives, the heavy mists, like steaming avalanches, will roll down over the walls of the gorges and it will feel exactly like we’re in a bad film. One of those films in which the cinematographer overdoes the lighting.
Months later, the rumour will still be gaining ground. It will take a few weeks before Tony hears about it in the café, or at one of the livestock markets.
He’ll tell me how he was humiliated in among the animals. He’ll tell me about the sarcastic comments in the middle of all the noise, the smell of manure and cigarettes, the whole atmosphere of men in boots, spouting insults, the bulging bellies, the hands in pockets, and the screaming, on top of that, you can’t imagine what it was like, the calves screaming, and the others laughing. I was humiliated.
He’ll tell me all that while I try to remember vaguely how, by opening the door of the cave, not even two months ago, he brought in the daylight and took me in his fireman’s arms, and even cried, out of sight of the others.
I will decide to stay here, because it’s my home.
I know time will pass and the gossip, the wounds, will be forgotten. The rumours will become what they were apparently hiding: some sort of truth, mine. I was a boy from here, and I never became a man. I was a boy, and I became a woman from here. I know the plateau is big enough for
the tongues to grow weary.
Sylvain is right, they’re not all fascists around here. I will have the support of his mother the witch, and of other families, not necessarily those you’d expect.
My brother will come up to support me. It will be undreamed of, instinctive. He’ll do the round of the bistros talking about his broken knucklebone and his sister, Adèle. People will pat him on the shoulder, and that will almost be enough to give me back my place back among the locals.
There’ll be a few jokes. When they dare to make them in front of me, I’ll go one better, and as my porno vocabulary is rich and varied, no one will be able to take it further. So, stupidly, quite simply, it’ll be respect.
In the end, it will be me who decides to leave Tony.
He will be gobsmacked, agitated, horrible.
He will slap me because I will have smiled and even laughed, laughed far too much at his exasperated gestures. He will try to imitate the men at the livestock market, in order to make me realise how hard it was for him. The most shameful moment of my life. You made me suffer the most shameful moment of my life.
But too bad, I won’t be able to stop laughing, because even though I will know how serious it’ll be for him, how hurt and beside himself he’ll be, it will still be hilarious, and he’ll be too stupid, and, anyway, what have I got to lose.
I will laugh like a drain and he will slap me and call me thoughtless, a monster, a kid, an adolescent. You’re no better than the little idiots you cart around.
Nielle and Sylvain are on either side of me; they’re not talking anymore. I hold back my tears for a bit longer.
And then it passes, it disappears into the charcoal flickerings of the old beech trees.
We stay there for a long time, we stay there all night, my Loire kids and I, our faces red, keeping watch over the others, stoking the fire, without saying anything more, only words without speech, words with gestures, like, leave that, Adèle, I’ll do it, when I get up to grab another log.
Nielle stands up straight, his arms full of wood, an exaggerated victory grin on his face. Then he places a log on the embers, pressing down a bit, digging in the crackling ashes as if he wanted to scratch out an extra space in the hearth. He gets up again and rubs his hands, still with the same triumphant expression.
He takes a photograph out of his cloth skirt and tells us that it was hanging on the sign, there, behind the woodpile. It’s a photo of the last caretaker to have lived here, until 1928.
In the glow of the fire, the face of the guy from the road appears.
Well, yeah, I dunno, that must be his father, or his grandfather.
So there you go, I say, it’s the night of revelations.
And we return to our cosy silence until the early morning, until Tony disturbs us by letting in the daylight, the cold, and noise.
Thank you:
To Lola first of all, who gave this novel a gentle start with her little poem.
To Danielle, and to all the girls born in the body of a boy.
To her brother Stéphan.
To all the children and adolescents who take, have taken or will take the school bus, in particular to Lola, again, and to Paul, Sylvère, Hugo and Jasmin. To all the little wolf pups of the plateaus.
To the men and women bus drivers in the mountains, and to all the snow-plough drivers—nightshift and dayshift.
To those who live in the Vercors region, to Stéphane the rope worker, to everyone from the hamlets of Truc, Bard et des Mondins, to Michel for his letter to the magistrate, and to the people from Greenpeace.
To the padgels, everyone living up on the Ardèche plateau, recently arrived or not, to those from the hamlets of La Tauleigne, Verden and those from La Rajasse, and especially to Christian, and to his wolf pups.
To the teachers in the primary and secondary schools in the Vercors Sud and the Haute Ardèche, to Daniel (of the blue cows and the deux-chevaux), to Marie-Paule, to Mallaury. To Monique, who was the teacher in the hamlet of Bertoire, even if in this instance I’m fudging the altitude.
To the parents of the students, especially Stéphane.
To the environment officers of Lake Issarlès.
To Jean-Philippe’s potato beetle.
It’s not a thankyou, but this novel also emerged from the memory of Misty, of her pain and of her mystery.
Emmanuelle Pagano was born in 1969 and lives in the Ardèche in south-east France. She has written fifteen novels; One Day I’ll Tell You Everything won the European Prize for Literature and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Emmanuelle regularly collaborates with artists working in other disciplines. emmanuellepagano.wordpress.com
Penny Hueston has translated books by Marie Darrieussecq, Patrick Modiano and Raphaël Jerusalmy, among others.
Praise for One Day I’ll Tell You Everything
‘One Day I’ll Tell You Everything is a sumptuous read. My senses were set alight—I could feel the sun, smell the air, taste the snow. At its heart lies the story of Adèle—a woman who is at once fleeing, and reconciling with, her past. It is Adèle who gives this novel its pulse. Every page thrums with her love.’ Melanie Cheng, author of Room for a Stranger
‘A superb novel, both thrilling and consoling.’ Le Soir
‘In One Day I’ll Tell You Everything, Emmanuelle Pagano infiltrates the intricacies of families and romantic turmoil; she strips bare the eternal duel between absolute love and failure to understand… Pagano writes with sensitivity, from the bottom of her heart. She takes us into a love story that is as troubling as it is exhilarating. Whether she’s writing about bodies in torment or her Ardèche mountains, her writing is all sensuality.’ Télérama
‘Close to being a masterpiece. A novel full of grace that takes us into the heart of female experience…There is something luminous and gentle about Emmanuelle Pagano’s prose…We do not expect the female narrator to have been a him. The theme of femininity carried by the substance of the writing itself takes on a deeper and more radical meaning…Pagano also excels at rendering palpable the lives of a tight-lipped, enclosed community, where the wind is a hazard and where farm anecdotes can become local mythology.’ Le Matricule des anges
‘One Day I’ll Tell You Everything is a novel to be savoured, that one wants to protect like a secret garden. Emmanuelle Pagano invites us on a journey, at the heart of which is a feminine identity discovering itself, coming to life before our eyes.’ 360 degrees
‘To live in one’s body as if it were a foreign, inhospitable land: this thread of suffering runs through the novel like a burn…Pagano is also a screenwriter and has a talent for creating images…A vibrant, fundamental truth emerges from these pages.’ Le Temps
‘This novel is above all moving because of the author’s extraordinarily beautiful language—both harsh and uncompromising like the climate, and exquisitely crafted and poetic—when, for instance, Adèle describes herself as masculine or feminine, depending on whether it is before or after her operation.’ Quotidien national
‘Adèle’s brother has never understood her, and hasn’t spoken to her for ten years…Apart from her brother, no one in the village knows the truth about Adèle, not even Tony, with whom she is having a love affair she never thought possible…The truth emerges from the mouth of a child, one of the adolescents Adèle drives to and from school every day, and who constitute as many mirrors in which she does and doesn’t recognise herself…The vulnerabilities of this person living in a body that is alien to her are subtly echoed by the issues of identity experienced by her adolescent passengers. Emmanuelle Pagano’s voice is understated and brilliant; she reveals the convulsions of the soul, the subtle feelings of her characters—One Day I’ll Tell You Everything is a heartrending book.’ Tageblatt
‘A writer of immense originality: she has a sharp awareness of bodies and the visible or secret movements of those bodies, a language rich with images, seemingly familiar, but in reality shrewdly sophisticated, and a deep knowledge of nature and all t
he forces that pass through nature.’ Le Pays d’Auge
‘Pagano writes about siblings, about love and lies, about life slipping away, and about adolescents who are full of life. She speaks about bodies transforming, seasons changing, and memories that never fade. This extraordinarily beautiful novel, both sensitive and thoughtful, has an astute and deeply affecting ending.’ Livre et Lire
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Copyright © P.O.L. Éditeur, 2007
Translation copyright © Penny Hueston, 2020
The moral rights of Emmanuelle Pagano to be identified as the author and Penny Hueston as the translator of this work have been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Originally published in France under the title Les Adolescents troglodytes by P.O.L. Éditeur, Paris, 2007
Published by The Text Publishing Company, 2020
Book design by Jessica Horrocks
Cover photo by Bo Bo/Stocksy
Typeset in Granjon 13.75/19.5 by J&M Typesetting
ISBN: 9781922268914 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925923407 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.
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