Enchantments (7 page)

Dame Dame always told us, “When you're playing in the Champ de Mars, watch out for men roaming around in the bushes. Most of all for the ones with raincoats.” But when I asked her what was particularly dangerous about men in raincoats, she replied even more enigmatically, “Under their raincoats they may be hiding a nasty surprise.” No, I definitely didn't understand. On the other hand, what she didn't understand was how one day I had managed to get my legs in such a state, bleeding from long thin red welts. “But how did you do that? Tell me how you did that,” she scolded me. “It looks as if you're wearing fishnet stockings.”

“I scratched them on some bushes playing hide-and-seek with Aude,” I lied, because I certainly
couldn't tell her that these were wounds from a glorious and holy war.

It had begun some days earlier.

In the bushes I am looking for bad boys, in particular a boy with thick eyebrows curling up on his high pale forehead, with two gray eyes like ice, beautiful as Lucifer and equally proud and wicked. The boys are in a gang that attacks weak defenseless little girls. They hide in the bushes, and as soon as they see a girl, alone or with a friend, they jump out and, armed with long switches, whip the girls’ legs, yelling, “Death to the vile sex!” They've come after me twice, without being able to hit me because I can run fast, certainly faster than they. But even if I've escaped, now I say that's enough—justice must be done, and I am the one to do it.

I pull up a nice thin sapling by the pond and trim it well, pulling off the leaves and twigs until it shines in my hand, smooth and slick, naked as the sword of an archangel. I carefully approach the corner of the Champ de Mars where the gang usually hangs out. I hide behind a plane tree, and from there I see them in a clearing, sitting on a bench, conspiring. I calculate—from my hiding place to the bench is about thirty meters. Yes, I can do it. And then I leap out—I
have to do it right away or I won't do it at all—I leap out and in a flash I fall on them, making my switch hiss on the thin calves of the astonished Lucifer. Then I take to my heels, a mad dash, my heart in my throat, until I reach safe territory, until I reach Dame Dame on her bench and let myself fall across her knees, exhausted. When she asks me with alarm, “What is it? What's happened? Say something!” I mumble, “Nothing, nothing. I thought there was a rabid dog chasing me.” And I stay there on her knees, gasping for breath but proud, with a pride that fills me completely—even if it puzzles me because I don't know (and don't want to know) if what is making me so proud is the punishing of the wicked, the rendering of justice, the crusade on behalf of the weak, or is it having done all this in front of the beautiful Lucifer—against him and yet for him.

Afterward, naturally, I wait for their revenge, I wait for it with fear and trepidation. But since day after day it doesn't come, in the end I go looking for it. Wthout my switch I penetrate the enemy lines.

And once I'm there, once they're on me with their switches and Lucifer is whipping my legs methodically and coldly, I don't make any
attempt to run away but give myself up in total surrender.

Because to those afternoons without the wicked boys prowling about, without a perversely beautiful Devil with whom to contend in a fight to the finish between Good and Evil—to those insipid afternoons I surely prefer their whippings.

My first men were waiters and gas station attendants, bakers and bus conductors. Fleeting encounters without entanglements. Enough distance between us so that I could train myself safely in the gymnasium of seduction. They attracted me, but that wasn't the point. The important thing was that I attracted them. I used them unscrupulously, as mirrors.

On the bus, the test of the gaze: to manage to keep looking into his eyes while he punches my ticket. At the restaurant, my hand resting lightly on the table, tilted a bit to hide the childish roundness so that when he comes back with the macé-doine he discovers it—a white butterfly with trembling wings. On my way to the corner where there's a gas station I walk any old way, but when I get there—a few meters before—I slow down.

Back straight, stomach in, eyes straight ahead. Above all not looking at him but checking to see if he's there without looking (I already know how to do that quite well). Then feeling his look like a hot beam. Putting an indolent sway into my walk.

It was only later that I tried riskier enterprises. A fifth-grade classmate—Giovanni Tini— chubby, shorter than I, with thick-lensed glasses. One day I found in my notebook a paper boat with a figurehead in the shape of a red heart, on which I read “G loves M as Romeo loved his Juliet.” There was another boy in my class whose name began with G, Gianluca, but it couldn't be him, he was too engrossed in his revolutionary reclassifi-cation of beetles. It had to be Giovanni.

At home I asked Mama who Romeo and Juliet were.

“Two young lovers. Their families were enemies and they didn't want the lovers to marry, so Romeo and Juliet could only be together in death.”

“Have you and Papa quarreled with Giovanni Tini's parents?”

“No. Why?”

“Nothing, I was just asking.”

I went back to my room. I felt confused, and that story about dying so they could live together worried me.

So I temporized, flirting with Giovanni just enough to enjoy his courtship. My notebook was the port where the white packet boats of his love dropped anchor. “You are my sweet Juliet.” “How beautiful and fair you were yesterday with your hair in long braids like Juliet's.” “You have dark eyes like Juliet's.”

But his pomposity and the way I had to bend down when I spoke with him as short as he was, and the pathetic way he groped around when our classmates knocked his glasses off his nose—it didn't take long for all this to become tiresome. And one Saturday afternoon at a party, without thinking about it beforehand, I found myself ferociously destroying his adoration.

I tore up and down the hallway like a rocket and ended up throwing myself across a divan screaming all the dirty words I knew. And the more incredulous and shocked he became, the more I taunted him, sticking this desanctifying dagger in up to the hilt. Finally a look of contempt came over his face. Only when I left, exhausted, did I begin to feel ashamed. The next Monday, after recess, I found a ship in my notebook made of black paper. The heart-shaped figurehead had been replaced by a white cross on which was written, “Juliet is dead. She fell off the balcony like a tomboy.”

For a while I felt bad about ending it—I was that vain—but I got over it when a new boy arrived: Lorenzo, from London. A sweater with holes in it, torn jeans with bell-bottoms, a purple velour pullover with the slogan “Make love, not war” sewed on the sleeve. All of it from Carnaby Street. A face with a constant play of feelings, cherry-red lips, and lively tender eyes. Infinitely more up-to-date than we were, he talked about taboos, the bourgeoisie, flower children, and rock groups I'd never heard of. One morning the teacher called on him to recite a poem we'd had to memorize.

Standing beside the lectern, Lorenzo began. At first his eyes were on the teacher. “We buried on this battlefield our youngest and our strongest. His only badge of valor the wounds upon his chest.” Then, as he became more impassioned, he turned toward the class as if moved by a current: “Machine-gun fire has mowed him down like wheat before a scythe … “At last, his eyes filled with tears, he clenched his fists and held them out toward me—straight toward me. I was thrilled, trembling, captivated as he recited the last prayerful stanza: “And now the farmboy soldier's soul is in Thy hands, O Lord. Grant his comrades’ prayer for him—a hero's paradise!”

From that moment I felt an awakening in
my heart, which fluttered like a caught bird. I would run breathlessly up the stairs at school to catch a glimpse of him in the main room standing in line for class. When he arrived late, I agonized. When he was absent, I felt abandoned by the world.

Then, one evening, I found out that he loved me too.

At eight the phone rings. My mother answers. “It's for you,” she says. “It's Lorenzo.” I take the phone. My hand is trembling. I say, “Hello?”

“Hi, it's Lorenzo. I wanted to ask you— tomorrow, for the arithmetic work in class, should I bring graph paper or lined?”

Afterward it dawns on me. What sort of question is that? It's an excuse. I shout, “It's just an excuse!” and run into my room. It's one of the May evenings in Paris when the day doesn't really want to die and the twilight is glowing and still. I'm sitting on my bed, near the window. I look outside, and in my ecstasy, which I am holding the way the day is holding the light, I see nothing, I hear nothing, I don't exist anymore, I'm not these arms, these legs, this head—all of me is in the frantic beating of my tiny chest.

Some Sunday mornings Clara and I would get up before our parents. As quiet as mice, we'd go to the kitchen to make orange juice for them (the squeezer, unfortunately, made an infernal racket) and get the coffee machine ready. Then we'd run back to our room—still quietly, because waking them up would spoil everything. Remembering to take the key, fly down the stairs and gallop all the way to the bakery on Rue de Laos to buy chocolate rolls for Papa and croissants for Mama. The last stop was at the florist to get red carnations for Mama. That was her favorite flower—she said it had that faint faint odor of a newborn baby—and luckily they cost the least, one franc each, so we could give her a bunch of five and sometimes ten. Once we were back at the
house we made as much noise as we could— everything was ready and we couldn't wait to see their look of surprise and pleasure. (After a few times, of course, they weren't so surprised, but I still delighted in the role of the perfect daughter.)

Some Sunday mornings my father was the last one up. About eleven.

In his baggy boxers and undershirt he makes his way to the living room and turns on the record player. He gives a huge yawn and starts leafing through records, humming a tune. Suddenly he stops, raises his eyebrows (his eyes are a little bit red, a little bit white, like a monster's), and then turns toward me and produces an angelic smile. At last he chooses a record—Fred Buscaglione—which he adores because it makes him remember I don't know what kind of good times. He puts it on and turns up the volume. He starts to dance, with spins and hops that are exaggerated and awkward. One of us always says, “Papa, you look like a gorilla.” He expects this, and it does nothing but make him wilder. And then there he is taking my hand so I'll dance with him, and I'm blushing and laughing. I go along for a few steps. At the same time I take in the words of the song—”I saw you, I followed you, I stopped you, I kissed you, you were so
young, so young …“and I happen to notice the record jacket on which there's a photo of Buscaglione with a mustache and a croupier's eyeshade. He looks dangerously like my father when he was young, when he too was a confirmed gambler, and it occurs to me that this is a part of his life that someone should be paying attention to. Every time my father plays a Buscaglione song I listen very carefully to the words, and I get an overwhelming impression of a murky red world where it's always nighttime, and there's kissing and fighting and a lot of platinum blondes who don't look anything like my mother.

It makes me nervous and worried, and I begin to keep an eye on my father, all the more attentively since my mother seems to be unpar-donably unaware.

One evening he comes home from a business trip, and he tells us that at the airport in Nice he ran into Brigitte Bardot. He has a sly look, and as he's talking he keeps glancing at my mother, as if he's thrown down a gauntlet. She's not really paying attention, isn't the least bit interested in picking it up. Now Papa is saying that the actress smiled at him, and he imitates the way she walked, her head turned toward him, trailing a smile behind her like a long net. Then
he opens his suitcase and takes out two pairs of sunglasses for my sister and me. They're huge, with mod frames covered with fluorescent checks. My father says that Brigitte Bardot had glasses just like these. When he holds them out to me I throw them into the air, and I shout that they disgust me and Brigitte Bardot disgusts me, and once again I burst into tears and go shut myself in my room.