Soft in the Head (4 page)

Y
OU CAN SAY
what you like, but, for a kid, schooldays aren’t the happiest days of your life. Anyone who says different doesn’t like kids, or doesn’t remember what it was like to be one.

What makes kids happy is fishing for gudgeon or building gravel barriers on the tracks to derail goods trains—even if everyone knows it never works. Or climbing up the strut of a bridge from the bank (which doesn’t work either, because of the slant). Jumping off the top of the cemetery wall, setting fire to a patch of waste ground, knocking on doors and running away. Making little kids eat ‘sweets’ that are really goat droppings. That kind of thing.

When you’re a kid, all you want is to be a hero.

If your parents aren’t standing behind you, banging on about how school is important, how you have to go, how you’ve got no choice, well, you don’t bother—at least I didn’t—or you go as little as possible.

My mother wasn’t strict about stuff like that. She would have broken a brush handle over my head if I’d tracked mud into the hall, but I don’t think she gave a damn that I never learned to read and write. When I came home at five o’clock, she hardly even looked at me. Her first words were always:

“Did you get the bread?”

And the next words were:

“Don’t leave your stuff lying around. Go and put your schoolbag away.”

I didn’t need to be told twice. I tossed my bag at the foot of my bed and went out to play with my mates, or by myself.

The older I got, the more I bunked off. When Bayle asked me where I’d been, I’d give him some lame excuse: my mother was sick and I had to do the shopping, my grandmother had just died, I’d sprained my ankle, I’d been bitten by a rabid dog, I’d had to go to the doctor.

I trained myself to lie and look him straight in the face. It’s harder than you think, when you’re only ten and you’re not very broad in the shoulders yet. But it taught me about courage. That’s something it’s important to have in life.

It didn’t matter, Bayle was happy to let me fool him. It was better than having me causing trouble in his class, and it gave him a bit of a rest from constantly yelling
Chazes, can you repeat what I just said?
knowing full well I couldn’t. What all this meant was by the end of primary school, I was more likely to be off fishing somewhere than warming my arse on a school bench. This meant that later, when I joined the army, I was classed as suffering from mental retardation, a phrase that neatly contains the word they really thought described me:
retard
.

In the period I was talking about just now, the period when I first got together with Annette, life pretty much went right over my head. And it didn’t bother me. I didn’t ask questions. I did my business in the sack and elsewhere, I played cards, I got hammered every Saturday night and
dried out during the week, I took jobs on building sites when I was strapped for cash, life seemed straightforward. I made no real connection between living life and understanding life, if you see what I mean.

It’s like with cars: if someone asked you to change the distributor, the coupling, the drive belt—or even just top up the oil, it doesn’t matter—how would you fare? Because most people who can drive don’t know the first thing about how or why an engine works. That was pretty much how I looked at my life. I turned the steering wheel, changed the gears, filled up when I needed to, and that was all…

When I met Margueritte, at first I found learning stuff complicated. Then intriguing. Then depressing, because learning to think is like getting glasses when you’re blind as a bat. Everything around was comforting, it was simple, blurry. Now suddenly you see all the cracks, the rust, the rot, you can see that everything is crumbling. You see death, you realize that you’re going to have to leave all this behind, and probably in a way that won’t be fun. You realize that time doesn’t just pass, every day pushes you one step closer to kicking the bucket. There’s no high score that gives you a free game. You do your circuit, and that’s it, you’re history.

Honestly, for some people, life is a complete con job.

M
ARGUERITTE
SAYS
that cultivating your mind is like climbing a mountain. I understand that better now. When you’re down in the valley, you think you see everything and know everything about the world: the meadows, the grass, the cow dung (that last example is mine). One fine day, you pick up your backpack and start walking. What you leave behind gets smaller the farther you travel: the cows shrink to the size of rabbits, to ants, to flyspecks. Meanwhile the landscape you discover as you climb seems bigger and bigger. You thought the world ended with the mountain, but it doesn’t! Behind it, there is another mountain, and another a little higher, and still another. And then a whole range. The valley where you were living a peaceful life was just one valley among many, and not even the biggest. Actually, it was the arsehole of the universe. As you walk, you meet other people, but the closer you come to the summit, the fewer are still climbing alongside you and the more you freeze your balls off! That’s just another figure of speech. Once you’re at the top, you’re happy, you think you’re clever because you’ve climbed higher than everyone else. You can see for miles. The only thing is, after a while, you realize something really stupid: you’re all alone. All alone and insignificant.

From the Good Lord’s point of view, even we are probably no bigger than bloody flyspecks.

This is probably what Margueritte means when she says, Do you know, Germain, culture can be very isolating?

I think she’s right, and what’s worse, you must feel very dizzy constantly looking down at the world below.

My plan is to stop halfway up the slope, and I’ll be happy if I manage to climb that high. Margueritte has got education. And I’m not talking about the piss-poor education and a piece of paper that everyone’s got (well, everyone except me), but the sort of higher-level education that takes so many years that you’re old by the time you graduate and don’t have time to make enough pension contributions to be able to retire.  

Margueritte passed her doctorate, only she wasn’t a
real
doctor, she worked with plants. She researched grape seeds. Personally, I can’t really see what there is to research, I mean a seed is a seed, there’s not much to it. But that’s what she studied, so I shouldn’t look down my nose at it.

There are no stupid professions, only bad seeds.

Anyway, maybe that’s why she’s always talking about
cultivating
and
cultivation.
Another pair of words that sound the same but mean different things.

In cultivation, you till the ground, you mark out your furrows, you aerate the soil where you sow your seeds. And then there’s the cultivating Margueritte talks about where you just pick up a book and read. But that’s not easy either, quite the opposite.

I can talk about books now: I’ve read some.

When you’re functionally illiterate like me, you wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to read. You look at the first word,
OK, you understand it, then the next, and with a bit of luck the next. You keep going, running your finger under the words, eight, nine, ten, twelve, until you get to a full stop. But when you get there, you’re not better off! Because no matter how much you try to put everything together, you can’t, the words are still jumbled up like a handful of nuts and bolts tossed into a box. For people who know what they’re doing, it’s easy. They just screw the right bits together. They’re not fazed by fifteen words, twenty words, that’s what they call a sentence. For me, for a long time, it was very different. I knew how to read, obviously, since I learned the alphabet. My problem was the meaning. A book was like a rat trap for my pride, a treacherous, two-faced thing that seemed harmless at first glance.

Nothing but ink and paper: big deal. Actually it was a wall. A brick wall to bang your head on.

So, obviously, I couldn’t see the point of reading unless I had to, like for tax returns and social security forms.

I think this is what I found most intriguing—
see also: arousing one’s curiosity
—about Margueritte.

Every time I saw her, either she was doing nothing or she had her nose in a book. And when she was doing nothing, it was only because she’d just put her book back in her handbag to chat to me.

That’s something I realized after a while. These days, if you asked me what was in her little back handbag, I could reel off everything with my eyes closed and not make a
single mistake: a packet of tissues, a pen, a box of mints, a book, her wallet, her purse, and some perfume in a small blue glass bottle.

Every single thing is always the same, except for the book, that changes.

When I look at Margueritte, it’s funny, I don’t see a little old lady who weighs about forty kilos, all crumpled like a poppy, her spine a little bent and her hands all shrivelled; I see that in her head she has thousands of bookshelves all carefully catalogued and numbered. And you wouldn’t think to look at her that she’s intelligent. I mean how intelligent she actually is. She talks to me about normal things, she walks in the park just like an ordinary person.

She’s not at all stuck up.

But from what she tells me, when she was young, it was rare for a woman to do advanced studies. I still don’t really know what she did exactly when she was researching seeds, or what the point of it was, but I know she worked in laboratories with microscopes and bottles and test tubes, and just thinking about it amazes me.

That and the books she is forever reading.

Well, that she was forever reading.

W
E RAN INTO EACH OTHER
again, Margueritte and me, I don’t remember the exact date, it wasn’t long after that first time. She was sitting on the same bench and it was probably the same time of day.

Seeing her in the distance, I thought, Hey, it’s the pigeon lady, but I didn’t think any more about it. I went over to say hello. Her eyes were half closed, she looked like she was thinking, or she could just as easily have been dozing.

With old people, everything ends up looking much the same: thinking, dying, napping…

I said hello. She turned, she smiled.

“Well, well. Hello, Monsieur Chazes.”

Not many people round here call me
monsieur
.

It’s more, Hi Germain! Or even, Hey Chazes!

She nodded for me to sit next to her. And that’s when I saw she had a book in her lap. Seeing I was looking at it, trying to work out what it was from the picture on the cover, she asked:

“Do you like reading?”

“God, no.”

It just came out, like a bullet from a gun, there was no way to take it back.

“No?”

She looked astonished, did Margueritte.

I tried to smooth things over, I said:

“Too much work.”

“Ah, I see. It’s true that, in life, work takes up a great deal of time… Counting pigeons, writing one’s name on the war memorial…”

She said this like it was a private joke, she wasn’t being nasty.

“You saw me doing that? I mean you saw me at the memorial?”

She nodded.

“That is to say… I did catch sight of you at the monument one day. You seemed utterly engrossed, but from here I could not guess what you were doing. So—and I hope you will forgive my curiosity—after you left, I went over to see for myself. And that is when I noticed that you had added a name to the list of the departed: Germain Chazes… Your father, I assume? Because, unless I’ve misremembered, you told me that your first name is Germain, didn’t you?”

I said yes. But given it was a single yes and there was more than one question, she took it to mean what she wanted. And I suddenly found myself with a dead soldier with the same surname as me for a father, which should have felt weird. Chazes is my mother’s surname, she was single when she got knocked up and she stayed single when she had me on her hands.

Or “got lumbered with me” as she often put it. Because I was a burden to my mother. And she made no bones about letting everyone know. But, as Landremont would say,
the converse is reciprocal—or something like that—which means that she was a pain in the arse for me too.

I didn’t want to disappoint Margueritte, to explain about the 14th July celebrations and my mother in the bushes learning about the birds and the bees from some thirty-year-old guy from the next village which left her with a bad reputation and a halfwit son. I got the impression that this wasn’t the kind of thing that happened in Margueritte’s world. That’s why I said yes. And suddenly, I was a poor unfortunate orphan whose dad had died in the war, which sounds a lot classier than the result of some random shag, if you want my opinion.

She gave a little sigh, like she felt sorry for me.

Sorry about what? I wondered. What was there to feel sorry about? My life’s pretty good, actually.

I remember she looked at me, all serious, and she said:

“I find it profoundly touching that you should be so passionate about righting what must seem a terrible injustice… In fact, when I think about it, it’s absurd: if your father died during the Algerian War, why is his name not engraved on the memorial?”

What could I say, what sort of convincing excuse could I come up with to explain why my old man’s name wasn’t on the list? Given that, from what I know, his real name is Despuis, he was a carpenter and he didn’t die in combat, he died in a car accident in Spain when I was about four or five. To say nothing of the fact that he’d never set foot in the Algerian War (1954–1962). And that if he’d died in the
Algerian War, I’d never have been born—which would have been a relief for all concerned—seeing as how I came into this world in April 1963. The 17th, to be exact.

But however much I thought about it, I couldn’t find a way of piecing the truth together and presenting it for this little old lady. I sat there like a lemon, fretting over my version of the story, but I couldn’t find a way to tart it up.

It was at this point she said:

“I’m so sorry, Monsieur Chazes… I realize my question was deeply indiscreet, please forgive me. I did not intend to make you feel uncomfortable. I’m sorry…”

I said:

“No harm done.”

And it was true. I don’t give a toss about my father. For me, he’s just biology.