If it’s summer you will not see Pasquale, for having spent all his savings on the shop, he’s obliged once again to work as a woodcutter in the mountains on the other side of the frontier. When he’s away he writes to Danielle most Sundays, telling her how many trees they’ve felled and what the weather is like. Danielle speaks Italian to her customers in the shop but with a noticeable French accent. She is more smartly dressed than many of them and wears large gold-coloured rings in her ears. She is expecting another baby.
Hanging on a wall near the door is a cage. The bird in it is blackish, a Blue Rock Thrush with a yellow beak and eyes like sequins. Whenever a customer comes into the shop the Blue Rock Thrush croaks out one of the insults Pasquale taught him. He is able to distinguish between men and women so that the insult fits. The customers would miss him by now if he weren’t there. Sometimes a customer speaks back to the bird as if to a fellow sufferer, cursing men or women or the government or priests or lawyers or the tax office or the weather or the world. And sometimes when no one is paying him any attention or feeding him any nuts, he blinks his sequin eyes and slowly repeats a phrase which has the accent and cadence of another language, of the voice of another teacher.
Marius à Sauva! Marius à Sauva …
In the little grocery shop there’s no question of sounds deceiving.
Once In Europa
Before the poppy flowers, its green calyx is hard like the outer shell of an almond. One day this shell is split open. Three green shards fall to the earth. It is not an axe that splits it open, simply a screwed-up ball of membrane-thin folded petals like rags. As the rags unfold, their colour changes from neonate pink to the most brazen scarlet to be found in the fields. It is as if the force that split the calyx were the need of this red to become visible and to be seen.
The first sounds I remember are the factory siren and the noise of the river. The siren was very rare and probably that’s why I remember it: they only sounded it in case of an accident. It was always followed by shouts and the sound of men running. The noise of the river I remember because it was present all the while. It was louder in the spring, it was quieter in August, but it never stopped. During the summer with the windows open you could hear it in the house; in the winter, after Father had put up the double windows, you couldn’t hear it indoors, but you heard it as soon as you went outside to have a shit or to fetch some wood for the stove. When I went to school I walked beside the sound of the river.
At school we learnt to draw a map of the valley with the river coloured in blue. It was never blue. Sometimes the Giffre was the colour of bran, sometimes it was grey like a mole, sometimes it was milky, and occasionally but very rarely, as rare as the siren for accidents, it was transparent, and you could see every stone on its bed.
Here there’s only the sound of the wind in the sheet flapping above us.
Once my mother told me to look after my baby cousin, Claire. She left us alone in the garden. I started hunting for snails and I forgot Claire as I followed the track down to the river behind the furnaces. When my mother came back she found my baby cousin alone in the cradle under the plum trees.
The eagle could have come! she screamed, and pecked her poor eyes out!
She ordered me to pick some nettles, and stood over me whilst I did so. I remember I tried to protect my fingers by pulling down the sleeves of my pullover to cover my hands. The bunch of nettles I’d picked lay on the bench beside the water tap outside the door, waiting for my father to return.
You have to punish Odile, my mother said to him when he arrived and she handed him a cloth to hold the nettles with. She pulled up my pinafore. I was wearing nothing underneath.
Father stood there, still as a post. Then, picking up the nettles, he held them under the tap and turned on the water.
Like this it’ll hurt less, he said. Leave her to me.
My mother went indoors and my father flicked the water from the nettles onto my backside. Not a single nettle touched me. He saw to that.
I thought I would be frightened and I am not. Since he was a small boy he was a son I could trust. Christian never did crazy things like the others and he was always reassuring. He inherited a lot from his father. I’ll never forget, for as long as I live, the time when he grew his first moustache. I couldn’t help crying out, he looked so much like his father. Perhaps the craziest thing Christian has ever done, at least amongst the things I know about, is to bring me up here. You’re sure you’re ready, Mother? Yes, my boy, I answered. And he screwed up his face as if he were in pain. Perhaps he was laughing.
Three thousand metres above the earth—he said he could climb to five thousand, I don’t know whether he was boasting—with nothing but air between us and what we can see below and I’m not frightened! The moment our feet left the ground, the wind was there. The wind is holding us up and I feel safe, I feel—I feel like a word in the breath of a voice.
There was a riddle I liked as a child: four point to the sky, four walk in the dew and four have food in them; all twelve make one—what is it?
A cow, answered Régis, my elder brother, sighing loudly to show he had already heard the riddle many times before.
Odile, how is it a cow? asked poor Emile, my younger brother. People would take advantage of Emile all his life. His laziness was not so much a sin as a sickness. Each time I was pleased that Emile couldn’t remember the riddle; it offered me the chance of explaining.
A cow has two horns, two ears pointing up, four legs for walking on, and four teats!
Six teats! cried Régis.
Four with milk in them!
Mother encouraged Régis to work with the furnaces because she was worried about Emile; it was going to be difficult for Emile to find a job anywhere, and so it made more sense if Emile was the one to stay at home with Father.
Father was against any son of his working in the factory. Régis would do better to go to Paris like men had done as long as anyone could remember. Long before the Eiffel Tower, long before the Arc de Triomphe, long before factories, they had gone to Paris to stoke fires and to sweep chimneys, and in the spring they had come back, money in their wallets, proud of themselves! Nobody could be proud of working—there. Father pointed with his thumb out of the window.
Times change, Achille, you forget that.
Forget! First, they try to take our land, then they want our children. What for? To produce their manganese. What use is manganese to us?
When Father was out in the fields, Régis said: He doesn’t know what a stupid old man he looks, Papa, leading his four miserable cows through a factory yard four times a day!
We’re over the factory. When we veer to the north I can smell the fumes in its smoke.
One night I went out to lock up the chickens and I found Father by the pear tree staring up at the sky and the flames flicking out of the top of the tallest chimney stack, almost half as tall as the cliff face behind it.
Look, Odile, he whispered, look! It’s like a black viper standing on its tail—can you see its tongue?
I can see the flames, Papa, some nights they’re blue.
Venom! he said. Venom!
Whenever I went near the factory, I saw the dust. It was the colour of cow’s liver, except that, instead of being wet and shiny, it was a dry kind of sand: it was like dried liver, pulverised into dust. The big shop was taller than any pine tree and when one of the furnaces was opened, the hot air as it rose would make a draught so that high up, by the topmost girders, a breeze would blow the dust off all the ledges and you’d see a trailing cloud like a red veil hiding the roofing. This dust astonished and fascinated me. It turned the hair of all the men who didn’t wear hats slightly auburn.
The men who worked in the factory smelt of sweat, some of them of wine or garlic, and all of them of something dusty and metallic. Like the smell of the lead in a pencil when it’s sharpened. For my work at school I had a pencil sharpener in the form of a globe, it was so small you couldn’t tell the countries, on
ly the difference between land and sea.
White the page of the world below. Like the traces of tiny animals in the snow, the scribbles of what I knew as a child. Nobody else could read them here. I can see the roof, the pear tree by the shit-house, the byre we stored wood in with hives on the balcony—the basin where I washed sheets for Mother is filled with snow, for there’s no trace of it—the garden beneath the windows, the little orchard, and surrounding all, as a floor surrounds a cat’s saucer, the factory grounds. Every year a man came to the school to explain to us children why the factory was built where it was and why it was the pride of the region. Men had come from New York, he said, to visit it! Then he drew on the blackboard the course of the river. His was white on black and the one below is black on white. The river goes through the factory. The factory squats on the river like a woman peeing. He didn’t say that.
Around the beginning of the century, he told the schoolchildren, men everywhere in the world were dreaming of a new power which was the power of electricity! This new power was hidden in our mountains, in their white waterfalls. They called the waterfalls White Coal! He made it look simple on the blackboard. Engineers canalised the water in cast-iron pipes which were two metres in diameter. They let the water, once captured, fall vertically until it acquired a pressure of 100 kilos per square centimetre, and with this pressure the water of our waterfalls turned giant wheels in turbines, which, turning, produced nine million kilowatts of electricity per hour. The beginning of electrometallurgy in Europe! he cried. Vive la République!
Its work done, the river rejoined its course and made its way to the sea. Do the fish go through the turbines? a child asked. No, no, dear, answered the man. Why not? We have filters.
Our house had three rooms. The kitchen where everything happened and I did my homework. The Pele where my two brothers slept. And the Third Room where my parents and I slept. In the summer, after we’d brought the hay in, my brothers sometimes liked to sleep in the barn. Then I’d move into the Pele and sleep there alone. Opposite the bed hung a mirror with a black-spotted glass. When I couldn’t sleep I lay there and talked to myself. I talked to my little finger. What was in the Beginning? I asked. Silence. Before God created the world and there was no earth, no manganese, and no mountains, what was there? The finger wagged. If you see a spider on a table and you brush him off, the table’s still there, if you take the table outside, there’s still the floorboards, if you take up the floorboards there’s still the earth, if you cart the earth away there’s still a sky with stars on the other side of the world, so what was there at the beginning? The finger didn’t reply and I bit it.
Seen from the height I’m now at, Father’s refusal to sell his farm to the factory looks absurd. We were surrounded. Every year Father was obliged to lead his four cows through an ever larger factory yard over more railway lines. Every year the slag mountains were growing higher, hiding the house and its little plot more effectively from the road and from its own pastures on the other side of the river. The owners first doubled, then trebled, the price they were prepared to pay him. His reply remained the same. My patrimony is not for sale. Later they tried to force him out by law. He said he would dynamite their offices. Now the snow covers all.
My job was to feed the rabbits. In the early spring it was dandelions. Father said there was no other valley in the world with as many dandelions as ours. Dandelion millionaires, he called us. Rabbits eat with such impatience, as if they are eating their way towards life! Their jaws munching the dandelion leaves was the fastest thing I’d ever seen and their muzzles quivered as fast as their jaws munched.
There was a black buck rabbit I hated. He had something evil in his eye. He was always waiting for his evil moment to come and he nipped me with his teeth more than once. Mother stunned the rabbits and strung them up by their hind legs and gouged out their eyes with a knife and they bled to death. When she did this it was always on a Friday, because a rabbit, roasted in the oven with mustard, was a feast to be eaten on Sunday, when the men could stay at the table drinking gnôle after lunch and not go to work.
You can drink two litres of cider and never piss a drop—it all comes out in sweat, Achille my boy, on the furnaces.
I tried to persuade Mother to kill the black rabbit. He’s our only big buck, she said. Eventually she cooked him. And to my surprise, I couldn’t eat anything. She must be coming down with something, Father said. I couldn’t eat because I couldn’t stop thinking of how much I hated him.
The moment the snow disappeared, Mother started to nag Father. They’re digging their gardens up at Pessy, she’d cry. It’s too soon to plant, he’d say, without looking up from his newspaper, the earth’s not warm enough. We’re always the last! she complained. And our cauliflowers last year? My cauliflowers were as big as buckets, he boasted.
It took Papa three days to turn the earth of the garden and to dig in the manure. I helped him by forking the manure out of the wheelbarrow. The lilac trees were in flower and a cuckoo was singing in the forest above the factory. It was as hot as in June. Father had his shirt-sleeves rolled up, and when he was too hot, he removed his cap and he wiped his bald head, but he refused to take off his black corduroy waistcoat. Every spring he said the same thing: Do the opposite of the walnut tree! I knew the answer to his riddle: the walnut is the first to shed its leaves and the last to come out in leaf.
The garden was almost dug. Its brown earth was raked and drying in the sun. The first green shoots would soon be appearing in straight rows without a fault, because, just as at school we drew lines in pencil in our exercise books to write our words on, so Mother made a line on the earth with a string when she planted her rows of seed.
My fork had three metal prongs like any other pitchfork, but its wooden shaft was shorter so it was easier for me to handle. Father had made it for me. All the year it leant against the wall by the tap in the stable, ready for when I helped him clean out the stable after the evening milking, my homework done.
Often he complained about my handwriting, and it’s true it was not as good as his. He wrote with loops and curlicues as if the whole word were a single piece of string.
The rain does better on the window pane, Odile, write it again!
In the garden he straightened his back, looked at me slyly and said: When you marry, Odile, don’t marry a man who drinks.
There isn’t a man who doesn’t drink! I said.
Fetch me a glass of cider from the cellar, he ordered me, from the barrel on the right.
He drank the cider slowly, looking at the mountains with snow still on them.
I’d give a lot, Odile, to see the man you’re going to marry.
You’ll see him all right, Papa.
He shook his head and gave me back the glass. No, Odile, I’ll never see the man you marry.
He said it smiling, but I couldn’t bear him saying it. I couldn’t bear the silence of what it meant. I said the first thing that came into my head: I won’t marry a man unless I love him, and if I love him, he’ll love me, and if we love each other … if we love each other, we’ll have children, and I’ll be too busy to notice if he drinks, Papa, and if he drinks too much too often I’ll fetch him cider from the cellar, so many glasses he’ll go to sleep in the kitchen and I’ll put him to bed as soon as the cows are fed.
The Barracks below are scarcely visible in the snow. I can spot them because of blue smoke coming from a chimney. A woman is crossing the footbridge over the river. The Barracks were three minutes’ walk from the factory—the same as our house in the opposite direction. From our house to the footbridge was five minutes’ walk. Three if I ran. Mother often sent me to the shop by the Barracks to buy mustard or salt or something she’d forgotten. I walked to the bridge and then ran. At whatever time of day, the men who lived there would cry out and wave. They worked on shifts, and of those not working or sleeping some would be washing their clothes on the grass, some preparing a meal by an open window, some tinkering with an old car they
hoped to put on the road. In the winter they lit bonfires outside and they brewed tea and roasted chestnuts. They were forbidden to fish in the river.
If I stopped running they held up their arms and grinned and tried to pat my head. I was always relieved to cross the bridge back to our side. Father said the Company had built the Barracks to house a hundred men as soon as the factory was finished. The Company knew they wouldn’t find more than two or three hundred local workers and so they foresaw from the beginning that they would need foreigners. Every man who lodged in the Barracks had his own secrets. Three, four, perhaps more. Impenetrable and unnameable. They turned over these secrets in their hands, wrapped them in paper, threw them in the river, burnt them, whittled them away with their knives when they had nothing else to do. Hundreds of secrets. We in the village on our side of the river had only four. Who killed Lucie Cabrol for her money? Where above Peniel is the entrance to the disused gold mine? What happens at the bridegroom’s funeral before they put him in his coffin? Who betrayed the Marmot, who was Michel’s uncle, after the factory-gate meeting? Only four secrets. Across the river they in their sheds kept hundreds.
From here, river, house, sheds, factory, bridge, all look like toys. So it was in childhood, Odile Blanc.
One blazing July day in 1950, Mademoiselle Vincent, the schoolmistress, came to the house. I hid in the stable. She wore a hat whose brim was as wide as her shoulders; it was silver-grey in colour and around it was tied a pink satin ribbon.
Merde! said Father. It’s the schoolteacher. Look, Louise!
I’ll be slipping out, Achille, said Mother.
I have come to talk to you about your daughter, Monsieur Blanc.
Not doing well at school? Do sit down, Mademoiselle Vincent.
On the contrary, I’ve come to tell you she—she scratched her hot freckled shoulder—on the contrary, I’ve come to tell you how well your Odile is doing.
Kind of you to come all this way to tell us that. A little coffee?