Not everyone was in favor of electricity, though, far from it. Some folks wouldn’t even give permission for a pole to be put up outside their house. What, I’m supposed to stare at a pole for the rest of my life? The hell with that! It’s my land up to the middle of the road. There were times they came after us with pickaxes, we had to call the police. They wouldn’t let us into their homes, they’d drive us off like thieves. Especially because with the houses, they weren’t being forced. If someone didn’t want electricity, that was their business. How did they explain it? In different ways. That there’d be another war soon, just you wait. And in wartime oil lamps are your best bet. If you run out of kerosene you can burn linseed oil. You just had to plant flax. Of all the different kinds of light, the most reliable were the sun, as long as God was willing, and oil lamps. It doesn’t need to be as bright in the night as during the day. It’s enough if it’s light during the day, nighttime is for sleeping. Were we trying to turn the world upside down? With all these poles and wires? What if the sparrows and the swallows sit on them? They’ll get burned to cinders. It’ll draw lightning. Sickness too, maybe. The sicknesses we already have are more than enough. You wouldn’t earn anything extra from those kinds of people, of course. But in general you didn’t do too badly with the private jobs. For millers, for example, before the government took over the mills. In the presbyteries and churches. Though with the priests you could never be sure. They’d always get away with a God bless you.
So one time when I counted up again how much I’d put aside for the saxophone, it seemed like it might actually be enough. I had no idea of the price of a saxophone. I started asking around among the musicians in the villages. They could tell me the price of a harmonica or fiddle or clarinet, but most of them had never even heard of a saxophone. Well, I took one day off and headed for the nearest town. There was a music shop, but they didn’t have any saxophones, nor did they know how much one might cost, especially now after the war. So some time later I took myself to another town, a bigger one. They didn’t have one either, but they promised to find out how much one might be, they might even try to order one if they could. They’d also ask around privately, maybe someone would have one, because from time to time people brought them instruments to sell. I gave them my name. I wanted to leave a down payment but they wouldn’t take it. They said to try back in a month or two. If one came in they’d set it aside.
You have no idea how much each night before I fell asleep I’d imagine hanging that saxophone around my neck, putting the mouthpiece between my lips, running my fingers over the keys. I even decided that when I finally got it, I’d throw a drinking party to celebrate and get drunk myself.
All of a sudden, out of the blue one day, someone heard on the corn cob that there was going to be a change of currency. What’s the corn cob? Not the airplane, they also gave that name to the radio speakers that were put in people’s homes, only if they wanted of course, where they already had electricity. And the new currency, you know what that was about? Not just that there were going to be different banknotes. It was that with the new ones you could buy three times less. You never heard of a change like that? Where were you then? Though never mind that. In any case, a saxophone was out of the question now. To be honest, I didn’t even feel angry. I didn’t feel anything at all. The only thing I felt was that I had no reason to go on living. So I decided to hang myself.
That day we were working on a transformer pole. Transformer poles look like giant As. They’re made of two poles that come together at the top, while lower down they’re reinforced by a linking horizontal crossbeam. I was going to use that beam. The previous day I borrowed a halter from one of the farmers. Towards evening, when I was through with work I put my tools away in the toolbag and dropped it to the ground. I tied one end of the halter to the crossbeam and made a noose in the other end. I put the noose around my neck and I was about to pull my spiked boots clear of the pole when I glanced down at the ground and I saw Uncle Jan. He was standing with his head tipped back, watching what I was doing. No, it wasn’t an illusion. I saw him plain as I see you now.
“Don’t do it,” he said. “I hanged myself, and I don’t see any difference.”
5
No, I stopped saving up for a saxophone. Besides, pretty soon I starting working on a building site, and when I got my first wages I bought myself a hat. Why a hat? I don’t know. Maybe I had to buy something so I wouldn’t be tempted to save up for a saxophone again. And maybe it was a hat because when I was still in school I’d made up my mind to buy a hat once I had a saxophone. Saxophone and hat, I used to like to see myself that way when I imagined myself.
They once brought this film to show at the school. There’s a big hat shop, a man and a woman come in, his name is Johnny and she’s Mary, and the guy wants to buy a hat. He starts trying them on, while Mary sits down in an armchair and buries herself in a magazine. It was the first film I’d ever seen in my life. So when he was trying on all those hats I had the impression that he wasn’t trying them on on the screen, but that he was with us in the rec room. Or that we were all in the shop where he was trying on hats.
He tried hat after hat, while Mary, who by the way was a stunner, was sitting in the armchair like I said, her nose in the magazine. She was wearing furs, her legs were crossed, she wore a chic pair of pumps.
I don’t know if you’ll agree with me on this, but a woman’s legs make or break the whole. And as long as she’s wearing nice shoes, everything else can even be very plain. Her face can be plain if the legs are OK. But she has to be wearing nice shoes. You rarely see legs like that anymore. Most all women go around in pants, and even if they’re in a dress they often wear the kind of shoes that remind you of wartime. Plus, these days hardly any of them can walk the way a woman ought to walk. Have you seen how women walk today? Take a look some time. They jerk their legs, stomp their feet. They’re more like soldiers than women. Even here, they’re in bathing suits and barefoot but most of them still walk around that way. And not on concrete but on earth, on grass. A movie director abroad once told me he couldn’t find an actress to play the part of a princess in a movie. The faces were right but not the walk.
So anyway, Mary was so engrossed in her magazine that she wasn’t paying any attention whatsoever to the man. And he kept trying on hats. In each one he would stand longer and longer in front of the mirror, and seemed less and less sure whether he should say, this one might work, or take it off and ask for another one, or study himself in the mirror a bit longer. He’d tried quite a few already, but he evidently didn’t like himself in any of them because he kept asking to see something else. And the clerk, he didn’t bat an eyelid and just kept bringing one new hat after another. Also, each time he brought a new hat he’d smile and give a half-bow. And even though the man could see himself full length in the mirror, the clerk still went around him with a hand mirror, holding it up to one side then the other, now in front of his face, now from behind so he could see how he looked in the reflection of the hand mirror in the big mirror in front of him. Each time, he’d sing the praises of each hat equally while the man was trying it on: