Danielle’s baby was a girl whom they christened Barbara. In the waste-land behind the shop, Pasquale has fixed a swing on a plane tree and Barbara sometimes plays there with her friends. The men in the tyre yard call Barbara their Uccellina, their tiny bird.
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.