They do go on, I replied, every day, every hour. People work, people go home to eat, feed the cat, watch TV, go to bed, make jam, mend radios, take baths, it all goes on all the while — till one day each of us dies.
And that’s what you’re waiting for! he said.
I’m not waiting for anything.
You know you talk like an old woman?
I’m a widow. I was a widow at eighteen.
You talk like an old woman and you’re not thirty.
In three months. Very soon. You believe age makes a difference?
It’s not age, it’s time running out. He dabbed at his forehead with his red handkerchief.
Say it again, Michel, I taunted him, according to you things can’t go on. But they do — you know it as well as I do. Things go on!
If we don’t fight, he said, we lose all.
Do you really think life’s only a battle?
At this he laughed, laughed till the tears came to his eyes. He filled up my glass, raised his, and we clinked them.
You of all people, Odile, not to know the answer to that question. Do you — you, Odile Blanc — really think life isn’t a battle?
He laughed shortly again but this time his tears were those of sadness.
When I went up to my room, with the freezer full of meat and a reproduction of the Angelus above the bed, I didn’t undress. I waited for half an hour and watched the river. Then I brushed my hair and, without putting my shoes on, I edged my way past the wardrobes in the corridor and found the door to Michel’s room, which I opened without knocking.
Our shadow is moving over the white snow, Christian, and looks like the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet, something between a D and an L. In Cluses, where I learnt words off the blackboard in the school, which, after the factory, was the tallest building I’d ever seen, in Cluses words were strange to me. Now they are coming back into my head like pigeons into their pigeon loft.
From our union, Marie-Noelle was born on 4 August ’67. At birth she weighed 3.2 kilos, a little less than you. The milk came up into my breasts and I fed her for more than nine months. I didn’t want to stop. I was no longer working in the Components Factory, for the four of us lived together above the shop in Pouilly.
Madame Labourier knitted a pink blanket for the cradle. Odile Blanc was not exactly the daughter-in-law Madame Labourier would have chosen for her son, but facts were facts, and Marie-Noelle was her granddaughter.
When Michel was young, Madame Labourier informed me, you couldn’t count the number of girls he went out with. After the accident, during the years he was away in Lyons, they all got married. All things considered, it’s understandable, isn’t it? After all, they were young healthy girls.
Later she warned me about the future. As he ages, he’s going to change, he’s going to become more and more demanding. I saw it with Neighbour Henri who had polio, and my poor cousin Gervais who had diabetes. As they get older, cripples — particularly men cripples — become difficult and crotchety. You’ll have to be patient, my girl.
After you were born, Marie-Noelle, it was as if you gave him back his legs. He was so proud of you, his pride had feet. He hated being separated from you for more than an hour or two. When you were old enough to go to school, he refused to take the car, he walked with you a good half-kilometre, holding your hand.
The limbs he had lost were somehow returned to him in your small child’s body. It was he, not me, who taught you to walk. Now you are no longer a child and from the sky I can talk to you.
Women are beautiful when young, almost all women. Don’t listen to envious gossip, Marie-Noelle. Whatever the proportions of a face, whether a body is too skinny or too heavy, at some moment a woman possesses the power of beauty which is given to us as women. Often the moment is brief. Sometimes the moment may come and we not even know it. Yet traces of it remain. Even at my advanced age now there are traces.
Look in a mirror if you pass one this afternoon in the hearing aid shop in Annecy whilst you’re waiting for Papa, look at your hair which you washed last night and see how it invites being touched. Look at your shoulder when you wash at the sink and then look down at where your breast assembles itself, look at the part between shoulder and breast which slopes like an alpage — for thirty years still this slope is going to attract tears, teeth clenched in passion, feverish children, sleeping heads, work-rough hands. This beauty which hasn’t a name. Look at how gently your stomach falls at its centre into the navel, like a white begonia in full bloom. You can touch its beauty. Our hips move with an assurance that no man has; yet they promise a peace, our hips, like a cow’s tongue for — her calf. This frightens men, who knock us over and call us cunts. Do you know what our legs are like, seen from the back, Marie-Noelle, like lilies just before they open!
I will tell you which men deserve our respect. Men who give themselves to hard labour so that those close to them can eat. Men who are generous with everything they own. And men who spend their lives looking for God. The rest are pigshit.
Men aren’t beautiful. Nothing has to stay in them. Nothing has to be attracted by any peace they offer. So they’re not beautiful. Men have been given another power. They burn. They give off light and warmth. Sometimes they turn night into day. Often they destroy everything. Ashes are men’s stuff. Milk is ours.
Once you’ve learnt to judge for yourself and are no more fooled by their boasts, it’s not hard to tell the man who deserves respect and the man who is pigshit. Yet the power of a man to burn, we discover only by loving him. Does our love release the power? Not always. I loved Stepan for many weeks before we lived IN EUROPA. He was burning when I met him on the footbridge.
Michel I started to love when we returned to the village. We never got to Paris. I can die happily without seeing the capital. We stayed for three nights at the mad hotel with the white geese and his room opposite the wardrobes. Then we came home.
Once in the factory Stepan and Michel worked on the same shift for three days, yet it’s in me they still meet. Marie-Noelle, Christian — embrace each other tonight, whatever happens, do this tonight, and know your fathers are embracing each other.
It is getting late and the light is already turning. The snow on the Gruvaz, facing west, is turning pink, the colour of the best rhubarb when cooked. I imagined we would come down to earth before it’s dark, but Christian must know what he’s doing. He’s a national instructor, he came second in the European Championship of Hang-gliding and when I said to him, they’ve both gone to Annecy, they needn’t know anything, need they? they won’t be frightened, take me up this afternoon, the time’s come, he simply replied: Are you ready?
Strange how I’m not cold. I can feel each toe and each finger, they’re warm as they were when I was a baby — I suddenly remember.
You take a man right into you and you cannot compare him or measure him or make a story of him. Everything that has ever been is swelling with the lips of the mouth into which you take him and he fills you, where you know as little as you know about an unborn child in your womb.
You can tell yourself other things about him when he has left, yet all of it remains far away compared to the places within you to which you lead him. Hay in the barn cannot change back into grass. If he’s burning, the places to which you have led him are flooded with light. In your belly there are stars and of these stars you may be a victim. Poor Clotilde gave birth in the stable all alone, the door locked on the outside by her father.
It is painful for us to judge the man we have taken, for he’s ours, already like a son. How can you judge a body which has been where he has been, who has come from there? Beside his single name all else is dead coals. How reluctant we are to judge! If we have to, if we are forced to, if we are picked up by the ears like a rabbit, we judge him and suffer the pain, the violence done to the sky within us where the stars shone. Men, poor men, judge more easily.