Soft in the Head (10 page)

I
’
VE BEEN THINKING
about the word
uncultivated—land that has not been tilled; see also: fallow ground
—which popped into my head one day while I was talking to Margueritte. And about how the cultivation in books relates to the cultivation of artichokes. Just because land isn’t cultivated doesn’t mean it’s not good for potatoes and other things. Make no mistake: tilling doesn’t make the soil better, it just prepares it to better accommodate the seedlings. It aerates it. Because if the soil is too acidic, too chalky or too poor, nothing will take root.

I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say: What about fertilizer?

Let me tell you something about fertilizer: you can dump a truckload on the land, but if the soil was bad to begin with, it’ll still be bad. OK, maybe with a lot of sweat, you might get three or four potatoes out of it. Spuds the size of marbles. Whereas if you have rich, black soil with thick clods that don’t crumble between your fingers, then with or without fertilizer, it will produce something. Then you have to factor in the know-how of whoever’s doing the gardening. And the weather, which depends on the Good Lord, who makes it rain whenever it suits Him. And the phases of the moon, because you’d have to be a complete idiot to plant during the young moon if you want roots—carrots, beetroot, onions—or during the old moon if it’s leaves—lettuce, spinach, cabbage—but I’m not telling you anything
you don’t already know. Then there’s the tricks you never tell anyone, except on your deathbed, such as the best places to find mushrooms—even just saying that, I crossed my fingers. May the Good Lord keep me hale and hearty and equal to the task.

All this leads me to the conclusion that with people, it’s just the same: just because you’re uncultivated doesn’t mean you’re not cultivable. You just need to stumble on the right gardener. Find the wrong one, one with no experience, and you’re a botched job.

And I’m not just saying that about that bastard Monsieur Bayle who obviously didn’t know how to sow by the moon, if I can be metaphorical—
see also: symbolic
.

Anyway, these are just a couple of ideas that popped into my head without me noticing.

Daydreaming helps me think.

A
FEW
DAYS AFTER
our conversation about questions and answers and dictionaries, I got to the bench to find Margueritte was already sitting there and next to her was a package in fancy wrapping paper.

I pretended not to notice and sat down the same as always.

She nodded to the package and said:

“It’s for you.”

“For me?” I said.

It wasn’t my birthday. Not that I wasn’t happy: it’s always nice to get a present when you’re not expecting something. Even when you are expecting it, I suppose. Though I don’t have much experience of that.  

Margueritte gave a little shake of her head. She said:

“Actually, strictly speaking it’s not a gift, it is something I have owned for a long time, something that has served me often…”

“But why?” I said.

“Why what?”

“Why would you give me a present?”

She gave me her surprised look.

“Don’t you think it’s possible to give someone something for no reason, just to make them happy? Why, only last week you spontaneously gave me that adorable kitten carved from apple wood…”

Margueritte has a different way of thinking from other people. From the people I know, at least. I can’t imagine Landremont or Marco handing me something and saying:

“Here, Germain, I just wanted to make you happy.”

That said, I can’t imagine giving them a little sculpted cat. Spontaneously or otherwise.

We’re not queers.

My mother didn’t really go in for giving presents. But seeing as how I got a present of a clip round the ear every day, I didn’t expect much on my birthdays. I thought about everyone I knew, but Annette is the only other person who could have done something like this, for no other reason than because she loves me.

Since I was just sitting there, saying nothing, Margueritte asked:

“Don’t you want to know what it is?”

I said: Yeah, of course!

Feeling it with my fingers, I worked out it was a book. Shit. I unwrapped it anyway, doing my best to look interested, because you don’t judge a gift horse by its cover. It was worse than a book: it was a dictionary.

Oh shit! I thought. What the hell am I going to do with this?

I said thank you to Margueritte. But, in all honesty, it was a bit of an effort.

And she, looking like someone who’s just pulled off some brilliant April Fool’s trick, said:

“Well, I’m relieved to see that you like it! I was worried I might be making a mistake, giving it to you.”

“Nuh-uh,” I said, “It’s a brilliant idea… Actually, I was just about to buy a new one…”

She said:

“Really? Is yours past its sell-by date?”

And she gave a little laugh.

I like it when she laughs. But at the same time it scares me, I’m always afraid she won’t be able to catch her breath. You see old people who start laughing and end up coughing and spluttering like a diesel engine, something goes down the wrong way and before you know it they’ve croaked.

Though it’s as good a way as any to die.

“Germain, do you know the
true
purpose of dictionaries?”

I felt like saying: For propping up a wonky table, but instead I said:

“For understanding difficult words.”

“Well, that too… But not just that. Above all, they allow you to sail away.”

“?…”

“Let’s imagine you are looking up a word, all right? Some word that you find ‘difficult’.”

That wasn’t very hard to imagine.

“Very well. You find the word and next to it you sometimes see the letters
s.a.
followed by one or more other words. It stands for
see also,
but it could just as easily stand for
sail away.
It urges us to turn the pages, to track down
new nouns, adjectives or verbs which in turn send us off again in search of other words…”

Suddenly, she was all excited. Old people get their kicks very differently from the rest of us, I swear.

So, anyway, I said, Yeah, obviously, of course, and I’m staring down at my feet.

“A dictionary is not simply a book, Germain. It is much more than that. It is a maze… an extraordinary labyrinth in which we joyfully lose ourselves.”

I don’t know much about labyrinths, unless you count the maze they create around the bridle paths at the Château de la Mort for midsummer festival, next to the ghost train and the rollercoaster, but if that was what she was talking about, I didn’t see the connection to this dictionary of hers, and certainly not to having fun.

So, I said, Uh-huh, but I didn’t add anything, I just nodded.

She kind of carried on raving for a bit, then she calmed down and we were able to talk about other stuff, mostly about her research into seeds, which are like tiny boxes “comprised of an integument that protects the albumen and an embryo”.

I know what an embryo is, it’s got something to do with hens’ eggs and with babies, too, and that suddenly makes me think of Annette. One of these days I’m going to give her one, there’s no getting out of it.

Albumen, on the other hand, doesn’t mean anything to me.

I explained to Margueritte that from grape seeds you can make grape seed oil. And she said, Yes, you’re absolutely right! And that they contain other ingredients including tannin, a word I know really well seeing as how you get it in wine.

It’s funny, you think you’re talking about scientific stuff but no, it turns out you’re on home ground.

W
HEN MARGUERITTE
got up to leave, I walked her as far as the bandstand and then turned and headed straight home without popping into Chez Francine. I couldn’t see myself showing up for a drink lugging a dictionary with me. In my crowd, books aren’t exactly welcome. A little bit is all right, but you can’t go overboard. When it’s Landremont, people accept it because he’s the oldest and the only mechanic. Even Julien, who passed his
baccalauréat
, or Marco who speaks five languages—Italian on account of his origins, Serbian and Romanian on account of his illegitimate stepfathers, and Spanish for the past ten years—even they don’t go around showing off how clever they are. So it wouldn’t look good, what with me being soft in the head—
see also: foolish, half-witted.

I went straight home without making any detours, I was scared of running into someone. I was so ashamed I stashed the dictionary out of sight like it was a porn mag. And that’s what was weird, because I felt the same overpowering urge to look inside. It just goes to show.

That night, I hesitated. And then I thought, why don’t I look up a difficult word just to get an idea?
Labyrinth
, for example.

And that’s when I realized there was a catch: to look up a word in the dictionary,
you have to know how to spell it
! Which means dictionaries are only useful to educated people, who are precisely the ones who don’t need them.

People are hacking down Amazon rainforests with chainsaws to make dictionaries that are supposed to help you but only end up proving how thickheaded you actually are? So much for the ecosystem!

It’s not Margueritte’s fault: she was born on the right side of the book cover, reading and writing comes naturally to her. Since I didn’t want to waste her present, I decided to look up a few things I felt pretty sure I could spell.

Fuck
and
shit
, yes.
Slut,
too.
Imbecile,
no.

Olympique de Marseille
, nothing doing, but
Saint-Etienne,
result!

I have to say, it’s pretty comprehensive for an old dictionary.

After that I looked up people’s names just for a laugh. I didn’t find Landremont, or Marco, or Zekouc-Pelletier, Youssef, Francine or Chazes.

I found Margueritte, with only one
t
, which is a type of daisy. And Annette, with no
e
and a
th
which means dill, so I looked up dill which turns out to be a herb you can eat raw, something I’d happily do with my own Annette.

I found two entries for Germain, but with different spellings.

Germane:
(adj.) relevant to a subject under consideration

German(e):
(adj., archaic) a sibling sharing both parents, as opposed to a half-sibling or step-sibling, from Latin
germanus
“genuine, of the same parents”; s.a. cousin-german, German

Since there was an
s.a.
for
see also
before
cousin-german,
I went to have a look but I didn’t really understand the
explanation, so in the end I looked up German:
(n.) a native or inhabitant of Germany, or a person of German descent
. Germans:
the tribes of Germania (Burgundians, Franks, Goths, Lombards, Saxons, Suevi, Teutons, Vandals)
and I filed it all away in my head just in case.

I’ve got a really good memory when it comes to memorizing.

Next, I looked up
sparrow
, which is
a passerine bird with brown plumage streaked with black; may refer to birds of similar livery.

Livery,
on the off-chance that you don’t know, means
clothing or uniform bearing the colours of a king’s coat of arms
which has got no connection to sparrows, but by extension it can also mean
the distinctive coat or plumage of an animal or bird,
which obviously is connected.

I have to say I was a bit disappointed by the entry for
tomato
, where it says:
annual herbaceous plant (genus: Solanum; family: Solanaceae) widely cultivated for its fruit,
which is fine, as far as it goes. But further on it says,
see also: plum tomato.
Well, I’m sorry, but no. Because
Solanaceae,
fine, no problem, but why only plum tomato? Why make people think that’s the only cultivar? Are dictionary writers paid to keep things short or what? Do they keep the entries brief to save on paper, or is it because cultivated people don’t know shit about things that are actually cultivated?

It’s not like I was trying to find fault with Margueritte’s present, but in this case I knew a hell of a lot more than her dictionary, seeing as how, from personal experience—off the top of my head, without even looking them up—I can
reel off loads of tomato cultivars: the Tonnelet, the Saint Pierre, the White Beauty, the Black Krim and the Santorini, the Orange Bourgoin, the Black Prince, the Goutte d’Eau, the Roma, and the Gioia della Mensa, not to mention the Marmande and the Picardy.

“
Y
OU KNOW
, trying to find anything in that dictionary of yours is like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black hat that isn’t even there.”

Margueritte raised an eyebrow.

“A blind man…”

“It’s a figure of speech, it means it’s complicated.”

“Oh, I see… But in what way is it ‘complicated’?”

I’d been fretting about this all night and all the way there that morning.

I had to let it out.

I thought, fuck it, just say it, so I gave it to her with both barrels, about how I hated reading, about not being able to spell, about that bastard Monsieur Bayle, the whole farrago.

Now we’ll see, I thought.

But Margueritte just gave me a funny look.

I was still laying it on thick, all the stuff I’d never been able to get out that was still stuck in my throat. How you get treated like a halfwit—me especially—if you don’t know how to read properly. How people think that education is a substitute for politeness. How they talk down to you the minute they realize you’ve only got a handful of words while they speak like they’ve swallowed an encyclopaedia. But scratch the surface of what they’re saying and it’s mostly bullshit and hot air. I went on and on, by now I was practically shouting.

Even though I could hear it in my head, that little voice yelling:
For God’s sake, shut up, Germain! Can’t you see you’re freaking out this poor old woman?
But I couldn’t shut up, it just poured out of me, the whole haystack of straws that broke the camel’s back, the injustice, the whole shebang. And the worst thing was that just listening to myself made me even more scared. It was like putting my life into words was like spilling salt on the wound. Inside I was a mess, and these pictures were flashing past and my inner voice was begging the Lord in His great mercy to gag me so I’d shut my trap. And then all the rest of it came out: the girlfriends, the job, the dreams I had as a kid. And to cap it all, my mother.

Lastly I told her that her dictionary wasn’t even complete, because
Solanaceae
, fine, no problem, but plum tomato!…

Anyway.

Margueritte took a long deep breath; it was like I’d been holding her head under water.

And she said:

“Germain, I’m so sorry.”

That took the pressure off straight away.

“Why are you sorry?” I said.

“Listening to you, I realized that you are right: if one does not know how a word is spelled, or the way it works alphabetically, a dictionary is utterly useless!”

“And no offence, but it’s not even comprehensive.”

“Ah yes, that is another point I cannot dispute. Not two days ago, I looked up the word
klingon
—and would you believe it, it wasn’t there!”

“I’m not surprised. And I can tell you right now it’s not the only word missing!”

“Probably not, probably not… At the same time, you have to admit that there are many things you
can
learn from a dictionary…”

“Fair enough, but if I can’t even use it…”

“Very true… Tsk tsk. It is frustrating. What are we going to do?”

She sat there thinking, her hands and her head shaking a little. I was racking my brain to think of something to help, because she’d said we, and that made me happy.

In the end, I said:

“I mean, if you just knew how to write the word you’re looking for, then you could just go to the right page…”

“Exactly.”

“Like, if I wanted to look up, I don’t know… let’s say
labyrinth
, though why I came up with that example, God knows…”

“And God works in mysterious ways. Oh, the French language is a difficult thing. For example, the word
labyrinth
is littered with traps. Here, let me show you.” And then she delved in her handbag, took out a pen and went back to rummaging again.

“You wouldn’t have a notepad on you?”

“Uh… no.”

“Perhaps a scrap of paper?”

“I’ve got my shopping list, if that’s any good.”

“That will be fine, Germain, that will be fine.”

She wrote down the word, tilting her head, leaning on her handbag. Her handwriting was large and slightly shaky, but not too shabby for her age. She held out the piece of paper.

“There you go.”

La-by-rin-th?

Bloody hell. I’d never have guessed that.