Soft in the Head (11 page)

A
FEW
DAYS LATER
, walking along the avenue du Général de Gaulle, I noticed that someone had tagged the new multimedia library—there was graffiti all across the front. Obviously, we all talked about it down at Chez Francine. Marco laughed, shrugged his shoulders and said it was no big deal since it was just some kid’s tag and not Nazi swastikas and stuff like that. And it would give the lazy bastards on the municipal street-cleaning crew something to do, because they never did a tap of work. Francine didn’t say anything, seeing as how she was still really broken up about Youssef. Landremont was angry. He kept saying the little shits responsible should be tarred and feathered, that would make an example of them. Julien nodded his head and said:

“Honestly, it’s a real shame. I mean, it’s pretty crap, the new library building, but at least it was clean. And it’s our taxes that’ll pay for it, you mark my words, because they’re not going to restore the place for free. And they’ll have to repaint the whole front of the building, so it’s not going to come cheap, let me tell you!”

“They tagged the other side too, on the rue Faïence,” I said.

“Jesus wept,” Landremont roared, “The evil little shits. Vandals, that’s what they are, vandals!”

“Yeah,” I said, “Vandals, that’s what they are. And Saxons. I blame the Saxons.”

They all looked at each other, confused, and Julien said:

“What the hell has this got to do with saxophones?”

“
Saxons,
I said Sax-ons you know, like Teutons, or Lombards.”  

Landremont shook his head and said:

“Sorry, I’ve no idea what he’s on about. You guys?”

The others shook their heads.

“Explain it to us, Germain, because right now we’re completely stumped.”

“What do you want me to explain? Do you know how to speak the language or don’t you?”

If there’s one thing you don’t wind Landremont up about, it’s culture and vocabulary. He always knows the answers to the quiz show questions on TV, he’s got a head full of information that’s as useful as a chocolate teapot, like
Name a fruit of the Solanaceae family
(tomato).

I knew I’d touched a nerve from the way he combed his hand across his bald head, like he was expecting to find his hair. In the end, he said:

“Could you be a little more specific as to what you’re talking about?”

“You’re the one who brought up the subject. You mentioned the Vandals, so I added the Saxons and the Teutons. I just thought of them at random, I could just as easily have said… I don’t know… the Burgundians.”

“Is he drunk or what?” said Julien.

“No, I’m not drunk. You should get out more: I was giving you examples of the Germanic peoples.”

“Really?” said Marco, “Were there any swastikas?”

“Bloody hell, it’s like you’re doing it deliberately. I said ‘Germanic’ from ‘Germania’, I wasn’t talking about the Nazis.”

“Not all Germans are Nazis!” Landremont said angrily.

Then, straight after, he turned to me and said:

“What made you bring that up?”

“What made me bring what up?”

“All those names, Burgundians, Lombards…”

“Saxophones…” said Marco.

“Sax-ons,” said Julien.

I yelled:

“But like I just said,
you’re
the one who brought it up first. You were the one who said that taggers are Vandals, that’s why I—”

Landremont banged his fist on the table.

“OK, guys, I think I get it.”

“Bully for you,” said Marco.

Landremont jerked his chin:

“Can you give us a list then, of these Germanic peoples?”

“No problem! There’s Burgundians, Franks, Goths, Lombards, Saxons, Suevi, Teutons, Vandals…”  

Landremont sniggered and repeated:

“…and Vandals… There you go. And in alphabetical order, no less!”

Marco groaned.

“If this is some private joke, just say so. We’ll leave you to it, you can turn the lights out when you go.”  

Landremont gave me a wink.

“Way to go, Germain! You never cease to amaze me. The other day you were talking about Camus’s
The Plague
and today it’s the ancient tribes of Germania… What’s next? Are you going to start quoting Maupassant to us?”

“Stop it,” said Julien, “Just give him a break!”

But when he smells blood, Landremont is like a dog with a bone, he locks his jaws shut and there’s nothing you can do. So, just like that, he said pointedly:

“Because obviously you know about Maupassant, right?”

“Yeah… Of course, yeah.”

“So tell me, what sort of things did he write?”

“Fuck off,” I said.

“Oh come on, just for a laugh.”

“Fine, then! He wrote that guidebook,
Le Guide Maupassant,
OK? I’m not a complete fucking moron.”

Julien coughed into his glass. Landremont raised his eyebrows.

I finished my beer. Then I got up and left without another word.

And then, just as I was going out the door, I heard Landremont yelling: “
Le Guide Maupassant!
Jesus H. Christ! Did you hear that?
Le Guy de Maupassant!
”

“Yeah, so what’s your point?… I’ve never heard of it,” said Marco.

“Is it like
Le Guide Michelin
?” said Francine.

I was too far away to hear any more. But I didn’t care, because I’d made Landremont look like a knucklehead. For once.

F
OR A WHILE NOW
my mother’s been going round the bend. But recently it’s more of a hairpin. These days, I see her shuffling down the garden at all hours, looking like she’s been dragged through a hedge backwards. She’ll stop in front of the runner beans, or the potatoes—it varies—and she’ll stand there like a statue, looking like she’s thinking, then traipse back up the path with her empty basket.

Whenever I go to see her, it’s like a fireworks display. I’m lucky if she even opens the door.

She’s got it into her head that I’m after her pension. She’s told all the neighbours that me and my friend are planning to kill her. She follows me around the house screaming that she’s not about to let herself be ripped off, and how I’m a disgrace, torturing my mother like this.

Anyway, she’s won; I’ve thrown in the towel, I’ve given up.

I’m not going to set foot in her house, I’m not going to bring her vegetables to make soup or fix her taps or change the light bulbs or anything. I say this to myself, but I go anyway, and I hate myself for being such an idiot.

She calls me a bastard. If I get too close, she tries to wallop me. Some days, it’s all I can do to stop myself giving her a good slap. Just to shut her up.

When I’ve finally had it up to the back teeth, I talk to the guys at Chez Francine, I spill my guts.

Julien gives me the usual spiel. No matter what you do, Germain, she’ll always be your mother. In this life, we only get one mother.

Just as well we don’t get more than one, I think, otherwise you might as well give me two planks, a hammer and some nails and I’ll make my own bloody cross right now.

Landremont says it’s understandable for me to feel angry because anyone would have to admit that my mother is like a dose of salts.

More like a dose of rat poison.

The other day, Marco asked me why I don’t put her into assisted living.

“Dump my mother in an old folks’ home? She’s only sixty-three. You think it would be easy, explaining that to her? I’m not about to risk it, I can tell you.”

Landremont explained that I could get someone to do it for me.

“And I suppose you could personally drag her there? You with your scrawny little arms?”

“Hang on a minute, she can’t be that bad!”

“You’ve obviously never seen her when she’s foaming at the mouth.”

Julien said:

“He’s right, when his mother’s angry, she puts the fear of God in me.”

“She could put the fear of God in God,” I said. “So to get her out of the house and into a care home, I don’t
see how it could be done without sending in a SWAT team…”

Francine protested that we were going a bit too far.

“I mean it, I don’t know what it is with men, they always have to exaggerate… Your mother isn’t that bad, Germain. She’s a bit gone in the head, that’s all.”

“She’s like a fish,” Marco laughed, “rotting from the head down.”

I reminded him that this was my mother he was talking about.

Marco said, OK, fine, no need to get riled, and then to calm things down he told us about his grandfather, who claims that microphones have been planted all over the house, especially in the toilet.

“Microphones?” we all said. “Who would want to bug your grandfather?”

“He says it’s the town hall, that they’re spying on him.”

“On the toilet?”

“Yep.”

“Shit!” we said.

And then Jojo said, You have to admit, there’s no upside to being old.

T
HESE DAYS
I work at SOPRAF Painting and Restoration.

I got the job through Julien’s brother-in-law, Etienne. I do the heavy lifting. Unpacking the tins of paint, stacking the shelves, taking the boxes and the plastic to the recycling, that sort of shit, it takes in a whole range of things I know how to do.

Jack of all trades, that’s my area of expertise.

Down at the Manpower office, they know me. They know my talents don’t come with degrees and diplomas. But when it comes to hauling sacks of cement on my shoulder while chatting and joking, I’m a genius. Whenever they have a thankless task—
see also: difficult, unpleasant
—that no one wants to do, they give it to yours truly, sorted.

Some people work in offices with wall-to-wall carpets and plastic plants, and other people—like me—sweat blood for three euros an hour.

That’s life, what can you do? We’ve all got our own shit to deal with.

The problem with jobs is that you have to have one in order to live. Well, you have to hold one down for long enough to be eligible for unemployment benefit afterwards. Otherwise, I have to say work doesn’t much interest me. Well, not when it’s hard graft.

Landremont says my problem is that I have no ambition.

I say Landremont’s problem is that he has too many opinions.

I think a person can be normal and not like work. Actually, it’s the opposite I find surprising. You have to remember that there are billions of people all over the world who manage to live without having jobs. The Jivaro Indians, for example. When I was a little kid, my dream of the future didn’t involve lugging breeze blocks or unloading palettes or humping truck tyres. And it didn’t involve a career on the dole. Apart from the powerful vocation I already told you about—rose window-maker—I wanted to be an Amazonian Indian. My uncle Georges had given me a book about them with loads of photos he’d found in a bargain bin.

For a long time I kept it in the bottom of the wardrobe in my bedroom.

On days when people were making my life hell (Monsieur Bayle, or Cyril Gontier—my greatest enemy back then—not to mention my mother, who always got the gold medal), I’d take out the book in the evening, snuggle up in bed and look at the photos.

I pictured myself as an Indian chief in a brand new feather headdress, my dick swinging in the breeze in its penis sheath. And I’d think to myself, If they don’t stop making my life a misery, I’ll whittle some poison darts and shoot them in the arse. Then I’ll stand there with my blowpipe, all casual, and watch them die slowly and painfully as they froth at the mouth.

You’ve got big dreams when you’re a kid.

All the same, being an Amazonian Indian seems pretty cool to me.

They wander around pretty much naked apart from a necklace and a bow and arrow, they do sod all apart from playing the pan pipes and having little wars every now and then. They sit around campfires getting plastered on booze made from jungle creepers and I don’t know what all, they smoke spliffs for religious reasons.

They’ve got it good. And they get to see naked women all day long without even making an effort, since their women go round with their tits out and their other bits hidden by a feather. They fish, they hunt, they collect plants—to make poison for the darts. They grow a few gourds, some manioc, a bit of tobacco. They don’t spend their whole lives lugging crates. If you want my opinion, their lives are heaven on earth.

The only problem is that, when Landremont is banging on at me about my future and saying:

“For God’s sake, Germain, you can’t carry on like this for the rest of your life. You’re forty-five years old, surely there’s something you want to be when you grow up?”

I can’t say:

“I want to be a Jivaro Indian.”

First off, he’d think I was mad as well as being soft in the head. And secondly, knowing him, he’d start lecturing me about the hole in the ozone layer, and oil and multinationals
and deforestation, about Blackwater fever and malaria—which are God-awful diseases—and end up with a national disaster where every living human being in Amazonia dies.

I don’t know whether it’s because his wife died or because he got cirrhosis, but lately Landremont’s turned into the kind of guy who can turn heaven into a shit tip in a couple of sentences.

He crushes all hope, he pours weedkiller on it.

T
O BEGIN WITH
, I found Margueritte funny. And educational too, from the conversation point of view. Then, little by little, I got attached to her without even realizing.

Affection is something that grows on the quiet, it takes root without you knowing, then overruns the place worse than Japanese knotweed. By then, it’s too late: you can’t dose your heart with Roundup to weed out feelings.

In the early days, I was just happy to see her sitting on the bench when I arrived.

Later, if she wasn’t there, I wondered what she could possibly be doing instead of coming to see me.

Later still, after we’d discussed cultural things and stuff, I thought back over our conversations.

Sometimes, when she was reading, I’d stumble on a word I didn’t know—
prestige, exorbitant, languorous
—and I’d give her a little sign and she would explain it for me, or she’d write it on a little notepad she’d bought especially, because that had become the way we did things, and at night, when I got home, I’d look up the words.

Exorbitant—
see also: expensive, outrageous, prohibitive.

She even made little reminders for me. She had written out the alphabet in order in big letters on a sheet of white paper. And for every letter, she’d also written the letters that came second and even third.

Ab, Ac, Ad…

Aba, Abc, Abd…

She must have spent ages doing it, but it was really useful, seeing as how it’s not enough to know where
R
is, if you’re looking up
reminisce:
you need to know that it comes before
repartee
and after
rejuvenate.

I pinned it up beside my bed, and every night before I went to sleep I’d read the alphabet, out loud: A, B, C, D… And then I’d think of examples from everyday life. A is for Annette, B is for ballsack, C is for carrot, D is for dipstick, etc. Margueritte was with me even when she wasn’t around.

And then, one particular day when she wasn’t in the park—I mean we don’t meet up every day, obviously—it hit me: I didn’t know a thing about her apart from the name that she was christened with. Even if I was being tortured, I couldn’t have given her surname to the cops.

I realized that if something serious happened, a stroke or something, no one would come and tell me because I didn’t have any entitlement—
see also: rights, prerogative
—so I’d never know, she’d be off dying somewhere and I’d never see her again. I tell you, I was shit-scared, like some little kid lost in a big department store. I tried to reason with myself. Get over yourself, Germain, she’s just some random old lady. But no matter how much I tried not to care, I spent the whole day worrying and fretting. And so next time, as soon as I clapped eyes on her, I asked her her address straight out, point blank.

“I’ve been living in a retirement home called Les Peupliers for the past two years. It’s a stone’s throw from the town hall, just opposite the square, do you know the place?”

I said: Uh-huh, sure I know it.

Too right I knew it, I’d worked as a labourer there four or five years ago when they were renovating the upstairs rooms. In fact, let me tell you they’ll be bloody lucky if a chunk of ceiling doesn’t fall into some old codger’s morning coffee one of these days, because they didn’t understand the concept of a load-bearing wall at that retirement home. I mean, it’s solid enough, if you don’t look too closely. If we get hit by an earthquake some day, I can’t answer for the death toll. Though obviously I didn’t tell Margueritte that. It was just something I thought to myself.

Margueritte went on:

“It’s a lovely home, I’m glad I chose it: the staff are always available, and they’re so caring.”

With the money they charge, they can hardly afford to be uncaring.

“And what’s your surname?” I asked out of the blue.

“Escoffier, Margueritte Escoffier, why?”

I could hardly say: In case some day I have to come and dig you out of the rubble. So I said:

“No reason. I just wanted to know.”

And
bang
! she was off at a gallop about “the desire to know, that insatiable curiosity peculiar to mankind”, and so fourth and fifth and sixth. I let her ramble on, she loves a good discussion. And it doesn’t cost me anything to sit
there and pretend to listen. You can still be human. After that she talked about her life at Les Peupliers: Scrabble, bingo, trips to museums, the kind of shit that could make you want to top yourself.

It was like Margueritte was reading my mind, because she sighed and said:

“No one wants to grow old, you know…”

Then she gave a little laugh and added:

“But the great benefit of being old is that when you’re bored, you know it won’t be for long.”

I said: You’re not wrong there.

She went on:

“I can’t complain: I’ve still got my health, I live in pleasant surroundings. My pension is more than adequate. No, honestly, it would be unseemly to feel sorry for myself. But growing old… Growing old is a nuisance.”

This made me think about my own situation and realize that, if I take after my mother, me getting old would be a nightmare for everyone concerned and one I’d be better off avoiding. All because of the bloody genetic traits you can’t help inheriting on account of genealogy. Not to mention all the defects I don’t know about because they’re from the bastard side of my father and his lot.

By the time I’d stopped thinking, I realized that Margueritte had stopped talking.

We don’t often look at each other, her and me. That’s normal with a park bench, because you’re sitting next to each other. Usually, we chat away and watch the kids with
their pedal cars playing at being Michael Schumacher. Or at the clouds, or the pigeons. The important thing is that we listen to each other, we don’t need to look. But seeing as how she wasn’t saying anything, I gave her a once-over. She looked really down in the dumps. I can’t stand seeing a kid or an old person looking sad. It makes me sad too. And before I could stop myself, I’d put an arm around Margueritte’s shoulders and kissed her on the cheek.

She gripped my hand—she looked like she was about to shed a little tear—and she said:

“You are a good man, Germain. Your friends are very fortunate.”

What are you supposed to say to that? If you say yes, you come across as an arrogant wanker.

If you say no, you sound like a two-faced bastard.

I said, “Well…”

That seemed to be all right.

Margueritte gave a little cough, she said:

“Now then, if I’m not mistaken, we said we would do a little more reading together, did we not?”

“We did.”

“But we have not done any reading since
Promise at Dawn
several weeks ago, have we?”

“Um… no.”

“We shall have to remedy the situation! What would you like me to read next time?”

“Well… um…”

“Is there a subject that particularly interests you?”

“…”

“History, for example? Adventure stories? Detective novels? I don’t know, perhaps—”

“Amazonian Indians!” I butted in.

And as soon as I said it, I figured it was going to make me seem like a prize idiot.

But Margueritte said:

“Ah, the Amazonian Indians, of course… Of course… In that case, without wishing to get carried away, I think I have a novel on my shelves that you will enjoy…”

I wasn’t even surprised: when you’ve got books about plagues, you’re bound to have something on the Jivaro Indians.

“Is it by Camus?” I asked.

“Oh, no, not this time. But it is very good nonetheless, you’ll see.”

I said OK, and that was the truth.