My son and I have a quick lunch with Wilma (two braised teals, with tiny spoonfuls of cabbage and carrots that Wilma doesn’t touch, claiming to be full from a generous helping of teal, but clearly the truth is that this woman likes and perhaps even tolerates nothing but meat), and when, falsely casual, Wilma asks if I spent the whole morning with Ralph, I find it easy to lie and say yes.
My son doesn’t correct me. Pleased, reassured, Wilma suggests we do the same tomorrow morning.
I’m very hungry, but I force myself to take only one thigh and some carrots. My son eats very frugally, leaving Wilma to devour the rest of the meat with a pleasure so excessive that you can only look away.
Afterward, they both go off for a nap. They start seeing patients again at four in the afternoon, they tell me.
I step outside. Even at this midday hour, the road is cold and damp, however clear and bright the sky over the roofs. I start off uphill on the road, which circles the cluster of houses and runs on between two rows of pine trees, first low and scrawny, then ever taller, thicker, and more vigorous, and so I soon find myself in the damp coolness of a blue tunnel, where nothing rustles or shakes.
After a multitude of inexplicable curves, with no visible reason why the road might have thought it should turn this way rather than that in this endlessness of identical pine trees, I suddenly come out into a vast clearing.
Children’s shouts begin to ring out. A new-looking building of wood, glass, and aluminum deploys its sinuous, rounded forms at the far end of the clearing. Before it, a pretty paved schoolyard, now filling with a flood of children.
I come closer, already in the grips of envy and regret. I clutch the bars of the fence. The big blue and gray pine trees surround the school from a distance. All wearing brightly colored anoraks, the children run and jump in the muted light, in the eternal, polar shadow that veils this side of the mountain, but the sky is high and bright.
I immediately sense that this is a good and fine school, where nothing bad could ever happen to me. How happy I’d be to work here, I tell myself!
The tranquil joy radiating from the children’s dark faces, their quiet play, everything tells me that here I’d be just where I belong, and it pierces my heart with the gentle pangs of melancholy.
I pull myself away from the fence and walk into the schoolyard. The circle of teachers immediately stretches into a line as I come near. Curious and gentle, they extend their brown, deep faces toward me, and now they’re bent over me, short as I am, like tall, kindly pine trees.
Oh, I tell myself, at first struck dumb, I’m one of them!
Then my surprise falls away, my uncertainty and timidity, and I feel how positively natural and irrefutable is my likeness with these strangers now smiling at me, curious and patient, trusting in my decency and my right to walk into this schoolyard.
“I’d like to see the principal,” I say, after the customary greetings.
They answer me in my language, politely, with an accent I recognize, my parents’ accent, which I once so violently scorned.
Inside myself, I reflexively flinch. Reflexively, too, a very faint disdain brings a cold little smile to my lips, I can feel it, a smile quickly erased, and I cordially thank them, silently praying I’ll soon be allowed into this group whose accent I might well end up taking on, I say to myself, and not even know it.
I walk to the door they’ve pointed me toward. No sooner have I knocked than a bright voice tells me in French to come in, and the moment I push open the door Noget’s face leaps out at me.
Terrified, I pull the door toward me again. The voice on the other side exclaims in surprise. I push the door open again.
“Well, come in,” says the principal.
She’s a pleasant young woman, with a smile on her face. The continual twitching of her wide, protruding lips reminds me of Corinna Daoui in our Les Aubiers youth, as does a very slight veil of sadness in her black eyes, emanating from some old or indefinable pain, in spite of her smile.
She’s sitting at a desk. Above her, facing the door, a tacked-up poster shows Noget’s face—his beard trimmed and combed, his gray hair slicked back, his hollow cheeks no doubt discreetly touched up with pink. Below it I read: RICHARD VICTOR NOGET, AUGUST 29, 8:00, COMMUNITY CENTER.
“Noget’s coming here?” I say, dumbstruck.
The principal looks back at the poster.
“Yes,” she says. “Quite an honor, isn’t it?”
“But why should he be coming here?”
“Well, after all…”
Now it’s her turn to be surprised, and she looks at me in friendly puzzlement.
“Well, after all, he’s Noget.”
“And so?”
“Don’t you watch television?” she asks, her voice suddenly almost mystified.
“No,” I say, “my husband and I don’t have a TV.”
Still pleasant but cautious, a touch more distant, her gaze slips from my face to my breast, to my stomach, where it lingers musingly before climbing back up to my eyes. She gestures broadly toward a bookshelf against the wall.
“I imagine I have his complete works,” she says.
I go to it, pull out a book.
“That one,” says the principal, “is his first little treatise on education. I’m going to ask him to sign it for me.”
I page through the volume, reading a few sentences here and there. I feel as if I’m hearing Ange’s voice: “The classroom must be not a comforting womb, but a place of judicious severity and implacable justice. / My brothers, what have we done to our children? / We must bring them not milk, an abundance of milk in their earliest years is enough, what we must bring them is in a sense the opposite of soothing milk: we must bring them blood, metallic, unpleasant, and sublime.”
Yes, that’s exactly the sort of thing Ange liked to say, and it so put me off that I learned to play deaf when he launched in, looking at him with a vacant eye, humming to myself (come dance, my little silver bag!) so my mind would go blank and I wouldn’t have to hear.
An incredulous little laugh escapes me as I turn the pages, confronted with the undeniable truth: this is exactly what Ange wrote in the articles he managed, not without effort or colossal pride, to have published in several journals, which I then couldn’t get out of reading, since he would have been gravely insulted. I even think I recognize bits and pieces of certain sentences, whole phrases, a rhythm, almost a breath, I think I can hear Ange breathing!
I put the book back on the shelf, turn toward the principal. A last lingering hope makes me ask her:
“Have you heard of Ange Lacordeyre?”
“No,” she says.
“He’s written articles on these same subjects, he…”
“Richard Victor Noget is often imitated,” the principal interrupts, with a touch of arrogance in her smile, “but he has an instantly recognizable style all his own. Still, it’s true, there are some very talented plagiarists out there.”
“When did his first book come out?”
“Twenty years ago at least,” says the principal.
Nothing of Ange’s is that old, but if he’d stolen from Noget, wouldn’t he have been caught? Can’t two minds think the same thoughts in the same words, a few years apart?
Recess is ending, I hear the bell. Charming as ever, the principal casts a quick glance at her watch. She speaks a few words in that language I don’t know—or perhaps once knew and then unlearned, having so long cursed it—and seeing that I don’t understand she grows slightly troubled, as if suddenly alarmed that she’d greeted me as a peer, as if I might be an enemy hiding behind a friendly face.
“I have to get back to work,” she says, with an apologetic smile.
“Yes,” I say, “of course.”
My hands clasp over my breast.
“You wouldn’t by any chance,” I say, in a tone more pleading and desperate than I would have liked, “have something for me to do in your school? I’m a teacher, I’ve been teaching for years!”
She freezes, silent and uncomfortable. She looks me up and down again, very quickly, from head to foot.
Slowly, she answers, “I’m sorry, but we don’t have any openings.”
She shakes her head, as if to forestall any further discussion. I start up again all the same, beseechingly:
“I’d be happy just supervising at recess, and in the lunchroom at mealtimes.”
“But you only seem to speak French,” says the principal, very polite, very gentle. “That won’t do for our children.”
“I believe I’m perfectly capable of learning your language,” I say.
She sighs, shrugs. She stands up to tell me it’s time I was on my way. Oh, I don’t want to go.
The fact is, I know your language, I’d like to cry out; I pretend I don’t but the truth is I know it more intimately than any other—won’t you please let me stay!
I really don’t want to go. How untroubled, how safe I feel in this clearing ringed with still, vigilant blue pines, under the friendly gaze and protection of teachers like tall, kindly pines! Wouldn’t the thing twitching and scheming in my stomach have to surrender in an atmosphere so free of poisonous ruminations?
The principal lays one hand between my shoulder blades and gently pushes me out of the room. Now the schoolyard is empty and silent. Only a muffled purr of voices from the closed-up classrooms seems to faintly stir the limpid air, an air as if rock-hard in its purity.
So I have no choice but to walk out of the school, walk away from the clearing. I take one last look back before I start down the road. The principal is watching from behind the fence. She raises a hand, gives me a slow wave.