Soft in the Head (6 page)

A
S I WALKED
, I was thinking about what she had just been reading to me. Apart from the rats, there were other scenes I’d really liked. For example the neighbour who wants to commit suicide and writes in chalk on his door:
Come in, I’ve hanged myself.

Come in, I’ve hanged myself!
That just blows me away, you know? What must have been going on in this guy Camus’s head to be able to come up with stuff like this!

Though I suppose sometimes, in real life… I remember, when I was a kid, one of our neighbours shot himself in the head. Lombard, his name was. He was afraid of his kids finding him when they came back from school, so he left a note on the front door too:
Gone shopping.
And so the dog wouldn’t run away, he kept it locked inside with him. It was a huge grey-brown mutt, a vicious animal, a cross between a Wolfhound and a Great Dane. When the kids came home from school, they saw the note their dad had left and they heard the dog inside scratching at the door. They wanted to let it out, but the door was locked, so the boy told his sister to stay where she was and be good while he went round to the other side of the house and snuck in through a back window. He didn’t come out again. When the mother came home from work and saw the note, and found her daughter alone on the front step and her son nowhere to be seen, she realized something wasn’t right, the whole situation seemed sketchy.

She dropped her daughter round at ours and asked my mother to look after her. I remember being hacked off because she cried the whole time.

At first, we heard nothing. Then we heard the mother scream. Then the ambulance sirens. Then the police sirens. I went outside to find out what was going on, but I couldn’t see anything much, just a bunch of people on the lawn crowding around a stretcher with a sheet over it.

Later, Madame Lombard told my mother that when she went into the house, she found her son standing, frozen in the kitchen, staring at the body of his father, which wasn’t a pretty sight. Apparently the dog’s muzzle was smeared with blood up to its ears. On the other hand, the floor was spotless, he’d licked the tiles clean. And his master’s skull while he was about it. There was not a drop of blood, not a sliver of bone, not a lump of brain. It was perfect. Clean as a new pin.

I think the dog had to be put down or something.

It sent the wife completely off her rocker. From then on, any time she saw a dog in the street she’d shriek at the kids
Get over here! Quick! Quiiiick!
scaring them so much they nearly shat themselves.

Especially seeing as how the son was already pretty messed up by the experience.

Whereas if the father had simply written:
Come in, I’ve shot myself,
like Albert Camus, it would have spared the kid a nasty surprise.

But you can’t always think of everything.

M
ARGUERITTE
got through reading me
The Plague
in a couple of days. I mean, not all of it, obviously. Just extracts. And I have to say that mostly it was really good. With characters so completely twisted you had to wonder where Camus came up with them. The guy called Grand, for example, the one who wants to write a novel, except he writes the same sentence over and over, just changing a couple of words. It reminded me of
The Shining
, you know, the movie with Jack Nicholson, where the character types the same sentence hundreds of times on this battered old typewriter before he starts breaking down doors with an axe. There’s another story that scared me witless. He’s really good at playing psychos, Jack Nicholson.

Anyway, to get back to the book, one thing is certain, which is that the days Margueritte and I spent reading
The Plague,
time passed a lot quicker around the bench.

One day, she said to me:

“You’re a true reader, Germain, I can tell…”

At the time, it made me laugh because, me and books, well, you know…

Thing is, she was serious. She told me that reading starts with listening. Me, I would have thought it started with reading. But she said: No, no, don’t you believe it, Germain. To cultivate a love of reading in children, you have to read to them aloud. And she explained that if you did it properly,
they were hooked, like it was a drug. Then, as they grow up, they need books. I was astonished, but, thinking about it I realized it made sense. If someone had read me stories as a kid, I might have spent more time reading books instead of getting myself in trouble because I was bored.

That’s why the day she gave me the book I was really pleased, even if I was embarrassed too, because in my innermost self—
see also: in one’s heart of hearts, deep inside
—I knew I would never read it, because it was too long and far too complicated.

She handed it to me, just like that, as she was getting up to leave, and she said:

“I’ve marked the passages we read together in pencil. Just as a reminder.”

I said, OK, thanks. And I said it was kind of her. And told her I was happy.

She smiled.

“The pleasure was all mine, Germain, I assure you. Books should not be loved selfishly. Neither books nor anything else, in fact. We are here on this earth merely to pass things on… To learn to share our toys, that is perhaps the most important lesson to remember in this life… In fact, I was intending to introduce you to a number of other books I love, from time to time. Unless of course you are tired of listening to me… Would you like that?”

There are people you can’t say no to. She was looking at me with her soft eyes, her gentle little wrinkly face, smiling at her own joke, as though she had just rung a doorbell and
was about to leg it. I thought to myself that she must have driven quite a few men crazy in her day, just by asking what she’d asked me: “Would you like that?”

I just nodded. I felt happy but dumb; with me, the two often go together.

I watched her walk off down the path. I stood frozen, holding my book. It was my first book. I mean, the first book anyone had ever given me.

Since I didn’t know what to do with it, I put it on top of the television when I got home. But that night, as I was about to turn off the TV and hit the sack, I looked at it. It was like it was waiting for me.

I heard that voice in my head again.

It was saying:
Oh for God’s sake, Germain, at least make an effort! It’s only a book.

I picked it up, opened it, flicked past the first pages and looked for an underlined passage, and I found the sentence:
On the morning of 16th April, Doctor Bernard Rieux came out of his consulting room and stumbled on a dead rat in the middle of the landing.
And when I found it, it was easy enough to read, because I knew it already. To make it stand out better, I went over it with the highlighter pen I use for labelling the vegetables I sell down the market.

Then, I looked for:
Come in, I’ve hanged myself.
It took a while, but it was like a game. A treasure hunt. So I highlighted all the passages I really liked. Even today,
The Plague
is a book where I only read bits of pages. With other books—not
counting the dictionary, which I don’t read from cover to cover either—even if it’s hard, even if I find it difficult, I keep going. Or at least I try.

But this one book… how can I explain it? I’ll never read it all.

Because the version—
see also: interpretation
—that I like best is Margueritte’s.

O
NE DAY
, not long after I was given
The Plague
as a present, I was at Chez Francine with Marco and Landremont. We were playing cards and watching the news. At some point, there was a report on some country, I don’t really remember which one. Anyway, someplace where life pretty much sucked, what with wars and suchlike. This time, there had been an earthquake, a proper natural disaster with loads of people dead—according to early estimates by the foreign correspondent.

Landremont said:

“Jesus! Some people really have it rough, don’t they? Those poor bastards have enough to deal with already. If it’s not bombs raining from the sky, it’s their roof caving in!”

Marco joined in:

“All they need now is a dose of cholera…”

“Or the plague, like in Oran in the book by Camus!” I said.

Landremont gave me a funny look. He opened his mouth but nothing came out, he turned to Marco and Julien, then back to me. And then he said, straight out:

“You’re telling me you’ve read Camus?”

“Well…
The Plague
, that’s all…”

“Really?… You’ve read
The Plague
, and ‘that’s all’? When did you start reading books?”

It got on my tits, the way he talked to me. I chugged my beer and, as I got up to leave, I said:

“I suppose you read a lot, do you?”

When I got outside, I thought, Next time you pull a stunt like that, you prick, I’ll give you a slap.

Just to sort out his ideas, as my mother would say. And, seeing as how I was thinking about her, it occurred to me that I should pay her a visit one of these days while she was still alive.

M
Y MOTHER
lives thirty metres from my place. She lives in the house, I live in the garden. Well, in the caravan. That said, thinking about it, we couldn’t be farther apart.

I suppose I could have looked for my own place, but what would be the point? I don’t need much space, apart from a bed, a place to sit and somewhere to eat. I take up more than enough space as it is. People say that, given the size of me, a caravan must feel very small. But ever since I was a kid, I’ve always bumped into things, I’ve always been too big for my size. Annette says I’m magnificent. But since when can you trust the word of a woman in love? You know what they’re like: they always think you’re the strongest, the most handsome. Mothers can be a bit like that too, apparently. Those who are the maternal type, at least.

I stayed here on account of my vegetable garden. I created it all by myself. I turned over the soil with a spade—and that’s no job for slackers, trust me. I built the fence with the little gate, the tool shed, the greenhouse. It’s like my kid. Maybe that’s a dumb thing to say. I don’t care. Without me, it wouldn’t exist. I grow a bit of everything: carrots, turnips, beetroot, potatoes, leeks. Different types of lettuce: frisée, romaine, some Batavian. Tomatoes too, beefsteak and Black Krim, as well as Marmandes. Anyhow, it depends on the
season and on how I feel. And I plant flowers too, just for show. I was young when I started it. I don’t quite remember how old—twelve, maybe thirteen?

My mother screamed at me like a fishwife, saying I’d turned her lawn into a building site. “Lawn”? You must be kidding. A patch of wilderness, more like.

These days, she doesn’t say anything. But she comes down and steals my vegetables as soon as my back is turned. In the beginning, I’d bawl her out, but actually, I don’t really care. I’ve got ten times as many vegetables as I can use. Sometimes I even go down the market and sell them. And besides, at least trekking down the garden and back with her basket gives my mother a bit of exercise. She could do with it, she barks like a seal when she breathes, her lungs will be the death of her, or maybe her heart. One or the other. Her mind is gone already. But being brain-dead isn’t fatal: even when your mind is gone, you can live on. Too bad for those around you.

The day I told my mother I was going to move into the caravan at the bottom of the garden, she looked at me like I was soft in the head. She said:

“Can’t you think of a better way to make us look bad to the neighbours?”

I replied, keeping my cool:

“I don’t give a damn about the neighbours! And I can’t see why they would be bothered. It’s our garden…”

She collapsed on the sofa. She was panting hard, one hand on her chest.

“God Almighty, what did I ever do to deserve a son like this?”

“To God Almighty? Nothing.” I said.

“Oh, go away! You make me tired. Go and live in that caravan of yours for all I care!”

I walked out and left her, I didn’t respond, I didn’t even turn back.

I
LIKE
THIS CARAVAN
. I resprayed it white and built an arbour over it to train a vine. It keeps me cool in summer and acts as a gutter during the rainy season. The caravan doesn’t belong to me, but I don’t think there’s any danger of the owner coming to claim it. Not if he values his balls, at any rate.

Gardini, his name is. Jean-Michel Gardini.

He showed up at the house one day. I was still a kid at the time, nine or ten maybe. Not much older. I do know I hadn’t started on my vegetable garden yet and that I was still going to school more or less. That gives me a couple of reference points.

This guy showed up one morning and asked my mother if he could park his caravan on our land because he was here for two weeks “on business”.

I don’t know about you, but a guy who sleeps in an Eriba Puck and comes around telling you he’s “on business” makes me suspicious. Well, it would make me suspicious now, but back then nothing seemed strange or surprising because I was still a kid.

In fact his “business”, we found out later, was selling knock-off jewellery at local markets.

Anyway, there he was explaining to my mother that someone down at the town hall had mentioned we had a large garden and that he’d like to rent part of it while he was
here. And, while they were on the subject, he was prepared to pay extra if she would cook lunch for him every day.

At the time, my mother was pretty much living from hand to mouth. She did a few little jobs here and there, but nothing out of the ordinary. So the prospect of renting out a bit of waste ground that no one ever used—except me as a playground, but I didn’t count—of taking in a lodger, half-board, cash in hand, no word to the taxman, gave her pause for thought. Though it wasn’t a long pause.

I think she’d said yes before he finished his sentence.

I hated this Gardini from the moment I set eyes on him, the two-faced fucker. He was a flash bastard, all tailored suits and stripy shirts. He wore his hair down over his shoulders, leaving snowdrifts of dandruff. He was trying his best to look artistic, but really he was just an arsehole, something I knew all about even then. Just having to sit opposite him at breakfast, lunch and dinner was too much for me. The way he ate was disgusting. He never washed his hands when he came out of the toilet, but that didn’t stop him helping himself to bread from the basket. He was forever talking with his mouth full, and I would spend the whole meal calculating the trajectories—
line (parabola) describing the path followed by a projectile after launch
—to avoid ending up with breadcrumbs floating in my water glass.

My mother would yell at me:

“Germain, what’s got into you? You’re holding on to that glass for dear life. Would you ever just put it down! No
one’s going to steal it! Children, I tell you… You wouldn’t believe what I have to put up with, Monsieur Gardini!”

“Call me Jean-Mi, Madame Chazes. All my friends call me Jean-Mi.”

“I couldn’t possibly…”

“Even if I ask nicely?”

“Well… as long as you call me Jacqueline. Germain, you’ll get a slap if you’re not careful.”

“Jacqueline? Such a charming name. It suits you… You must be so proud to be blessed with such an elegant name.”

“That’s so true.”

This was news to me. She spent her time moaning to her girlfriends:

“Jacqueline makes me sound like an old biddy. I prefer Jackie…” And Gardini, bowing and scraping to get into her good books, telling her how she cooked like a queen, how she deserved a Michelin star. How she was one of the ten wonders of the world. He had a good line in soft soap… Long story short, after a couple of days they hardly even talked during meals, they were so busy devouring each other with their eyes. At first, I was happy, I didn’t have to play goalie with my water glass any more. But even though I was a kid, I wasn’t completely blind. Whenever my mother got up from the table to get more bread or fill the water jug, I noticed that Gardini watched her like a stray dog watching someone take away its bowl. And that he mostly stared at her below the waterline.

Sometimes, after the cheese course, he’d start jiggling on his seat like a corn kernel on a hotplate. Then he’d say:

“I’ve brought some lovely stuff back from my studio in Paris. Would you like me to show you?”

“It would be a pleasure, but you do know I couldn’t possibly afford—”

“I’d just like you to see them.”

And my mother would say:

“Well, in that case…”

Gardini sprinted down to the end of the garden and came back with the large briefcase stamped
Brotard & Gardini—Authentic Parisian Chic—Jewellery and Finery
that he always kept in the boot of his Simca.

In the meantime, my mother would have cleared away the plates. Gardini would set the case on the table. He would start giving her the sales pitch while he showed her his tacky crap.

“Here, try on this necklace. It’s genuine silver plate, look at the hallmark! Go on, try it on! Just for me… It would beautifully show off that elegant neck of yours.”

I wondered why he was always talking about her neck since the necklaces were never chokers, but chains that dangled down to her breasts. 

Gardini was always helpful, I’ll say that for him. He would go round behind her and press up against her.

“Just a minute, Jacqueline, just a minute, I’ll put it on for you.”

It must have been a tricky process, because he seemed to struggle for a long time behind her. My mother would giggle loudly. He would blush and his voice sounded hoarse.

Eventually, my mother would say:

“Germain, I’ve just noticed the time, shouldn’t you get back to school?”

That was suspicious in itself since usually she didn’t give a shit whether I went to school or not. Then she’d say, in this strange, soft voice:

“Go on, go on, you don’t want to be late.”

And I thought to myself, women are stupid, one silly necklace and suddenly they’re in a good mood.

Kids are so dumb.