To the Wedding (3 page)

Jean opens the street door, gets astride the bike and pushes with his feet. As soon as the back wheel is over the doorstep the bike rolls by itself out into the road. He looks up at the sky. No stars. Blackness, a visible blackness.

I walk past the railway station with Majestic in my jacket and everybody stops and points with their fingers and smiles. Those who know us and those who don’t. He is a new creature. Monsieur le Curé asks me his name as if he were going to arrange a baptism! Majestic! I tell him.

The railwayman goes to lock up his house. He turns the key in the door as if the act of turning it is already an assurance that he will be back next week. The way he does things with his hands inspires confidence. He is one of
those men for whom manual gestures are more trustworthy than words. He pulls on his gloves, starts the engine, glances at the petrol gauge, taps down to first, lets out the clutch and glides off.

The traffic lights by the railway station are red. Jean Ferrero waits for them to change. There is no other traffic. He could easily slip across without any risk. But he has been a signalman all his life and he waits.

When Majestic was seven, he was run over by a lorry. From the first day when I fetched him and he rested his chin over my top button and I carried him home under my jacket, saying, Majestic, my Majestic, he was a mystery.

The light turns green and as man and bike gather speed, Jean lets his booted right foot trail behind, whilst with the toe of his left he taps up into second, and, by the time he reaches the telephone boxes, up again into third.

I saw it yesterday, hanging in a shop window next to the Hôtel du Commerce, that dress has my name NINON on it! All the body black Chinese silk with scattered white flowers. Just the right length, three fingers above the knees. V-neck with long lapels, cut, not sewn. Buttons all
the way down. Against the light it lets a little through, but not enough to be blatant. Silk is always cool. If I dangle it up and down, my thigh will lick it like an ice cream. I’ll find a silver belt, a wide silvery belt to go with it.

The motorbike with its headlight zigzags up the mountain. From time to time it disappears behind escarpments and rocks and all the while it is climbing and becoming smaller. Now its light is flickering like the flame of a small votive candle against an immense face of stone.

For him it’s different. He is burrowing through the darkness like a mole through the earth, the beam of his light boring the tunnel and the tunnel twisting as the road turns to avoid boulders and to climb. When he turns his head to glance back—as he has just done—there is nothing behind except his taillight and an immense darkness. He’s gripping the petrol tank with his knees. Each corner, as man and machine enter it, receives them and hoicks them up. They come in slow and they leave fast. As they come in, they lie over as much as they can, they wait for the corner to give them its camber, and then they leap away.

Meanwhile, what they are climbing through is becoming more and more desolate. In the blackness the desolation is invisible but the signalman can feel it in the air and in the sounds. He has opened his visor again. The air is thin, chill, damp. The noise of his engine thrown back by the rocks is jagged.

D
uring the first year of my blindness, the worst recurring moment was waking up in the morning. The lack of light on the frontier between sleep and being awake often made me want to scream. Slowly I became accustomed to it. Now when I wake up, the first thing I do is to touch something. My own body, the sheet, the leaves carved in wood on the headboard of my bed.

When I woke up in my room the next day I touched the chair with my clothes on it, and again I heard Ninon’s voice as sharply as if she had climbed up a ladder from the street and was sitting on the windowsill. No longer a child, not quite a woman.

Today—the first flight of my life. I loved it above the clouds. Where there’s nothing to stand on, I could feel God everywhere. Papa took me on the bike to the airport at Lyon. First hop over the Alps to Vienna. Second hop to Bratislava. And here I am in the city whose name I only knew as a postmark or as part of her address. The river Danube is beautiful and the buildings along it too. Maman was at the airport. She looked prettier than I thought. And I’d forgotten how beautiful her voice is. I’m sure men fall in love with her voice. She was wearing her wedding ring. The flat on the fifth floor has high ceilings, tall windows and furniture with thin legs. A flat made for long talks. All the drawers are full of papers. I looked! To get to my room I go out on to the landing by the staircase and open another front door with a key. I think this room belonged once to another flat. Maman says something about “a shameful story of informers” and I’m not sure what she means. I like my room. There’s a big tree outside the window. What kind of tree? You should know that, she says in her beautiful voice, it’s an acacia. Best of all, there’s a pick-up so I can play my cassettes.

Three days without a note. I must be enjoying myself.

Went for a long walk in the forest looking for mushrooms. I found some
éperviers
. Maman didn’t know about éperviers—she thought they were only birds!—so I said I’d cook them for us. If you don’t know how, they can taste very bitter. We ate them in an omelette.

She asks questions all the while. What am I going to do after my Bac? Have I many friends? What do I want to
study? What do they want to study? What about foreign languages? What would I say to learning Russian? In the end I tell her I’d like to learn to be an acrobat! Straightaway she answers: There’s a very good school for circus artists in Prague, I’ll make enquiries. I kiss her because she doesn’t see I was joking.

Sunday lunch in a restaurant on the Danube. Before we went swimming. She bought me a costume yesterday. Black. Quite sexy. She told me that a few years ago she swam across the Danube at night—it’s forbidden—to prove she was still young! By herself? No, she replied but she didn’t say anything more. Her costume is black and yellow like a bee.

The Pope is visiting Poland, and all during lunch Maman talks about what’s happening there. Lech Walesa is in hiding and his trade union has been outlawed.
Solidarno
ść, as Papa calls it. The old General, according to Maman, the one whose name begins with a J, has fewer and fewer choices, he’ll have to negotiate with Walesa even if he doesn’t want to. The old guard are finished, she whispers. We both have a second ice cream. The Brezhnevs and Husáks can’t last, they’ll go, swept aside. Do you know what the people in the street call our President?—she bends very close to my ear—they call him the President of Oblivion!

Maman has two daughters! That’s what I’ve learnt. I have a sister. Maman loves us both. My sister’s called Social Justice. Justie, for short. She’s writing a book, Maman. It’s called “A Dictionary of Political Terms and Their
Usage, 1947 Till Today.” The first entries are Abstention, Activist, Agent Provocateur … When she says these words, they sound like love words. She has a lover, I think. A man called Anton telephones and she talks to him—I can’t understand anything except when she says my name—she talks to him with a voice like a cat’s tongue, tiny and warm and raspy. I asked her and she said Anton wants to take us into the country. We’ll see. Her book is all about my sister. She’s plainer than I am. But worthier. They’ve got as far as the letter I. Idealism, Ideology. Soon she’ll be on to the Ks. In the restaurant we’re drinking coffee when an orchestra files in, tunes up and starts to play. Tchaikovsky! Maman hisses. A disgrace! For Czechs it’s a disgrace! We have our own composers. I ask her if she knows the Doors? She shakes her head. Jim Morrison then? No, tell me about him, you must tell me. I recite in my poor English:

Say it to me again, slowly, Maman asks. So I do. And she sits there gazing at me. After a silence she says something I immediately wanted to write in my diary. You’ll never
have, she says, all of you, the future for which we sacrificed everything! I felt so close to her at that moment, closer than my sister ever is. Afterwards, in the tram, we cried a little on each other’s shoulders and she touched my ear, fingering it—like the boys at school try to do.

T
he roar of a waterfall. Jean, the signalman, has left his bike on the mountain road, its two headlights still burning, and he is picking his way across a kind of shore of stones. The waterfall is behind him. On the shore there are many boulders, some as small as him, others much larger, which have fallen from the peaks. Perhaps yesterday, perhaps a hundred years ago. Everything is stone, and everything speaks of a time which is not ours, a time which touches eternity but can’t get back inside it. Perhaps this is why Jean Ferrero left his headlights on. The crags and mountains around the shore are lit up by a pale light, the stars are fading. In the east, towards which he is walking, the sky is the colour of a dressing over a wound which bleeds. He appears totally alone in the vastness
which surrounds him, but this may be more evident to me than it is to him.

A mountain is as indescribable as a man, so men give mountains names: Ovarda. Civriari. Orsiera. Giamarella. Viso. Each day the mountains are in the same place. Often they disappear. Sometimes they seem near, sometimes far. But they are always in the same place. Their wives and husbands are water and wind. On another planet the wives and husbands of mountains may be only helium and heat.

He stops and squats before a boulder, whose southern side is covered with lichen. It is the south winds from the Sahara which bring rain here. They gather clouds of vapour as they cross the Mediterranean, and these condense to make rain when they touch the cold mountains.

He’s looking, as he squats, into a pool of water beneath the boulder. The pool is the size of a washbasin. A current of water flows into it from under the rocks and, on the side where he is squatting, overflows into a gulley, which captures the little stream no larger than the width of two fingers. In the depths of the pool the tiny current is as continuous as the roar of the waterfall and he is staring at it. Its rippling waves are like those of hair and their curling is the only soft, unbroken thing to be imagined here among the jagged mountains at daybreak. He changes position and kneels on his knees, head bowed. Abruptly he puts a hand into the basin and splashes a handful of the icy water over his face. The shock of the cold stops his tears.