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Overview
"From the bus stop across the street, it was hard to tell, but suddenly I understood, seeing the passengers in the van that picked her up every morning, that she was slightly retarded."
A precocious teenager in a French suburb finds himself powerfully, troublingly drawn to the girl he sees every day on the way to school. As he watches and thinks about her, his daydreams—full of lyrics from Joy Division and the Smiths, fairy tales, Flowers for Algernon, sexual desire and fear, loneliness, rage for escape, impatience to grow up—reveal an entire adolescence. And this fleeting erotic obsession, remembered years later, blossoms into a meditation on what it means to be a smart kid, what it means to be dumb, and what it means to be in love with another person.
03 is a book about young love like none you have ever read. It marks the English-language debut of a unique French writer—one of the great stylists of his generation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429933223 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 06/22/2010 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 103 KB |
About the Author
Jean-Christophe Valtat teaches comparative literature at Clermont-Ferrand University. He is the author of two novels and a story collection.
Mitzi Angel is the publisher of Faber and Faber, Inc.
Read an Excerpt
03
By Jean-Christophe Valtat
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2005 Éditions GallimardAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3322-3
CHAPTER 1
From the bus stop across the street it was hard to tell, but suddenly I understood, seeing the passengers in the van that collected her every morning, that she was slightly retarded. Once you knew, it was easy to make sense of her thin adolescent frame, her black hair spiking up on her little head as though she were enduring some slow, endless horror, her eyes, like those of a heroine in a Japanese cartoon forced open onto the real world, eyes so round and so opaque that if they'd focused on me, I might almost have picked them up like two black marbles rolling in the gutter at my feet. It was harder to guess her age; imagine someone whose growth had suddenly stopped, useless and discouraged or, seeing that it had dwarfed the rest of her, had chosen to freeze her body at a jarring, already awkward fourteen years of age. And yet, at first glance, I had found her pretty; her fragility moved me, or rather, I found it touching that she was so pretty, even as I worried that this pale, poorly articulated delicacy would almost certainly fall victim to the filthy urges of abusive teachers or the fumbling and hasty advances of other disabled children. I was sad that this beauty would never be truly seen by those around her or that, even if they did see it, it could never be communicated to her or that, even if it was, it would never make sense to her. But even as I formed this thought, my sadness had already turned into a kind of desire, a vague excitement I could feel in my gut, not unlike the jitters one feels on the diving platform at the pool, as though I was drawn to her precisely for the chance to love a beauty that had no self-awareness and of which, consequently, I alone would be the sole and watchful guardian. Or maybe I was jealous (for what I felt toward her was, actually, from the very start, a form of jealousy), not because she might be subjected to sexual desires beyond my grasp, but because in that unknown world — those white buildings on the hill where the bus took her — someone else, however retarded, might also find her beautiful and love her and, I didn't know why exactly, that idea seemed, in its very generosity, more repellent than all the rest, as though it stripped me of the privileges I enjoyed thanks to my normal intelligence. How to approach her (because that was question number one) I had no idea. I couldn't possibly cross the street in the dawn light and speak to her directly: first because I felt held as though on a leash by my bus stop and wouldn't dream of missing the public transport meant to hand me over to school; more to the point, because her mother (whose face, strangely, held so little interest for me that I couldn't have recognized her from one sighting to the next) rarely let go of her hand, or allowed her daughter to let go of her own, until it was time to board the bus. All the same, since her mother walked her there every morning, I imagined they must not live too far from the bus stop, so logically all I had to do was wait for her return and follow them home and sooner or later put myself in their path. This was easier said than done because I hadn't the slightest idea when a person might come back from a place like the one she went to, and if I did know the time, who was to say I'd be available, free to do as I pleased. Locked in her state of unteachable ignorance, it occurred to me, she might be kept away for something like an entire workday, until it was too late for me, with the limited movements of a twelfth grader, to meet her like a lover running off to a tryst: I had certainly never seen her on her way home, which was hardly a surprise because while I could waitto board the bus in the morning, my return offered no such opportunity. Suppose her schedule was more or less like a regular student's schedule (after all, disturbing as it was to think so, there were ineluctable similarities between her predicament and my own, beginning with our shared morning routine and the rituals of transportation), I would then have had to wait who knows how long from the moment I got off my bus until she returned, and this might happen any time as late as seven o'clock, far too late for me to explain, because I was, like her, an overprotected schoolchild in a town where nothing at all could plausibly have distracted me from my records and books for any length of time. Besides, even if I'd come up with some far-fetched excuses for my delay (since one evening was all I needed to figure out when she got home), I would still, during this unlikely wait for a bus I had no intention of boarding, have to pretend that I wanted to do just that, all the while standing there exposed to unwelcome stares on the pinkish gravel of the sidewalk, standard issue in this hostile suburb, with its looping roundabouts, its homes with façades that grazed the eye like gravel against the knee, bristling with spiny shrubbery and often guarded by a "dangerous dog" I took bitter pleasure in spitting on through the wrought-iron bars of the gate. Maybe I could have asked the institution when exactly she was sent home, but quite apart from my being too shy to face any such undertaking, with all its foreseeable complications, I didn't know which of these places to ask; the center on the hillside that I've already mentioned had simply popped into my head, without my bothering to question it, and for reasons that had nothing to do with plausibility. I'd leaped to embrace the idea thanks to the name of the institution — Rocher Fleuri, "flowering rock"— and, more precisely, for the grip it held over the local imagination and, even more locally, over the imagination I called my own. Schoolchildren, and later middle schoolers, often used the name, although less frequently over the years, when trading insults — sometimes to tell their friends where they really came from, or else to say where they were going to end up. And I'd lost count of the times I'd heard my parents mention it when, driving behind a wheezing bus, we watched unruly mongoloids mimic us and make faces from the safety of the backseat. Whatever its literary merits, the poetic force of the name provided much of its appeal and gave me easy food for thought. On the one hand, it demonstrated, according to a tacit law almost universally observed, a sort of national principle by which the more pastoral a place-name sounded, the more safely you could assume that the official Arcadia hid the empty eye sockets of blight: moldering housing projects, schools for dunces in highly inflammable prefabs with roofs that would fly off the moment a storm broke (this happened at my school, a rare instance of the sublime), sometimes nursing homes or psychiatric hospitals. Then again, it could suggest (depending on one's mood) that "hope springs eternal" or else that there was a "terrible irony" in this impossible pastoral ideal: either way, it struck me as the perfect way to describe the plight of a defenseless virgin left alone on this ravaged earth. Which is to say, all of those institutions might have been called the same thing, and my very literary attraction to this one name was a cover-up, since this disabled little girl could have been taken to any number of places without her having any more say in the matter than anyone did when it came to school. Because for reasons that were beyond me but which, to my bitter, rather churlish mind, made an intuitive sense, the area was swarming with such centers, classed by the kinds of disability they treated, or openly failed to treat: Brignat, Le Reray, La Bouchatte, and that was only to name a few. I had some firsthand experience of these places because I'd played soccer against a few of them with the local police club, whose barracks were stationed nearby; these were handicapped matches where we faced opponents not only incapable of grasping the simple rules of the game, but, what's more, who were seized by panic and ran all over the place like decapitated chickens, screaming with fright when the ball came their way, scoring almost half the fifteen to twenty goals we racked up against their team. And because we weren't short of adolescent "team spirit," which sometimes makes "Hitler Youth" seem no more than a tautology, we taunted one of these kids by asking him his name — only to watch him, after a sickening pause, as though already completely lost, stutter his way through the institution's name and not his own, a name he'd taken pains to learn by heart and which now teetered on the brink of oblivion. I vividly remembered one of these matches we played against Brignat: a youth worker, one of those Robespierres in dirty tracksuits who for some reason rejoiced in the crude brutality of competitive sport, decided to call an imaginary penalty against us, perhaps to correct the general injustice of the world through one small transgression of his own, possibly as a check against his sporting impulse to eliminate the weak. After endless and confused debate in the opposing team (their shouts billowing from the outlines of their heads like the bright scribbles of children with felt-tip pens), a boy stepped forward to shoot. I'd come across him years earlier when I was in first grade and he was already eleven years old (only later did I imagine how humiliated he must have been each time a gang of new boys arrived to start the school term while he sat condemned as though chained to a magic desk that shrank with every passing year, a humiliation he covered up by chewing erasers, a habit he and I, oddly enough, had in common). After moving toward the ball to take the penalty, the boy did not shoot, instead he tried over and over, despite a series of warnings, to dribble, head down, into the goal. His persistence may have been funny and exasperating, but his blind rage was also, however stupid, a noble charge against the so-called order of the world; and that attitude I considered MY OWN and identified with wholeheartedly: because my intelligence, carefully crafted to satisfy all the demands of my teachers, right down to the essential touch of originality that would set me apart, was, when you thought about it, nothing more than the way I dribbled straight into the goal to score my qualifying penalty. Maybe I found this girl even more touching because I suspected her own weakness held none of the rage and anguish I'd witnessed and embraced at the games — and I would therefore have to find something else to bring us together. On my melancholy trips home from these places that I imagined to be as cursed as the one she returned from, while I sat surrounded by the sounds of normal kids shouting dirty songs, I couldn't help wondering whether, just once, or maybe every day, she felt the same sadness on her way home — probably not, though, because this was her natural state — or whether, in a way, I actually expected my own feelings to come back with her on the bus, as though I wanted her sadness to be my own, as though, even with the world against us, we could have our unlikely, longed-for rendezvous, right here at the bus stop, for — or despite — the very reason that everything seemed to separate us, "everything" being a few dismal meters of asphalt road, which looked the same from both sides but which clearly pointed in two opposite directions. But if neither sadness nor rage could unite us, I didn't know what could — the more I wanted to identify with her, the more I identified with myself; and the more I tried to understand her, the less, necessarily, I succeeded: the failure of an intelligent mind to grasp feeblemindedness was deep and dark, no less than the failure of a feeble mind to grasp intelligence, because intelligence got its shape by not understanding the thing it could never be. Since I'd never been a compassionate person and had always considered other people — with the exception of one or two vibrant characters — with suspicion and even disapproval, I had to imagine that my easy empathy for this girl and her spiky hair must apply just as much to a version of my own existence, an idea of what my life would be like if somebody took away, altogether or partly, the mental faculties that let me show off for adults and be rewarded for it (though I'd long ago realized that the kingdom they claimed to rule was nothing but one tiny province in a much bigger empire where they were nothing but pawns: that in dealing with grown-ups you kept coming up against one kind of disability or another, a thing that was disconcerting at first, but more and more reassuring when you realized that the judgments they handed down had no authority). The idea of my own mental deficiency, and my resulting destitution and vulnerability, an idea that was completely absurd and empty seeing as it corresponded exactly to my blind spot as an intelligent person, was therefore what filled me with this sorrowful compassion, so unusual for me. Not to say that my interest in this girl, who would always remain a child, implied an indifference to her actual personality, a personality so much more mysterious than the vaunted depths of human psychology. The opposite was true: I couldn't patronize her because, while she might seem to be a young person, she was also this thing that my so-called intelligence bumped up against when it reached its own limits; an intelligence that, in truth, it would have been less taxing to use in other ways. So the potential advantage I had over her, fully endorsed by a society that had calculated our IQs and sent us in two different directions on two different buses, was, as far as she was concerned, a "dead letter." This was clear from the way she never returned my gaze when I looked at her, so that my own existence, hard enough for me to maintain with any robustness to myself, was, for those dark eyes — black as the inside of closed fists, reflecting less the outside world than the abandoned interior of a skull — a thing she never recognized but saw as a hazy blip on the landscape of those school mornings, an unremarkable little figure standing in front of the already shabby backdrop, a simple outgrowth, barely organic, of the bus shelter I leaned up against, my hands in my pockets, brain blowing on my eyes as though they were embers, trying to make my "passion" seem that much more notable, more incandescent, but failing to send it over to the other side, across the cold magma frozen into tarmac by the organized disaster called society. There were two ways to think of this obvious lack of recognition, and both suited me, for different reasons. The first, in keeping with my low opinions of romantic love, and perfectly appropriate for my age, was that my love, if ever I could make it halfway visible in the too often cold and clammy air that lay between us, would be doomed to a disappointment that matched the intensity of my feelings, in which case my sincerity, underwritten by the pain I'd have to feel, would no longer be in doubt, however unlikely the source of it might be. The second was that this love represented — not despite the lack of acknowledgment but precisely because of it — a blissful reprieve from the war I was waging against the "world," a war that basically depended on getting grown-up approval for what I was good at, and on my belief that I was using this approval to play them, to play them so well, in fact, that it was sometimes hard to tell where the lines of battle were actually drawn. So, now that I could do without all this plotting and scheming, my feelings became "pure"; I could leave the conflict behind and, at the very same time, deliver the final blow. My love, though unspoken and vowed to silence, became a kind of strategic maneuver and stood in danger of losing its spontaneity and, some would say, its value. But at this point the misery I felt at her lack of recognition always came to the rescue and piled itself up like slabs of raw meat on the true balance of my feelings; and anyway, the idea that spontaneous feelings were better than others, well, this struck me as open to debate. I heard a song that nailed it: "And if the day came when I felt a natural emotion / I'd get such a shock I'd probably lie / in the middle of the street and die." Where were these so-called natural emotions and why were they worth more than the others? Hadn't I already begun to suspect that with feelings, as with revolutions, the more spontaneous-seeming were actually the outcome of long and involved tactical maneuvers? And if, unfortunately, you had to make do without being "natural," wasn't it better to act as consciously, as deliberately, and therefore as forcefully as possible?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from 03 by Jean-Christophe Valtat. Copyright © 2005 Éditions Gallimard. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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