As soon as you get on the bus, you’re greeted with three rules clearly posted on a written sign: no smoking, no talking to the driver, and no exiting the bus while in motion. Hello, good listener and good reader!
The second rule is rendered unnecessary by the bus driver’s own attitude. He certainly must hear what his customers say to him: a hello, a good-bye, an expressed curiosity, and the destination, for which he must calculate the correct amount due. Basile hands over the right tickets, hands back the change, gives a “thanks” with a nod of his head, and moves on to the next customer, but he never answers questions.
“Where are we headed?”
It’s written on the sign on the front of the bus. “Where are we coming from?”
Is it possible to know where one is coming from, at a point somewhere between the chicken and the egg?
“Where are we?”
You should know just as well I do, you who have consciously boarded the bus at this precise location.
Basile remains silent. Everyone knows this. But although he’s silent, he isn’t completely mute. He speaks with his habits. Basile doesn’t sing, doesn’t yell at the road or his vehicle, other drivers, or the cops. He doesn’t disseminate the usual banalities. He doesn’t hold long conversations about the unpredictability of our era. Basile is far away.
Pshhhh.
It’s departure time. Mechanically, Basile has already checked behind him to see if the little steel hammer is in its place, the one used to break the windows in an emergency. Everything is in order. Someone has boarded alone, an ordinary, older woman who’s too warmly dressed for the trip, headed out to kill a few hours in the next village along the bus route. She will take her time making her way back.
The bus will remain mostly empty during the first part of the trip, which is still very mountainous: short distances connecting small villages, and short stops for a single person here and there. To win over his passengers, a driver must know when to let one of them off between two official stops, or even when to let one on at the end of a dirt trail. He also has to agree to deliver packages, boxes, foodstuffs, and newspapers. Sometimes, in spite of all of his efforts and his many years of experience, Basile arrives at a village stop early. He has to wait for the exact departure time, with the bus door open, scanning the empty landscape for a sign of a passenger, a regular, rushing to catch the bus. Most of the time, no one comes. Or someone will be waiting half a kilometer away to flag him down.
We’re still winding through the narrow part of the route, heading down from the pass, the part of the journey that never seems to end. The undergrowth is moist here. Rocks tumble from the steep slopes and roll onto the road. The slope on the shady side is mushroom-laden. With a bit of luck you might spot a squirrel scurrying about, darting incessantly in all directions, and, perhaps once every ten years, a bold pair of mountain goats. It’s the icy part of the route when winter insists on it, the part where you feel sick in the morning on an empty stomach, and the part where the sun makes glorious halos two months out of the year at a precise time of the day, piercing through the fog and the trembling leaves.
It’s autumn today. Summer has been left behind in the rearview mirror. At high elevations, yellow needles fall, dying, from larches. The chestnut trees still hold on to half of their leaves. Further down, the oak trees will cling to their browned and wilted leaves until springtime.
Most of the time, passengers hardly look at one another. But look here, two are saying hi . . . I move closer and hear them whispering about their driver:
“He isn’t talking any more than last time.”
“Or any of the times before.” “Seeing how long this has gone on, I’m of the opinion that he won’t ever speak again.”
Which seems to suggest that he’s talked in the past. “A hopeless case.”
As we get closer to the midpoint between the two small towns, Châtillon and the stop at La Chapelle-something-or-other, we begin to enter a zone of heightened magnetization. It feels as if everything that lives and feels, out of habit or by impulse, everything that admires or desires, is moving toward the town ahead. The effect of this phenomenon is a considerable increase in bus passengers.
In the courtyard of a saw-mill, a fire burns incessantly, fueled by wood chips and sawdust. Even the smoke flows in the same direction as my beautiful bus. The cry of the biting saw is earsplitting.
Basile turns on the radio to listen to the daily news. What’s on today? Reports follow each other like days, and look a lot like one another: the famous are ill prepared for their inevitable obscurity; foreign trade is reviving; the weather is peremptory. There’s a death toll; Basile hears the total and turns it off.
School is about to start and it’s time to pick up all the classroom-bound-kids along the road to La Chapelle. It’s conceivable that there’s a big middle school there, since the stops are taking longer and the columns of twelve-to-fifteen-year olds are getting longer. The time must be taken to slide a few big bags into the luggage compartment. The school kids open and close the compartment door on their own. They board in bunches. There’s the cocky kid, armed with a sole flap folder decorated with a garish sticker expressing his disdain for bulky schoolbags. There are those who rush toward the very back, the loudmouth boys with their little tiffs about who’s on top. A girl has the right (or the cheek) to join them. She has entrusted her small backpack to her friend who has stayed up front, who isn’t as pretty, and therefore doesn’t have the same privileges . . . she resigns herself to isolation, but not without the pride of becoming, after the incident, a trustworthy confidante.
Basile daydreams about his daughter, their daughter, who drifted away from their world, moving further and further away day by day. This was necessary for her to be able to grow up, receive her high school diploma, and leave for Paris to study business. Everyone wants to study business these days. He broods over the vague fear that they may never become close again. An autumn feeling . . . like spring will never be seen again, out on the horizon, through the windshield. In his bus, Basile passes the house that he built fifteen years before, very slowly, brick by brick, he even got his own hands dirty in order to reduce the cost of the enormous project, completing all of the finishing touches on his own. How time flies! Not a leaf is left on the tree. He honks his horn, a greeting to the smoke drifting from the chimney, signaling that the central heating has turned on. He’s well aware that there’s no one inside the house and that the electronic salvation must have been triggered by the drop in temperature. The rose bushes that he has dressed with straw are ready for the tough season. The boxwoods sometimes freeze over. It snows on the gnomes. In the rearview mirror, once it has been passed by, the house is newer, the trees aren’t as tall, the renderings are radiant; everything appears like it was not so long ago.
Basile isn’t the kind of driver who goes out of his way to entertain the middle-schoolers. No zigzags through detours. No radio liberating its sound waves. Sometimes, during easy-listening hour, he’s willing to understand the silence from a little girl passenger patiently standing beside him as a question, and answers yes by turning the radio on at a very low volume, as if with his own voice he were whispering a song in her ear.
More and more adolescents get on. After a few more stops, there won’t be enough seats for everyone. Some will have to stand in the aisle, keeping their balance by holding on to the handrails. My beautiful bus shakes its passengers when it rolls over a speed bump, known to some as a sleeping policeman. Fog begins to film the windows on the inside due to the combined effects of breathing, conversation, and laughter.
At a village stop, before the recent rush of passengers got on, a young woman boarded the bus through the side door. She didn’t buy a ticket. She didn’t show a bus pass.