However, a combination of unfortunate circumstances would seem to confirm that no one had ever thought of giving me my name.
‘You have such pretty eyes,’ added the teacher, and I knew intuitively that she was not lying, that at that moment my eyes were shining with all their beauty and, to reflect the miracle of my birth, were sparkling with a thousand small fires.
I began to tremble and looked into her eyes for the complicity that shared joy can bring.
In her gentle, kindly gaze I saw nothing but compassion.
In the moment where I had at last come to life, I was merely pitied.
I was possessed.
As my hunger could not be assuaged by playing the game of social interaction – an inconceivable aim, given my social condition (and it was at a later point in time that I would grasp the meaning of the compassion I saw in the eyes of my saviour – for has one ever seen a girl raised in poverty penetrate the headiness of language deeply enough to share it with others?) – then it would be appeased by books. I touched one for the first time. I’d seen the older children in class look into books for invisible traces, as if they were driven by the same force and, sinking deeper into silence, they were able to draw from the dead paper something that seemed alive.
Unbeknownst to all, I learned to read. When the teacher was still droning away with the letters of the alphabet to my classmates, I had already been long acquainted with the solidarity that weaves written signs together, the infinite combinations and marvellous sounds that had dubbed me a dame in this place, on that first day, when she had said my name. No one knew. I read as if deranged, at first in hiding and then, once it seemed to me that the normal amount of time to learn one’s letters had elapsed, out in the open for all to see, but I was careful to conceal the pleasure and interest that reading afforded me.
The feeble child had become a hungry soul.
At the age of twelve I left school and worked at home and in the fields alongside my parents and my brothers and sisters. At seventeen I married.
In the collective imagination, the couple formed by married concierges – a close-knit pair consisting of two entities so insignificant that only their union can make them apparent – will in all likelihood be the owners of a poodle. As we all know, poodles are a type of curly-haired dog preferred by retired petty bourgeois reactionaries, ladies very much on their own who transfer their affection to their pet, or residential concierges ensconced in their gloomy lodges. Poodles come in black or apricot. The apricot ones tend to be crabbier than the black ones, who on the other hand do not smell as nice. Though all poodles bark snappily at the slightest provocation, but in particular when nothing at all is happening. They follow their master by trotting on their stiff little legs without moving the rest of their sausage-shaped trunk. Above all they have venomous little black eyes set deep in their insignificant eye-sockets. Poodles are ugly and stupid, submissive and boastful. They are poodles, after all.
Thus the concierge couple, as served by the metaphor of their totemic poodle, seems to be utterly devoid of such passions as love and desire and, like their totem, destined to remain ugly, stupid, submissive and boastful. If, in certain novels, princes fall in love with working-class lasses, and princesses with galley slaves, between two concierges, even of the opposite sex, there is never any romance of the type that others experience and that might some day make a worthy story.
Not only were we never the owners of a poodle, but I believe I can fairly assert that our marriage was a success. With my husband, I was myself. I think back to our little Sunday mornings with nostalgia, mornings blessed with restfulness where, in the silent kitchen, he would drink his coffee while I read.
I married him at the age of seventeen following a swift but proper courtship. He worked at the factory, as did my older brothers, and stopped off on many evenings on his way home to drink a coffee and a drop of something stronger. Alas, I was ugly. And yet that would not have played the slightest role had I been ugly the way others are ugly. But I bore the cruelty of my affliction alone: this ugliness that deprived me of any freshness, although I was not yet a woman, and caused me at the age of fifteen to resemble the woman I would be at the age of fifty. My stooped back, thick waist, short legs, widespread feet, abundant hair, and lumpy features – well, features lacking any shapeliness or grace – might have been overlooked for the sake of the youthful charm granted to even the most unprepossessing amongst us – but no, at the age of twenty I already qualified as an old biddy.
Thus, when the intentions of my future husband became clear and it was no longer possible for me to ignore them, I opened my heart to him, speaking frankly for the first time to someone other than my own self, and I confessed to him how astonished I was that he might conceive of wanting to marry me.
I was sincere. I had for many years accustomed myself to the prospect of a solitary life. To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one, in our society, to a dark and disillusioned life, a condition one ought to accept at an early age. To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things – some sort of balancing of the scales offered by nature to those less favoured among her children – no, it is a superfluous plaything to enhance the value of the jewel. As for ugliness, it is guilty from the start, and I was doomed by my tragic destiny to suffer all the more, for I was hardly stupid.
‘Renée,’ he replied, with as much gravity as he could muster, showing himself to be more loquacious during the long disquisition to come than he would ever be again, ‘Renée, I don’t want my wife to be one of those giddy young things who run wild and have no more brain than a sparrow beneath their pretty face. I want a woman who’s loyal, a good wife, a good mother and a good housekeeper. I want a calm and steady companion who’ll stay by my side and support me. In exchange, you can expect me to be a serious worker, a calm man at home and a tender husband at the right moment. I’m not a bad sort, and I’ll do my best.’
And he did.
Small and dry like the stump of an elm tree, he had nevertheless a pleasant face and usually wore a smile. He did not drink, smoke, chew tobacco or gamble. At home, when work was over, he’d watch television, browse through fishing magazines or play cards with his friends from the factory. He was very sociable and often invited people over. On Sundays he went fishing. As for me, I looked after the house, because he didn’t like the idea of me doing it for other people.
He was not lacking in intelligence, although his particular intelligence was not of the sort that an industrious society values. While his skills were confined to manual work, he displayed a talent that did not stem solely from mere mechanical aptitude and, however uneducated he might have been, he approached everything with a spirit of ingeniousness, something which, where small tasks are concerned, distinguishes the artists from the mere labourers and, in conversation, shows that knowledge is not everything. Having been resigned from an early age to the prospect of the life of a nun, I felt therefore that it was benign indeed of the heavens to have placed between my young bride’s hands a companion with such agreeable manners and who, while not an intellectual, was no less clever for it.
I might have ended up with someone like Grelier.
Bernard Grelier is one of the rare souls at 7, Rue de Grenelle in whose presence I have no fear of betraying myself. Whether I say to him: ‘War and Peace is the staging of a determinist vision of history’ or ‘You’d do well to oil the hinges in the rubbish store,’ he will not find that one is any more significant than the other. It even seems miraculous that the latter phrase manages to fire him into action. How can one do something one does not understand? No doubt this type of proposition does not require any rational processing and, like those stimuli that move in a loop through our bone marrow and set off a reflex without calling on the brain, perhaps the summons to apply oil is merely of a mechanical nature and sets in motion a reaction