saw him as a man with a gaping hole where his heart should be. Un homme avec un trou. I wanted to fill that hole. I felt pain in his place. I felt pain because it didn’t cause him pain. Or because he thought that it didn’t cause him pain.
When I think of it, it still causes me pain.
In his first year, his parents sent him to school on the train. He wasn’t yet six. They didn’t take him to the station, no, no. He walked over a kilometre to the station by himself, took the train and got off at the next station. Then it was another quarter of an hour through the town to the school. At four o’clock he had to do the same journey, but in the opposite direction. And he had to make sure he got the right train. Only the slow train stopped in his village. He couldn’t mistake it. But of course other trains stopped at the station near his school. How could a child make that distinction? At the beginning he couldn’t yet read, could he? But God help him if he made a mistake.
The following year they sent his brother with him. Two little boys alone on the train. They could have been abducted! And that while there was a school in the village where they lived. But they didn’t consider it good enough. His parents were both primary school teachers. They looked after other children at yet another school. They could have taken their sons with them to that school. But no. The father was at loggerheads with all his colleagues. He didn’t trust them.
At first I refused to believe it. I thought M was pulling the wool over my eyes, but his father started talking about it. He thought it was perfectly normal. That’s what happened in the Congo. There, children were sent to the spring to fetch water. Children were given responsibility from a very early age. A child of five carried his brother or sister, who couldn’t yet walk, on his back. And a can of water on his head, or firewood. That strengthened their backbone, literally and figuratively.
The worst thing was that it was against the law. A child of five is not allowed to take the train unaccompanied. That’s why it stopped after two years, because the railway authorities finally realised that that little chap and his brother were on the train alone every day.
It took them a long time to realise.
The father was particularly afraid that the children would be spoilt. Spoiling children—that was the great danger that must be avoided. Leaving children to their fate, that was OK. Neglecting them: fine. Spoiling yourself, there was nothing wrong with that. Stuffing yourself in front of the children with the sweets you had confiscated from them: great. Because sweets were bad for their teeth. But not for yours.
Had he seen that in the Congo too?
And of course M took after him. And I kept trying to give a different example. And hoped the children would follow my example.
Il faut partager.
You must share.
Try teaching that to a child when its own father keeps everything for himself.
The mother would have done better to murder M. She could have said it was an accident. Accidents happen all the time. Most accidents happen at home. Fatal accidents too, especially those. People are careful everywhere except in their own home. They think they are safe there. They let themselves go. Even M. let himself go at home sometimes. Sometimes.
There is no such thing as safety. Anywhere. She must have known that. Why else did she want to learn judo? A normal woman doesn’t learn judo. Certainly not when she has five children. She stays at home and looks after her children. Period. Perhaps she takes cookery classes, or sewing lessons, or yoga. But judo? No.
She could have finished him off with a judo hold and afterwards she could have said that he had had a fall. She could have laid him at the bottom of the stairs, as if he had fallen down them. She always maintained that he was no good, that she had always known. She should have been consistent and taken responsibility. It would have been a trifle for her.
Lhermitte did not know judo. Neither did her rival. Those women began something without realising what they had begun. They were not prepared. And so they could not see it through. According to plan Lhermitte should have killed herself too. And her rival should have killed all her five children. But after the third child she faltered, like an engine that sputters because the fuel tank springs a leak. Caused by whom, by what? Don’t ask questions, Odette. There’s a leak, OK?
Sometimes things go your way, sometimes they go against you.
Man proposes, fate disposes.
A panic attack, writes one.
An epileptic fit, maintains the other.
I say: an epileptic fit caused by panic.
If I have learned one thing from M, it is not to give in to panic. He did not know what panic was. He didn’t know what love was and he didn’t know what panic was either. That sometimes makes life easy, you know, not knowing what feelings are. Feelings get in the way. Not always, but often. And of course M had feelings. He felt pain, rage and indignation. They are feelings too.
Perhaps panic is more of a reaction than a feeling, but that is no excuse. You must learn to control reactions too. When they arrested me in front of my children, when they led me away in handcuffs, when they took me away in a wailing police car… I didn’t feel a moment’s panic. I knew that panic wouldn’t help me. On the contrary.
Cool head, cool head, cool head. Make the best of a bad job.
Now too. Definitely now.
Anyone who lets themselves be carried away by panic is giving up, said M. And humiliating themselves. He had seen that often enough in the girls he dragged into his van. They wet themselves. He found that embarrassing for them. Extremely embarrassing.
M never gave up. Not even when he had lost.
If you ask me he still hasn’t given up.
If she had not had that panic-epileptic attack, she could have beaten Lhermitte: murdering five children and herself too.
Lhermitte wouldn’t have liked that. No more gold medal for Geneviève Lhermitte!
Now her rival didn’t have a chance. She collapsed like the twin towers in New York. She lay there like a sack of potatoes. The two children she had not yet murdered rushed to her aid. ‘Mummy, Mummy what’s wrong?’ They wanted to help their Mummy, their dear Mummy. They rang for an ambulance. And they fetched the woman from next door. She came as soon as she could and also brought her little son with her. What chance did that woman have with all those people in her house?
M. would say that the plan was no good, but even he could not always foresee everything. If he had foreseen everything I wouldn’t be in here now. And he wouldn’t be in there. The two most hated inmates, each in their own prison. Mirror, mirror in the wall, who’s the most hated one of all, him or me?
They’ve thrown Lhermitte in jail, but where has her rival been dumped: prison, hospital or madhouse?
In love, engaged, married. In love, engaged, prison. In love, engaged, madhouse. In love, engaged, hospital. They’ve probably put her in a madhouse. A madhouse specialising in epilepsy.
Whenever the moon is full and round in the sky, it crackles in their heads. They fall to the ground like lumps. White foaming saliva leaks from their mouths. They jerk like a bad actor faking orgasm. ‘They can choke,’ said my mother. ‘Sometimes they swallow their
