she starts by recalling how it all began. At times she loses the thread. She no longer knows what brought her here. Often she even tells herself that she’s made a mistake, a “fine fuckup,” as the other one told her one day.
The other is the one who was important at some point but would be crushed today if he were aware to what extent he no longer means anything to her. But in her inner dialogue she recognizes this is an always-fleeting doubt. She knows that being here can’t have been a mistake. A mistake happens only when you have several options. She isn’t sure she ever had a choice.
She remembers the morning when everything began, she is now certain of that. That morning is set firmly in a recess of her head. Every now and then she likes to take it out, the way you unfold an old garment to let it breathe, consider its wear and tear and its obsolescence. Almost indifferent, she sees it unfurl again, as precisely as possible.
It’s a typical morning. A strident ringing wakes her. Seven o’clock. A few minutes later, she gets up, slowly. She puts on the kettle and lights a cigarette. She takes a shower. She gets dressed after spending a minute, dazed, in front of her closet. She has cereal and drinks tea. She gathers up the things she needs for her classes and goes off to catch the 8:10 train. A typical day also means that she puts on makeup before leaving while the small apartment whose window she has opened fills up with fresh air from outside and that she turns off the clock-radio whose sound has been her companion since seven o’clock. Usually, nothing of the flow of news, weather reports, commercials, and songs reaches her foggy consciousness. Just like her yawns, the shower water, or the tea, the radio is only a means of stimulating her sleepy senses.
As she remembers it she is alone that morning. The other one hadn’t inflicted himself on her for the night. Before picking up her briefcase she makes sure she has everything she needs. She almost left the report she’d prepared for the marketing strategies course on her desk. She congratulates herself on her habit of checking everything before going out. How does an involuntary action manage to slip into an automatic physical function?
When she goes to turn off the radio before leaving, she raises the volume instead of turning it down until it clicks off. As unbelievable as it may seem, it’s because she increased the volume rather than turning it off that she is now here. Everything else flowed from that gesture.
She remembers exactly how violently the sound burst forth. She wonders whether it’s possible the sound never even left her ears from the day that she’s now revisiting in her thoughts. Besides, where does the sound go that we hear? Where do words go once we’ve heard them?
That morning the radio shouted at her that, in a country of which the mere mention made her freeze with anxiety, the number of prisoners was such that, at the speed with which the verdicts were pronounced, it would take two or three centuries to examine each of the cases. More softly now that she’d turned the volume down, the reporter quoted the percentage of the incarcerated population in proportion to the population of the country itself. He was talking about her native land.
She stared at the small clock-radio for a very long time, her gaze seemingly directed at a friend who had just betrayed her in the most shameful way. Until that moment she had managed to protect herself from the mere mention of the only word that was unbearable to her—the name of the country where she was born—and she couldn’t understand why she had failed. She ended up turning the radio off, but the news item on the air that had assaulted her the way a criminal pounces on his prey wouldn’t leave her.
As she was walking toward the station, it seemed to her that she was having a more difficult time than usual hurrying along so she wouldn’t miss her train and her first class.
In retrospect, it was apparent to her that at that moment, as she was dragging her feet going to school, she had already moved on to something else—to another place. She was merely going through the motions, fulfilling a routine, or doing something she still saw as a duty. But part of her was no longer following along.
She arrived a few minutes early anyway, even though she wasn’t rushing as much as she usually did. In the lobby a crowd of students was milling about and rustling like a disturbed anthill whose population had suddenly grown and whose sound had been amplified.
Some were falling all over each other to catch a glimpse of the screen that showed which courses were being taught in what rooms; others were waiting their turn at the vending machines selling drinks. Most were chatting and smoking.
She is pleased to note that this world, though it couldn’t have changed in any way, has become completely foreign to her today. It’s only in a dream that she goes back there, joins up with a cluster in the lobby, and, after the obligatory round of kisses, hears herself ask the question she had formed:
“Did you hear the newscast this morning?”
No one picked up on her comment so she began again:
“Did you hear that unbelievable item on the prisons?”
“Yeah, you mean about those massacres a few years ago? What do you expect, such horrible events implicate an awful lot of perpetrators, and so an awful lot of prisoners. It’s only normal.”
“What do you expect?”
“It’s terrible, but what can you do . . .” a voice added in a compassionate tone, raising his hands and dropping them to his thighs, as if to bring the conversation to an end.
A short silence followed this remark that had escaped everyone except her. She plummeted down inside her head, feeling as cumbersome and painful as a brick in the pit of her stomach would be. Her brain sap was trying doggedly to rein her in, to no avail.
When she resurfaced from her straying thoughts, the conversation had picked up again. Everything she heard made her nauseated. A burden similar to that which had kept her from running for the train that morning added to the throbbing in her head, immobilized her. She was incapable of going to class with the others and even less of giving a presentation, as she was expected to do. So she headed outside without alerting anyone, her face showing nothing unless someone could see how haggard she looked.
She slipped her student ID card into the door detector and abandoned it there. As she walked toward the station, the words of that one phrase etched themselves into her head, flickering as on the screen of an old computer on standby: It’s terrible, but what can you do . . . Had they said it to hurt her? Did they know, or were they making fun?
She felt like crying but restrained herself. She didn’t care to add another drowned face recovered from the water to all the ones in front of her in the train going back. She’d bought a newspaper should she lose control. She opened it and buried herself in its pages, too much so to look as if she really were reading. Had anybody been interested, he would have seen that she was trying above all to hide what, that morning, had so dramatically illuminated the absurdity and cowardice of her daily pattern. She lost her grip and ended up by shedding at first two tears, then four, until she stopped counting them.
Once home, she threw herself on the bed and closed her eyes for as long as she could. And she had wept and wept and wept.
That morning, whose every detail she is replaying, she blamed herself first of all for not getting a hold again of the enthusiasm that had always carried her forward. Then, imperceptibly, something else got in her way. She was taking pleasure in feeling lost, crushed, trapped—commendable for once because, satisfied to drop the mask, finally naked, this excess was not acquiescence.
TWO
32.
