learned, what the people of his kingdom are thinking. Wouldn’t it be something if it just so happened that, plain and simple, my subjects didn’t give a damn about the Koran, compared to turning forty? Or perhaps I can observe how they nourish themselves with pure wine and love, and how they cope with their romantic troubles. Like my own potential problem, for example, the one that would arise if the queen were to find out that I’m clearly a peasant, and, feeling betrayed, throw me out.
How does the common world live through its troubles? How do others go about loving, and how do they handle love when it trembles at its foundations? Can I learn something from their example?
Our invisibility in the bus, a gap, the hollow I like a fly whose veins have been sucked dry by a garden spider and who, in a nightmare, becomes a vampire, a Dracula, which means that it can now take its turn drinking the blood of others, this kind of fictional character (especially when he’s the narrator), is zombie-like. If it looks like blood is flowing through his veins, it’s really just water dyed red. While watching the Disney Channel yesterday, I giddily jotted down an implicit reflection on this I character: in the Walt Disney version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Scrooge McDuck is Scrooge, Donald is the nephew, and Mickey is Bob Cratchit. But Mickey also plays Paul Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, based on Goethe . . . I immediately found myself imagining Mickey Mouse as Puss in Boots, a beautiful contradiction that might pass unnoticed given the strange role that this sort of character plays. (It would be the same sort of alchemy if Charlot—not his American persona, Chaplin—were to play Jesus, for example.) He isn’t exactly an actor playing a character, because this actor is already a character, but more precisely a multidimensional character, who’s nevertheless still contained by the dimensions of his sort, loosely employed, readily hosting an array of characters in his mold. There’s something similar about my narrator, I. He has to be a stereotype, a jack-of-all-trades, capable of seeing everything and being in every situation, without ever failing to keep a distance, the least burdened as possible, from the author’s idiosyncrasies, refusing to give in to them or at least resisting them as much as possible. But this can’t be done. An author doesn’t know how to hide himself behind his characters. Instead he shows himself naked through them, and rhymes with them all.
And so I’ve embarked. Which seat should I pick? The one that’s best for stretching my legs or the one best suited for propping my knees up at eye level against the back of the seat in front of me? The one that offers the best view of the landscape or the passengers or the driver? A window seat halfway back on the left? Up front on the right for the conversation? In the very back with the middle-schoolers? Actually, I have the luxury of changing seats as I wish, without being noticed or suspected. So, it’s decided: I will read, as if this were a book, everything that would ordinarily be kept secret. And I will try, naïvely, to learn some lessons from it all.
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
