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. She waved to Basile from a distance, communicating some kind of understanding between them. Some middle-schoolers, for the most part girls, say a shy hello to her, but keep their distance. She places a leather briefcase on the seat next to her. She will have to hold it in her lap soon. I’m immediately drawn to this passenger: she’s beautiful without being too beautiful, small and of an indefinite age; she’s smiling and curious about these people around her who are so easily surprised by nothing, and ask questions about this nothing until they find their special secret, always lying in wait for a slice of conversational pleasure. They will always find at least some pleasure. I have never seen her before; she reminds me of someone. I recognize her right away, with the strength of a resonating echo that I have trouble pinpointing. She has one hand that I believe I know, while the other is completely foreign to me; one eye has already seduced me, while the other can hardly see me. She stirs up feelings of pain and reminds me of my troubles. She is reading a book and a newspaper, alternately. The newspaper is regional. The book is thick. She holds back a yawn.
Since she got on, Basile can’t stop looking in all of the rearview mirrors at hand, and, to that end, he even adjusts the left side-view mirror. She’s the one he’s looking at, no, observing, no, the one he’s staring at, and the one he sees change shape and get larger, but only slightly.
At one point, she smiles at him and widens her eyes, as if to say “watch the road!” or “be careful!” or even “patience!” Then she lets her gaze drift away into the expanse of scenery flying by.
The bus on the road follows a fierce flowing river. The water is grayish, a sign of violent rains upstream. Random pickets hold back grass, sentences, twigs, shredded bits of plastic, giant masses of hair, everything that the current carts along, living molecules that compose and consume stories. Public dumping is a common occurrence. The waste unabashedly finds its way down to the riverbank.
Once the road reaches a particular hamlet, Basile stops, and pshshshsh. He waits with the door open. Is someone there? No, but something is. A pot with a cover held in place by a knotted dishtowel has been delivered right to the door by a limping old man. The man doesn’t even announce what’s in the pot. It contains mushrooms, oyster mushrooms. He only says “thank you,” in a tone that implies more, that says that everything is happening as expected, a simultaneous “hello,” “good-bye,” and “it’s understood . . .” and “I know everything about you that I need to know.” Basile doesn’t say anything. He knows to whom he should pass along this seasonal commodity: to the best restaurant in La Chapelle, which has the ironic, rhyming name of La Gamelle, the Lunchbox.
The bus is packed, but it’s still a while before the empty seat next to the woman reading the book and the newspaper is filled by a young girl who is more daring than the others. Do they know each other?
“So, Nathalie . . . how have you been?” “You remember me!” “Of course! So, how are you? You’re in eighth grade, right?” “Ninth grade, ma’am.” “Already . . .” “Yep. Actually, I have a homework assignment on Baudelaire . . . I wanted to ask you . . . Am I on the right track to suggest that his prose poems . . . um, well, that they were more modern than his Flowers of Evil?”
“Modern . . . Well in any case it’s . . . Does he say that? Well, I don’t know . . . I can’t remember.”
The woman reading the book refrains from saying: “I teach fifth grade, you know.” Deep down she’s thinking that she may never have really known the answer to the girl’s question, and it makes her sad because it was nevertheless within her reach to know. She only has about two minutes to confirm the young girl’s brand-new impression that she knows a little something about literature. She settles with encouraging her, hardly daring to dream about the big city Baudelaire envisioned, his conformity to an elastic style of prose, while through the window she admires the precision of the fields of plowed rows, the meticulous planting of young crops and vineyards, which are like lines of verse on a page. She lets out a sigh:
“I’ll have to read it again . . .”
And I bet she will.
Rush hour is over. The middle school and the high school are on the outskirts of La Chapelle. The youngsters have exited the bus, slowly and wearily, carrying with them a vague anxiety hidden under too much nonchalance. The closed space of the schoolyard—which in a sense belongs to them, after all—reassures them. It opens up its doors to them daily, with no exceptions.
Against the flow of the emptying bus, a fat woman gets on. She seems like the type who’s just looking for something to complain about. She’s only going as far as downtown and regretfully takes out a few francs, as if she were being forced to give away precious stones. It’s expensive. To make sure that she gets her money’s worth, she takes up two whole seats with her big bags. She sits down in the same row as the woman reading the book, but across the aisle. She wants to chat. To get the conversation going, she talks about the driver, which apparently isn’t the best method.
“Out of all the company’s employees, I like him the best. A very gentle man . . .”
And
