two women size each other up. Apparently the one who boarded most recently doesn’t like the other one’s small smile. It irritates her. It makes her realize how vain her words are. She’s the type of woman who leans in close to whisper gossip but deliberately raises her voice to make herself heard anyway.
“Is he doing alright these days?” “Oh, I don’t watch over him.” “Well, I guess you’re right not to.” “I don’t know if I’m right. But that’s the way it is.” “You’re lucky!” “Lucky . . .”
In the rearview mirror, Basile watches her answer. Does he know how to read lips?
He pulls the bus into its temporary terminus. It will make a fifteen-minute stop here. The fat woman exits the bus, grumbling. She has a hard time making it through the aisle smoothly with all of her bags, and no one helps her. That’s always the way things go nowadays. The world is becoming wild again. She makes sure to say good-bye to the driver, but not to the woman passenger with the book.
Apart from her and myself, there’s no one left on the bus. Basile comes over to her and tells her something, without speaking, something tender I believe. I can tell by the way he approaches delicately and cautiously. Pretty soon it becomes obvious that she’s the person, the Odile and the wife, for whom he has decided to reserve the surprises of an inaudible language, a language spoken by only one person in the whole world: him, but understood by another person, and one person only: her. Keep in mind that if I want to remain faithful to the role that I have set for myself, at this point I will have to learn how to translate it.
And so together they whisper to each other, in their way. They tenderly hold one another’s hand. It’s break time for both of them. Odile smiles, which is paradoxically what betrays her faint sadness. Perhaps she wants to get back to her reading, but she surrenders to the duty of being present and paying attention. She says:
“If I have the energy later, I’m going to grade some of my students’ notebooks.”
The tone in her voice hints that she’s somewhat dreading the chore, but that she’s confident nonetheless. She knows that once she’s gotten started, she will find herself completely immersed in the task, and will be ready to dote over a good assignment or congratulate herself for some evidence of progress.
“I don’t have class today. If it’s all right with you, I’ll ride along your route with you. And I’ll get off at La Ferté to see my mom.”
He has a fatalistic expression on his face. He’s surprised, from what I can tell, that she can write without difficulty in my beautiful bus.
“It’s not exactly writing . . .”
But what about reading? It makes so many passengers nauseous. They say so themselves.
“Not me.”
Would you read on top of a volcano? “Why not?”
During an air raid?
“Even on Charon’s boat, the boat that brings the dead to the other side of the river.”
A rotten line of work. “He’ll make all of us get on the boat someday.”
Not you. “Yes, even me.”
No.
Time . . . It’s about time to leave again, time for the most distant collusions, using the rearview mirror or collective memories as the intermediary, amid the usual peacefulness of a trip without surprises, if all goes according to plan.
Pshhhh.
Basile turns the key to the ignition and puts the engine in gear. The motor hums, as it’s supposed to. The turn signal blinks. The bus has the right of way as it leaves its stop. In a flash, Basile thinks about his back, the compressed vertebrae, which is a common condition in his profession. Others have it worse than he does. He thinks about the required solidarity between time and space, the Siamese twins of his toil. He awaits the sight of the mansion with a bare triangular pediment that he has watched crumble to ruins over the past twenty years, little by little, in the same spot. To keep his fear at bay, he inevitably muses on his two-part obsession, each part undoing the other: the first one involves him crushing a child under the wheels of the bus, a child that turns out to be his own daughter; second, he thinks about the punishment he would have liked to wish upon himself to prevent the first: a truck ahead of him carries a heap of scrap metal. A scrap severs the strap holding it in place, takes flight as the truck passes over a bump too quickly, passes through the windshield of my beautiful bus, and decapitates Basile the driver—a negative consequence of the fact that the new roads permit higher speed limits by bypassing the center of large towns. Fortunately, the bus, for its part, still has to pass through towns, regularly exit the national highway, slow down, and snake through the old road that all of the traffic was once forced to squeeze through. The bus has to wind its way to its stops at the plazas lined with plane trees, and be received ceremoniously as the vehicle of saving grace that opens up all of the Republic’s enclaves to the rest of the world.
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