The temporary lover will be lulled by her bawdy song about birdcages and birdies, and the bare giantess will lift her short, sausage fingers, and pass her hand through a wig, a shaggy mess of curly red wool. Eyes purified for love or murder. The wig will fall over the piano keys.
She will be big and bare and bald, like someone doomed to the pyre, and then there’ll be nothing but sleep; there’ll be peace over the earth, peace over the forests, from which the nightingales and starlings and tales set out.
The room doesn’t allow for movement. Here, the wardrobe with the mirrored door partly open. Here too, a quarter step away, the bed. The rumpled blue sheet, a pair of green socks, a roll of toilet paper, a bra, a blue skirt. The radio program. A thin book, Humour en français. Notebooks in blue-paper covers. The radio atop a bookshelf attached to the wall. Newspapers. Two small reading lamps. A thin, blue sock. Pale blue underpants, a white sock. The lamp’s wires hanging over the bed. The stove. A green thermos. A large, red Dutch oven. A white, long-handled pot for coffee. A box of matches. An open jar of salt. Over the stove, mounted on the wall, a wooden rack where the television stands. Near the bed, a nightstand. The phonebook. A thin blue sock hanging off its edge, mate of the one by the radio. The sink. A long-handled comb. A brush. A violet bottle. Common Lavender. Another bottle. Fine Lavender. Two white plastic bottles: Nutritional Milk. A tube. Foaming toothpaste with chamomile extract. A toothbrush with a green handle in a pink plastic case. It will be necessary to wait and kill her here in this ramshackle pigsty — once briefly, once at length, to lay waste this box of piddling junk.
At the other end of the bed, behind the blue pillow, a flowered drapery. It masks a former door on which narrow shelves have been mounted. Boxes. Jars. Bottles. A flashlight. A bottle of cognac, empty. Colored boxes. Fruit Cocktail. A green plastic bag. A salt jar. Canned goods. Liver pate. Creeping thistle. Pork. Pork kidneys. Bottles with fruit nectar. Jars of jam. Fruit compote. Confiture.
The absent giantess doesn’t have a clue that she will have to pay for the filth and ugliness that her small world represents or that her salvation is being prepared — the bullets, the noose, the poison — which will be announced in the obituaries, so that the children who’ve escaped from her piano lessons and lullabies can sleep peacefully at night. She’ll find peace, finally, in this tomb where so many things are crowded together: the bed, the bookshelf, the piano, the stove, the television, the radio, the armoire, the sink, the books, the scores, the stockings, the confitures, the fats — here, where the spirit of the absent inhabitant unifies everything: dumping ground for delinquents, or conspirators’ cell, or multicolored box where children tortuously try the cadences he-he, hoo-hoo on the funereal keys.
• • •
The professor of French and the piano will have an hour break for lunch. First, however, the stammering hours will come, the hours of gasping je suis, tu es, il/elle est. Recreation. Before instruction and recreation, morning: waking in haste, facing the disorder of a new day, not-combing, not-washing, racing down the stairs, enduring the suffocation of the tram, then climbing off and finally approaching the school.
The long limousines appear, braking elegantly in the building’s courtyard: reaching maximum speed in front of the square, then suddenly, perfectly braking into the last, lazy, negligent curve — the barely audible stop like a ripple. The driver getting out on the left, slamming his door, running around the front of the car, and opening the door on the right, the vacant and sleepy little girl getting out, stiff and mute, slamming the door, climbing the school’s front steps. The driver crossing in front of the car again, opening the door on the left, putting the car into gear, and then hitting the gas and bringing the car forward. . this, the drop-off pantomime mechanically repeated in a continuous procession of limousines, drivers, and children.
It was a matter of vainly having arranged her class schedule in order to avoid this insufferable courtyard motorcade, of preferring to arrive at school after the first hour and leave before the last — to avoid seeing the monsters coming and going. Nevertheless, the unseen automobiles will still be there, in their place, on their way, in her way, in her nightmares full of bewilderment and frustration. They race into the courtyard; they brake suddenly, the drivers dash left and right, opening and slamming doors. A blond boy steps out of the maroon car amidst stifled laughter. From a white car, a thin little girl has descended shyly, stepping fearfully. Keeping pace with each other, the boy and girl climb the school’s steps slowly. The drivers open their doors, seat themselves, start their motors, rotate their wheels, disappear. Nightmarish apparitions: the stops, the departures, the phantoms, limousines always coming and going, arriving only to disappear, to empty their delicate, savage load and disappear as if none of this had ever been.
The gathering of the notebooks, the signature in the register, the hasty combing, dressing, arranging, smiling, greeting. Movement will be hindered to the barricaded right of the square. The specters gather: a long limousine, the little savages howl, roar with laughter, rush the school gate shouting at the top of their lungs. Screaming, dozens of invaders hurl their knapsacks in the air and toss kisses left and right. The door slams, the posh maroon car rumbles, starts moving, meteorically reaches the curve of the square, disappears. Now the white car departs — the one for the little girl in blue, who’s having a difficult time separating from her girlfriends, chattering, and kissing them all. The little princess salutes her last girlfriend, rips a sheet from a notebook, writes something on it, holds out the paper. They both toss their golden hair, giggle, kiss each other once more. The white car leaps forward. Next a green one appears. There are a lot of students gathered, wild, sweaty, throwing their caps, knapsacks, scarves — a deafening romp.
Now! Freedom appears for an elusive moment among the rows of apparitions. Gaze lowered, among the phantoms torturing her night and day: an instant to consider her movements, humility, lack of grace, and how to pass unobserved to a point beyond the cars with their drivers who would love to insult her — an instant to run horrified all the way to the tram stop, to hear nothing, to withdraw and become unreachable, to pass a hand through her hair, over her eyebrows, over her frightened eyes, to gather the notebooks spilling out of her briefcase, to arrange the collar of her blouse, to remain unknown and unavailable for a couple of seconds, taking a single deep breath, one moment allowed by the gods.
Maybe, then, an hour for lunch. Only then. Barely then. But Monica is always ready to dream of a new spring day: the lilac, suave and sweet, the noble partner suave and sweet, and the owl singing with the cuckoo and the nightingale, suave and sweet, soothing and sinister.
• • •
“The transcription is in a file on the table. After you record the broadcast, please check that the text matches the recording,” she had said. To record. On tape. On an outdated tape-recorder with a black and yellow checkered slipcover.
The big crimes of the day are broadcast live, on the spot, captured by television cameras and hurled simultaneously to millions of famished, hypnotized eyes. Imagination is on the wane, humiliated by hallucinatory reality. The little black microphone replaces and registers the horror. . the tapes will roll on monotonously, memorizing, transcribing, depositing, proving, authenticating.