Sweet Days of Discipline Read online

  What Micheline wanted from life was to have a good time, and wasn’t that what I wanted too? Sometimes it upset me deeply that I was neglecting Frédérique, and other times it gave me a kind of satisfaction. I was doing it on purpose. And I saw Frédérique, exactly as she had been, never talking to anyone, detached from the rest of us, detached from the world, and I wanted to go and talk to her, to tell her that it was a joke for me, a distraction, that she should let me play. As soon as I had these thoughts, I did the opposite. Was I perhaps punishing Frédérique for my love?

  Three months had gone, the second term was almost over and I had deserted Frédérique. Every evening, when I lay in bed and the German girl slept with her curls neatly spread on her pillow, I passed the time with Frédérique; we would be walking together and sometimes, without realising, I would speak out loud. I’d decide to go and see her next morning. All would be as it had been before. The next morning I changed my mind. If I met her in the corridor, she smiled without stopping. She didn’t even give me the chance to say anything. She slipped away from me like a shadow; if we were in the same room, I was unable to joke with Micheline and I would stare and stare at Frédérique, hoping for a sign or a nod. She was impassive.

  Frédérique never sought me out during those months. On the contrary it was me with my old woman’s hands who sought to cling to her. One day we heard that her father had died. And Frédérique would be going. That day I learnt what terror was. Something irrevocable. I ran to her room. She spoke to me very sweetly, she was going to her father’s funeral and she wouldn’t be coming back to the Bausler Institute I went with her to the small station in Teufen. It was hot, the sky was blue, a distant haze veiled the infinite. The landscape, enchanting. It was three in the afternoon. She hardly spoke at all, walking fast. I was afraid and I walked behind her, catching up with her in little bursts.

  I declared myself, I declared my love. More than to her I spoke to the landscape. The train looked like a toy, it left. ‘Ne sois pas triste.’ She left me a note. I had lost what was most important in my life, the sky was still blue, oblivious, everything yearned for peace and happiness, the landscape was idyllic, like idyllic, desperate adolescence. The landscape seemed to protect us, the small white houses of Appenzell, the fountain, the sign Töchterinstitut, it was as if the place hadn’t been affected by human distortions. Can one feel disorientated in an idyll? An atmosphere of catastrophe covered the land-scape. The irremediable came home to me in one of the most beautiful, transparent days of the year. I had lost Frédérique. I asked her to promise to write. She said yes, but I sensed that she wouldn’t. I immediately wrote her an impassioned letter, not knowing what I was writing. I waited for a letter from her. I sensed that she would never write to me. It wouldn’t be like her. She was the kind that disappear.

  And that was what Frédérique did, she disappeared. I went back to the school and spent my time with my misery, which is a way like any other of spending time. I read the note she had given me at the station, two small sheets of chequered paper seven centimetres square. Her handwriting slept as if on a stone in this paper wall. Practising patiently, I had learnt to copy her handwriting, I had perfected perfection itself, with the discipline of falsehood. I read her note as though it were an ornament. Waves. She spoke to me of metaphysics, she didn’t mention our friendship. That exhortation, that deception, that anonymous tone, ecumenical and cloistered, would have done as well for anyone. In the last line she ‘embraced me with affection’: a formal expression, a static gesture. We never embraced, nor did we use the word affection when we spoke to each other. Her note was a sermon in a way, she recognised certain qualities I had together with an inclination to destruction. I didn’t keep the two sheets of paper like a relic, nor did I tear them up in that dark, restless spring, tossing them away into the void. For a while I kept them in my pocket, then they got crumpled, the paper shrivelled up, it tore, the ink faded. Frédérique’s words were headed for burial. We can put a cross against certain words and place them in our minds with a file card.

  I went home for the Easter holidays, to a hotel. Some people invited us for lunch, they showed us slides of a trip with ruins and landscapes and themselves. They were an old couple of exemplary virtue, well-meaning, rich, discreetly tight, discreetly polite, opposed, especially the wife, to good humour and good living, if such a thing as good living exists. Dry and stiff, in long shapeless clothes, her hair pulled straight back, the wife did not look kindly upon my youth from her shrunken head and colourless eyes. Out of bonhommie or indulgence the husband would let a deep laugh gurgle up from his well-defined, slightly fleshy mouth, if there was anything to laugh about, and his eyes became sly, almost as though laughter were connected with malice. On his waistcoat he wore the pocket watch of his grandfather, or some dead relative. He looked at it frequently, weighing up the time in his hand. His dark suit had given long service and conferred a certain dignity.

  In the garden, which looked down on the lake, an Alsatian behind a fence paced furiously up and down, snarling. The following day, a white foggy day, father and daughter were taken for a trip round the lake. The woman, supervising the maid, prepared a picnic. Everything was calculated to guarantee a happy outing. The mute expression on the lady’s face, brimming with a sense of duty as she peered at the meagre rays of sun as if at a trap, said as much. Two hours later the trip was over. They were my father’s best friends.

  From the moment we entered the Bausler Institut all we thought about was the moment we would leave it. And now that moment had arrived. Sooner than expected, mentally, but on schedule according to the calendar. The fervour of the spring announced the end, the meadows were covered with flowers. It began to get hot, the Föhn. The first mowing striped the grass. The windows were always open and the air was heavy with a sense of bitterness and fate. The year took its leave. And, despite all this, nothing happened. The German girl is hot, she sits near the window.

  Micheline promised everybody invitations and balls in her villa. She changed dresses every day, her blouses made us look at our own, which were simpler and more suitable for school, with dismay. But it was Daddy who chose Micheline’s dresses. Daddy whom we were soon to meet, but we were already having fun with Daddy, all our jokes were about Daddy, and Micheline never stopped talking about her Daddy, her father seeped out of her flesh like a second voice. And your mother? they asked her. Oh, Maman isn’t around. Is she dead though? Not exactly, Micheline said. And if she realised that some girl or other was worried she would take her by the arm. No one’s died, dear. But there was bitterness in her eyes now.

  Sometimes I would walk to the little station in Teufen and stand there to listen: I heard Frédérique’s brief, philistine farewell: Adieu, a brief, sober sound. Farewells have distant ancestors and the hills and fields cover them with chaff and dust.

  I hadn’t been able to say anything to her about her father’s death, it was as if he’d never existed. But even those who don’t exist die. And that’s why Frédérique left the school and me. I saw no emotion in her eyes. Nor was I moved, by the death of her father: it was Frédérique’s sudden departure scared me. The banker had come between us.

  Frédérique was folding her clothes, which had already been laid out with the arms crossed over each other. The cupboards were empty. I attempted a vague ‘désolée’. Frédérique shut her suitcase.

  Meanwhile my father was making notes in a book bound in blue cloth entitled ‘Mein Lebenslauf’, and containing the dates relative to my life. As far as the Bausler Institut is concerned the book offers the following record: his visit 31 October, dinner at St. Gallen. 9 November, his visit. 17 December, Christmas Party in school. 3 January, I visit him. 25 April, Teufen. 8–10 May, I visit him. And these notes had been going on and on since I was eight. I received visits, I made visits. The names of the schools changed. A series of repetitions. Only here and there a name changes, a different village. But Frédérique’s name is not to be found in the Lebenslauf with th
e blue cloth binding. I was still sure that the notes were premonitions, looking forward to the life I would live after school. I was almost fifteen now, and the book had filled up. Without my knowing. With a senile girlhood.

  Frau Hofstetter called in her dog, a bulldog, who, like the boarders, liked to bask in the sun. When the bulldog was obedient she cleaned his slobbers, saying: ‘Mein Kind.’ I heard Herr Hofstetter call his wife, the headmistress, ‘Mutti.’ It seems that in the Appenzell in spring drowsy affections are reawakened, animals and little girls are pampered. The proprietor of the café and stationer’s greets them with a new and heavy smile.

  There’s a breath of resurrection in the air, murder transformed into a state of grace. Pairs of young ladies sit at the café. Despite its being spring, hardly anyone goes by. It’s hot. Teufen is all theirs. Marion has made her choice. She walks by with her friend. She said: I want that one. And the girl, a generous girl, has already given her a part of herself. They walk together as Frédérique and I walked together in months past, but Frédérique has gone. They walk together as the first boarders did no sooner than the Bausler Institut was built in Canton Appenzell.

  During the distribution of the post in the large and noble dining hall, we watch the headmistress’s hands as she gives out the letters, slowly, cautiously. She would pretend to make a mistake and give me my envelope last. I recognise the stamps, the dignitaries of the country, from way off. The envelopes from Brazil were light and the air mail stamps had their perforations nibbled up, like fruit by insects. I knew Frédérique wouldn’t write. But I persevered in the pleasure of taking my sadness to the limit, the way one does with some practical joke. The pleasure of disappointment. It wasn’t new to me. I had been relishing it ever since I was eight years old, a boarder in my first, religious, school. And perhaps they were the best years, I thought. Those years of discipline. There was a kind of elation, faint but constant throughout all those days of discipline, the sweet days of discipline.

  We all wore blue berets with the initials of the boarding school. I was at the station, in my uniform and beret. I was waiting for the train from the Gothard. It would stop for three minutes beside the windy platform. They let me go on my own, they checked that I was impeccable, my shoes polished. There I stood, spruced up, to see her pass by, go through the station, then she would be taking the Andrea Doria and sailing across the ocean, my maman. Opposite, the second-class buffet in the station was like our own shrouded rooms, or a nursing home. I seemed to see destitute people stretched out, the disorder of a destiny that breathed on the windowpanes, seen, from the other side of the railway lines, like some sequence in a novelised life.

  So there I was, with my beret and the initials, on the other side of the world, on that side where one is protected and watched over. I foresaw the pain, the desertion, with an acute sense of joy. I greeted the train, the carriages, the compartments, all split up, the burnished alcoves, the velvet, the porcelain passengers, those strangers, those obscure companions. Joy over pain is malicious, there’s poison in it. It’s a vendetta. It is not so angelic as pain. I stood a while on the platform of a squalid station. The wind wrinkled the dark lake and my thoughts as it swept on the clouds, chopped them up with its hatchet; between them you could just glimpse the Last Judgement, finding each of us guilty of nothing.

  That school was destroyed. It doesn’t exist any more. When I found out, I couldn’t hide my satisfaction. I had thought it immortal. Even the majestic marble staircase and the beds surrounded by gauze drapes promising candour and death, had been demolished. I told Frédérique, for she was the one person I could tell, how the building’s destruction had given me ‘un parfait contentement’ (as it says on one of the tarot cards). I also said to Frédérique that maybe it had been our thoughts, or the vibrations given off at the age of innocence, that had destroyed it. She said that innocence was a modern invention.

  We joked, we wondered how long the Bausler Institut would last. And it seemed as if it must last forever, for future generations, in radiant peace. Standing in the shadow of the school wall, Frédérique jokes. The shadows of the trees, like banners, exalt this place that seems immortal.

  I noticed she had a dull, leaden, glazed look about her, something unpleasant in her eyes, which would seem indigo sometimes, but in fact were moss coloured, swamp coloured.

  Micheline, the cheerful, fun-loving Belgian, calls to me. She doesn’t realise that cheerfulness can become dreary. Cheerfulness is difficult to handle. Micheline takes off her pullover, she’s hot, she helps me to put it on, I’m cold. We lift our arms together, I feel her warmth, and her warmth is cheerful. Her skin, her perfume. Have fun, Frédérique seemed to be saying, but she would never have actually said it. Except to someone at death’s door. Micheline laughed. Her little teeth were all even, exact, her forehead low and her mouth made up when she went to the village, to Teufen. The cripple was there, and two pale gentlemen with pitchforks, as if they were off to swear an oath, the baker, who smelt of custard cream and puff pastry, the ageing women with their braids and buns. The child with the tin whistle, and the windows framed in white. A belltower with a golden ball on top. The village street finished where it began. Wir wollen kein Glück. We want no luck, you hear people say in the village.

  Daddy has promised Micheline a fortune. Daddy swept away her worries, she mustn’t have disturbing thoughts. Daddy invites everyone to his big party in Belgium. I saw Frédérique from a distance, untouched by the other girls’ happiness, their fun. Frédérique keeps her eyes down on a book.

  At Carnival Micheline and I danced together. All the boarders have to dance. Everyone was wearing their carnival masks, it was a must to wear your carnival masks. Frau Hofstetter and her husband, the bursar, sat calm and still as they watched us, like the agents of a lenient police force. The Hofstetters man and wife sat together in the dining hall, specially done up for the ball. Streamers on the walls, fancy decorations and candyfloss. Frédérique didn’t join in. She excused herself and went up to her room. Micheline moved her hips, keeping time. Perhaps cheerfulness is getting to be tiresome for her too. Her low forehead beaded with sweat, her red cheeks. Daddy will wash her face, a face about to wither. Her beauty has become a parody. The old face is already sketched out in the young, and exhaustion lurks behind cheerfulness, the way some babies are scarcely born before they’re reminding you of the grandparent who just died.

  Only the little black girl was sad, a sadness without respite, controlled and measured. I watched her. It was the sadness of desperation I thought. She doesn’t let the headmistress hold her hand any more these days. Her hands touch nothing but the emptiness of her thoughts. I saw her gathering yellow flowers, she held them warm and drowsy in her arms. She cuddled them as if they were a little baby, singing a soft lullaby, her eyes dull and ecstatic. Then she threw them on the ground. She buried them. She was the tiny dispatch rider of a routed army.

  She looked around, her body moving slowly with the stiffness and bleariness of someone shocked by a bad dream. ‘Good morning,’ I greeted her. But she didn’t answer. We had never spoken to her, Frédérique and I. Her life at the Bausler Institut seemed to be exclusively a matter for the headmistress. She took private lessons, she never had a friend, and if we heard her voice at Christmas it was only because she was forced to sing Stille Nacht. As far as most of the girls were concerned she was the President’s daughter, and they made her pay for that. There are times when one wants everyone to be equal and one imposes a sort of imaginary democracy. If a girl is received, as the black girl was, with flags and pomp of every variety, and if there is applause for an African head of state, then that applause will be held against her.

  By tacit agreement and right from the beginning the girls in a school will choose their pariah with careless affection. Not because one passes the word to the others: it’s a general impulse. It’s the evil eye, like a divining rod, seeking out its victim. With no real reason to explain the choice but bad luck. The black g
irl did nothing but wrap herself in it, give it an aura of truth, as though imposed by destiny. She was pining away, visibly. She began to cough, she no longer spoke, and when she leafed through a book Frau Hofstetter had given her, her alabaster fingers came to rest on an illustration: a mound of earth and a cross.

  I felt friendly toward her in my last two days at school. I followed her around. Somebody so unhappy, I thought, won’t notice that she’s being spied on, and spy is what I did. It wasn’t so much her I was watching, though, as her unhappiness. Just as at the beginning of the school year I had kept my eye on Frédérique, so now I observed the black girl. My attention was entirely concentrated on her, on that one thing: unhappiness. I thought of the graves in the wall, the graves that nest in our minds. The black girl didn’t notice anything.

  It was as though I were looking at someone already dead. With her carefully twisted braids, the round eyes that had lost their spell, a sickly smile, as if of constant farewell. They made her wear a blue cotton jacket. A Swiss driver came to get her. They sat her in a limousine. The powers that be were lined up: Frau Hofstetter with gleaming teardrops in her eyes, and her husband. Two girls were playing tennis and I was walking along the road towards the village. At a bend the car passed. Like a robot, the black girl nodded and her hand sketched a goodbye.