Sweet Days of Discipline Read online

  Madame poured the tea, she poured slowly until the cups were half full, offered the petits fours. ‘Je vous en prie, dear.’ She brought the cup to her lips, concentrated on some thought that remained unformulated, suspended in the air. On the walls the faces of the portraits seemed to grow animated, twitched nervously in their cracks. She smiled at me, I smiled at her. So, I was a friend of her daughter’s, her daughter who had no friends. She was pleased to meet me, she said sweetly, politely. It was almost convincing; I was grateful for that almost, that faint uncertainty attenuating every brusque opposition between true and false. Her eyes cloaked me in an almost girlish gaze, an innocent gaze. They were a girl’s eyes, they wouldn’t be disturbed, or a doll’s, without idiocy or amazement. A curdled paradise, the Genevan lake-blue irises streaked. Madame seems to be happy. With extraordinary sweetness she asks me what hotel I’m staying in. ‘At the Hôtel de Russie.’ ‘It’s falling to pieces,’ she said. ‘They’ll knock it down,’ she added confidently.

  The rooms, I went on, are large and spacious, real salons, I said with emphasis (as though to protect the hotel from destruction). Yes, she knew, but in bad repair. Stubbornly, but with the same sweetness, she asked after my dear parents. And if they were Protestants. I mentioned to Madame that we had already met once. Sweetly, she seemed not to remember. I insisted: it was the day she had come to get Frédérique at the school. And I went with you, I said, to the station. Now Madame remembered, ‘une jeune fille triste’‚ a charitable smile trembled her chin. She didn’t speak about times past, but about the weather, the heat and humidity. She was well informed about matters meteorological. Her calm and sweetness were sumptuous, a thick velvet. And durable too, they could have been used to improve doors and windows. I took some more petits fours, she apologised for not having offered them twice. I counted them, there were five or six left on the plate. I decided to finish them. My mind went back over all the mamans I had known from my school. I felt faintly repulsed. For no reason. I saw them in the drawing rooms where we would meet them, in their tailleurs, moving their lips.

  Some drawing rooms, especially those in the religious schools, have something sinister and conspiratorial about them. In my first school, run by nuns, when I was eight, we were all obsessed by ‘spies’, a word that brought cosmic resonance to tale-telling. That was what I was thinking of when Madame poured the now lukewarm tea into our cups.

  Frédérique hadn’t said a word. Her silence had no weight to it. It was lifeless, alien. All at once she started. Until now she had been sitting in the middle of a sofa, sitting as if about to get up and go, her bust leaning slightly forward. She let out a rasping sigh, then another. Her breath seemed to leave her chest as if with an echo, a rumbling, a second voice. Madame kept her cup in her hand, she remarked that in the Appenzell the men went to vote with their swords while the women watched from the window; and Madame turned toward the window, but I realised she was looking at her daughter. She had found a reason for looking at her. Madame went back to the weather. The acrid exuberance of the vanitas gave off a greenhouse perfume. Madame stroked a petal. Frédérique lifted her chest with sudden violence to take a breath. Her chest rose and fell, the rhythm was constant now, as if being gripped by spasms. Her breath whistled. For the first time I caught a dullness in her eyes, an expression of disorientation, a haze.

  ‘My daughter’, Madame whispered, showing me to the lift, ‘tried to burn me.’ She said it so sweetly it sounded like a regret. She opened the lift door. Inside was a mirror and a bench. ‘Elle n’est pas responsable.’ And in the mirror I saw her crystalline eyes, tearful with trust, concise as an epitaph. You try to believe that, my dear. I can show myself out. She pressed the button. ‘This is quite a trip for me. I keep guard. I almost never leave the house. You know what I mean, don’t you?’ After you. I made a gesture to let her go out first. She pushed me toward the door. Finally she said goodbye, thanking me for my visit, radiant because she had met her daughter’s friend. The door closed.

  It was a clear, grim day. The lake lapped in the wind. By the parapet an Asian delegation was getting into line. Silver hoops dangled from a fountain as if from a gallows. Frédérique had arranged to meet me in a café. I was early. The minutes passed slowly. I asked for a glass of Ovaltine. I had nothing to think about. The hands of the clock were still. A streaked leaf and a white butterfly courted each other. The leaf fluttered, mindful of the sap it once had, and the butterfly followed it, like a messenger. Idyll and death in a graceful whirling.

  The table was marble. I asked for another glass of Ovaltine. I must find something to think about to pass the time. I thought of the railway stations, Teufen, Staz, Rigi, Wengen. I had taken swimming lessons in a pool and my father, in winter clothes, would sit in the shade, rejecting the summer sun. A wrong sun shone on our summers, a leaden sun pierced our twilight, a light of woods and marshes, a light that didn’t come from above but seeped out from the toadstools and poisoned berries, the damp soil. We were walking toward that dark light, an oasis of walled-in peace. Father and daughter, hand in hand, like an old married couple. He pointed and told me the names of the mountains. In the hotel a metallic light lay across the tables, the croissants, the silverware. It was breakfast. A large window looked out on Cervino, the sun, the regeneration of the world. At the next table a woman and her three daughters caught our attention. Their bulging foreheads generated an air of such happiness. They were born well, I thought, they were born happy. The woman and the little girls displayed an almost stubborn happiness, demonically relaxed features.

  ‘You see‚’ I said to my father, ‘wie glücklich sie sind.’ (Perhaps he thought it was me was happy, he was distracted.) That whole day I was haunted by the vision of their sumptuously laid table and their happiness. The one on the right was the youngest, I thought; she had the smallest head, the narrowest forehead, the least obvious eyes. Thin nostrils. She wore her hair like the eldest, a fierce parting in the middle, frivolous in its fierceness. During our walk, the happiness that frolicked with the woman and her daughters presented itself in sharp contrast to my father and myself, alone every year, obstinately alone, a little sour, set in our ways, nervous if, as happens in hotels, someone trying to please should sit at our table. We say good morning to the people sitting at the next table. We would say goodbye when we got up to go. We always finished first.

  We read in the lobby, the sound of a band drifted over from the lounge. Elderly couples danced the waltz, the fox-trot, the men taking long steps, keeping time. The Swiss have always had rhythm in their blood. When the French were there and they were celebrating the guillotine, the Swiss danced with them, raising their knees and showing the soles of their shoes.

  The following day the hotel was unable to keep it a secret: the youngest daughter, she was my age, had hung herself in her room from the curtain with its pattern of flowers and leaves. So as not to disturb the guests things were done discreetly and we didn’t see the corpse. Appearances did not violate the natural order of things. It’s true that a suicide is not in the natural order of things. But what’s the difference? In the room the curtain was drawn to again. I thought of winter, in hotels. The icicles weeping on the branches outside, they would melt in spring. I never saw them melting.

  And Frédérique arrives. She sits down. Her face is close to mine. We look at each other. Is it sorcery that brings lovers together? We joke. She smiles. It’s our last meeting. ‘What did you do with that doll?’ ‘What doll?’ She looked me straight in the eyes. She has always kept hers; and she seemed to be saying that she kept it on her, in a pocket. The doll, she explained patiently, that the school gave us, the St. Gallen doll, with its costume and cap. ‘Oh, I threw mine away as soon as I got it,’ I said. ‘No, you didn’t, you’d better look for it, you must have left it somewhere. You’ll find it, you’ll see, I’m sure you didn’t throw it away.’ And it’s almost as if she were reproaching me. She’s like a saint, there’s still a glimmer of ferocity in her eyes, a moment
before she turns meek. She was sure I couldn’t have thrown away that doll. It would have been a terrible thing to do. She was still insisting on being the most disciplined of us all, the most obedient. And she even seemed to be reproaching me for not having remembered that stuffed toy with its Tracht and painted eyes. I take her hand. The hand that wrote at school, in Teufen. And I copied her handwriting. She wants an example. I write her name on a scrap of paper. She who copies becomes the artifice. Goodbye, Frédérique. It’s she who writes the word adieu. That small philistine sound I heard in Teufen is repeated now, turned on its head, it flattens out, it surrenders, it becomes part of the language of the dead.

  Twenty years later she wrote me a letter. Her mother had left her something to live on. But she had had enough of the mental home, if she went on staying there, she’d be on her way to the cemetery.

  I’m standing in front of the school building. Two women are sitting on a bench. I greet them with a nod. They don’t respond. I open the door. A woman sitting behind a table. Another standing. She asks me what I want. I ask about the school. I say the name. She’s never heard of it. Here in Teufen, sind Sie sicker? She looks at me with mean, enquiring eyes. Of course I’m sure. I lived here. For a moment my answer seems trivial. She advises me to go to St. Gallen. There are a lot of schools there. I repeat the name of the school. I am mistaken she says. I apologise. This, she says, is a home for the blind. That’s what it is now. A home for the blind.

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  About the Author

  Translated into about twenty languages, FLEUR JAEGGY is a true original of European writing. The Times Literary Supplement named Jaeggy’s S. S. Proleterka as a Best Book of the Year, and her Sweet Days of Discipline won the Premio Bagutta as well as the Premio Speciale Rapallo.

  Born in Manchester in 1954, TIM PARKS is a novelist, memoirist and translator. He came across Sweet Days of Discipline while browsing in an Italian bookshop. His highly praised translation subsequently won the John Florio Prize.

  Copyright

  This edition first published in 2018 in the UK by And Other Stories

  Sheffield – London – New Haven

  www.andotherstories.org

  First published as I beati anni del castigo in 1989 by Adelphi Edizioni S.P.A, Milan

  © 1989 Adelphi Edizioni S.P.A., Milan

  English-language translation © 1991 by Tim Parks

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book. The right of Fleur Jaeggy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.