The Complete Stories (23 page)

Alone at his post: he was looking at me.

It was the first time we’d come face to face, by ourselves. He was looking at me. My steps, meandering, almost halted.

For the very first time I was alone with him, without the whispered support of the class, without the admiration my daring provoked. I tried to smile, feeling the blood rise to my face. A bead of sweat ran down my forehead. He was looking at me. His gaze was a soft, heavy paw upon me. But though the paw was gentle, it completely paralyzed me like a cat unhurriedly pinning the mouse’s tail. The bead of sweat went sliding down my nose and mouth, splitting my smile down the middle. That was it: with an expressionless gaze, he was looking at me. I started backing up against the wall, eyes lowered, all of me hanging onto my smile, the sole feature of a face that had already lost its shape. I’d never noticed how long the classroom was; only now, at the slow pace of fear, did I see its actual size. Not even my lack of time had let me notice up till then how austere and high the walls were; and hard, I could feel the hard wall on my palms. In a nightmare, in which smiling played a role, I hardly believed I’d ever get anywhere near the door—from which point I’d run, oh how I’d run! to hide among my peers, the children. Besides concentrating on my smile, my meticulous zeal was bent on not making a sound with my feet, thus adhering to the intimate nature of a danger of which I knew nothing further. It was with a shudder that a sense of myself came to me as suddenly as in a mirror: a humid thing backed against the wall, slowly moving on tiptoe, and with a gradually intensifying smile. My smile had crystallized the room in silence, and even the noises coming from the park slid around outside the silence. I finally reached the door, and my imprudent heart started beating too loudly, at the risk of awakening the gigantic world that slept.

That’s when I heard my name.

Suddenly nailed to the ground, mouth dry, there I stood with my back to him lacking the courage to turn around. The breeze coming in through the door had just dried the sweat on my body. I turned slowly, containing within my clenched fists the impulse to run.

At the sound of my name the room had been dehypnotized.

And very slowly I saw the whole entire teacher. Very slowly I saw that the teacher was very big and very ugly, and that he was the man of my life. The new and great fear. Small, sleepwalking, alone, facing the thing to which my inescapable freedom had finally led me. My smile, all that was left of a face, had also gone out. I was two leaden feet on the floor and a heart so empty that it seemed to be dying of thirst. There I stood, out of the man’s reach. My heart was dying of thirst, yes. My heart was dying of thirst.

Calm as if about to kill in cold blood, he said:

“Come closer . . .”

How is it that a man takes revenge?

The globe that I myself had thrown at him was about to come back and strike me in the face, one that, even still, I didn’t recognize. I was about to be struck again by a reality that wouldn’t have existed if I hadn’t recklessly figured it out and thus given it life. To what extent was that man, that heap of compact sadness, also a heap of rage? But my past was now too late. A stoic repentance kept my head held high. For the first time, ignorance, which up to that point had been my greatest guide, abandoned me. My father was at work, my mother had died months before. I was the only I.

“. . . Take your notebook . . .,” he added.

Surprise made me suddenly look at him. So that was it!? The unexpected relief was almost more shocking than my previous alarm. I stepped forward, reached out my hand while stammering.

But the teacher didn’t move and didn’t hand over the notebook.

To my sudden torment, without taking his eyes off me, he started slowly removing his glasses. And he looked at me with naked eyes that had so many lashes. I had never seen his eyes that, with their innumerable eyelashes, looked like two sweet cockroaches. He was looking at me. And I hadn’t learned how to exist in front of a man. I hid it by looking at the ceiling, the ground, the walls, and kept my hand outstretched because I didn’t know how to withdraw it. He was looking at me mildly, curiously, his eyes disheveled as if he had just awoken. Would he crush me with an unexpected hand? Or demand that I kneel and beg forgiveness. My sliver of hope was that he hadn’t found out what I had done, just as I myself no longer knew, in fact I had never known.

“How did the idea of the treasure in disguise occur to you?”

“What treasure?” I murmured idiotically.

We went on staring at each other in silence.

“Oh, the treasure!” I blurted suddenly without even understanding, anxious to admit any fault whatsoever, begging him for my punishment to consist solely of suffering forever from guilt, for eternal torture to be my sentence, but never this unknown life.

“The treasure that’s hidden where you least expect it. That all you have to do is find? Who told you that?”

The man’s lost his mind, I thought, because what did the treasure have to do with any of this? Stunned, uncomprehending, and moving from one unexpected thing to the next, I still foresaw some less dangerous terrain. In all my racing around I’d learned to pick myself up after falling even when I was limping, and I quickly regained my composure: “It was my composition about the treasure! so that must have been my mistake!” Weak, and though treading carefully on this new and slippery reassurance, I had still picked myself up enough from my fall to be able to toss, in an imitation of my former arrogance, my future wavy hair:

“No one really . . .,” I answered trailing off. “I made it up myself,” I said trembling, but already starting to sparkle again.

If I’d been relieved to have finally found something concrete to deal with, I was nevertheless starting to become aware of something much worse. His sudden lack of anger. I looked at him intrigued, out of the corner of my eyes. And gradually with extreme suspicion. His lack of anger had started to scare me, there were new threats I didn’t understand. That gaze that never left me—and devoid of rage . . . Bewildered, and in exchange for nothing, I had lost my enemy and sustenance. I looked at him in surprise. What did he want from me? He was embarrassing me. And his gaze devoid of anger had started to bother me more than the violence I’d been fearing. A small dread, all cold and sweaty, was overtaking me. Slowly, so he wouldn’t notice, I backed up until I hit the wall, and then my head backed up until it had nowhere else to go. From the wall onto which I had completely mounted myself, I looked at him furtively.

And my stomach filled with a nauseous liquid. I can’t explain it.

I was a very odd girl and, going pale, I saw it. Bristling, about to vomit, though to this day I don’t know for sure what I saw. But I know I saw it. I saw deep as into a mouth, in a flash I saw the abyss of the world. What I saw was as anonymous as a belly opened up for an intestinal operation. I saw some thing forming on his face—the already petrified distress was fighting its way up to his skin, I saw the grimace slowly hesitating and bursting through a crust—but this thing that in mute catastrophe was being uprooted, this thing so little resembled a smile as if a liver or a foot were trying to smile, I don’t know. Whatever I saw, I saw at such close range that I don’t know what I saw. As if my curious eye were glued to the keyhole and in shock came upon another eye looking back at me from the other side. I saw inside an eye. Which was as incomprehensible as an eye. An eye opened up with its moving jelly. With its organic tears. An eye cries all by itself, an eye laughs all by itself. Until the man’s effort reached a peak of full awareness, and in a childish victory he showed, a pearl plucked from his open belly—that he was smiling. I saw a man with entrails smiling. I could see his extreme worry about getting it wrong, the diligence of the slow student, the clumsiness as if he’d suddenly become left-handed. Without understanding, I knew I was being asked to accept this offering from him and his open belly, and to accept the weight of this man. My back was desperately pushing against the wall, I shrank away—it was too soon for me to see all that. It was too soon for me to see how life is born. Life being born was so much bloodier than dying. Dying is uninterrupted. But seeing inert material slowly trying to loom up like one of the living-dead . . . Seeing hope terrified me, seeing life tied my stomach in knots. They were asking too much of my bravery simply because I was brave, they were asking for my strength simply because I was strong. “But what about me?” I shouted ten years later because of lost love, “who will ever see my weakness!” I looked at him in surprise, and never ever figured out what I saw, what I had seen could blind the curious.

Then he said, using for the first time the smile he had learned:

“Your composition about the treasure is so lovely. The treasure that you just have to discover. You . . .” he didn’t add anything for a moment. He scrutinized me gently, indiscreetly, as intimately as if he were my heart. “You’re a very funny girl,” he finally said.

It was the first real shame in my life. I lowered my eyes, unable to hold the defenseless gaze of that man I had wronged.

Yes, I got the impression that, despite his anger, he had somehow trusted me, and therefore I had wronged him with the fib about the treasure. Back then I thought everything made up was a lie, and only the tormented awareness of sinning redeemed me from this vice. I lowered my eyes in shame. I preferred his former rage, which had helped me in my struggle against myself, since it crowned my methods with failure and might end up setting me straight some day: what I didn’t want was this gratitude that was not only my worst punishment, because I didn’t deserve it, as much as it also encouraged my wayward life that I so feared, living waywardly attracted me. I very much wanted to tell him that treasure can’t be found just anywhere. But, as I looked at him, I lost my nerve: I didn’t have the courage to disillusion him. I was already used to protecting other people’s joy, that of my father, for example, who was less wary than I. But how hard it was for me to swallow whole this joy I’d so irresponsibly caused! He seemed like a beggar thanking someone for a plate of food without noticing he’d been given rotten meat. The blood had risen to my face, so hot now that I thought my eyes were bloodshot, while he, probably mistaken again, must have thought his compliment had made me blush with pleasure. That same night all this would be transformed into an uncontrollable attack of vomiting that kept all the lights on in my house.

“You,” he then repeated slowly as if gradually admitting in wonder something that had sprung to his lips by accident. “You’re a very funny girl, you know? You’re a silly little thing . . .” he said putting on that smile again like a boy sleeping with his new shoes on. He didn’t even know he was ugly when he smiled. Trusting, he let me see his ugliness, which was the most innocent part of him.

I had to swallow it as best I could, the way he offended me by believing in me, I had to swallow my compassion for him, my shame at myself, “fool!” I could have shouted at him, “I made up that whole story about the treasure in disguise, it’s just stuff for little girls!” I was very aware of being a child, which explained all my serious flaws, and had put so much faith in growing up one day—and that big man had let himself be fooled by a naughty little girl. He was killing my faith in adults for the first time: he too, a man, believed, as I did, in big lies . . .

. . . And suddenly, my heart beating with disappointment, I couldn’t stand it a second longer—without taking my notebook I ran out to the park, hand over my mouth as if someone had smashed my teeth. Hand over my mouth, horrified, I went running, running to never ever stop, the profound prayer isn’t the one that asks, the most profound prayer is the one that no longer asks—I went running, running in such fright.

In my impurity I’d placed my hope for redemption in adults. The need to believe in my future goodness made me venerate grown-ups, whom I had made in my own image, but in an image of myself purified at last by the penitence of growing up, liberated at last from the dirty soul of a little girl. And now the teacher was destroying all that, and destroying my love for him and for myself. My salvation would be impossible: that man was also me. My bitter idol who had unwittingly fallen into the lures of a mixed-up impure child, and who had meekly let himself be led by my diabolical innocence . . . Hand clamped over my mouth, I ran through the dust of the park.

When I finally realized that I was far out of the teacher’s vicinity, I exhaustedly reined in my gallop, and nearly collapsing leaned all my weight against a tree trunk, breathing heavily, breathing. There I stood panting and with my eyes shut, tasting the trunk’s dusty bitterness, my fingers running over and over the rough carving of a heart with an arrow. And suddenly, squeezing my eyes further shut, I moaned while understanding a bit more: could he mean that . . . that I was a treasure in disguise? The treasure where you least expect it . . . Oh no, no, poor little thing, poor thing that King of Creation, that was why he had needed . . . what? what had he needed? . . . to have transformed even me into a treasure.

I still had a lot more running inside me, I forced my dry throat to catch its breath, and angrily shoving the tree trunk I started running again toward the end of the world.

But I still hadn’t spotted the shadowy end of the park, and my steps grew sluggish, excessively tired. I couldn’t go any further. Maybe it was fatigue, but I was giving in. My steps were slowing down and the foliage of the trees was slowly swaying. My steps were a bit dazzled. Hesitantly I came to a halt, the trees swirling high above. For an entirely strange sweetness was wearing out my heart. Intimidated, I hesitated. I was alone in the grass, barely standing, with nothing to lean on, hand on my weary chest like a virgin annunciate. And from fatigue of that first gentleness a finally humble head that from a distance may have resembled a woman’s. The grove swayed back, and forth. “You’re a very funny girl, you’re a silly little thing,” he’d said. It was like a love.

No, I wasn’t funny. Without even realizing it, I was very serious. No, I wasn’t a silly little thing, reality was my destiny, and that was the thing in me that pained others. And, for God’s sake, I wasn’t a treasure. But if I had already discovered in myself all the eager venom that we’re born with and that gnaws away at life—only in that instant of honey and flowers was I discovering how I healed others: whoever loved me, that was how I would cure whoever was pained for my sake. I was dark ignorance with its hungers and laughter, with its little deaths feeding my inevitable life—how could I help it? I already knew that I was inevitable. But if I was good for nothing, at that moment I was all that man had. He would have to love at least once, not loving a person—through a person. And I alone had been there. Though this was his sole advantage: having no one but me, and forced to start off by loving something evil, he had begun by doing something few ever managed. It would be too easy to desire something clean; ugliness was what was unattainable through love, loving the impure was our deepest nostalgia. Through me, someone hard to love, he had received, with great compassion for himself, the thing of which we are made. Did I understand all this? No. And I don’t know what I understood back then. But it was as if I’d seen for an instant in the teacher, with terrified fascination, the world—and even now I still don’t know what I saw, only that forevermore and in a single second I saw—just like that I had understood us, and I’ll never know what I understood. I’ll never know what I understand. Whatever I understood in the park was, with a shock of sweetness, understood through my ignorance. Ignorance that while standing there—in a painless solitude, no less than what the trees felt—I was completely recovering, ignorance and its incomprehensible truth. There I was, the too-clever girl, and it turned out that everything worthless in me was worth something to God and men. Everything worthless in me was my treasure.