to her. She will have to hold it in her lap soon. I’m immediately drawn to this passenger: she’s beautiful without being too beautiful, small and of an indefinite age; she’s smiling and curious about these people around her who are so easily surprised by nothing, and ask questions about this nothing until they find their special secret, always lying in wait for a slice of conversational pleasure. They will always find at least some pleasure. I have never seen her before; she reminds me of someone. I recognize her right away, with the strength of a resonating echo that I have trouble pinpointing. She has one hand that I believe I know, while the other is completely foreign to me; one eye has already seduced me, while the other can hardly see me. She stirs up feelings of pain and reminds me of my troubles. She is reading a book and a newspaper, alternately. The newspaper is regional. The book is thick. She holds back a yawn.
Since she got on, Basile can’t stop looking in all of the rearview mirrors at hand, and, to that end, he even adjusts the left side-view mirror. She’s the one he’s looking at, no, observing, no, the one he’s staring at, and the one he sees change shape and get larger, but only slightly.
At one point, she smiles at him and widens her eyes, as if to say “watch the road!” or “be careful!” or even “patience!” Then she lets her gaze drift away into the expanse of scenery flying by.
The bus on the road follows a fierce flowing river. The water is grayish, a sign of violent rains upstream. Random pickets hold back grass, sentences, twigs, shredded bits of plastic, giant masses of hair, everything that the current carts along, living molecules that compose and consume stories. Public dumping is a common occurrence. The waste unabashedly finds its way down to the riverbank.
Once the road reaches a particular hamlet, Basile stops, and pshshshsh. He waits with the door open. Is someone there? No, but something is. A pot with a cover held in place by a knotted dishtowel has been delivered right to the door by a limping old man. The man doesn’t even announce what’s in the pot. It contains mushrooms, oyster mushrooms. He only says “thank you,” in a tone that implies more, that says that everything is happening as expected, a simultaneous “hello,” “good-bye,” and “it’s understood . . .” and “I know everything about you that I need to know.” Basile doesn’t say anything. He knows to whom he should pass along this seasonal commodity: to the best restaurant in La Chapelle, which has the ironic, rhyming name of La Gamelle, the Lunchbox.
The bus is packed, but it’s still a while before the empty seat next to the woman reading the book and the newspaper is filled by a young girl who is more daring than the others. Do they know each other?
“So, Nathalie . . . how have you been?” “You remember me!” “Of course! So, how are you? You’re in eighth grade, right?” “Ninth grade, ma’am.” “Already . . .” “Yep. Actually, I have a homework assignment on Baudelaire . . . I wanted to ask you . . . Am I on the right track to suggest that his prose poems . . . um, well, that they were more modern than his Flowers of Evil?”
“Modern . . . Well in any case it’s . . . Does he say that? Well, I don’t know . . . I can’t remember.”
The woman reading the book refrains from saying: “I teach fifth grade, you know.” Deep down she’s thinking that she may never have really known the answer to the girl’s question, and it makes her sad because it was nevertheless within her reach to know. She only has about two minutes to confirm the young girl’s brand-new impression that she knows a little something about literature. She settles with encouraging her, hardly daring to dream about the big city Baudelaire envisioned, his conformity to an elastic style of prose, while through the window she admires the precision of the fields of plowed rows, the meticulous planting of young crops and vineyards, which are like lines of verse on a page. She lets out a sigh:
“I’ll have to read it again . . .”
And I bet she will.
Rush hour is over. The middle school and the high school are on the outskirts of La Chapelle. The youngsters have exited the bus, slowly and wearily, carrying with them a vague anxiety hidden under too much nonchalance. The closed space of the schoolyard—which in a sense belongs to them, after all—reassures them. It opens up its doors to them daily, with no exceptions.
Against the flow of the emptying bus, a fat woman gets on. She seems like the type who’s just looking for something to complain about. She’s only going as far as downtown and regretfully takes out a few francs, as if she were being forced to give away precious stones. It’s expensive. To make sure that she gets her money’s worth, she takes up two whole seats with her big bags. She sits down in the same row as the woman reading the book, but across the aisle. She wants to chat. To get the conversation going, she talks about the driver, which apparently isn’t the best method.
“Out of all the company’s employees, I like him the best. A very gentle man . . .”
And she smiles with a look of understanding. The fat woman waits for a response to her eloquent words, which won’t come.
“And the most punctual. I’m telling you . . . It’s been more than ten years that I’ve been riding this line at least once a week, you know.”
The 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