A Very French Christmas Read online

  “It only remained for me to see her face. A woman’s face is the dessert, while the rest is ... the roast.

  “I hastened on and overtook her, and she turned around suddenly under a gas lamp. She was charming, quite young, dark, with large black eyes, and I immediately invited her to supper. She accepted without any hesitation, and a quarter of an hour later we were sitting at supper in my lodgings. ‘Oh, how comfortable it is here!’ she said as she came in, and she looked about her with evident satisfaction at having found a supper and a room on that bitter night. She was superb, so beautiful that she astonished me, and her figure fairly captivated me.

  “She took off her cloak and hat, sat down, and began to eat, but she seemed in low spirits, and sometimes her pale face twitched as if she were suffering from some hidden sorrow.

  “‘Have you anything troubling you?’ I asked her.

  “‘Bah! Don’t let us think of troubles!’

  “And she began to drink. She emptied her champagne glass at a draught, filled it again, and emptied it again, without stopping, and soon color came into her cheeks, and she began to laugh.

  “I adored her already, kissed her continually, and discovered that she was neither stupid, nor common, nor coarse as some ordinary girls are. I asked her for some details of her life, but she replied:

  “‘My little fellow, that is no business of yours!’ Alas, an hour later ...

  “At last it was time to go to bed, and while I was clearing the table, which had been laid in front of the fire, she undressed herself quickly, and got in. My neighbors were making a terrible din, singing and laughing like lunatics, and so I said to myself:

  “‘I was quite right to go out and bring in this girl; I should never have been able to do any work.’

  “At that moment, however, a deep groan made me look around, and I said, ‘What is the matter with you, my dear?’

  “She did not reply, but continued to utter painful sighs, as if she were suffering horribly, and I continued:

  “‘Do you feel ill?’ And suddenly she uttered a cry, a heartrending cry, and I rushed up to the bed, with a candle in my hand.

  “Her face was distorted with pain, and she was wringing her hands, panting and uttering long, deep groans, which sounded like a rattle in the throat, and which are so painful to hear, and I asked her in consternation:

  “‘What is the matter with you? Do tell me what is the matter.’

  “‘Oh! my stomach! my stomach!’ she said. I pulled up the bedclothes, and I saw ... My friends, she was in labor.

  ‘‘Then I lost my head, and I ran and knocked at the wall with my fists, shouting: ‘Help! Help!’

  “My door was opened almost immediately, and a crowd of people came in, men in evening dress, women in low necks, harlequins, Turks, musketeers, and this inroad startled me so that I could not explain myself, and they, who had thought that some accident had happened, or that a crime had been committed, could not understand what was the matter. At last, however, I managed to say:

  “‘This ... this ... woman ... is giving birth.’

  “Then they looked at her and gave their opinion, and a friar, especially, declared that he knew all about it, and wished to assist nature, but as they were all as drunk as pigs, I was afraid that they would kill her, and I rushed downstairs without my hat, to fetch an old doctor who lived in the next street. When I came back with him the whole house was up; the gas on the stairs had been relighted, the lodgers from every floor were in my room, while four boatmen were finishing my champagne and lobsters.

  “As soon as they saw me they raised a loud shout, and a milkmaid presented me with a horrible little wrinkled specimen of humanity, that was mewing like a cat, and said to me. ‘It’s a girl.’

  “The doctor examined the woman, declared that she was in a dangerous state, as the event had occurred immediately after supper, and he took his leave, saying he would immediately send a sick nurse and a wet nurse, and an hour later the two women came, bringing all that was requisite with them.

  “I spent the night in my armchair, too distracted to be able to think of the consequences, and almost as soon as it was light, the doctor came again, who found his patient very ill, and said to me:

  “‘Your wife, Monsieur ...’

  “‘She is not my wife,’ I interrupted him.

  “‘Very well, then, your mistress; it does not matter to me.’

  “He told me what must be done for her, what her diet must be, and then wrote a prescription.

  “What was I to do? Could I send the poor creature to the hospital? I should have been looked upon as a brute in the house and in all the neighborhood, and so I kept her in my rooms, and she had my bed for six weeks.

  “I sent the child to some peasants at Poissy to be taken care of, and she still costs me fifty francs a month, for as I had paid at first, I shall be obliged to go on paying as long as I live, and later on she will believe that I am her father. But to crown my misfortunes, when the girl had recovered ... I found that she was in love with me, madly in love with me, the baggage!”

  “Well?”

  “Well, she had grown as thin as a homeless cat, and I turned the skeleton out of doors, but she watches for me in the streets, hides herself, so that she may see me pass, stops me in the evening when I go out, in order to kiss my hand, and, in fact, worries me enough to drive me mad; and that is why I never keep Christmas Eve now.”

  1882

  CHRISTMAS AT THE BOARDING SCHOOL

  Dominique Fabre

  This is an old story, a school story. I was in the third row and he was in the second, near the entrance. He had arrived in September and sometimes, when he wasn’t busy listening in class, sharpening a pencil or writing an assignment, he looked around looking a bit lost, as if he’d just gotten off an airplane and didn’t know where he was. Today, ages later, I think he would have struck me the same way. I surely wasn’t alone in thinking this. He was a bit bigger than we were and definitely didn’t dress the same. I couldn’t say if his clothing cost more or less than ours. It didn’t matter. Just by looking at him, the new guy, one could tell that it wasn’t going to work out, that he wouldn’t stay long among us. He was called Black Jo.

  He had a godmother here who was a secretary in a large international organization and she sometimes stopped by unexpectedly when she had the time. She was a big, imposing woman, she smiled with all her teeth; a woman like her inspired confidence in life. She carried a little Chanel purse and wore flat shoes, no doubt because she was very tall. Apart from rare weekends when he went to her place, Black Jo led the sad life of a somewhat abandoned child; his parents lived far away in Senegal. They had to send him to France because of “events,” he explained to us. From all over the world, “events” make it necessary for kids to be kept safe, apart from their family.

  Black Jo knew the names of the players on the Africa Cup teams, and the African players on French teams, who according to him, scored three times as many goals as the whites. He had a fairly peremptory tone when he talked about soccer scores, or strategy, and, while I had little interest in the game and carefully avoided the ball, I remember that he would often score goals. But he was ridiculed. He fervently maintained that Africans were the original inventors of the bicycle, others contradicted him, and they almost came to blows about the bike story. The wheels were wooden, without a chain, but they rolled just fine. The others didn’t accept his view: one more reason for the loneliness of Black Jo, when his godmother couldn’t have him come for the weekend. Black Jo was of mixed race; he had light skin, he had freckles. He struggled in class. Believing it was the right thing, the teachers seated him next to the kid from Martinique, the pretentious son of a doctor. They didn’t get along.

  Other students sometimes had to spend the weekend at the boarding school. Langinieux was among them; he asked to stay since his parents didn’t get along and he preferred to avoid them. Sometimes, there were other students who were kept back because of serious violation
s of the rules. Black Jo had to spend some weekends entirely alone, when even Callaghan, an English student far from his country, went to his godmother’s. These godmothers. I went home every weekend but mother sent me to my godmother as well, so as to get rid of me. Sometimes I thought about Black Jo alone in the boarding school. It wasn’t fun for him.

  On Friday evenings the students, looking forward to wild weekends, put on their own clothes and packed their bags to take the express train. Joseph watched all this activity without any obvious sadness or bitterness. They went away in a group, beyond the fence and shouting, waving, passing through the second gate under the relieved watch of the teachers, because they too were, after all, prisoners here. Black Jo had the dormitory to himself. He could go into the common room, to which he had the key for the weekend, and where there was a television in a cabinet; that was to watch soccer or rugby matches, and in the spring the French Open or Wimbledon. He had keys to the infirmary. He occasionally suffered from migraines, and he never had to worry about getting permission to lie down, with perhaps a dose of aspirin or just a bit of nonmedical relief accorded to him by the nurse, a young pale woman with very light eyes devoid of sparkle, who wore stone-washed jeans. When she arrived each morning, we saw her cross the courtyard looking a bit lost, weary, considering all this terrain around her as still foreign, as if she were sizing it up. Maryse Gentil. Her walk across the courtyard is one of the most vivid memories I’ve retained from those years.

  Since his arrival Black Jo had spent several weekends roaming around the big school to discover the different spots; the cafeteria, the large industrial kitchen and the athletic facilities, the building reserved for priests, a few of whom taught here and others who’d returned from missions to Africa, congregations where the school distributed funds for families. It involved raising money and tax reductions were given to the largest donors. There was the library, where Joseph often went because in the end he found his classmates idiotic, devoid of curiosity. They didn’t understand that the world extended beyond the tip of their nose, the address of the rich kid’s vacation house or summer camp for the others ... he went to get his meal tray at the guardians’ lodge; they lived in a small two-story house.

  Langinieux was one of the only ones who came to get news from Jo on Monday, a little after the nurse had crossed the courtyard on her way to the infirmary or while Joseph was waiting for her return or dreaming of his family in Senegal, waiting for the time to pass and expecting that we classmates would continue to laugh in disbelief upon learning about all that the Africans discovered, well before the little French who ran like goats and who had red ears during the math tests. What surprised us, apart from the stories about Senegal, was his faith in God’s power; he volunteered to be a choirboy and got up for vigils. The vigils were a weird feature of the boarding school; there were hours of prayer during the night, since to carry away the sins of the world was no small matter and required a kind of marathon. For Joseph God was absolutely present in life, which bothered others who were more preoccupied by their grade point averages, sports scores or how to sneak into the nearby girls boarding school, playing the fox in the henhouse, not even in your dreams!

  On Monday, I was coming back from the small suburban town where I had been bored all Sunday. I had hardly gone any farther than the Asnières station in one direction or the Tricycle Cinema in the other where I didn’t go often. Jo never asked what we did over the weekend, it was a painful question for him. On Monday he chattered nonstop, as if he needed to empty himself of all the words he’d kept in for two days, often looking up at the sky. He described the clouds of his homeland, much more extraordinary than the tiny masses found in France. When he too had spent the weekend elsewhere, at his godmother’s, having had a meal surrounded by her lovers, friends, neighbors, indeterminate relatives talking in several languages, including French, it took him a week to reacclimatize, to discover as if for the first time the gray buildings of the school and the athletic facilities that weren’t a minor selling point of the institution. There he is again sitting in the second row, off to the side. It was now winter and Jo had made up his mind about this country, this school. Sometimes he looked out the windows to where the Seine flowed, about a mile in the distance. From there, he’d have had to ask the way to Orly Airport. Jo wore skimpy shirts and sandals; classmates gave him a sweater, shoes, so that he wouldn’t drop dead from the cold. He talked a bit more about the wonders of his country, the lions, tigers, the shape of the clouds, of all the hours playing soccer on the beach. He showed his friends a picture of his house, surrounded by a white wooden fence. As for his clothes, the priests at the school had noticed them; the headmaster, who we were afraid of, said to him, you don’t have any warm clothes, Joseph? Black Jo spent the evening in the common room, sitting on the radiator in his underpants, waiting for a classmate willing to be beaten at checkers because Africans are better than we are at that game. Everyone told him he had to cover up now, this wasn’t the Africa of his childhood, the place where according to him his parents still lived in a house surrounded by a white fence. France isn’t my country, Black Jo would say, it’s awful to live here. The teachers are mean to those who don’t succeed and the French are selfish, that’s what he thought, sitting there on the radiator in the common room.

  Joseph had been playing checkers since he was very little; he learned by watching grown-ups at the market while his mother went shopping. We taught him to play cards. We didn’t have the same games here as down there; here we were beaten on the back of the hand, and sometimes the students ended up brawling. I recall Joseph with his fists clenched close to his body, his tears spilling out against his long eyelashes and how he began to tremble. The mocking students didn’t attack him directly, though. He said come on, I’m ready for you, to the boy who was after him, who did well not to go there. In any case, I recall from this dispute that the teacher in charge interrupted with an angry gesture, handing a tissue to Joseph, and then I found myself in the bed next to Black Jo, taking the place of the boy who used to sleep there, who called him a nigger and a faggot. Something must have happened since the next week he had new clothes, almost like ours, corduroy pants and a white long-sleeved shirt, but his outfits all had labels and were decorated with a print that evoked Africa ... I suppose they had a certain appeal. He arranged them neatly folded on the iron chair next to his bed.

  He had truly been transplanted here. He had a kind of patience, each evening I saw him pray with extraordinary concentration. In Africa, he explained to us, people went to mass, not just old women like in France, but also young people like us and children. Then when he had finished he opened the drawer of his night table and inspected his treasures, the letters from his parents; he never spoke about them but with me, Langinieux and a few others he mentioned his godmother, the walks they took together, the museums, the friends to whose houses he accompanied her. She didn’t find it the least bit embarrassing to take him, the little light-skinned African from Senegal who had no hope of returning there for a long time, serious but somewhat lost in his schooling, to an evening of dancing. Once he picked up the handkerchief that fell out of a man’s vest and brought it back, a shiny piece of cloth he often fingered and kept as a treasure in the drawer of his night table, similar to fifty others in the dormitory. He also kept photos, his mother in traditional garb seemed very young in comparison to parents here; his father, about whom he never spoke, photographed near the Senegal River. He spoke to me several times about the Senegal River, it was much more than a river for him.

  When the lights were turned off, he had the habit of closing his eyes as if for a yoga exercise or as if he wanted to stay awake to continue a conversation or to whisper in the middle of the night. One time, however, one of the idiots who couldn’t stand Black Jo went to open up his drawer and extract his treasures; I didn’t dare to alert him for fear of retaliation. But Jo sensed something and once he’d opened his eyes, under his long lashes, he threw himself on the boy and if
the teacher hadn’t arrived in time he surely would have strangled him. As it was nighttime, the classmates didn’t talk about the incident; Joseph inspected all the objects from his drawer and afterward he kept an eye on every other bed until the sobbing student he’d almost strangled had closed his eyes again. He didn’t reply to my “good night.” We used to wish each other good night and to keep any eye out for each other at school; I was a kind of support, a pal to Black Jo, the mixed race African with freckles.

  Things got worse for him from that night on. He was forced to stay in on a weekend when he’d been invited by his beautiful godmother from the international development organization. A few of us came to his defense and explained what had happened. He was only defending his territory. The dean of students just shook his head without replying. Since we insisted, he ended up saying he would make us stay the next weekend too; the crazier it got the more we laughed. We didn’t win but it helped bring us closer to Black Jo. After free time he wanted to go out with us to smoke a cigarette. He was homesick, he missed Africa in general and even if we tried to persuade him that it was worth giving it a try here, bit by bit Langinieux and I began to hope that he would tell us his stories about the wooden bicycle, animal races, canoeing up the Senegal River, without really being able to change things. To fight off loneliness Black Jo enveloped himself in his memories, while waiting for the end of classes, between two weekends at his godmother’s who was his only reason to hang on, and the masses he participated in as a choirboy.

  It started snowing early that year and he returned from the lodge once he saw the first snowflakes of his life. There must have been three or four of us behind the big building and the gym near the little house at the entrance. Jo was carrying a letter. Sometimes stamps covered half the envelope. He occasionally received blue aerograms and mail on letterhead. Look, snow! He couldn’t resist reaching out for the flakes, holding his letter in the other hand. Soon, sticking out his tongue and waddling like a fool, he put the letter in his pocket to enjoy the snow. He didn’t read it right away, he was no doubt waiting until he was by himself. In class Black Jo did his assignments carefully and when it was time to go to the dining hall he went toward the upper window of the classroom, the snow was still falling, there must have been already over an inch on the handball and basketball courts and on the asphalt in the courtyard.