Small Lives by Pierre Michon Page B

unconfessed but certain in my mind, and it made me tremble; once, many years earlier, I had had a dream: my grandfather, very high up in a cherry tree under a perfect sky, was picking cherries; he was singing, and I was at the foot of the tree coveting the lovely fruit; I called to him: he turned his head, looking down a little to smile at me, and in doing so, lost his footing. He fell slowly through crashing branches, a profusion of bursting fruit. He fell to pieces before my eyes. Yet he had smiled at me; and his tenderness had not saved him? I sobbed, cried out, my mother came. When, when will they die, I asked her, the ones I cannot do without, and who are old? She evaded the question, wanting to go back to sleep and thinking to reassure me with a date so far in the future that a child would consider it infinity. When you are at boarding school, she told me. I had not forgotten. Enteringboarding school was entering time, the only time I could identify in that it held permanent losses; I was approaching that period when immunities fall away, when nightmares come true and death exists; my appetite for knowledge would mean walking over corpses; I could not have one without the other. My grandparents died well after my schooling came to an end; but in a certain way I was always “at boarding school.” Separating from my mother had not led me to embrace things; language remained a secret, I did not take possession of or reign over anything; the world was a child’s nursery and every day I had to “begin studies” there, for which I had no great hopes. But I had learned no other option.
    Thus, one October day, my mother led me into that magic house from which I thought I would emerge as a butterfly. The hill where the lycée stood was planted with chestnut trees that were losing their leaves. The tall building in which faded brick alternated with granite lost the black of its slate roof superbly in the black of the sky. It appeared to me many faceted, right-angled, and fatal, cavernous as a temple, a barracks for lancers or for centaurs; I would not have been surprised if the Pantheon, or the Parthenon, the names of which I knew and confused with one another, had resembled it. There, too, lurked Knowledge, an ancient, imaginary, and nevertheless gluttonous beast, who deprives you of your mother and delivers you up, at ten years old, to some pretense of a world; that was what moved the wind in the raging chestnut trees.
    The afternoon passed in the formalities of getting settled. My mother bustled about the laundry room, the dormitory, the study; my name appeared on cupboards, a bed. I did not recognize myself there;my identity lay in those skirts that I followed, fearful and ashamed of my fear, the presence of those awkward but inquisitive boys forbidding me from cowering in them, becoming small again, renouncing my absurd prerogatives, the exercise of which terrified me. Evening came, we left one another; my heart launched itself toward the one who parted, took the railcar, arrived dismayed in Mourioux where I was not; what was my leaden body doing here? With evening recess I was thrown outside; in the dark courtyard, a great wind stirred strange crumpled wrappers, moonlit but obscure, newspapers that suddenly took off and pierced the night, all white and spectral like owls, at the mercy of the slightest breeze; whirling, they foundered. I foundered too in these minute extinctions; I wept and hid my tears. Other poor oafs, in their first year like me, stood rooted in the long exercise yard, staring wide-eyed down that shadowy well where weak things were falling. The courtyard’s yellow light slanted down on their heads, diminishing them, isolating them, they only dared to make small gestures, fingered a penknife in a pocket, examined a new watch with dimwitted slowness, attempted a step and quickly retracted it, furtively sank to pick up a chestnut that they then did not know what to do with, worried