Ignorance Read Free Page B

bluebottles, and ants. You had to squash them. Outside, on the garden paths, slugs and snails lounged along. You were supposed to squash them too. The words in my brain could not be squashed. They wriggled and squelched and inched back and forth.
    Marie-Angèle said I might know lots of words but I was still a baby. I was afraid of the dark, and sometimes at night I wet the bed. Washerwoman’s daughter pissing in the wrong place. All that gave me grace in her eyes was my capacity to tell her the stories I culled from her book of fairy tales. Reading bored her. She preferred listening to my oral versions. Chewing a fingernail. Sucking a strand of hair. The bloodthirstier the stories the better.
    Now from the end of the bench in the schoolroom she hissed at me.
    You’re pathetic. First of all you dare us to do something and then you get cold feet. Are we going upstairs or aren’t we?
    She stood up, in front of the estrade and the blackboard, put her hands on her hips, stared at me contemptuously. She looked so exactly like a little woman that I wanted to laugh. She wasn’t a child at all. You could see what she’d look like at forty. Her plump little face, with its apple-pip eyes, its tight mouth, wouldn’t change. She was already complete and grown-up.
    I didn’t want her to leave me on my own in the downstairs classroom, too close to the front door on which passing tramps sometimes banged for food. If I opened the door to them, what would happen? They’d kidnap me I’d run away with them they might try to marry me I’d never see Maman again.
    All right, I said: let’s go.
    As part of the dare, more chance of getting caught, we went up by the main stairs. This staircase wound about the great well in the centre of the school. It rose through layers of classrooms and dormitories, networks of corridors. The wide wooden treads gleamed, bare and highly polished. During the week, at recreation time, when the bell clanged, a flood of overalled girls would swirl down it, pour out into the school yard. Now only we two remained in the house.
    No windows: we climbed up in semi-darkness. On the second half-landing stood a statue of Our Lady of The Seven Sorrows, her colander heart pierced by seven swords, all the love once in it leaked out like whey. A red gleam came from the votive lamp in front of her. I lifted my feet with caution: too much space around me. Not yet dusk: going upstairs in this half-dimness was more bearable than at night, when I stepped towards bad dreams. Dead mothers waited for me at the far end of the corridor with cobweb mantillas over their faces. They’d pushed up their tomb-stones and escaped. They were lonely in their graves, and so they’d come to the school to fetch some children to play with. They’d pull our bones about then eat us.
    We climbed two flights and slid into the chilly dormitory. Here we fetched chairs, set them side by side, stood on them to peer out of the window on the left-hand side.
    From this height, we could see over the high stone wall that separated the school grounds from the Hermit’s garden. We surveyed a completely enclosed space. Between patches of melted ice the grass gleamed green. Inside his encircling walls he had allowed sycamores to seed wildly in little copses. These untidy saplings he had trimmed and pollarded in extreme fashion, stripping off all the lower branches and shaping the top ones into balls. The sycamores stood in groups: tall, slender ladies with round heads turbaned in brown twigs. Maidens who hovered, uncertain whether or not to walk inside the ogre’s castle.
    Bluebeard’s fiancées, I whispered to Marie-Angèle, and felt her flinch against me.
    A narrow gravelled path twisted in and out between the young trees, like a white ribbon tying them together. The school playground was all sharp angles; the nuns’ oblong garden marched in straight lines, spotless paths bisecting rows of fruit trees and flowerbeds; but the Hermit’s parterre