To the Wedding Read Free

lapels. If I don’t count the snails, the worms, the caterpillars, the tadpoles, the ladybirds and the crayfish, he is my first pet. I call him Majestic because he is so small.
    Jean opens the street door, gets astride the bike and pushes with his feet. As soon as the back wheel is over the doorstep the bike rolls by itself out into the road. He looks up at the sky. No stars. Blackness, a visible blackness.
    I walk past the railway station with Majestic in my jacket and everybody stops and points with their fingers and smiles. Those who know us and those who don’t. He is a new creature. Monsieur le Curé asks me his name as if he were going to arrange a baptism! Majestic! I tell him.
    The railwayman goes to lock up his house. He turns the key in the door as if the act of turning it is already an assurance that he will be back next week. The way he does things with his hands inspires confidence. He is one ofthose men for whom manual gestures are more trustworthy than words. He pulls on his gloves, starts the engine, glances at the petrol gauge, taps down to first, lets out the clutch and glides off.
    The traffic lights by the railway station are red. Jean Ferrero waits for them to change. There is no other traffic. He could easily slip across without any risk. But he has been a signalman all his life and he waits.
    When Majestic was seven, he was run over by a lorry. From the first day when I fetched him and he rested his chin over my top button and I carried him home under my jacket, saying, Majestic, my Majestic, he was a mystery.
    The light turns green and as man and bike gather speed, Jean lets his booted right foot trail behind, whilst with the toe of his left he taps up into second, and, by the time he reaches the telephone boxes, up again into third.
    I saw it yesterday, hanging in a shop window next to the Hôtel du Commerce, that dress has my name NINON on it! All the body black Chinese silk with scattered white flowers. Just the right length, three fingers above the knees. V-neck with long lapels, cut, not sewn. Buttons allthe way down. Against the light it lets a little through, but not enough to be blatant. Silk is always cool. If I dangle it up and down, my thigh will lick it like an ice cream. I’ll find a silver belt, a wide silvery belt to go with it.
    The motorbike with its headlight zigzags up the mountain. From time to time it disappears behind escarpments and rocks and all the while it is climbing and becoming smaller. Now its light is flickering like the flame of a small votive candle against an immense face of stone.
    For him it’s different. He is burrowing through the darkness like a mole through the earth, the beam of his light boring the tunnel and the tunnel twisting as the road turns to avoid boulders and to climb. When he turns his head to glance back—as he has just done—there is nothing behind except his taillight and an immense darkness. He’s gripping the petrol tank with his knees. Each corner, as man and machine enter it, receives them and hoicks them up. They come in slow and they leave fast. As they come in, they lie over as much as they can, they wait for the corner to give them its camber, and then they leap away.
    Meanwhile, what they are climbing through is becoming more and more desolate. In the blackness the desolation is invisible but the signalman can feel it in the air and in the sounds. He has opened his visor again. The air is thin, chill, damp. The noise of his engine thrown back by the rocks is jagged.

D uring the first year of my blindness, the worst recurring moment was waking up in the morning. The lack of light on the frontier between sleep and being awake often made me want to scream. Slowly I became accustomed to it. Now when I wake up, the first thing I do is to touch something. My own body, the sheet, the leaves carved in wood on the headboard of my bed.
    When I woke up in my room the next day I touched the chair with my clothes on it, and again I heard