But if neither sadness or rage could unite us, I didn't know what could - the more I wanted to identify with her, the more I identified with myself; and the more I tried to understand her, the less, necessarily, I succeeded: the failure of an intelligent mind to grasp feeblemindedness was dark and deep, no less than the failure of a feeble mind to grasp intelligence, because intelligence got its shape by not understanding the thing it could never be.
Jean-Christophe ValtatI dismissed this course of action, sensing my own reserves of strengths, but I experimented with the idea and took it as far as I could in a game I christened Bus Stop: on summer nights, I would stretch out on the road in front of my house, on hot, grainy asphalt scattered with sharp bits of gravel, and watch and wait for growling motors, the blinding movement of headlights, and I weighed up the pros and cons, what tied me to life like a blood oath, what left me cold, or tired me out; and when the noise grew sharper, more grating, and when the headlights from the first bend in the road began to cut out the sides of the buildings and project a slow, revolving shadow dance on the wall, I always came back to the same conclusion - that I felt something stir inside me, as hazy and phony as a childhood memory, as insistent as a hit song you'd heard so often you couldn't get its bitterness out of your head, something that promised me a better future, only somewhere else. And I would unpeel myself from the road, I'd pick myself up, what was left of me, what could still be of some use, and slowly make my way back to the pink gravel of the sidewalk, just like the one my little retarded friend was standing on this morning as stoic as an abandoned house awaiting demolition.
Jean-Christophe ValtatI heard a song that nailed it: "And if the day came when I felt a natural emotion / I'd get such a shock I'd probably lie / in the middle of the street and die." When were these so-called natural emotions and why were they worth more than the others? Hadn't I already begun to suspect that with feelings, as with revolutions, the more spontaneous-seeming were actually the outcome of long and involved tactical maneuvers? And if, unfortunately, you had to make do without being 'natural', wasn't it better to act as consciously, as deliberately, and therefore as forcefully as possible? Just because a feeling had been painstakingly pieced together didn't mean it was worthless, nor was it necessarily shallow...
Jean-Christophe ValtatDon't we all discover, at some stage or another that there are some things we'll never get any better at, even though we have no idea why and hardly ever notice it when it happens, even though we may have enjoyed these things and might not have been lagging behind last time we checked? Learning to draw, for instance, was a familiar catastrophe - all of a sudden, unaware, you just stop getting any better at it, your drawings never progress beyond those of a four-year-old or a six-year-old, you're left behind by those who "can draw," condemned to producing flat, doughy figures on the page, with no sense of perspective to them and (this was what really struck me) no resemblance to the outside world: condemned by your ruined self to a shameful childhood.
Jean-Christophe ValtatI didn't like what that word-'childhood'-conjured up, or rather, I didn't like the way most people use it: that presumption of innocence and starry-eyed wonder. The only good thing about childhood is that no one really remembers it, or rather, that's the only thing about it to like: this forgetting. What else could possibly lie beneath that blissful oblivion but shame: a dark knowledge of that terrible badge of weakness, that inescapable servitude (bearable only thanks to the slow revelation that we could inflict cruelty and evil on the weaker kids), a sickening awareness that just about everything there is to understand was beyond us, made even worse by the lies and inaccuracies that adults feel entitled to spread around, deliberately, or because they don't know any better, about themselves or about the nature of reality?
Jean-Christophe ValtatThe notion of this powerful childhood gaze was all the more specious given that adults, in the name of that very spontaneity, subjected chidren to every sort of rehearsed and prepackaged foolishness so that what children were supposed to see and like was no more than the adults' idea of what they imagined having lost themselves, which in turn was probably no more than other versions of childhood recycled by other adults, this cycle of loss building itself up according to the endless demands of nostalgia, so that the older and more rotten the world became, the more this driveling idocy prevailed and this idea of innocence took hold. Grown-ups tried to sweeten the pill, but there was no hiding it, children were the most oppressed creatures on earth.
Jean-Christophe ValtatHere, too, I recognized-easily, from firsthand experience, since this kind of thing happened at my age-the heat of the moment, the very instant you knew you should be feeling something but, for various reasons, partly due to inexperience, partly to a desynchronized, muddled teenage constitution, this emotion, however hard you tried to express it, stayed uncomfortably stuck in your heart, only half there and only half felt, just like my love for that girl across the street, the feeling I was trying to coax out of myself the way you might squeeze a toothpaste tube you'd decided to roll from the bottom up but that, distracted, and in a rush, you finally ended up pressing any which way.
Jean-Christophe ValtatShe understood nothing, she learned nothing, so she just stood there, lively sometimes, joyful even, a groundless joy that brought tears to their eyes, though they wished they could share these moments with her: her ecstasy over a leaf, which could last for whole minutes at a time, as though it were the most wonderful thing in the world, as though the precise bifurcations of its veins or the carefree elegance with which it swayed in the breeze was what made her clap her hands together in glee...
Jean-Christophe ValtatIn English sometimes they call a mentally disabled person a retard, and there is a kind of accidental poetry in naming a human being with this quality of latency or absence, like a clock left behind in an empty room, a page someone forgot to rip out of a calendar, the walking embodiment of jet lag.
Jean-Christophe ValtatHe considered each and every second as if he'd never encountered one before, as if the time it kept was a permanent surprise.
Jean-Christophe ValtatPage 1 de 2.
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