Читать книгу Windows on the World - Frédéric Beigbeder - Страница 19

I’ve got a problem: I don’t remember my childhood.

The only thing I remember is that being middle class doesn’t buy you happiness.

Darkness; everything is dark. My alarm clock goes off, it’s eight o’clock, I’m late, I’m thirteen years old, I slip on my brown Kickers, pick up my huge army surplus bag full of Stypens, correction pens, textbooks as heavy as they are fucking boring, Mom is already up heating some milk, my brother and I slurp it noisily, bitching because there’s skin on the milk, before taking the elevator down into this dark winter morning in 1978. The Lycée Louis-le-Grand is miles away. It’s on the Rue Coëtlogon, 75006 Paris. I’m dying of cold and boredom. I stuff my hands in my ugly loden coat. I wrap myself up in my itchy yellow scarf. I know it’s going to rain and I’ve missed the 84. What I don’t know is that this whole thing is absurd, that none of this will ever come in useful. Neither do I know that this dismal dawn is the only morning in my whole childhood that I will later remember. I don’t even know why I’m sad—maybe because I haven’t got the balls to cut math class. Charles decides to wait for the bus and I decide to walk to school, past the Jardin du Luxembourg, along the Rue de Vaugirard where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived from April to August 1928 (at the corner of the Rue Bonaparte), but I didn’t know that then. I still live nearby; from my balcony I can see kids with the school-bags rushing to school, spewing plumes of cold breath: tiny hunchbacked dragons running along the sidewalk, avoiding the cracks. They watch their feet, careful not to step on the gaps between the paving stones like they’re walking through a minefield. Bleak is the adjective that best sums up my life back then. BLEAK as an icy morning. At that moment, I’m convinced nothing interesting will ever happen to me. I’m ugly, skinny, I feel completely alone and the sky buckets down on me. I stand, soaked to the skin, in front of the Senate which is as gray as my shitty school: everything about school fucks me off: the walls, the teachers, the pupils. I hold my breath; things are awful, everything’s awful, why is everything so awful? Because I’m ordinary, because I’m thirteen, because I’ve got a chin like a gumboot, because I’m scrawny. If I’m going to be this scrawny I might as well be dead. A bus comes and I hesitate, I really hesitate, I almost threw myself under the bus that day. It’s the 84 overtaking me with Charles inside. The big wheels splatter the bottoms of my stupid pleated pants (beige corduroy with turnups that are way too big). I walk toward normality. I walk, wheezing, across the black ice. No girl will ever love me, and I can see their point, I don’t blame you, mesdemoiselles, I can see your point: even I don’t love me. I’m late: Madame Minois, my math teacher, will roll her eyes to heaven and spit. The cretins in my class will heave a sigh just to make themselves look good. Rain will stream down the window-panes of a classroom which reeks of despair (despair, I now know, smells of chalk dust). Why am I complaining when there’s nothing wrong with me? I haven’t been raped, beaten, abandoned, drugged. Just divorced parents who are excessively kind to me like every kid in my class. I’m traumatized by my lack of trauma. That morning, I choose to live. I walk through the school gates like walking into a lion’s den. The building has a black mouth, its windows are yellow eyes. It swallows me in order to feed on me. I’m completely submissive. I agree to become what they make of me. I come face to face with my adolescent spinelessness.

From the top of the Tour Montparnasse I can, if I try, make out the School of my Wasted Youth. I still live in this neighborhood where I suffered so much. I do not leave this place which made me who I am. I never rebelled. I never even moved house. From my house, to get to my job at Flammarion, I walk down the same Rue de Vaugirard as the little boy whose ears and hands were frozen. I spew the same plumes of cold breath. I still do not walk on the cracks. I never escaped that morning.