stray dog in the street. (That’s a figure of speech. My mother was crazy, but she wasn’t that crazy.) Let’s just say my childhood was no picnic.
The upshot is that I’m not exactly tactful sometimes, and I know some people find me a bit rude. When I try to express myself, I can tell I shock people from the way they twist their mouths a little or the way they wrinkle their noses like something stinks.
The problem is that I have to explain what I think using the words I’ve learned. And that makes things difficult. That’s probably why I sometimes seem too direct, because I’m always talking in a straight line. But a cat is a cat and a twat is a twat. It’s not my fault these words exist. I don’tmake them up, I just use them. It’s not worth flogging a dead cat over.
At the same time, I have hang-ups about it. Not so much because out of every fifteen words I say, ten of them are swear words, but because fifteen words usually isn’t enough to say what I want to say.
Landremont says that power will always belong to orators. And he makes a big deal of it, pounding his fist on the table, all smug, because he obviously thinks he’s one of them.
“To orators , Germain! Do you understand? To or-a-tors!”
He can lord it over me all he likes, no one’s going to die and make him king of the world.
He talks better than me, I’ll give him that. But what use is that if he’s got nothing to say?
All this to get back to the fact that even though Margueritte seemed completely harmless, with her little smiles and her sentences, I thought that sooner or later she’d end up treating me like a pathetic moron. But she always talked to me like I was a person.
And you see, that can change a man.
W HEN SHE TALKS about herself, Margueritte looks so happy you wouldn’t believe it. She’s so hungry to tell me about her life, it must taste like jam.
My life tastes like a shit sandwich but someone forgot the bread.
She’s been all around the world and back again. The deserts, the savannahs and everywhere in between. When you look at her in her flowery dress, her stick-thin legs and her goody-goody expression, you’d think she was a nun or a nurse or maybe a teacher. But no, she used to head off and camp out with tribes of headhunters, she slept under mosquito nets. It makes me laugh, thinking about it. I look at her and I think, This little granny is really someone.
She tells me about these amazing adventures, she says everything that happens can teach us a lesson, serve as an example, help us to stand taller. When it comes to standing tall, I don’t need any help: I was at the front of the queue when they were dishing it out. But I think I’m starting to get the idea that what happens can teach us a lesson. If everything was piss easy, what would we do with all the happiness? Happiness needs to feel like a lucky break, either that or you have to earn it, but it needs to be rare or expensive, otherwise I don’t see the point. That’s not verywell put, but I know what I mean and that’s the main thing. Being happy is all about comparisons.
And on top of everything, for lots of people in the world, happiness is in danger of extinction just like the Jivaro Indians, or gorillas, or the ozone layer. Not everyone gets served a big dollop of happiness. If we did, I think we’d know.
There’s nothing communist about luck.
O NE DAY , I talked to Margueritte about all these questions that have been going round and round in my head lately—since I met her, I’m pretty sure, though I didn’t tell her that.
I told her I couldn’t stop them, they repeated on me like a dose of garlic, these whys and wherefores that were doing my head in.
Margueritte smiled.
I said, Why are you smiling?
“Because you’re asking yourself all these questions… It is the defining trait of man.”
I didn’t dare tell her that the defining trait of man mostly applies to women, because, when it comes to
The upshot is that I’m not exactly tactful sometimes, and I know some people find me a bit rude. When I try to express myself, I can tell I shock people from the way they twist their mouths a little or the way they wrinkle their noses like something stinks.
The problem is that I have to explain what I think using the words I’ve learned. And that makes things difficult. That’s probably why I sometimes seem too direct, because I’m always talking in a straight line. But a cat is a cat and a twat is a twat. It’s not my fault these words exist. I don’tmake them up, I just use them. It’s not worth flogging a dead cat over.
At the same time, I have hang-ups about it. Not so much because out of every fifteen words I say, ten of them are swear words, but because fifteen words usually isn’t enough to say what I want to say.
Landremont says that power will always belong to orators. And he makes a big deal of it, pounding his fist on the table, all smug, because he obviously thinks he’s one of them.
“To orators , Germain! Do you understand? To or-a-tors!”
He can lord it over me all he likes, no one’s going to die and make him king of the world.
He talks better than me, I’ll give him that. But what use is that if he’s got nothing to say?
All this to get back to the fact that even though Margueritte seemed completely harmless, with her little smiles and her sentences, I thought that sooner or later she’d end up treating me like a pathetic moron. But she always talked to me like I was a person.
And you see, that can change a man.
W HEN SHE TALKS about herself, Margueritte looks so happy you wouldn’t believe it. She’s so hungry to tell me about her life, it must taste like jam.
My life tastes like a shit sandwich but someone forgot the bread.
She’s been all around the world and back again. The deserts, the savannahs and everywhere in between. When you look at her in her flowery dress, her stick-thin legs and her goody-goody expression, you’d think she was a nun or a nurse or maybe a teacher. But no, she used to head off and camp out with tribes of headhunters, she slept under mosquito nets. It makes me laugh, thinking about it. I look at her and I think, This little granny is really someone.
She tells me about these amazing adventures, she says everything that happens can teach us a lesson, serve as an example, help us to stand taller. When it comes to standing tall, I don’t need any help: I was at the front of the queue when they were dishing it out. But I think I’m starting to get the idea that what happens can teach us a lesson. If everything was piss easy, what would we do with all the happiness? Happiness needs to feel like a lucky break, either that or you have to earn it, but it needs to be rare or expensive, otherwise I don’t see the point. That’s not verywell put, but I know what I mean and that’s the main thing. Being happy is all about comparisons.
And on top of everything, for lots of people in the world, happiness is in danger of extinction just like the Jivaro Indians, or gorillas, or the ozone layer. Not everyone gets served a big dollop of happiness. If we did, I think we’d know.
There’s nothing communist about luck.
O NE DAY , I talked to Margueritte about all these questions that have been going round and round in my head lately—since I met her, I’m pretty sure, though I didn’t tell her that.
I told her I couldn’t stop them, they repeated on me like a dose of garlic, these whys and wherefores that were doing my head in.
Margueritte smiled.
I said, Why are you smiling?
“Because you’re asking yourself all these questions… It is the defining trait of man.”
I didn’t dare tell her that the defining trait of man mostly applies to women, because, when it comes to
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