Spring 2007

Kick the Animal Out, an excerpt
Véronique Ovaldé

That summer Mommy Rose and I spent a lot of time on the roof of the building where we lived with Mr. Loyal in the Rue du Roi-Charles. We lived in the north of Camerone on a hillside, the side of one of the five hills of Camerone. The town was like lava, flowing down the slopes and forming a glutinous mass on the shore. The buildings in the upper town were white, dilapidated, and perched with dizzying views, proof of the recreational activities enjoyed there in better times. For a long time Camerone had been a seaside resort whose mild flower-filled winters attracted beautiful women and their wealthy gentlemen. Then this well-off population gradually depleted—probably preferring more exotic skies than these—and the masses came to invade the coast for the long stifling Camerone summers.

I liked living in Camerone because you could smell the sea and the cheap coconut oil, because its fall from grace lent it a sort of decadent languor—the old women of Camerone still carried broderie anglaise parasols along the seafront promenade and were offended by the giggling groups of girls in their skimpy cotton sarongs. What I particularly liked was the sun's searing attack throughout the impressive succession of blue summer days. I watched Camerone steam from right up on the roof of our building on the Rue du Roi-Charles, on that wide terrace pounded by the heat—heat not unlike a molten metal or a glassblower's kiln, altering the elements and distorting them to suit itself. I stayed close to the hutches because I savored their smell and the constant rustle of tiny lives. I hobbled over the disjointed gravel-set-in-concrete paving stones of the terrace and scratched at the moss in the joints with my index finger—fascinating how determined vegetation can be to colonize territory perched so high up—blackening my nail and inspecting it closely in the hopes of detecting a minute reptilian world. I was usually stripped to the waist with faded panties and a black cape tied at the neck. My sweat created salty landscapes on the lining of my cape. I scrubbed them with soap and water in the evenings so that the wretched cape would stay spotless and operational.

I was fifteen years old. But my age didn't mean anything. I was a very old woman on the inside—an old woman full of wisdom, mom said— someone who could reason, who panicked at the thought of how many centimeters she had left to live, a woman with a very long memory and moments of terrible confusion. And seen from the outside, I was a fat little girl who had no plans to grow or to start her periods anytime soon, or to have to think seriously about going to high school more regularly—in a normal school, that is. (Mom would have added, you're not fat, you're not fat, you're not fat, you've got sex appeal to burn, trust me.)

I could see the horizon, a horizon of roof terraces, a bric-a-brac of TV antennas, satellite dishes, water tanks, clandestine gardens with bamboo and fences and receptacles to catch the acid rain, chairs, crates acting as footrests, refrigerators for beer, their generators whirring night and day; there were also the stray cats, the seagulls, the sirens, and the gasping sounds from the port. The noise from the streets wafted up to us in lazy snatches. I would always think, they could easily all die down there, they could all get the plague, and we wouldn't know anything about it, me and my rabbits.

The rabbits were huddled under the shade of the chimney stack, they had small fans to ensure they had a bit of air, so that they didn't pass out but carried on gazing at the roofs-and-terraces horizon in front of them.

We understood each other perfectly, my rabbits and me.

They wore such shimmering colors, some had long fluffy coats, so much so that you could be forgiven for thinking they were out of focus, others had dull eyes or were completely blind and reproduced in darkness. We were inundated with baby rabbits. So to counter the invasion—and therefore our own elimination—we ate them, and as a way of buying favor with the inhabitants of the building on the Rue du Roi-Charles, we would cut them up and give these skinned offerings to our recalcitrant neighbors. I liked eating my rabbits. It meant I could stay with them forever.

I spent most of my time on the terrace near the rabbits (that I would soon be eating), sitting on a small red wooden chair, concentrating on catching a dazzling patch of the ocean between two buildings. I willingly let my retina burn when it blinded me like that—the flash of light streaking toward my eye, brilliant and bewitching, my own treasure burning my eyes and eating away at my optic nerve.

Mom didn't stay on the terrace as long as me, she had things to see to. From time to time she would come up to say she was going out or to the shop, or to tell me my snack was ready. I saw her emerging from the trapdoor, she was very beautiful, carrying a pretty plastic purse that gleamed as if she had been rubbing it all night with a felt cloth. Sometimes she would ask, do you think I have a little bit far too much makeup on? and I would say no with a shake of my head, even though I felt my opinion couldn't matter less because I didn't know anything about women or women's attire, all I knew about was my terrace, the Institute I was packed off to some evenings, and the trip I sometimes made on my own between the terrace and the aforementioned Institute. I was grateful to her for asking me. I watched her leave and hoped I would be like her one day.

I often let my snack disintegrate and dribble over the tablecloth in the kitchen or sometimes I would go and fetch it and get myself all sticky on the way back up to the terrace.

How the summer vacation dragged on.

I didn't have to think about the Institute I would soon be going back to, my special school, as they called it, my parents. I used to hear them talking about it to Mrs. Isis or another neighbor, they would say, our little girl goes to a special school for exceptionally talented children or a school for raving lunatics. People never asked any questions, they smiled and nodded their heads as if they understood, but their eyes betrayed a particular kind of panic, terrified because neither my father nor my mother would elaborate on the subject. I watched them do it and wondered whether my parents were ashamed or simply tired of explaining and preferred just to sigh and hope people would reach their own conclusions.

When dusk came I would lean over from the rooftop and watch people's heads as they passed by down below. The blue evening shadows looked damp from up there, the road was so deep down and so far from the intense clarity of my terrace, I could make out the pitching and hissing of cars, and I tried to spot mom's wig. I waited up there in studied immobility—if I move everything falls apart—watching out for her—if I move, she won't come back.

From the open windows of our building I could hear the sputtering chitchat of radios or mellow bossa nova coming straight from Mrs. Isis's apartment. And then I would see mom coming around the end of the street, she still had her shiny polished plastic purse and shopping bags full of milk, breakfast cereals, vegetables that an old woman she knew gave to her, and perhaps some meat for my father the circus manager. Yes, it was definitely her all the way down there with that gleaming hair. She was walking quickly, not moving her doll-like blond head too much, I could almost hear the click-clack of her heels. I waited until she went into the building, the heels on her shoes were unbelievable, she disappeared under the porch, they were dangerously high, I think the man who designed them must have said, if any woman manages to wear them, I'll marry her, she'll have the perfect feet for my perfect shoes.

I hurried down from the terrace to meet her, bursting onto the landing before she got there, waiting for the elevator to clang and let me know she had arrived safely. She pushed the door open with her shoulder: she was gorgeous. And that was when I always wondered—just as she appeared before me with her blond wig, the heels I found so terrifying, and the dark rings under her eyes—I always wondered why she had had a daughter like me, given that she was so gorgeous.

When Rose met my father—my kind father, the circus manager—when Rose met her Mr. Loyal, she was already pregnant with me.

But her stomach was so flat—her magnificent hipbones created a sort of basin between them—her stomach was so flat that my father didn't suspect I was there. After a little time, he put his hands onto her hipbones and told her, you have such a long flat stomach, it's the stomach of a sterile little girl . . . My father, Mr. Loyal, can't have said anything like that. My mother told me what he said but I just can't believe he could have uttered a sentence like that, he was the sort of man who had no malice in him, the sort of man who never gave things infinite meaning, he was like a pocket mirror, a practical thing with a red leatherette case that you could pop in your purse, a world away from those medicine cabinets where you can angle the mirrored doors opposite each other and watch the infiniteness of it all.

She would say, he talked about my sterile little girl's stomach, and then start laughing, her eyes shining, can you imagine?

I could imagine.

And I felt just a little bit hurt, because of that very flat stomach that had tricked my father's judgment.

But my mother wasn't laughing to make fun of him, she was amazed he could be so innocent, delighted that her circus manager was so naïve. Can you imagine, can you imagine? she kept saying. (Mom often repeated things three times. These triplets set a rhythm to her conversations like some mysterious regulation.)

I never answered, I would get up from my chair, smooth my cape, and say with a sigh, I'm going to the bathroom or I'm getting a cookie. And I would go and look for a packet of cookies in the sideboard, and make a lot of noise opening it, ripping and stripping the cardboard, tearing and scattering the plastic packaging, all over the tiled floor. Then squirrel-like nibbling, choking, and related noises. She understood why I was making all this racket—showers of crumbs on the Formica, swallowing, lemonade glug-glugging into the glass and fizzing in my throat, microsound of explosions, multiplication and pulverization—so she would say, sorry, sorry, sorry, and smile at me, adding, anyway, I adore your father. And when she said this I never knew which father she was talking about, the circus manager or the one who had deposited me with his dick in the depths of my mother's body—and I imagined he had deposited dozens of other children in women's bellies, I could have been a black boy in a pitch-black belly, that's what I imagined on the subject of my other father (the one who wasn't a circus manager), I imagined him specializing in impregnating girls.

That gave me something to think about.

When my father met Rose, my father, the real one, the one with the dick, she was devastatingly pretty. He was the only one who realized it. When he saw her he felt like he'd stumbled across something gleaming at the bottom of a cave, something fluttering like a little bird's heart. He watched my mother walk past, he watched her going backward and forward in the schoolyard—should he see some sort of invitation in the repetition of this trip or was it actually just the natural mechanics of the muscles in my mother's thighs and calves working in tune with her thoughts, and absolutely unconnected to the boy standing in the covered yard, a boy who was so young and arrogant that he was invisible, but conscious—now that he was confronted with the princely indifference of my mother, who was not yet my mother—of his own youth and arrogance.

Her clothes were secondhand and altered to fit but they still had a trace of their previous shape, faithful as a mattress keeping the imprint of a body. He felt his heart break and he felt clammy, that's what he thought, fuck, my heart's breaking and I feel clammy, but he kept on waiting under the covered yard, rolling his cigarettes, he could roll them so perfectly that he sold them under the chestnut trees.

My future father didn't go to see her right away. He waited for several weeks. He just wanted to watch her walk past. He wondered how she managed to be so attractive when she wasn't wearing the red All Stars everyone was supposed to wear, when she didn't have the plastic khaki sports bag that all the girls had to have, when she didn't chat to any of the other girls about pop music and the "bests" (prettiest girls, coolest ski resorts, hippest radio stations: everything could be cataloged), my father looked at her and asked himself questions—which gave him a foretaste of unsuspected abysses in his own depths. He felt trapped and that made him nervous, he felt like a space probe sent hurtling thousands of light-years into the most terrifying darkness, a probe that might pass right next to my mother but would be incapable of stopping its own headlong flight toward death. My father was worried about having thoughts like this, he tried everything he could to flatten himself on the ground with his face in the grass, to try and stop thinking of this girl as anything more than badly dressed and slightly weird. She's from Milena too, he told himself, how did I manage not to see her, I must have gone to school with her as a kid, how come I nearly missed her? My father didn't understand what had suddenly opened his eyes, whether he had just emerged from a deep sleep or whether she had undergone a metamorphosis.

He went on posting himself in the same place every day, illicitly selling his made-to-measure smokes and watching out for her, regularly running an anxious hand over his head, which was close-shaven just as it had to be.

At the time he even thought to himself, this is a girl I could take with me when I go on the run. He thought this because of the imagery of wide open spaces, Thunderbirds, saturated guitar chords, and gas stations waiting to be robbed out in the desert.

Not talking to her directly, with a bit of persistence, seemed like the best way of establishing a connection with this creature.

He did try to find out about her, affecting all the offhand disinterest of a detective, but also experiencing the disturbing satisfaction of talking about her as often as possible, even to virtual strangers in the high school—and talking about her filled him with gratitude. He didn't reap anything particularly convincing from it: he was told she was a lesbian, but in those days that was a reputation often given to pretty girls who were a bit distant.

My father was fifteen years old.

If Rose had looked at him as she went past the covered yard, she might have noticed his intensity, the intensity of his being there, she might have thought, I like that guy with his bad-boy look. But Rose didn't notice or think about anyone. She was just a princess, with her tall headdress and her veils, her eight-meter train and her bracelets jingling on her wrists.

My name is Rose like my mother.

Not Rose b, not Rose II, or Rosebud, Rosalie, Rosette, Rosa Niña, Seven Sisters Rose, or Rosa Gallica. No, I'm just called Rose, like her.

I think it was my father who decided to call me that. My father the circus manager. I don't want to know, I've never wanted to know, I'm only guessing why I have the same name as my mother.

And every time I think about it I feel myself sinking into a long, deep, cool well, and the bottom of the well is way down at the end, slippery with moss and damp rock, the chill humidity penetrating my lungs and the bones of my ankles. I rest my ass on the red mushrooms, which crumble and give off a smell like seashells.

I stay in that shady place with a big circle of sky up above, breathing cautiously and repeating the words: my name is Rose like my mother.

Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter

Editor's Note: Kick the Animal Out was originally published by Actes Sud, and the translated edition is forthcoming by MacAdam/Cage in spring 2007.