Soft in the Head by Marie-Sabine Roger Read Free Book Online

just have to look at the way they let us take advantage of them, but for some things, they’ve got, like, a sixth sense.In two seconds flat, they can tell you exactly what makes you tick. And it’s not always wrong, the stuff they come out with. They talk a lot of sense sometimes.
    All of a sudden, I noticed something incredible: here I was thinking about the way I think, the way I react, that kind of stuff. Bloody hell! I thought.
    This was new to me, it made me dizzy. Because, before that day, I was either thinking or not thinking. One or the other. And when I was thinking, I didn’t think about it, it was like it happened outside me. When I thought, I did it without thinking.
    OK, I realize that when you put it that way it doesn’t make much sense. But I wasn’t in the habit of trying to work out the how and the why of things.
    By accident, Margueritte had triggered a burning desire for thinking, it was like my brain had a hard on.
    So, that night, while I was barbecuing my steak outside the caravan, I remembered a whole bunch of things that happened since I was a kid. That stuff I told you about Monsieur Bayle for example. The screaming matches with my mother. That bastard Gardini—I’ll tell you about him later. The first time I snatched a handbag, but I was just a kid, all boys do stuff like that. The army. Boozy games of belote and bar fights. Getting legless and getting a leg over. All the arseholes who make fun of me and think I don’t notice.
    And the years that went by so fast that now, as Landremont says, what with statistics and life expectancy, I’m closer to the end than to the start.
    Later, I remembered all the things I wanted to be when I was a kid. Even the vocation— Inclination, penchant (for a particular profession or occupation) —I had when I was about twelve. Whenever it was open, I found an excuse to pop into the church. Not to pray—I didn’t give a damn whether the Good Lord in His mercy forgave me. I went in to look at the big rose window above the altar. I thought the colours were mind-blowing and the images were amazing. So I decided to be a rose window-maker.
    When I said this during careers guidance, I was told that “rose window-maker” was not a profession. Not a profession? What the hell was wrong with these people? It’s the most wonderful profession in the world. Instead, they suggested I could apprentice with a glassmaker. I told them to go screw themselves, I said I wasn’t interested in making glasses. Why not somewhere that made Pyrex bowls while they were at it?
    It was one word, just one word, to work out. But that day, no one bothered to explain that you had to be a glassmaker to make rose windows.
    So, anyway, as I was chopping tomatoes and onions for a salad, I thought some more about me, but as though it wasn’t me. As though it was some guy I’d bumped into on the street, the neighbours’ kid, a nephew. A lad who hadn’t had much luck in life. A poor bastard who had no father and no mother to speak of, because if I had to choose between my mother or no mother…
    I saw myself from above and it felt peculiar. I thought, Jesus H. Christ, Germain, why do you do the things you do?
    By “things” I meant: counting pigeons, running until I was out of breath, playing belote, whittling bits of wood with my Opinel. I asked myself the question seriously, it was like I was someone else talking. The voice of God, maybe—with all due respect and reverence to Him. Germain, why do you do the things you do? It echoed inside my head. Why, Germain, why?
    I think I had a sort of brainstorm that night. I’d had a couple of episodes like it before. When I was a kid, in fact. But, back then, someone would quickly cure me. Go out and play, don’t be such a pain in the arse, stop bugging us with all your questions!
    When people are always cutting you down, you don’t get a chance to grow.

 
     
    T HE THIRD TIME I saw Margueritte, I arrived before her. I sat on the bench and