Boredom

Johanna is walking under the sun. She was born of this heat, of sudden, slightly jerky lovemaking, on an evening of wine and clammy sleeplessness. She was born somewhat by chance, like Céline, but a year later. Her arrival into the world caused less of a stir than that of her sister: Séverine’s youth was no longer as brazen, and anyway, her hip-swaying days at the Privilège were over. So another birth was in the natural order of things really. People even expected it to carry on – after all, the father was Spanish, so she was going to pop one out every year; Spaniards and Arabs, it was always the immigrants who were competing as to who’d produce more kids. The little girl’s two-tone eyes weren’t noticed at first. The doctor from the Mother and Baby Council didn’t notice anything, and in any case he was more focused on the mother during the final check-up before the discharge from hospital, with a grimace halfway between dismay – second child and she’s barely eighteen – and fascination: Séverine was still beautiful. It happened later, when she was about one: the blue iris turned grey-green; they said she must have seen something her childish eyes couldn’t bear, they said it was a punishment, they said it was a magic eye that saw what others couldn’t see; that her iris had turned inwards and that she had been changed by it. They said it was weird, that it was the omen of a future disaster. Here, anything even slightly unusual is commented on, dissected, and becomes a conversation topic. Through the lens of bar talk, self-righteous and drunk, there’s no expedient apart from habit. Only habit can make something banal when it isn’t.

But Johanna is grateful for this singularity. Maybe, she sometimes thinks, it’s this strangeness that forces her to look elsewhere, to want to escape, to imagine worlds she doesn’t yet know. Had she been lulled by the illusion of normality, she might have perhaps looked like her sister.

She bursts out laughing, here, right now, like a lunatic who gives herself permission to do so. There’s no one to hear her, anyway. Immersed in the scrubland, she paces up and down looking for the rare shade of small pines sticky with sap, throws pebbles in front of her, and feels a little bored. She knows it well: here, boredom is an art form, almost a life art, and her own boredom stinks of anticipation. She doesn’t feel like seeing her school friends or the village gang – she still hates Lucas and Enzo, the little shits she sees through with surprising clarity. Céline isn’t here to add her own boredom to hers, and she misses that. They’ve spent their lives glued together for such a long time, despite their differences.

Jo is looking for ways out. She must be patient, but she has neither the age nor the temperament for patience. What she dreams of is explosions, magnificent events, nuclear wars. She is all pernicious expectation and anxiety. Céline’s pregnancy doesn’t actually change anything, and it’s again about her sister, the centre of attention. But there’s something hatching, buzzing in the thick atmosphere, in the family silences. She can feel it, like that sharp taste when biting into a green grape, on alert.