Read Soft in the Head for Free Online Page A

was very different. I knew how to read, obviously, since I learned the alphabet. My problem was the meaning. A book was like a rat trap for my pride, a treacherous, two-faced thing that seemed harmless at first glance.
    Nothing but ink and paper: big deal. Actually it was a wall. A brick wall to bang your head on.
    So, obviously, I couldn’t see the point of reading unless I had to, like for tax returns and social security forms.
     
    I think this is what I found most intriguing— see also: arousing one’s curiosity —about Margueritte.
    Every time I saw her, either she was doing nothing or she had her nose in a book. And when she was doing nothing, it was only because she’d just put her book back in her handbag to chat to me.
    That’s something I realized after a while. These days, if you asked me what was in her little back handbag, I could reel off everything with my eyes closed and not make asingle mistake: a packet of tissues, a pen, a box of mints, a book, her wallet, her purse, and some perfume in a small blue glass bottle.
    Every single thing is always the same, except for the book, that changes.
    When I look at Margueritte, it’s funny, I don’t see a little old lady who weighs about forty kilos, all crumpled like a poppy, her spine a little bent and her hands all shrivelled; I see that in her head she has thousands of bookshelves all carefully catalogued and numbered. And you wouldn’t think to look at her that she’s intelligent. I mean how intelligent she actually is. She talks to me about normal things, she walks in the park just like an ordinary person.
    She’s not at all stuck up.
    But from what she tells me, when she was young, it was rare for a woman to do advanced studies. I still don’t really know what she did exactly when she was researching seeds, or what the point of it was, but I know she worked in laboratories with microscopes and bottles and test tubes, and just thinking about it amazes me.
    That and the books she is forever reading.
    Well, that she was forever reading.

 
     
    W E RAN INTO EACH OTHER again, Margueritte and me, I don’t remember the exact date, it wasn’t long after that first time. She was sitting on the same bench and it was probably the same time of day.
    Seeing her in the distance, I thought, Hey, it’s the pigeon lady, but I didn’t think any more about it. I went over to say hello. Her eyes were half closed, she looked like she was thinking, or she could just as easily have been dozing.
    With old people, everything ends up looking much the same: thinking, dying, napping…
    I said hello. She turned, she smiled.
    “Well, well. Hello, Monsieur Chazes.”
    Not many people round here call me monsieur .
    It’s more, Hi Germain! Or even, Hey Chazes!
    She nodded for me to sit next to her. And that’s when I saw she had a book in her lap. Seeing I was looking at it, trying to work out what it was from the picture on the cover, she asked:
    “Do you like reading?”
    “God, no.”
    It just came out, like a bullet from a gun, there was no way to take it back.
    “No?”
    She looked astonished, did Margueritte.
    I tried to smooth things over, I said:
    “Too much work.”
    “Ah, I see. It’s true that, in life, work takes up a great deal of time… Counting pigeons, writing one’s name on the war memorial…”
    She said this like it was a private joke, she wasn’t being nasty.
    “You saw me doing that? I mean you saw me at the memorial?”
    She nodded.
    “That is to say… I did catch sight of you at the monument one day. You seemed utterly engrossed, but from here I could not guess what you were doing. So—and I hope you will forgive my curiosity—after you left, I went over to see for myself. And that is when I noticed that you had added a name to the list of the departed: Germain Chazes… Your father, I assume? Because, unless I’ve misremembered, you told me that your first name is Germain, didn’t you?”
    I said yes. But given it was a single yes and