The Book of Proper Names Read online

  But weight was not their chief concern. Their bodies were so exhausted by the endless hours of exercise that their sole obsession was to sit down. The moments when you didn’t use your muscles seemed like miracles.

  Plectrude waited to go to bed from the moment she got up. The moment she consigned her aching carcass to bed for the night was voluptuous. This was the only relaxation that the girls had. Meals brought anguish. The teachers had so demonized food that however mediocre it might have been, it appeared highly tempting. The girls were disgusted by the desire food aroused in them. A single mouthful was a mouthful too many.

  Plectrude soon started wondering about things. She had come here to become a dancer, not to believe there was no higher ideal than sleep. She worked on her dancing from morning till evening, without a sense that dancing was what she was doing. She was like a writer forced to not write, but instead to study grammar incessantly. Of course, grammar is essential, but only if writing is the end in view: deprived of its purpose, grammar is but a sterile code. Plectrude had never felt less like a dancer than she had since coming to the école des rats. In the ballet classes that she had attended in previous years, there had been room for little choreographies. Here all they did was exercises. The barre started looking like the bars of a jail.

  Her perplexity seemed to be shared by many of the others. None of them spoke of it, yet they could all feel discouragement spreading among them.

  Some girls left, and the school’s staff seemed to have been hoping that they would. These defections led to others. This spontaneous shedding of surplus weight delighted the teachers. For poor Plectrude, each departure was like a death.

  Inevitably, she was herself tempted to leave. What stopped her was her feeling that her mother would be angry with her, and that any reasons she gave would not be good enough.

  It was clear that the staff was waiting for a predetermined list of people to leave, for their approach changed suddenly. The girls were called into a room larger than usual, and given a new speech.

  “You may have noticed that many students have left the school over the last few weeks. We would not go as far as to say that we deliberately provoked them to go, but we will not be so hypocritical as to regret that they did.”

  There followed a silence, the sole purpose of which was to make the children uneasy.

  “By leaving, those girls proved that they did not really want to dance. More precisely, they have shown that they lacked the patience a true dancer needs to have. Do you know what some of these silly geese said when they told us they were going? That they had come to dance, and that we did no dancing here. What on earth did they think? That they would be performing Swan Lake for us the day after tomorrow?”

  Plectrude remembered an expression of her mother’s: “retaliate first.” The école’s teachers were busy retaliating first.

  “Dancing is something you must earn. Dancing—dancing on a stage in front of an audience—is the greatest joy in the world. Even without the audience, even without the stage, dancing is absolute bliss. This is justification for the cruelest sacrifices. The education that we give you here shows dance for what it is: not the means, but the end. It would be immoral to allow pupils to dance when they hadn’t earned the right. Eight hours a day at the barre and a famine diet will seem harsh only to those without sufficient desire to dance. Anyone who still wishes to leave, should go!”

  * * *

  NO ONE ELSE LEFT. The message had been loud and clear. You can accept the severest forms of discipline so long as they’ve been explained to you properly.

  The reward came: they danced. To be sure, it wasn’t much. But for the girls the mere fact of leaving the barre to launch themselves into the center of the room with everyone watching, to twirl around for a few moments and feel the extent to which their bodies had mastered their steps, was utterly intoxicating. If ten seconds could give so much pleasure, imagine what they would feel when they danced for two hours.

  Plectrude felt sorry for Roselyne, who hadn’t been accepted at the école des rats. She would only ever be an ordinary young girl for whom dancing would be a hobby. Plectrude blessed her teachers’ harshness, for it had taught her that art was a religion.

  What had shocked her before, seemed normal now. It seemed normal that they should be starved, that they should exhaust themselves at the barre, going over their technical exercises for hours at a stretch, that they should be insulted, that children without a hint of plumpness should be mocked as fat cows. It all seemed quite acceptable.

  There were even worse things that initially had made Plectrude feel as though she was witnessing crimes against humanity, but now no longer revolted her. Those girls who displayed signs of puberty earlier than the others were forced to swallow pills that delayed certain changes. No one had periods at the école, not even in the upper classes.

  She had had a secret talk about it with an older girl, who had told her, “For most students those pills aren’t even necessary. Undernourishment is enough to obstruct the menstrual cycle and the physical changes that come with your first period. But some still manage to enter puberty in spite of this. They have to take the famous pill. You won’t find a tampon in the whole school.”

  “Does anyone have their period in secret?”

  “No way! They’re the ones who ask for the pill.”

  At the time, Plectrude had been shocked by that conversation. Now she found the school’s Spartan laws quite magnificent.

  Her spirit had been subjugated, she was now beneath the teachers’ yoke, she agreed with them on everything.

  Fortunately, the voice of her childhood, still active and more knowledgeably rebellious than that of her adolescence, saved her by whispering healthily outrageous remarks. “Do you know why this place is called the école des rats? They say it’s for the pupils, but it’s really for the teachers. They’re the rats—nasty rats with big teeth to gnaw the flesh from the bodies of the ballerinas. We, at least, deserve some credit for being passionate about dance. The only thing they’re passionate about is ratting us out. They want to eat us up with sugar on top. Rats are misers, miserly about beauty, pleasure, life, and even dance! You think they love dance? They’re its worst enemies! They’re chosen for their hatred of dance, deliberately, because if they loved it, that would make life too much fun. Loving what your teacher loves would be too easy. They’re asking something superhuman of us here: that we sacrifice ourselves to an art that our teachers hate, an art they betray a hundred times a day with their pettiness. Dance is all about spirit, grace, generosity, talent—the very opposite of the rat mentality.”

  The dictionary supplied her with nourishment. Plectrude read the “rat” entry with gusto: “gutter rat, dirty rat, rat-faced, rat fink.” The school deserved its name.

  There was careful deliberation involved in choosing the école’s wretched teachers. The school believed, not without reason, that it would have been immoral to encourage the ballerinas. If it was to be total art, dance required the investment of the whole being. So the girls’ motivation had to be tested by undermining their dreams down to their foundations. Those who gave in would never have the mentality of a star. Such methods, monstrous though they were, were based on sound principles.

  But the teachers didn’t know this. They were not aware of the supreme mission behind their sadism, and exercised it simply for its own sake.

  And thus it was that, in secret, Plectrude also learned to dance against them.

  * * *

  WITHIN THREE MONTHS she lost eleven pounds. She was delighted. She also noted an extraordinary phenomenon: by passing below the symbolic bar of eighty-eight pounds, she hadn’t merely lost weight, she had also lost her feelings.

  Mathieu Saladin: the name that had once sent her into a trance now left her utterly indifferent. She hadn’t seen the boy again, or had any news from him, so he hadn’t been able to disappoint her. Nor had she met any other boys.

  It wasn’t the passage of time that had mad
e her so cold. Three months wasn’t long. She had been studying herself too closely not to notice the connection between cause and effect: every pound she lost took a part of her love with it. She didn’t regret this. To be able to regret it, she would have had to have some feelings left. She was glad to be rid of this double burden: eleven pounds and a burning passion.

  Plectrude vowed she would remember this great law: love, regret, desire, and infatuation were illnesses produced by bodies that weighed more than eighty-eight pounds.

  If by some mischance she reached such obesity again and feelings started tormenting her heart once more, she would know the remedy: stop eating.

  Life was different when you weighed seventy-seven pounds. You focused all your time on mastering the physical ordeals of the day, distributing your energy in such a way as to have enough for eight hours of exercise, for confronting the temptations of mealtimes, and for proudly concealing your exhaustion—in other words, for dancing when you had earned the right.

  Dancing was Plectrude’s sole means of transcendence. It fully justified her arid existence. Putting your health at risk meant nothing at all so long as you could know the incredible sensation of taking flight.

  * * *

  THERE IS A WIDESPREAD misconception about classical dance. For many, it is merely a silly universe of tutus and pink slippers, à pointe mannerisms, and aerial soppiness. The worst thing is that it’s true. Ballet is all those things.

  But it isn’t just those things. Strip ballet of its sentimental affectations, its tulle, its stuffiness, and its chignons, and you will discover that what remains is hugely important. The proof of this is that the best modern dancers come from the classical schools.

  The Holy Grail of ballet is flight. No teacher would dream of putting it like that, for fear of sounding like a complete idiot. But anyone who has been taught the technique of the sissone, the entrechat, and the grand jeté en avant, knows beyond any doubt that what they are trying to teach is the art of flying.

  The barre exercises are so tiresome because the barre is a perch. When you dream of taking off, when you can feel your limbs yearning to fly freely in the air, you are furious at being moored for hours on end to a piece of wood.

  The barre corresponds to the training that fledglings receive in the nest: how to spread their wings before using them. For fledglings, a few hours is all it takes. But when a human being has the audacity to change species and learn to fly, she quite rightly needs to devote years of exhausting exercises to the effort.

  She will be rewarded far beyond her expectations the moment she is allowed to leave the perch—the barre—and hurl herself into space. The spectator may not be able to see what happens in the body of the ballet dancer at that precise moment. What happens is the truest kind of madness. And the fact that this insanity adheres to a code does nothing to diminish the deranged aspect of the whole idea of classical ballet: that it is composed of a set of techniques designed to make human flight seem possible and reasonable. Consequently, why would anyone be surprised by the gro-tesquely gothic context in which this happens? Why should anyone expect that such a demented project be adopted by individuals of sound mind?

  This lengthy digression is directed at those who would see ballet as nothing more than a source of entertainment. They are right to be amused. But let them also look beyond their amusement, for within classical dance lurks a fearsome ideal.

  And the ravages that this ideal can wreak upon a young mind are like those of a hard drug.

  * * *

  AT CHRISTMAS, THEY went home for a short while.

  No pupil at the école des rats looked forward to vacations with any great excitement. The whole prospect filled them all with apprehension. Holidays. What possible point could there be in those? They had been justifiable when life’s purpose was pleasure, but that time—childhood—had come and gone. Now the sole meaning of their existence was dance. Family life, composed essentially of meals and flabbiness, was in direct contradiction to this.

  Plectrude told herself that not looking forward to Christmas was another sign of leaving childhood. It was the first time that this had happened to her. She had been right about being afraid to turn thirteen. She had really changed.

  Everyone noticed it. They were all struck by how thin she was. Only her mother was pleased. Denis, Nicole, Béatrice, and Roselyne, who had been invited over, all disapproved.

  “You’ve got a face like a razor-blade.”

  “She’s a dancer,” protested Clémence. “You couldn’t have expected her to come back to us with big round cheeks. You’re very beautiful, my darling.”

  Apart from her thinness, a more profound change in Plectrude left them even more perplexed because they couldn’t put a name to it. Perhaps it was so sinister that they simply didn’t dare say what it was: Plectrude had lost her spirit. She had always been a laughing little girl, and now she seemed indifferent.

  It must be the shock of coming home, Denis thought.

  But the impression grew stronger with each passing day. Nothing she did could conceal her indifference.

  Mealtimes seemed to be a torment for her. Her family was used to her eating very little; now she ate nothing at all, and the rest of the family felt tense.

  Had they been able to see what was happening in Plectrude’s head, they would have been even more worried than they were.

  On the day of her arrival, they had all struck her as obese. Even Roselyne, a skinny adolescent, seemed enormous to her. She wondered how they could stand to have such huge bellies. She wondered how they could bear to lead such vain lives—great softness spreading everywhere, leading nowhere. She blessed her harsh existence and its privations. At least she was heading somewhere. It wasn’t as if she was committed to the cult of suffering, but she did need meaning in her life. In that respect, Plectrude was already a teenager.

  * * *

  WHEN THEY WERE ALONE together, Roselyne, breathless and excited, told her all about what had happened to her classmates. “And guess what? Well, Vanessa’s going out with Fred, yes, really, that senior!”

  She was very quickly disappointed with her lack of success in getting any reaction.

  “You were in their class for longer than I was—don’t you care what’s happening to them?”

  “Don’t take it the wrong way. If you knew how far all this is from me at the moment.”

  “Even Mathieu Saladin?” asked Roselyne.

  “Of course,” Plectrude said wearily.

  “You didn’t always feel like this.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  “Are there any boys at your school?”

  “No. They take their classes separately. We never see them.”

  “Just girls, then? What absolute hell!”

  “We haven’t got time to think about such things.”

  Plectrude didn’t have the heart to tell her friend about the barrier separating those who weighed more than eighty-eight from those who weighed less, but she felt the truth of it now more than ever before. What did she care about those stupid high-school flirtations? She felt even sorrier for Roselyne now that her friend was wearing a bra.

  “Do you want me to show you?”

  “What?”

  “My bra. You haven’t stopped staring at it all the time I’ve been talking to you.”

  Roselyne lifted up her T-shirt. Plectrude shrieked with horror.

  * * *

  DEEP DOWN, THE GIRL who had learned to dance against her teachers also learned to live against her family. She said nothing, but she studied them critically. They all slump! It’s like they’ve been beaten down by the laws of gravity. Life has got to be better than that.

  She found that their lives, as opposed to her own, lacked poise, and she was ashamed on their behalf. Sometimes she wondered if she had been adopted.

  * * *

  “I TELL YOU IT WORRIES me. She’s very thin,” said Denis.

  “So? She’s a dancer,” replied Clémence.

>   “Not all dancers are as thin as that.”

  “She’s thirteen. It’s normal at that age.”

  Reassured, Denis was able to get to sleep. The parental capacity for willful blindness is immense. By means of an observation—the frequent occurrence of thinness among adolescents—they manage to blot out individual circumstances. Their daughter may have been slender by nature, but this thinness wasn’t natural.

  The holidays came and went. Plectrude went back to school, to her very great relief.

  “Sometimes I feel as though I’ve lost a child,” said Denis.

  “You’re being selfish,” protested Clémence. “She’s happy.”

  She was wrong on both counts. First of all, the little girl was not happy. Secondly, her husband’s selfishness was nothing compared to her own. She would so have liked to have been a ballerina, and Plectrude satisfied that ambition vicariously. So what if the health of her child needed to be sacrificed to that ideal. If anyone had said that to her, she would have opened her eyes wide and exclaimed, “All I want is for my daughter to be happy!”

  Her reaction would have been an honest one. Parents don’t know what remains concealed behind their own sincerity.

  * * *

  WHAT PLECTRUDE WAS experiencing at the école des rats was not the thing called happiness. Happiness requires a sense of security. The girl didn’t sense the merest hint of that, and she was right not to: at this stage of her life, she was no longer playing with her health, she was gambling with it. She knew that.

  What Plectrude was experiencing at the école des rats was called intoxication: ecstasy fed on a massive dose of obliviousness, obliviousness of privation, physical suffering, danger, and fear. Through such voluntary amnesia, she was able to throw herself into her dancing, and to know the mad illusion of it and the trance of flight.

  She was becoming one of the school’s best pupils. She was definitely not the thinnest of them, but she was without contest the most graceful. She possessed that marvelous ease of movement that is nature’s most supreme injustice, for grace is given or withheld at birth, and no effort can compensate for its absence.