My nose
Often, I say that my life consists of two parts: the great rise of a gifted child until the age of six, then, from that moment on, a slow and inevitable downfall.
At the age of six, I was a bright, determined child lively with an insatiable curiosity, much like the elephant’s child in Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, which I had the entire record of at home. In the story, the elephant’s child had a strong desire to get to know the world and understand it, which allowed him to go to the big river Limpopo (which is like oil, gray-green and bordered with fever trees) to have a horn made for him by the crocodile as to avenge the ragging of his conservative family.
My brother was just born. My parents and adults in general, bored me: much like in the story, they didn’t answer any of my questions. I dragged them around with me like a ball and chain: their rules, their order had neither cause nor valid consequence. They suggested a frame of life that I was eager to get past. It was more of a feeling than something I was conscious of. An aspiration. My plan was ripening.
When I needed to think, I went down to the parking lot which extended from our ground floor on the rue des Rosiers, in Dijon. There, I would turn round in circles. We had a fig tree which died that year, frozen, along with the gutter. I’d make figure-of-eights with my bike, in the same way that Sherlock Holmes plays the violin as to better concentrate and solve the mystery. I was tracing eights on the pavement for an eternity, when suddenly, it was revealed to me that I had my parents’ nose. I had their nose, it was undeniable: they had handed it down to me.
The appearance of this link that I wore on my face, as if to mock my prisoner, tore me from my daydream and it was then that I saw the parking lot’s low wall, which stood exactly at the height of this nose that wasn’t mine. I stop mid-loop and accelerate: the nose crashes into the wall, I bleed. My entire face hurts, but I feel happy because I’ve pulled it off. It’s finished, because I am finally myself again, I no longer have my parents’ big nose.
Today, I often tell people that I was an adult for a very short time in my life, between the ages of six and nine. One of the parking lot’s wooden doors still had the scraggly snail traces from last week, on the target traced in chalk. In Bourgogne, snails are used in every way possible, and often as darts. You steal some salad from your aunt. You organize races.
Later on, my mother told me that she had her nose redone when she was young. My father found her nose too big, or in any case, not to his taste. That day, I admitted to her that as a child I’d broken my nose on purpose by smashing into a wall. And I asked her whether she remembered, she said that yes, it was a Sunday, I came up to her nose bleeding but smiling, so she didn’t bring me to the hospital.
All the things you were doing behind my back, she says to me. All the things we didn’t know…
Francois Beaune, citizen of the Mediterranean world
Translated by Olivia Baes