But she is wrong about me, just as the world was wrong about us. If my geese ever dream, they alone know that the world will never be allowed even a glimpse of those dreams, and they alone know the world has no right to judge them. I live like my geese.
一开始其实是不太敢读李翊云的书，知道她丧子遭遇，笔风沉郁，其实很早就知道这本书。这本书是听了播客介绍之后决心要读。
首先说情节本身并不复杂，关键是刻画的这两个女生的形象， Agnes看似是没有防备，其实是因为她对Fabienne的爱。尽管两个女孩的年龄设定只有十五岁，却因为写作特有的感触而迸发丰富的感情——这种爱不是浪漫的爱，而是一种无可奈何，一种对命运的反抗，Fabienne也是爱着Agnes以至于她需要分裂成为两个人格。
李翊云的文采让人不可自拔，我居然不到一周就读完了，每天上下班连小红书都不刷了，好奇两个女孩的后续发展。到最后压抑的对决几乎要尖叫。
因为懂少许法语 (工作语言) 所以看到其中的法语描述觉得亲切。
YOU CANNOT CUT AN APPLE with an apple. You cannot cut an orange with an orange. You can, if you have a knife, cut an apple or an orange. Or slice open the underbelly of a fish. Or, if your hands are steady enough and the blade is sharp enough, sever an umbilical cord.
You can slash a book. There are different ways to measure depth, but not many readers measure a book’s depth with a knife, making a cut from the first page all the way down to the last. Why not, I wonder.
You can hand the knife to another person, betting with yourself how deep a wound he or she is willing to inflict. You can be the inflicter of the wound.
One half orange plus another half orange do not make a full orange again. And that is where my story begins. An orange that did not think itself good enough for a knife, and an orange that never dreamed of turning itself into a knife. Cut and be cut, neither interested me back then
MY NAMES IS AGNÈS, but that is not important
you would think the same calamity should never strike a family twice, but if you think that way you are likely to be called an idiot by someone
We grow your happiness as beet and mine as potato. If one crop fails, we still have the other.
I DID NOT TELL FABIENNE then that I thought our happiness should be like the pigeons M. Devaux kept. They went away, they came back, and what happened in between was no one’s business. Our happiness should not be rooted and immobile
How do I measure Fabienne’s presence in my life—by the years we were together, or by the years we have been apart, her shadow elongating as time goes by, always touching me?
EVERY STORY HAS AN EXPIRATION DATE. Like a jar of marmalade or a candle.
Does marmalade have an expiration date? Yes, marmalade only makes fruit live longer, not forever.
Does a candle have an expiration date? It may not come with one, but once past a certain point in its life, it is corrupted, even if it still burns.
Time corrupts. And we pay a price for everything corruptible: food, roof beams, souls
This story of mine expired when I heard of Fabienne’s death. Telling a story past its expiration date is like exhuming a body long buried. The reason for doing so is not always clear to everyone.
If I told people that I was once a myth, nobody would believe me. But is it a myth’s job to make you believe in it? A myth says, Take me or leave me. You can shrug, you can laugh at its face, but you cannot do anything about it. You are the one to change your mind, or not to change—either way, a myth is a complete thing, and you, a nonmyth, are a nonentity.
No one is born a myth. All babies, whether delivered in a barn or in a palace, need the same things to stay alive. Later, some people are smart enough to turn themselves into myths. Some people turn others into myths. Yet what is myth but a veil arranged to cover what is hideous or tedious?
People are oftentimes hideous or tedious. Sometimes they are both. So is the world. We would have no use for myths if the world were neither hideous nor tedious.
“See, he just needs some distraction,” Fabienne said later, before we parted near my house.
“Distraction from his wife’s death?” I asked.
“Boredom,” Fabienne said. “Sad people don’t often know that they are sad and bored.”
For now, we must write.
Isn’t it enough just to know a story? Why take the time to write it out?
I now have the answer, for her and for myself. The world has no use for who we are and what we know. A story has to be written out. How else do we get our revenge?
(Revenge against what, or whom, precisely?
Don’t, Agnès, fall into the trap and answer that question.)
(Mathematics may not be that important even in life. You need only to be able to count and to add. And those skills may still be superfluous. If god said he was to take something, your sight or your hearing or your arithmetic aptitude, would you find being blind or being deaf preferable to being unable to do arithmetic?
. I, Agnès, would be just fine with only Fabienne in my life, but she needed more than I could give her
Fabienne was savage. I was only crude.
. It did not matter at all that I could not catch up with her. I lived through her. What was left behind was only my shell
The difference between us was that I respected and feared death, and would rather not think about it unless I was forced to. To her, death was a prank. Only the weak, the foolish, and the unlucky would fall for it.
Fabienne made promises to me all the time. She knew I would never expect her to keep them.
From life to life? That is a long way. The cousins of my geese, the wild ones, fly over a continent. People leave their homes for new homes, new cities, new countries. But who can shorten the distance between two people so they can say with confidence that they have reached each other? In that sense perhaps Fabienne was one of the few who worked miracles. She made me her. She made us into one person.
The single lie—or the variations of the same lie—I had told in those years was to Fabienne: I made her believe that I was like a vacant house, my mind empty of any thoughts of my own, my heart void of feelings.
I was not aware of my falsity then.
“Now you truly look like an idiot,” he said. “Smile like you did earlier. Give yourself an air.”
“What air?”
“Mystery, humility, coquettishness.”
I understand that Fabienne and I shared something not often available to children (or adults, for that matter). Neither of us felt intense love toward our parents, or intense resentment. And the world was made of people who were not that different from our parents, so it was only natural that neither of us felt intense love or intense resentment toward anyone. We had each other, and for a long time that was enough.
I missed the days when we spoke endless nonsense or lay in the graveyard without moving or speaking
Perhaps they were too worn-out to feel much of anything.
No one can stop you from wanting something for your children, but most of the time what you want will never be granted. Some people have to become parents themselves to truly understand that. Not me. I learned that by watching my parents.
I would have been one of them had Fabienne not been in my life. What a tragedy that would have been, living an interchangeable life, looking for interchangeable excitements.
I wondered if she would kiss me. It would not be our first kiss. When we were younger, we used to stick our tongues out and let them touch for as long as we could stand it, and then dissolve into hysterical laughter. But that was before Fabienne’s mother died. After her death, Fabienne and I stopped playing some of our silliest and wildest games, and she no longer laughed like she used to.
I gave Fabienne what she wanted: her Agnès. I did not give this Agnès to others, but what they asked of me I did my best to accommodate
The world Fabienne and I made together: it was as real as our nonsense.
I did not know what I wanted on this trip to Paris. Perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say that most of my life I have benefited from not knowing. Some people have to figure out what they want from a life before they commit to that life. Some, like me, can commit to anything, which is like committing to nothing. Perhaps that is why my American relatives call me passive
Often I imagine that living is a game of rock-paper-scissors: fate beats hope, hope beats ignorance, and ignorance beats fate. Or, in a version that has preoccupied me: the fatalistic attracts the hopeful, the hopeful attracts the ignorant, and the ignorant, the fatalistic.
She studied me from where she was sitting on a tree stump. “You can’t wear those things on a farm, you know,” she said. They were the exact words I had expected her to say, but there was a strange gentleness in her voice, as though she were amiably introducing a newcomer to the ways of the countryside.
“I … I want you to see them,” I said.
“They fit you nicely,” she said. “I like how you look.”
When you are used to the sharpness of a knife, you can safely run your finger along the edge or press your palm onto it with just the right pressure. You can even keep the blade between your teeth without cutting your lips or tongue. But what if you touched the blade and felt the soft silkiness of a rabbit pelt?
But were we not, in a sense, two blind girls? One would walk everywhere as though not a single mine were buried in the field. The other would not find the courage to take a step because the whole world was a minefield. Had they not been placed side by side by fate, they would have lived out their different lots. But that was not the case for us. Fabienne and I were in this world together, and we had only each other’s hands to hold on to. She had her will. I, my willingness to be led by her will.
“We can find work there,” I said. “And we can live together.”
“Just the two of us?”
“Yes,” I said. “We don’t need anyone else, do we?”
Fabienne looked at me strangely. It was not one of her usual looks, teasing, or contemptuous, or mockingly affectionate. I knew every expression on her face as she knew every thought on my mind. But now her eyes betrayed something else. Alarm. Incredulity. Even hostility.
“I mean it,” I said. “I don’t think we want husbands or children, right?”
“You dream big,” she said.
I shook my head. I told her that the book-writing game was dreamed up by her, and I was only following her, and I would do what she wanted me to
imbecile
the only reason you take them seriously is because they put on such an impeccable air
You must go,” she said.
“Do you want me to?” I asked.
She stopped walking and took one of her shoes off, knocking it on a tree trunk. I wondered if there was a pebble that was bothering her. She did not speak.
“I’ll go if you want me to,” I said. “But you have to know that if I go, I’m doing it for both of us.”
“But…” I hesitated. “I’ll miss you.”
“It’s only for one year. It’ll be like, poof, a night of sleep.”
“Yes,” I said bravely, not wanting her to see my disappointment. That she would not miss me I had already expected. Still, wouldn’t it be nicer if she could just lie once, saying some soft and loving words to me?
And the best part, of course, was that he was really Fabienne.
Perhaps he would make it easy for me to say things that I had never said to her. Perhaps she would feel the same, too, saying to me things she would never say as Fabienne.
I was fortunate because Fabienne did not want to be me.
“All those girls, any one of them would be dying to be you. What makes you so special? Are you truly the prodigy the press makes you out to be?”
Was it possible that, between Fabienne and me, I was the truly morbid one?
The peony blossoms, splendid and short-lived. The mother wren darting about to feed her young.
We were not liars, but we made our own truths, extravagant as we needed them to be, fantastic as our moods required. Built from scratch like our books, our games had banished M. Devaux when he became a trouble for us, catapulted me into this English finishing school, and made Meaker my only true friend in this foreign land. Our make-beliefs were our allies. How else could we thrive, if not for them: unseen, nameless, patient, always on our side?
But she is wrong about me, just as the world was wrong about us. If my geese ever dream, they alone know that the world will never be allowed even a glimpse of those dreams, and they alone know the world has no right to judge them. I live like my geese.
I have interrupted that living to write: the story of a faux-prodigy, which is the real story of Fabienne and Agnès, as real as on that day when we were in the graveyard, wanting, and unable, to kill each other; wanting, and unable, to save each other.