Chapter 9

On the first Sunday evening of January I got on the bus in freezing cold temperatures. The old vehicle emitted nerve-wracking noises I hardly paid attention to. I felt how numb my feet were, and kept moving them. The lack of heating kept me focused on my icy feet. We were five passengers, all separate on our cold seats. The mechanical noises broke the silence and kept bringing me back to my physical existence. When I got up at the bus terminal I walked like an automaton, my cheap boots were useless in the damp cold. All I wanted was to get to the dorm.

I often hurried back to school for the wrong reasons, for comfort or relaxation. At the entrance, which had been cleared after the recent snowfall, I met Sylvie, the girl who lived in the next cubicle. Her parents had brought her from Sainte-Emilie. She smiled, asked if I’d had a good holiday, and said it was too bad school was starting again. She kept smiling. We went up to the fourth floor. The heat relaxed my body. My reddened feet felt even heavier.

Sylvie’s eyes sparkled, her new hairstyle left her neck un-covered. I found her very attractive, and listened without wondering why she was getting so talkative. She was an only child she said. She talked about her boyfriend. She’d met him the summer before. Ever since, he’d been wanting to take her out and she’d kept refusing, saying she had to study as an ex-cuse to keep him at a distance. Over the course of the Christmas holidays she’d agreed to see more of him. Now they were going out together. She said she was happy with her decision. Her words made me feel happy. Sylvie’s hands revealed a gentle kind of voluptuousness. She wasn’t the only one who spoke with her hands. Her gestures went with her words and emphasized them. She needed both words and gestures to make herself understood.

The next day, the students were happy to all meet up again, and there were the sounds of new voices. Friendships had be-gun. The excitement increased my desire to see Yolande. I wandered around looking for her, she did not come to class that afternoon.

The next day I got up at the first bell. I hurried over to the exit and saw from the open curtains around her cubicle that she wasn’t there. I was the first one in the cafeteria. The smell of toast filled the air as it did every morning. Cold toast is what awaited the boarders. I didn’t feel like eating. I took a miniature box of cereal and a coffee and sat down in the corner where the supervisors couldn’t see me. I thought about her.

She wasn’t in class. The teacher spoke in exasperatingly slow tones. Her lazy, weak voice repeated the same sentence in various different ways. I wanted a challenge from school. I was not getting it. The semester before I’d accepted approximations, and gotten good results. Last minute revisions had been enough. I still had the best intentions. My mind wandered, I couldn’t pay attention. The empty discourse destabilized me. I had the feeling of living through the final throes of a cold world that was too sure of itself. What I heard was pure repetition with constant references to God and morality. I could have felt privileged by so much security and certainty. I didn’t. I was anxious.

Our teachers took religious teachings literally, daring to make only a few allusions to the enemies of the faith. We were a homogeneous group of young women from lower middle-class backgrounds, believers who were being called upon to transmit an established tradition. Our mission was with the children.

Our teacher told us at the end of the afternoon that we would be going on teaching practice into primary schools. This caused quite a stir, both excitement and apprehension. A stomach cramp made my muscles grow tense. The feeling of light laziness left me. The news had the effect of a wind of change for my classmates, they became animated. I clammed up, unable to turn toward the others and their exclamations of joy, that were perhaps mixed with fear, but were mainly happy.

The teaching practice would be the only challenge of the year, a challenge that sent me into inner turmoil. I knew I would be all alone with the children, all alone in front of the pupils. The act of transmitting knowledge became mysterious. Lots of questions filled the rest of the day. What happens between the teacher and her pupils at the moment when she is teaching a lesson? Can the teacher insist that what she says is exact? How would I be sure that the children understood the material?

I was oppressed by the painful feeling of being unfit. I recalled the first shock my conscience experienced at the age of twelve, when I’d asked the insoluble question: what does it mean to judge, which also translated as what does it mean to pass judgement?

The full moon lit up my cubicle. I huddled under the covers waiting for sleep. The cold dry night crept into my cell. I was cold.

Yolande was away the whole week. My questions were re-duced to a spray of fireworks. I didn’t have enough knowledge to sustain my thinking. I would go off on teaching practice, I’d noted the date.