Army Leave

Every time I do something, I think of my brother, and every time I think of my brother I remember that he would have done it better than me.

This has been going on for twenty-three years.

You can't really say that it's made me bitter; actually, it's made me think more clearly.

Here, for example, I'm on the train number 1458 in the province of Nancy. I'm on leave; the first time in four months.

So, I'm doing my military service like a regular guy while my brother is in a higher regiment, always eats at the officer's table, and gets to go home every weekend. Give me some of that.

I'm going home by train. When I get to my seat (which I had reserved beforehand), there was an old matron sitting with all of her children spread out on her knees. I didn't dare tell her. I sat down facing her after having balanced my enormous canvas bag in the baggage hold. In the compartment, there was also a cute-looking girl who was reading a book about ants. She had a freckle at the corner of her mouth. Too bad.

I had already bought a sandwich in the train restaurant.

And here's how I would have spent my day had I been my brother: he would have given a huge smile to the old matron and shown her his ticket, "excuse me, ma'am, listen, perhaps I've made a mistake, but it seems like . . . " and the lady would have excused herself like mad and shoved all her stuff in her bag and gotten up right away.

As for the sandwich, he would have made a little fit next to the station saying that for 28 francs, they had better put a little thicker piece of ham on, and the server with his ridiculous black cardigan would have changed it right away. I know; I've already seen it happen.

Onto the girl; it's even more vicious. He would have looked at her in such a way that she would have fallen for him immediately.

But she had known at the same time that he had noticed her freckle. Then, she would have been hard-pressed to concentrate on her ants.

That's if he had been interested in her.

Because in any case, the non-commissioned officers travel in first class and, there, it goes without saying that the girls don't have freckles.

Me, I wasn't able to tell if this cute girl was interested in my cowboy boots or shaved head, because I fell asleep right away. They had us wake up at four in the morning to do some stupid drill.

Marc, my brother. he did his service after three years of prep school and before starting engineer school. He was twenty years old.

Me, I did it after my two years at tech school and before looking for work in the electronics sector. I am twenty-three years old.

Anyways, it's my birthday tomorrow. My mom insisted that I come home. I don't really like birthdays, I'm too old now. But oh well; it's for her.

She's lived alone since my dad ran off with our neighbor the day of their nineteenth anniversary. Symbolically, that's pretty strong.

I couldn't understand why she didn't get together with anyone else. She could have and probably still can, but . . . I don't know. With Marc, we talked about it once and we thought the same thing, that she was afraid. She doesn't want to risk being abandoned again. Once, we tried to get her to put an add in the dating section of the paper, but she never wanted to.

Since then, she's gotten two dogs and a cat, so you'd think with a menagerie like that, it's practically mission impossible to find a good guy.

We live in Essonne, next to Corbeil, a little villa on the National 7. It's fine, it's calm.

My brother, he never says 'villa', he says 'house'. He finds the word 'villa' too redneck.

My brother never got over not being born in Paris.

Paris. He never stops talking about it. I think that the best day of his life was when he first rode the Metro. For me, Paris or Corbeil, it's all the same.

One of the rare things that I remember from school was the theory of a great philosopher of olden times who said that the important thing was not where you are but the state of mind you find yourself.

I remember that he wrote his for one of his friends who got restless and wanted to travel. The other said to him roughly that it wasn't too bad to have to drag around all his crap with him. The day that my teacher told us that, my life changed.

It's one of the reasons that I chose manual labor.

I prefer that my hands reflect my life. It's that simple.

In the army, you meet a bunch of morons. I live with these guys that I never would have known before. I bunk with them, I go to the bathroom with them, I grub with them, I play cards with them, and still they disgust me. It's not a question of being a snob or anything, it's just that these guys aren't anything. I don't mean like having sense, that's like an insult, I'm talking about weighing something.

I know I'm not explaining very well but at least I understand myself; if you take one of these guys and you put them on a scale, obviously you'd have weight but really, they don't weigh anything. . .

None of them could be considered as substantial. Like ghosts, you could put your arm right through them and touch nothing but noisy emptiness. Them, they would tell you that if you put your arm through them you would risk losing an arm. Snarf snarf.