Girl Read online

  ALSO BY CAMILLE LAURENS

  Little Dancer Aged Fourteen

  Who You Think I Am

  In His Arms

  Originally published in French as Fille in 2020

  by Éditions Gallimard, Paris

  Copyright © Éditions Gallimard, 2020

  English translation copyright © Other Press, 2022

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text designer: Jennifer Daddio / Bookmark Design & Media Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Laurens, Camille, author. | Hunter, Adriana, translator.

  Title: Girl / Camille Laurens ; translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.

  Other titles: Fille. English

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021045577 (print) | LCCN 2021045578 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635421019 (paperback) | ISBN 9781635421026 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PQ2672.A78365 F5513 2022 (print) | LCC PQ2672.A78365 (ebook) | DDC 843/.914–dc23/eng/20211006

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045577

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045578

  Ebook ISBN 9781635421026

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Camille Laurens

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Epilogue

  Credits

  About the Authors

  To my wonderful daughter

  one

  1

  “It’s a girl.”

  It starts with a word, like light or darkness. Your birth is like the creation of the world, and there is heaven and there is earth, one word cleaves space in half, splits the masses in two, separates time. It’s not God who pronounces it, though—better for you to know that right away. It’s Catherine Bernard, a midwife at the Sainte-Agathe clinic where the clock on the wall says it’s a quarter after five. She didn’t prepare this announcement, she didn’t want or determine anything, having all the less opinion on the matter because she’s a nun, but the result is the same: she says it, she labels you as she brings you into the world, there in her immaculate headdress this virgin bride of Christ pronounces her judgment, she gives birth to you by labeling you. You’re born from this word as if from a rose, you bloom in her mouth. You’re still nothing at this stage, barely a subject, struggling to come to life; you can’t yet say “I am,” no one says “she is,” not even in the past tense, “and the girl was,” even with an indefinite article—“and a girl was”—it’s not something people say. You’re not indefinite, anyway, oh no, you weren’t born indefinite, there’s already an “s,” you see, just one tiny letter to make the switch from he to she, but a huge letter all the same. In fact, you’re a very definite article. The facts speak for you. Born a girl. There it is, it’s been said, it reverberates in the room, a white space with a bottle of water, a small bed, and a crucifix. Your birth is a commonplace enigma. You’re almost nothing when you’re born, it’s all a little rough-and-ready. Some schism is taking place, but where? And there is evening and there is morning. The one follows the other, the one becomes the other. But not you. You can’t be changed. That’s how it is. It’s too late now for the fairies to gather around your crib. The deed is done. You arrive in this world headfirst and your newly delivered life unfolds in the free air, well, “free” in a manner of speaking because day or night, morning or evening, you won’t be anything else ever again. You cry, you scream out loud, it’s a cold hard truth filling your lungs, a feminine rhyme, and the crying gives you a harsh sense of separation, you can feel a division, it’s as simple as that, there are now two, there’s a cut, it’s cut. Your birth separates you both from your mother, who’s also a girl, that’s a known fact, and from all of humanity that isn’t labeled a girl. The opposite word isn’t spoken, and with good reason, but it hovers silently in the ether of the room, the inverse word creates a stencil effect in the air, until now the embryo, the fetus, the baby had been “he” or, at best, “it.” She or he, only a few seconds ago everything was still possible, grammar could still glide dreamily over the landscape, but now your wings have been clipped (and what else?), you’re more alone than Robinson Crusoe but still, it’s done, the die is cast along with the placenta. God (who was born a boy, people say, who was the father of a son, people believe), God is a child who plays dice: it’s a girl.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s a girl.”

  The voice that formulates your incipit has no particular inflection other than the modulations induced by a job well done. Catherine Bernard likes a little drink when she’s not on duty, but her results haven’t been affected to date. She’s helped plenty of women become mothers, oh yes, and brought so many fruits of their wombs into the world. Even when really probed, she wouldn’t reveal a preference—an ambivalence at most: newborn boys always remind her of baby Jesus in the manger, the sacred aspect of her work and of the nativity. But girls are less alien to her, she finds it easier to wash them. On reflection, she realizes she spends a lot of her time fiddling with genitalia. Baby boys’ parts are huge in proportion to the rest of their bodies, inflated with hormones, they’re all anyone can see. With girls, where they’re more discreet, she feels less shame, even though that’s ridiculous. Lord, forgive me my thoughts.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s a girl.”

  On the other end of Sister Catherine’s announcement are your parents, its recipients, and its guilty parties too, the girl-manufacturers, the troublemakers—in the zero hour, which of them failed to supply what? But right now, that’s not the prevailing question, although later they might blame each other in order to ratify their disappointment, to deal with the intransigence of it. So, they receive the news. When they were waiting for it to come, waiting for you to come, they knew nothing. They didn’t see you through the opaque walls of your mother’s womb, didn’t watch your hands stirring its liquid air on a glowing screen studied by someone in a white coat. Someone whose practiced eye they would have eyed eagerly, clinging to a decisive statement always clouded in some doubt (for the sake of professional conscience), touched by such intimate interpretations (to be moving about that much, this must be a…)—hanging on the oracle’s pronouncement, on the likely truth of it, not “It’s a girl” but a more cautious equivalent, an approximative synonym: “I can’t see anything.” They weren’t informed of your missing configurations in the specific place where this matter is configured. “I can’t see anything,” by which you understand: “It’s a girl…” Nothing to see here, move along please, it’s a girl. Your parents didn’t expect or hear such announcements because the appropriate equipment doesn’t exist yet. It’s 1959. A shadow of the family jewels—or nothing—pixelating before the viewer’s eyes has only just been conceived as an idea; technology isn’t yet inscribing the thickset waves of longings and disappointments, no image captures amniotic swimmers, so you can go to great lengths, you can move heaven and earth with your kicking, but the suspense remains intact to the end, and your “hello there”s with your toes are wasted, despite all the pregnancy predictions: no morning sickness, it’s a boy, can’t stop throwing up, it’s a girl; soaring libido, it’s a boy, zero sex drive, it’s a girl. Craving salt, craving sugar? Girls like their food, everyone knows that. They say that if the bump is as round as a soccer ball, the baby’s a boy; if it’s shaped like a rugby ball, then it’s a girl. (“Pah!” says your grandfather who tricked the All Blacks in 1925 in a stadium full to the rafters.) There are still more secret hypotheses, whispered from ear to ear by laboring women, in between two bouts of panting: if you orgasmed when the baby was conceived, it will be a boy, if you didn’t feel a thing, you’re having a girl. Your mother’s worried.

  It’s news for another reason too: you’re not the first. It’s not just a girl that’s being announced to them but another girl. A second girl—second and final they’re thinking, not anticipating any more (they’re wrong). You’re not just a girl, you’re a girl again. You follow on from a girl. Your sister (you’ll soon become aware of this), your sister was born before you—and with your birth, you’re the one who gives her the name “sister,” you’re the one who bapti
zes you both with a label other than girl, the label you now share of sisters (she doesn’t want it, mind you, and neither do you nor anyone else). By the grace of God, your elder sister was allowed to come into this world without too much haggling. Still, she was named Claude just to let God know (not that anyone believed in him) that, well, they were expecting, they thought, they hoped…You, though, the second girl, you’re bewildering. “It’s another girl”: you’re disappointing news. You weren’t expected. Your sister didn’t set things up well for a pigeon pair, but you’ve made it a couple of lame ducks.

  Your father’s taken the trouble to be here, all the same. Full of impatience, he attends your birth. It’s still very unusual, ten years before May 68; fathers are kept away from their wives’ dilated vulvas, from the pain that stirs smells of shit and blood in them, from the way they moan like dying animals as they empty out their innards. The fathers would never get over it, so people claim, the sight would make them impotent. Men are protected from a bankrupt libido and couples from mutual disgust. But an exception has been made for your father, he’s deemed strong enough to stay in the delivery room, after all he’s in the business…well, nearly: he’s a dentist. So he’s used to gaping wounds, then, not horrified by bloodied mucous membranes. Being accustomed to gums, he’s unlikely to feel threatened by a vagina with teeth. Unlikely to pass out on the spot, gelded for life by the terrifying spectacle. Every day, he…Wait, what? No…It’s not your father who’s a dentist, what nonsense, that’s Dr. Galiot whom he came across earlier in a billow of cigarette smoke along the corridor, next to the midwives’ station; he’ll be your dentist when you have teeth, and the son he’s about to take in his arms, without even putting out his cigarette, will be in the same class as you for eighth and ninth grade—Jérôme Galiot, a little asshole born the same day as you, your not-twin whose cheap jokes will help you understand just how opposite the opposite sex can be, but for now he’s his parents’ trophy at the Sainte-Agathe clinic in Rouen, just fifteen minutes and a few centimeters in length ahead of you. No, your father’s a GP on the rue Jeanne-d’Arc and he already has a name for you: Jean-Matthieu. Jean like his father and Matthieu like himself, honoring the men in the family and the two finest Gospels, an expression of puritanical Protestantism. He was contacted at his office and told it would be soon, he dropped everything and came running then left again, then came back at five in the morning, the night air nurtures the XY chromosome, it’ll come right this time, it’s a boy, he can tell, he wants to be there. He waved to Dr. Galiot in passing, “Congratulations,” and hurried into the delivery room just as you emerged from the abyss. Sister Catherine feels lukewarm about the intrusion, she makes a sort of draping action with her apron as if she’s been caught naked, and your father hardly has time to see you crown before she dispatches him toward your exhausted and still-ignorant mother: no room for jealousy, and it’s more seemly. Judging by the scant hairs stuck to the top of your head, you’re of the male gender, for sure, it could even be said there’s no mistaking you’re in your fifties with galloping hair loss and not long left before you’ll be bald: your father’s joking but no one’s laughing, your mother’s demented with pain, the fruit of her womb is raking through her, she’d forgotten this monstrous pain, she’ll never say a word about it to you because pain is erased from the body’s memory more readily than pleasure, nature’s a clever thing, and you’ll experience this supreme torture meted out to the girl-born soon enough. Your father stands by the bed half-heartedly holding the mask over your mother’s nose, and her want of oxygen and tenderness, while she strains her neck toward Sister Catherine who’s immersed in the struggle of new life, “come on, push, come on, breathe,” hoo, hoo, and back to that, and on again, the shoulders are out, how many babies has she given birth to in words? The moment of delivery is near, meanwhile your father—as he waits to hold the baby, or at least the truth about this baby—holds his breath, he suddenly loses faith, strangulated and lost for words as he teeters on the brink. “What is it?” your mother asks between two gasps for air, no one knows yet, one last push, there isn’t a smell of roses and yet there it is, your father falls apart, did he ever believe otherwise? What is it? It’s a missed opportunity.

  You’re laid on your mother’s stomach, hi there, says your father when he sees your undeniable vulva. You cry. On autopilot, he breaks into a smile, then backs away. You’re not mewling, you’re yelling, screaming, what a pair of lungs, funny that, you couldn’t tell the difference from the sound of it. A booming voice, 3.9 kilos, 52 centimeters: we came so close. Your father leaves the room. It all feels exhausting to him, he’s empty, goes home to bed—the cord, the first feed, the first bath, they don’t mean much to him, in four hours he’ll be giving consultations again. And calling the family in the Ardèche, carefully modulating his rasping voice: “It’s a girl…yes, yes, that’s nice too.” A girl. There, it’s said, it’s done. The champagne can stay in the car. With a boy he’d have watched the first bath for the pleasure of seeing those favored body parts float. But a girl…nothing to see. It’s not that he’s unhappy, no. There’s just a little something missing from his happiness. He slinks along the walls to avoid seeing Dr. Galiot again but bumps into him on the way into the parking lot. “Well?” “It’s a girl.” “Ah! That’s nice too.”

  * * *

  —

  “It’s a girl.”

  Come to think of it, perhaps those aren’t really the first words you hear—because you do hear them, that much is indisputable: it’s not known exactly what newborn babies can see, whether they’re more or less blind or shortsighted in the first few hours, but no one has ever suggested they’re deaf. It’s even said that they hear sounds in utero, several months before they come into the world, that, through the gurgling and whispering of amniotic fluid, they can make out their mother’s voice or its reverberations, the father patting her stomach, when there’s a father around, and music if it’s played loudly enough. In your particular case, your father certainly made no effort to engage in conversation before you were born, it’s not like him to talk to strangers—male or female. It’s also unlikely that you heard Bach’s cantatas or Mozart’s sonatas because he listens to records late at night, at a time when a pregnant woman should already be in bed. On the other hand, in the mornings and afternoons, when your father wasn’t there, your mother listened nonstop to that year’s hit, “Only You,” crooned by the Platters, “You’re my dream come true, my one and only you,” because she’d bought the single the day it came out. Or Doris Day singing “Qué será, será, whatever will be, will be”…So perhaps, before that inaugural sentence, during your multilingual gestation, you caught snatches of bottom-of-the-swimming-pool English, and would translate them later when that became your job, only then understanding “You’re my dream come true”; and possibly a few words of Spanish muffled as if by earplugs, “Whatever will be, will be, the future’s not ours to see.” The last of those lyrics are more fitting to the happy event than the first because what happens is categorically not what anyone was dreaming, given that what happens is in fact just you, in other words it’s only you. Six months before you were fully developed, then, you were all ears, ready to listen, firstly to the refrains of your future existence and then, on the cusp of the outside world, to both the plop of a pebble skimmed across the relatively smooth surface of the surrounding silence (“It’s a girl”) and its ricochets bouncing from voice to voice (“That’s nice too,” “Better luck next time,” “Girls are easier,” “You’ll just have to keep trying”).

  * * *

  —

  You’re swaddled in a white sleepsuit, a present from your grandmother who didn’t want to tempt fate. Have you heard the one about the two babies on the maternity ward? Two babies have just been born and they’re lying next to each other in the hospital’s nursery. “What are you?” one of them asks, “A boy or a girl?” “Don’t know,” the other replies. “Hold on,” says the first one, leaning toward the other crib, lifting the blanket, and peering in. “You’re a boy.” “How do you know?” the other one asks. “Well, you’re wearing blue slippers.” There was a degree of caution with you, they resisted knitting anything sky blue, decided against painting the walls periwinkle, refrained from hanging a navy frieze in the nursery that had been readied. A little patience with that azure. Never count your cockerels till the eggs are hatched. But they didn’t tend toward candy, salmon, or blush either, they even avoided eggshell in favor of pure white, snow white (virgin white) onto which fate and chromosomes could project some (blood) red or (royal) blue: it’s nature, not our dreams, that writes the story. The presents offered to the new arrival soon make up for this hesitation. Rabbits, rattles, hats, towels, you’ll have a vie en rose, pretty in pink—like that dress of Grace Kelly’s that so many women have copied since she married her prince. Even the safety pins holding your diapers in place will be pink—yes, you’re born at the historic frontier between washable and disposable diapers; and that doesn’t make you look any younger, I know, I know. And, can you believe it, this white layette doesn’t do your mother any favors, it wasn’t really a brilliant idea. Your grandmother’s knitted enough for six months, what with the sleepsuits, the blankets, the cardigans and socks, all in neutral white, so every passerby in the street, everyone in her apartment block, and every patient of her husband’s who takes an interest but has nothing to go on has to ask “What is it?” or “What’s your baby’s name?” and your mother has to keep replying “It’s a girl,” or even (and this takes the cake) to disabuse anyone amazed by your misleadingly sturdy frame, “No, no, I promise you, it is a girl.”