A Leopard-Skin Hat
About this book
Fanny enters the narrator’s childhood as a magnetic older girl, funny, imaginative, imperious, and already vulnerable to terrors other people cannot manage. Their bond changes across years without settling into one category of friendship, kinship, or desire.
Brief scenes preserve clothes, rooms, jokes, quarrels, treatments, disappearances, and the exhausting cycles through which crisis becomes familiar. The narrator does not make Fanny’s illness picturesque, nor does she pretend attentive love supplied the cure it wanted to be.
The title’s hat is one of many objects through which memory returns with greater precision than explanation. Writing becomes an act of mourning that can honour a person without organising her suffering into a useful lesson.
A Leopard-Skin Hat is Anne Serre’s intimate novel in Mark Hutchinson’s English translation. Its small scale and direct address give grief the shape of a conversation that continues because an answer is no longer possible.
Read a sample
5,099 words
Plain text
From the opening
I
OH! HOW PRETTY she was, Fanny, back in the days of her childhood, with her shiny black boots and her long blue eyes with their golden brown lashes, climbing onto walls and the branches of trees, the top of her wardrobe, calling herself Felix which means happy, powerful as a wrestler and clenching her teeth when she played the piano. One summer, a child from next door asked her if he could use her piano and Fanny refused, saying quite simply, “No.” There was nothing gracious about it, no attempt was made to comfort him or soften the blow. It was No. The child was taken aback and hurt, and went off looking distinctly sad. Even when Fanny was a full-grown adult and well into her thirties, her forties even, she could look at children in a most unpleasant way. One time, for example, it was little E, two or three years old, who caught her eye and recoiled in horror, curling up like a dry leaf. Then there was L, seven, struck dumb with astonishment in the middle of the swimming pool. At other times Fanny would dote upon these children, making a show of charm and affection that was again disproportionate and in response to which they would shrink back slightly, keeping their distance.
Much of the time Fanny’s body was lost in thought, like the rest of her being. Quizzical even. She had a way of standing in her swimsuit in a mountain lake, up to her knees in water, like a question. She wasn’t gazing off into the distance, nor was she contemplating the shimmering veil of the lake’s surface exactly; no, she was simply standing there, waiting for something manifestly impossible to happen, some unearthly apparition or reckoning; and were you then to gently recall her to her “senses,” she would emerge from a grim, dreamlike state beneath the dome of which no bird flew.
For twenty, for fifteen years now, and ever more intently as time wore on, the Narrator had been keeping a close eye on his friend Fanny. He had examined her a million times, from behind, in profile, head-on—gently, as Fanny was a little fearful of being looked in the eye. He was sensitive to her hard, firm body, at times half-dead, like the body in “Petrified Man.” Something in it had congealed and wasn’t circulating properly: the blood? the lymph? With words, his own words—paltry little things—the Narrator would try to breathe new life into that body, to put back into circulation the teeming, fearless existence that lay bunched up in the hollow of Fanny’s belly like a clenched fist, a stone, a dead child, a poor stuffed animal. Even some of her fingers refused to move. Ten years earlier, Fanny had injured her hand after falling over, drunk, onto splinters of bottle glass, and ever since, her hand when playing the piano had been limp and slack, and the muscles at the base of the thumb had collapsed. That was when her stigmatization began and she started to slip away. Hence that “No” to the child who wanted to play her piano.
Besides, she had herself given up the piano, unable to play anything at all on it because of this enfeebled hand, which also kept her from sewing—not that she was a great one for sewing or darning, far from it—or doing any kind of work that was in the least bit painstaking. It was like a wounded paw caught one day in a trap; even the ring it wore had lost its shine. The other hand, however, had a powerful grip. It could clasp the straps of a very heavy bag and carry it around without difficulty, without grunting from the effort or breaking into a sweat, for miles, on trains, in streets, often as not filled with books she had read, passed judgment on, sorted and decided to sell because they quite rightly seemed to her of no interest whatever and she needed the money.
Twenty euros would get her through a day, or two days, or ten. But she was light-headed enough to pilfer things, and one day came home with an elegant leopard-skin hat which in reality she hardly ever wore but had taken a shining to. She would tell you about the theft with the amused and somewhat shamefaced air of a little girl, and were she to put on the hat would resemble the woman she might have been had her clenched belly, her often uninhabited body, and her sluggish hand not denied her entry to the cheerful, straightforward world we all of us inhabit, regardless of our afflictions. For us, the sky can be clear, cloudless, and blue. For Fanny, it was nothing of the sort and never could be, even if it also had, of course—thank heavens!—its shining paths, though probably none of the ones you might imagine.
An old man could be a shining path for Fanny. There was a time, for example, when she was rather taken with a library attendant, and chatting and drinking coffee with him at the foot of the Paris Panthéon gave her shards of joy. She was avid for new encounters, a thousand of which would furnish her with these shards of joy that would lodge in her for weeks on end, for months sometimes, so that, in spite of her inner turmoil and the lack of any heavenly response to her calls, she always carried within her little nuggets of joy and hope. They soon found ways of attaching themselves to her; the way was clear, the welcome wide open. So perhaps her body wasn’t quite so petrified after all: beneath the hard, firm, muscular crust, which oftentimes seemed almost deserted, there must have been a liquid realm, soft and luminous, so that a thousand shards could find their way in, one after the other, allowing her to breathe.
Continue reading the sampleClose the sample
For there was more to Fanny than the obstacles she encountered. She also had in her, popping up from time to time, and always when you least expected it, the jovial young woman in the leopard-skin hat she would have been had certain hatches not got battened down one day, by accident, abruptly, as if by a gust of wind. Whenever this woman turned up in a word or a look, the Narrator was astounded. So Fanny wasn’t just this old friend battling against great odds? She was also this perfect stranger, this person no one had ever heard of whose lineaments had yet to be set down. This fully formed individual who revealed her presence only in tiny bursts and seemed, I must say, in Fanny’s hard, taut body, to lead rather a pleasant life, given how fresh-faced and jovial and droll she was in her leopard-skin hat. Who was this woman?
She was intimidating to the Narrator because he knew nothing about her, and because her presence, which would reveal itself in a fraction of a second only to vanish on the spot, came as such a surprise each time. How was he to communicate with her? Could it even be done? It was as difficult as if you had wanted to speak to someone through a pane of glass. You could wave to her, of course, exaggerating the movements of your mouth so that she could understand the words you were miming; but of this woman in Fanny, this woman who was Fanny, this Fanny B, so little was known—her language, her habits, her tastes, her knowledge, her intentions—that you were lost for words in her presence; not to mention that her way of turning up only to vanish on the spot left little place for any attempt at a relationship.
The Narrator tried addressing the jovial young woman in the hat, even when she failed to turn up, on the assumption that she was, after all, always there, albeit concealed much of the time, or else absent but likely to pop up suddenly if summoned. It didn’t work. Besides, it was a horribly complicated exercise to pull off: it would have meant addressing Fanny as if Fanny weren’t Fanny at all but this Fanny B with the hat, blonde-haired, jovial and relaxed. Addressing Fanny as if Fanny were to all intents and purposes someone else entirely. Perhaps there are psychiatrists who can do this, but I wouldn’t count on it. There are people who can do this, but there aren’t many of them and they’re hard to find. They’re like water diviners, I imagine, or shamans. No doubt somewhere in the world there was at least one person capable, upon meeting Fanny, of addressing head-on and straight-out the jovial, fresh-faced woman in the hat who lived inside her. But they couldn’t be found. That said, did this woman really want to live? To come out of her hidey-hole? To step into the light of day? To rub shoulders with anyone?
If she did, she certainly showed no signs of it. Not once did she give a wave of the hand, not once did she appear for more than a second or two, not once did she show any interest in communicating, or not with the Narrator at least—with others, we don’t know. If he thinks back over her ten or twenty or so appearances, something leaps out at him which he hadn’t quite picked up on, hadn’t really noticed at first, something that might have made him a little uneasy each time: a hint of irony in this woman, a barbed little irony like the tip of a very sharp dagger. Perhaps it was this that made communicating with her so impossible. Unless, of course, it was the Narrator who had simply been very foolish and very cowardly to have let such a tiny obstacle stand in his way.
But at least in the final years he had known she was there. Whenever he was talking to Fanny or hiking around with her, he would keep this Fanny B in mind, the woman with the blonde curls and the leopard-skin hat, the jovial one hiding behind the curtain with her ironic streak. She was included in the conversation, so to speak, so that even when the Narrator was talking to the real Fanny and taking all the usual precautions—any word would set off so many echoes in his friend that the weight of each had to be measured on high-precision scales—he was also talking in a way to Fanny B. And the latter he could have sworn (but we so often get things wrong) was listening.
How could he tell this? From a faint wavering, now and then, in Fanny’s gaze, or in one of her intonations. At moments like these, Fanny would be slightly off-balance for a second—and happily so. Slowly she would stare up in surprise at the Narrator puffing on his pipe like Maigret. So there were three of them now: the Narrator, Fanny the old friend with the crippling existence, and this other woman, the one in the hat, the jovial, ringleted one hiding behind her curtain, whom it would have been unthinkable to mention, to simply set down at the table—that was strictly forbidden—but whom it was neither prohibited nor authorized to throw a lifeline to. When you’re out on a limb, you have to try everything.
Fanny never said a word about her either way. Was she even aware of having inside her this unbuttoned, fresh-faced young woman who bore no resemblance to herself? You can be fairly sure she knew nothing of her existence, even though she was the one who had pilfered the leopard-skin hat Fanny hardly ever wore but was fond of, all the same. For the Narrator, however, the companionship of this silent young woman, this third party who might have been a kind of Blue Angel, or a Hopper figure waiting in a room while night turns the windows blue, or again, the woman in an upcoming film, or a film from the past that due to some unforeseen turn of events had never been released and would only be discovered fifty years later after the actress had died, the companionship of this young woman, then, with its powerful emotional charge, was refreshing.
No doubt we all have someone else inside us, thought the Narrator, though, to tell the truth, I’ve never felt this with anyone but Fanny. And if I examine my conscience, the Narrator went on, I know that I myself am that character, the writer’s secret twin, the one writing this story and the stranger within. But unlike this blonde-haired woman hiding behind her curtain, I work. When my master cries out to me for a story, even if I’m accustomed to not answering him at once, playing hard to get because I’m not servile, I always respond in the end because I would get bored otherwise and because it’s my role in life. So who exactly is this blonde-haired lady? Fanny’s narrator? No, no, she’s different somehow, it would never occur to her to dabble in poetry or fiddle about disentangling this enormous web of words as we Narrators do; no, what she would like no doubt is to live, to climb over the railing, cross to the other side of the screen; but how can she possibly do this when Fanny has placed her under “house arrest”?
For Fanny makes no attempt, or so it would seem, to free this woman. Or maybe she simply can’t. We have to face the facts: however astonishing it might seem in light of the enormous powers we all possess, there are things we cannot do. I myself, for example, thinks the Narrator, am incapable of writing a realistic novel. There’s nothing I can do about this. I’m a good observer, I love realistic novels, yet the moment I try to write one I yawn with boredom, crumple up and vanish. It may be that Fanny is unable to free Fanny B, whom it would nevertheless be fascinating to know and see spreading her wings.
In any case, no, it’s clear now, she has no wish to. The Narrator has only to mention the woman in passing for Fanny, often as not, to stiffen and brush him gruffly aside. “Let the dead bury their dead!” she seems to be saying. “Stop trying to interfere with the natural order of things, in the smug belief you can somehow improve on it.” As they make their way along a country road, he steals little glances at her. She walks determinedly on, ensconced in her birdless dream. She doesn’t really take in the scenery, except in a desultory sort of way. It’s inside herself that she looks, astonished at the sight of this dark turmoil, puzzled to be harboring such a thing, understandably a bit skeptical, but doing what she can to acknowledge its incredible existence.
II
BEFORE DYING ONE NIGHT in March, Fanny lived for forty-three years, without her fate, which had seemed so promising at first, showing any real improvement over time; on the contrary, it was a long, a very long, slow, inexorable decline. Her reaction to this was always sensible and to the point. There was hope? She would seize it with both hands and not let go. But hope, the moment she took hold of it, would wither and disintegrate and crumble into dust. She was also brave: faced with these countless, unrelenting deaths she never once gave up, never once threw in the towel. Should a new hope arise, she would again seize hold of it, knowing full well how little faith she could place in it now. But we do this, at times, saying yes to the world over and over again, quietly and with dignity (you see it in great novels). It’s a way of advancing one might call triumphal, regardless of the outcome.
Fanny’s actual life probably bears no resemblance to what the Narrator writes, because it was typical of Fanny to be as mysterious and baffling to others as she no doubt was to herself. She would, however, say “I.” And when she said “I,” she would say what she thought and felt, since it was also characteristic of Fanny that she never lied. After a while, though, the Narrator, her friend, realized to his surprise and horror that this “I” was actually made up of all kinds of words and voices, all kinds of thoughts and views, that were not the fruit of Fanny’s own personal reflections but a mishmash, so to speak, and sometimes even a substitute for her own. No doubt we are all made that way: composed of the thoughts of others in whom we have recognized a brother, a master, a fellow traveler; thoughts that have amplified, refined, and nourished our own. But in Fanny’s case, it was slightly different. It was as if, in place of her own mind—she whose intelligence and probity were unusually keen, and who had at her disposal a sound, broad fund of knowledge which she never ceased to refresh, being curious and eager to learn—it was as if at the point where all these currents come together and one’s own thoughts are formed there was a kind of hole. A black hole.
In other words, the rivers and brooks and streams that would normally flow into the sea to form new waters there, in her case gave on to an absence. It wasn’t that she couldn’t join up what she had learned or was unable to distinguish properly between things: she could, and her fund of knowledge never died. But where you and I say “I,” she would say the “I” of someone else, then someone else again, never quite managing to say her own. So her knowledge went unheeded, and what she said never really belonged to her, even if the words and thoughts that papered the walls of her brain, which she amassed the way certain madmen hoard bundles of rags in order to build a surrogate home for themselves, were not entirely alien to her. But who knows? Perhaps the jovial blonde-haired woman in the hat alone had a language, her own personal language, made up of her own personal thoughts. But that one didn’t speak.
People were often taken in by Fanny, of course, because she’d had a good education and knew how to manipulate appearances and hoodwink people. Her conversation was lively, and not for a second would an untrained ear have suspected the nonstop salvage work she had to resort to—hauling in other people’s words, arranging them so that they resembled her own, holding on to them. She was a “toiler of the sea,” a worker of the deeps—hence those sinewy arms and limbs—continually hauling in her nets filled with other people’s words, quickly emptying out the plentiful proceeds of the day’s catch, and then skillfully arranging it all: not to impress or seduce people, but simply to have words to say that would enable her to set foot elegantly, like everyone else, in the world of the living.
But how could she possibly have set foot there, the poor darling, with words that weren’t hers? She slaved away, she worked with all her energy, intelligence, and skill, she worked like an artist who insists on going flat out: and what was the result of it all? Not nothing exactly, since she had a life, but this all-engulfing lake. There were roads that were open to her, but they were so narrow, so spindly and unstable, that you would catch your breath at the sight of them. Fanny liked to draw, for example, and her drawings were those of a child. They were hers, they came from her and from her alone, they were conceived where the hole in her life wasn’t quite so dark, but they were exclusively copies of paintings. And when she did dare to try and draw from life, the line was so hatched, so segmented and broken, that it was more like the memory of a thing than the thing itself, the fragmented recollection of something that had vanished. “On this tree,” the Narrator asked her, looking at one of her drawings, “weren’t there leaves by any chance?” Fanny examined the drawing, looking puzzled and surprised. “I don’t know,” she replied.
*
There were times when Fanny was as youthful as a kid goat. One day, with the Narrator at the wheel, they drove out to the Lac de Rignac, a tiny lake in their favorite spot for walking, parked the car on the path, and lit out across the meadows. Fanny was wearing a short raincoat, the Narrator walked on ahead among the blue gentians, the clods of earth, and the yellow grass, then turned to wait for her. A hundred yards away, coming toward him, was a small girl, a child, a kind of rubber-booted Red Riding Hood with blonde curls. As Fanny drew near, her extreme youthfulness ceased and her eyes had their calm, secluded look. The Narrator gestured around at the countryside and the cows, enthusing about the beauty of it all. And Fanny, in her own words this time, said ever so tactfully, in that very tactful way she would have when she wasn’t too distressed, that, of course, it was certainly all very beautiful, but she didn’t feel a thing.
So he took her away, they traveled together, he would have taken her to the ends of the earth if only she would wake up and be happy and carefree. She would tag along, paying attention but never once, alas, taking the initiative, never once discussing or opposing the plans or routes he would propose while asking her for her opinion, trying to get her to join in and take charge. Joy of any kind seemed to astonish her, and a hundred-and-one things would give her keen pangs of joy, which she would embrace with the amazement of a little girl. At Béziers, they slept in a hotel where their room overlooked a garden. You would think she had never had any contact with flowers: she stood on the balcony, as if in awe of it all. They dined in a restaurant where there was a parrot: she laughed, astounded. In Thézan, they watched a procession of floats passing by, and photographs show her clapping her hands in amazement. At Vendres, where there’s a beach, she built a sandcastle and, while the Narrator was quietly reading in a deck chair like some hoary old paterfamilias, she sidled over and uttered this terrifying request: “Could you please talk to me instead of reading?”
And yet he talked to her continually. Never had the Narrator talked so much to anyone. He talked to her to rouse her, to keep her alive and in the real world, to bring her round from her dreams. He talked to her in every language known to man, he talked to her in tongues—he who disliked talking and needed silence. He talked to her to distract her and make her laugh, he talked to her so that she could breathe, to feed her and quench her thirst, he talked to her to bond with her, because he loved her and needed her to respond. He talked to her to manufacture life, cranking it out like a machine, he talked to her to drive back death, to fend it off with her, and she knew this, he talked to her and it was exhausting, she loved him for all the energy he expended on her.
At night on their travels she would sleep naked beside him without considering for a second how strange it was to be sleeping naked next to an old friend. When he put music on in the blue car he had rented, she loved it and would relax. There was a World Cup being held that summer: they watched the final on the terrace of a village café, a man was fawning on her, she was ready to spend the summer night outside with him—or anyone else, for that matter—happy and relaxed. The Narrator was of two minds. Fanny needed love so much, but at the same time the man was so oafish and Fanny so frail. The Narrator took her back to the guest room, she was happy there, after all. It wasn’t cuddling she needed so much as joy.
Then he drove her to the airport, she was flying out to Africa to meet some friends, a bit scared but eager to get going. Africa from which she would soon return, prematurely, unable to put up with her own company for very long. He took her to Marrakech, where another friend was living, but she would only take small steps visiting the city, often as not preferring to lie in the darkness of her room, where she spent so much time lost in thought that the Narrator started to get worried. For Fanny’s reflections, which she was quite happy to discuss with him, had no real focus it seemed, revolving around a bottomless well, a whirlpool that would suck them in, and whenever the Narrator went to fetch her, knocking gently before poking his head around the door, the eyes she turned to him took a second or two to recognize him, weighed down by an arduous journey from which she had evidently once more come back empty-handed.
Hardest of all for her friend the Narrator was Fanny’s astonishment—a perpetual, dumbstruck amazement, littered with question marks—at the lack of response that was her lot. That was why, on the rare occasions when she did fight back and flew into a terrible rage—even with the Narrator sometimes—he always felt relieved. There you are, there was life, there was frenzy, the desire to do battle! It was a sign she was rallying her forces, was about to march on the enemy and slay him perhaps—perhaps even slash him to ribbons, since the violence of these sudden outbursts seemed to know no bounds. They could last for days, weeks even. He can still see her, teeth clenched, seated beneath the trees in a park reading, glancing up to find her old friend there, happening by, and the look in her eyes, the language she had used to shoo him away. Had Fanny been armed she would probably have killed him that day. But sadly she had a loyal heart and would sit in judgment on herself. So once these fits of violence and loathing had passed, she would examine her conscience and opt for more civil relations. She would force herself to do this, taking no pleasure in it and guided solely by reason; her eyes still glowered, her jaw remained clenched, and it was impossible to catch her eye, for she continually looked away. She was like a horse in fetters, it was truly dreadful to behold: to be so full of life, yet bound up in chains. And for what? To what end? Merely to endure, to endure a little longer.
III
FANNY AND THE NARRATOR had been close friends since childhood, but within that friendship, roles that would normally shift about and change had been frozen for years now, and that wasn’t good. Nor did it bode well. The Narrator was stuck in the role of the watchful friend, steadfast and reliable, Fanny of the one who strays, is forever losing things—possessions, lodgings, friends—and only with the greatest difficulty manages to maintain a semblance of stability. He would have liked to have broken out of this box, not because he wished to fall apart in turn, but so that his friend could play the role of the steadfast, reliable one for a change. They could manage this for a minute or two, but not much more. For though Fanny liked to poke fun, and cruelly at times, at the Narrator’s chronic good health, she couldn’t stand him being weak. It would have been too much of an upheaval in the natural order of things.
She couldn’t bear the thought of the Narrator having secrets, and this was their big falling-out, their grueling war, for though they were perfectly willing to reach out and accommodate one another, the Narrator could never get Fanny to accept that he was entitled to his own secrets, and she never understood or forgave him for this. It would have required a diplomat between them to resolve the matter, bearing missives, shuttling back and forth, toning down their messages and altering them slightly, but there was none. All their lives, but especially during the last twenty years, they had come up against the Narrator’s secret as if it were a rock between them. To meet, they had to find a way around it, and most of the time they did; but like a dolmen in a meadow, the rock was there, day in day out, dawn to dusk. For nothing in the world would the Narrator have parted with his pebble; for nothing in the world would Fanny have consented to its presence. And while they had words for everything, words with which everything could be defined, examined, weighed, and considered, they had no word for this rock.
The Narrator could never understand why Fanny attached so much importance to his secret; as for Fanny, she was so full of it at times that she was unable to lead her own life, inferring and fantasizing and dreaming about the Narrator’s secret as if it stood in the way of her existence, hatching plans to destroy it, bombs with which to blow it up. But the secret was actually very simple: the Narrator was happy. Fanny wasn’t jealous of this in the way petty and embittered people are sometimes envious of the happiness of others; her feelings were nobler than that: she couldn’t bear the Narrator’s happiness because she couldn’t conceive of such a thing. It was this that pained her. That you were happy because you had achieved some great victory she could have understood. That you were happy because your existence was unusually full and rich and the world was exactly equal to your appetite she could have accepted. But that you were happy for no real reason, for no good reason at all, was a source of outrage and torment to her, and, to some degree, madness.