A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre

Author:Anne Serre [Serre, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions

VIII

SOMETIMES SHE HARBORS truly savage thoughts and everyone is terrified she’ll create a scandal, or worse. It’s justice she seeks, and she has no hesitation—does she ever hesitate?—in enlisting the relevant authorities, or those she imagines to be relevant at least. She pays a visit to the village priest, for example—though she no longer really believes in God, or at any rate doesn’t attend church—to set out her grievances and ask for his advice and intervention in her conflict with X or Z. The priest, needless to say, prevaricates. Perhaps he’s trying to reason with her and calm her down? She writes to the chairman of a company she used to work for, where she quite rightly feels she was treated unfairly, to seek redress. All she receives is some vaguely worded reply, but even the embryo of a response is enough at times to appease her sense of grievance. Because all she is ever asking for is a response. And even if the response is partial, unsatisfactory, slight, it will allow her to endure, to endure a little longer.

The Narrator spends whole summers in her company waiting for a letter or a phone call that never comes—in response to a job she has applied for, a project she has submitted to some decision-making body. Many of the letters and applications she sends out he has seen: they’re beautifully written, serious, substantial, gracious. Fanny’s patience at times knows no bounds; she’s capable of waiting for days on end. But her passiveness is no less marked, and the Narrator, who’s accustomed to getting things done, is alarmed by this. Fanny doesn’t try to intervene, to demand the reply she still hasn’t received; it’s as if such things were due not, as is so often the case, to some plodding employee who has fallen behind in their work or to a technical hitch, but instead to some mute embodiment of fate. “Call them! Demand a reply!” he tells her. And she does, yet the sheepishness with which she goes over to the phone makes it clear to him—it’s appalling—that, deep down, she has stopped believing. That if she continues to go through the motions it’s as much for the people close to her, the ones who love her. There is no response, and she knows it.

So when she does get a reply—and a real one, a lovely great answer, crystal clear, spanking fresh and a hundred percent real—how she jumps for joy! At moments like this, she can even start thirsting for blood again, her reply tucked up under her arm like a young tiger or pressed to her heart like one of those bouquets people hold out to film stars when they step off the plane. Immediately she gains in confidence, becomes a grown-up, even motherly at times, and starts to speak to you with a hint of indulgence. It’s done: she has her real life back, the one she had as a child when living was so simple. And for a few hours she’ll be the Fanny she would have been had everything not fallen apart one day.

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