Anonymous melancholy
In the first part of my life as a cultural professional, I traveled around the region. In order to promote our events by distributing posters in A3, then A4 format — it turned out that a small poster was more visible, since no shop dared to display the large one, fearing to open the door to hundreds of promotions in 42 x 29.7 that would fill the windows till the darkness.
So I was roaming the neighboring towns, every thursday, aboard my gleaming red and black Dacia — that is to say, red with a black wing, the scar of this day a very poor evaluation of the distances precipitated the front of the car in the supporting post of the mirror intended to facilitate maneuvers. One of the million backstabbing ironies this new job would offer me daily.
Among the areas covered by my weekly promotion, Solre-le-Château. I have a special connection to this village, as I spent part of my childhood there. Between the town square, welcoming every tuesday the remains of a market that marked my youth, and the first High School, where I wandered with my band of buddies, it is difficult not to wriggle with the past, inspired to me by these streets the young me trampled a thousand times.
The same ghost of anxiety twists my stomach every time I walk up l’Avenue du Collège (“the high school avenue”).
I see myself doing the same movements, but twenty years earlier, with my too heavy schoolbag and my too light motivation, bathed in the naive chaos of hundreds of young people that I will rub shoulders with 24/7 before losing them, probably forever.
Here too, this zone of my past shows changes on an abrupt generational course.
The phone booth is still planted at the foot of the high school, but its shattered windows, its wire dangling in mourning from its torn handset and its charred aluminum carcass bear witness to a succession of unfortunate episodes with authentic square meter gangsters.
The front parking lot still exists, and its tired asphalt no longer supports the teachers’ cars but the metallic barriers of a counter-terrorism plan.
The dirty gray of the barricades and the cabin awake an unpleasant taste in my mouth. Undoubtedly the taste of renunciation, of the acceptance that my past, MY School, are dead and will never live again …
Distribution days follow one another and look the same, the excitement of finding a street from my past forerunning the bitterness of seeing its present. The western entrance of the building is now closed by a barrier overhung with spikes and cameras. In the distance, at the end of the alley, I can see the plinth that once housed this bronze statue of Rodin’s The Thinker, whose outstretched hand received, through empty cans or toilet paper, the absurdity of our idiotic youth. All that’s left is a concrete cube soiled with copper lashed by rain for decades.
Even the Thinker has disappeared. It’s revealing.
A little further, a large parking lot made of white pebbles below three soil embankments still testifying to the claws of the bulldozers. I sigh. There was an abandoned factory here, which we had explored with my best friend when we were twenty. We had to cross a thicket full of thorns, to face wild cats and to avoid traps, like that barbed wire which stuck in the skull of my buddy, disheveled, and in a very bad mood afterwards.
Since my last visit here, I had no idea the building was gone. I call it Fringe Syndrome, callback to the TV series, the feeling of having slipped into a parallel dimension where everything is the same, except for a few startling details. Like a factory, the cradle of my explorer memories, and erased from my sight, as if this reminiscence were only imaginary, to exist only in evanescence.
The neighborhood that saw the chubby, clumsy schoolboy grow up has changed so much that it has disappeared, in a way. I am the same person in the same place, but everything is different. I have become anonymous, again. Even though each episode it offered wasn’t happy, I project down this street, and what it stood for, the impossible wish to go back.
But the high school avenue is, like a symbol, a one-way street.
