Sweet Days of Discipline

by Fleur Jaeggy

I still thought that to get something you had to go straight for your goal, whereas it is only distractions, uncertainty, distance that bring us closer to our targets, and then it is the target which strikes us.

Frédérique spoke of a man as of a completed parabola. In the evening when I went back to my room with the German girl, I thought it over. Of course we are experts when it comes to women, we who have spent our best years in boarding schools. And when we get out, since the world is divided in two, male and female, we’ll get to know the male side as well. But will it ever have the same intensity? Will conquering men, I wondered, be as difficult as conquering Frédérique?

Literature for its own sake didn’t amuse me; the important thing was to prepare for my conversations with Frédérique.

With us there was a kind of fanaticism that prevented any physical expression.

She attached a value to her poverty, the way others might to their extravagance. She was truly possessed by her indigent state, all she had was herself, but it was more than enough, since the aromas of servitude bubbled up from her constantly, a natural predisposition.

But I persevered in the pleasure of taking my sadness to the limit, the way one does with some practical joke. The pleasure of disappointment.