“I’ve already published articles in Claire magazine. I sent them with my résumé.”
“Yes, yes, agreed. But, how can I put it? This is a daily newspaper, not a women’s magazine. And you don’t come from around here, do you?”
“No.”
“You see, that’s what I’m saying. Now, to be a stringer is to know the region. To go out and meet people. To take the pulse of the countryside, eat pork for breakfast and drink wine at ten in the morning. To be like doctors in the old days, you know …”
Christian Voubert had sighed deeply as he gave her the bad news. (We don’t need anyone else at the moment, but I will not hesitate to contact you should the occasion arise.)
Anita was watching him closely and was reminded of her father’s deep inhalations and exhalations when he was embarking on his daily yoga session. A big veranda, bougainvilleas, a lean dog with half-closed eyes, the dawn, a man doing his vipassana meditation, birds calling to one another in the trees, strange how memories creep in where nothing calls them forth.
Did she give him a faint smile, there in that glass office? Did she relax a little? Did a hint of something touching and sincere appear in her face that caused a sudden shift in Christian Voubert’s resolve?
“Anita, it’s your lucky day. We’re going to give you a few months’ trial. Agreed? You’ll be a stringer. That’s all I can offer you for the moment. Later on, we’ll see. You’ll have to prove yourself.”
That evening, standing on a chair in front of Adam, with a rug draped around her like a toga, Anita had declaimed:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears
To be a stringer is to know the region
To be a stringer is to take the pulse of the countryside
Monsieur Voubert, my friends, tells us to eat pork for breakfast and drink wine in the morning
And Monsieur Voubert is an honorable man …
Adam had laughed until the tears came to his eyes.
Anita was making a joke of it but she was too naive, too happy to read between the lines, to guess at Christian Voubert’s private thoughts as he wondered how long a woman like that would stick at it with that job.
A woman like that was the sum total of prejudices, clichés, and impressions he had formed in his mind as a result of his meeting with Anita.
A foreigner: she doesn’t know her way around and makes mistakes in French.
A young mother: not always available and gets depressed.
Married to an architect whose office is three streets away from the newspaper: a housewife looking for an occupation so as not to get even more depressed.
Has lived in Paris: arrogant.
Native of an island: lazy.
But as Christian Voubert will discover, Anita is not a woman like that. She calls at the editorial office every Monday. The schedule for the day is posted at 10:00 a.m. and she comes in through the door at 10:07. The top lines on the schedule are devoted to the news stories that will occupy the front and back pages in the paper. Politics, social news, financial news, news in brief, environmental topics, culture. She reads through the topics, the names of the reporters, occasionally there is a note of the style of coverage or the angle the article will take.
Lower down on the schedule there is a list of locales, with a note of the commune, the topic, the name of the stringer. There is never any note of the angle or the style. Anita looks through the topics to which no stringer has been assigned and every week she writes down a minimum of two and a maximum of five. She naturally has her own criteria—she only covers events that take place between 9:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., so she can drop Laura off at school and pick her up; she never works on Wednesdays because Laura is at home then; she notes down all the events happening on the weekend because that is when Adam takes over for her at home. Next she makes her way to Claire, the news editor. She is a good-natured, plump woman who talks fast and gives good advice. She is forever tossing her head backward to rearrange her pretty curls, which seem to be mounted on springs. A coquettish gesture on the verge of becoming a nervous tic, thinks Anita. Claire confirms the topics or not, decides which days the stories will appear, and Anita can begin the week.
She accepts whatever falls to her equally calmly and seriously: the final interclub match between pétanque teams, a veterans’ reunion, the annual bazaar at a primary school, a miniconcert given by a Johnny Hallyday lookalike at an old people’s home, a performance of Antigone by a high school dramatic society, a day of regional cuisine, the deliberations of the jury for a “Houses in Bloom” competition.
On her first time out, in a village where they were celebrating the birthday of a pair of ninety-year-old twins, she had failed to understand the looks she attracted, both surprised and questioning. People responded to her politely but warily. She had great difficulty in getting them to tell her stories about the two spinster ladies who had been born in this very village. The best she got was the grocer’s son telling her how they used to wash one another’s feet each morning. Twice the mayor asked her if she was indeed the person he had spoken to on the telephone the previous day and for how long she would be standing in for Georges (the regular stringer who was down with flu). She did not manage to take good group photographs, people kept drifting away as fast as they gathered. All she managed to take was a picture of the ninety-year-old ladies in profile, after they had blown out their candles, their faces swathed in a faint mist.
