An extract from A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson

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 stigmatisation began and she started to slip away. Hence that ‘No’ to the child who wanted to play her piano. 

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.