![]() Rather, my dreams were so humble that normal people would have considered them laughable. As a little girl, Delphine wanted to be a secretary at a travel agency. It was just a way to introduce the fact that my last dog took forever to die and maybe fish for a little sympathy.”ĭelphine is a veterinarian, which is not something that she’s dreamed of doing since she was a little girl, contrary to what people assume when she informs them of her profession. I mean, I know the chances that my being late would lead to any catastrophic consequences are low, maybe exactly as low as my being early would, actually-I don’t know, I’m not a math person-but I’m sure they’re not zero, they’re not “nothing,” so why say anything at all? I don’t understand why people say things like that. “Nothing horrible will happen if you’re a little late,” he’d say. His office was the one you stumbled upon when, after looking in vain for Sarrazin’s, you were ready to give up on “Venice in the Middle Ages” to take a shot at “Advanced Latin.” Allan’s class was always full.Īt the restaurant, waiting for my sister, I refrained from Googling “white spots tongue.” My sister wasn’t late, by the way. I’d taken Allan’s class my first semester. The “Sarrazin triangle” had direct consequences on Professor Allan’s class enrollment-that’s how I knew about it. In my time, there had been a legendary office, Professor Sarrazin’s, and every year I would hear of a student having a meltdown in some hallway during registration week, trying to find it. I assumed that the Sorbonne ranked Professor Croze fairly highly, because her office had been particularly hard to find. I’d noticed, back then, that the more prestigious the professors the more carefully hidden their offices were. ![]() Leaving Professor Croze’s office, I got lost in the same maze of university hallways that I’d always had trouble navigating as a student. They think bravery is a form of stupidity, actually.” They thought I was brave, which made me weirdly proud-except they see no value in bravery. “They said, ‘But what if we had been bad people? Did you think about that?’ They couldn’t understand why I would leave my home and take chances staying with them. “In fact, they were way more concerned about my own lack of fear in coming to them than anything else,” she went on. “I can’t see how this relates to Burgundy,” I’d said. It doesn’t even occur to them that they could respond.” ![]() Neighboring tribes come and slaughter them and rape their women, and the Pawong don’t know to defend themselves or retaliate. “There’s this tribe somewhere in South Asia, the Pawong, if I remember it right, and they don’t understand war or even conflict at all. “It’s always fear with you.” He’d closed his eyes at this point, which was something that he did whenever he planned a sentence more than four words long. “It’s just that I get bored there during the day. “What is it now? Is it the thought of getting on a train full of strangers that frightens you? Or is it seeing an old man on the verge of death?” (Glauber’s father had cancer.) We’d just had an argument about a four-day weekend: Glauber wanted to go visit his parents in Burgundy, I wanted to stay in Paris. What he’d told me about the Pawong, though, on the night we broke up had been meant not as edifying trivia but as an insult, I think, even though I hadn’t taken it that way-as I said, I take nothing personally. “The Mehinakus are so strict about female and male task attribution that a bachelor would rather go hungry than cook for himself,” he would say, or “The Aztecs believed that the goal of war was to take prisoners, not kill the enemy, and that’s why they lost to the Spanish so quickly.” Glauber had been an anthropology minor in college, and random facts about faraway cultures would pop into his head on occasion, usually over dinner, when there was a lull in our conversation. ![]() I’m not just making it up for the sake of the story. Glauber is a name, in case you’re wondering, and it was Glauber’s name. The Pawong were a small tribal society that my boyfriend, Glauber, had told me about a couple of months earlier. From one month to the next, I’d seen it shuffle around among the entertainment, politics, and women’s-interests sections of the newsstand. I was writing a story on the Pawong for Wide, a cultural magazine with interests so broad that no one knew quite how to think about it. ![]()
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