Lips tight and eyes tighter, they called me over to them. (I don't actually remember which teachers they were, and that's probably for the best.)
"That girl who won," they told me. "Did she speak French as well as you?"
"Well, no," I said. There was a noticeable difference.
They turned and spoke a few condensed volumes to each other. Something might have been said about the different schools we came from, the winner and I. As in, she was not from a Catholic one. I got the picture that my teachers felt their students had always underperformed in these contests and were beginning to think that something more than just bad luck was operating.
They spoke to me again. "Did she act her poem out? Gestures and such?"
"Yes."
Their lips got worse. Apparently they'd been beaten by (non-Catholic) amateur dramatics before, and it pissed them off. This was supposed to be about how well you spoke the language, not how well you gestured and emoted. On top of the possible prejudice issue, they were not happy to hear that a highly active but not-all-that-well-spoken recitation had beaten She Talk Pretty.
Then they stared at me hard. "How about you? Are you okay?"
I wasn't sure what they meant. "Well, yeah."
They didn't believe me. Eyed me up and down.
It took me nearly two decades to understand that they were looking for the normal human reaction--disappointment, a share in their suspicion, anger.
I didn't have it. I just didn't. I was hopelessly indifferent. Within a week of the contest, I had lost my third-place medal. I don't even remember what the contest was, exactly, except that it involved reciting poems in foreign languages. I don't remember who sponsored it. In fact, I wasn't clear about any of this *at the time.* Only years later did it dawn on me that my teachers had looked so angry because they had actually cared about the outcome. Can you imagine?
Now I will grant you that I should have been medicated back then. I was demonstrably not okay. (My doctor had even tried to slip me the psychoactive by prescribing a "muscle relaxant" for my troubled breathing, but this did not make it past my furiously anti-medication family.) (He was livid, and in light of how things turned out subsequently, I can understand why.)
But there was something else too. I mean, just look at the poem I chose.
"Recueillement"
Sois sage, o ma Douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille.
Tu reclaimais le Soir; il descend; le voici;
Une atmosphere obscure enveloppe la ville,
Aux uns portant la paix, aux autres le souci.
Pendant que des mortels la multitude vile,
Sous le fouet du plaisir, ce bourreau sans merci,
Va cueillir des remords dans la fete servile,
Ma douleur, donne-moi la main; viens par ici,
Loin d'eux. Vois se pencher les defuntes Annees,
Sur les balcons du ciel, en robes surannees;
Surgir du fond des eaux le Regret souriant;
Le Soleil moribond s'endormir sous une arche,
Et, comme un long linceul trainant a l'Orient,
Entends, ma chere, entends la douce Nuit qui marche.
<>
"Come, my sadness, far from them. Watch the years go down and smiling regret bubble up; like a shroud trailing to the east, hear the sweet walking Night."
(There's a lot more to it than that, but that's the core.)
It would have been a travesty to "win" with a poem like that. No matter how pretty I talked, not even if I'd concurrently danced the Dying Swan and cut my own throat for the "Regret souriant" to surge out of. A travesty. Poor Baudelaire could never have tolerated such a violation of his meaning and intent.
As Delirium, iirc, put it to the stuffy Destiny in "Sandman:" "There are other tales outside your book. There are other paths outside this garden."
