A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (32 page)

The concierge is red-faced and fat and sweet. She didn’t even throw me a second look.

Once the concierge went back downstairs Mother started pacing and wringing her hands.

“Why? WHY?” she said. Aunt Susanne was standing by the window staring out at the street.

“Oh, look! You can see a bit of the harbor from here,” she said.

“WHY, damn it? What I simply cannot comprehend is WHY she didn’t tell us before it was too late!”

“What’s done is done.” She was trying to sound calm but I could tell she was getting angrier by the second. “So just shut up, will you?”

“My God! Fifteen, Susanne! FIFTEEN! Think about it. Her whole life is ahead of her! But really, what did I do? I sent my children to the best schools, I taught them everything I knew…”

“Here, have a cognac and sit down. Calm yourself, Sylvie. Calm yourself.”

Mother started to cry. After she stopped crying she sat down next to me on the bed where I was lying facing the wall and took my hand.

“My darling baby. My poor poor darling baby. I hate to leave you like this. I’ll stay with you, how’s that?”

“It would be better if you went back to Paris with Susanne,” I told her.

Thursday 1 July.

Mother makes me laugh. Grandmother could tell her to go piss off the balcony of her loge at the opera and Mother would do it without blinking an eye.

Friday 2 July.

Night.

The apartment is not bad at all. In the main room the walls, the bedspread, the wood table, and the wicker chairs are all white. Like in a sanatorium. The shutters on the two big windows are also white. There’s too much light in here unless I close them and when I close them it’s too hot. But one thing I can’t stand is the sun pouring in all day long from seven in the morning till eight at night screaming BEACH! CRUISE! LIFE! in my ears.

It’s not bad, being alone. Better than those five days between the time I told them and they brought me here which were the worst days of my life up until now. I’m sure there’s worse yet to come, however.

I spent the whole day in bed staring at the ceiling. I thought maybe I’ll get up and write in my diary but I couldn’t seem to do it. Maybe I’ll draw in my sketchbook but I couldn’t do that either. Things only seem to become okay when the sun goes down.

The groceries are here so the concierge must have come up. I don’t remember letting her in. Maybe I’m losing my sense of reality?

Maybe I need a piano. I’ll ask them to bring me a piano and then I’ll probably lie in bed and stare at it.

Sunday 4 July.

Mother came on Saturday and stayed until this morning. Her eyelids are even redder than usual. Her eyes are washed out. They used to sparkle a weird blue sort of like the Mediterranean with the sun on it. She’s not happy and she says she doesn’t sleep. I don’t know if she sleeps or not at home but here I don’t sleep and I know that she did because I watched her. She didn’t move once all night.

She says she’s worried about me but I think she’s more worried because she’s getting older and isn’t attracting the kind of men she’s used to attracting. I say good, because the kind of men she’s used to attracting should be shot. How old was I when my father left? Four, I guess. He ran away with a model, “that young floozie,” Mother says. He doesn’t care about being a father and that’s fine with me. I don’t remember how old I was when Mother started with the men. It was like this. One guy would be a painter and then suddenly painting was the most important thing in her life. Suddenly we had new, modern paintings hanging on every inch of wall space at home, paintings that looked like someone had flung shit at a white canvas from across the room. The next guy would be a married bomb scientist and suddenly physics was crucial, how the Americans really aren’t that much further ahead than the Russians and here we are a little country stuck in the middle, we have to protect ourselves, etc. She had one South American revolutionary who was about twenty-two and had long greasy hair and a beard and during him she hung a poster of Marx in the bathroom.

She forgot about Marx and then one day Grandmother came to tea. Grandmother saw the poster of Marx and threatened to disinherit the whole bunch of us and Mother took the poster down immediately.

You didn’t have time to get used to one man before a new one would arrive. I don’t know what it is with Mother but she always manages to pick men who really love to talk about themselves. Mother acts like they’re the world’s greatest genius but she hides every single one of them from Grandmother.

The one thing you can count on with Mother is that Beauty and Class are the most important things on earth and that you should be friends with People of Importance even if they’re assholes. Even the Marxist revolutionary came from a good, rich family and had class.

I don’t give a damn about the men but I wish she’d get a clue about her feelings. Why am I different from her? Why couldn’t I be the same and not think so much? My brother is different too, but in a different way than I.

Monday 5 July.

I’ve been thinking about my brother. He’s left for Germany already with Pierre-Antoine. It’s funny when I think about them traveling and laughing and so on and here I am.

I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say that my brother is like a brick wall. A very handsome brick wall with lots of brick-wall type of opinions. When you’re a boy raised without a father I suppose you think if you act sweet or girlish or weak in any way they’ll call you a fag, so you compensate. He’s like a Nazi with his opinions—I think that’s a reaction to Mother being like a blade of grass in the wind. But I couldn’t be sure.

I’m not sorry for writing this.

If I die they’ll find this and say, “My God, we had no idea Véronique was such an angry child! That nice quiet girl.”

That is my thought for tonight.

Tuesday 6 July.

5 p.m.: Mother just called and said she’s coming up to spend the night. She’ll open the shutters and say let’s get some fresh sea air in here and now I’ll have to pretend to sleep at night and I’m tired of pretending.

Wednesday 7 July.

Night. I can’t sleep again. Maybe I’ll write so much this’ll turn into a book like
The Diary of Anne Frank
that we had to read last spring. Except I don’t think I’m going to die. I’ll record everything anyway. They say Françoise Sagan was seventeen when she wrote
Bonjour Tristesse
so maybe there’s hope for me. I always did win first prize for essays in French class. They told me I had a brilliant imagination. I swear to God a person couldn’t invent what’s happened to me.

So Mother arrived with more dopey clothes. Lots of flowers and polka-dots and so on. Horrible. She brought some novels (I haven’t looked at them, who could read at a time like this?). We played backgammon until pretty late. I won four games in a row and then I said, “It’s no fun, you’re not paying attention.”

She sat back in her wicker chair and started rubbing her eyelids. “Does it hurt?”

“Don’t rub your eyelids like that,” I told her.

“Oh.” She stared down at her hands like she didn’t recognize them at all. Then she smiled at me, but she looked about to cry. It’s the strangest thing. I’ve wanted her to cry over me for years, to come to some realizations concerning the fact that I exist and have feelings too, but now when she looks about to cry I hate it.

“I want a piano, Mother,” I said in a cold tone, imitating Phillippe. When he wants something he just says it like this, “Mother, now don’t say a word, I’ve done research on this matter and have found that the best mode of transportation for me at this time is a motorbike.” Whatever it is, he gets it. Mother melts like a Camembert in the sun when Phillippe talks like that.

“A piano? All right, darling. We’ll get you a little piano. What else can I get you? Anything. Ask me for anything.”

“I want curtains. The shutters closed make the room too hot. White ones.”

“All right,” she said, looking unsure. “You want to keep the air circulating, you know.”

I didn’t say anything.

“All right,” she said. “Anything else?”

“Make this go away. All of it.”

She sighed, slapped her knees and got up. She poured herself a cognac in the kitchen and brought it back. We sat in silence for a long time, staring at the corners.

In the morning she opened the shutters and made scrambled eggs. She’s the worst cook on earth but I ate her eggs to make her happy and then I threw up. She washed me and then puffed the pillows on the couch where she slept and watered the plants that I already watered yesterday.

Thursday 8 July.

I am pretending the world outside doesn’t exist. Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s not. It’s not when Mother is here. Today it’s raining and that helps because I don’t feel like I’m missing out on life. I’ve decided that if I want to sleep all day and stay up all night I can. I’ll burn the red candles on the table and stare at the corners wondering if I’ll ever be normal again. They say things pass. You get over them. Yes, if they stop existing in your mind. Like old school friends who move away. But how can something like this stop existing in your mind? It will always exist and I’m starting to hurt all the time now, which only reminds me that it will always exist. I feel like I swallowed a magic seed and now a watermelon is sitting low in my intestines, growing and blocking everything.

I feel ripe, like an overripe pear that’s starting to get moldy. I lie here and think this can’t be me. My God, I think, what if my brother could see me now? He’d probably kill Pierre-Antoine, just on principle even though they’re best friends.

I hate this thing and would like to kill it. I know this isn’t normal and I know that if I fell out the window or something I would probably die too. Do I want to die? Or worse, be crippled forever? No. I know I’m not normal because they say I’m supposed to feel some kind of love for it. But I don’t, I feel sorry, but that isn’t love, is it? I don’t love anything or anyone.

Saturday 10 July.

Aunt Susanne came with a manual to help Mother hang the curtains today. They finally had to call the concierge’s son because they were scared to climb the ladder. They wouldn’t leave the boy alone. They stood at the foot of the ladder in their silk dresses and high-heeled shoes and gave him advice, as if they knew how to hammer a nail into a wall!

Every time they called him “my pet” I cringed. He didn’t say a word and neither did I. He kept looking at me though, over his shoulder. I was lying on the bed staring at the ceiling. He’s about seventeen, tall and thin, so thin it looks like he grew too fast. He has saggy shoulders and big eyes that seem surprised by everything in the world. Or maybe it’s just me that surprises him.

Mother said to Aunt Susanne, “Do you think it’s all right for him to see her?” nodding sideways at me.

“What do you think—you pay his mother a thousand francs a month to keep her.”

The boy kept on hammering. That’s how they are in my family: Nobody cares about insulting the intelligence of peons and dogs.

It’s true that money takes care of everything. His mother can probably use the thousand francs a month. Plus I wonder how much they paid to get the phone installed. Most people wait a year. In any case, Aunt Susanne rented the place under a fake name to make sure no one ever finds out. They left before dinner because there was a big fête at Saint Laurent they had to go to.

Sunday 11 July.

Outside in the street there are lots of children and grownups walking, holding hands, and laughing. Sundays are a family holiday and it makes me want to throw up. I wish they’d all go home instead of parading their happiness in front of my window.

Tuesday 13 July.

Aunt Susanne came late yesterday afternoon and stayed overnight. I wasn’t expecting her, especially on a Monday. She said she thought it would cheer me up. We played backgammon for a franc a point until midnight. I lost ten francs. She said I didn’t owe her when I tried to pay. It’s all their money anyway, money they left me to give the concierge if I want anything.

By that time Susanne had drunk half the bottle of Williamine she’d brought with her. Her chignon was beginning to come apart and she kept sticking pieces of hair back in with her fingers. She was red in the face and her eyes were all shiny. “You’re very grown-up for your age,” she said. “You had to grow up fast, I suppose, because you certainly didn’t get much help from your mother.” I think Aunt Susanne feels guilty because it happened at her birthday party that Grandmother threw at the Château in November.

“Now you’re going to be a grown-up woman before your time. Poor baby. Your mother is my favorite sister, you know that. She’s had a fragile nature since she was born. I’ve protected her all her life and I don’t know where she’d be without me. It’s them, you understand, the others. They’d crucify us if they knew. You understand that, don’t you? She loves you very much even though she doesn’t know how to show it very well. Do you believe that?”

“I don’t care.” I stared at her with a flat expression through the candlelight.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you care.”

No one said anything for a while and we listened to a drunk out in the street crying about how nobody loved him. “It hurt her much more than anyone knows when your papa left. Your grandmother and everyone else were completely against that marriage. But since he was from a good family—well…You know how it is with fashion photographers, they like those young girls. The man isn’t in one city long enough to make a phone call to his children. The bastard. We tried to get him but he’s in Northern Iceland shooting for the winter line. The bastard.”

Aunt Susanne got up and went to the window. She put her hands on her hips and arched her back. She pulled the curtain to the side and looked out at the street.

“Why didn’t you tell us before it was too late? My God, you really waited till the last possible minute. We could have taken you to England. Were you afraid of us?”

“I already told you I didn’t know.”

“But how could you not know?” She spun around and looked me straight in the eye.