Tita (13 page)

On the shelves in Father’s study, I found another book about a child. Its cover is white, with only the title,
Jean Santeuil
, in red letters. The rest is black: “Marcel Proust” and “Gallimard”. Around the writing there’s a triple frame — two thin red lines and a black one. As usual, I skip the preface. Before the introduction there’s a small paragraph, all alone on the page: “Can I call this book a novel? It is less and much more, the very essence of my life. This book was not made, it was gathered.”

The introduction itself I can hardly follow: two men are spending their vacation on a farm in Brittany, and are all excited when they realize that a writer they admire is also there. They write him a note and manage to meet him but nothing much happens. Nobody has a name: there’s “a duchess” and “the princess of ***”; the other characters (and even some places) are just initials.

But as soon as Chapter 1 starts, I’m enthralled. Jean is a seven-year old boy, and he doesn’t address the reader (like Henry), but someone tells us about him. His mother has decided that this evening, for the first time, she won’t go and kiss him good night in his bed. His parents’ guest, a doctor, politely hopes that he’s not the reason why madame Santeuil won’t go to her son’s room. “No!” madame Santeuil answers, “we want him to give up these little-girl habits, we want to bring him up
virilement
.” I’d never thought about this. Do parents treat boys differently from girls? Maybe. Philippe doesn’t get a good-night kiss. I thought it was just because Estelle is not a kisser, but I’ll have to look into this.

Jean is not happy about his mother’s decision. He comes back into the garden, three times, to say good night. Then from his room he calls his mother, who hurries upstairs because she’s afraid he’ll catch cold standing at the window. Meanwhile, she’s told the doctor that she wants her son to become a judge or a lawyer. “But I thought he had a gift for music and poetry,” the doctor says.

“Even if he were Mozart or Beethoven,” the mother replies, “I’d much rather he found a respected, well-paid position in the Foreign Service or the
haute administration
.”

“What about medicine?” the doctor asks.

“Oh, no!” the mother says, even though she seems to admire the doctor’s achievement.

I hope Jean does what he likes, not what his mother wants. My parents don’t seem to have any plans for us; maybe I should start thinking about the future myself. It’s probably going to take place somewhere else. I don’t hate Cugnac (where I was
not
born) the way Henry Brulard hates Grenoble, but Father seems to assume that there’s no room here for me.

Today, after our lesson, mademoiselle Verdier remembers her former student. “So, how is Justine doing in England?” she asks.

“Very well. She says she learns new words all the time, and everybody is inexplicably nice to her.” What she wrote in a special secret letter to me (half of it in English) is that she has
three
suitors, and that over there it’s completely normal to go out with boys. Different boys on different days. Even the parents don’t mind.

“A clever girl,” mademoiselle Verdier says, handing me a plate of peaches. “And very well behaved. Let’s hope she doesn’t take after her mother.”

Her mother! Am I finally going to learn something about Mystery Woman My-ex? I wait. Mademoiselle Verdier is deep in thought. “People should never get married in such a hurry,” she finally says. “There she was, a guest of the Pujols, the older couple, I mean, Roger’s parents, who’d met her at some spa in the Pyrenees. Nobody knew anything about her, except she was a good tennis player. It all happened in September of... 1934.” Mademoiselle Verdier, once again, becomes abstracted for a while. “Of course, your father would be interested,” she goes on. “He was the best tennis player in the
département
. So, they play together every morning for three weeks, then they come home one day and announce that they’re getting married!”

She sits up, reaches for the kettle, and pours some hot water into her half-empty cup. “Pure recklessness!” she exclaims. “Utter folly! There they were, in their tennis clothes, all sweaty and full of smiles, announcing, ‘We’re engaged’. As if it were completely normal to marry someone you’d never heard of three weeks earlier.”

“Did you play tennis too?” I ask.

“I?” she shakes her head, fast, pushing her shoulders up and shivering, as if my question were utterly absurd, or even offensive. “Certainly not.”

Then how did she know exactly how this came about? She sounds like she was there when Father and My-ex announced their engagement. Well, she lived practically next door at the time. Did this happen in the garden, and was she spying from the other side of the wall? Or did she see them pass her window in their tennis clothes and then someone told her what they’d been up to? But who? Aunt Caroline must have been married by then, and living in Paris.

“And your father was
not
so
young!”
mademoiselle Verdier goes on. “He should have known better. Your grandmother was not happy, I could see that, but for once there was nothing she could do. She said they should wait, and they didn’t pay any attention. Most likely your father was sorry he had obeyed her when she made him come back from Japan to take over the business after your grandfather died in 1932. Such an unfortunate idea. He had a brilliant career in front of him, and she put an end to it just because she didn’t want to live alone in that big house. Not that she was really alone. She had a housekeeper, a cook and a maid at the time, plus Ginette of course, but Ginette never lived in. She didn’t mind using your grandparents’ bed, though. Ginette was so giddy, as a girl. I was surprised to see her settle down with Joseph Sens. Once, it was in August, your grandparents came back from their house in the Montagne Noire
a day earlier than expected, and found her
in their bed
with the gardener, a married man. Why on earth did they need to use your grandparents’ bed, when the house was full of guest rooms? Both of them should have been dismissed, but your grandfather just laughed it off. He was a magnificent man, but he never took anything too seriously. Your father too errs on the side of leniency with his employees. He has such a good heart.”

Again mademoiselle Verdier loses herself in contemplation of my father’s goodness and of its downside. I often hear people say that Father is “too good.” Why should that be a problem? Obviously, My-ex was not too good, in mademoiselle Verdier’s opinion. But what was wrong with her?

“I’m not saying that your father’s wife was the only guilty party,” mademoiselle Verdier goes on. “Your grandmother was not an easy woman to get along with. She was in her house, with her servants, her only son. She was not ready to share. Do your remember your grandmother?”

“Yes, I visited her in her room when I was little. She showed me her treasures: gloves, postcards, prayer books.”

“Good, you do have some idea of...  She was a
grande dame
. From Paris, one of the best families. Jewish, originally, but Catholic for generations. She played the harp beautifully, and her embroidery was outstanding. She was always kind to me, and taught me a few stitches I’ll never forget — except now my poor hands are not much use. It might have worked out if your father’s wife had been more docile. Maybe. But that Odette had a mind of her own. And her manners were not... She couldn’t fit in.”

Odette! Was that really the woman’s name? Or is mademoiselle Verdier getting her confused with my mother?

“By the time Justine was born,” mademoiselle Verdier goes on, “the house was already divided in two: your grandmother had the street side of the first floor, and your father’s ex-wife took the garden side. The second floor, of course, was for the children and the servants.”

“What about my father?” I ask.

“Well, he had his study and offices on the ground floor, where they are now. His mother and his wife stopped coming down for meals, the maids had to carry everything up. When he had guests in the dining room, he asked one of the women, never both at the same time. It worked for a while, but eventually he had to make a choice. That’s how it ended up in divorce. But it took years. You father seemed to like that woman in spite of it all. But the house was his mother’s.”

I wonder where Father slept. “Couldn’t he and his wife go and live in another house?” I ask.

Mademoiselle Verdier sighs. “No, I don’t think it was a possibility.”

This is so much to take in, I’m glad it’s time to get on my bike. I choose the long way around the stadium, where the acacia trees are covered with flowers. Their intoxicating scent competes with brisk wood and sober cement when I pass a building site: about twenty houses, white and clean above the mud. Two floors, and a bit of bare land in front of each. Windows on all sides but no glass in them yet. Slightly different from each other in size and shape, but every one of them pretty. That’s where Monique and Nicole are going to move in September. I wonder which house will be theirs.

As I pedal back along the river, I try to imagine Ginette as a giddy girl. Not too hard, actually. Easier than picturing mademoiselle Verdier naked in her kitchen. But it’s hard to imagine her in bed with the gardener, Achille, a small shrivelled man I’ve never seen without his beret!

Father is not in the office. “I think he went to the cellars,” Simone says. I get on my bike again, and there he is in the yard, talking to Célestin, one of the cellarmen. Célestin goes inside, and Father comes toward me.

“How was your lesson? I’m going to La Fourcade now,” he says in English. So I leave my bike in the cellar yard and take his hand. Today, I need to speak French first.

“Mademoiselle Verdier says that, before you became a wine dealer, you had a great career. What kind of career was that?”

Father shakes his head. “I worked for a few years as a commercial attaché, in three different places. All over the world, you could say. Doesn’t it sound thrilling? I liked the idea of living abroad, but... it turned out, none of these places felt like abroad. The work was insipid, for me at least. There were long periods of having very little to do, and my plan was to use them in order to read and to write. I did read, and I did write. But somehow I got more and more discouraged. With my job, with what I wrote, and with myself for staying on.”

Mademoiselle Verdier mentioned Japan, and I’d like to know the names of the other countries he worked in, but I don’t think he wants to talk about this any more. I remember his mentioning Morocco once, but maybe he just sailed there. So mademoiselle Verdier was wrong about the brilliant career?

“Were you happy when you came back here to sell wine?” I ask as we walk along the narrow path between the sawmill
and the pond.

Father slows down and, gazing at the stagnant water, rests his hand on the nape of my neck. “I was relieved, in a way. I was doing what my mother wished. I no longer had to decide.”

“Didn’t you decide? To come back? To do what your mother wanted?”

Father stops completely, and pulls my plaits, gently, one after the other. “You’re quite right. I did decide. I made a bad decision. I was disappointed with where I was, and there was an obvious place to go back to, where I was needed.” 

We’re entering La Fourcade, where Achille is pulling up weeds under the cherry trees. He looks up, waves, and I try to see him as a lover. Maybe he didn’t have that bumpy red nose when Ginette fancied him? “Good evening,” Father says. Achille grunts and nods. Then he looks at me, and the right side of his mouth moves up. In a smile. Just for me. He stretches up, picks a few
guignes
, crisp wild cherries, from a high branch, and lays them in my cupped hands. “To eat, or as earrings,” he says. Father takes out a list from his pocket, and they go into the shed discussing fertilizers.

What about Odette? Shall I ask Father if that was actually his first wife’s name? No, I won’t. Because now I’m pretty sure mademoiselle Verdier
didn’t
make a mistake. That’s why the first wife’s name is never uttered in our house.

At the end of the week, Pélican wants news about our sacrifices. Seven of us have managed to do (or not do) as we promised. Doing appears to be easier than abstaining, especially doing one thing once. For me, it was painful, but achieved in a few minutes. I got my toys together, attached them to my bike’s rear rack, and went to the smelly street, rue du Mimosa. There were at least twenty children playing outside. A woman took the boxes from me and said, “Thank you”. She didn’t invite me in, so what could I do? I tried not to hurry back home, but I pedalled fast enough. I was done. Noëlle put her allowance in the poor box. Whereas poor Anne-Claude couldn’t completely keep away from her brothers. They came into her room on Sunday morning and tried to drag her out of her bed. What choice did she have then? She tried to play dead, but one of them tickled her while the other pulled her hair, so how could she help hitting them?

According to the level of our vows and the quality of our success, Pélican decides how many hosts our sacrifices have won us. The net outcome is, we’ve only earned less than half the box of a hundred hosts this week, so we have to make new vows to earn the rest. A few of the kids in Group One jabber about abstaining from rude words and doubling the usual amount of rosary decades they recite every day. Anne-Claude, annoyed with her failure, comes up with “abstaining from impure thoughts,” which completely stumps Pélican. I say that every morning I’ll kneel in front of my altar to the Virgin for ten minutes, which is no sacrifice at all. We didn’t want to cheat the first time, because what’s the point of cheating if what you’re going to come by is nothing anyway? But by now all we want is to get Pélican off our backs.

In the afternoon Pélican starts reading us a story about saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, my least favorite saint, who practically invented the Sacred Heart — without her, we wouldn’t have to stand and kneel, twice a day, in front of a bland-faced Jesus, almost life-size on his low pedestal, opening his arms wide to let us admire, blazoned over his tunic, his bleeding heart, adorned with cross and thorns.

In the middle of a description of teen-age Marguerite-Marie carving the name “Jesus” into her chest, a kid from downstairs comes to call Pélican, who looks flustered and leaves the room without even saying which one of us is in charge. We can hear her shoes clattering to the bottom of the wooden stairs, and I go to the window (getting up from our seats without permission: strictly forbidden). She’s walking across the yard to her house, hurrying as much as she can, which isn’t much. “Let’s take a look at the hosts!” I say. The babbling was getting louder as Pélican got farther from us; now the room becomes very still. I’m standing near Pélican’s desk. Noëlle and Anne-Claude join me.

“You wouldn’t dare!” Elisabeth cries from the other end of the room.

“What if we go to hell?” Maryvonne mutters.

I open the desk. There on the left is the metal box of hosts, which looks exactly like a box of biscuits. I take it out for all to see. The girls are watching me in complete silence. I start working on the tape that keeps the box shut. Anne-Claude takes the box from me and deftly pulls all the tape off. Now we can open the box. But that again is hard. Anne-Claude tries, but the lid is stuck. Noëlle finally succeeds. I remember Pélican, and move to the window: she’s not in the yard. We have to watch the yard. When we hear her footsteps on the stairs, it might be too late.

There Noëlle stands, the open box of hosts in her hands. “Who wants one?” I say.

“Don’t you think she’s going to...” Elisabeth shivers, looking sideways at the box.

“Come on! I’m taking one anyway,” I say. Anne-Claude eats one too, then Noëlle, and one by one all the girls. They’re hurrying now, while I watch the yard. “Anybody for seconds?” Noëlle asks in a shaky voice. Silence. Maryvonne is coughing, as if a host got stuck in her throat.

“This isn’t a mortal sin anyway,” I say. “These hosts aren’t consecrated. So it just comes down to disobeying the teacher. Or not even that, since she never
said
we shouldn’t touch the hosts.”

“We’re not supposed to open her desk,” Elisabeth says. “Let alone take things from it.”

“Has she ever actually said so?” I ask. But I haven’t been looking out. “Stop!” I say. “Here she comes!” Pélican is already in the middle of the courtyard.

Noëlle quickly puts the box back into the desk and we’re all in our seats when Pélican enters the room, her wig awry, her glasses in her hand. “Where are your notebooks?” she says. But we were ordered to put our notebooks away to listen to the Alacoque story. “Take out your notebooks this minute,” she croaks, “and Group One, do exercises number 4, 5 and 6, page 28 of your grammar book; Group Two, in your math book problem 6 page 57, you’ll come to the blackboard in fifteen minutes; Group Three…”, etc. The woman has completely forgotten about saint Marguerite-Marie.

When we sit down to dinner Loli, as usual, brings the soup tureen. Meanwhile, I notice a bowl of bigarreau cherries on the dresser. Their pale, sleek skins make me want to break the sturdy flesh, taste the juice. “May I start with these cherries?” I ask.

Mother frowns. I go on, though. “Remember, the doctor said...”

She doesn’t seem to hear. Maybe I should have reminded her earlier? Every morning, since the first banana, I’ve had fruit for breakfast. Pear, raspberry, apricot, melon, whatever Achille brought or Loli picked. Then two large slices of
gros pain
with honey. Loli keeps saying that doctor Pauli is clever, that he’s practically turned me into a normal eater. But we’ve both kept quiet about this. Just to be on the safe side.

Mother is serving the soup.              

“Doctor?” Father asks.

“Not Doctor Barral,” Mother says, her eyes on the ladle. “That young man who came last time, his substitute. Tita, eat your soup before it gets cold.”

“What did the doctor say?” Father asks.

Mother is eating her soup. Ignoring him. Can I say something? Or is it rude to answer a question if you’re not the one who was asked? But
Mother
is being rude.

“That I should eat fruit to start every meal,” I say. “For vitamins. And as an
apéritif
.”

Father stands up, gets a small plate from the sideboard, and drops a handful of bigarreaux into it. “Here,” he says.
Bon appétit!

In the evening, Mother doesn’t come to our room to kiss us good night. Coralie doesn’t notice. She’s reading
Buck John
, whose covers always feature a man wearing a cowboy hat, with a little yellow scarf around his neck and a gun in his hand. When she’s finished, she strokes the cover and sighs. Her eyes are bright. “When I grow up,” she says, “I’ll dress like him. With a red shirt, a yellow scarf, a cowboy hat. And a star!”

“Do you know what the star means?” I ask.

“Yes! It’s a sheriff’s star. I’ll be a sheriff!”

I’m going to tell her that there are no sheriffs in France, but I stop myself. Maybe she’ll live in a country where she can be a sheriff.

I tell her a story I make up where Sophie and her cousin Paul go to America like at the end of
Les Malheurs
. There’s a murder, and the sheriff needs the children’s help to find the murderer. I’m in pretty deep water, as I have no idea what a sheriff is supposed to do, or what Americans are like. But Coralie falls asleep after five minutes, and I go back to
Jean Santeuil
.

Jean doesn’t go to school, not because his parents are snobs like Henry Brulard’s, but because he’s considered too fragile. He’s not shut up at home, though. “In Paris, with his legs bare to let them get tan, he stayed all day on the Champs-Elysées, sitting on a bench. Little boys invited him to play, little girls approached him, his maid threatened him, but he kept desperately silent, hiding his face against the back of the bench.” This goes on until he falls in love with Marie Kossichef, “a Russian girl with long black hair, clear mocking eyes, pink cheeks, and the sparkle of health, life, joy, of which Jean was deprived.” But his parents think that Jean’s
surexcitation
about the girl is dangerous for his health, and they decide that he shouldn’t see Marie any more, shouldn’t go to the Champs-Elysées. Instead, he will have a lesson with a private teacher. Jean starts yelling, “Not go to the Champs-Elysées! Not to the Champs-Elysées! Yes, I’ll go, I don’t care about the teacher, if I run into him I’ll kill him, that hideous monkey, I’ll kill him, do you hear me?”

This is not the only time Jean becomes very angry at his “cruel” parents. He often shouts and curses in such a way that they think he might be crazy. When his father tells him that he is going to Henri-IV (a school), Jean says “I won’t set foot there!” and “This is the last Latin translation I’ll ever write!” But in the end he has to do what his parents want, so I wonder if all the drama is worth it. Maybe it is, though. Maybe it’s better to show that you don’t agree.

The next morning, when we come into the classroom, Pélican doesn’t tell us to sit down, so we all remain standing as she gives us a long lecture. A terrible misdeed has been committed, and the only way for the culprits not to remain in a state of sin and risk going to hell is to confess immediately. I reflect that she shouldn’t have used the word “confess”, because it reminds me (and probably all of us) that we have another way of dealing with our sin: we can just tell the priest at our next confession, which is tomorrow. So even if we’ve committed a mortal sin (which I don’t think is the case), we’ll only risk hell if we die within the next twenty-four hours. And the priest couldn’t tell Pélican: seal of confession.

We all keep silent, and Pélican finally tells us to sit down. But at break time she says, “I’m sorry to announce that there will be no breaks for this class until the culprit of the terrible deed I alluded to earlier has come forward. Meanwhile, all breaks will be spent in the Sacred Heart room kneeling with your rosaries”.

Okay, she wins. What’s the good of having everybody kneeling in front of the Sacred Heart? I’d rather do that on my own. I put up my hand.

“I did it,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“You stay here,” Pélican says. “Everybody go down to the yard.” When the rest are gone, she makes me stand in front of her desk. I look down, of course.

“You of all girls,” she says, “who should know better. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

“Yes, M’selle,” I say. I watch her out of the corner of my eye as she sits for quite a while glowering at me. I try to imagine what she could do to me. Beatings are out. She could give me a thousand lines, but I wouldn’t care. I get lines more or less every day, and I manage to do them in school mostly, between exercises. I’d hate to get so many lines that I couldn’t play with my friends in the evening but, if she tried that, Father would object. So I wonder. Maybe she too is wondering. What if I got myself expelled? I’d stay at home, like Jean Santeuil and Henry Brulard. Read all day. Learn Latin with Father, and English with mademoiselle Verdier. I’d be rid of Pélican, all her works and her pomps. But I’d miss my friends!

“We are going down to the schoolyard,” Pélican finally declares, “and when we get there you’ll do exactly as I say.” What’s going on? I was ready for the Sacred Heart, the rosary, endless detention. She must have thought up something worse.

When we get to the middle of the yard, she says, “Now you are going to get down on your knees in front of me and ask my forgiveness.” The games around us have slowed, and all the girls surreptitiously look in our direction. Anne-Claude rolls her eyes and makes as if to clap. I look at the ground: yes, I can kneel. If that’ll make the woman happy. But I don’t feel like it right now. So I don’t move. “I’m warning you,” Pélican says, “you’d better comply or…” I glance at her for half a second. She’s trapped. She has no “or”. She’s staring at me with stern eyes behind her round gold-rimmed glasses, but she’s cornered herself and she knows it.

She steps towards me and tries to push my shoulders down to make me kneel, but I resist. She pushes harder. I don’t kneel but keel over and fall. My left knee hits a stone and starts bleeding. Not a lot. Madame Riu, the downstairs teacher, comes up to us, takes my hand and says, “Come with me, I’ll clean that, put a plaster on it.” As we go to her classroom I notice that, under her dark-blue gathered blouse, her body doesn’t have its usual clear shape. She bends over my knee to disinfect it, but not easily. Something’s going on around her waist. Yes! I remember when this happened to Cami. Madame Riu must be pregnant. Good for her!

I don’t get any lines, don’t have to kneel in front of the Sacred Heart. The next day, I add to my scanty list of sins, “At school, I took unconsecrated hosts that didn’t belong to me,” which is the most specific sentence I’ve ever pronounced in confession. I go on to describe the opening and eating and inciting. The priest responds as usual, “My dear Euphémie, my little friend, you will say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys”. He absolves me in Latin, both of us making the Sign of the Cross.