Tita (7 page)

May first, lily-of-the-valley day. Mother came back last night from a few days in Lyon. While she was unpacking, Father showed me the sprigs he brought from La Fourcade and hid in the tasting room. This morning Coralie and I, as soon as we open our eyes, run down in our nightgowns to find them and present a few to Grandmother and to Loli. We get kisses in return. Then we run up to our parents’ room and give Mother her little bouquet. “It smells wonderful,” she says, and kisses us too.

Back in our bedroom, Loli helps us get dressed before we join our parents again. Father is reading
La Revue Nautique
. Mother plaits my hair and Coralie’s, then helps herself to more coffee. When she pours milk into it, I run to the window and hide behind Father’s chair. I rather like the way coffee smells on its own (especially when it’s roasting and not yet soaked in water), but mixed with milk it’s mephitic.

Coralie is already tripping back towards our room but Mother, gulping her coffee, calls her. “Come here, let’s make you presentable.” Coralie, her feet wide apart, stops but doesn’t turn round; I alone, from my hiding place, can see her pouting lips and ferocious eyes. Mother pulls down the skirt of Coralie’s blue-and-white smocked dress. She also tries to straighten up the short puff sleeves, but she can’t get hold: they are too tight around Coralie’s plump arms. “Coralie has grown so much this year,” she says. “And she’s put on so much weight, there’s not a chance Tita’s dresses from last summer will fit her. I’ll have to get some fabric and make at least two new dresses for each of them. I found amazing patterns in Lyon, the kind nobody in Cugnac has ever heard of. Wait and see.”

Father looks up from his magazine. “Of course,” he says. “Poor Coralie, you can hardly breathe! But maybe you’ll choose another color this time? Isn’t there anything you like apart from blue?”

“I — don’t — like — blue,” Coralie articulates. “And I don’t like dresses. Can I have shorts and shirts instead?”

“Nonsense,” Mother says. “Do you want to go to school in shorts? To church, and to birthday parties?” She breathes in slowly, then out through her nose, and says, looking in Father’s direction but not at him, “What’s wrong with blue? It’s her color. It looks perfect with her eyes.”

Father smiles, and shrugs. “I know it’s silly, but blue always reminds me of Children of Mary. I find it a sad color. So, if Coralie doesn’t particularly...”

How can he imagine that Coralie’s tastes, or mine, have any influence on what we wear? “What’s a Child of Mary?” I ask.

Father shakes his head. “I don’t even know exactly, but there were lots of them when I was growing up. I think it started with a nun in the nineteenth century, who had seen some apparitions. The Children of Mary wear a miraculous medal on a blue ribbon. They also wear blue capes. Everything must be blue.”

“Medals are so gruesome,” I say. “Not to mention miraculous ones.” Actually, I despise all ornaments.

Father nods slowly. Coralie has settled in his lap and is drawing a horse on a discarded envelope. Father makes me laugh sometimes, the way he recoils from religion. It’s almost like me with cheese. No-good Children of Mary! But that reminds me of the
Month
of Mary (nothing to do with the Children), which starts today. Tonight. And for which we need to get ready.

“Can we have our baskets, please?” I ask Mother, who is studying the fashion pages in
Modes et Travaux
.

She doesn’t even look up.

“Our Month of Mary baskets!”

“Oh. Of course. They’re in the main attic. I’ll get them for you later.”

She’s totally engrossed in the beach outfits. “Can I go and get them now?”

She doesn’t answer, and I decide it means yes.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Loli is amazed at how fast I eat my porridge, on my own. “Hey, you’re making progress!” she says. “Soon you might even get hungry like the rest of us.” While Coralie goes on with her breakfast I run up to the main attic, look around, and finally make out the baskets in the top of the white cupboard, above the Christmas decorations. I climb on a chair to reach them, and the chair is wobbly, but I hold on to the shelf and reach for one, then the other. Mine is oval, larger and slightly deeper than Coralie’s round one. Both are covered with white muslin and have ribbons that will go around our necks.

Tonight, like every Friday, our parents are going out, probably to the cinema. For once I don’t care. Every evening of this month we too will be away from home. In church, with our friends. May is the Month of Mary, and the hymn says it all: it’s the most beautiful month,
le mois le plus beau
.

In the afternoon we join our friends in the back street, but we’re all so excited about tonight we can hardly concentrate on our games. We try cops and robbers, hopscotch, Mother May I, but every time neighbors walk by we stop them to ask what time it is. When the sun finally sets, I appeal to Eléonore’s grandmother, who is sitting outside the cellar in her garden, reading a book of poems. She tells me it’s five past seven. “Are you going?” I ask her in Catalan. She and her husband are famous for coming to France on foot before the war. From Ripoll, over the Pyrenees, pushing a wheelbarrow with their belongings. She shakes her head, and grins. “I’m an atheist, remember? Have a good time!”

We dine at quarter past seven, in the kitchen with Loli. At ten past eight, Coralie and I hang our baskets around our necks and go to the garden to choose our flowers. Peonies, dahlias, sweet peas, narcissi. Mother said we can take only those that are completely open, and where at least one or two petals have started shrivelling. I snip off the whole blossom (Coralie is not allowed to use the clippers), and we pull the petals off into our baskets. Then, intoxicated by the surfeit of scents, the sharp red ones, the acid yellow, the many shades of pink, the quiet white, we stand among the rose bushes, fingering the supple membranes, the soft shallow cups, warm from the afternoon sun.

Eléonore is at the back door. Roseline, Monique, Nicole are waiting for us around the corner, and we all walk up the avenue with our full, fragrant baskets hanging from our necks. Further on, we pass friends from both our schools, all hurrying to church while the bells break out in fancy chimes. In the church, Coralie and I go and sit with Sainte-Blandine on the left; our friends from the state school are across the aisle with their catechism classes.

Soon the organ starts and we’re all on the move again, for the procession. In front, four choirboys carry a statue of the Virgin Mary, and we follow, first Sainte-Blandine then the rest of the children, reciting the rosary as we walk, one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and again, five times, while the organ punctuates our prayers with crisp, cheerful chords. After each decade of the rosary, the bearers stop in front of a different side chapel, where incense burns and lights shine on the statue. Then, as the rest of us pass the chapel, singing, we throw our petals to the Virgin. I so love to sing, I tend to get carried away and not pay attention to what I’m doing. But we need to be careful: there are five decades, five stops in front of chapels, and it doesn’t look good if we spend all our petals too soon and then have nothing to throw but air.

For each stop there’s a different hymn but in between chapels we go back to
C’est le mois de Marie,
where Mary is compared to the spring, to a lily (pure), a violet (humble) and a rose (loving). During the last decade, the Virgin is taken to the middle of the chancel, and everybody faces her to recite her litany. In Latin, not in French like at school in the Sacred Heart room. The Latin invocations sound so much more thrilling:
Rosa mystica, Turris eburnea, Domus aurea, Stella matutina
. As if ivory, gold, morning were burned into the Virgin’s substance, had become part of her body. The Latin, the sweet scents, the songs waft me above the ground, and I seem to swing there, light and swift. Giddy.

The organ, silent during the litany, booms again in full glory to tell us it’s time to go. In the aisle the two schools mix again as we stroll out of the church. Our baskets are empty now, so we can skip and romp through the narrow winding streets around the church and into the avenue, greeted as we pass by the many older people who sit in cafés, or on benches and chairs outside their houses, enjoying the fresh air and the action. Among the adults, all but a few devout women eschew the
Mois de Marie
ceremonies, which take place around the usual dinner time. But at nine thirty, when we children walk home, the whole population of the town is out.

As we sit down to lunch,
Father announces that he’s managed to sell Le Cabarrou, our park. He sounds relieved, and wretched. He enunciates cautiously, as if his voice couldn’t proceed without a walking stick. Mother’s face is rigid, her eyes on the Pyrenees behind the railway station. I think she knew already. 

Father keeps selling bits of property, that’s what we live on. I don’t think his vineyards or his business really make a profit. When he sells a piece of land, he usually says it’s “for peanuts”. Not this time, though. Maybe we’re going to be fine for a while? Maybe he got a lot of money for Le Cabarrou. It’s huge and beautiful. There’s a chalet, a pond, a tennis court, lots of almond trees, lilacs, irises. Also, at the back, beyond the laurel bushes, an old railway car.

The people who bought the park aren’t exactly friends of our family, but we’ve known them for a while because their daughter, Noëlle, is in my class, and her father is our dentist. They have an apartment in town, above the dental practice, with a puppet theater where we sometimes put on shows. Noëlle makes all the puppets, and she paints all the sets. She has a younger brother, and her mother is pregnant again. Now they’re going to build a house on the tennis court. No more tennis. I’m happy for them, because their apartment is so small, and in the new house Noëlle will have her own room; I’m happy for myself too, because there are few things I hate more than tennis, and as long as the court was there I had to play every Thursday and Sunday (except when it rained, but it hardly ever does). Mother likes tennis, though, she’s good at it. And she’ll miss being the hostess, the owner of an attraction that fostered so much social activity.

The sale creates a link between Noëlle’s family and ours, even though people here, adults, tend to be wary of newcomers — Noëlle’s parents came to Cugnac just after Noëlle was born, but they’re still outsiders. Mother says that at least Le Cabarrou won’t go to the kind of people who already have too much and never needed to work for it. I think she’s more sympathetic than most to those who haven’t been here for ever, like Noëlle’s parents.

With Father’s friends, even though the women invite her and the men compliment her, she tends to be wary. When they allude to something that’s foreign to her, like troubadour poetry or existentialism, her shoulders and her feet contract for a second or two. In her place, I’d ask a question, or at least try to pick up some information from the conversation. She doesn’t. And she doesn’t completely withdraw either, as she does when they reminisce about sailing adventures. She tries to saunter through the problem, brushing it aside as if she knew all about the topic but it didn’t deserve her full attention. She pulls it off mostly, but it can’t be easy.

This afternoon she takes us to what is no longer our park, and she sits with Noëlle’s mother, drinking tea and knitting in our old deckchairs in front of the chalet. The younger children are playing hide and seek, but Noëlle wants to draw the artichokes that border the wide path, all the way from the chalet to the front gate. She says they are extraordinary, all in bloom. She gives me paper and crayons, and I’m about to say that I can’t draw, but I change my mind. I don’t feel like hide and seek, or anything else. And artichokes are one of the few foods I like. Coralie loves them too. When we were small, people said we must have been born, instead of in cabbages, in artichokes.

We sit cross-legged on the dry earth, and as Noëlle concentrates on her artwork I vaguely listen to our mothers, who are talking on the other side of the lilac bushes. About headaches. Mother says hers can last for days; but sometimes they go away when she smokes a cigarette. Noëlle’s mother never gets any, thank God and touch wood. Noëlle shows me her first drawing, which I sincerely admire. She hasn’t gone into details, but her purple flowers inside the spiked leaves look so alive. I have nothing to show; as usual the lines on my piece of paper don’t make any sense. Noëlle says she’ll get some watercolors from the chalet. Meanwhile, the women have gone on to another topic.

Noëlle’s mother is laughing. “I was already five months pregnant with Noëlle when we got married,” she says. “We’d been thinking about it for a while, but our families were far away, we had to decide where it would take place, organize it... We were both busy at the time, with our final exams. Then of course we could no longer wait. My mother was upset. She couldn’t believe I really liked René. She thought I was marrying him because I had to!”

“You won’t believe it,” Mother reciprocates, “but
I
didn’t get married until Tita was more than a year old. When I met my husband, he was getting a divorce. Then his wife heard about me, and suddenly she no longer wanted the divorce. She set impossible conditions: she claimed everything he had. This took for ever to sort out and meanwhile, I got pregnant.”

This is all news to me, and probably “not for children”. But the lilac bushes are thick.

“It must have been hard,” Noëlle’s mother says.

“It was all right. And something really funny happened. When Tita was born, I didn’t give my name at the clinic. The doctor told me there was a new law: the mother doesn’t have to register if she doesn’t want to. So I didn’t.”

“Why?” Noëlle’s mother asks.

“Because Tita’s father wasn’t divorced yet, so he couldn’t recognize Tita legally. If I didn’t give my name, when we got married she’d have her father’s name right away. There’d be no trace of her being born out of wedlock.”

Wedlock? Noëlle’s mother doesn’t react in words. Noëlle is back, with new implements. She offers me some, I choose haphazardly, and she settles down with her easel further up the walk.

“I forgot about this,” Mother goes on, “until one day my mother, who was taking care of Tita, said that a social worker had called and wanted to see me. Two women visited us at home. They said, ‘We have good news for you: we’ve found a very nice family to adopt your daughter.’ I couldn’t believe my ears. Then they explained that when a child was born to unknown parents, it was automatically put up for adoption. I was so happy to tell these women that my baby didn’t need to be adopted, I was marrying her father next month. Then they were all congratulations and so on. We had such a laugh. Adopted!”

Again, no reaction from Noëlle’s mother. “There I was,” Mother insists, her voice overflowing with rare delight, “there I was, telling them, ‘I’m getting married next month.’ They hadn’t expected to hear this. They wished me luck, again and again. They were so happy for me, they said.”

Coralie is sure that
she
was adopted: her real parents were gypsies, who were killed in a horse-drawn cart accident of the kind that happens at the beginning of
Les Petites Filles modèles
. Only a baby survived; Mother, who happened to drive by, took her in because of her blond hair. It’s a good story, except everybody says that Coralie looks a lot like Father’s mother, so I don’t think she could have been adopted. And now it turns out
I
am the one who almost was. I could have been raised by... that “nice family”. I wonder what those parents would have been like. But I have zero imagination.

Noëlle is back. She shows me her varicolored artichokes. “Great,” I say. Her colors blend into each other, sharp and delicate; you can feel how thrilled she was when she looked at the plants.  

Now that she’s started, Mother can’t stop. She must like this story, which allows her to present herself as knowledgeable (the new law) and adventurous, modern, different from the Cugnac
bourgeoises
. A few days later, she recounts my near-adoption to Eléonore’s mother’s secretary, who has come to take cuttings from some geraniums. The next Thursday I hear the tale again, in the exact same words, while I’m passing the cakes. I have a question and I decide to ask it. In public (the public consisting in Estelle Vié, Denise Pujol and Cami Espeluque). On purpose. Because I’ve noticed that when you ask her a question in front of her friends, Mother can’t afford to be absolutely deaf.

“What was my surname before you married Father?” I ask. It couldn’t be hers: the whole point was that she remained anonymous.

She starts, and spills some tea on her off-white skirt.

I’m waiting. Everybody is. She hesitates, her eyes on the wet spot, her right hand playing the piano on her thigh. She could say something about the chocolate cake. No, she can’t. She raises her head, inhales, gives a loud sigh.

“You didn’t need a name,” she finally says. “You were just a little baby.”

“But nobody can go without a name,” I insist. “Not in France.”

Something is happening to Mother’s face. It’s drawn and grey, her big eyes wan behind her glasses, all the sparkle gone. “Don’t be tiresome,” she says. “Ask Dolores if she can bring some more hot water. Then go play with your sister.”

I’m dismissed. I stand in front of Mother and her friends, holding the empty plate in front of me as if it were full. Mother has already turned her back on me, but the other women are not ready to resume their conversation. They’re not eating or drinking either, but watching me sideways. Cami’s hands are joined against her mouth, as if she were praying, and Estelle’s lips are trying to stop themselves from smiling. I want to ask again, to make a scene, but I don’t know how.