by Lily King
Come live with us so we are not so lonely anymore.
With hugs and kisses,
Your mother’s Aunt Anne
“She thinks I’m four years old.”
Lucie came down then with her own letter, which she handed to Nicole.
Dear Mme. Quenelle,
As I have received no word from you, I am now planning to write the child directly. I trust you will not impede such action but let my niece act with autonomy. I live here in Paris, as I have said, in a large apartment in the sixteenth, and alone, now that my husband has passed on. The place is equipped with three servants and, upon Nicole’s arrival, a governess à la anglaise. Her life will become a veritable Brontë novel.
Lucie, I have known you a long time, and while you yourself have refused many an opportunity, I am loath to believe you would let such a fate fall upon Nicole Guerrin. We must commence with her education now. It is what her mother, may she rest in peace, always wanted for her, and her wish alone ought to be respected. Please do not hinder it any longer than you already have.
With my best and most hopeful sentiments,
Anne d’Auvene
So Aunt Anne, too, believed she was dead. “What is a Brontë novel?” Nicole asked.
“I don’t know,” Lucie said. There were several words on the page she hadn’t understood, and she hoped Nicole wouldn’t find them all. “This is the third time she’s written. I should have told you.”
Nicole could see thin glossy streaks where tears had rolled through the powder on Lucie’s face. She told her, “I’m not going. I don’t want to go.”
“You should think about it.” She placed her hand on Nicole’s arm. “There are many advantages she could provide. You would go to a fine school and learn an instrument and—”
“I know all about the advantages!” She shook herself of Lucie’s clasp. “I don’t care about the advantages! I want to stay here. This is where I live.” She was hollering and it frightened her because she was yelling at her mother, who seemed to be gripping her now that Lucie had let go.
She would have kept on shouting if Lucie hadn’t said, in a voice that cracked like a whip, “Stop it, Nicole,” a voice her mother had never possessed. Then Lucie took her two hands in hers and told her, “You know what I want with all my heart. But you must never be afraid to do what you want.”
“This,” Nicole said, holding up the two letters and their torn envelopes, “is not what I want.” She threw the papers in the fire and watched how slowly the thick paper took the flames and how all the writing seemed to slither to the far side of each page as the fire approached.
Lucie never spoke to Nicole as if she were a child, never put a fake lilt in her voice or told Nicole tall tales. Instead, she recounted stories from the newspaper or the gossip passed up the hill. She may have embellished a bit, but at the root was always a seed of truth. Nicole had loved her mother for her romantic nature, for her love of candles and storm clouds and hand-painted teacups, but she loved Lucie from the moment they met for her love of life exactly as it was.
In bed that night, however, two sensations accosted her mind. One was a voice—It is what her mother always wanted for her—the other a smell—the fluted vanilla candles her mother had read by in the evening. Thinking of the novel Aunt Anne had mentioned, Nicole wondered if she too read by scented candlelight in her apartment in Paris. It is what your mother always wanted. It was a sweet winter smell that always ribboned through her mother’s small bedroom.
After a while, she led her mind to school, to the blond boy, Félix, who wanted to kiss her, and then to the trip she would soon take with Lucie to Avignon. She forced these thoughts to scud across the smooth surface of a certainty she would not acknowledge for several weeks: her mother was there, somewhere in Paris, and she could not refuse her again.
Every Sunday Nicole was picked up after mass and taken to one of her sisters’ houses for lunch. No matter which house she went to, the afternoon always ended in the same way, with the sister making the obligatory offer that Nicole come live with her. But they each had large families and little money, and though she knew in their hearts they wished her to say yes, their fearful eyes begged her to decline. She knew too that it wasn’t just the number of children and the insufficient income that made them hope for a no each Sunday. Her hair and her hands, the burgeoning shape of her body, and the way, if she weren’t paying attention, she tended to tilt her head and look out the sides of her eyes when listening to a story—all these were the uncontrollable ways in which she was developing, in their minds, into a disconcerting incarnation of their mother. Once Juliette’s twins had taken Nicole up to their playroom, and she had emerged wrapped from the waist up in white cheesecloth with all her hair piled up into a flesh-colored skullcap.
“Look, look, Maman! Aunt Nico is a mummy!”
Juliette blanched at the sight. “Get that stuff off her immediately!” But she rushed at Nicole before her sons knew what she had said, pulling at the cloth so fiercely it bruised Nicole’s new and tender breasts, yanking along with the cap a great deal of hair. When Juliette was angry, blood rushed to her curled ear, and that day it throbbed a scarlet red, the blood swirling within like liquid through one of those knotted straws they sold at the Limne fair. Nicole watched, in utter confusion but without fear. Few things frightened her now, and these strange outbursts, usually caused in some inexplicable way by her own body, were something she had come to expect in her sisters.
The Sunday before she was to leave for Paris, Lucie invited them all to dinner. Octave came late, halfway through the meal, and barely spoke. He seemed not to understand the occasion. Oh, she was ready to go, to go and find her mother and never come back. She took a deep breath to contain a thick wave of anticipation. Then she saw Lucie at the other end of the table, talking to no one, chewing mechanically. This was their last Sunday together. Often in the evenings when she came home from one of her sisters’, Lucie would tell her, “You’re all wound up tonight.” She’d fetch a sweater and her change purse and they would walk to town to drink lemonade on the terrace of the Café Plaire. If she spoke of her girlhood or her late brief marriage, Lucie’s voice would crack. She never cried, or even let her eyes pool up, but her throat would tighten and words would creak out as if through an old door. Ever since Nicole told her of the decision, she noticed that Lucie’s voice had begun to crack in the same way over things in the present or near future: the darning of Nicole’s winter stockings, the purchase of their favorite chocolate, any mention of her trip to Avignon, which she now would make alone. Never, Nicole thought, had she caused someone so much pain, not even her mother. Her mother’s pain, whatever it was, had come long before Nicole had refused her. No, it had not been her fault. She owed her mother nothing. She repeated this to herself: I owe my mother nothing.
But her bags were packed and everyone gathered to say good-bye and Aunt Anne had already transformed her late husband’s study into a bedroom with fabrics Nicole chose from a book of swatches that arrived in the mail. And by the time she had convinced herself that none of this mattered if she could remain here with Lucie and her father and her sisters, who were hard at times and strange but loved her all the same, she could no longer remember why she owed her mother nothing. She had failed her once and she could not—even when, after everyone was gone, Lucie asked in a creaking voice if she’d like to walk up to the café—do so again.
The following Tuesday, they all clustered about her on the station platform. Nicole wore her best dress and her best hat, and though they had both been worn by at least two sisters before her, they felt new now beside the great green train with its wooden plaques by each door with the word PARIS printed in blue. To her sisters, too, the outfit was unfamiliar and each struggled not to say what Marie-Jo eventually blurted out: “You look just like Maman!” She knew they needed her to leave. Once she was in her seat and watching them through glass, their eyes brimmed and their mouths sank but their arms waved jubilantly, as
if they were greeting a train and not seeing it off. Octave hadn’t come. Nicole had seen the last of him that Sunday; he would die of a heart attack the next spring.
Lucie stood apart, closer to the door that was now shut and bolted. Nicole had said good-bye to her last, knowing that she would be revealing to her sisters whom she would miss the most, but doing it anyway because she needed Lucie to know. Lucie was old and would only get older. Already her long torso curled forward; already the first two fingers of her right hand had begun to stick together. The reasons for leaving and for staying swirled in her head until the platform and everyone on it began to pull away from the window and her sisters’ sleeves flashed wildly in the sun and Lucie raised her bare arm, bent at the elbow and cradled in the other hand, and kept it there, heavy and motionless, until the train curved left and they were gone.
The Sights
I STOOD AT THE OPEN WINDOW OF THE ROOM LOLA AND I WOULD SHARE THAT night. It was tall and narrow, protected by five wrought-iron bars that began flush to the building at the top before, halfway down, billowing out and then gathering themselves back in at the sill, as if to allow for a curious head—but no more—to peer down into the courtyard.
We were in Cuenca, a small medieval city southeast of Madrid. The hotel had once been a monastery and was set at one end of a high ridge famous for its casas colgadas, the gaunt run-down houses that hung over it, threatening to pitch into the river below. Marc had pointed to this row of houses excitedly from the road as we drove in from Madrid, but our interest in this sight was quickly diluted by the inundation of its image on T-shirts, store signs, and restaurant advertising. On every block were at least a dozen references to these casas colgadas. “A whole beautiful Spanish city reduced to two words,” he’d said, but once past the plaza mayor with its shops and tourists, and up where the streets were not much wider than an arm’s span and convex mirrors were nailed to the sides of corner houses and cars had to swerve up onto the sidewalks to pass each other, Marc regained his enthusiasm for Cuenca.
The monastery was not colgada. It stood safely back a way, allowing only the garden to meet the lip of the high ridge. The rest were down there now, watching the end of the sunset we’d seen from the car. It had been Guillaume’s idea to race down once our bags had been delivered to our rooms. He’d seen a statue of Mary on the opposite cliff, where she’d been put at the top of a tall white pillar. “Doesn’t the sky look like a golden cape held out for her?” he’d said. “No,” Lola had snapped, but she agreed to go down to the garden with everyone else all the same. I thought it was something a family should do together on their first night of vacation, and I was feeling much less a part of this family now that I was out of their kitchen with no space and no routine to claim my own. What and when and where we ate was now entirely out of my control.
“¿Pues, que toman?” the waiter said, after depositing shallow dishes of almonds and olives on the table. He was looking directly at Nicole. With her Mediterranean coloring and madrileña hauteur, she’d been taken for Spanish from the moment we’d arrived that afternoon. As she’d done at the car rental, the front desk, and just now at the door of the restuarant, she shook her head without apology and said in French that she was French. Undaunted, the waiter asked again in Spanish, throwing an imaginary drink down his throat with one hand.
I spoke up and ordered a Coke.
“Dos,” Lola said. She was wearing a dress she’d bought last week, a long-sleeved close-fitting dress with pale flowers on black. When she’d held it up, I’d thought it a preposterous choice; Lola wore jeans and loose shirts and enormous black shoes. There had been nothing compatible about the girl and the dress she held. But now at the table saying Dos with complete confidence while reaching for an almond, she was transformed. No one else seemed to notice how graceful her long neck had become or how her breasts had risen. She seemed ignorant of the change herself.
No one ventured to order anything other than Coke. When the waiter had gone, Nicole commented on the filth of the floor: greasy napkins, olive pits, frayed toothpicks. Odile admired the bright tiled scenes on the walls. Marc studied the menu.
“What’s atún?” he asked in irritation, as if, despite all his research and planning, he’d forgotten that all of Spain would be in Spanish.
“Tuna,” I said.
“And aguacate?” Guillaume asked.
“Avocado.”
It went on like this. Most of it was so similar to French I didn’t understand why they couldn’t make the small adjustments, the rearrangement of a few vowels, the loss of a consonant here or there. It was a strange thing to witness the limitations of language in these people whose facility with words I’d coveted for so long. When they gave their orders to the waiter, they muttered or blushed. Their discomfort gave me a confidence I never would have had otherwise. I used the verbs I’d practiced. I spoke in full sentences. The waiter gathered up the menus and complimented my efforts. Marc beamed at me from across the table, and I had, for a few blissful seconds, the delusion that the trip had been for my sake alone.
An English couple was led to a table beside us. They began to argue almost immediately about the definition of sepia.
“I’m certain it’s squid,” the woman said.
“Calamares are squid.”
“And pulpo is octopus. We read that in the Susset guide at breakfast.” Her s’s were piercing, and after a few more sibilant exchanges, I had to put an end to it. Sepia had been a popular dish in Español Ahora.
“Excuse me, but I think it’s cuttlefish.”
“You do,” said the man. His eyes fell back to the menu. “I think you’re quite right.”
“Quite,” said the woman, dropping her eyes as well.
I was ashamed of my intrusion. I was the typical American, leaning over and butting in. But a few minutes later the woman was holding out her menu to me, pointing to several spots on the page to translate. She asked where I was from, told me they were from Cornwall, and dismissed me once more. When it came time to take their order, the waiter used me to explain the three ways of serving sepia: grilled, in its own ink, or in a cold salad. The couple told me about the caves they’d seen in the Basque region and the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela they were about to make.
“We’re just demi-pilgrims, really,” said the woman.
“The real pilgrimage begins in France and goes all the way across,” added the man.
I explained that we were off to Toledo tomorrow, then Granada, then Mallorca for a week.
“You and all the Germans. You know, they own nearly half the island.”
“The east side,” her husband added.
I searched for both a response to that information and a way to extricate myself from their sporadic attentions. Conversation had stopped not only at my table but at many of the other tables around them, as if everyone else in the room were straining to test their comprehension. But before I found a solution, the woman wondered if it wasn’t the west side of the island, and they were off again.
“Four years of it, and I can barely understand a word,” Odile said.
“But the American is so different,” Nicole said.
I felt a bit belligerent myself now and told her where the couple was from.
When dinner arrived, no one else could recognize the names of what they’d ordered and I had to orchestrate their delivery. The waiter seemed to have a faith in our communication that Parisian shopkeepers had never shown me. He was a man of about Marc’s age with a severe underbite and eyebrows that coiled out in all directions. He poked fun at anything that caught his attention: skinny Guillaume’s enormous appetite, Lola’s giggle, the ring of crumpled napkins around Marc’s plate by the time he’d finished. The playful intrusions irked Nicole.
“Just because we’re foreign, do we have to be mocked like children?”
She seemed more exasperated than I had ever seen her, and whereas at home exasperation gave her face a brightness, her words a pointed power, a
nd her whole presence an increased authority, at this table in Cuenca she seemed to shrink in dimension and importance. Marc barely acknowledged that she’d spoken. Mortified that the waiter might have heard and understood, he compensated with extra appreciation when several bottles of liqueurs and four shot glasses were brought out, compliments of the house.
The streets had been nearly empty when we’d walked into town from the hotel, but now, on the way home, they were clogged with a slow-moving stream of traffic whose headlights and tailights flickered as the overflow from the packed sidewalks weaved carelessly in and out among the cars.
“Stay all together now,” Marc called, but there was bound to be someone who let herself get pushed back by the bodies moving seductively to the music that spilled out of nightclub doors, by the loud cryptic sounds of speech, by fear and confusion and exhaustion.
Nicole wasn’t with us when we turned onto the emptier street of the monastery.
Marc told me to take the children back. Guillaume was crying by the time we reached the lobby, convinced that his mother had been abducted by Spanish pirates. With more patience than I ever would have had, Odile explained that pirates needed boats and water for their crimes. Marc was being silly to turn this into such drama. Didn’t Nicole know the name of the hotel or at least its location on the ridge? She’d probably found a shortcut and was already upstairs in bed. This was Nicole we were talking about, after all.
Once in our room, Lola and I were distracted by loud, inexplicable, disturbing noises coming through the open window. There were low rattling moans and rasping cries. There were great thuds and long hisses.
“What’s out there?” she asked, pulling me with her across the room.
It was cats, clawing and biting and screeching at one another, the females in heat and the males hunting them down. We watched in silence through the curved bars. The chases were elaborate, the females finding temporary safety and the males pacing, their tails straight up, heavy-gaited like angry drunks. Lola looked on with a fascination so great she momentarily forgot her concern for her mother, until we heard steps outside in the hallway.