The Only Girl in the World

by Maude Julien

  When Périsaut arrives, the big gates are opened for the delivery truck. The seller leads out a small animal whose coat is brown and beige—it looks like a dog. Périsaut is a Shetland pony only a few months old. ‘You must wait until he’s at least six months old before riding him or you could break his back,’ the man warns.

  My father has come up with a whole training program. Périsaut will help out with trimming the grass: he is tied to a big iron stake in the middle of the lawn from eight in the morning until eight in the evening. Now, my father explains, he’ll create ‘perfect circles’ as he grazes around this central point. I go to fetch him from his stable and my mother attaches the metal chain to his collar. But nothing goes as planned: the pony is so tiny that the weight of the chain makes him tip forwards onto his knees. We have to accept that the chain needs to be replaced with a rope, but Périsaut regularly chews through it and goes wandering around the grounds.

  Although he doesn’t openly admit it, my father abandons his plans for circular grazing and instead sets about training Périsaut in order to show me how psychological conditioning works. A few months earlier I had to mark out a three-metre-diameter circle in the levelled-area of the garden. This was where my father wanted me to work on my somersaults. He now wants to make Périsaut stay inside this circle. He tells me to fetch one end of an electric fence and hold the pony firmly by the collar. Every time Périsaut sets a hoof on the white line I have to give him an electric shock in the chest. My mother stands guard on the other side of the circle with a riding whip, which she cracks along his back if he tries to step out. Périsaut is terrified; he rears and whinnies. He kicks me several times and gives me a huge bite on the arm. I still have the scar. While I’m forced to torture him, I silently ask his forgiveness.

  Eventually Périsaut gives in. Now when I take him into the circle he lowers his head and stays there, making no attempt to leave. In the evenings my father summons me to his room and turns on the outside light in that levelled area to point out that the conditioning is working. It’s often raining and I watch the water running down poor Périsaut’s mane as he stands in his circle.

  During these training ordeals, all I’m allowed to bring him is water. I whisper to him that, although he and I don’t understand these exercises, there may be some valid reason for them that we can’t see. Périsaut gazes at me with sad eyes that seem to ask: ‘Why?’

  His whys amplify all the whys that have obsessed me for so long. Why should Linda be shut in? Why must Périsaut be tied up? Why am I not allowed out? Why must I not derive any pleasure from eating? Why does Yves stub out his cigarettes on my knee? Why does Raymond do what he does to me? Why can’t I have any heating in my bedroom? Why don’t we wash? Why does no one kiss and hug me like people do in books? Why am I not allowed to go to school with other children? Why?

  But the biggest why is: why does my mother hate me so much? Yesterday I showed her where my eyelid was swollen from a spider bite. I looked at myself in the mirror and said, ‘I look like a monster.’

  ‘If that’s how you see yourself,’ she replied icily, ‘then that’s the real you: a monster on the inside.’

  Menie Grégoire

  My compulsory reading continues with an author whom I instantly dislike: Sade. My father, who always refers to him as the ‘Marquis de Sade’, talks of him in rapturous terms: ‘Now, there’s a man who really got it. He was never fooled by sheep or manipulators! And that’s why he ended up imprisoned…’ He occasionally takes out one of Sade’s books, chooses a long passage—usually on a philosophical topic—and uses pieces of blotting paper to mark the beginning and end of the extract. Then he tells me to sit alone in the ballroom and read it. I loathe reading Sade: it chills me to the bone and all I want to do is finish so I can go and knock three times on the dining-room door for my father to come and put the book away.

  My father wants to get rid of the ‘dimwit’ in me; it exasperates him and he’s relying on Sade’s sound ideas to help him. If I happen to show my enthusiasm for the characters in, say, The Odyssey, he replies, ‘Stop believing what others want you to believe. Penelope was never faithful, she bedded all her suitors. No woman is ever faithful. As for Telemachus, he was homosexual. And if Ulysses’ dog wagged his tail when he saw his master, it’s only because he hoped he’d throw him a bone.’

  I nod in agreement. But Edmond Dantès, Gavroche, Rodolphe, Man Friday, Ulysses and Telemachus are still the heroes I adore. I talk to them inside my head, and they reply. I listen to Telemachus’s tales of his travels with his father. I wish I too had a father who took me on adventures, who could run, jump…

  I sometimes also talk to Nancy, whom I met in the Nancy Drew detective series. But our conversations never last long. It’s as if there is no common ground between her world and mine. I feel ashamed of myself and of my miserable reclusive life when Nancy is so beautiful, with her immaculate hair, all her friends and a father who loves her.

  The conversations with my ‘invisible friends’ started when I was very young. The first person who visited me was Athena. Not my father’s Athena holding the sphere of knowledge at the foot of the stairs, but the one from The Odyssey: I adore her because she’s intelligent and beautiful. She calms me down when I start to panic. When I’m daunted by the next day’s schedule she gives me sound advice. If, for example, I have to go out into the grounds at night and I’m having terrible trouble finding the light switch near the duck pond, I hear her whisper in my ear: ‘Count your footsteps so you don’t get lost. You know it’s twenty-eight paces to the right before you reach the switch…’

  I’ve never mentioned this to my parents. I’m sure my father wouldn’t like me talking freely with anyone else. Ever since I read Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, I’m feeling more confident about my mental health. In that book, the hero holds forth to absent listeners for pages on end, and yet he isn’t mad. He’s mean, which is different.

  Sometimes I also invent an older brother who reassures me when I hear strange noises in the house and worry that a ghost is suddenly going to appear in front of me. ‘Nothing bad is going to happen to you,’ he says. ‘I’m here.’ I also have schoolfriends and we whisper together on our way downstairs, gossiping about the headmaster, the strict ‘Monsieur Didier’, who will punish us if we make too much noise, and about our teacher ‘Madame Jeannine’, who is bound to tell on us. We giggle among ourselves even though we’re scared.

  But it’s when I listen to the radio in secret and hear those glorious voices buzzing with life that I’m most moved. My mother has managed to evade my father’s prying eyes and acquire a small transistor radio that she takes to her room every night to listen to her favourite program. She hides it in the classroom during the day because, although my father could decide to search our bedrooms at any time, for some mysterious reason he never searches the classroom. She leaves me alone in the afternoons more and more frequently, so I get through my homework and then, during whatever time I have left, I listen to the radio. She doesn’t suspect a thing.

  By chance I stumble upon Menie Grégoire’s program, in which listeners call in to tell stories about their lives. I’m completely transfixed. To me, she has the most beautiful voice in the world and in a flash it transports me out of the house and beyond my father’s reach. What I love most is when Menie says, ‘I’m not judgmental.’ She seems both very kind and very firm in her views. The people who write to her are like me: they’re frightened, they feel stupid, ugly, unloved. And Menie ‘understands’ them, never condemning them as cowardly or weak. She gives them simple, sensible advice. She even seems to care for them. For the first time in my life I dare to hope that somewhere in the world there might be someone who, though they wouldn’t go so far as to love me, might not think me stupid or hate me. Menie is the great Athena, but with added warmth.

  Coming back to my father’s world afterwards is painfully hard. At the moment Périsaut is the subject of a variety of culinary and alcohol-related experiments.
As he is stubbornly refusing to take on his role as a lawnmower, my father has decided the pony should forsake his instincts and become an omnivore. He wants to prove to me that nature itself can’t resist his power. Périsaut gets used to eating the same food as us and develops a taste for omelettes. His favourite dish, though, is the same as mine: spaghetti with tomato sauce.

  One day my father has some horse meat delivered by the Killer and tells my mother to cook it. Then we are solemnly summoned to witness a crucially important scientific experiment. He fills a tin plate with the meat and adds some tomato sauce. Périsaut eats it all up greedily and my father turns to me triumphantly: ‘You see what living beings are like? You think Périsaut is so sweet and affectionate towards you, but he wouldn’t think twice about eating you if he could—he’s happy enough eating his own kind! People are the same, they’re cannibals, quite prepared to betray you and eat you. Do you see now why you can’t trust anyone but me?’

  I tell him, ‘Yes, yes, I understand.’ But no, I don’t understand why he’s so happy to have made a cannibal of Périsaut. When he describes how his own father tricked him into eating his beloved pet rabbit, he gets very emotional. It’s as if he’s now trying to outwit that cruel man.

  Périsaut also has to drink alcohol every day and tackle the white line test like me. He quickly gets used to drinking white wine, red wine, diluted Ricard and mulled wine, but flatly refuses neat Ricard. When he tries to avoid it, three of us have to hold him—my mother, Raymond and me—so that we can pour the alcohol down his throat. As soon as we release him, he lets out the most heart-rending squeals. He never succeeds in walking straight along the white lines and very often falls forwards onto his nose. My father is extremely disappointed.

  Périsaut also disappoints my mother by absolutely refusing to let anyone ride him. Despite a storm of whipping, it’s impossible to get a saddle on him. He nips at my mother, or bites my father’s pants—in short, they can’t do anything with him. Eventually they give up.

  Hungarian Rhapsody

  For three years now, since I was seven, Yves has been my music teacher; for three years he has mistreated me several times a week. He is always beside himself when he’s short of money. And he always seems to need money; he is constantly in debt and pursued by bailiffs. My father offers him and his wife Mireille a room on the second floor in exchange for eight hours of music lessons a day, except of course when he’s performing at local dances. So Yves moves into our house for a few months. It’s a nightmare. I almost end up loathing music.

  My schedule is turned upside down to accommodate his availability. When he goes off on tour I can breathe easy for a few days. But the moment he’s back I’m in hell all over again. It’s as if he’s taking out his revenge on me for the extra work imposed by my father. When I play the piano he grabs my hair and yanks my head back, yelling, ‘What did I just tell you?’ He sometimes makes me stand for more than an hour playing the horrible accordion, which weighs over twelve kilos.

  For eight hours a day we alternate between the piano, the accordion, the clarinet, the saxophone and the trumpet. There is also a twelve-stringed guitar, a guitar so huge I can’t even get my fingers around the fret-board. On top of all this, my father makes use of the fact that Yves is here to get me started on drums and the pedal organ, both of which he commissions Yves to buy.

  I’m fascinated by the organ’s double keyboard. Thanks to my familiarity with the piano and the solfège work that Madame Descombes assigned to me, I have a certain facility for reading three-part scores. I decipher Bach’s Cantata 147 with relative ease. Yves is amazed and asks whether I’ve already studied the piece. ‘No, but I drew on what Madame Descombes taught me.’ He spots the gleam of reverence in my eyes when I mention her, and flies into a temper, tossing the musical scores on the piano across the room. When I see my precious Hungarian Rhapsody on the floor, my breath catches. He notices immediately and, with a spiteful look, he grabs it and tears it into tiny pieces.

  Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 is a sacred memento for me. Madame Descombes gave it to me a long time ago with the words, ‘This is what you’re working towards. One day we’ll work on it together.’ When I’m sad, I need only think of this score and I have the heart to carry on, as if it were telling me that another life is possible and I’m not condemned to stay here forever.

  I don’t know why I think of turning to Mireille, Yves’s wife. She isn’t actually allowed to talk to me and risks being beaten by her irascible husband. All the same I slip her a little note asking her for some sticky tape. There isn’t any in the house. But Yves has some, I’ve seen him use it to stick his scores together. Mireille manages to sneak me a roll of tape. Her kindness makes my heart swell. Still anxious, though, I ask her not to mention this to anyone. She puts a finger to her lips and whispers, ‘Don’t worry, I know.’ That night I stick my precious Rhapsody back together one tiny piece at a time, like a jigsaw puzzle. When it’s finished I hide it inside my big book of Czerny exercises. Yves loathes that book, so there is little risk of him opening it.

  I’m now ten years old and I dare to do things that only a few months ago I would never have dreamt I could do. At night, for example, even though I’m still not allowed to leave my bedroom, I get up and go for ‘walks’ around the house. They’re not walks for the fun of it: I get bruises from bumping into walls, but I hope I’m also inflicting a few bruises on this damned house. I hate the place and I want it to know how I feel.

  I do much worse than this. When it’s not too cold at night I open my shutters, taking great care not to make them creak. I climb out the window and jump down onto the roof of the verandah. From there I can slide onto the roof of the kennel and land in the garden. After all these years of my father making me walk around the garden at night, I can find my way in the dark without any trouble. Although I still feel a little scared, this is soon outweighed by the thrill of being free. Linda runs to greet me and together we go to find Périsaut, who sleeps standing up over by the henhouse. He usually avoids the stable because he’s so afraid of being shut in. But when he sees us on one of these nocturnal trips, he heads over to the stable of his own accord and lies down on the straw. Linda and I nestle against his belly for a few minutes of unadulterated happiness.

  I worry about Périsaut’s frequent punishments for refusing to drink neat Ricard, or for biting Raymond: he gets locked up between the outside door to the stables and the green gate on the inside. I hate this narrow space; it’s exactly where Raymond stands waiting when he wants to catch me. Périsaut stays trapped there in the dark, sometimes for three days in a row.

  My father still insists the pony should ‘mow’ the grass in various places, particularly in front of the bench near the verandah. If he doesn’t graze these areas, he earns further punishments. Before climbing back up to my room I make a detour to the lawn and clip the grass around the bench, one clump at a time, using scissors from the stables. My father scrutinizes the grass every day and seems satisfied. He believes his conditioning is working: Périsaut is omnivorous and is less and less keen on eating grass, except in the places where my father wants it cut.

  Aspro

  Yves and Mireille take all their meals in their room on the second floor. They are very discreet and avoid being in the same rooms as us. But in the evenings we sometimes hear them bickering behind closed doors. Yves is probably no kinder to his wife than to me. Some mornings Mireille comes down with a black eye and a defeated expression.

  She’s a kind woman, a little chubby, heavily made up, a hairdresser by trade. I’m intrigued by her dark brown hair. I’d love to have pretty, medium-length hair like hers, like the girls in the La Redoute catalogue. My father has always forbidden both my mother and me from wearing our hair even half an inch shorter. ‘Whores have short hair, which is why during the war…’ His reasoning leaves us perplexed. Meanwhile, we have hair down to our waists. We’re even instructed to touch it as little as possible, and to wash it only once a month.
My mother always wears hers up, and mine is always braided because ‘loose hair over the shoulders is for women of loose morals’. As for our foreheads, they have to be kept clear to ‘allow the free circulation of intelligence’. According to him, ‘a pair of curtains in front of the eyes keeps stupidity inside’.

  After my German lesson one day, I summon all my courage and make a sacrilegious request: I ask my father whether he would allow Mireille to cut my hair a little. He glowers at me. ‘Do you really want this? All right,’ he says simply. Days go by and I daren’t remind him that he has given permission. Then, when he comes across Mireille in the corridor, he calls to her, ‘Do you have a moment?’ She pales visibly. I think she is more afraid of him than I am. ‘Do you have your hairdressing things? Go and get them. You’re going to take care of Maude.’ She relaxes. ‘Oh yes, I’d be delighted. But I’ll have to wash her hair first—’

  ‘No need,’ he interrupts.

  She comes back down with her bag.

  ‘Shave her head,’ my father snaps.

  She freezes for a moment, then says in a wavering voice, ‘I could give her a pretty little short haircut…’

  ‘Shave her head.’

  While she runs the clippers over my scalp, I can read the heartbreak on her face in the mirror. My long blonde hair falls like the strips of hemp we bind around the water pipes in winter to stop them freezing. I avoid looking at myself, ashamed. And yet I didn’t sleep with the Germans. If my father is subjecting me to the same punishment as those unworthy women he sometimes describes, then I must be truly worthless. Perhaps I’m being punished for the humiliating experiences I undergo with Raymond…

  I wait for her to finish. I look up and turn to stone. I don’t recognize my own face, which is even uglier than before. Clearly visible on my scalp are dozens of little scars I inflicted on myself as a child, when I banged my head against walls. Over the next few weeks my head itches. I feel more and more of a stranger in my own body, and avoid mirrors even more than before. My parents must be pleased because they can’t stand me looking in the mirror. If my father catches me glancing in a mirror, he makes his voice sound nasal and snidely sings Avez-vous vu le nouveau chapeau de Zozo1? I’m filled with shame. Mireille avoids me now, as if she can’t bear the guilt of my bare scalp.