The Only Girl in the World

by Maude Julien

  The Santinas Jazz Band

  It is incredible what Monsieur Molin has managed to get my father to accept. I now work in his music shop every day, and join the double bass class he teaches at the conservatory in Dunkirk. My father agreed to this even though the classes are late in the evening. I come home on the nine-thirty train, when it’s dark and there are sometimes drunken men in the carriage—I’m careful never to mention them at home. Of course, I was given solemn instructions: ‘Now you’re starting to complete your initiation into the world. But be careful, I’ll say this once again: you mustn’t get pregnant. Otherwise all my plans for you will fall apart.’ Then he warns me about ‘sects’, people who will try to persuade me to go live with them; these sects are worse than religious groups and their leaders are called gurus. The guru will make me take drugs, which would wipe out all the training my father has given me. Whenever my mother and I are alone, she comes back to this subject obsessively. She thinks I’m ‘ideal prey’ for sects because I’m weak, and she’s terrified I won’t be able to resist these gurus who have only one thing in mind: to get me into their beds.

  It annoys me that she keeps coming back to the subject of sex. I have absolutely no desire to end up in anyone’s bed. Anyway, I still feel very awkward and I hate my oversized body. Luckily I’m on friendly terms with Angèle, the young woman who runs the shop next door on the rue Nationale. She encourages me to try on clothes, explains which colours work together, the difference between fabrics, what a belt is, a scarf…Thanks to her, I now wear normal clothes, which has helped reconcile me somewhat to my appearance.

  One Wednesday in December, halfway through a double bass lesson, the door opens and in steps a tall, very thin young man; almost the only thing visible above his thick red scarf is his black hair.

  ‘Ah, here’s tall Richard,’ says Monsieur Molin. ‘Come in.’

  I’ve never seen anyone so tall or who looks almost as shy as me. Maybe his height is a burden to him too?

  ‘What are you doing here, my friend?’ Monsieur Molin asks.

  Richard stammers that he’s here for his Friday lesson.

  ‘But it’s Wednesday,’ Monsieur Molin says with one of his winning smiles.

  Richard opens his mouth and his cigarette falls to the floor. He bends down and makes a clumsy attempt to scoop up the ash.

  ‘Here,’ says Monsieur Molin, taking his arm, ‘let me introduce you to young Maude, she’s a great musician and so pretty too…’

  I flush as red as Richard’s scarf.

  It turns out that Richard is twenty-five and has started studying double bass and solfège.

  ‘I’m happy to see that someone at twenty-five still has the urge and the courage to take up a musical instrument,’ says Monsieur Molin, and Richard’s thin, introverted face suddenly lights up. I notice the way he looks at Monsieur Molin, as if he’s gazing at the Messiah.

  I immediately take a shine to this tall young man, and to his shyness and absent-mindedness. He sometimes comes to the music shop to buy strings and sheet music. He’s the complete opposite of the sailors who follow me along the street, who confuse me with all their drivel and who are almost impossible to shake off. Richard hardly dares smile at me. He seems as much a novice, as much at a loss, as I am in everyday life.

  When I get home in the evening I find my parents in exactly the same place I left them in the morning. I can’t bring myself to ask my mother whether she spends her days holed up with him in the bar. My father now tries to spend as little time as possible in the house: as soon as his morning routine is over, we help him downstairs and he heaves a sigh of relief as he steps into the grounds. He doesn’t go back to the house till bedtime; it’s as if he’s frightened of the big old place now. No one sets foot anymore in the large ground-floor rooms, where an atmosphere of deathly gloom pervades.

  I can tell that my father views my work as a shop assistant and my double bass lessons as nothing more than a phase that he can put an end to at any time. I need to find a way to break out. Right now, though, I’m completely focused on the end of year exam that Monsieur Molin is determined I take at the conservatory. After the trauma of the bac, I need all his encouragement before I agree to take it. Richard has promised to come and support me.

  When the day comes, I perform a Bach Chaconne. My hands shake like leaves and my bow feels as if it’s been greased with oil. I cling to somewhere deep inside me, rather as I used to during the alcohol exercises my father made me do. By the time I finish the piece, I’m dripping with sweat and I am filled with a strange feeling of unreality. Other pupils are waiting their turn with their parents, who encourage them, kissing their foreheads and even their hair. How wonderful that must be! Like an orphan, I clutch my bow, too much of a ‘breed apart’ to deserve a mother’s love.

  Monsieur Molin shakes me out of my stupor: ‘My little one, you electrified the jury! You’ve won the conservatory’s first prize. Congratulations! You really earned it.’

  I smile, I’m pleased, but I wonder whether I really have earned it. I know that ‘great musicians’ play naturally: thanks to Madame Descombes, Monsieur Molin and the records I can now listen to, I know about real music, the sort of music that seems to reach for the skies. But for me music is synonymous with torture, suffering and hour upon hour of work. I have no spontaneity.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Monsieur Molin asks. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘I can’t even improvise…’

  ‘Well, little one,’ he reassures me, ‘contrary to what you might think, you can learn to improvise. You’ll see when you come and play in my Santinas Jazz Band with me…’

  My mother is worried about how frequently I am out of the house; she’s convinced I’m ‘seeing people’ and that I’m in grave danger of falling prey to the first man to come along. Perhaps that’s why my parents are in such a hurry to marry me off.

  One day, when there’s a public transport strike, Richard drives me home in his car. My mother asks him in and takes him to the bar, where my father is ensconced in his usual chair. He asks for Richard to be given a large glass of whisky and interrogates him about his age and his work. Then he asks my mother and me to leave the room. After a long private conversation, my father summons me back in and announces that Richard and I are to be married in three weeks’ time, just long enough for the reading of the banns. The date is set for Saturday, July 24th. I’m speechless with surprise.

  Lying in bed that night, I can’t believe I’ll be leaving the house for good to go and live with this painfully shy, handsome young man. Am I dreaming?

  The Sunday before the wedding my father gives my mother and me an ‘impassivity’ exercise that I struggle to complete—I’m churning inside. Afterwards he asks my mother to leave us alone together.

  ‘All these years have been devoted to moulding you,’ he says. ‘You’re now entering an important phase, but first of all you need to have been married. So you’re going to marry this young man but you won’t consummate the marriage. Don’t worry about dealing with that. In six months’ time I’ll pay for your divorce and you can come back to live here and accomplish your mission.’

  I have to repress my shudders as I listen to his words. His voice grows still more solemn as he adds, ‘Now, if you want me to let you go, you must promise that you’ll come back in six months. If you refuse to promise you won’t go.’

  He tells me to raise my right hand and swear three times. I raise my hand and I swear three times; at the bottom of my tattered heart I know for sure that I will break this oath. I will not get divorced after six months, I will not come back to live with him, I will not accomplish his ‘great’ mission. In fact, I will do everything I can to sustain my marriage and achieve my freedom.

  On the Saturday morning of the wedding we perform his wake-up routine in silence. The last for me. My mother doesn’t say a word; I realize with a heavy heart that she’ll have to carry the chamber pot from now on; she’ll be on her own here doing it. Then I ta
ke the little bag I’ve packed with a nightdress and two dresses bought from Angèle’s shop. I slip my sticky-taped Hungarian Rhapsody into the bag along with Notes from Underground, which I stole from a box on the second floor. After all these years in this house, they are the only two things I want to take with me.

  It’s twenty to nine, and the ceremony is set for ten o’clock in the Dunkirk town hall. My parents won’t be there. My mother accompanies me to the garden gate, where Richard has just parked. She lets me go without a word, without a kiss. Maybe it’s better like this; if she opened her arms to me I think I’d bury myself in them. I’m dying to get away and yet I’m shaking with fear. The shutter at my father’s window is open and I see the curtain move. He didn’t say goodbye to me; he’s hiding as he watches me leave. My heart constricts. I love my father and I miss him already. I hate my father and want to get away. As the gate closes behind me, the memory of my false promise feels like a blade driving through me. My mother is right: I can’t be trusted. I’m leaving like a thief, like a traitor, like a rat off a sinking ship. I’m ashamed of myself, but I get into Richard’s car and slam the door to erase the sound of the gate that first closed on me fifteen years ago.

  I earn a living working full-time for Monsieur Molin. When we’re confronted with a problem—a cranky customer, a tricky piano repair or the like—he says conspiratorially, ‘Ah, my little Maude, the pair of us managed to get out of far more complicated situations, didn’t we? We won’t let a little problem like this stop us.’

  For a long time now he has wanted me to play in the Santinas Jazz Band, a band in which all the musicians can play any of the instruments.

  ‘Now that you’re married you can come and rehearse with us in the evenings.’

  I really like the four band members who play the trumpet, the double bass and the piano. But even though I can perform in front of professionals, I don’t have it in me to play for a real audience. I feel as if I’d be putting myself in terrible danger: my father told me so many stories about dangerous crowds, like the mobs who throw rotten tomatoes at great opera tenors.

  When performance day comes my stomach is in so many knots that I can’t eat a thing. I’ve chosen dark clothes, in case I’m pelted with tomatoes. On the stage I cling to my double bass and play studiously while the other three musicians and Monsieur Molin on the banjo all seem to be enjoying themselves. The concert comes to an end and we leave the stage amid applause. Phew, we avoided the tomatoes! But what’s happening? The clapping is getting louder, people are shouting, ‘More!’

  Monsieur Molin gives me a pat. ‘Come on, little one, we’re going back on.’

  I panic slightly; I don’t know what we’re going to play, I don’t have any more music prepared.

  ‘Come on, guys,’ Monsieur Molin says, ‘let’s give them “When the Saints Go Marching in”.’

  The audience are on their feet, clapping along. The band starts to let loose, clowning around. So it is possible to do things properly and to have fun at the same time. I gradually succumb to the excitement. I’ve never felt anything like it. I can feel my fingers softening over the strings, my body loosening, my face brightening and breaking into a smile all on its own. I wink at the trumpeter and he winks back at me!

  It’s wonderfully euphoric.

  I’m not in a concentration camp. I’m not playing music to stay alive. I am alive. And I’m playing music for the pleasure of sharing the excitement with other musicians and other human beings.

  I got out of my parents’ house. I got out.

  Epilogue

  As a little girl, I used to make a promise to myself and seal it with a prayer: ‘If I ever get out, I’ll be in awe of everything I see. I pray that my father’s voice will stay shut away in this house and won’t follow me everywhere I go.’

  I think I’ve kept my promise, but I sometimes wonder whether my prayer was answered. I often go to Arnhem Land in northern Australia, travelling deep into the bush with Indigenous Australians and staying with Max Davidson, a ranger who has been running a camp in this idyllic area for more than thirty years. The last time I was there, I dreamed I was staying in Max’s wonderful place, surrounded by that beautiful country, which always gives me an intense feeling of freedom. Then the dream lens suddenly zoomed out, the magnificent scenery shrank dizzyingly before my eyes until it was a little model sitting on a table on the verandah in front of my father. He laughed: ‘Ha, ha! To think that all these years she thought she was outside, when in fact she’s never left the house.’ My body stiffened with terror; I turned to look at Max, who nodded and said, ‘Yes, I thought all this was real, too, but it was just a model.’ I woke with a start.

  Luckily, I don’t have that dream very often, but it reminds me to remain vigilant. It has been thirty-eight years since I left my childhood home to get married. Then came the struggle to secure my emotional freedom. For a very long time, I couldn’t talk about my past, not to my husband or my friends. Not even to my therapists. Whenever I did allude to my upbringing, I was always vague. Who could possibly have been interested? In truth, I was hiding my story like a shameful secret. I was afraid people would turn away. That they would look at me with disgust, the way Rémi did when he noticed my scar. I was terrified of ending up alone, again.

  Mostly, I was so happy I’d escaped my imprisonment that I had no desire to go back, not even in my thoughts. I went to see my parents every week, with increasing discomfort, tormented by the guilt of having abandoned a sinking ship. My father eventually got used to Richard and stopped demanding that I divorce him. But as soon as I walked away, I would jump feet first into my ‘real’ life with ‘real’ people and ‘real’ relationships. I didn’t have time to dwell on my past. It was much later that my buried fears emerged again, forcing me to confront the wounds of my childhood.

  In the meantime, I had more urgent and far more exciting plans and longings. I wanted to walk for hours on end without being caged in by fences, to run on a beach that stretched to the horizon, to earn a living working with colleagues, to travel, to move furniture around, go into a bookshop and buy whatever book I wanted, listen to the Beatles, go to the cinema, laugh till I was breathless, cry freely.

  Yet I had to learn the most basic codes for life in society: talking to strangers, finding my way in unenclosed places, eating in a restaurant with friends. It may seem obvious, but how do you eat, talk, drink, chew, reply and swallow at the same time without dribbling or choking? How do you pass someone on the footpath when there are people coming towards you? How do you say no? Or yes? I was too busy navigating all of this to dwell on the past.

  It was only after my father died, in December 1979, that my body started to express the suffering I had buried. As soon as I was away from a professional setting where everything ran smoothly, I was gripped by muscle spasms, fainting fits, and episodes that I mistook for asthma attacks. I now realize these are all classic symptoms of what’s known as Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I would clench my teeth and pull myself through with sheer willpower, just as my father had taught me. Besides, I was even less inclined to pay attention to these signs because I’d just given birth to a gorgeous green-eyed little girl. I kept repeating to myself: ‘You got out, you’re free.’

  But being outside wasn’t enough to make me free. I was still shut away behind the ‘gates’ of my upbringing: I felt guilty if I spent a single minute doing nothing; I always woke before my alarm and sprang out of bed without even taking the time to stretch; I planned my journeys so that I would get to meetings exactly at the appointed time, to the minute. I could feel unspoken fears from my childhood lurking in the dark forests of my mind, biding their time until they could pull me apart.

  The fears leaped out at me the day I decided to change my life, to move away from the area and once and for all put some distance between me and my father’s house. I was twenty-five. As I drove towards Paris, I had a panic attack that almost cost my daughter and me our lives. It was the first of many. On the surfac
e, I was a highly effective construction lawyer. But underneath I was prey to the horrors experienced by other sufferers of panic attacks: nightmares that sent me straight back to the cellar seething with rats, where I was supposed to mingle with the dead; phobias that made the simplest tasks insurmountably difficult; debilitating obsessive-compulsive behaviour, rituals to ‘protect me from the number three’; dizzy spells, fainting fits and panic attacks. My senses were constantly and terrifyingly in turmoil: pins and needles, dizziness, feeling of suffocation, a sense of imminent death…It was as if, by moving away from my father’s house, I had inadvertently released the howling pack of wolves—my childhood fears.

  At the same time, I started experiencing other physical side effects, some of them severe. I didn’t see a dentist until I was eighteen, so my teeth were crumbling, my gums full of abscesses. My stooped back was prone to muscle tears as a result of the countless falls I had endured doing somersaults. The massive alcohol intake had irreparably damaged my liver, which secreted Gamma GT and transaminase enzymes as soon as it came into contact with substances as common as paracetamol. As for the scars on both sides of my body, doctors were baffled by them and swiftly dismissed my parents’ explanation that they were ‘left by an X-ray’ or the result of a fall. To this day I don’t know what caused them. At a certain point I was so miserable that I no longer had a choice: I had to commit to some sort of recovery process. That was when I started my long journey with therapy, at the end of which I became a therapist myself. I did sometimes teeter on the edge of the abyss as I struggled to find the right kind of help. There was the Freudian analyst who saw me for a year and hardly spoke a single word: having suffered so much at the hands of silence, I felt I was being subjected to searing rejection all over again. Or another psychoanalyst who was besotted with puns and saw fit, at our first session, to assail me with: ‘What do you know, it’s Maude the Maudlin!’ Or with the overly sensitive psychiatrist who was distraught by my story: he was convinced I was going to attempt suicide, and that I wasn’t the sort to fail.