But when I finally find Father, Maxime says he’s used up his roll of film, there’s nothing left, sorry. Father is here, I can hear Mother nearby, and this dolt had to take thirty-six shots of lilac blossoms. I want to kill him. Instead, I start crying, which makes me angrier still.
A few days later, in the family album, there’s a square black-and-white photo of a skinny girl in a longish white dress and a rosebud crown. She’s stamping her foot, her face distorted with rage, tears flowing down her cheeks, her arms raised toward the torpid skies. Maxime wrote the caption: “Tita on the day of her private communion.”
Names
Tita is what most people call me. Nobody but mademoiselle Pélican, the nuns and the priest use Euphémie, my baptismal name — I had to get a new name when I was baptized because my legal name, the one on my passport, wasn’t a saint’s name. Last week Justine asked me, “When you are my age, and you meet a boy, if he wants to know what your name is, what will you say?”
This was not an idle question; it was a test question. “Tita,” I said. To keep her happy, and even though Euphémie might sound better when I stop being a child.
“Right. Tita is so much sweeter, isn’t it? You should always be called Tita, even when you’re older. Even as a married woman. It’s so charming. It’s you.”
Well, I thought, there’s at least someone in the world who thinks she knows what “me” is. I wasn’t at all convinced, though. Justine is extremely interesting to watch and listen to; but I don’t think she has all the answers.
In the music room Ginette, our cleaning lady, is dusting the window frames. I sit on the piano stool with my back to the instrument and look at the portrait, high on the wall, of a girl who must be about my age: my aunt Marta. There are portraits of great-uncles and forefathers all over the house, most of them in military uniform, but aunt Marta is the only female who rates one. Is it because she died in boarding school (Father says “convent”) when she was twelve? In the painting, she wears a thin white animal around her neck, with the head and tail clearly visible, and a white pillbox hat. She is pale, and looks serious. A bit timid, perhaps.
Ginette is now rubbing the piano keys with something sour-smelling from a bottle. She lives across the back street with her husband and daughter, and she’s been working in this house for ever, every day but Sunday. “Did you know my aunt Marta?” I ask her.
“Of course I did. My mother used to work for your grandmother, and I sometimes came along. Marta was three years older than me, but she was nice. She read books all the time, and she lent me quite a few good ones.”
“Did she ever do forbidden things? Did she climb roofs?”
Ginette laughs. “I never heard about that. But she was lively enough. When she went out with the maid, she always wanted to take some of her dolls with her. Said they needed the fresh air.”
“I have this porcelain doll, Jacqueline, that used to be hers. Do you remember her playing with it?”
“Yes, and she broke both Jacqueline’s legs trying to get her to do somersaults. Her mother, your grandmother Clara, said the doll would have to remain legless — that would teach Marta. Then, after what happened... your grandmother gave me some of Marta’s toys, and put away the rest. But just before your second birthday she went to the linen garret, found this broken doll, and took it to the repair shop in Narbonne, in the rue Droite. She wanted you to have it. From the beginning, she said you were very much like your aunt Marta, and I guess that’s why she called you Tita.”
“Was Tita her...?”
“Yes, Tita is what we called your aunt Marta. I think Marta made it up herself when she was little. People called her ‘Martita’ sometimes, so... Then, not long after you came here, your grandmother took a fancy to you and started calling you Tita. After a while, everybody followed suit. Do you remember your grandmother Clara? Probably not, you weren’t even three when she died.”
My grandmother Clara. People, when they mention her, say things like, “She was such an amazing lady, walking tall in her long black dresses and her high white chignon. So refined, so imposing.”
I do remember her, but not like that. “She always stayed in her room,” I tell Ginette. “She read me fairy tales. She let me play with her fans, she had a whole drawer of them. With her scarves too, and her embroidered handkerchiefs.”
Two tears slide down my cheeks. Ginette puts down her duster, pulls me up from the stool, takes me in her lap, and kisses me a few times. I kiss her back then go downstairs, across the garden and out through the back door into the street. The dirt road on the left leads down to La Fourcade, our rambling orchard. I sit on a wood bench under a fig tree, thinking about my name. If I were Marta, if I were dead, would I like someone else to get my nickname, the name I made up for myself?
There are worse things in the world than feeling uneasy about your name. There are enormously worse things than I and my friends are ever likely to experience, as mademoiselle Pélican reminds us every other minute with her stories of miscellaneous martyrs and Chinese children who not only go hungry but haven’t been baptized, so they will be sent to limbo at best when they die.
I don’t intend to fall into self-pity. I should be grateful to Grandmother Clara: if she hadn’t thought of calling me Tita, I might be stuck with my legal name, the one Mother chose for me: Lakmé. Mother says that she looked forward to having a daughter just for the sake of naming her Lakmé, which is the title of her favorite opera and the name of its heroine, an Indian girl who falls in love with an Englishman who abandons her so she kills herself at the end, with poison. I can’t imagine a more ridiculous thing to do than killing yourself over some man. Mother said that she had a lot of trouble with the registry officer at the clinic, Lakmé was so unusual. But she told him about the opera, sang the beginning of Sous le ciel tout étoilé, and he couldn’t resist. I wish he had.
I make a decision: I’ll give each of my children three names, all as unobtrusive as possible, and they’ll choose between these when they’re seven. Seven, because it’s the age of reason.
Now I can relax in the smell of fig leaves. Behind the tree there’s a hut with quinces, apples, nuts, some tools and, on a low shelf, a heap of books. I start reading Léonie veut aller à la fête. Léonie, the heroine, is invited to a dance for the first time. Her father, who is a sailor, is away in Africa. She’s excited about the party and would like to wear the dress her father sent her for her birthday, but there are a few snags. Her stepmother, madame Mercier, thinks she’s too young. Then Dora, the stepmother’s daughter, wants to borrow Léonie’s dress. As Dora is much larger than Léonie, the dress might not survive.
The story is good, but I’ve read it before. What catches my attention is the way Léonie addresses her stepmother. Léonie calls madame Mercier Belle-mère. Which is the French word for both mother-in-law and stepmother, and literally means “beautiful mother”. This sounds like a solution.
Because Coralie and I have a problem: we don’t know how to address our mother. She is a belle-mère to our older brothers and sister, but they just call her Odette. Justine even coined a pet name for her: Dette (which actually means “debt”). Coralie and I are supposed to say Maman, but we don’t. Ever. We don’t call her anything. At all. Which might get us into trouble. Because it’s not polite to just say “yes”, or “thanks”, or “please”; you should go on with the name or title of the person. As in “Thanks, Loli”, or “Please, Grand-Mère”. We can’t do it with our mother, we just can’t bring ourselves to pronounce the word maman, it sounds so babyish; so we try to avoid situations where we’d have to.
Now why not call our mother Belle-mère? She is beautiful.
I can’t wait. I run back to the house with the book. I find Coralie in the coal shed, grinding chunks of coal onto her hair with both hands.
“Hi,” she says. “Where have you been? I’d like to be a gypsy. Can you become a gypsy?”
“I guess. Shall I read you Léonie veut aller à la fête?”
Then our mother calls from inside, “Tita, Coralie! Lunch!” Normally, we’d just go. Silently.
But I answer, “Oui, Belle-mère.”
Coralie echoes, “Oui, Belle-mère.”
Our mother doesn’t seem to notice. She never pays much attention to words.
Currency
This morning when I wake up my nose is so clogged I can only breathe through my mouth, but my throat is swollen, so not much air gets in. When I try to say good morning to Loli no sound comes out, not even a whisper. Mother decides that I’ll stay home from school. Dr Barral drops by, and Loli goes to the pharmacy for the usual lozenges and tablets. Meanwhile I follow Mother up into the bathroom. She takes a long twisted metal stick out of the medicine cabinet, disinfects it, winds a cotton swab around one end, takes me in her lap, dips the stick in a bottle of tart-smelling red liquid and thrusts it into the back of my throat. I should be used to this. Every time, though, I’m sure the stick is going to pierce my vocal cords.
Some gagging is going on in my throat, but the rest of my body stays very still as Mother dips and paints, dips and paints. I’m trying to stop my mind, pretend I’m already dead so nothing can hurt me. When she’s done, Mother closes the bottle, lays the stick in the washbasin, and gives me a long cuddle because I’ve been so quiet. “My sweet little sick girl,” she says. Then she carries me to my bed, where I leaf through a bunch of old Lisettes and Fillettes from the night table, because I’m too tired to go and look for a book.
After a while I fall asleep. When I wake up, the gold clock on the mantelpiece, held up by three curly-haired naked boys with outstretched arms, says twenty past five, and I feel like getting up. I walk slowly downstairs (I’m still dizzy) and into Father’s study. I can vaguely hear Father’s voice coming from the office, in conversation with Simone (the secretary) and Berthe (the accountant), while on the other side, in the sitting room, Mother is having tea with her friends.
I slide into the sitting room, as noiselessly as I can, and sit on a low stool between the wall and a wide armchair that has a full square back and straight legs. The women are all at the other end of the room near the windows, in flimsier chairs with curved legs, with their teacups on small painted tables, all of slightly different sizes so you can stack them if you like. Nobody notices me. I often try this, and succeed about half the time. I do it as an experiment, to find out how invisible I can be, but today I also have a practical reason: if Mother saw me she might, instead of asking me to pass the cakes and then forgetting about me, send me back to bed.
Cami Espeluque, my friend Anne-Claude’s mother, plump and blooming in a low-cut yellow dress, is telling the others about her two-year-old twin boys, who have colds. “Can you believe those rascals? They get a kick out of sneezing into each other’s faces!” Mother often says that Cami “has no conversation” because she tends to go on about the twins, but the twins are a pretty good topic, I think. More entertaining than hats. Mother talks about her children too, but she never tries to be amusing. Or maybe she doesn’t know how.
But I am the topic right now. “Tita too has a cold.” Mother announces. “She’s in bed! Again! Throat infection, cough, the works. She’s so delicate, and such a bad eater. I don’t think this climate is good for her — all this dry wind, it’s enervating. I do everything I can to make her stronger, I never stop. Every morning I give her cod liver oil, nose drops three times a day, enemas every evening. I wonder what would happen if I didn’t. I guess she wouldn’t be alive by now.”
I’ve often wondered why Mother lies so much. Thank God she doesn’t wield cod liver oil every day. Or enemas! She does inflict those torments on me, but not very often. So why “every morning, every evening”? A lot of what she says is like that. For instance, last week, the owner of the fabric store in Narbonne said, “This ochre silk is perfect for you, you have such a beautiful complexion!” Mother looked delighted. “Thank you!” she said. “And you know, it’s absolutely natural. I never do anything to my skin other than wash it with savon de Marseille, never use any kind of cream or lotion. Ever!”
When actually she keeps a whole array of pots and bottles on her dressing table — she brings them back from Lyon, a big city far away near the Alps, where she used to live before she married Father. She often visits there because that’s where all her real girlfriends are, from the time when she had her own beauty salon. Through her friends, she can still get the wholesale price for serums, oils, masks, toners, moisturizers, foundations, powders. She uses a few of them evening and morning, over and above the concoctions she creates from fruit and vegetables.
I can’t imagine why her words are so at odds with the facts. I tried to discuss this once with Justine. She rolled her eyes at my instances of Mother’s mendacity: “You can’t call this lying! It’s hyperbole.”
“I’m not sure Dr Barral is up to scratch,” Mother goes on, “so I called a specialist in Béziers, Dr Viala. Have you heard of him? He was written up in Le Midi Libre, sounds like he’s the best. Very handsome too, at least according to their photo. I was lucky to get an appointment for tomorrow afternoon, at three thirty. Oh, and there’s a sale at the Galeries Modernes. They’re going to remodel the store. I think I’ll take a look at it after the specialist. I need beach towels, and a bathing suit. Would you be interested?”
Estelle shrugs. “Why not? I haven’t been to Béziers for quite a while. Let’s go and see what’s going on.”
“Good idea,” Cami says. “What about you, Denise? Let’s all go, shall we? In my car?” Because of her four children, Cami has the largest car.
Denise Pujol, our next-door neighbor, hesitates. “I’d like to take a look at their tea towels,” she finally says, “but I’ll have to talk to Roger.”
The other women try not to look at each other, but I know what they’re thinking: “Poor Denise!”
Not that the Pujols are poor, financially. Quite the opposite. They live next door to us in a bigger and more ornate house (ours is neater, though, with its plain façade and slender roof balustrade). Roger Pujol is one of Father’s oldest friends. He’s a notaire, and his offices take up the whole ground floor of their house. Their daughter lives in Toulouse (she married a surgeon), and their son is studying economics in Germany. They have a cook, two maids and a gardener. Every summer they go to the spa in Luchon, checking into the Grand Hotel. But Denise doesn’t have her own car. She doesn’t even drive. Also, the way the Pujols deal with money is peculiar. Roger gives Denise, every morning, the cash needed for grocery shopping. If she wants more than usual, she has to ask. He’s not actually stingy, he’ll give her what she wants, but she has to ask.
Mother finds this humiliating. “Every month, I get sixty thousand francs in my bank account,” she likes to say. “Which isn’t a lot, but at least it’s mine. Henri trusts me to spend it as I see fit.” What about Cami? Does her husband, too, put money into her account? He’s a propriétaire, he manages his vineyards with his father and my impression is, they’re in trouble. But Cami’s parents own a few houses around town. Her father has a real-estate business, and her mother a perfume store.
Estelle “has her own money”, people say. Is this the same as a dowry? My throat starts tingling, my chest is burning, I think I’m going to cough, so I slide back into Father’s study, which is empty. I sit at Father’s desk, forget about coughing, look up dot in the Robert. A dowry, biens dotaux, is what a woman brings to the marriage, to be managed by her husband. What she actually owns personally is called biens paraphernaux.
Crocodile
At noon Loli is waiting for us in front of Sainte-Blandine. On our way back, we meet two friends of hers near the école laïqu
e. Coralie, followed by the other maids’ little boys, climbs onto the benches along the avenue, jumps down, runs around the trees, hops on one foot, waves to acquaintances, while I listen to the maids discussing dances and boyfriends in Occitan. They exclaim, disagree, make fun of the men. They’re not going to be maids all their lives, and they don’t want to go back to their parents’ farms: they all came to town to find a husband.
Loli says to her friends, “There’s no hurry, is there? As long as you don’t have to wear Saint Catherine’s bonnet...” Nobody wants to be a Catherinette, which is what you become if you’re still unmarried when you turn twenty-five. For Saint Catherine’s Day all the Catherinettes make elaborate headdresses and walk in a procession wearing them. Loli is sixteen; in November for Saint Catherine’s day she’ll be seventeen, so she still has eight years left to find a fiancé. I hope it takes her a while, because I like her. She’s so cheerful. It’s not easy to be a maid: even though you are a grown-up, you have to do as you’re told, all day long. Our previous maid, Jeanine, who got married last spring, was often in a bad mood; she yelled at Coralie, and quarrelled with Justine.
As soon as we come through the garden door, I feel queasy. Veal blanquette. The smell of the sauce, creamy, vealy, makes me want to run away. Instead, I wash my hands and enter the dining room, where my parents are kissing against the central-heating radiator. The radiator is cold and if they wanted heat, which they probably don’t on this warm day, they could stand in the sun at the other end of the room, near the windows. But they always hold each other and kiss in front of the radiator. It’s a large radiator, as tall as Mother’s shoulders. Its top part is a cabinet that’s supposed to hold plates and dishes to keep them warm but it’s now full of old newspapers for the stove. For we also have a small wood stove, which is needed when it gets really cold. Eléonore’s grandmother told me that our house was the first one in town to get central heating, which is why our ancient radiators don’t produce much warmth. Mother says it’s also because the house is too big and too drafty.
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