Father sees Le Bon Usage next to me. He frowns. “What do you want with that book?”
“I just... like it,” I say.
“You do? It’s a very good book, but you probably have something simpler, written for children.”
“Our grammar book is much too vague,” I say. “For instance, about the agreement of past participles, it only gives the main rules, but there are lots of exceptions.”
Father is shaking his head. “Why on earth do you care so much about past participles?” he finally says.
“Don’t you care about words? This book looks like it has been used a lot.”
“Too much, maybe. You can have it.”
I jump up to kiss him. “Oh, thank you! But are you sure you won’t need it?”
He smiles. “If I need it, I’ll tell you. But I haven’t used it in years.”
I like rules, and I like to catch Pélican’s blunders, but what I like best is just to think about words. Le Bon Usage is special: it doesn’t tell you, “Do this, do that,” like our grammar book at school. In each case, it describes what many writers do, and others don’t; what various grammarians think, what was more usual in the seventeenth century, what’s happening to the language now. You can see that the author, monsieur Grevisse, would like precision and common sense to prevail, but he never says, “This is right, that is wrong”. He gives quotations that illustrate one usage, and quotations for a different usage, and he tells you what he thinks. Then you can make up your own mind. I’m in love with him.
“Enjoy yourself,” Father goes on. “And if you have trouble finding something, ask me. The index is so detailed you might not always know where to look.”
Early Mass
Mother is going to stay in Paris with Aunt Caroline, Father’s sister, who lives in a fancy house with columns and turrets next to the bois de Vincennes. Aunt Caroline’s husband is a politician with a long white beard. Sometimes he is ministre des Finances, then he becomes ministre de la Marine and then it’s his friend monsieur Morel-Basset who’s ministre des Finances. At other times neither is a minister, but never for long.
Aunt Caroline invites about twenty people to every meal. Mother always has great times with my two cousins, aunt Caroline’s daughters from a previous marriage, who are nineteen and twenty-two. Operas, plays, parties, nightclubs. “When we go out together,” Mother says, “people always think we’re sisters.” Being mistaken for someone much younger is one of her great pleasures in life. She’s in heaven when people assume that my brothers are her brothers, and you hear of nothing else for days. Justine’s ambition is just the opposite: she wants to look like she’s at least sixteen. As for me, I just wish people would refrain, when Coralie and I are introduced, from asking who is older. But Coralie is almost as tall as I am, and much bigger, so strangers get confused.
Usually, as soon as Mother starts making plans and I overhear her on the phone giggling and planning frolics with my cousins, the air becomes so thick around me I have trouble breathing. She’s going away, soon she will be gone: the thought insists, pressing on me night and day. I try to stand still in the overcast limbo, to close my eyes, shrink my skin, empty my head, forget that I am there, with nothing before me but the abyss.
But somehow this time it isn’t so bad. Mother is going to Paris, but this perspective doesn’t befog the landscape. The world is still there. It’s even brighter than usual.
After lunch Mother, still sitting at the table, pulls me into her lap. “Come for a cuddle, my pet,” she says. “You know, I’m leaving on Friday, are you going to miss me?”
“Yes,” I say. But I’m not so sure. She’s never asked before. Has she noticed how different I feel, this time?
“My precious lamb,” Mother says. “I won’t stay very long, only two weeks.”
As soon as she’s gone, I even feel a kind of relief. Grandmother is in charge, and it’s such a change of atmosphere. Grandmother never tries to please anybody, she just does what she thinks is right. She doesn’t take me in her lap, cuddle me, or even kiss me much except when she’s going away, or I am, or when I give her a bunch of wild flowers. She doesn’t need anything from me, doesn’t expect me to love her, wait for her, miss her. She just wants me to behave, and as a whole I do, so we get on well.
On Saturday, after school, Coralie and I don’t go home, but Loli takes us to the Vié house. Estelle has invited us to sleep over and spend Sunday with her family. She often does, when Mother is away; and I play with Philippe, her nine-year-old son who’s in boarding school during the week (the same school both our fathers went to, in the Montagne Noire), while Coralie romps with little Mireille.
“Can we go round to the garden gate?” I ask Loli.
“Why should we do that?”
I shrug. I can’t tell her about the ripe odour I want to avoid. So she rings the bell and Adèle, the Viés’ housekeeper, opens the door and kisses us in the entrance. I hurry into the hall, the reek from Bertrand’s office on the left is so overwhelming. Bertrand is a doctor, but he doesn’t need to work for a living. He just keeps these two rooms in the house, a waiting room and an examination room. When he’s around, anybody can come and be treated for free. A lot of gypsies do.
I wonder why I’m such a coward: if Bertrand can welcome them, examine them, talk to them, I should at least be able to bear the smell for a few seconds. It makes me woozy, like cheese does, but I have to try. Father explained that not everybody has the same idea of cleanliness, the same rules. He said that gypsies, if they follow their traditional laws, are only allowed to wash in running water. Not easy when you don’t live near a stream but in old houses around the church, where you don’t have running water!
Philippe is calling me from the top of the stairs. “Hey, Tita,” he says, “come and see my new cars. They have windows!”
In his bedroom, he’s already set up a chute for the car race. He has more than twenty toy cars, and his favorite game is to set them at the top of the chute, let them slide down and see how far each goes. You aren’t allowed to push. When I visit, we share the cars and the competition is between us.
I choose the Renault 4CV and he the Simca Aronde. Mine wins over and over, but today this doesn’t bother him. He’s trying to elucidate what is special and wonderful about these two new specimens. I can’t pay attention, but I like to listen to him, the passionate way he pronounces words like hub, steering, suspension.
Adèle calls us to dinner. The grown-ups have just finished their aperitif, and Bertrand excuses himself: he’s going to L’Etang, their country house in the Minervois. Three women from Béziers are staying with Estelle for a few days. This evening, they’ll all play bridge. Estelle has many friends. Local ones like everybody else, and bridge friends from all over. She’s also the head of the Dames de charité, and she organizes the kermesses, the church bazaars.
After dinner and baths, Philippe falls asleep almost immediately, and I look around his room for a book. There are lots of illustrés: Rodéo, Bugs Bunny, Pépito, Hopalong Cassidy. Finally, on the top shelf, I find Sans Famille and start reading.
Rémi is an eight-year-old who lives happily in the country with his mother and their cow. They never need to eat meat because the cow, who is their friend, gives them everything they need. They never see the father, who’s a stonecutter in Paris. Then the father gets hurt while working, he needs money for a lawsuit against his boss, and they have to sell their cow. “No more milk, no butter! In the morning a piece of bread, at night some potatoes with salt.”
On the evening of Shrove Tuesday, Rémi’s mother has a surprise for him: she’s borrowed butter and milk from her neighbors to prepare the traditional pancakes. Just as she slips the butter into the pan, and Rémi watches it melt and splutter on the fire, a man comes into the room. Rémi doesn’t know him, but it’s his father. No more pancakes! The man wants the butter for an onion soup.
He doesn’t look happy to see Rémi, and he sends him to bed. But the bed is in a corner of t
he kitchen, and Rémi, who can’t sleep, listens to the couple’s conversation. He finds out that he’s not their son, but a baby the man found in Paris “on a step”. The man has lost his lawsuit. He doesn’t want to keep Rémi, and plans to take him to the Foundlings’ Home the next day. The woman says he’s exactly like a son to her, but she’s not the one who decides.
Rémi is frightened, shocked that the woman he’s always loved is not his mother, but happy that this horrible man is not his father. I fall asleep wondering what it feels like to be hungry, to be excited about pancakes, to have no father.
The next morning we all go to high mass, and in the afternoon to the rugby match. Philippe is even more enthusiastic about rugby than about toy cars. He has a notebook where he keeps tabs on each player, and on umpires too. He draws plans of the field at decisive moments, showing where all the players are, what they’re doing, and what else they could have done. I don’t always understand the fine points of his explanations, but I admire his impartiality. People around us loudly support one team or the other, yelling at the umpire when he rules against their side. Meanwhile Philippe takes notes, devises alternative strategies, and reflects.
“All this chauvinism is pathetic,” he says as we leave after the match. “Why would the fact that you live in Cugnac or in Carcassonne obfuscate your judgment?”
Coralie and I join Father outside the stadium and walk back home, where dinner is unusually relaxed. Coralie, after gambolling around the rugby field with her friends, concentrates on the food. Grandmother asks Father about the match, and tells him about her older sister in Nantua, with whom she has spoken on the phone. When Mother’s around, you hardly ever hear Grandmother at mealtimes except about practical matters. Tonight, she also has news about a neighbor’s nephew who is becoming well-known with his songs in Occitan. When she notices I’ve stopped eating, she doesn’t fuss but negotiates: if I finish the mashed potatoes, I can leave the rest of the fish.
I borrowed Sans Famille from Philippe, who said, “Yes, it’s a good book, with a monkey and a dog.” I read it in bed to Coralie, starting again from the beginning. Coralie is already asleep when I get to Chapter 3 where, instead of being sent to the Foundlings’ Home, Rémi is sold to a travelling musician and animal trainer.
Over Monday lunch, Grandmother and I compromise again: if I eat half a stuffed tomato, I won’t have to touch the roast. Later, as I’m holding a spoonful of petit-suisse in front of my reluctant mouth, I offer a more comprehensive deal: every evening, for a whole week, I’ll voluntarily swallow one of these gluey white cylinders; in exchange I’ll be allowed to go to early mass on Wednesday. She agrees.
I already go to early mass on Fridays, that’s my jour de garde as arranged with mademoiselle Pélican. We all have a jour de garde — a morning when we undertake to stand watch in the church — starting at our private communion. Mother was against it, she tried to have me exempted because it would dangerous for me to be out “on an empty stomach”.
But Pélican wouldn’t go along with this, bless her heart, plus our old cousin Edmondine, who attends mass every morning, told my parents that on Fridays, when we come out of church, I eat the croissant she buys me with good appetite. So Father said, “Maybe it’s better for Tita to have breakfast later, maybe that’s what she needs, in fact: to work up an appetite.” Mother didn’t like that, but there was nothing much she could do. Thank God, because the early mass on Friday is the high point of my week.
Being awake when everybody else is in bed. Walking in the empty streets all alone. The dark, the fresh smells, the wind, the church bells calling out to me. Sitting and kneeling in the nearly empty church, in the second pew on the left. Walking with Edmondine to the pâtisserie Cassagnol. And it’s true: I have no trouble at all eating my croissant. I even enjoy it.
So this week I’ve managed to haggle my way into another morning of bliss. It was uphill work, finishing my petit-suisse at the end of every dinner. But worth it. With bits of strawberries, it tasted less offensive, less intimately mammalian. I felt strong and determined, almost heroic. For early mass and its delights, I was ready to face the horrors of the food world, the mush and the stench.
Wednesday. When I open my eyes, the sun has already reached the middle of the carpet. It’s too late for mass. I run downstairs in my nightgown. Grandmother is making coffee in the kitchen while Loli puts away plates and dishes. “Didn’t you remember?” I cry. “Didn’t you remember I was going to mass this morning?”
Grandmother doesn’t even look at me. She turns off the stove. “Once a week is enough,” she says. “Your mother didn’t want you to go twice.”
“How do you know?”
“I asked her yesterday, on the phone.”
I can’t believe this. She’d made a deal with me, hadn’t she? “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She shrugs. “I figured you’d know soon enough. You were so looking forward to it.”
“Why did you have to go and ask Mother?”
“She’s your mother. And she’d have found out.”
This is unfair, but all I can do is calm down. Grandmother is a practical woman. That’s what she has in common with her daughter: words are just tools to help get things done. And she doesn’t wield much power. She’s like me: she needs to please the mistress of the house. Even when Mother is away, our lives are ruled by her wishes.
Petite Fille Modèle
Mother came back last night. This morning (Thursday) Coralie, in the garden, is mixing gravel and water in a pail. She goes to the laundry room with a shovel, brings back ashes from the fireplace, all the time talking to herself. She tips the ashes into the pail and stirs her soup with a stick. Then she goes over to the laurel tree, pulls some leaves from its branches, and tears them into tiny pieces, which she sprinkles into her concoction.
She looks absolutely focused, and totally happy, in a way I remember from when I was younger. Happy: the word makes me think of a book I started reading yesterday. When Grandmother called me for dinner, I hid it in the storeroom behind the scullery, in a drawer under some old seed catalogues. I wasn’t sure it was “for children” but now, as I open it again, I think it might be: it has lots of drawings and plans, of a road, a hat, houses, churches, streets, theater stages. Not like the drawings in children’s books, though — much simpler, like a friend trying to show you what he’s talking about.
This book is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s called La Vie de Henry Brulard, and it has many sentences I love amidst others I don’t understand at all. There are quite a few foreign words in it, but that’s not a problem because some are easy Latin and the others (my life, drawback, dazzling) I looked up in Father’s English-French Dictionary. But the first two chapters are a bit confusing. Henry makes a list of the six women he has loved, who “summarize” his life, and compares their characters. He says that with them he was always like a child. Like a child? On the way, he tells us too about his friends, his brother-in-law, living in Rome, wars, money... What I love is that he speaks to me, directly: “I should tell stories, and I write reflections! O my reader, you’ll need a lot of patience.” I need a little patience, yes, but he’s worth it.
At the end of Chapter 2 he writes, “After so many general thoughts, I’m going to be born.” Chapter 3 starts with his first memory: a cousin of his, a twenty-five-year-old woman wearing a lot of make-up, wants him to kiss her; he doesn’t want to, she scolds him, he bites her. He’s so right! I remember the tribulation of having to kiss all our relatives good night in Paris. But I couldn’t bite people, and I shudder when I try to imagine their skin between my teeth.
That’s when I hear Mother’s voice. “Tita, Coralie, I’m going to town right now, will you come with me?” This, in spite of the syntax and the intonation, is not a question at all. Mother is standing in the tasting room door at the other end of the garden. I close my book slowly, reluctantly. From her I don’t need to hide it — she wouldn’t notice. Still, I put it safely back into the drawer.
Smoothing my dress, I walk across the garden. Coralie is still kneeling over her pail, crushing mint leaves and adding them to her broth. “Hurry up, Coralie, we have to go now!” Mother calls.
Coralie doesn’t even look up. “I’d rather play,” she says.
I stop next to her. “Maybe I’ll stay here too, then,” I say.
Mother comes forward, adjusts her glasses above Coralie. “I can’t take you anyway, you’re too dirty,” she says. “Tita, let’s go.”
“I’d like to stay here and read,” I say. “If you don’t mind.”
Mother, who had started back towards the house, stops and spins around. She’s breathing in the jerky way that means she’s so indignant she can’t speak. I’ve just done something unheard of. Something Coralie does all the time. But I’m not Coralie. I’m the one who always wants to be with Mother. Not this morning, though. This morning, I want to be with Henry Brulard.
“I’m coming,” I say. Mother takes my hand, and relaxes. We walk through the house, fast, then out and across the avenue de la Gare. As we get into the car, Mother smiles at me. “We can stop at the newsagent’s and get you La Semaine de Suzette,” she says.
Mother always tends to be different when she comes back from Paris, as if she resented being with us and wished she were still at Aunt Caroline’s. This time, it’s worse. On Friday, when we come home from school at noon, she calls Loli in a stern, fretful voice, and tells Coralie and me to go to the playroom. Coralie runs back into the garden, and Mother doesn’t even notice. I don’t go to the playroom either, but stop next to the half-open kitchen door and sit on the red-tiled steps that lead to the upstairs storeroom. I want to know what’s going on.
“Dolores,” Mother says, “what were you doing in front of the école laïque ten minutes ago?”
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