Tita

by Marie Houzelle

  Flat is good, I decide. I think I’ll dedicate myself to celebrating what is flat. Like Charles Péguy in the poem Pélican made us learn about his “plate Beauce” and his “Beauce plate”. Meanwhile, I need to stand up for the truth.

  “It is flat because you’re looking west,” I say. “On your left, behind that house, are the Pyrenees. And if you turned around, you’d see all the hills between here and the sea.”

  Mother snorts. “Hills! With nothing on them but dried-up scrub. And the Pyrenees hardly compare with the Alps.”

  I think of what Henry Brulard says about himself and his father: “Never had chance brought together two persons more essentially antipathetic to each other.” The difference is that Henry never felt any affection, any attraction for his father. Simpler, I guess.

  The waitress brings Mother a cup of coffee. “I only need one sugar,” she says. “Justine, will you have the other one?”

  Justine tries to sit up. Her cheeks are red. “Thank you, no,” she says. “I don’t... feel too well.”

  “I’ll have it!” Coralie cries.

  Mother hands it to her. “Maybe you ate too much,” she says to Justine. Her voice is solemn. “You should be careful. You look very good now, but around your age a lot of girls eat just a little too much and before they’ve even noticed what’s happening, they’re fat. Once you’re fat, it’s almost impossible to get your figure back again. I’ve seen so many cases. Friends who could have been quite good-looking and just because they didn’t pay enough attention… Yes, when you’re fat, there isn’t much you can do about it. It’s very sad.”

  Aperitifs

  When Mother came to kiss us good night yesterday before going to a dinner party at the Viés’, she found me coughing, so this morning she took my temperature and decided that I had to stay put and wait for the doctor. She said I could get up if I felt like it but shouldn’t go out of the house, not even into the garden. And she made me wear socks even though it’s warm.

  I’m still coughing, my throat hurts, and there’s something going on deep in my left ear, but I don’t feel too bad. The beautiful side of being ill is that I’m practically released from eating meals. For breakfast, I had just a cup of rosemary tea with honey, not in the kitchen but in our parents’ room. Then a long cuddle in Mother’s lap. Since Mother came back from Paris, I’ve noticed that while I still enjoy her kisses and caresses, I no longer need them. I feel the same about our Holy Mother Church. As if I were outgrowing all my mothers.

  Now I’m sitting in Father’s office typing addresses on envelopes for Simone, Father’s secretary. So much more fun than school. Simone is talking on the phone. “Maybe he didn’t really need a new fishing rod, but come on, we’ll get the fish, won’t we? Think of all the husbands who spend their money on aperitifs.” She listens for a while, then bursts out laughing. “Okay, apéritif then. The Conti at seven-thirty. No, just the two of us, Alain will be playing pétanque. Yes, you’re right, pétanque is a good deal, the metal balls are quite durable. But it doesn’t get you any fish!”

  The office has bay windows that open onto the garden, above Mother’s hydrangeas, now adorned with quite a few big blue and pink flowers that don’t look quite real, they’re so trim. Two double desks sit in the middle of the room, facing each other, and two smaller tables near the windows. Simone does more of the typing and Berthe more of the calculations, but they share the rest of the work as it comes.

  Berthe is the chiropodist’s daughter, she can look shy or haughty to people who don’t know her well but, when it’s just the three of us in the office, she relaxes and her conversation becomes extremely interesting. She’s unhappy about her skin (pimples), her hair (not enough) her weight (too much), and her mother. She keeps discussing possible solutions. Simone is pretty, skinny, and quick. People call her “a live wire”. She talks to everybody, so she knows all the gossip in town. She got married last year, to Alain, a car mechanic who looks like Gérard Philipe. I was her only bridesmaid.

  “You’re having apéritif with your mother?” Berthe asks Simone. “That’s nice.”

  “Yes, she seems to be a little lonely. She should go out more. She complains about my father spending too much money on fishing tackle, but what she really resents is his going away to the lagoon without her. She’d like to do things with him. But he needs some quiet after driving his truck all week.”

  “Couldn’t she go with him to the lagoon?” Berthe asks.

  “She’s tried it, but she finds it so boring. Actually, I think she should get a job. In a store or something. She’s like me, she needs to be active.”

  “It’s no longer so easy to find a job around here,” Berthe says. “The wine crisis is dragging everything down and...” She glances at me, and stops. I think she’s worrying not only about the wine crisis in general, but about Father’s business, and about her own job.

  Berthe busies herself with the account book. Simone comes and watches over my address typing. “Incredible! You don’t look at the keyboard at all now!”

  “For the numbers, I do. Maybe I could manage not to, but I don’t want to make a mistake and ruin an envelope. I need to practice.”

  Simone goes back to her own typing. “This girl!” she says to Berthe. “If the little pigs don’t eat her up…” I have no idea where those little pigs would come from, but I think I know what Simone means: if I escape the little pigs, I’ll make my mark, somehow. I just need to watch out for the little pigs.

  A knock on the door: Ginette. “Tita, the doctor is here for you.”

  A blond, brawny young man in a light-green polo shirt is talking to Mother as I enter the sitting room, “Yes, I’m Dr Pauli, Dr Barral’s substitute during his vacation.” Can this be the doctor? He shakes hands with me. “Good morning, Tita.” He looks as different as possible from our Dr Barral, who is tall, very thin, bald with a grey moustache, and always wears a dark three-piece suit.

  Mother helps me undress as she explains my condition to the doctor with quite a bit of head-shaking and eye-rolling. I sit on a chair in front of Dr Pauli, and he examines me with his various cold tools. He listens to me coughing naturally as well as on purpose, looks into my ears with his light through a funnel-shaped instrument, then puts everything back into his bag and takes out his prescription pad. “The left ear is slightly infected,” he says. “And there’s tracheitis. But she should be better in a few days.”

  “It never stops,” Mother says. “How many times has she been ill this school year? Ten, at least! No other child catches so many infections. Is it because she doesn’t eat enough?”

  Dr Pauli is still writing sedately. He finishes with a large, dashing signature, then looks up. “The important part, if you want to avoid or to fight infection, is fruit. Fresh fruit, vitamins. Does Tita eat enough fruit?”

  “Well, persuading her to eat her main dish is so much work,” Mother says. “And her white cheese! She doesn’t eat any other cheese, you know. So when it’s time for fruit...” She sighs. “We’re all exhausted.”

  “What fruit do you like?” Dr Pauli asks me. Me!

  “Figs, pomegranates, apricots, peaches,” I say. “Actually, there’s no fruit I don’t like.”

  “Excellent! Then you should eat fruit as an hors d’oeuvre,” the doctor says. “As many different kinds as possible. Start each meal with it. Breakfast too.”

  Mother’s mouth falls open and her face, for a few seconds, is like wood. “But,” she breathes, choppily, twice, “won’t that spoil her appetite?”

  “Even if it did,” the doctor says, “vitamins are essential, so fruit comes first. And don’t worry about her appetite. Fruit might even work as an apéritif. You’ll see.”

  Apéritif? Apéritif is the time when you get together before lunch or dinner to drink orgeat or menthe à l’eau (or Cinzano, if you’re a grown-up), with olives, anchovies, bits of carrots and cucumbers. What has it got to do with fruit? But now I remember a prayer we sometimes say before mass, Aperi, Domin
e, os meum, “Lord, open my mouth”. Apéritif, then, could also be something that opens the appetite. I’ll have to look it up.

  Mother’s frown is getting deeper as she stares at Dr Pauli’s white boat shoes. When she finally notices that I put on my dress backwards, she turns it around mechanically. After a while, she sees my red cardigan on the armchair, picks it up, takes me in her lap and starts pulling one of the sleeves over my arm.

  Dr Pauli looks at me. “Are you cold?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m really hot.”

  “Then you don’t need a jacket.”

  Mother stops with the sleeve up to my elbow, my hand inside. “But she catches cold so easily!”

  “Don’t worry,” Dr Pauli says as he picks up his big black bag. “If she’s cold, she’ll know to put it on.”

  Mother shakes hands with Dr Pauli and walks him to the front door. I can hear her, as soon as the door bangs shut, talking to herself. “As if children knew anything!”

  I’m going back to the office, but Father calls out from the tasting room, “What did the doctor say?”

  “Ear infection, tracheitis, the usual.”

  A short grinning man is taking out sample bottles from a case and setting them on the pink-and-white marble counter. “This is Tita, my number four,” Father says. “And Tita, this is monsieur Espardelier from Peyriac-Minervois.”

  Instead of lunch, I’m allowed to have a nap. As soon as I’m alone in my room, I retrieve Henry Brulard from under the Virgin. After his mother dies, Henry likes to be with his uncle Romain, his mother’s brother, a young lawyer who sometimes takes him to the theater, to the opera. “He laughed with me and allowed me to watch him as he took off his beautiful clothes and put on his robe, every evening at nine before supper. These were delicious moments for me. Then I walked downstairs in front of him, holding a silver candlestick.” Romain has many beautiful outfits he couldn’t have paid for, and this creates problems with his father. “When I saw my father coming into the Xes’ salon,” Romain tells Henry, “I had to run away and change into an ordinary outfit. Meanwhile, madame Y was waiting to see me in the splendid suit she’d bought for me!”

  Henry explains that, at the time, there was nothing wrong with taking money from ladies, provided you spent it hic et nunc — didn’t hoard it. But when questioned by his father, Romain says that he won the money gambling. So it looks like, for his father, gambling was better than ladies. Henry thinks that Romain shared his winnings: “He took money from his rich mistresses and gave it to the poor ones.” He must have had lots of mistresses. Which I know is a word for a woman lover, but why isn’t a man lover called a master?

  I also wonder why Romain, a grown-up man, is still afraid of his father. Maybe because his father gives him money, and an apartment in the family house. When I grow up, I won’t let anybody give me money, or tell me what to do. I love this house, leaving it will hurt. But I want to be free and on my own.

  Henry’s family members are: his grandfather, his great-aunt, his uncle Romain, his aunt Séraphie (“a female devil”), his father Chérubin (“an extremely disagreeable man”) and his two younger sisters. “These are the characters in the sad drama of my youth, of which I remember mostly pain and deep moral vexations.” This, just after he told us about all the fun he had with his uncle Romain. But I understand. If you’re alive, you’re bound to enjoy yourself at times, even if mostly drenched in spite and gloom.

  Again Henry thinks of us before he starts in on the details of his calamities: “The reader here could skip a few pages, and I beg him to do so, for I’m writing haphazardly and this might well be extremely dull.” I skip pages and paragraphs all the time, especially about politics, which I can’t follow at all, but I want to know about Henry’s troubles. Everything he says feels both illuminating and enchanting, as if I had, for the first time, a friend who is my kind.

  But he also makes me grateful for all the friends who are not my kind — for school, for neighbors, for my bicycle, for the vineyards and the pine forests. Henry has to study at home with a stern priest he detests. He sleeps in an alcove in the priest’s sunless room, next to the noise and stench of a cage holding the priest’s thirty canaries. He’s never allowed to play with other children because his father feels superior and doesn’t want him to mix with des enfants du commun.

  After a while, I feel drowsy. I sleep, then Grandmother comes in with a cup of linden tea. Later, Father brings me a large flat package with a gold ribbon. When I open it, I see a paper doll set. “And here are your scissors,” Father says.

  The doll’s name is Pepita, and she smells of cinnamon. “You got this in Spain!” I say.

  “Yes, I found it last month in Gerona and kept it for an occasion like this, when you shouldn’t read too much or it will hurt your head.”

  I love this chubby little figure with her old-fashioned outfits.

  “Have fun,” Father says, “and try to rest too, that’s how you’ll get better.”

  I cut out Pepita and her frilly one-piece bathing suit. I leave the other clothes for later, and I sleep some more. When I wake, the clock says it’s four-thirty, and I feel almost well, so I go and see what’s going on downstairs.

  In the kitchen, Justine is deep in a roman-photo in Nous Deux, “the magazine that brings you luck”. She couldn’t do this anywhere else in the house, because only maids are supposed to read Nous Deux. But Berthe told me she likes it, too. “If you don’t have a boyfriend, you can always dream,” she said. Meanwhile, Loli is arranging petits fours on two plates. “Hey,” she says, “you look better already, would you like your goûter?”

  “No, thanks. Just some water.”

  Loli takes the tea into the sitting room, and I carry the cakes for her. Mother is there with Estelle Vié and Denise Pujol. I’m glad to see Estelle. Whenever she’s around, the conversation takes a brighter turn. Denise is more predictable. Their contrasting voices greet me: “Here’s the sick girl, how do you feel?”

  “Pretty good, thank you,” I say, and go to sit on my low stool. As soon as they’ve poured the tea they’ve also forgotten about me, and I can listen.

  “Have you seen this Dr Pauli?” Mother says. “Rather handsome, but I don’t trust him. He wanted Tita to eat fruit before her main dish! Imagine! Why not candy?”

  “Bertrand likes him,” Estelle says. “Finds him brilliant. He’s young, of course. From Perpignan. Fruit first might not be a bad idea, you know. Why not try it?”

  Mother is staring at her cup, her mouth set. Estelle, in matters of the body, is respected as an expert.

  “Still,” Denise says. “Fruit first, that’s very unusual.” “Unusual”, for Denise, is the equivalent of “horrendous” for someone else.

  I slide away, back to the kitchen, where Loli is peeling aubergines. There’s a basket of morello cherries on the sideboard. “May I have a few?” I ask her.

  “Sure,” Loli says. “As many as you like. I can get more from the orchard. Help yourself.”

  English

  Justine is gone. Father didn’t find a school for her, but something much better: she’s in England. In Sussex, in the country, near a town called Eastbourne. Father has friends there, who invited her to stay with them until September so she can improve her English. She was ecstatic when she left: she loves riding, and these people have horses. She’ll speak French with their two children, who are about her age and take French at school. I so wanted to go with her, but Father said maybe I’d go later, when I can really speak English.

  I’m learning. I have a lesson with mademoiselle Verdier every Tuesday after school. Then I bicycle back home, and all I want to do is find Father and practise what I’ve just learned. He likes to speak English with me, but we have to skid back into French as soon as Mother comes near. She gets intensely irritated if she hears anybody speak a language she doesn’t understand (i.e. anything but French). That’s probably why I hardly ever speak Occitan or Spanish with Father. It’s okay, because we both share the
se languages with many other people. For English, though, Father is my only partner: mademoiselle Verdier teaches English, but she doesn’t speak it.

  She lives at the other end of town, in a small house with only four rooms. Two upstairs, which she rents out; downstairs her bedroom, and a dim kitchen which opens onto an overgrown back garden. That’s where our lessons take place. Even though it’s warm outside, the wood stove is always going, with several pans whispering on it, one of which remains on the corner closest to us and contains permanent gruel. Mademoiselle Verdier is withered and bent, her thin face nothing but wrinkles. When you meet her in town, she always wears a convoluted hat, and a whole fox around her neck. Even now, in June.

  At her kitchen table I read from an ancient book she gave me. Every double page starts with a picture: a boat, a battle, a cliff, a town between two rivers or at the top of a hill. Father says they are called woodcuts because they are printed from carved blocks of wood. After the picture comes a story about Romans, Angles, Picts, Saxons, Jutes, with names like Cadwalla, Oswiu, Willibrord, Ecgfrith, Biscop, or Offa. They’re all men, so I don’t pay much attention to their exploits, but I delight in every word. I don’t know how to pronounce them but it’s obvious they shouldn’t sound like French or Spanish, so I just try for a different sound.

  Once in a while, mademoiselle Verdier corrects me. She sits in an armchair on my right, near the stove. After I finish reading each sentence I’m supposed to translate it. If I can’t, she helps me. Sometimes she glances at my book, but mostly she seems to understand what I read. Maybe she knows it all by heart, this book seems to have been used so many times.

  For Justine, the book was a different one, slightly more recent, but the lessons followed the exact same pattern. Justine thought it was weird. “This woman teaches English as if it were Latin!” she said. In her various schools, the English teachers usually tried to start a conversation of sorts, usually with little success. “Do you think mademoiselle Verdier can speak English at all?” my sister wondered. Maybe she can’t. She went to England when she was a jeune fille, she told me. So many years ago. Before World War One. And here I guess she doesn’t know anybody who could speak English with her. Except Father, but they don’t see much of each other these days.