Strike Your Heart

by Amélie Nothomb

  When her sister wasn’t looking, Aunt Brigitte put her arm around her niece and whispered in her ear: “I have a chocolate in my hand, and I’m going to put it in yours.”

  “No, thank you, Auntie, I don’t want any.”

  Her aunt did not insist, but gave the little girl a puzzled look.

  When Brigitte and her family had left, Marie always made a few disparaging remarks: “The twins have put on weight, don’t you think?” Or: “Have you seen the way Alain wolfs down his food: you’d think he doesn’t get anything to eat at home!”

  Olivier shrugged off these nasty comments, which for him were just a sign of the affection between the two sisters.

  When she was two and a half years old, Diane started nursery school. She was thrilled. The teacher was kind, and she had long hair that made her very beautiful. She didn’t have the goddess’s problem, she liked girls as much as she liked boys and she showed it openly. Diane was such a good little girl that the teacher adored her; when she took her in her arms, Diane felt her long hair caressing her face and went weak with delight.

  As a rule it was Mamie who came to pick her up when school was over. The teacher gave her a kiss on both cheeks and said, “See you tomorrow, sweetheart!” Swooning with happiness, the little girl jumped up in her grandmother’s arms.

  Sometimes it was Maman who came to pick her daughter up. The transfer of power between the two goddesses could prove tricky. The teacher would hurry over to tell Marie all the good things she thought about Diane. She failed to see how the mother pursed her lips and the daughter turned pale.

  One day in the car Maman said to Diane, exasperated:

  “I cannot stand that woman, I’m going to send you to a different school.”

  The child had the presence of mind to declare: “At the cafeteria she wouldn’t let me have seconds of the chocolate mousse.”

  Maman must have revised her opinion, because there was no further talk of changing schools.

  In the meanwhile, Nicolas was growing, and following in his sister’s footsteps: he was handsome, intelligent, advanced for his age, and charming. Diane cherished her brother and spent hours playing with him: she would pretend she was a horse and gallop around with Nicolas on her back. When she whinnied the little boy laughed.

  Olivier told his wife he could never thank her enough for such happiness. The little girl thought that jealousy was not solely a bad thing: without jealousy, how would she have known that her mother loved her father? As for the rest, she tried to understand it. There must be a reason for this jealousy: otherwise, why would a goddess gifted with every quality stoop to such an attitude?

  Diane loved her mother so much that by the age of four she grasped her mother’s disappointment, how she felt that life had unjustly fallen short of her expectations. Even if she had made progress in life, she was still no more than an accountant at her husband’s pharmacy, not a Queen, and while her husband might be the most attentive, infatuated spouse imaginable, he was still not a King. The little girl’s love for her mother was so great that it could even encompass what her own birth must have meant to Marie: resignation, the end of her faith in some kind of ideal. Nicolas’s birth had not sealed her fate in any way, and that too was why Maman showed him her affection.

  When she saw the goddess kissing the little boy, leaving her out, Diane managed to move beyond her pain and remember that some day she would become Queen, not out of personal ambition, but in order to hand the crown to her mother and console her for everything in her life that seemed so constricting.

  Every night, she remembered that sublime embrace she had known when Maman still had Nicolas in her tummy: her mother’s tight embrace, her words of love, the voice she had used. The memory transfixed her with happiness. She suffered from the fact that Marie had never behaved that way toward her again, yet she had built such a myth around the brief spell of hugs and kisses that she knew she could find there all the fervor and energy she would need to ascend the throne.

  Nicolas, too, had started nursery school, and his first teacher was delighted to find so much of his beloved older sister in the boy. Diane appreciated this dynastic phenomenon, and supposed, rightfully, that it would endure.

  Maman was pregnant yet again.

  Nicolas said that she had a melon in her belly. Diane explained to him what it meant.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I remember when you were in there.”

  In secret Diane prayed the new baby would be a boy. It would be better for everyone, starting with the baby. Maman, too, would be happier: she was radiant when Nicolas was born.

  As they could not exclude the possibility of a girl, Diane prepared a strategy: she would smother the poor little thing with affection to console her for her mother’s coldness. Because it might be too much to hope that the unfortunate child would display her older sister’s fortitude from the outset. Moreover, the newcomer would have to put up with the mother’s marked preference for her older brother: how could she bear such an injustice?

  All children pray, although they do not necessarily know to whom. They have a vague instinct of something that is, if not holy, at least transcendent. Diane’s parents and grandparents did not believe in God. They went to mass so as not to disrupt the social order. The little girl asked Mamie to go with her to church. The grandmother found it normal, and asked no questions.

  Diane tried to listen to the priest’s prayer and soon realized that she did not understand what he was talking about. As this did not matter to her, she joined her hands and prayed to God that her mommy’s third child would be a boy. When Mamie brought Diane home to her father, she said, “Olivier, your daughter was praying fervently—I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Papa burst out laughing. The little girl was ashamed.

  For the evening meal Olivier prepared soft-boiled eggs for Marie. She made a face.

  “But when you were pregnant with Diane you wanted them all the time,” he said.

  “Yes. Now, just the sight of them makes me nauseous.”

  The little girl was delighted: wasn’t this the proof that the baby was not a girl?

  “Okay. Would anyone like these eggs?” asked the father.

  “I’ll have them,” said Diane.

  She loved the experience of it: you thought you were eating a hard-boiled egg and then, no, the yolk was runny, and the color was infinitely warmer and more beautiful. “When Maman had me in her tummy, she ate them all the time,” she mused to herself, fascinated. Did that explain why this particular meal had such an effect on her? She trembled with pleasure and emotion.

  “It’s my favorite meal,” she declared.

  Her imagination combined these two new things. When she went to mass again with Mamie, the church seemed to her like some giant soft-boiled egg whose yolk was God, running inside her if she prayed very hard; she felt as if the magical color were spreading all through her. Similarly, when she ate the soft-boiled eggs her father was in the habit of making for her, she would eat the white first, saving the delicate yolk for last as she gazed admiringly at it in her plate: this was God, since it didn’t spread. She asked for a spoon, so as not to destroy the miracle, which she placed whole in her mouth.

  In June the teacher told Mamie that Diane was ready to start primary school: “She won’t be the only five-and-a-half-year-old child to start first grade. She’s very intelligent and very well-behaved.”

  Grandfather joined them, very excited, and told them that the baby had just been born and they had to hurry to the hospital.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?” asked Nicolas.

  “A girl.”

  Her heart sank. She was worried for her unfortunate little sister, and, as the car pulled away from their house, she prayed for her, not without also reflecting on the uselessness of her prayers, which had not stopped God from picking the wrong sex for the third child.

  Nothing turned out as expected. Maman was not rosy with happiness, she was ecstatic: lik
e the Virgin holding up Jesus, she showed them a round-faced baby and said, “Meet Célia.”

  Unlike her older siblings, who had always been featherweights, Célia was chubby, like babies in commercials.

  “What a fine little round baby!” said Mamie in greeting.

  “Isn’t she?” answered Marie, holding the newborn to her breast.

  Diane could see there was something wrong. When Nicolas was born, Maman was happy and loved her baby; this time, Maman was delirious with joy, overflowing with love for Célia. She kissed her as if she were going to eat her. Over and over, possessed, she said things like How I love you, my sweet sweet baby.

  It was obscene.

  Nicolas ran to his mother and asked if he could kiss his little sister.

  “Yes, darling, but be careful, don’t hurt her, she’s fragile.”

  Papa and the grandparents looked on, adoringly. No one noticed that Diane kept well to one side, stiff, incapable of moving even an eyelid. Hypnotized by the scene, she composed a silent speech to this woman to whom she would have given everything:

  Maman, I’ve accepted everything, I’ve always been on your side, I’ve gone along with you even when you were blatantly unfair, I put up with your jealousy because I understood that you had expected more from life, I endured it in silence when you begrudged me other people’s compliments and made me pay for them, I tolerated the fact you lavished tenderness on my brother and never gave me so much as a crumb, but now, what you are doing here before me is evil. Just once, you did show me your love, and I knew there was nothing better on earth. I thought that you couldn’t demonstrate your love because I was a girl. But now, there before my eyes, this creature on whom you are showering the deepest love you have ever shown—this creature is a girl. The explanation I have given for the workings of the universe is crumbling. And I understand that, quite simply, you hardly love me at all, you love me so little that it doesn’t even occur to you to hide your mad passion for this baby in any way. The truth is, Maman, that if there is one virtue you are lacking, it is tact.

  In that moment Diane stopped being a child. She did not become an adolescent or an adult: she was five years old. She was transformed into a disenchanted creature who was obsessed with not foundering in the abyss that this situation had created inside her.

  Maman, I have tried to understand your jealousy, and the only thanks I get is this abyss that you have opened before me, into which you have fallen, and it even looks like you’d have me fall into it, too. But you won’t get away with it, Maman, I refuse to become like you, and I can tell you, without even having fallen in there, just sensing the call of that abyss, it hurts so badly I could scream, it is like a void closing around me. Maman, I understand your suffering but what I don’t understand is why you care so little for me, in fact you are not trying to share your hurt with me, you simply don’t care if I suffer, you don’t see it, it’s the least of your worries, and that’s the worst thing of all.

  She acted as if everything were fine. She had to. Diane kissed Célia as warmly as she could, and no one noticed the death of her childhood.

  That summer was hell. There was no more school to distract her. Every day meant renewed awareness of this abject situation—Maman coming down to breakfast cooing and chirping with Célia, whom she almost never put down, and Diane struggling every moment against the pull of the abyss inside her: she mustn’t hate this baby, this debauchery of maternal love wasn’t her fault, even if she couldn’t help but find the baby’s attitude somewhat accommodating—who could guarantee that in her place she wouldn’t have done the same, she mustn’t hate Maman, who yielded to these excesses without the slightest display of modesty toward those around her—yet again her cruel lack of tact.

  Diane had shown that she could understand a great number of inhuman things. That her mother preferred her brother: she had accepted this with exceptional generosity of spirit. Most children wouldn’t tolerate not coming first in their mother’s affections, especially when they’re the eldest. But Marie had scorned Diane’s nobility so immoderately that the little girl could never forgive her.

  By mid-August, when she couldn’t take it anymore, she asked if Mamie could look after her.

  “What’s the matter, sweetheart?” asked her grandmother.

  The little girl couldn’t answer. Her grandmother looked her in the eye and saw there was something wrong. Because she loved her, she did not ask for an explanation. But the nonchalance with which Marie agreed to entrust Mamie with her eldest child gave her a fairly good idea.

  Before long Nicolas, too, realized something was wrong. His mother went on loving him, but there could be no comparison with the transports of love she experienced with Célia. When he saw that Diane was seeking grandmotherly asylum, he told his elder sister that he would stay at home, “to stop Maman from eating Célia as if she were some coconut cake.”

  This was no mere image: Marie’s excessive love for Célia evoked the swooning of certain thirteenth-century saints when swallowing the communion host. It was holy gluttony.

  Olivier was not unduly worried that his eldest child wanted to go and stay with her grandparents: he knew she adored them, and she would be home on weekends. He shared Marie’s passion for Célia: even if he did not feel it quite so intensely, he did think the newcomer was particularly delectable. When his wife held the infant in her arms, he embraced the indivisible duo, and melted.

  He was a good father in that he loved his three children deeply and showed them his affection. But his love for his wife blinded him to her faults and to the hurt she was inflicting on Diane. He always managed to justify their quirks in a way that was reasonable and acceptable.

  When his mother asked him why his eldest child spent the week with his in-laws, he replied that it made things easier for Marie, who had so much to do, what with the baby, and that Diane had always had a special relationship with his wife’s parents. He added that she was a big girl now and was already showing a need for autonomy.

  When his father expressed his surprise that Marie did not seem to be in any hurry to get back to her work at the pharmacy, whereas, after Nicolas’s birth she had started up again quite soon, Olivier answered:

  “She doesn’t want any more children. She knows this is her last chance to stay home and play mommy, and she wants to devote all her time to it.”

  Play mommy: this ridiculous expression was a gross oversimplification of his wife’s behavior. Only fear of what others might say coerced her into putting the baby into its cradle at night, otherwise she would have kept it in her own bed. In the morning she awoke already in a state of obsession over her latest offspring: she ran to the little bed and seized hold of her beloved with a tender moan (my chocolate croissant, my little warm brioche), and began to eat her up with kisses. This consuming love never stopped. When Marie drank her coffee, she would nibble her daughter’s cheek between two sips, the way others take a puff on their cigarette. During the day, no matter what she was doing, she always had Célia by her side, most often in the baby sling she had received when Diane was born and that she had never used. Now she adored the baby harness because it allowed her to feel the love of her life constantly pressed against her belly.

  Oddly enough, she did not breastfeed her. She had never thought of doing so for either Diane or Nicolas. For Célia, it did cross her mind. In 1977, however, it seemed to her that to do so would have tarnished her image as a modern mother, and the baby herself would have blushed at such a prehistoric mode of feeding.

  The baby sling was a fantastic invention. If she had not been afraid of looking like a frazzled mother, she would have returned to work at the pharmacy with the child on her belly. It was extremely important to her to seem to have everything under control, to look the accomplished woman.

  Be that as it may, Célia was a sort of redemption for her. With her child in her arms, she at last stopped seeing herself from the outside. However extravagant her maternal tenderness might seem, it allowed her to v
iew things from another angle than purely that of the envy they might arouse.

  Marie only went back to work at the pharmacy two and a half years later, once Célia started nursery school. For all that her two older siblings were ideal pupils, well-behaved and thoughtful, the youngest turned out to be unbearable, accustomed as she was to having everything her way. The teacher mentioned this to Marie, who gave a shrug.

  One day when Célia was sobbing and screaming and rolling on the floor in the classroom, it occurred to the teacher to send for Diane. The little girl immediately grasped the nature of the problem and followed her former teacher. She found her little sister behaving like a wild beast and walked resolutely up to her.

  “Right, that’s enough, now,” she said. “You’re not a baby anymore, Célia. You can’t behave like that at school.”

  The little girl immediately obeyed. Henceforth, every time she threw a tantrum, they would send for Diane’s help.

  Célia revered her big sister: eight years old, so serious and beautiful. Diane felt an irascible affection toward the spoiled child, which she hid behind the kindly authority of the wise older sibling.

  She often talked about it with Nicolas:

  “Since you’re with her during the week, don’t hesitate to act the older brother around her. It’s not Célia’s fault if Maman is crazy about her.”

  “Not her fault—I don’t know about that.”