It is all very cruel when a person has passed the age of adaptability and it killed Mr Bertrand as it has killed so many hundreds of thousands. But out of it the young generation springs with a new spirit and Jeanne came to a full realization of her position in life much earlier than do other girls. It was forced on her. She had in her – resistance. She would not be crushed.
She attended the public schools and speaks excellent English, and she shows that she has read much out of the book of life itself, and that she has thought and studied considerably. A photographer’s studio is a great place to study life.
But she has the artist in her. One can see that at a glance. All it needed was the opportunity (…), and, she says Mr Albee encourages her in all her desires for study. He, it appears, is a venerable gentleman who has become very deeply interested in Jeanne, and he acts as a sort of guardian toward her, for all her people left Torrington soon after the father’s death. She is alone in the world, she says, but every moment of her time is filled up with study and research. ‘I want to know all I can by the time I am thirty,’ she exclaimed.
Here I close the chest and let the dust settle on the writer and Mr Albee again, but not entirely on Jeanne J. Bertrand as yet. She has left some traces in documents. In 1908, she was still photographing the wealthy people of Boston. In 1909, she was admitted to a mental hospital, exhausted due to overwork (it also sounded like she had a gruelling schedule).
In 1917, she was hospitalized again, this time after ‘a violent outburst’ (at an annoying customer? at Mr Albee?), and again appeared on the front page of the newspapers: ‘Miss Bertrand Insane Again – Artist and sculptress gone deranged in the Conley Inn.’
Her beloved Pietro Cartaino, a sculptor and immigrant from Sicily, who happened to be married, died of the Spanish Influenza in 1918; for a time Jeanne was his apprentice at his studio in NYC and began to make sculptures. The result of that love was a son born out of wedlock, whom she surrendered to a cousin. There was plenty for her to be unhappy and angry about.
We find another trace of her in 1930, when she lived with Viv and her mother in the Bronx; Jeanne is listed as the head of the family. At that point, she worked as a photographer at a portrait studio called Materne in Union City, New Jersey. Just like Maria, Jeanne came from the valley of Champsaur in the French Alps, but from another village.
We are now back to the beginning. Maria has taken Vivian by the hand, has left Charles Maier, has trudged through St Mary’s Park with her suitcases and moved in with Jeanne. When I was a child, I wanted to be a conductor. When I saw classical music concerts on TV, my eyes were locked on the conductor, the way he used his baton or his hands and his gaze and sometimes his entire body to make the musicians aware of what he wanted from them, and I thought the music grew out of him. I didn’t know there was a score but thought that the music came to be with the help of the conductor’s precise hand movements. Music stands and sheet music evaded my attention, or I must have considered them as a kind of decoration. I loved to see the conductor draw, wave, beckon, tempt the music out of the orchestra. I did not become a conductor. I have my characters that I can point at, make them speak, turn them up and down. Now I point my cane at you, Maria Jaussaud, I am sweating, and my hair is falling into my eyes, but I haven’t had a chance to brush it from my forehead, you who have drawn the name Maier from you as if it was a leech that drank your blood or brushed it aside as if it was a caterpillar (which reminds me of my childhood, when our birch tree in the garden suddenly produced a huge amount of caterpillars one year, it was nightmarish – you couldn’t pass the tree without them sprinkling down on you. They were yellowish-green with brushes, and how I screamed and brushed them off me, and how they splattered when you accidentally stepped on them! That year I did not walk on the grass barefoot.)
Maria
‘The camera creates loneliness, because it crops, because it draws something (the motif) out of its context. It is brutal. It lies. The camera always lies,’ Jeanne said that to me this morning before she went to work at Materne Studio, where she slaps people up against white or other backgrounds and takes them – so what kind of a context is she talking about? I mean, the customers come of their own free will, it’s completely voluntary.
I don’t know what it stems from, what I had said to her or asked her about. I thought about myself. How I have stepped out of my context, how brutal it must appear from the outside. Seen through my mother’s eyes, my son’s eyes, my in-laws’ eyes. An entire forest of stabbing eyes. Jeanne’s eyes don’t stab. She also left her son to the family, her illegitimate son, her filius naturalis – it sounds more beautiful. She sat down on my bed and told me that one day until my eyes overflowed.
But oh how straightforward this new context is here in its manlessness (my son would have been out of place here), its Drunkard and Assailant Charles von Maierlessness, he tore everything down.
Narrator
The airy somewhat peaceful ‘we’ here consists of, other than the two women and the girl, a small female dog, Kiki, who sleeps with Maria, ‘because pets are grown-ups’ teddy bears,’ Maria tells Vivian when Vivian wants to have Kiki in her bed.
Maria
One day he comes for a visit, this son, Jeanne’s that is, he is pallid and has dark curls. We are alone for a moment, I’m in my bathrobe. This son must be about sixteen. I’m in my bathrobe, I feel like tugging on the belt, just to open it a small crack. I look at his hands – are they strong? Yes. And his shoulders, too. Then Jeanne returns with her groceries, she wants to make Sicilian food in memory of his father. The moment has passed. He speaks loudly and seems very lively, very different from my own tragic silent half rubbed-out son that life has wiped with a mouldy rag.
I have offered my services as a maid in a classified ad in the newspaper, but admit that it is half-hearted, and hope Maman steps in, that she pulls her hands full of jingling money out of the stoves of the affluent…
Narrator
On eBay and other sites I have searched (in vain unfortunately, I could do with a secretary or a course in websurfing) for the issue of Town & Country where Eugénie writes about the millionaires’ kitchens where she composed her famous French dishes and sent the servants off with them, up to the high-lustre polished dining tables, I’m talking about the kitchens of the Lavanburgs, the Gayles, the Lords, the Dickinsons, the Strausses, the Vanderbilts, the Emersons and the Gibsons.
Maria
…and hold them out to me. Anything can happen. I have not lost heart. Was it written in stone that Maman was going to become a celebrated chef? Hard work, she says. (One could always go looking for a husband.)
When Jeanne came home today, she had a present for me. She gave me a camera, is it because she thinks I am a born liar? No, she thinks I should have something to do other than lie in bed and dream about furs and men who slip their hand inside. There was so much to do outdoors in the country, first the hens had to be let out, then they had to be let in again, there was weeding and berry picking to be done, and geese to be plucked. In filthy NYC there is nothing to do outdoors when you don’t have any money.
At the very beginning with Charles and me, the good times lasted at most a few months. All the signs of affection, I welcomed them, sometimes attentively, sometimes distractedly, always as though there was an inexhaustible quantity in store for me.
I prefer film (to photographs), it isn’t as solemn, nearer to life, where every moment immediately cancels out the previous one. If time is a sausage or a loaf of bread, then slice it off, click-click-saw-saw. I immediately took a couple of photographs in order to show my good will, and Jeanne developed them for me, and then we stood for a while reflecting on my proud stiff slices.
Jeanne
You couldn’t really say that it is a photograph that makes us leave, but Walker Evans’ pictures of the Depression gave us a nudge, in particular (for my part) the one with a woman sitting on a doorstep with three practically naked children, the one child’s genitals exp
osed, all decency crushed, completely powerless in the claws of hunger.
Fewer and fewer people, soon only a handful, visit Materne Studio, and nobody has responded to Maria’s advert. That’s when we decide to turn our backs on the bleak city and sail Home.
Maria
It was not Art that made us leave. It was when the Lepinskis from the fourth floor moved onto the sidewalk. They were only there the first night, then they moved into the tunnel with all the others, I counted thirty-two mattresses leant against the crude wall, it’s so dank that the sheets could probably be wrung out. Nobody looks at me when I walk past. We live each in our own world, those who still have a home and those who no longer do.
No money comes from Maman. She cannot forgive the fact that I’ve brushed sonny-boy off on his own kin. I write to her: ‘Maman, I’ve visited him. He’s better off with them.’ But nothing comes of it, no spondulicks from that quarter.
Today I let Kiki stay in St Mary’s Park once I had walked her, I walked off while she was busy digging a hole, Mary full of grace please provide her with the bones I am no longer able to. Vivian cried, obviously, when I came home alone, and I don’t think it was such a good thing to do either. When Jeanne found out, she got very indignant. So in order to comfort them I said: ‘You know how fat the dogs got during the Great Famine in Ireland.’ Now Jeanne isn’t talking to me. And Vivian has attached the leash to her belt and will only eat from her plate on the floor.
Viv
We’re travelling second class, the very poor have been shoved down into the bottom of the ship, they live in a hole, I can look down at them. They sleep helter-skelter next to or on top of their luggage. Jeanne is seasick and only wants to die. But she has to wait until she gets home to France. It is her last trip across the Atlantic, she says. She is going home to die. Mother walks around counting the lifeboats. She cried when the Statue of Liberty was no longer visible, she called it her American mother of stone, you always knew where she was, and she waved a scarf at the great void. Huge rolling Atlantic waves seen through the eye of a porthole, no – I only like the ocean when I see it from land.
The Beauregard farm is situated by the road, with its back round a bend, and all the farmland bulges out in front. There is a constant crackling sound, like that of a fire or knives being sharpened, which in fact comes from the mouths of the sheep. They graze year-round, they graze their way into our stomachs, they graze to end up as blood-stained skins over the stone wall, and their small spotted hooves end on the dunghill. When I went along to help move them from one pasture to the next, I was given a long cane to keep them with the rest of the flock, to be able to reach absconders. How I lashed out! There were not enough absconders for my cane – I never tired of the way the blow to the sheep’s bottom recoiled in the cane so I could feel how elastic the flesh was, without even touching it with my hands.
Beauregard. When Mother returned to her childhood home in 1932, it hadn’t been properly cleaned in decades and required a multitude of cleaning agents: Aunt Maria Florentine said she had a cleaning obsession, but I don’t think so, because I recall Beauregard being very dirty. It had to be clean, otherwise Mother would not be able to endure it. ‘How does that look, coming into someone else’s home and starting to clean?’ Aunt Maria Florentine said as the grease dripped down the walls of the kitchen and a rather pretty mint-green appeared underneath, Mother was sweating like a pig, her hair was dripping wet, and she was red in the face, now on her knees with the scrub brush. I was afraid of this Aunt, whom I didn’t know, and swung up onto Mother’s back, and rode her while she scoured, with legs that were too long by her side, and she inadvertently splashed water on the tips of my swaying light-blues shoes. Later we had to move into a house in town because Mother kept cleaning long after there was nothing left to clean. We had to move because Monsieur Paramour moved in with Aunt and shouted when he drank, and stuck his fingers between my folds – that happened in the horse stables.
The view from my room at Beauregard: the sheepfold, black ammonia mud, all their grainy shit – but I have never had a room to myself before. At first, I don’t know what to do when I’m alone. Well, for example, I could potter about saying the same word so many times that its meaning has incalculable consequences. The word pumpkin sent me to bed with a fever in the end, pumpkin, I can no longer take responsibility for it even though it is my mouth that sends it off. I draw people dangling from the gallows, neither Aunt nor Mother like it. When I draw people without clothes, I immediately tear the drawing into pieces.
1. I, using my skipping rope, whipped the eye of my doll Alma into pieces, the one Aunt Alma gave me on the dock before the ship sailed.
2. I only did it so that I could then comfort Alma.
3. I only comforted Alma after having destroyed her in order to feel the great warm waves break in my chest.
The shit spawns the flies, like the Great Flood, they enter the house. You have to take an extra look around inside the house, on the cold stone floors, because scorpions might have come in from the garden. The heat outside, the cold inside – two very different worlds.
The dogs at Beauregard: there is the setter Minette, a hunting dog who is brown and cream-coloured. She has spots and sleeps on a chair outside my window and the instant my eyes open, she stands looking in through the window. There is the Airedale terrier Monsieur Lebric. He eats the flies in the kitchen after Mother has sprayed poison. He passes out. We put him in a tub and drag him outside. Seventeen hours later: the doors open, it’s Monsieur Lebric who having slept it off, staggering like a drunken man, is back in the kitchen. There is the cat Minnie, the devastating female when catching mice, with very sharp sudden teeth and claws. I don’t have much to say about it. One day my mother pops up behind the cleaning agents and says, ‘We’re having a party for your friends the Animals.’ We gathered them on the patio and arranged a meal for them, something with bread balls and drippings. It would have been funnier if Charles had also been there, the mere mention of my brother’s name made my mother cry, and so I said it over and over and over until it was a pure white sound, like the sound a bird in the sky might make.
The drawing room at Beauregard so packed with shiny furniture that it was difficult to get around, all you had to do was shine and you had access. I was admitted there when I had done something wrong and was shining with delight, for example when I went into the sheepfold with freshly chalked shoes. There was a piano too. Suddenly there was something to say about the cat. I pulled my stocking off my foot, put it over its head and placed it on the keys. It was wretched. It was noisy. That was it. I would rather have been too good for this world (but I wasn’t), it was the greatest praise you could get. But I wasn’t. I stood in front of the mirror and turned my lips down and tensed all the muscles until I was shaking everywhere, and the mirror was filled with evil. When Mother doesn’t like me, she says I remind her of Father. The wall around the garden at Beauregard, the wrought iron gate, the two stone lions that guarded the exit, the road outside that dragged itself upwards, my heavy feet.
‘All of this will be yours one day,’ Aunt said with a hand on my shoulder, and together we looked out over Beauregard’s billowing grounds. It wasn’t until years later that I looked up and actually noticed the mountains.
I have never seen anyone in the family dance, but by all acounts they have all gone dancing at the town’s dance school, and now it is my turn. I resist fiercely but simply end up being pushed out onto the slippery floor. I am assigned a partner. He wants to dance with everyone but me, there is nobody he won’t dance with, even Miss Harelip, in order to escape me. That’s not true, Aunt says. I am lovely, I am bright, my posture is just not very good, my shoulders are up by my ears, but dancing will change that. Dancing improves your posture. Just snap your chin up and feel your worth. Remember that you are a star, at least in my heaven. Then the boy Philippe and I hold hands, as they tell us to, and go out onto the floor with the other child dancers with skirts that are starched
in sugar, and shoes that are polished with spit; dance school on gravel, dance school in tall grass, dance school in fat or melted asphalt, until luckily it becomes dance school in nose bleed, and I am allowed to lie down next to the wall.
I cling to my mother, I never hear the end of it. It gets to the point where they have to tear her dress out of my hands while I scream. Sometimes when I won’t let go, she starts to walk, and so I get dragged behind her across the floor or the courtyard or wherever we happen to be. The house we move into with Jeanne when Aunt Maria Florentine has had enough of Mother is called Renoul – it lies in the centre of town, is light-yellow and has white shutters. Mother would prefer to find a position quickly, possibly in a shop. Jeanne has saved a little and doesn’t need to work, I hope it doesn’t turn out like when you put a horse out to pasture and its muscles disappear, its figure completely changes until you can hardly recognize it, so haggard and stiff-legged. The farmhand at Beauregard showed me a working horse and a retired horse, and laughed at Aunt’s weakness for animals, he would have eaten the old horse although it probably would have been too tough. I miss Beauregard, here in Saint-Bonnet we are strangers even though we have many relatives, a labyrinth full of them; I’ve got a bicycle now, people call me the Girl with the Bike when I step inside a shop: ‘Well here we have the Girl with the Bike’, I always have a trail of toddlers after me as I swoosh through the streets. I love the air here. If I’m bored, Jeanne is prepared to teach me some tricks with the photographic apparatus, she wants to teach me everything she knows. A wife died close to Renoul, and Mother used to look after the widower’s children. She has stopped that now that Aunt gives us money. I have nice shoes. There have never been so many people who liked me at one time: François, Maryse, Laurence, Philippe. Jeanne goes for long walks with her camera every day, and says she keeps a visual diary, it’s become necessary due to her failing memory. She also says it’s a way of belonging again, after all the years in America. The apparatus is her way of latching on. The camera feeds, and a picture comes out the other end. She has turned the bathroom into a darkroom, and says I am her apprentice. But I don’t like the darkroom, the strong smells – I have a keener sense of smell than others (and smell things others can’t), I’ve always had that ability. She says the photographs are shreds torn from reality.
Vivian Page 11