Amour Provence (23 page)

By the time she and Marco left the café, the sky had turned a clear sea color and two bright stars were visible straight above like illuminated clock hands pointing to the hour. When they arrived at Domaine Petitjean, Philippe and Marie-France were already there. Compared to her sister-in-law in her silks and jewels, Gilberte felt underdressed in her loose trousers and light cotton shirt. When
she'd first arrived in Edinburgh, she'd dressed
à la française
, showing off her rounded hips and full breasts, aware that she drew appreciative glances. But when Simon began to harp on what he termed her inappropriate seductiveness, even though it was
he
having the affairs, she'd taken to covering everything up, telling herself that in the British Isles people generally dressed for comfort and that she was simply making an effort to fit in. But that night she decided that now that she was back in Provence, it might be nice to again wear clothes that flattered.

During dinner, Philippe barely mentioned their mother and instead talked steadily to Clément about the new vintages and what would be sold for export. When the main course was finished he and Marie-France surprised Gilberte by getting up and saying their good-byes. In general, no one ever left the table before a meal was complete, which meant a cheese course, dessert, and at the end, a demitasse of coffee. Gilberte had seen six pear tarts on a baking pan in the kitchen, but she didn't mention them. Without her mother to orchestrate things, the proprieties of dinner had been obliterated.

From the hallway window she saw Marie-France stop for a moment on the outside steps to light a cigarette. Philippe stood just beneath, his hand on her hip. They were still as sphinxes. Gilberte sensed that in some way they found her return problematic. But they needn't worry; she hadn't returned for any personal gain, or to await the demise of her parents, as her father had intimated. In fact, money meant very little to her. The only thing she hoped for was a chance to begin life afresh. The truth was that though her time in Scotland had at first been new and different,
and then had afforded her the chance at further education and a career, over the years she had begun to think wistfully of her youth spent outdoors on warm summer nights with her contemporaries, and the long walks on the clear chill days of winter when the mistral chased all the clouds away, leaving the sky a pure celestial blue. As a girl, she'd be off with friends up to the mountains, where wild chamois roamed and kestrels soared in the wide expanse of blue far above her. She found herself dreaming of her life as it had been when she'd known everyone in the village and there was always something new and pleasant to discover. In Edinburgh, her days had consisted of a dull back-and-forth to work in the rainy darkness of early morning and the lonely return on tenebrous evenings where no stars shone in a cloud-obscured sky.

“I'm taking Berti up to her new home,” Marco told their father after he and Gilberte had cleared the table and done the dishes.

“Will you be all right,
Papa
?” asked Gilberte.

“Of course, I'm fine. What do you think?” Clément waved her away, and she wondered what Philippe had meant about their father not being himself. His personality certainly had not changed. But when she looked down at his bony, splayed hands, they appeared to her held together by musty cobwebs instead of flesh.

Marco could barely fit Gilberte's luggage into his tiny car, but he folded the backseats forward and managed to jam in the trunks. On the short drive, Gilberte fell silent, thinking of the odd, unwelcoming household to which she had returned. Yet as soon as they got to the tiny road that
skirted the ramparts of the neighboring village of Serret, the crenellations of the tower where she was to live loomed up in the darkness and her spirits brightened. Instead of the ruin it had once been, the structure was now perfectly restored, the stones clean and gleaming in the light of a streetlamp that hung from the ancient parapet like a jeweled pendant on a necklace.

The two furnished rooms she'd rented turned out to be clean and pleasant, with a tiny kitchen and living area painted pastel peach and the bedroom pale violet, colors that were rarely used in Provence, where rough whitewashed plaster walls were practically ubiquitous. She opened the windows to the warm night and the valley spread out below her, the vineyards and orchards and the smudge of an olive grove above the Ouvèze River, for the moment a narrow, silent stream that ran desultorily between two heaped banks of boulders meant to quell the rare floodwaters that had caused such havoc and death only a few years before.

Marco hefted her trunks up the two flights of stairs. For someone so thin, he had a strength that amazed her. When he'd finished, her brother descended the winding stone staircase. She followed him out through the front gate onto the street and watched him roll another cigarette. The keys that her landlord had sent clinked against each other on their steel ring as the two walked side by side. At the juncture of two roads, one coming up from the fields, the other running down along the edge of the ramparts, a simple stone fountain fed by an underground spring chortled its melodious song. Gilberte dipped her hand into the cool water then put her lips beneath the metal spout and drank.

The sweet scent of rotting grapes that remained in the fields after harvest mixed pleasantly with occasional whiffs of her brother's tobacco smoke. As a teenager, she'd puffed cigarettes on Saturday nights with friends in the village parking lot. Life had seemed so full of promise. The boys in her group each had their own special attractiveness and she'd felt a little snap of electricity whenever Jeannot took her hand or Didier Falque pulled her close for a dance at the local discotheque. She could have gone off with any of those boys, even married any one of them, but at that point, despite her attachment to her mother, she couldn't imagine remaining near her father for long.
Caractériel
, they called men like Clément, unpredictable and disturbingly moody. So Gilberte had been very careful not to get involved with any of the young men orbiting around her. She had simply bided her time until the moment when she could go off and create her own life.

Marco pulled the cigarette from his lips and came to stand next to her.

“We should talk about
Papa
,” Gilberte said.

“All right, Berti,” he replied. “If you really want to know, he has difficulty even organizing the paperwork now. Philippe would like to get his hands on the bank accounts, but our father is determined not to allow that to happen. Up until recently, our mother had done the lion's share. But over the past weeks, by the time I arrive in the evening she's so exhausted she can barely speak. They both seem to be hanging by a worn thread.”

“Their insurance would pay for someone to come help them at home, wouldn't it?” she asked.

“Of course, but Philippe and Marie-France don't want anyone involved. That's where I come in.” He took a last drag on his cigarette, then tossed the butt to the ground. In the light of the streetlamp Gilberte saw that his fingers were stained ocher.

“They expect you to come by every day? They're taking advantage of you, Marco.”

She remembered her brother talking about going out on his own, maybe even traveling around the world. Instead he'd moved to Fenasque, an ugly little town just down the road. It had a Roman arch overgrown with ivy and a section of aqueduct still standing on the dank square where young men sat together at night hoping something would happen. The main road came right through town, causing car exhaust to blacken buildings that had never been handsome in the first place. It was one of those lost places, sinister in its way, and completely dead.

But Marco wasn't dead. His hair was dark as the grenache grapes that went into the Petitjean wines. The fact that he was tall, taller than anyone else in the family, which tended toward squatness in the men and petite but attractive athleticism in the women, was also to his advantage. His stature and gentle personality certainly would have been enough to attract one of the local girls. Gilberte didn't understand why he didn't have someone. She'd never thought of him as moody, the word her father had used.

“Maybe we both should stay away,” Gilberte continued. “Let the others be the responsible ones.”

And then Marco's telephone rang.

Gilberte was astonished to find herself sleeping that night not in her Rapunzel tower with its cozy atmosphere, but in the cavernous bedroom of her childhood. Philippe had telephoned after finding their father wandering around in the garden, confused and anxious.

“Get Gilberte over here!” was the first thing he said to Marco. “It's the least she can do.”

Gilberte's old bed felt like cement and smelled of camphor with a damp, fishy undertone even though she'd put on fresh linens. She was used to the eternal dampness of Scotland, but even in dry Provence, rot and mildew encroached when rooms were uninhabited. Without life, things deteriorated. Could her parents be on that same trajectory? That night, in his pajamas, undisguised by his tailored jacket, her father had looked shrunken, a dark-faced waif with wild hair, but he'd snapped to when he saw Gilberte and had gone immediately to bed. She rolled to her side on the unforgiving mattress, bringing her knees to her chest as she had done when she was a child, taking slow breaths in the hope of inducing a relaxed, meditative state. Across the room stood the bed that had been her sister Marguerite's. A strange shape, probably just a folded duvet, gave the impression of a person. And in the silence of the night, Gilberte remembered Marguerite sobbing, and a scene long buried sprang to life and began to play itself out before her. She could practically see her father standing over Marguerite with the end of his belt wound tightly around his knuckles. His face had a purplish glow
and he was not an emaciated and rattled old man, but a person in the full strength of active middle age. He was holding Marguerite against her mattress, his hand over her mouth, and he began to whip her as if he was beating a farm animal. Gilberte had been too frightened to move. She'd barely drawn a breath as she heard her father say, “Vincent Charavin told me he saw you walking through his orchard with an Arab boy.” Once again the belt snapped. “No daughter of mine will be seen with one of those dirty Maghrébins, not ever! Do you understand?” And then he'd lifted his hand from Marguerite's face and left the room.

The memory was enough to jolt Gilberte out of bed. In recent years, she had rarely thought of Marguerite, the sister who had disappeared so long ago. But at that moment she recalled that within days of the beating, Marguerite had left their childhood home forever.

It was as if a curtain had been drawn aside. Finally, though her whole body was tingling, Gilberte lay back down on the musty bed and breathed steadily and deeply for a long time until she relaxed enough to get some sleep before the lavender dawn crept across the windowpanes.

As soon as she rose the next morning, she flung open all the windows in her room to let in fresh air. She remembered a particular village fête when her father had lashed out at all of them, even slapping her mother across the face when she had come to their defense. Their father's public displays of violence were not uncommon and certainly must have been remarked upon by their neighbors. She realized that whatever pride she'd had in being a part of the Perra family,
owners of the eminent Domaine Petitjean, had been nothing more than an illusion.

That morning, Gilberte found her father sitting downstairs at the red Formica breakfast table. He glanced up at her, but said nothing and she did not bend to kiss him. She spoke not a word as he drank his café au lait and crunched his way through a toasted baguette as if he was one of those innocent old saints that one saw so often in Provençal churches carved out of fruitwood and perched by the side of an altar.

She neither ate nor drank, but stood by the window as the eastern light filtered through the curtains her mother had embroidered with red rosettes. Her father finally gave her a piercing look. Though his frizzy hair had been combed and flattened, the light brought out the fine wrinkles in his cheeks, and the sagging of his chin weighed down his face, deforming it. But the fact that Clément Perra had grown old and frail meant very little to Gilberte now that she was aware of the truth. It had become all too clear that her father had terrorized them all and was responsible for driving Marguerite so violently from the house those many years ago.

Comprendre est pardonner
. She had thought those words so full of meaning, but they had inverted themselves the way the twisted form of a serpent could symbolize wisdom or evil. Now that she finally understood, she felt that she could never forgive. Instead she sat down across from her father, folded her hands before her, and said, “I was thinking of Marguerite last night. She's been gone so long. I wonder why she left with barely a good-bye, and then never, ever came back. Do you know?”