Tita (12 page)

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.”

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 these 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.

They’ve known each other for ever, though. Father told me that mademoiselle Verdier, when they were growing up, used to live on the ground floor of the
Maison Bousquet around the corner from us. She was a few years older than him, and friends with his sister Caroline. Once when he was about twelve he ran into her house on some errand and when he opened the door of their kitchen, there she was standing naked in a basin of water, with a sponge in her hand. He muttered something and ran away, but he says it was the first time he’d ever seen a woman without any clothes on, and he never forgot it. “For me, she will always be this beautiful vision, like a marble statue in the middle of the kitchen.”

Mademoiselle Verdier was an only child, and she doesn’t have any family here, Father said. “Her parents left her the house she lives in now, which used to be her mother’s parents’. But that’s all she has. Nothing else, no money at all. It must not be easy for her to make a living. And she needs to maintain the house, or she couldn’t get tenants.”

Today, in mademoiselle Verdier’s kitchen, when we’re done reading and translating our double page, we talk. In French. She offers gruel and I say no thanks, after which she hands me a white napkin embroidered with tulips and a plate of plump, juicy apricots from her garden. I eat a few while she sips her tea. She’s very interested in marriages, especially the kind that end up not happening, or that shouldn’t have happened.

“Is your father still trying to find someone for Cécile Barniol?” she asks. The Barniols are distant cousins of ours, who live around the corner from mademoiselle Verdier.

“Well,” I say, “he invited her to dinner last month with a sailing friend of his from Perpignan, a nephew of the Viés’. I don’t think they liked each other at all. The man was telling Father about sailing along the coast of Andalusia last fall, and Cécile immediately announced that she couldn’t stay on a boat, she was always seasick. Then Father mentioned the fact that Cécile likes to paint, and the Viés’ nephew went on about Matisse — he’d just seen an exhibition. But Cécile said she couldn’t even look at a Matisse painting, they were all so ugly.”

Mademoiselle Verdier is amused. “What Cécile does is hardly art: she just copies reproductions from books! Your father is so generous. He will do anything for her. I don’t think he’ll ever get anywhere, though. She’s too stuck up. And she’s getting old, nearly forty, isn’t she? She had her chance when the new
notaire
came to town, remember?”

I love that mademoiselle Verdier speaks to me as if I were her age. As if I could be familiar with what happened ten years ago. But she’s going on about cousin Cécile. “She was not even thirty at the time, she still looked good enough. Although she always wore too much make-up. He would have married her, but... I think her mother is to blame. She’s always set her sights much too high. And Cécile is entirely under her thumb.”

I say goodbye, and hurry home on my bicycle. I want to speak English. Father is in his study, reading a Série Noire novel titled
Touchez pas au grisbi
. “What is
grisbi?
” I ask in English.

Father explains and, miraculously, I understand:
grisbi
is a slang word for “money”. We go on like that for a while, and I learn (without any explanation in French, without any translation) the words “title”, “street”, “stove”, “boat”, “novel”. I already knew “what”, “book”, “read”, “I”, “like”, “go”, “back”, and a few more. Father and I are swimming together in this whirling stream, where short, crisp words twist and jump all around us. Then Father says something that I don’t get. Or I’m not sure. “Do you mean that I shouldn’t read detective novels?” I ask in French.

“Right,” Father says.

“Because they are ‘not for children’?”

“No, not only because you’re too young. You
are
too young, I’m sure you wouldn’t be interested in these novels now. But I’d like you to keep away from them even when you’re older.”

This doesn’t seem to make sense. Father reads them all the time, so why shouldn’t I? “Is it because they are for men?” I ask.

“No.” Father seems to think. “No, it’s just because I’d like you to choose a more... substantial kind of literature. Something larger, more complex, more... real?”

I wonder if he means something like
Henry Brulard
. The book is pretty worn out, he must have read it many times. I’d better not mention it, but I have an idea. I go to the shelves, where I’ve seen several other books by Stendhal, the author who wrote
Henry Brulard
. I take one out. “Do you mean books like this one?” I ask.

Father strokes the front page, which has a small drawing of a jumping horse. “
Armance
,” he says. “Stendhal’s first novel. I remember buying it in Paris at the librairie Honoré Champion, near the Palais du Luxembourg, a long time ago. Yes, it’s a beautiful and very strange book.”

“Can I read it?” I ask.

Father shakes his head. “You’ll have to wait. It wouldn’t make sense to you now. It’s about a dramatic, morbid kind of love, and you’d have to know first about healthier kinds. You’d also need to know some history. Look at the subtitle:
‘Ou Quelques Scènes d’un salon de Paris en 1827’.
Eighteen-twenty-seven probably means nothing to you right now.”

“What does it mean to you?”

“The Restoration.”

“The Restoration?”

“That’s the time when the monarchy was restored in France. The Bourbons were back, after the Revolution, after Napoleon. Stendhal is a republican, and he sees the Restoration as a time of ennui and decay.”

Father is right about the Restoration but thanks to Henry Brulard I know something about the Revolution. Henry witnesses, from the window of his grandfather’s room, what he calls “the first blood spilled by the French Revolution”: a hatter, supported by two other men, blood spurting from a bayonet wound in his lower back, walks up the six flights of a house across the street. All this is clearly visible through the large windows of the staircase and Henry can’t stop looking. When the worker gets to his room, he dies. Henry’s parents are for law and order and against the revolution, but Henry sees “the anger and the strength of the people”.

I open
Armance
. There are many pages of preface and
Avant-propos bibliographique et critique
, ending with a photo of Stendhal’s manuscript — his handwriting looks even worse than mine. I read the first page of the novel itself, which starts with a few English words. Then the story: Octave is twenty, just out of
Ecole Polytechnique
, and he’d like to enter the artillery. But he is an only child and his parents want to keep him in Paris, so he gives up his plan. “Do I have to wait until I am twenty to read this book?” I ask.

“Maybe sixteen?” Father says.

Sixteen! “And I shouldn’t read detective novels at all? Ever?”

He sighs, his elbows on the table, his cheeks between his fists. “Some of them are very good of their kind. I’m not saying you should avoid them altogether. But they... I... don’t really... enjoy them so much, as a matter of fact.”

I love it when he says “as a matter of fact”. It took me months to analyse this expression, which felt like a single word. As with
Mon-ex
. “Why do your read them, then?” I ask.

“That’s...” he laughs, “what I’d like to know. I guess it’s.... to take my mind off... things. The way I do crossword puzzles, or play bridge.”

He looks around, stands up, takes my hand. “Let’s go into the garden,” he goes on in English, “and before it gets dark let’s try to call some flowers by their English names.”

This evening Coralie is already asleep when Mother, smelling of carnation in a pink and green floral-print bustier dress, comes to kiss us good night. Our parents are going to a dinner party at the Viés’. As soon as I hear them walk down the hall and close the front door, I go back to the last pages of
Henry Brulard
, about the “five or six months of celestial, complete happiness” he spent in Milan. I love “five or six” because it means that he doesn’t know exactly, and he admits it. Mother would never say “five or six”. She always knows exactly, because she doesn’t care about the truth.

Milan, for Henry, becomes the most beautiful place on earth. “I don’t at all feel the charm of my fatherland,” he says. “I have for the place where I was born a repugnance, a physical disgust, like sea-sickness. Milan, from 1800 to 1821, was where I constantly yearned to live.” Milan! A place I’d never heard of until now. I try to think if there is a place in the world where I could yearn to live. Maybe Paris, in spite of the bad reputation Justine and our brothers give it.

“Reader, forgive me!” Henry writes. “If you are older than thirty or if, younger, you are on the side of prose, close this book!” He’s always telling us to close his book, or asking his future editor, if he ever gets one, to cut his digressions. It’s a bit much but I like him so I decide that I’m not on the side of prose either.

Henry starts telling us about the woman he loved in Milan: “She did love me, somehow. She had other lovers but I told myself that, if my rank had been on a level with theirs, she would have preferred me! I had other lovers too.”

This is what I’ll do. I don’t know if I’ll go to Milan, it might be some other place, but I won’t stay in my fatherland either. I’ll be happy sometimes, celestially, and I’ll have quite a few lovers, like him. He doesn’t say much more about these times: “How can I paint the extravagant happiness everything gave me?” The last sentence of the book is,
On gâte des sentiments si tendres à les raconter en détail
, One spoils such tender feelings by recounting them in detail.

I hear Grandmother and Loli go up to their rooms. The house is totally quiet now. The clock on the mantelpiece says ten to eleven, so our parents should still be safely away. I decide to take
Henry Brulard
to Father’s study, and look up
prose
in the Petit Robert.

I don’t quite understand the definition, but the word came into the French language in 1265, from the Latin
prosa oratio
, “speech that goes in a straight line”. And I can see that Henry does exactly the opposite: as soon as he starts telling us about something, he remembers something else.

I also look up
porridge
: it was first an English word, which only settled into the French language in 1901, when Father was already four years old. I wonder what Father had for breakfast before 1901. If I ask him, he’ll say he doesn’t remember. He remembers practically nothing that happened before he was seven and was sent to boarding school. But could he have had porridge anyway? By another name?

The Robert says that porridge was originally an English word, a “corruption” of the French word
potage
. It doesn’t say when
potage
became
porridge:
for this, I need to look into the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary — two heavy dark-blue volumes, each much larger and thicker than the Robert. All in English, but I understand that
porridge
was born in 1532 and came from “altered f. POTTAGE”. “Altered”, so much more polite than “corruption”. So,
potage
became
pottage
at some point (in English), and then
porridge
. This English dictionary is engrossing. But I need to be in bed before our parents come back.

I abhor porridge, I think as I turn off the light. Since Dr Pauli asked me what fruit I like, I’ve been looking at food in a different way. I’ve always eaten fruit of my own accord, especially from trees, but I didn’t think of fruit as
food
. Food was something people wanted to thrust into me, so I automatically shrank from it. Now I see that what I dislike is meals. Meals at home. Because that’s where you’re supposed to eat up whatever they put in your plate Or Else. That’s where you have to sit and endure all kinds of repulsive smells while others make conversation and ingest their food without worrying about it. That’s where your duty is to pick up bits of seared flesh, haul them to your lips one by one, shove them inside your mouth and keep them there until, in desperation, you make up your mind to swallow.

But there are foods I actually like. Fruit, bread, fresh almonds, tiny raw artichokes, hazelnuts... Even at meals once in a while there are good moments. Grandmother’s soups I always found okay, but now I try to guess what vegetables she put in them. Potatoes, carrots, celery are staples, but I especially like fennel, cucumber. And there are some other dishes I enjoy: sautéed string beans, chard, aubergine-and-tomato gratin.

The problem is, the more I let myself enjoy some foods, the more I abominate others. I used to be able to let Loli stick porridge into my mouth. For a while now I’ve been doing it myself and it means that I have to be
there
, to
taste
the actual putty. Gruesome. Why should I eat something that makes me sick?

In the morning when I see Loli taking the box of oats from the shelf, I say, “Please, may I have a different breakfast? Something I like?”

She turns towards me, the box still in her hand, and grins. “
Is
there anything you like? Anything serious?”

“Yes!” I say. “I could have fruit first, because the doctor said I should, and then... bread? With your grandmother’s honey?”

Loli seems to think. She puts the box back on the shelf. “Will you have a banana? A banana, that’s nourishing”, she says, as if to herself.

“Okay!”

So she brings me a banana from the storeroom, cuts a slice of
gros pain
, spreads beautiful liquid honey on it. This is so good! The best meal I’ve ever had. And I just needed to ask?

I arrive at Sainte-Blandine in a strangely energetic mood. As soon as we’re done with mass, Pélican demands our complete attention, opens her desk, and takes out a round box. There are a hundred hosts in there, she says, unconsecrated. When we have “earned” them all she’ll give the box to the priest, who will consecrate them.
Earn
them? We look at each other with wide eyes. What can she mean?

“Exceptional sacrifices”. We’re supposed to come up with these ourselves, but Pélican gives us some examples: not saying a word to anybody in school (except when the teacher asks us to) for a whole day, not eating any candy for a week, giving away our toys to the church bazaar. If we succeed in these extraordinary feats of goodness, we “earn” a host. Or several.

Break, and brainstorming in the yard. “I could try to save my weekly allowance,” Noëlle says, “and give it to the poor. Put it into that box at the back of the church. I couldn’t buy any cardboard for my puppets, or any paints. But for a week, I guess I could try.”

“If there’s something you need, I can give you my candy money,” I say. We don’t get an allowance, but Father gives us a few francs every day after lunch. I like liquorice, but I can easily do without it.

“Thanks!” Noëlle says. “And that could be
your
sacrifice. Going without candy.”

I can’t say it aloud, but I don’t think so. Our sacrifice needs to be something difficult.

Anne-Claude is frowning. “This doesn’t work,” she says. “If Noëlle gets money from you, where will be her sacrifice?”

“It will only be a few francs,” I say. “For an emergency.”

“Okay,” Anne-Claude says. And I could try not to smack my brothers. For a whole week! That will be really really… I’ll have to keep away from them. Stay in my bedroom. I won’t even be able to play in the yard.”

“You can come and play at my house,” I say.

“It’s too easy not to smack them if they aren’t around!” Noëlle says.

“That’s where you’re mistaken,” Anne-Claude says. “I guess at first I hit them because they annoyed me. They never stop crowding me, and the only possible reaction is to smack them when they come too near. But now, when I think of a whole week without them, I realize I’ve got used to the whole... Tita, what about you? Do you hit Coralie?”

I have to laugh. “Sometimes, I’d like to,” I say. “But she’s very strong. And she enjoys fighting, which I don’t.”

My friends are amazed. “She’s not even six!” Anne-Claude exclaims. “You can’t be afraid of her.”

“But I am. And it’s not only that she’s stronger. I don’t like to be too close to her. She often smells of butter, of cheese…” This gives me an idea. “I know what my sacrifice will be,” I say. “What I hate most is the smell in the passage between the pâtisserie Cassagnol and the rue de l’Horloge, where several gypsy families live, with lots of small children. I always take a wide detour to avoid that street. What I’ll do is, I’ll take a bunch of my toys to that street. I’ll actually go inside a house if they ask me.”

“That will be two sacrifices then,” Noëlle says. “The smell, and giving away your toys.”

“The toys won’t count,” I say. “I only care about my dolls, and I won’t give them away, because they’re my children.”

But Noëlle is right. I’ll tell Pélican about giving away my toys, although it doesn’t mean anything. I won’t mention the stench. Pélican probably has no idea what a torture it can be. Her house reeks of stale sausage and moldy fabrics.

Back upstairs in the classroom, we announce our vows. My toy sacrifice doesn’t make much of an impression, but when Anne-Claude explains about her brothers, I can see Pélican’s face contracting in horror. When we’re all done, she says, “Some of you have deeply reprehensible, shocking behaviour to get rid of, and should be grateful for this opportunity. Remember, if you practice violence, it is not enough to give it up for a week. Except if you plan to go to hell.”