Authors: Marie Houzelle
Today I’m tasting the host. Anne-Claude compares it to paper, Justine says it feels more like cotton wool. Intriguing.
I get to church half an hour before the ten o’clock mass because we have to rehearse our hymns and movements one last time. When the congregation comes in, we stand at the back of the church; then we all walk very slowly in procession from side chapel to side chapel, between the parts of the mass, and we sing. In front of saint Régis, I do my solo,
Au ciel dans ma patrie
, about the bliss of joining the Virgin Mary in heaven. I’d love to die and be forever ecstatic, but I don’t feel any special attraction to the Virgin. Except I’d like to give birth in a stable, like her. Not to the son of God, though. I want daughters. Four, like in
Les Quatre Filles du docteur March
.
Mother is pleased because I look good in my new white dress, white ankle socks, white patent-leather shoes, crown of tiny white roses on my dark ringlets (her work of the morning, with a curling iron). Father has come too, and he doesn’t look disgruntled. The host is fine. You feel something smooth and quiet on your tongue, but solid, not slippery. It sticks a bit, and after a while it dissolves. Hardly any taste at all. I wish I could live on hosts.
After mass, we all drive to the Cabarrou with Grandmother, my two brothers and two sisters, a few friends of my parents’, and my friend Eléonore. The Cabarrou is our park, but it isn’t attached to our townhouse, or even very near. To get there, you have to walk for ten minutes to the other side of the railway tracks, into the vineyards.
Today, as soon as we open the gate, a foul smell attacks me. Barbecue. I run all the way to the other end of the park, but I can’t find a cranny that’s free of the reek. Behind the pine trees it isn’t so bad, but once in a while you get hit by a wave of burning flesh. My brothers are the ones who instigated the barbecue. They said they’d take care of it.
The only good thing about a barbecue, especially when there are people coming, going and jostling around, is that nobody pays any attention to what I eat. Or don’t eat. Except for my brother Etienne, but he’s not going to rat on me. “You should taste this lamb chop,” he says. “It’s perfect.”
“No, thanks.”
“If you had a choice between eating this and having your eyes gouged out,” he asks, “what would you do?”
“Try to find a quicker way to die?”
Etienne shakes his head. “You know, you must be a Cathar.”
“A Cathar?”
“From the Middle Ages. Simon de Montfort massacred them. They didn’t eat any meat or cheese. For them, Matter was a prison. They were vanquished, but they survive in you!” He takes my waist between his large hands, throws me up, catches me and sets me back on the ground. Then he runs to tend the barbecue.
I try a tiny radish, and it hurts the whole inside of my mouth. People seem to gobble them as if they were figs, or cherries. Many are sticking wedges of butter on them. I ask Justine why anybody would want to do this, and she says, hoping her vocabulary will dazzle me, “It assuages the pungency.” As if people had to eat something that stings their taste buds in the first place.
At the end of the meal Father starts pouring Champagne. Eléonore drinks hers in one gulp, and shivers. I taste mine slowly. After every sip, my tongue keeps on tingling. Then someone gives us more, and I drink it up although I already feel dizzy. I’m not sure what happens after that. I climb some trees with Eléonore and Coralie. A branch snaps. Coralie slides into the pond and gets her blue dress all muddy. Justine rescues her. “You’re lucky I happened to be around. I wonder how you all manage to stay alive when I’m in Paris.” Right, Coralie was going to drown in two feet of slime.
Eléonore wants to play ballerinas, and my sisters agree. Justine suggests a corny choreography inspired by the film
Violettes Impériales
, and Coralie says she’ll provide acrobatics. I roll my eyes, and leave — they’re so busy plotting their entrechats, they don’t even notice. As I walk about the park trying to think of something to do, I bump into my oldest brother Maxime, hard at work taking photos of lilac blossoms. I can only see his back, all bent and awry as he concentrates on his task. Next to playing ballerinas, taking photos of lilac blossoms must be the most stupid occupation in the whole universe.
Maxime got a state-of-the-art camera for his twenty-first birthday in February, and he’s been obsessed ever since. He used to take lots of photos before, but normal ones: of the family, friends, some neighbor’s new car, his rugby team, the cats. Now, with this new equipment, he’s become an artist, so he’s no longer interested in the kinds of photos anybody could take. If you see a human being in a photo of his, it’ll only be their wrist. Or a bit of their ankle. An earhole, a strand of hair. That’s what artists do; he’s explained it all to me.
“Please, Maxime,” I say. “When you’re done with this, could you please take a photo of me with the parents.” I have a very clear idea in mind: me in the middle, with a parent on each side. A Jesus-in-the-crib configuration.
“No, I can’t,” he says, pressing buttons and turning knobs as he peers into his camera. “I’m not even sure I’ll have enough film for what I want to do.”
“Maxime!” I wail. I sound like a baby. “This is my private communion, there should be a photo of it, don’t you think?”
He’s still busy with his focus and his flowers. Can’t even spare me a glance. “There must have been a photographer at the church door, when you came out,” he says.
“It will be everybody coming out of the church, a jumble of people. What I’d like is a photo of just the parents and me. Please.”
I want this very much all of a sudden. I don’t know why, but I can’t do without it. Who needs all these lilacs? I hate him. I decide to look for Father. Perhaps he could ask Maxime in a way that would make him do it.
But when I finally find Father, Maxime says he’s used up his roll of film, there’s nothing left, sorry. Father is here, I can hear Mother nearby, and this dolt had to take thirty-six shots of lilac blossoms. I want to kill him. Instead, I start crying, which makes me angrier still.
A few days later, in the family album, there’s a square black-and-white photo of a skinny girl in a longish white dress and a rosebud crown. She’s stamping her foot, her face distorted with rage, tears flowing down her cheeks, her arms raised toward the torpid skies. Maxime wrote the caption: “Tita on the day of her private communion.”
Tita is what most people call me. Nobody but mademoiselle Pélican, the nuns and the priest use Euphémie, my baptismal name — I had to get a new name when I was baptized because my legal name, the one on my passport, wasn’t a saint’s name. Last week Justine asked me, “When you are my age, and you meet a boy, if he wants to know what your name is, what will you say?”
This was not an idle question; it was a test question. “Tita,” I said. To keep her happy, and even though Euphémie might sound better when I stop being a child.
“Right. Tita is so much sweeter, isn’t it? You should always be called Tita, even when you’re older. Even as a married woman. It’s so charming. It’s
you
.”
Well, I thought, there’s at least someone in the world who thinks she knows what “me” is. I wasn’t at all convinced, though. Justine is extremely interesting to watch and listen to; but I don’t think she has all the answers.
In the music room Ginette, our cleaning lady, is dusting the window frames. I sit on the piano stool with my back to the instrument and look at the portrait, high on the wall, of a girl who must be about my age: my aunt Marta. There are portraits of great-uncles and forefathers all over the house, most of them in military uniform, but aunt Marta is the only female who rates one. Is it because she died in boarding school (Father says “convent”) when she was twelve? In the painting, she wears a thin white animal around her neck, with the head and tail clearly visible, and a white pillbox hat. She is pale, and looks serious. A bit timid, perhaps.
Ginette is now rubbing the piano keys with something sour-smelling from a bottle. She lives across the back street with her husband and daughter, and she’s been working in this house for ever, every day but Sunday. “Did you know my aunt Marta?” I ask her.
“Of course I did. My mother used to work for your grandmother, and I sometimes came along. Marta was three years older than me, but she was nice. She read books all the time, and she lent me quite a few good ones.”
“Did she ever do forbidden things? Did she climb roofs?”
Ginette laughs. “I never heard about that. But she was lively enough. When she went out with the maid, she always wanted to take some of her dolls with her. Said they needed the fresh air.”
“I have this porcelain doll, Jacqueline, that used to be hers. Do you remember her playing with it?”
“Yes, and she broke both Jacqueline’s legs trying to get her to do somersaults. Her mother, your grandmother Clara, said the doll would have to remain legless — that would teach Marta. Then, after what happened... your grandmother gave me some of Marta’s toys, and put away the rest. But just before your second birthday she went to the linen garret, found this broken doll, and took it to the repair shop in Narbonne, in the rue Droite. She wanted you to have it. From the beginning, she said you were very much like your aunt Marta, and I guess that’s why she called you Tita.”
“Was Tita her...?”
“Yes, Tita is what we called your aunt Marta. I think Marta made it up herself when she was little. People called her ‘Martita’ sometimes, so... Then, not long after you came here, your grandmother took a fancy to you and started calling you Tita. After a while, everybody followed suit. Do you remember your grandmother Clara? Probably not, you weren’t even three when she died.”
My grandmother Clara. People, when they mention her, say things like, “She was such an amazing lady, walking tall in her long black dresses and her high white chignon. So refined, so imposing.”
I do remember her, but not like that. “She always stayed in her room,” I tell Ginette. “She read me fairy tales. She let me play with her fans, she had a whole drawer of them. With her scarves too, and her embroidered handkerchiefs.”
Two tears slide down my cheeks. Ginette puts down her duster, pulls me up from the stool, takes me in her lap, and kisses me a few times. I kiss her back then go downstairs, across the garden and out through the back door into the street. The dirt road on the left leads down to La Fourcade, our rambling orchard. I sit on a wood bench under a fig tree, thinking about my name. If I were Marta, if I were dead, would I like someone else to get my nickname, the name I made up for myself?
There are worse things in the world than feeling uneasy about your name. There are enormously worse things than I and my friends are ever likely to experience, as mademoiselle Pélican reminds us every other minute with her stories of miscellaneous martyrs and Chinese children who not only go hungry but haven’t been baptized, so they will be sent to limbo at best when they die.
I don’t intend to fall into self-pity. I should be grateful to Grandmother Clara: if she hadn’t thought of calling me Tita, I might be stuck with my legal name, the one Mother chose for me: Lakmé. Mother says that she looked forward to having a daughter just for the sake of naming her Lakmé, which is the title of her favorite opera and the name of its heroine, an Indian girl who falls in love with an Englishman who abandons her so she kills herself at the end, with poison. I can’t imagine a more ridiculous thing to do than killing yourself over some man. Mother said that she had a lot of trouble with the registry officer at the clinic, Lakmé was so unusual. But she told him about the opera, sang the beginning of
Sous le ciel tout étoilé
, and he couldn’t resist. I wish he had.
I make a decision: I’ll give each of my children three names, all as unobtrusive as possible, and they’ll choose between these when they’re seven. Seven, because it’s the age of reason.
Now I can relax in the smell of fig leaves. Behind the tree there’s a hut with quinces, apples, nuts, some tools and, on a low shelf, a heap of books. I start reading
Léonie veut aller à la fête
. Léonie, the heroine, is invited to a dance for the first time. Her father, who is a sailor, is away in Africa. She’s excited about the party and would like to wear the dress her father sent her for her birthday, but there are a few snags. Her stepmother, madame Mercier, thinks she’s too young. Then Dora, the stepmother’s daughter, wants to borrow Léonie’s dress. As Dora is much larger than Léonie, the dress might not survive.
The story is good, but I’ve read it before. What catches my attention is the way Léonie addresses her stepmother. Léonie calls madame Mercier
Belle-mère
. Which is the French word for both
mother-in-law
and
stepmother
, and literally means “beautiful mother”. This sounds like a solution.
Because Coralie and I have a problem: we don’t know how to address our mother. She
is
a
belle-mère
to our older brothers and sister, but they just call her Odette. Justine even coined a pet name for her: Dette
(which actually means “debt”). Coralie and I are supposed to say
Maman
, but we don’t. Ever. We don’t call her anything. At all. Which might get us into trouble. Because it’s not polite to just say “yes”, or “thanks”, or “please”; you should go on with the name or title of the person. As in “Thanks, Loli”, or “Please, Grand-Mère”. We can’t do it with our mother, we just can’t bring ourselves to pronounce the word
maman
, it sounds so babyish; so we try to avoid situations where we’d have to.
Now why not call our mother
Belle-mère
? She
is
beautiful.
I can’t wait. I run back to the house with the book. I find Coralie in the coal shed, grinding chunks of coal onto her hair with both hands.
“Hi,” she says. “Where have you been? I’d like to be a gypsy. Can you
become
a gypsy?”
“I guess. Shall I read you
Léonie veut aller à la fête?
”
Coralie wipes her hands on her dress and follows me outside. On the green bench under the wisteria I read aloud, practicing my
Belle-mère
responses. I notice that Léonie hardly ever says anything to her stepmother. Most of their exchanges consist in madame Mercier’s giving orders and Léonie’s answering “Oui, Belle-mère
”.
Then our mother calls from inside, “Tita, Coralie! Lunch!” Normally, we’d just go. Silently.
But I answer, “Oui, Belle-mère
.”
Coralie echoes, “Oui, Belle-mère
.”
Our mother doesn’t seem to notice. She never pays much attention to words.