Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (6 page)

I return my eyes to the desk. I am allowing some fantasy to distract me from the task at hand. Mme Proust is tireless and I must work faster if I am ever going to get through the
notebooks. I’ll just skip ahead a few months here: I am determined to finish this one today, and move on to 1893.

Great excitement yesterday because Marcel went off for his first sitting with M. Blanche. He returned in good form, filled with awe at the spectacle of the studio, with its huge north-facing windows and a young model who was hurriedly reclothing herself when he entered! Well, that sounds odd, but I do believe this M. Blanche is really perfectly respectable. He seemed very pleasant when we met him at Trouville last year, and after all, his father is a doctor too.

Marcel is to wear his dinner jacket—he hid it under his greatcoat and several scarves in the cab on the way up—and was explaining to me how difficult it is to stand perfectly still. About every twenty minutes or so he is allowed a little break, but M. Blanche marks on the studio floor in chalk the outline of his feet so that he can take up the exact same pose when they begin again. Marcel says he chews on the end of his brush and sighs a lot as he paints, and absolutely forbids the boy to talk. I worry that Marcel is not taking his courses at the Sorbonne seriously enough, but at least the sessions with M. Blanche will be a distraction from his silly pursuit of Mme de Chevigné. I believe he is waiting in the street outside her house to catch a glimpse of her, because he is up and out suspiciously early in the morning these days.

Eh bien
. We are to have a visit from the famous Mr. Wilde. Marcel met him at one of his soirées and was enchanted. He says he is so witty that he makes Mme Straus herself seem dull, and he wears the most colourful waistcoats. Marcel has invited him here for dinner Thursday, before his Paris tour comes to a close and he must return to England. The boy insists that his father and I should be present, saying that even though Mr. Wilde speaks beautiful French, my English must be ready in the wings just in case the gentleman should prefer that language. Reading is one thing, and talking quite another, but I imagine I can muster enough to show Mr. Wilde we French are not without sympathy for the English people and the English language. (Although, I have just recalled that he is, in fact, Irish. Does it make a difference? I wonder.)

Great preparations for tomorrow. Have decided on the
blanquette
.

We have received a visit from the great Mr. Wilde and I did not even lay eyes on the man! He was to dine yesterday evening. Adrien made great efforts to come home from the hospital in lots of time, despite an afternoon meeting of the board, and he and I were all ready in the salon at seven o’clock. Marcel was late—he is getting impossible on that score; I wonder that he
ever gets to his parties before they are over—and had yet to arrive when the bell rang and Jean went to open the door. No one ever appeared in the salon, but Jean told me later than Mr. Wilde peeped into the room, and then asked for the facilities. Marcel arrived a few moments later, there was some hurried conversation in the hall, and then Mr. Wilde disappeared again, all without even so much as a
“Mes hommages, madame.”
What extraordinary behaviour!

Marcel was mortified, and clearly took it very personally. Apparently there was some misunderstanding about it being a dinner invitation
en famille
. Mr. Wilde had perhaps been expecting a tête-à-tête and was unprepared for a larger gathering. Not that we are so intimidating, after all. At any rate, there was a great deal of injured pride all round, and I spent the evening soothing both Marcel and Félicie (“a perfectly good
blanquette de veau
gone to waste, and all that work on the seafood sauce for the sole…”). Adrien, on the other hand, was very cheerful about the whole affair and said he was just as happy to spend the evening working on his papers. At least he tucked into Félicie’s veal with appetite, so she was somewhat assuaged, but Marcel refused to eat a thing and departed to his room in tears.

Were it not for my great affection for Mr. Dickens, Mr. Wilde might drive me to quote Montesquieu himself: “The English are busy; they don’t have time to be polite.”

Marcel came home from M. Blanche’s studio all breathless and excited this Saturday, not sure whether to be upset or delighted with the turn of events. Apparently, the portrait has not been going well since they resumed work after Marcel’s recent illness, and yesterday M. Blanche announced he was giving up and would destroy his work. Marcel was appalled and pleaded with him, but the artist snatched up his big easel. Marcel then tore the still-wet painting from his hands; M. Blanche snatched it back, saying it was his work and he would do with it what he pleased. After all, Marcel had not commissioned the portrait. Marcel responded that it was his likeness and surely he could buy it from the artist if he wanted to. M. Blanche refused, saying it was not for sale and Marcel finally ripped the canvas from him, but got away with only the top half, running into the street with it in his hands.

He had quite the time trying to get it home in a cab without disturbing the paint. Luckily, the top of the work was largely dry, for it was the legs M. Blanche had been working on most recently. That is where he seemed to get stuck. (Marcel said he complained he just could not get the pose to seem natural.)

Anyway, what remains looks fine to me—we are left with a nice bust portrait rather than a full-length one, but it is a grand likeness. Blanche has made his skin very white, but the long, straight nose, the cupid-bow lips, and the heavy-lidded, dark eyes are all there. Marcel is wearing evening dress and sports an orchid in his buttonhole. A portrait of a young dandy—perhaps M. Blanche felt he had failed to capture some of
Marcel’s intelligence and sensibility. He certainly has captured his beauty.

P
ERHAPS YOU NEED SOME
context for my translation, some sort of introduction. I should explain myself at least. When it comes to the hovering librarians, I’m the reader with a reserve on File 263 and I don’t elaborate. Why should I justify myself to them? But you won’t share their narrow, academic prejudices. You’ll appreciate the personal note.

When I was a girl I lived here… but no, this story begins later. It is experienced as a memory, a very first adult memory, a recollection of childhood as something now past.

Let me describe to you then a fifteen-year-old girl, standing on the steps of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. She is not yet a woman. Scrawny and flat-chested, she has long black braids, a heart-shaped face, white skin, pink cheeks, and the unformed features of a child. I am she.

I am dressed in the tight, straight-legged blue jeans that I always wear. They are a European fashion, just now replacing bell-bottoms, and perhaps in this way I can be seen as a trendsetter, one who leads rather than follows in the fierce social hierarchy that marks every adolescence. But these jeans are my single eccentricity. Otherwise, I am shy, silent, unnotable, and unnoted, preparing myself to pass through life as an observer.

I have come here from my home in Montreal, on a school trip, and have spent the afternoon in the company of dinosaurs, potsherds, and other fifteen-year-olds. As the 1980s begin,
Toronto is outstripping its historic rival to become the pre-eminent Canadian city, or at least a place certain of its own importance if not yet self-confident enough to be sure that others agree. So, it urges its achievements at you, boasting, displaying. The museum is world renowned; the telecommunications tower the tallest anywhere; an Olympic bid is a definite possibility. Clustered together on the steps of the museum, we schoolgirls are convinced, sensing that the city is a more weighty thing than any fifteen year old and so, more impressive than any place she might come from. We want to touch the city, to belong here, but hide our awe and our desire behind embarrassed giggling and inconsequential conversations that we conduct in unnecessarily loud voices just to prove to anyone who might overhear us that we speak the language.

We are Montrealers, but we can speak English. We do speak English. In the street, to a neighbour, to anglophone friends, and even to some of our relatives. No problem there. And yet Toronto’s flat and self-sufficient tongue intimidates us as much as the museum’s echoing hallways. The city seems simply not to need French, not to even know it exists. Happily unaware of what it is missing, it never has to choose between languages. There is no awkwardness or difficulty, there are no hesitations, false starts, or left turns. Toronto just keeps on speaking English as though there were no alternatives. The idea is novel, and yet as we twist our minds around it, we can’t help but realize that if you lived in this place, you would have half the homework. This thoughtless unilingualism is so different from our ever-questioning bilingual reality, our linguistic jostling, our Montreal—and what is different from us is better.

I share my classmates’ excitement; I am convinced of this envious world view, although it is quite new to me. Two years
ago, I had never heard of such civic pride and geographic comparisons. I had not yet learned how to yearn. Until my thirteenth birthday, I had lived at the centre of the universe and never conceived that any other place in the world might be worth living, nor that any citizen of the planet who lived elsewhere counted for much at all. I had lived in Paris.

On a chilly November day at four, as the light dies in the streets, I am standing outside the elegant grey-limestone building that houses my school. I am dressed in the grey skirt, white blouse, powder-blue cardigan, and navy blazer that are the required uniform, but they are not enough to keep me warm. There is a good four-inch gap between the top of my wool knee socks and the bottom of my pleated skirt, and a breeze blows up my legs. School is out and I am waiting for my mother.

Set amongst the gracious streets laid out one hundred years before by the Baron Haussmann, the school is at the end of an affluent cul-de-sac and backs onto a large park made up, like all French parks, of walking paths of buff-yellow dirt and large expanses of grass fenced off with green-painted railings so that no one can enter them. Uncomfortable metal chairs, painted the same colour as the railings, are dotted about, unused. At the edge of the park, strategically placed so that the smell from his brazier wafts towards the uniformed children now tumbling from the school’s large, wrought-iron doorway, is a chestnut vendor.

I unstrap the hard, leather satchel from my back and carefully take a one-franc coin from the pink plastic pencil case that I keep in the front pocket.

“Des
marrons pour mademoiselle?”
He speaks in the exaggerated tones of all Parisian street vendors, punching his
consonants hard and cocking an eyebrow at me. I hold out my coin and in exchange he hands me a paper cone twisted shut at the top.

The roasted chestnuts must be peeled, and with my satchel back in place, I hold the warming cone between my knees so that I have both hands free. There are shells lying on the hard ground of the park where other children have discarded them, but I carefully tuck mine into my blazer pocket, and sample the first chestnut. Its hot flesh almost burns me, and I toss it about inside my mouth, puffing out my cheeks and rolling my tongue. When it becomes cool enough to taste, I can savour the sweet, pasty pulp with its subtle flavour.

A slight, black-haired woman hurries towards the school. She is wearing a trim little Chanel suit from which emerge slim legs and delicate feet that carry her trippingly forward. With small features and bright eyes, she possesses the kind of dainty prettiness that will fade and shrivel with age. But her fragile charm must still be discernible now, in her forties, just barely, hidden as it is behind anxiety and haste. This is my mother and she is late.

She is always nervous, my mother, always worried about something, always loudly insisting on English when I need her to speak French, always launching into her accented French when her proper English would do. My big, French-Canadian father dotes on her, calling her his English rose, and laughing indulgently when she reminds him that her family was Irish once. But she and I are forever bumping into each other and hurriedly retreating, like two little animals who have both startled the other by appearing unexpectedly.

She leads me away from the chestnut vendor’s brazier to the car she has parked at an outrageous angle in the cul-de-sac,
worrying as she walks. Has she got a ticket? Have I caught cold waiting? Have I spoilt my appetite? Are chestnuts not too oily to be good for me? As I hurry behind her, skipping to keep pace with her skittish gate, a boy calls my name. “Marie, Marie.”

He is standing on the other side of the narrow street, cheerful, affectionate, grinning like mad. He has blond, curly hair and shines with health. His skin is so gold it looks tanned, but perhaps this is only a trick of light, an unseasonable ray of sun having just now emerged dramatically from behind the November clouds. This is David. He is American, or at least his father is, and the son has inherited that particularly American brand of self-confidence. Although his mother is French, he has moved here only recently and is not fully aware yet that Paris is the centre of the universe. He is even so assured that he might not believe it once this fact is pointed out to him. He appeared in our midst only last year and is unperturbed by his slow progress in French class. I am infuriated by his refusal to accept our standards—and was once moved, with an uncharacteristic lack of control that I instantly regretted, to kick him beneath the desk when he laughed off a mistake in conjugating his subjunctive—but I envy him his easy charm and lust after his blond curls. Outside class we chat together in English, happy to have this in common and delighting in our schoolmates’ incomprehension. They, in turn, mock us.