Tita (10 page)

Just before dinner, as Coralie and I are washing our hands, the phone rings. Through the half-open door, I see Father come out of the tasting room into the hall and go to the phone, which sits on top of a high black cabinet filled with bottles of eau de vie and liqueur. “Yes, yes,” he says. “I see.” “Yes, I understand.” “Of course, I’ll be there.” His voice isn’t warm and relaxed as usual but stiff, almost solemn. Something is happening.

Mother comes downstairs and he says something to her I can’t hear. Instead of moving into the dining room, they stand there and go on whispering. Coralie throws some water at me and says, “Come
on!
Can’t you smell the soup? Artichoke! And Loli won’t bring it till we all sit down!” She pushes me into the dining room, where Grandmother is putting away her knitting. I hear Mother exclaim, “Again!” Father has his hand on her upper arm as they come into the room. 

Over dessert (tiny tart-smelling strawberries), Father says, “Tomorrow morning, Justine will arrive on the 7:49 train.”

“Yay! Do we get a vacation too?” Coralie asks.

“It is
not
a vacation,” Father says. He’s doing his best to sound normal, but his voice is weary. “She can’t go on at Sainte-Gudule, so we’ll have to find another school for her. Meanwhile, she’ll stay here.”

“What’s wrong with Sainte-Gudule?” Coralie asks.

“She’ll tell you when she gets here. If she wants to.”

“She’s always going to new schools,” Coralie moans. “Why can’t we go to a new school? We’ve been at Sainte-Blandine for ever!”

Father laughs. Not a very happy laugh, but he’s not making fun of Coralie either. I think he finds it appealing that she always wants something. “Enjoy Sainte-Blandine while you can,” he says.

“Enjoy it?” Coralie cries. She’s right, “enjoy” is not quite the right word. But compared with what lies ahead of us, with boarding school and being locked up all week...

Mother breathes in noisily. “What I don’t understand,” she says, “is why something always goes wrong between Justine and those nuns. Justine is such a clever girl, and so affectionate. I never have any trouble with her.”

In the evening, when Coralie is asleep, I retrieve
Henry Brulard
, which I’ve hidden under the cloth of my altar to the Virgin. I read, “My mother, Mme Henriette Gagnon, was a charming woman, and I was in love with my mother. I hasten to add that I lost her when I was seven.”

In
love
with his mother?

“I wanted to cover my mother with kisses,” he goes on, “and I didn’t want her to wear clothes. She loved me passionately and kissed me often, I kissed her back with such fire that she had to leave. I hated my father when he came in and interrupted our kisses. The place I always wanted to kiss was her breast.”

His mother died when he was the age I am now. I wonder what would have happened if she had lived. Maybe he would have fallen out of love, the way I have. Maybe not. “She didn’t participate in this love,” he says. Then what about “She loved me passionately”? But I like the way he contradicts himself after two paragraphs. It’s not because he’s lying, but because he’s trying to capture many kinds of truth.

“
I
was the criminal, I loved her charms furiously.” The way he describes her, though, isn’t very furious: “She was plump and fresh, very pretty and only, I believe, not quite tall enough.” And why does he call himself a “criminal”? I wonder as I turn off the light. I’m too tired to put the book back under the Virgin, so I keep it close to me under the sheets. It feels more precious to me than any other book. The cover is of an unusual blue, soft and mixed with grey, white, and a bit of green. The letters are black, except for the title and
Le Divan
, which must be the publisher. Inside, there’s a map of Grenoble in 1776. In spite of all the drawings, maps and floor plans, I’m pretty sure this book is not “for children”. 

In the morning, Father and I cross the street and the station forecourt to welcome Justine, who gets off the train with a suitcase and a large blue bag. She kisses Father over and over, then me. “You can’t imagine how happy I am to see you both! How’s my dear Odette?”

“Asleep,” Father says. “And very well.”

As we walk toward the house, Father carrying the luggage, Justine says softly, “I’m sorry. I tried my best, but...”

“I know,” Father says. And sighs. And goes into his study.

In the kitchen Justine kisses Loli on both cheeks. Loli shakes her by the shoulders. “How’s the bad girl? What did you do this time?”

“Nothing!” Justine moans. “Practically nothing. They just caught a letter I was writing to a boy. As if it were any business of theirs.”

“Boys!” Loli laughs. “Here’s your tea. Do you want a boiled egg?”

“No, thanks. Just some bread. Loli, honestly, you don’t know what nuns are like. Obsessed!”

“There. Try this honey, it’s from my grandmother. Pure rosemary. You need to eat, you’re so pale. And thin. Are you in love?”

Justine shrugs. “No! Yes! Not really. What about you?”

I’d like to hear more, but it’s time for school. Loli has forgotten about my porridge. I discreetly take my bowl into the scullery, holding my breath (the cheese larder) and throw the contents into the garbage. Back in the kitchen, I drink up my orange juice before we leave.

Justine yawns. “I think I’m going to take a nap,” she says. “But I’ll say hello to Odette first. Is she awake?”

“Yes, she’s waiting for you,” Loli says.

Justine has been at Sainte-Gudule for five months, I reflect on the way to school. For her, a record. When she first got there, she told me it was a school for stupid girls who have failed everywhere else. “So at least I won’t have to work,” she said. “I’m far ahead of the rest. They aren’t just lazy, like me. They’re incredibly slow-witted. Seriously, they don’t have a clue.”

Then I heard Father tell Monsieur Bonnafous, his accountant, that Justine’s new school was extraordinarily expensive. Why would Father want to pay a lot of money for a bad school? Because he didn’t have a choice. Justine had already been expelled from five schools in three years.

At noon, I look for Justine and find her upstairs sitting at Mother’s dressing table, applying some kind of cream under her eyes. “Look at these rings,” she says. “What do you think? Is it a good idea to cover them up? Or do they make me look older, more interesting?”

“You look perfect with or without,” I say. And she does. Always. Her ponytail, tied with a black polka-dot scarf, has style. So do her tight jeans, her large white shirt, the thin silver chain around her neck, and her red lace-up espadrilles. As soon as you see her, you know she comes from Paris. Nobody here looks so completely in control, down to the minutest detail, and so relaxed, so confident about their appearance.

“I hope Father doesn’t find another school for me,” she says. “It’s hardly worth while. Only a few weeks left before summer vacation.”

I’m happy she’s here, but I wonder why she didn’t stay with her mother. I don’t ask, because we never talk about her mother. Never. I don’t even know her mother’s name. I thought I did: when Father mentions her (which is seldom) he uses a word I long assumed was her first name. I’d never heard it before, and I had no idea how to spell it, so I vaguely imagined the woman was foreign, or came from another planet. I finally managed, only a few months ago, to analyse this designation into
Mon-ex
, “My ex”.

Father doesn’t seem to talk to
Mon-ex
but she writes to him, mostly to ask for money. When he writes to her, he has to wait for ever before she sends him what he needs — some piece of information, or a paper with her signature. I’d like to know more about
Mon-ex
. Won’t Justine miss her if she stays here for several months?

“Won’t you miss Paris?” I ask.

Justine rolls her eyes. “How can anybody miss Paris? You have
no
idea what Paris is really like, or you wouldn’t ask. You only know Aunt Caroline’s house in Vincennes, where you’re pampered all day by the cook and the maids. Aunt Caroline’s chauffeur drives you to the Eiffel Tower, the Tuileries, the puppet shows in the Luxembourg. You can’t imagine what it’s like to
live
in Paris, for most people. For us! It’s all so drab. The rain, the crowds, the pressure. The
métro!”

“What’s wrong with the
métro?”
I ask.

She shakes her head, fast, and shivers dramatically. “I can’t begin to tell you what’s wrong with the
métro!
As soon as you get down there, everything and everybody looks terminally sepulchral. All you want to do is kill yourself.”

I’ve been in the
métro
a few times, and what I’ve noticed is people in all kinds of outfits, some of them speaking outlandish languages. But she and our brothers greatly prefer Cugnac. They like everything here. They always get depressed when it’s time to go back to Paris. Justine especially will check her calendar and say, “Only three days of happiness left.”

At the end of each vacation, on her last day in Cugnac, she needs to say goodbye to all her cherished locations, and she takes me on a tour. She usually sheds a few tears under the fig trees in La Fourcade, then we bicycle to the church, the place du marché, the pine forest on the hill, and the terrace above the canal. There she’ll say, “And now I’ll go back to my lugubrious life.” Maybe there’s something awry with Paris that I can’t imagine. Or with her mother?

“I’ll take you to the real Paris sometime,” Justine goes on, spreading something green on her eyelids. “You’ll see. You don’t know your luck. Here, put your hands together and hold this eyelash between two fingers. Don’t show me! I’ll have to guess which fingers, and if I’m right I won’t go to school until October.”

I turn my back to her and place the eyelash between my middle fingers. When I show her my hands, she looks at them for quite a while, frowning, and chooses the ring fingers.

“Shit! I lost!”

“You’re here,” I say. “Let’s have fun while we can.”

She stands up, and kisses me. “You’re so much more sensible than I am.”

“Lunch!” Loli calls from the hall downstairs.

As we go through the library and the music room to the landing, Justine says, “This afternoon I have to go and see mademoiselle Verdier. Father wants me to take English lessons with her, and he wondered whether you might like to do that too. Would you?”

I jump so high, I slip and would tumble downstairs if Justine didn’t catch me. “Of course! I’d love to speak English!”

Justine shakes her head. “What’s with you, always wanting to learn things when you don’t have to? Let’s hope you’re not disappointed. Mademoiselle Verdier doesn’t seem to be much fun, but never mind. I’ll wait for you in front of the school, and we’ll go together. Then,” she whispers in my ear as we come into the hall, “we’ll be just in time for a few turns on the avenue. I need to catch up.”

“Catch up?” I whisper back. “You mean with boys?”

“Exactly.”

We have a visitor, a man I’ve never seen before, or heard of. His name is Marcel, and he lives in Mexico. Mexico! Last Christmas vacation when we were staying in Paris, aunt Caroline took Justine and me to the Châtelet Theater, for the operetta
Le Chanteur de Mexico
. The star was Luis Mariano. At the end of Act I the main character, a singer, goes to Mexico — he’s from the Basque Country and has already had some success in Paris. I can’t remember what Mexico looked like, though. Only the song,  “Mexico, Mexi-ee-co-o” — we have it on a record aunt Caroline bought us after the show.

Luis Mariano does this great trick with his voice: “Mexi” in his usual warm timbre and then “ee” a major sixth higher in a tiny, bright, sharp tone that seems to come from another instrument. He goes on with “
Les femmes sont charmantes, ee
”, and again the “ee” (this time a fifth higher), comes from another
world
, although it sounds easy and natural, a cry of pure delight.

At the Châtelet, he started this song with “
Ha, ha, ha-ee
”, very high, in a voice like a girl whooping, with his hands spread out, palms down, as if to say, “Quiet, quiet.” Then, slowly, he lifted his arms, swinging them just a little at the same time as his hips. There he was, his arms wide and high, and his tiny hands fluttering like leaves in a strong wind. Justine was entranced: “He’s so sexy!”

Father’s friend Marcel lives in Mexico at the moment, but he’s French. He went to a school called Sciences Po with Father, and all through these years they’ve been corresponding, it turns out. I wonder how many more secret friends Father has. Right now, they’re drinking coffee in Father’s study, just the two of them (I’m not counting myself, sitting quietly on a low stool) and they sound like they’ve been neighbors all their lives.

“So, if you’d like to teach at the university, it’s possible,” Marcel says. “I discussed it with the head of the Business Department. You could start in September. The problem is, you’d be paid in pesos. In Mexico City, it would be about enough to live on with your wife and younger daughters. But how would you pay for all those boarding schools in France?”

Mexico City? Are they actually talking about moving to Mexico?

“In the present circumstances,” Father says, “anything to do with wine is practically worthless. If I sold the cellars, the trucks, La Fourcade, and what’s left of the vineyards, I could hardly manage to raise enough for a few years of school for my older children. Flying the children back and forth for vacations wouldn’t be cheap. And there’s the alimony, which will never stop. So I’d have to sell the house too. And even the house wouldn’t probably...”

Sell our house! Is that possible? Vineyards, yes, Le Cabarrou, the cellars, the trucks, La Fourcade even... But our
house?
Of course, people do move. Why is it so difficult to imagine our family outside this house, or this house without us? Maybe because we’ve been here for ever. Father’s family. His father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather... I heard our great-great-great-grandmother built this house, a long time ago. She was a widow, and she came here with her children. Who told me that? I don’t remember, but every time we come home after a vacation the cool, dark smell of the entrance hall, like a deep cave, like a well, is an exhilarating surprise.

“You also need to think about the younger girls,” Marcel says. “They’ll go to university too, and by then you’ll probably be retired. And… yes, if you no longer have your house here, where will you…”

“Yes,” Father says. “I should have looked for a solution much earlier. There’s no way I can make any money here. In Mexico, I could. But only for a few years.” He slowly rubs his forehead with his fists. “I need to think.”

To think? Seriously? About Mexico? Father is taking Marcel to meet our neighbor Roger Pujol, so I move to the dining room, find the “Mexico” record and put it on the turntable. I’m all alone because this is the time when Grandmother goes to the kitchen to “see about the soup”. She’s very interested in soups, and in the evening all she has is soup, salad, cheese, and fruit. She says at her age you don’t need more. Cheese aside, I wouldn’t mind this kind of meal. Soup isn’t so bad. Well, the ones with pasta in them are dire, not to mention the ones with meat, or Parmesan. But Grandmother makes hers with vegetables and nothing else. When they’re cooked she purees them. The color is different every time, and the smells are interesting.

I listen to the song carefully, in case I’ve missed something about Mexico, but no: the women are “
charmantes
-
ee
” and one forgets everything under the sun of Mexico. That’s about it. Except for an interesting verse about Mexican
aventures
, love affairs.

But Mother and Justine are back from shopping in Carcassonne. They’ve also been to the hairdresser’s: Mother’s hair is blonder than when she left, and Justine has acquired bangs, which make her look like a film star. I give them a few compliments. Mother gathers up all the shopping bags and leaves. I hear her call Loli, who I think is kissing her boyfriend outside the back door. I hope Coralie had time to warn her. Justine has been laying out, on the dining table, a bunch of earrings she brought back from Carcassonne. She plays with them, moving them around as I do with my farm animals.

I put the needle back on the beginning of “Mexico”, to pay more attention to the
aventure
verse: “A Mexican affair lasts hardly a week, but what a week! What a crescendo! The first night, you go for a walk, then you dance a tender bolero; the next night you already go wild...”

“What a song!” Justine says. “I never tire of listening to it. It’s intoxicating!”

“Yes, the words are great,” I say.
“Une aventure mexicaine, ça dure à peine une semaine, mais quelle semaine, et quel crescendo!
Would you like to go to Mexico?”

Justine looks up from her earrings. “I’d love to go to Mexico. And passion, sure. But passion should last for ever.”

“A crescendo can’t go on for ever,” I say.

Justine has put on a pair of flat dark-blue earrings with white stars. She looks at herself in the mirror above the mantelpiece. “You might be right,” she says. “That’s the way it seems to go with me. Crescendo, crescendo, then... all gone, I’m done. I guess that’s because I haven’t found the right man yet.”

“The right man for what?” I ask.

“For what? For everything! Mr Right! The love of my life!”

“You actually think there’s a man destined for you?”

“Don’t you?”

This big sister of mine is so comical sometimes. “Destined?” I ask. “By God, or what? You said the other day you don’t even believe in God.”

“I know! But everybody believes in true love, don’t they?”

“Let them,” I say.

“You don’t? How can you live, then? What’s the point?”

Mother is back. She falls into one of the armchairs by the mantelpiece and sighs,
Ouf!
as if the shopping expedition had exhausted her. She stretches her arms and her legs, kicks off her sandals. “Don’t you girls ever tire of this wimpy Luis Mariano?”

“Please don’t insult my future husband!” I say.

Mother looks up at me seriously. “You don’t stand a chance,” she declares. “He’s not the kind of man who’s interested in women. He’s forty years old, and he’s never even been engaged.”

“Then,” I say, “I’ll be an old maid. You’ll have to rely on Coralie if you want grandchildren.” Of course I’m kidding. I’m completely set on getting married as soon as I meet a reasonably agreeable man (one who doesn’t eat cheese, kidneys or liver), and having children immediately.

“I know girls need celebrities to admire,” Mother says. “I myself used to be crazy about Maurice Chevalier. But Luis Mariano! He has an
accent!”

“Everybody has an accent,” I say. “Especially Parisians, and Lyonnais! Luis Mariano’s accent is Spanish, and very much like ours. Like Father’s. Don’t you like Father’s accent?”

Mother is stumped for a moment. She purses her lips, while the big toe of one foot taps against her discarded sandal. “Luis Mariano is short!” she finally says.

“Not so short,” Justine remarks, trying on a pair of dangling silver earrings. “He’s five-seven. Taller than me.”

Mother sneers. “For a
man
, that’s short!”

“Well,” Justine says, “why should that be a problem?”

“A problem?” Mother says. “Of course it’s a problem. What woman would be seen with a short man? She’d have to be desperate.”

Justine is still in front of the mirror, lost in thought. “Or the man,” she says after a while, “would have to be... fascinating?”

For once she is practically disagreeing with Mother (who’s just bought her quite a collection of earrings). Could she be attracted to a short boy? Yes! I saw her exchange several glances last night, on the avenue, with Hervé Barral, who is definitely shorter than her even though he’s seventeen. Cute guy, and a good rugby player.

“You’ll see,” Mother says. “As you grow taller, your life won’t be easy. Most men will be shorter than you. Yes, believe me, there will be very few men for you to choose from.”

This makes me wonder. Did Mother choose Father because he was the only man who was tall enough for her? His height, his appearance, are traits she always mentions with wholehearted approval. Mother is five foot nine. On the one hand, she’s very proud of it. She despises short people. Justine is already pretty tall, and Mother expects her to become as tall as herself, which is, I think, one of the reasons she’s so fond of her. Coralie too is tall for her age, and our brothers are giants. I’m the only one in the family who’s about average, and Mother hopes this will change if I eat more meat and petits-suisses.

On the other hand, being tall has always created problems for her. When she left school, she was apprenticed to a dressmaker. For a whole year, she got terrible back pain, bending over the machine, crouching to pin up hems on customers. That’s how she decided to become a beautician, which suited her much better anyway. But her main problem was with men. She often says that she had to move to Lyon because, when she went to dances in her village and nearby, the men were all too short for her.

“I don’t think it matters much whether a boy is taller or shorter than I am,” Justine says. “That’s a minor detail. His personality is what I care about.”

“You can’t be serious. How could a topsy-turvy couple look good? And short men have unpleasant personalities too.”

“I haven’t noticed that,” Justine says.

Mother is breathing hard and fast, her shoulders bunched up to her ears. The record has run its course. I go and stand in front of her. “
Mexico, Mexi-ee-co-o, les femmes sont charmantes-ee!
” I sing, moving my hips and hands in Luis Mariano style. “Wouldn’t you like to live in Mexico?” I ask her.

She shakes her head. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she says. But her shoulders have relaxed, and she’s almost ready for a smile.