Tita (17 page)

After our nap, time for bread and chocolate in the dining room, and tinny water flavoured with grenadine. The syrup can’t overcome the foul taste, but my mouth is parched so I drink a whole glass anyway. I also have a slice of bread. The bread at least is okay, huge loaves like you find in villages.

After this, Mother Ho and her sidekick Sister Bri take us out in front of the house. They have whistles hanging from their necks. As they start wielding them, the girls jump into rows. Then, each time a nun blows her instrument, the first girl in a row turns around towards the others, shouts something and makes weird gestures, imitating maybe some animal. The rest of the row yells something back. With the next round of whistles, each row of girls, in turn, recites something in unison, with words like “faith”, “obedient”, “cheerful”, “heart” and “Jesus”. 

The four of us Cugnacaises are standing against the wall with Françoise, and nobody’s paying any attention to us, they’re all so busy with their thrilling rites. When they’ve exhausted themselves shouting and moving around the place in rows and circles, they scramble down into the forest, apparently on some kind of mission. There we are, alone on the terrace, and the two nuns finally catch sight of us. “What are you doing here?” Mother Ho says. “Which is your
patrol?”

“No patrol,” Anne-Claude says. “We’re from Cugnac.”

“I’m not from Cugnac,” Françoise says, “but...”

“Oh, I see. Well, just follow the rest.”

Françoise dashes down the slope, leaving us to dawdle. At the bottom, she turns around. “Are you coming?” she calls. “Shall I wait for you?”

Anne-Claude and I glance towards the house: the nuns have gone in. “No, thanks!” Anne-Claude shouts back to Françoise. “Go ahead!”

We stroll down to the forest and sit on tree trunks. “Do you think these girls are Guides?” Anne-Claude asks me. “Last year I read a novel about Guides. I think it took place in England, though.”

“What are Guides supposed to do?” I ask.

“I’m trying to remember. Sleep in tents? Wear uniforms? Have a totem, exchange their name for an animal’s? Get badges? Play hare and hounds?”

“At least the
patro
girls don’t have uniforms,” I say.

“Why do they shout at each other so?” Sylvie whimpers. “They don’t even sound like they’re angry, but they hurt my ears.”

I feel especially bad about bringing Sylvie to this place. In Cugnac, I hardly paid any attention to her. She’s nearly my age, but for me she was just Anne-Claude’s sister, a quiet kid in Group One. Since we came here I’ve been worrying about her, because she’s not grown-up and sensible like Anne-Claude, or energetic like Coralie. She’s sweet and dreamy, unprepared for hardships.

“We’ll have to blend in somehow,” Anne-Claude says. “We might even need to become like them. Or pretend.”

“I want to be an Indian!” Coralie cries. “In this forest! Why didn’t Mother let me pack my Red Indian outfit? I’m an Indian anyway. Sylvie, you’re a cowboy. Look at that branch over there! That can be your horse. Let’s play!”

Anne-Claude and I say we’ll be the cowboy’s mother and the Indian’s wife; we’ll keep house here while Coralie fights Sylvie and her horse. I don’t feel like moving.

Anne-Claude could remind me that this was all my idea, but she just lies down on the moss and hides her face with her arms. Her long black hair is spread out around her head, and bedecked with pine needles. “Tomorrow we’re supposed to go to Lourdes,” she says after a while. “There’s holy water there. Maybe we can drink some! Or could it be the same as the water here? Is it the holiness that tastes so rank?”

“Then we can buy Vichy,” I say. “I have some money.”

“At least we’ll get away from here,” Anne-Claude says.

The
patro
girls are back, stumbling and puffing. It sounds like the first patrol won: they tracked down whatever booty they were supposed to find.

Anne-Claude stands up. “I guess we’d better head back to the house,” she says. “Sylvie, Coralie, come on! Time for prizes and prayers!”

We wash our hands while the bell rings again. When we come into the refectory, we see Françoise sitting with a bunch of older girls at a table where two seats are still free. “Shall we?” Anne-Claude asks me. “No,” I say. “You go, and I’ll sit here with Coralie and Sylvie.”

Dinner starts with soup, certainly made with the stuff we threw away at lunch, mixed with water and boiled. The potatoes have mostly melted but there are still gristly bits of veal floating in it. At our table, only two girls seriously try to eat some. The others taste it and moan. I’m trying not to breathe. Coralie looks at her soup with a wide-open mouth and furious eyes. Sister Bri comes by and says we all have to eat up what’s in our plates. Sylvie says she can’t, and Sister Bri gives her the usual blah-blah about hungry children in China. As if our making ourselves sick with this pig-swill could be of use to anybody, let alone Chinese kids.

The nun is gone. One of the
patro
girls takes out a plastic bag from her skirt pocket, and deftly pours her soup into it. She passes it on to the next girl, and so on. Sylvie and Coralie are grinning. I’m last: “What shall I do with it?” I whisper. The bag is half full by now. “Keep it on your thighs, with your skirt over it,” Delphine says. “If your skirt isn’t long enough, pass it on to Lauriane.” But my skirt is long enough, and I might need the bag later.

Delphine takes the empty dish to the kitchen and brings back a pasta gratin covered with stale-smelling cheese. Everybody else looks happy with it. Lauriane, after the first forkful, says, “It’s not as good as my grandmother’s, but definitely better than what we get at the canteen, don’t you think?” “Yes, more cheese than at Assomption,” another girl says. The rest agree.

“Are you at the Assomption school?” I ask.

“Yes,” they all nod. “Except for the five of you, everybody here is from Assomption. The
patro
goes with the school. On Thursdays some little girls stay at home, but most of us go to the
patro
. All the boarders anyway.”

So that’s it? But Assomption is where Anne-Claude’s supposed to go in October! And I don’t think she’s aware of the connection.

“Are any of you boarders?” I ask.

“Most of us. In the nursery and elementary sections, if your parents live in town you can go home in the evening, but starting in
sixième
you have to be a boarder.”

After dinner we sit on the grass outside and sing. We don’t know the songs, but they’re easy, and surprisingly refreshing.
Au bord de la rivière, m’allant promener
, “As I walked along the river”. Maybe tomorrow we’ll find a river, water we can drink, water in which to swim and forget.

In the dorm, there are no lamps apart from the night light above the door. I’m not sleepy at all and, as soon as Sister Bri leaves us, I go and sit in a bathroom stall with
Marjorie Morningstar
.

Marjorie is studying to become a biology teacher, but what she wants to be is an actress. Meanwhile, she goes riding in the park with boys. She seems to be enormously interested in clothes, and in making boys fall in love with her, especially boys who go to Columbia or live on the Upper West Side. Her fiancé is in the Bronx, though. There seems to be a huge difference between these neighborhoods, and I think it has to do with money, but not only.

The neighborhoods are stacked on top of each other. “Above the West Side, the older and wealthier Jewish families of the Upper East Side. Still above, the well-to-do Christian families of Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue.” Is New York built on a hill? I’d need a map. And does this mean that people of different religions live in different parts of town?

Is “Jewish” the opposite of “Christian”? I know there are several religions, but I don’t know anybody who isn’t a Catholic or an atheist or an agnostic. I’m trying to remember my catechism: there are heretics who disagree about some tenets of Catholicism, schismatics who don’t want to obey the Pope, apostates who have left the church... for another religion? And infidels! I think infidels are people who have never heard of Jesus. But the Jews have heard — they’re in the Gospels.

Marjorie’s mother is called Rose and when she was young she spoke Yiddish. Yiddish? In Brooklyn. I stand up, close my book, lay it on the toilet seat, stretch my arms, pronounce the exotic words a few times: Yiddish, Brooklyn, Bronx.

But I
am
sleepy now.

The next day, there’s milk for breakfast, in large metal jugs, and the girls say it tastes fine. But I don’t drink milk. Milk smells like the inside of someone else’s body. Which it is. Still, breakfast is by far the best meal here: good bread (though it’s rather hard now), okay plum jam. I try to swallow some water, but I give up, the aftertaste is so dire.

The good news is, we won’t have to take a nap today. Just after breakfast, the nuns give each of us a paper bag (“your lunch”) and we trudge down to Lourdes with our backpacks. The patro girls, in their patrols, sing loudly, and we bring up the rear, shaking our heads and giggling. We wouldn’t giggle if we knew what’s in store for us.

As soon as we enter the streets of Lourdes, I want to run back into the woods. Lourdes must be the ugliest place in the whole world. Every house in it is a café, a restaurant, or most likely a souvenir store. The streets are packed with people, mostly moving in herds, like us. Wheelchairs, crutches, distorted bodies and faces, but also many ordinary-looking people who don’t seem particularly in need of miracles.

We are taken to the Grotto. Now we all have to hold hands in case some of us get separated from the group, the crush is so bad. We hardly get a glimpse of the Virgin in a little hole above the entrance to the Grotto before Mother Ho leads us around and behind the rock. She looks excited. “You’re going to walk the Stations of the Cross,” she says. “On your knees.”

It sounds like the privilege of our lives. Some older
patro
girls mutter that they’ve done it before, but we all get on our knees and start. Coralie is lucky, she’s wearing trousers. But I have a flimsy cotton skirt that doesn’t want to stick under my knees. Nobody looks uplifted. Anne-Claude, behind me, whispers, “Why don’t the nuns do it themselves if they think it’s such a treat?”

I’m thirsty. God, the sun is burning now. And I need to pee, but there are people all around us, and no public lavatory in sight. After the Way of the Cross, the nuns say we’re going to a park for a picnic. The park turns out to be a bare piece of ground with one bench (for the nuns). We sit in the trodden grass, and open our paper bags: there’s a sandwich in there, soaked with runny omelet. I shut the bag fast, and hide it behind me. Most girls eat a few mouthfuls and throw the rest into the garbage can. The nuns made us put water in our flasks, which I use to wash an apple I retrieve from the bottom of the paper bag, all sticky with omelet juice. After I dry it with my skirt, it’s fine.

A crowd of Spaniards marches into the park, and I slip away. There’s a grocery shop further up the road. I buy two bottles of Vichy water, and I ask the woman about a public lavatory. She say’s there’s one near the parking lot, then decides to let me use hers at the back of the shop. The water there is okay, so I drink a lot of it, and fill up my flask — I’ll keep the Vichy in my backpack, for later. I’m all set now, practically happy.

When I get back to the park, Mother Ho is explaining that we’re going to take a look at the souvenir stores. We’re not supposed to buy anything until later, but she’s sure we’ll be interested in checking out the wares.

So we visit three of these emporia, with the nuns, each time, waiting for us outside. Rocks with a Virgin in the background, figurines of saint Bernadette, shells, crucifixes, shawls, brooches. When I see dolls dressed in Pyrenean costumes, I think of Eléonore’s collection. I wonder if I’ll get her one. I so object to the whole idea. Collections. Showcases. Junk. At least I don’t have the kind of parents who would want grottoes and Bernadettes. Or any kind of souvenir. Grandmother might like something, though. But what? Everything here is so ugly. So I have two problems on my hands: Eléonore, and Grandmother. And nearly two weeks to decide. God, two weeks of this!

We plod back up to the camp in the heat. When we get to the forest everybody wants to rest, and the nuns agree — it must be worse for them with their long dresses, wimples,
and veils. I find a bush to hide behind, take out one of my bottles of Vichy and discreetly offer it to Coralie and our friends. Anne-Claude declares that I’m a genius. “Hush,” I whisper. Sylvie and Coralie kiss me, then start building something with pine cones. Anne-Claude and I are sitting against tree trunks.

“I heard that the
patro
is part of the Assomption school,” I say. “So some of these girls are going to be in your class, I guess.”

Anne-Claude looks up, startled. “Who told you that?”

I tell her about the conversation at dinner. “Delphine is going into
cinquième
, but Lauriane is your age, I think.”

Anne-Claude gives a long sigh, then lies down, her head on her backpack, her yellow cardigan hiding her face. “These girls might be okay, don’t you think?” I say. “In school they’re not going to do the Guide stuff. Only on Thursdays.”

Anne-Claude stays silent for a long time, and I hold her hand. But here is Mother Ho’s whistle, followed by her screech: time to go. We stand up.

Back at camp, we’re all sweaty and exhausted. I ask Sister Gisèle if I can have a shower and she says no, we’re not allowed upstairs during the day.

“Why not?” I ask. She looks embarrassed.

“It’s a rule. We can’t have girls running all over the house. You’ll wash at the basin this evening. Showers are on Saturday mornings.”

Does she mean we won’t shower tonight? Last night, we
did
go to bed directly after brushing our teeth. I didn’t pay attention then, because everything was so strange.

“Why can’t we shower every day?” I ask.

Sister Gi hesitates. “Hot water is expensive,” she says.

“I can use cold water, I don’t mind at all.”

“You should learn to abide by the rules,” the nun says. “You argue too much. Be careful, you could get into trouble with Mother Honorine.”

“What kind of trouble?” I ask. I know I shouldn’t, but I’m curious. How could Mother Ho make this Gehenna worse? Is she going to lock us up in a cell, beat us?

Sister Gi looks at me pensively. “You’re not used to this, are you?” she finally says.

After the
goûter,
the
patro
girls get ready to line up in their patrols, run up and down, dance to the whistle. This time we sit behind the house, out of sight. There’s a smell of disinfectant and turnips coming from the kitchen, but we’re too discouraged to go into the woods. “This place is like
Les Malheurs de Sophie
,” Coralie says. “Mother Ho would be madame Fichini. She really likes to make girls suffer.”

“And the worst thing is,” Anne-Claude says, “these girls look like they’re used to it. It makes you wonder. Can people get used to just anything? After a while, do you automatically line up and jump to the whistle? Are we going to like this water eventually? I mean, not
like
it, but... drink it without disgust?”

“I’m already eating some of their food,” Coralie says. “I can’t do without food. But it makes me sad. It’s the first time I’ve ever eaten meals without enjoying them at all.”

“Same here,” Sylvie says.

Françoise, who seemed to have joined the
patro
pursuits, is now plodding towards us. “How are you?” I ask as she sits down against the wall.

She shrugs. “Fine, thank you. Actually, you were quite right to stay here. I tried. And it was okay for a while, but now they’re meeting in small groups and they say I can’t sit with any of them because I’m not a member.”

“A member?” Anne-Claude asks.

“It isn’t their fault. They have all these rules. They made a promise — it’s a solemn ceremony, where you recite the law, you get a totem, whatever. They said I could become a member, but it’s a whole... It takes a lot of time, months, years maybe. So here I am.”

“Are you going to join?” I ask.

“No. If I could do it here, today, I would, but according to them it’s completely out of the question.”

“At Assomption, in October, we’ll have to,” Anne-Claude says.

“I’m not going to Assomption,” Françoise says. “I live in Berlin. I go to the French lycée.”

“Berlin!” Anne-Claude says. “The capital of Germany?”

“Used to be. Now it’s more complicated, with the division... East Berlin is the capital of
East
Germany, but I live in West Berlin, in the French sector.”

“Are you a boarder?” I ask.

“No, there are no boarders in our lycée. It’s around the corner from our house. What I love is that we have a German-style timetable: we start earlier than here, at 7:30, but at 1 we’re free. We have the whole afternoon to do what we like!”

“Amazing!” Anne-Claude says. “What do you do in the afternoon?”

“Long-distance running, swimming, chamber music — I play the cello. In winter, ice-skating...”

“You’re so lucky!” Anne-Claude says. “Your school sounds like the exact opposite of... ours.”

“I want to go to the lycée! I want to live in Berlin!” Coralie cries.

Françoise laughs. “You don’t have to live in Berlin, there are lycées in France too. My father went to the Lycée Arago in Perpignan. He was there at the same time as Charles Trenet, can you believe it? Not in the same class. Charles Trenet was older.”

“Father’s favorite singer!” Sylvie says.

Coralie leaps up and starts singing,
Boum! Quand notre coeur fait Boum!
She jiggles and jumps from foot to foot.
Tout avec lui dit Boum! Et c’est l’amour qui...

The bell. As we walk towards the refectory, Anne-Claude presses my arm and sighs. “Looks like I’ll have to go through the whole rigmarole then, promise-patrol-totem... Tita, pray for me.”

Before bed, while we’re all brushing our teeth in front of the basins, I take off my skirt, my blouse, and start soaping my shoulders. I’m not even naked, I’ve kept my underpants on, but the girls around me mutter, “You’d better not, careful, she’s coming,” and two seconds later Sister Bri is behind me. “What are your clothes doing on the floor?” she asks.

I go on lathering my arms and torso. “I didn’t know where else to put them,” I say.

“You shouldn’t take them off until you go to bed and change into your nightgown.”

“Am I supposed to wash with my clothes on?”

“You will wash in the morning,” the nun says. “With your nightgown on.” I turn to look at her. Again I’m staring at a nun, and I know I shouldn’t, but I want to make sure she’s joking. She isn’t. “Tomorrow you’ll wash your face and neck, your hands, your feet; and you’ll have a shower on Saturday.”

“I can’t stay all dirty until Saturday,” I say. The nun gives me a tense little smile.

“Well, you’ll have to, like everybody else. You shouldn’t worry so much about your body. Just make sure your soul is clean.”

I’m not sure my soul is so clean, but I can’t stand the smell of my body. So I wait until everything’s quiet in the dorm, and take
Marjorie Morningstar
to the bathroom with me. Also a towel, and soap. But I can’t go to the showers — they’re at the end of the passage next to the nuns’ rooms. In front of a basin, I lather my whole body up, very fast, with my hands. But then, how can I rinse it? If I wet my towel, I won’t be able to dry myself.

There are quite a few flannels hanging from pipes under the basins. I borrow one. When I’m done, I wash and rinse it carefully and put it back on the pipe. Perfectly dry, in my nightgown, I can go and sit in a toilet stall with Marjorie. I feel so comfortable now. I take out the scented card with which I mark my page, an ad for Roja Flore brilliantine featuring a bunch of blue, red and yellow flowers, and start reading. 

Marjorie too is going to camp! In Camp Tamarack, she teaches dramatics to “twittering little girls”. Like us. Except nobody here teaches us
dramatics
, which I suppose means acting. A pity. But I’m not sure Marjorie is a good instructor. She doesn’t seem to pay much attention to the little girls. In fact, the novel tells us nothing about her work and practically nothing about Camp Tamarack, except that Marjorie is extremely disappointed when she realises it has a rule that forbids its counsellors from going to a place called South Wind, an “adult camp” on the other side of the lake. South Wind is what Marjorie is really interested in — the real reason she took the job at Camp Tamarack.

I wonder why adults would want to go to camp. Finally Marjorie’s girlfriend who works with her at Camp Tamarack takes her to South Wind at night, secretly, on a boat. They have to go, because so much is happening there (as opposed to
nothing
at Camp Tamarack with the little girls).

There they are fascinated by a “celebrity” called Noel Airman, “a thin man in a black turtleneck sweater”. I don’t know what a turtleneck is exactly (I’ll ask Justine), but I decide that I’ll wear a black turtleneck sweater. I like the idea, and I’ve never had anything black. Noel Airman writes songs and holds forth about his audience, “college kids” he describes as the new leisure class, “a transient class but a solid one,” living “off the sweat of parents” as callously as the French aristocracy used to exploit its peasants.

I’d never thought of this. Leisure classes. Even though most of them can’t be called aristocrats, there
are
people around me who don’t have to work, who don’t really work, like Bertrand, or Anne-Claude’s father.
Propriétaires
, who could be said to live off the sweat of peasants. And most
bourgeoises
don’t work, even if their husbands and fathers do.

I’m going to work, as soon as I can. I want to study too, but I’ll work at the same time. I know some children actually make money picking grapes. I’ll ask Loli, and Simone. They both do the grape harvest every year. Practically everybody does, in Cugnac, except the bourgeois.

I don’t want to live off the sweat of anybody. Not that my parents sweat much, now that they no longer play tennis.

The next day, first thing after breakfast, we’re detailed to peel potatoes and scrape carrots. All the girls, in circles in the yard, around big pots. Delphine has a great scraping technique, which I try to imitate.

“You’re good at this,” I say. “How did you learn?”

“My mother showed me,” she says. “I like to cook with her on Sundays. And I do quite a bit of peeling, scraping and chopping at Assomption. Because I chatter a lot in class. I can’t help it, most of the lessons are so dull. When we’re caught doing something bad, as a penance we’re made to help.”

“Don’t you get lines?” I ask.

“Sometimes. But they need help in the kitchen, so their first choice is always kitchen duty. When they have enough of us in the kitchen, then they start giving lines. Which is worse, actually. The sisters in the kitchen are okay, they’re glad to have us. Whereas if you get lines you have to stay in the classroom during breaks, with Sister Bri staring down at you.”

“Sister Bri?” I ask. “In your
school?”

“Sure. Sister Bri is our history teacher; she also does study hall and detention.”

I knew that some teachers were nuns in these boarding schools, but I imagined a different kind of nun from Sister Bri.

“Mother Ho is chief supervisor at Assomption,” Delphine goes on, “and Sister Gi teaches music in the elementary section.”

“What about the other teachers? Are they all nuns?”

“Practically. This year we only had one lay teacher, for biology. But the only difference is the habit. Mademoiselle Ferrand has a room in the convent, she never goes anywhere, I don’t know why she isn’t a nun.”

Now I’m worrying not only about Anne-Claude, but about myself too. Assomption is where I’ll end up in a year, if Pélican finally decides to let me go.

“What’s your favorite subject?” I ask.

Delphine stops scraping. “Subject?”

“Yes, do you like math, for instance? English? Latin?”

“Oh, I see. Well, there’s no Latin, no English. Only Spanish. Favorite subject, that’s a strange question. Music was okay with Sister Gi, but this year our teacher was totally out of it, she played records and we just talked and read magazines. Well, at least we could relax — in the other classes we’re supposed to listen. I could imagine... yes, Spanish, why not? With a different kind of teacher, I might like Spanish. But if I ever got interested in a subject, I’d be seen as a freak, even by the teachers. So better not.”

“Do you mean the teachers themselves aren’t too keen on their...”

“Right, what’s important at Assomption is good conduct, i.e., keeping your head bowed and your mouth shut.” 

When we’re done with the vegetables, Sister Bri and Sister Gi give us smaller pots and pans and take us down the hill at the back of the house to pick red currants in the sun. The
patro
girls look unenthusiastic but unsurprised. Coralie and Sylvie don’t pick anything, they just eat. I should eat too, I rather like red currants and I’ve swallowed nothing in the last three days but bread, jam, and two apples. But I can’t. It’s too hot. I fill my pan like a robot, a nun takes it from me, empties it into a tub, brings it back. As in a dream, I go on pulling the tiny berries. My fingers are red, the sky is red. Then black.