Tita (18 page)

A torrent.
a
waterfall. I’m burning. The cascade is an inch from me, but I can’t move. I’m stuck in the desert, or is it hell? It can’t be hell, because I’m all alone. Alone, with sand all around me stretching to the horizon. I am a stone statue in the middle of the Sahara. Then I am on my bed. The dorm is empty, but there’s a noise in my head. Of water, waterfalls. Sister Gi comes by after a while with a glass of water. I moan when I smell it: I don’t want to drink this. She tries to make me. There’s water all over my face, my neck, the sheets. I won’t let this into my mouth. I want my bottle, I still have a bottle in my backpack, but I can’t move, and I can’t speak.

She leaves, I doze, I dream of a small fast river. I can’t drink because I don’t have a mouth, but I can drown. When I open my eyes, small furry animals with long tails are crawling on all the beds around me. I kind of know they aren’t real, but I’m not dreaming either, I’m not asleep. The other girls come and go. Anne-Claude gives me daisies and non-sparkling, non-metallic water, Coralie a drawing, Sylvie a kiss. Sister Gi brings camomile tea, and I drink some, although the stink is there, just under the gentle surface. Slowly, I start moving my toes, my fingers. Sitting up.

One afternoon, Sister Gi asks me if I want a shower. It’s Saturday, she says. The next morning, I’m given a clean dress, and I go downstairs. A priest has come to celebrate mass in the chapel. He does it very fast. No singing, nothing. He must be in a hurry to get to a real church for a real mass. I take communion like the rest, although I haven’t been to confession. I’ve never done this before. I vaguely wonder if I’ve committed a mortal sin since last time. I don’t think so, and I don’t care.

At breakfast, everybody is excited: another outing, another picnic. They went to Lourdes again while I was ill, but this time we’re hiking in the opposite direction, up the mountain, to a lake. There’ll be no Way of
the Cross, only pleasure.

Again we’re given our lunch in paper bags. Again we start along the paths to the strains of martial songs. But this time we’re walking upwards on a steep path. Coralie and Sylvie look wan. Anne-Claude’s face is sunburned. “Are you okay?” I ask her. We’ve been here for six days, but it feels like for ever.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m waiting for a letter from my mother. It’s the only thing I’m interested in. And getting out of here. By the way, Françoise
did
get out. She asked Sister Ho if she could call her mother, and Sister Ho said impossible. But on Friday when we were in Lourdes she managed to sneak into a café, she talked to her mother, and yesterday around noon her mother came and took her away.”

“Would you like to run away?” I ask. “It would be easy to run into the forest while the rest have their picnic.”

She sighs. “I don’t know. We’d have to take Sylvie and Coralie. Sylvie is slow. And what if we get lost? Maybe we’d better wait it out. But I can’t believe we still have lives in Cugnac. In little more than a week we’ll be there. And then everything will be like a normal vacation, which I hadn’t realised until now is practically heaven... but in October... I’ll be back with Mother Ho and Sister Bri. At first, I thought this camp was just a bout of purgatory, but it might be a foretaste of hell!”

I’d like to contradict her, give her some hope, but I have exactly the same impression. “Would you rather stay with Pélican another year, if you could?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Yes, at least I’d eat and sleep at home. But I don’t have a choice. I can’t stay at Sainte-Blandine for ever.”

“Except if you went into Group Three.”

“It would mean that I leave school in three years, don’t take my
bac
, don’t go to university. My parents would be so disappointed. They’re so happy when I do well in school. And there’s something I learned from this camp: I like my parents. I mean, of course I do, but I resented my father for driving too fast and playing more with the twins, my mother for wearing bright colors and laughing too much... You know how it is. They’re not perfect. But now I can see that, with all their faults, they’re kind and funny and... real! Don’t you think?”

“Anne-Claude, I love your mother! I always have! But do you think Assomption will be as bad as this?”

“Worse! Here at least we have each other. We have the forest. And the air smells good, even if the water doesn’t. At Assomption we’ll be inside, or at best in the yard. For seven years! I just... I’d rather not think about it. Until it happens. Sometimes I just wish I could fall seriously ill at the end of September. Not tuberculosis, because you have to go to a sanatorium. Something that would keep me at home, for ever. Well, until I’m old enough to get married or work or... Old enough to be done with school. It was clever of you to get sunstroke. I wish I had. But I’m strong.”

Yes, she is strong. And now I notice that she looks older somehow than before my little illness. “At least we’re going to a lake,” I say. “Swimming will be a relief. But we didn’t take our swimsuits!”

“You’re dreaming,” Anne-Claude says. “The
patro
girls didn’t even
bring
swimsuits. Those weren’t on the list, remember, we had to count them with the underpants. We get to
look
at that lake, that’s all we get to do. The nuns keep their clothes on, we keep our clothes on.”

We all sit near the lake, take out our paper bags, and that’s it. Our sandwiches are filled with the most awful-smelling dirty-looking slices of... stuff. Delphine says it’s called liver sausage. The mere words! There’s also a banana, but it’s black and squashed, and smells almost as bad as the sausage. Coralie eats both hers and mine. I wander away around the lake and find a cascade like the one in my dream. Under the pouring water I drink, drink, drink. Then I fill up both Vichy bottles and put them back in my backpack. The Vichy water is long gone. Anne-Claude filled the bottles in Lourdes on Friday, and this morning we shared the last drops.

Anne-Claude was right. We’re too tired to run away. But I can say some prayers.
Jesus, Mary, Joseph, saint Rosalie, deliver me from this place of darkness, or if you can’t (
I’m afraid they can’t
) then give me the strength to stay in a good mood and not despair, but learn from this slight (and self-inflicted) predicament, as well as from the hardships to come.

I have a special devotion to saint Rosalie. A year ago, Aunt Caroline gave me a rosy-cheeked plastic doll, and I was wondering what to name her. I asked Father, who said “Rosalie”. I knew it was a joke, he didn’t really think Rosalie was a beautiful name, but I liked it. I looked it up in the Grand Larousse and found that saint Rosalie had lived near Palermo in the twelfth century.

I had no idea what Palermo was like, but I enjoyed pronouncing the name, and
Sicily.
The Larousse also said that Rosalie had been a hermit, and the Robert told me that
hermit
comes from a Greek word that means “solitary”, which suited me perfectly. So I called the doll Rosalie, and I decided that saint Rosalie would be my patron saint.

After lunch, the nuns doze in the shade of a weeping willow near the lake, and most of the girls start a game. They lie down at the top of a meadow, at right angles with the slope, and let themselves roll, or push each other down. There’s a lot of poking, tickling, and giggling, they seem to be having quite a good time, and I’m surprised the nuns let them. But the nuns look dazed. Maybe there was wine in their flasks. Sylvie and Coralie are building a castle near the lake, pulling up grassy soil with their hands and consolidating it with a few sticks, carrying water for the moat. Anne-Claude joins me. “Do you still want to be a nun?” she asks.

“I never wanted to be this kind of nun anyway. Maybe a contemplative nun, who does nothing all day but pray.”

“Wouldn’t you get bored after a while?”

“I don’t think so. But I don’t want to be with other nuns. I could be a hermit.”

“A hermit! You’ll live alone at the top of a mountain?”

“Not a mountain. I’d be near the ocean. I want to swim.”

“Do hermits swim?”

“I can’t see why not. Do you know what you want to be?”

Anne-Claude picks up a small pine cone, inspects it, smells it. “Not really.”

“Do you think you’ll live in Cugnac when you grow up?” I ask.

“Yes. Or maybe in Carcassonne. It depends on… the man I marry,” Anne-Claude says, blushing.

“You could decide to go somewhere first and find a husband there,” I say.

“Go where?”

A girl is throwing up at mid-slope, and Sister Gi shambles towards her. Anne-Claude notices two other girls being sick further down. A whole group near the lake are holding their bellies. Mother Ho heaves herself up. “Enough rolling in the sun, young ladies, come and rest here before we go back to the house.”

That evening, I am the (more or less) healthy one, and nearly everybody else is sick, including the nuns. They say it comes from rolling down the meadow, but did the nuns roll down the meadow? Or Sylvie and Coralie? And they’re all very sick, you just need to look at their faces. Green. Anne-Claude is almost all right but, as she said, she’s strong. The smell in the dorm is terrible. Thank God sister Bri, who looks like a ghost tonight, staggers away as soon as we’re in bed. I can go back to my stall and to
Marjorie Morningstar
.

Marjorie’s father, when she’s twenty, tells her that he’d like her to have as many children as possible, as soon as possible. Marjorie is an only child, I wonder why her father didn’t have more children. Maybe he couldn’t, or his wife? Anyway Marjorie doesn’t agree with him. She’s not completely against children, but she doesn’t want to have them until she’s thirty and ready to “retire from the human race and become a breeding machine.” As if she were going to have thirty children! She also says that she doesn’t want to be “just one more of the millions of human cows.”

Why cows? Wolves and tigers too have children. The difference is that, if they live in the wild, their children are not taken away from them and killed for meat. Neither are human children, usually, so why the cow comparison? Maybe it means that, for Marjorie, marriage is a kind of slavery? She seems to be afraid that if she had children she wouldn’t live in Manhattan but in “the suburbs”. I’ve never been to a suburb, so I can’t imagine what’s so scary about them. And her parents live in Manhattan, for her the exact opposite of a suburb, so why couldn’t she? She seems to be incredibly particular about neighborhoods. “Living north of Ninety-Sixth Street”, even though it’s still Manhattan, she considers “disqualifying”.

What Marjorie wants is “to have everything in life worth having”. I wonder what she means by that. When her father asks, she says, “the finest foods, the finest wines, the loveliest places, the best music, the best books, the best art.” Like her father, I don’t know much about all these things except for books, and I can’t see how having children would automatically deprive her of them. I also wonder what she means by “the finest, the loveliest, the best”. For me
Henry Brulard
is the best book in the whole world; I’m pretty sure Marjorie wouldn’t want to read it, though. Anyway she doesn’t seem to read books at all, ever.

Her dream: “Amounting to something. Being well known, being myself, being distinguished, being important, using all my abilities.” She wants to be famous, like Noel Airman, to be looked up to. If that’s what makes her happy, okay, but I can’t see the attraction. What about the idea of using all her “abilities”? She feels she has a gift for acting, so she wants to act. Okay, but what she wants most is to be with Noel Airman, and then she doesn’t mention any other abilities. 

It makes me wonder if I have any abilities. Not for acting. My friends are clearly better at this than me. No, I can’t think of anything I am particularly good at. Anything
useful
, anything you can do for a living. Except typing, maybe. But I hope I’ll be good at picking grapes. I love the smell of vine leaves, of ripe grapes. But this can’t be my vocation — the grape harvest lasts only a few weeks.

Marjorie’s father says that “the main thing is happiness.” Maybe. But how do you know what will make you happy? Mother Ho likes us to suffer, I guess that makes her happy. Mother and Justine, like Marjorie, need people to adore them, to admire them, to do what they like. They think they’ll be happy if men or boys find them irresistible. I’m not sure I want to be happy. What I’d like is to be free. From Pélican, from boarding school, from Father’s money. But still more from... how can I explain? From needing things.

I drink some cascade water from the Vichy bottle I keep in my backpack — Anne-Claude has the other one. Then I hide under the sheets with my four scented cards.

The next day, after breakfast, we’re told to stay in the refectory and write letters to our parents. I write, “Dear Parents and Grandmother, I hope you are all well. We went to Lourdes and walked the Way of the Cross on our knees. The water here has a weird taste. We are only allowed to shower on Saturdays. We miss you.”

I don’t say anything about the food because I don’t want to sound too pathetic.
I
put myself (and the others) in this situation. Our parents are not responsible. But the shower detail might upset Mother, and the Way of the Cross, Father. They might come and get us, if it’s not too much trouble.

Coralie writes, “Hi mum dad com I don want stay hir sisters ar min food disgustin I want my Red Indian soot.”

Sister Bri surveys our letters. Most
patro
girls are allowed to put theirs into envelopes, but the four of us are in trouble. The nun tears up our papers and tells us to start again.

“Why?” Anne-Claude asks.

“Your parents want to read interesting news about camp,” Sister Bri says.

“I don’t know what else to write,” Anne-Claude says.

The nun looks at her sternly. “You’ll stay here until you’ve written an adequate letter.”

So we spend the rest of the morning at our table. Sylvie tries, she thinks Sister Bri hasn’t liked her handwriting, so she prints all the words, but she writes almost exactly the same as before: “Dear Mum and Dad and Jeannot and Hervé. My head hurts. We eat potatoes at every meal not like at home, burned and mushy. We have to walk on our knees. The
patro
girls play stupid games because they are Guides.”

Anne-Claude and I decide not to write at all. Coralie is drawing a squirrel. There are dingy smells from the kitchen, noises of dishes being shoved into the oven. When it’s time for lunch, Mother Ho comes in. She looks at Sylvie’s letter, shakes her head, and goes to throw it in the garbage. When she comes back she turns to us. “Where are yours?”

“Sister Bri tore them up,” Anne-Claude says.

“She told you to write better ones. Do this immediately or you’ll go without lunch.”

How scary!

“I can’t think what else to write,” Sylvie says. Mother Ho goes out and brings back a letter one of the
patro
girls wrote.

“This will give you some ideas,” she says.

Anne-Claude and Sylvie start copying the
patro
girl’s sentences. “My Patrol got nine points on the Weasels in yesterday’s treasure hunt”, “We prayed in front of the grotto where the Virgin appeared to saint Bernadette.” I won’t do that. I don’t care what Mother Ho does to me. When she comes back, the
patro
girls have already set all the tables. “Well then,” she says, “just sign your sister’s letter.” So I write my name under Coralie’s squirrel.