Tita (5 page)

Again we’re getting ready for a show. “We” means madame Robichon and her ballet students, of whom Coralie and I are the most unwilling. There are nine of us, eight girls and one boy, Jordi Puch. He won’t come back next fall, he told me. He’d rather play rugby, but his mother wants him to finish the year. He says it’s okay, he likes our company. I like him. He is six, and in the downstairs class at Sainte-Blandine. Slender, with pale curly hair. Nimble, energetic. His gestures never look contrived. His feet stretch easily even though he never practices apart from the classes.

The classes! Who ever got the idea of standing on their toes must have been demented. Justine has friends in Paris who take ballet lessons, and she says they don’t start pointe work until they are ten or eleven, because it can hurt your feet if they’re not “ossified”. Since the Easter vacation I’ve been calling Justine every Sunday morning, around eleven. Father wouldn’t allow it at first, but Justine explained that I’m her confidante. Father said, “All right, six minutes maximum, you’ll have to use the egg timer.”

The show is next Wednesday, and today we rehearse at the theater. Madame Robichon decided that the way it will start is we’ll all walk onto the stage, one after the other, very fast, and do a cartwheel. Zip zip zip, the nine of us, across the stage. After which most of us will stand at the back and let the stars do their stuff. Eléonore will wear six different tutus, all kinds of lengths and colors. Her mother and aunt will be in the wings to help her change. Coralie and I hate tutus. Anyway, according to Justine, you shouldn’t cartwheel in a tutu. She discussed it with her ballerina friends, who called it “sacrilege”.

“Can’t we wear our leotards?” I ask madame Robichon.

“What a ridiculous question!” she answers, rolling her globulous eyes, whose eyelashes are always congealed by a thick layer of mascara. “This is a show we’re putting on! The whole point of a show is dressing up.” There’s something uncanny about madame Robichon: she wears her hair rather short, in a pageboy, and it’s always exactly the same length. It doesn’t grow.

“Jordi will wear his leotard,” I say. “Why couldn’t we?”

“You are not boys, are you? Please, we have a lot to do, there’s no time for silly talk.”

“I’d like to be a boy,” Coralie says. “I’d wear a leotard. No, I’d play rugby.”

Madame Robichon makes us rehearse our cartwheels. On a beach, it’s fun to turn a cartwheel. Or two, or three. What I don’t like is doing it on a small stage. Anyway a cartwheel, according to Justine, is gymnastics, not ballet, and shouldn’t be part of a ballet performance.

While Eléonore capers and pirouettes, Coralie turns to me and makes a pig face with her nose and lips turned up. I’m so tired of the whole thing, I squat for a while. “Stand up, please!” madame Robichon cries. “Think of your parents, how proud they’ll be to see you on stage in your beautiful tutus next Wednesday!”

“I’m so looking forward to this show!” Eléonore exclaims in the changing room. We’re all ready to go, but she’s still busy with her many layers of undershirts, blouses and cardigans. “She’s always as covered up as a honeypot,” Mother likes to say. Which doesn’t make any sense to me, but is certainly derogatory.

Mother is waiting for us outside, with Cami Espeluque and Estelle Vié who, like her, take classes with madame Robichon, twice a week. Not ballet:
culture physique
, to enhance their figures. Estelle is lean and brisk, she says she’d like to become more flexible. Cami wants to lose the weight she put on when she was pregnant with the twins and breastfed them for more than a year, but I don’t think she should: she’s beautiful as she is, all chubby and sparkling. Mother’s aim is to remain as slim and perfect as she’s always been. For ever.

Eléonore comes with us in the car. “How’s it going?” Mother asks. Eléonore explains how hard it is to remember all her moves, in the right order. After we drop her in front of her house, Mother says, “That girl shouldn’t do ballet. Not with those thick ankles.”

“She has strong legs,” I say. “She’s a good dancer.” Actually, I don’t think she’s so great — she tries too hard, and worries too much about how she looks. But I won’t let anyone disparage my friends.

“Don’t talk nonsense,” Mother says. “She’s a nice enough girl, but her mother shouldn’t put it into her head that she’s pretty. It won’t help her. With her heavy limbs, her pasty skin, her mousy hair, she should realize her prospects are very limited.”

Mother pays huge attention to appearance. As if she’d never heard of souls. According to school, church, and the comtesse de Ségur,
being
good is what matters, not
looking
good. Of course madame Fichini is cruel when she makes Sophie wear a coarse cotton dress with a dirty spot on it to visit her friends. That’s rude. You need to be clean, to dress in a way that suits the occasion, your social situation and your age, neither too coarse nor too elaborate. But having an attractive body is just luck, there’s no reason to gloat about it.

At home, I look for Father. He’s in the music room playing the piano, trying out some composition of his. The same tune in various keys, with a few variations. I wait on the landing, because I know that if he sees me he’ll stop. Then when I haven’t heard anything for three minutes I go in.

“Hi, Tita, how’s life? Do you want the piano?” How can he be my father, live in the same house with me, and not know I
never
want the piano!

“Have you met madame Robichon?” I ask.

“Who?”

“Madame Robichon, our ballet teacher.”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“She’s the stupidest person I’ve ever met,” I say. “I just wondered if someone more stupid could exist. You know so many people.”

“How would you define stupid?”             

Now. This is difficult. You can
see
that madame Robichon is stupid. If he’d seen her he’d know. But define it? “She’s like wood,” I say. “Her face never moves.”

“Is she paralysed?”

“No. She’s normal. But you always know what she’s going to say.”

“Our words are often pretty predictable,” Father says.

That’s not it. How can I explain? “She’s
more
stupid,” I say. “Most people, they mouth the usual phrases, but you can feel something else going on, underneath. They’re alive. With madame Robichon that’s all there is, and it’s... contagious. You end up feeling stupid too.” I’m not making my point. “Try to talk to her on Wednesday after the show.”

“Oh,” Father says, “a show? Your mother didn’t tell me. I’ll have to call my bridge friends.”

“You don’t have to come,” I say. “Honest, don’t come for me, or for Coralie. We’re no good.”

“But I want to come!” he says. “You must have worked hard for this show!”

“We haven’t,” I say. “We hate it. We’d like not to do it. I guess it’s too late for this year, but could we please not take ballet after the summer?” I hadn’t thought about this, it just comes out. And as soon as I hear myself, I know I should have kept quiet. Father looks at the piano stand, at the notes he’s been making for his song, in lead pencil, and the revision, in green.

“You’ll have to see about it with your mother,” he says.

Time for the show. Coralie and I squeeze into the back seat of Eléonore’s car between Eléonore’s large father and her larger grandmother, under a mountain of tutus. Coralie hugs me and whispers in my ear, “If we suffocate, let’s be buried in the same tomb.” Eléonore is in front next to her mother, with a few more tutus in her lap, including a rainbow one with, her mother says, seventeen layers of tulle. When we arrive at the theater, Coralie grins. “I think I forgot my demi-pointe shoes,” she says, looking into her bag. But madame Robichon sends Eléonore’s mother to the office to call our parents. Coralie should have waited. It’s no use anyway. We’re doomed. What can we do? Grow up, but it takes for ever.

Mother arrives in time to re-braid my hair and stick in some flowers. Then it’s Coralie’s turn. She yells. Madame Robichon is giving a speech on the other side of the curtain. Thanks, art, support, Mr Mayor. Now it starts! Coralie goes, then Jordi… “Your turn!” Madame Robichon whispers loudly behind me. I throw my hands onto the wooden floor, but my legs don’t stick up in the usual way. I don’t know what they do, but my feet are back on the floor on the wrong side. “Hurry, try again!” madame Robichon urges. But I don’t feel like trying again. I just step to the other side of the stage. I don’t run away, but behave as if nothing had happened, looking straight at the audience. I bungled my cartwheel, and I want to laugh.

We’re done. It’s been amazingly fast, and almost painless. Now there’s clapping and stomping. The room is full. We bow and re-bow, and come back onstage twice. That’s the most strenuous part.

Father doesn’t talk to madame Robichon after the show. Everybody presses in to congratulate and exclaim. In the car, Mother says, “You have good muscles, Coralie, but you need to exert yourself.”

“I want to play rugby,” Coralie says.

“If you work hard,” Mother says, “I’ll make a new tutu just for you.”

“I could go to
La Patriote.” Coralie says. “With Nicole, and Roseline.”

“What is La Patriote?” Father asks.

“An athletic club,” Mother says. “On the place du Marché.”

Coralie bounces up and down. “They do asymmetric bars, springboard, vaulting horse!”

“Isn’t this a good idea?” Father says.

Something has happened. Father has spoken up for once. And Mother is a sportswoman. It must be obvious to her that Coralie will be good at this, will be able to make her proud, for a change. Coralie might be freed!

“Coralie is enough of a tomboy already,” Mother says. “And the children at La Patriote are a mixed lot.”

So we all know there’s no hope.

Mother likes to talk about me. I might even be one of her favorite topics. Along with dresses, coats, hats, shoes, rings and handbags. There isn’t much difference, for her, between me and a scarf. That’s because I’m quiet.

“This one?” she says, when people ask how I’m doing — tradesmen, visitors, neighbors. “This one is a dream! She never makes a sound.” Unlike Coralie, noisy Coralie who clamors for candy, juice, toys, playing outside on the street.

My impression is, I was born a listener. I only speak up when there’s a reasonable chance of achieving a result, while many people keep flaunting their feelings and opinions, and seem to enjoy expression for expression’s sake. I am odd, in quite a few ways. 

But how odd? This afternoon (Thursday, so no school) Mother is having tea in the sitting room with her friends, and I’ve just finished passing the petits fours. The women are admiring my smocked dress (Mother’s latest masterpiece) and exclaiming over the fact that I always look so neat, spotless and wrinkle free. I stop listening, as this is the kind of prattle I find embarrassing, not to mention terminally dull. But something in the air warns me that they must have moved on to another topic.

“Two months!” Mother has just proclaimed in her clear, buoyant voice.

Everybody’s staring. At her, not me — I’m sitting on a low stool now, pretty much out of sight.

Estelle Vié smacks her cup down on the enamel table. “My God,” she says. “That child must have been a total prodigy.” I can hear, in her placid, slightly raspy voice, a hint of irony. “None of mine,” she goes on, “were out of diapers before their third year. I thought it was because the first two were boys, but Mireille was no different. She sat on the potty quite happily, but nothing much happened until she was two.”

Among Mother’s friends, Estelle is one of my favorites. She always wears interesting little scarves on her head that she ties at the nape of her neck. She keeps them on all the time, even inside, even in her own house. Mother says it’s because her hair is so thin she’d rather hide it. “She’s not quite bald, but nearly,” I’ve heard her say quite a few times. I wonder how she knows.

“Yes,” Mother goes on breezily, “with some children, it takes a lot of time and effort.” (She should know: Coralie still has accidents pretty often.) “But this one was marvellous. From two months old she never dirtied a diaper again. Not once! All I had to do was hold her above the toilet once in a while. I never needed to use a potty. She immediately knew what a lavatory was for.”

Probably just another lie, I reflect as I retreat to our bedroom, where Coralie is lying on her bed face down, hands between her legs, doing what Mother and Grandmother don’t want her to do.

I sit at my desk and remember Mother saying, “I was back at work just a week after I gave birth. The salon couldn’t do without me. Obviously. All the clients were asking for me. So I had to go back. I couldn’t keep them waiting for ever.” I’ve never thought about it, but I start wondering. Who was taking care of me when Mother was in her beauty salon all day? I was born in Lyon, four hundred kilometers from here. And I don’t think Father ever left Cugnac. Why did we stay in Lyon? How long did we go on living there?

Lyon, according to Mother, is a wonderful city with a lot of stores, chic restaurants and cafés where she has all these friends from the time when she was young and single, with her own booming business. She loves staying there at her goddaughter’s, a niece who married the owner of a large sewing-machine store. She often says that Cugnac is a one-horse town where people don’t even speak proper French.

Cugnac has only seven thousand inhabitants, but every Wednesday lots of villagers come from far away to our open-air market. We have three cinemas, a busy promenade, many cafés. And our accent is different from hers, but she only knows French, whereas here we also speak or at least understand Occitan, Catalan, and some Spanish too, because we’re not far from the border. For Mother, the only real language is French. She looks down on all the rest. According to my brother Etienne, the Greeks (a long time ago) were like her: they called all foreigners “barbarians”.

Downstairs, in the dining room, Grandmother is sitting near her favorite window, the one with the best view of the railway station forecourt and the avenue. I wait until she’s done with the Cugnac page of
L’Indépendant
. When she resumes her knitting (a brown sock), I ask, “Did Mother go back to work after I was born?”

“As soon as she was out of the clinic. She stayed there five days, because the doctor made her, but she couldn’t wait to get out.”

“Who took care of me then?”

“I did. We stayed in the apartment. I cleaned, I cooked, and we went to the park in the afternoon.”

“Was that in Lyon?”

“Yes, up on the Croix Rousse.”

“So I wasn’t with Mother much.”

“Only on Sundays. On Sundays your father came to visit, and they sometimes took you out with them. When they didn’t go to the cinema. On Mondays she didn’t work but she had to check out new products, go to the stores.” She adjusts her glasses, looks at her knitting. “You always wanted your mother,” she goes on. “You howled when she left, and in the evening you never went to sleep before she was back.”

“So you fed me, you changed my diapers?”

“Yes. I prepared your bottle early in the morning while she got ready for work. But you never wanted it until she was gone. When she was around, you were too excited.”

“How old was I when I stopped wearing diapers?” I ask.

Grandmother frowns. “You started walking when you were eleven months old, and you still had them then. But after that... I’m not sure. When you and your mother moved to Cugnac, I went to stay with my sister Julie for a while. Your father had a maid who looked after you, what was her name? The one before Jeanine.”

So I was not a complete freak. “How old was I when I came to Cugnac?” I ask.

Even before I finish my sentence, I know I shouldn’t have asked. Grandmother stands up, puts her knitting back into her work table. “I’ll go and see about dinner,” she says.

In the evening, I decide to try Mother. As she runs our bath, I ask again, “How old was I when we came to live in this house?”

“Oh,” she says. “We came here... just after you were born.”

This can’t be. We were still in Lyon when I was
walking
. And what about the clients she went back to? But I won’t badger her about these incongruities. I wonder why. In school, when there’s something I want to know, I ask. When the answer doesn’t satisfy me, I insist. If mademoiselle Pélican doesn’t like it, too bad.

Going to school for the first time was such a treat. I couldn’t wait. People opened books and looked entranced: I wanted to know what that was all about. Mother often boasts that I learned to read in three weeks, as soon as I got to Sainte-Blandine, when I was two years old. Probably another exaggeration.

The atmosphere is quite different now, with mademoiselle Pélican, but I was happy in the nursery class downstairs. Right away. Relaxed, and utterly comfortable. Learning to tell time with the big clock on the blackboard, listening to stories of saints. Writing. Away from food. We all brought a
goûter
for the afternoon break, but nobody cared what we did with it. So I ate it, easily. Two slices of bread, a bar of chocolate. Safe.

But before I started school, before I came here, I lived in Lyon. I have clear memories of being in a walker, and moving from the front door, through a passage, into a room with a lot of light. I remember enjoying the movement, to and fro, from the door, through the passage, into the room, around the room, back to the passage. The large windows, their square metal frames. Hiding behind the front door, waiting. My mother opening the door, and not seeing me behind it.