Sisters - Brigitte Lozerec'h French Literature

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and embankment roads piled high with crates, barrels by the hundreds, enormous piles covered with tarpaulins, unrecognizable cargo waiting to be loaded into the bilges of deep barges or onto the decks of flat ones. But in Paris there weren’t any proud three-masted schooners setting sail and leaving onlookers behind to dream! Never any tide. William and I became aware then of the sea’s influence in London . . . In Paris what we liked to see were the carts full of old books lining the parapets along the quays shaded by plane trees and poplars, and also the café terraces on the sidewalks that filled with people the minute the sun was up. So, how Paris revealed its charms to us, and likewise its hideousness, was determined by the horse’s pace, sometimes walking, sometimes at a slow trot . . .

      Everything about our life was different, even our mother who’d already changed in the first few months after our father died, and had changed even more since we’d arrived at her mother’s house. Taking us out on carriage rides was a way she’d invented to fill herself with the intoxicating spectacle of the streets, all the while remaining seated safely inside a fiacre. The façades, avenues, and gardens of the city of her youth unfurled before her and it gave her obvious pleasure to show them to us. But every now and then we’d see her become strangely languid and despondent. William and I would glance at each other, worried. As soon as she became aware of this, she’d quickly reassure us: “Paris, the city of grace, the city of harmony . . . You’ll find that you love it, my children!”

      One day we paid a visit in Passy to one of our father’s cousins, whom she called by her first name, Dilys. She welcomed us beneath an arbor of wisteria in full bloom. For an instant our mother rested her cheek on the shoulder of this elegant woman in her forties, then she closed her eyes as if she wanted to fall asleep right there on her feet. Her acting so familiar with someone I didn’t know caught my attention, but I saw also her thin-lipped smile: I felt she wanted to cry but was holding it in. William and I instinctively moved closer together. Seeing that we were petrified, our mother forced herself to lift her head and speak. “So, Cousin, will you treat us to some nice tea with some of your wonderful fruitcake?” Then, almost immediately, there were the charming sounds of porcelain and silverware on the garden table with its embroidered tablecloth, and we spent a merry, completely English afternoon that remains preserved for me perfectly, because it was my first contact with the woman who would come into my life, years later, as though she were a guardian sent by my father.

      In two years now I’ll be thirty, my mother’s age at the time. I’m trying to get a real sense of the depth of her bewilderment in those days, even though I have no children. Right then, no matter how hard I tried to imagine her utter grief, I couldn’t see how alone she was—because we were there! I’d not yet noticed that she no longer sat down at the piano; it had been months . . . Only quite recently have I realized that she’d given it up in the months when she was expecting Eugénie.

      I also remember having caught sight during our interminable carriage rides of a dark opening between two apartment buildings in a very populous suburb. The passageway plunged away toward dilapidated houses from another century. Was it over by the Bastille? Toward the fortifications? Or maybe near Montmartre where, all in the same slow but steady rhythm, men in wooden shoes wielded scythes to cut the tall grass in the square below the basilica then under construction? In that alley that I’ve never forgotten, children in rags shared the pavement littered with rubbish, with geese and scrawny dogs. They were playing in the mud. A little blonde girl stood there and followed us with her eyes; her arms were wrapped protectively around some other little ragamuffin as if she feared we might snatch him away from her. There was just time enough to catch sight of them and then we’d gone by. But I saw them. I remember being gripped by a fear impossible to describe because I could see that she was more or less my age. I was struck by the feeling that something similarly catastrophic was threatening us as well. I’d read it in the eyes of this child standing there, motionless and dignified with that chaos of blonde hair heavy on her shoulders. She stared straight at us without hatred during the few seconds it took us to go by, and the dark brilliance of her eyes alarmed me. If I’d known the word “destiny” then, that’s the one I’d have applied to the way she stood there with as much swagger as resignation: this was some sort of omen of our destiny. For a moment, remembering the sale of Swann House, I’d thought it possible that we might ourselves arrive at such destitution. An unpleasant shiver ran through me. As soon as I looked at my mother, her head held high beneath her black hat, the feeling went away, but not the fear—the fear of a fall. Yet none of these emotions and reflections kept William and me from our puns and laughter; the woman in black accompanying us played along, but was no longer the happy person we’d known.

      The crowning moment in our outings was always a visit to the Café de la Paix where a glass of juice or sherbet would be set before us. My mind would race ahead then to the end of our jaunt. I thought how I’d be back with baby Eugénie before the hour was up. She’d have finished her nap and would greet us with little chortles that clearly showed how pleased she was to see me again. I’d put my dolls away in a trunk the day she was born because I was so happy to have a real little baby in the family, a doll baby in the flesh that I could hug and examine and love as much as I wanted. I made puppet shows for her with my fingers; I sang; I could see the tiny changes from one day to the next on her jolly face, so pale, so alive, and so mysterious. I’d never imagined a lovelier miracle. I didn’t like being away from her for more than a few hours, and so the sound of the horse’s trot as it went back up the rue Blanche was a joyful noise soothing my impatience to see her again.

      We spent the summer after we’d come back from England at Sainte-Coulombe, Grandmother’s house on the road out of Villennes-sur-Seine, downstream from Poissy. This prolonged our carefree days but didn’t lighten my mother’s burden of grief, which could be seen in her eyes and the way her body seemed to crumple when she didn’t know she was being observed. She was well aware that our fate was already sealed. We’d hardly celebrated our ninth birthday when my brother and I were each led off to our respective boarding schools. How can I ever forget that terrible autumn of 1895?

      As for William, yes, he blossomed at Lakanal.

      In the well-regulated life of the convent I performed whatever gesture I was ordered to undertake, though without ever really understanding what they meant. What I did know was that they weren’t leading to the love that the nuns kept going on and on about, describing it as “divine.” Sometimes I didn’t even hear people speaking to me, haunted as I was by beloved voices from my past, letting them resound to fill the emptiness inside me. All the nuns’ rules and regulations continued to seem foreign to me. Still, I’d have liked to be satisfactory. Their criticism of what they considered my provocative attitude was enough to make me feel terribly guilty. In England we’d never gone to school. A tutor came to Swann House to teach us how to read and write and do arithmetic; he told us about distant lands that he then showed us on our globe, and recounted stories of wars waged by kings and princes. From this point on, however, my youth was going to be conducted within high walls. We’d only go outside once a month and for the holidays. I could have visits in the parlor on Thursdays. Feeling terribly abandoned, I told myself over and over that our father would never have put up with that situation.

      The lavish words of adoration in the sacred texts were like honey soothing a sore throat. Through them I entered into a world of thought, unreal and magical, experiencing moments of elation that lifted me into who knows what fictional, harmonious upper reaches of reality, into flowery feelings filling the emptiness of my heart with their syrup. I became a star, or a cloud, maybe even a single longed-for raindrop on an earth that was so dry it crackled under one’s foot . . . And my self became diluted in the violent beauty of the stained glass in the chapel. Depending on the time of day and the sun’s intensity, the reds and blues in particular made me want to dissolve away into them. The dream drew me up and away to a timelessness outside of the quotidian matters of existence.

      My friend Alice took me to the library where the only books to which the students had access were sacred texts, antiphonaries, or bibles. Gilt-edged volumes full of sleeping miracles: the illuminations. People, plants, and animals scrambled up the opening letter of each verse, coiled inside their

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