The other Sunday, I went to see my sister.
My sister lives in Ville-d’Avray, in the western suburbs of Paris. She shares a comfortable house with Christian, her husband, and their daughter: big garden, with lawns and flower beds, in a residential neighborhood. One of those streets that climb the hills near the Parc de Saint-Cloud. As I live in the center of Paris, we seldom see each other and I rarely visit her. Luc says, “Going to see your sister is an expedition.”
But that’s not true, the distance isn’t the only issue. I know very well that there’s regular train service to Ville-d’Avray. The truth is that Luc doesn’t like Ville-d’Avray, and that he finds my sister “boring”; it would be more accurate to say that he’s suspicious of her. Her husband Christian’s a physician in a group practice. For a brief time she was a high school teacher, like me, but she doesn’t work anymore. She helps Christian in his practice, in a vague sort of way. Sometimes, when he needs her, she fills in at the reception desk, treats people with ordinary symptoms over the phone, or directs anxious patients to the hospital, but that’s not what you’d call work. “And between us,” says Luc, “I don’t trust your sister’s ability to diagnose patients; she always seems to be ‘elsewhere.’ Your sister,” says Luc, “has never had her feet on the ground. It’s a family trait.”
At that point Luc and I usually have an argument. We have an argument every time we talk about our respective families.
As I was leaving Paris that Sunday, I calculated how many months it had been since we’d last spoken to each other, my sister and I. Luc was attending a seminar, or claimed to be attending a seminar. I had my doubts on the subject. To be more precise, for some time I’d been suspicious of his relationship with a woman from our circle of friends, Fabienne, an academic. In any case, I’d had enough of Paris; the city was hot and polluted.
The season was moving on. It was, I remember, a Sunday in the beginning of September, one of those days that cross the border between summer and fall.
Some of the houses in the neighborhoods I passed through were still closed up—proof that their owners hadn’t yet returned from summer vacation—but there were flowers in the gardens. Flowers blooming in untended gardens, all by themselves. You could sense everywhere, much more than in Paris, the sort of languid stretching and immobility characteristic of plants in the fall. There were fewer red roses than pale-pink ones—red roses, despite their more pronounced color and their stronger scent, don’t last as long. They seem to wear themselves out.
Maybe it’s the color that wears out the roses.
I passed a station, I don’t remember which one, where the people getting off a train from Paris stood out behind the railing that separated the platform from the street like figures silhouetted against a background of sky. You got the impression that they were hesitating, they didn’t know where to go. The train left again; it was typical of Sunday, all that, the degree of blankness, of slight uncertainty, of vague apprehension (connected to uncertainty) that characterizes a Sunday; I put on my sunglasses and told myself that despite the fine weather, despite what was left of summer, you could always recognize a Sunday afternoon.
On Sunday evenings when my sister and I were children and our family lived in Brussels, Mama was often nervous. Night fell faster than it did on the other days of the week, especially in winter, and it was preceded by a damp fog. We’d be brought to the park; we’d be required to walk around the lake, to “get some fresh air.” “Walk fast and breathe through your noses—if you don’t, you’ll inhale the dampness, you’ll get sore throats, and I have no intention of taking care of you.” We’d go up on the Japanese bridge and throw bread to the swans. Mama would watch us from a distance, clutching her fur collar tight with both gloved hands. On the avenue that bordered the park, the streetlamps would come on one by one; we liked the way those lights, magnified by the foggy mist, shone in the night; we could feel their chilly poetry, but on the way back we’d walk “as though we were walking on eggshells,” with a strange pang in our hearts. We knew what the rest of the evening would be like. It was the same every Sunday: when we got back home, Mama would reproach Papa, who’d stayed home to read the newspaper, for the boredom and the household chores with which marriage had filled her life. Those reproaches were exacerbated by our life in Belgium; our life in Belgium greatly exacerbated the Sunday evening anxiety in our home. For example, the neighbors in the apartment above ours, a Belgian couple (the Kacenelenbogens), were content with café au lait and tartines de cassonade, slices of bread spread with butter and brown sugar, for Sunday dinner. From this practice Mama would draw an argument: if we could only have been Belgians, real Belgians, free from French complications in matters regarding la cuisine, we would have eaten tartines de cassonade like the Kacenelenbogens, and she wouldn’t have had to tire herself out. She’d slam the kitchen door; she’d say that Sundays were unbearable, and that her life was a failure.
As for the neighbors below us (the Van Huysts), they had made some comments on the noise coming from the floor above their heads. We were required to wear slippers with felt soles inside the apartment. Sometimes we’d pretend to skate on the floor in the hall, as if on a Dutch canal. We’d go over our poems. Monday was recitation day, so we always went over our poems the night before. I haven’t forgotten the ones we learned; they seemed fitting for Sunday, for the gray, cloudy weather. There was the one that started, “Here’s the wind, the wild November wind,” and also one by Théophile Gautier called “Autumn Song”:
Rain bubbles on the garden pond.
The swallows gathered on the roof
Confabulate and correspond.
Reciting the poems gave me a delicate pleasure, delicate and a little sad.
Our apartment was very silent. The silence would weigh on us, and we’d ask permission to turn on the television set and watch Thierry la Fronde, Terry the Sling. In those days, like all the girls of our generation, we were in love with Thierry la Fronde; I’m tempted to say like all the normal girls of our generation, but sometimes I wonder if our childhood, my sister’s and mine, was normal.
No one’s childhood is really normal, I suppose.
Speaking of Thierry la Fronde, a good many years ago I saw the actor Jean-Claude Drouot onstage, in a performance of Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya. Drouot played the title role, but it was hard to believe him. He wore the rumpled white linen suit that in the imagination of French directors represents the way Russian landowners dressed in summer on their birch-wooded estates. He had aged, which shocked me; even so, he didn’t look at all like a Russian landowner. He looked as though he was still roaming, with his jerkin, his sling, and his companions, through the forests of French public television (ORTF, as it was in our day). It was a weird feeling that lasted, in my case, for the whole performance, as if Chekhov’s melancholy had suddenly replaced the memory of our Sunday afternoons in front of the television.
I was sitting in the third row of the orchestra, and while the play was going on, I spoke to the actor in my mind. I said to him, You just can’t fool us.
(Or was it You just can’t make us forget?)
We had tender hearts and lots of imagination.
Two or three years later, Jane Eyre’s alarming “master,” the formidable and gloomy Mr. Rochester, succeeded Terry the Sling. Rochester too appeared to us on the small screen one afternoon, in an old Hollywood adaptation of the novel. He made such an impression that I can still see him arriving, a horseman riding on the fog, his burly silhouette, his cape like a Gothic king’s, his curly black hair, which he pushes off his pale forehead as he asks, “Jane, do you find me handsome?”
The answer floored us: “No,” Jane boldly says.
That was surely on a Sunday (Sunday was television day). The living room was filled with late afternoon darkness. Crows were circling the chimneys of Thornfield; sounds of rattling chains echoed in the corridors. Our knees were weak, our eyes bulging, our mouths slightly open, when Mama opened the door: “Close your mouths, don’t slump on the sofa. Have you learned your recitations? I want to hear you recite in ten minutes.”
We were going to recite “The Wild November Wind” and “Rain bubbles on the garden pond.” But it was too late; the damage had been done; it would last. Thierry la Fronde, newly perceived as dull and scrawny, got tossed into the dustbin of childhood. Now we dreamed of being afraid; we dreamed of a gloomy man our father’s age, with wide nostrils, Orson Welles’s head (Welles played Rochester), and the look of a half-caste king.
There was one scene we were especially fond of: Jane’s spoiled wedding. It would suggest to my sister the scenario of a game that I describe here to give an idea of what our childhood was like (and which, naturally, I keep secret from Luc): it consisted in wrapping ourselves up in one of the transparent curtains that decorated the window in our room. This window, situated just above the radiator, overlooked the courtyard of our apartment building, a courtyard where there was absolutely nothing to see: some garages and the roofs of other buildings, bristling with TV antennas. Nobody could guess what we were doing. Or—to be fair—people outside could naturally suppose we were misbehaving. They could figure we were sunk in the glum and guilty boredom of children, the boredom of Sunday evenings.
Nothing was further from the truth: our hearts were pounding because we’d just put on our “wedding veils.” Unmoving and veiled, our noses in the sheer curtains, which smelled (I remember) like dust and new fabric, our knees hot from the radiator, singing softly (a diversionary tactic), we’d stand in spirit “before the altar,” betrothed, hand in hand with a gloomy, “olive-skinned,” no-longer-young man.
“Does anyone know of an impediment to this marriage?” the priest would ask.
A voice would cry out from the back of the church: “Stop! The marriage cannot take place. Mr. Rochester has a living wife.”
“Proceed,” Rochester would say to the clergyman.
He’d bring us back to the manor house, squeezing our hands in his “grasp of iron.” He’d open the door to the hidden room, guarded by a certain Grace Poole, and reveal to us his secret: a woman kept under lock and key, a disgusting red-faced gorgon with unkempt hair, neighing like a beast, our rival.
“That is my wife,” he’d say; “Such is the sole conjugal embrace I am ever to know…And this is what I wished to have,” turning toward us, “this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell.”
That’s what we were doing, my sister and I, under the curtains on Sunday evenings. We were standing, grave and quiet, at the mouth of hell.
“Why is it so dark in here? What on earth are you two doing, always tangled up in those curtains? These children are nervous wrecks,” Mama cried when she opened the door. “When are you going to start your homework? If you don’t study, you’ll end up cashiers. Discount store cashiers. So you know what’s waiting for you.”
Those were the days when my sister developed a taste for spending long periods of time at the window, doing nothing. This soon turned into a habit.
She had such a capacity for silence that it sometimes upset Mama: “What’s Claire Marie doing? I can’t hear her. Go see what she’s up to. She’s not going to look out the window all day long.”
I knew very well what Claire Marie was up to when she had her nose pressed against the glass: she was wandering the moors, pouring buckets of water on Rochester’s burning bed, strolling with him in the orchard at twilight (“Jane, do you hear that nightingale?”), or she was in one of the rooms in Thornfield Hall in the dead of night, sponging blood off a stranger—an operation that fascinated us, by the way. When we were asked to clean the table (which we had to do after supper every night, taking turns), we’d watch the sponge swell up with water; we had a vague notion of what it might be like to “sponge away blood.” A stranger’s blood.
I’d ask the question for appearances’ sake, in my capacity as interpreter of the Higher Powers: “What are you doing?” I’d say to my sister.
“Nothing,” my sister would reply.
“Nothing,” I’d go back and tell the said Powers.
“She doesn’t have homework to do? She doesn’t have any math exercises? How does she expect to make any progress? That child’s going to wind up being a cashier! She won’t be able to say no one warned her!”
I remember a phase when we were totally somnambulant, when we were conducting a nonstop amorous discourse. We’d walk, sleep, comb our dolls’ hair, and talk to Rochester all the while. We thought we could hear him calling in the night.
“Is that you? Where are you, Master?”
We had begged for the book, we were reading it, at night, in bed with the lights out, embroidering the plot, inventing scenes that thrilled us and frightened us.
(“Those children are going to wind up with myopia, both of them!”)
I believe my sister stayed under the spell of that literary love affair for a long time, while I, younger but clearly more practical-minded, developed a crush on my first-year Latin teacher, Monsieur Jumeau (Bernard Jumeau). My grades climbed up to the heights. I knew my declensions by heart. I worked hard to dazzle him. Things went so far that predictions for my future employment shifted from cashier to Latinist or archivist-paleographer—which had been Monsieur Jumeau’s first vocation and fondest dream; he told us about it in the course of a gathering in the faculty room. Blushing and modest, I stood between my parents the whole time. I was twelve. He suggested the same future for me, a suggestion I took as a declaration of reciprocal love and a discreet way of making our engagement official.
“Very nice, your Latin teacher,” Mama said when we got home from the party. “And a pretty good-looking man.”
IN THE END, I didn’t study archival paleography.
On the road to Ville-d’Avray that day many years later, in the immobility of that fall Sunday, I nevertheless gave some brief thought—and why? Was it an intuition? Was it because I was moving closer to my sister?—to Monsieur Jumeau (Bernard Jumeau). He had dark hair; he looked (at least in my personal mythology) like the statue of Julius Caesar Imperator reproduced in our Latin textbook. He’d been my first incursion into the domain of real feelings and actual life. It was obvious that Thierry la Fronde or Rochester couldn’t be considered in the same way. Then I said to myself, Have no regrets! If you’d pursued your studies in archival paleography, you’d surely be myopic by now. Archivist-paleographers have to spend hours and hours in the library.
As for Claire Marie, she made a late exit from her Rochester period and plunged straight into her rock music period. A taste for acrobatic rock’n’roll replaced a taste for daydreaming. Or, more precisely, her musical enthusiasms alternated for a good while with her other phases, which tended to be more fanciful. Young, long-haired rock’n’rollers, energetic fellows whose handshakes were vigorous and upbeat, just the way Papa loathed them, succeeded one another in her heart. Periodically, when Mama returned from one of her evenings out, she’d go back to predicting a future as a cashier for Claire Marie and, because she wouldn’t be able to keep a steady job, the general failure of her life.
AND SO I WAS FULL OF MEMORIES, I was in the melancholy state of mind that often comes over me when I go to see my sister, and I think I started by getting a little lost in Ville-d’Avray, by driving through the provincial, peaceful streets of my sister’s neighborhood, past private homes with their gleaming bay windows, their porches, their phony airs (Art Deco villa, Norman country house), their gardens planted with rosebushes and cedars.
I had the good luck to find a parking spot on her street. The doorbell at the gate emitted two or three rising notes. Nobody came; but an upstairs window was open.
After five minutes or so, my sister stuck her nose out the front door, cried out in surprise, and crossed the garden to the gate. Her bare feet were in flip-flops, she wore no makeup, her hair was disheveled; she seemed a bit distracted; she pushed a thick lock of hair off her forehead, and I thought I heard Mama (or Grandma) say, “Comb your hair for a change, Claire Marie!”
I asked her, “Are you by yourself? Am I disturbing you?”
“Not at all,” my sister said. “I was reading, and I must have dozed off. You’re not disturbing me at all. I don’t see you that often, you know. It’s a surprise. Especially on a Sunday!” She gave a slight laugh. “You and Luc didn’t go out for a walk? Everybody takes a walk on Sunday. Especially since the fine weather won’t last. The house isn’t very tidy at the moment. Don’t look at my cellar. It’s a shambles!”
Music was coming from one of the rooms.
“Mélanie’s playing the piano, rehearsing for her audition. And Christian’s at the office, he’s on duty today, it’s his turn. I think he’ll be home late. We’ll sit in the garden.”
She showed me the dry soil under her rosebushes. “I shouldn’t have fallen asleep, I should have watered the roses. You see, we just came back from vacation, the garden needs a lot of attention. This Sunday’s half over, and I still haven’t got anything done. It’s terrible. Soon it’ll be time to deal with the leaves. It’s been very dry, so they’ve already started falling, and when they fall, they pile up. Stay there, I’m going to get us something to drink and tell Mélanie you’re here.”
She walked toward the house, making a broad gesture that meant, Things are piling up. Leaves are piling up. As if she were helpless in the face of those enormous piles.
I could hear my niece’s piano through the window. Her room was on the upper floor; I’d seen her open window; it looked out on a cedar that hid the house across the street. From time to time, my niece stopped playing. There was a passage that kept tripping her up, but when that happened, she’d dutifully start the whole piece over. Through her open window, she must have been breathing the still air, full of the peace proper to the beginning of autumn, full of its damp tranquillity. Her neighbor was mowing his lawn; the loud drone of his motor competed with the piano; I imagined my niece turning toward the window in irritation from time to time as she played. She surely dreamed of being an elegant, refined pianist whom men would admire. And she was, perhaps, in love with her piano teacher. Classic.
Unfortunately, the piano teacher would say, “That’s not very good, not very good at all.”
Life’s like that: you make a valiant effort to carry your dreams, yours or those of others.
AS I WAITED IN THE GARDEN, I also had a familiar but indefinable feeling, slightly heavy, like a mild illness. Ville-d’Avray is just a few minutes from Paris, but you’d think you were hundreds of kilometers away. That, no doubt, explains how a man like Luc can be incapable of comprehending the universe my sister lives in. Luc’s the very model of a busy, active Parisian. He’s stuffed full of theories about all sorts of things; he’s adaptable, practical, rational, often ironic. He has reasoned opinions on every subject. I’ve often tried to explain to him that this is not the case with Claire Marie. Not that she isn’t intelligent. She’s read a lot, but she hasn’t drawn any theories from all that reading. She’s remained muddleheaded, dreamy, passive. I’m sure that Ville-d’Avray, with its peaceful, secluded streets, its houses set back in their gardens, given over to the passage of the seasons as if defenseless against time, has further increased the gap between her and reality. She has all sorts of outdated habits: every time I invite her to my house, she “dresses up”: I’m sure she tries on several of the dresses in her closet, I’m sure she hesitates, like Mama, and asks Christian, who’s waiting for her and hurrying her along, asks him the way Mama would ask Papa, “Are you sure this looks all right on me? Wouldn’t the little blue dress be prettier?” Whereupon she takes out “the little blue dress” and says, “I’ll just slip it on, won’t take a second, and you’ll tell me what you think.” And then she changes her mind and tries on something else and complains, “I don’t have anything to wear, I can’t, I won’t be good enough”; she’s afraid of not being “good enough,” but one might well wonder why; her indecisiveness is obsessive. Result: she always arrives late and her hair’s a mess, but she’s decorated “like a flowerpot” (one of Luc’s expressions for her). Most of our friends, Parisian academics, come to our parties wearing jeans, a manifestation of their critical spirit, of their free outlook on life; a sign that they’ve liberated themselves from the tiresome, bourgeois ceremonial of appearances. It would be more accurate to say that the ceremonial takes subtler forms in their case, hidden in certain nearly invisible details of their clothes, which are simple, well-tailored, usually black, responsive to selective codes, born in the center of Paris, fluctuating like fashion, and which my sister does not own because she lives in Ville-d’Avray.
“What did you think about Claire Marie’s dress?” Luc asks me when the party’s over and we’re back in our bedroom. He sounds critical. “Where does she buy her clothes?”
When she’s at our house, she seems about as comfortable as an owl that’s left the woods; she makes the rounds from group to group, courteously holds out her hand to our friends, shows nothing, rarely takes part in the conversation; I think what’s being said leaves her indifferent.
It sometimes happens that one of our guests notices her and later asks me a question: “Who was the tall, thin woman in red at your place the other day?”
“My sister,” I say. “My older sister.”
“One doesn’t see much of her.”
Then I say, “She lives in Ville-d’Avray.” Which isn’t an explanation.
“She’s got something, not that I know what it is,” our friend Adrien pointed out one day, he who prides himself on his psychological insights and his amorous successes. “She looks like Faye Dunaway. The tall dark-haired guy’s her husband?”
“An old actress who must be well past it at this point.” That was Luc’s comment when I told him about the conversation. “But you know Adrien, he’s a smooth talker.”
To be honest, I think I can assert that the vague discomfort I felt that day as I waited in the garden was the same as the malaise I often experience when we’re invited to Ville-d’Avray for lunch on a spring Sunday. In those cases, Claire Marie calls me up and says, “Come and enjoy the garden, we’ll eat outdoors. We’ll do a barbecue.”
She imagines that we, like all Parisians, suffer from lack of fresh air and greenery. But that’s a mistake: Luc loves the atmosphere of the boulevards, he loves the cafés in the Latin Quarter, they cause him no suffering at all.
Those days at my sister’s start off well but end with the same uneasy, slightly odd feeling. All the same, lunch is pleasant. The weather’s lovely. The table’s set with paper napkins. I go inside to join Claire Marie in the kitchen and help her with the aperitifs while Luc and Christian (we say “the men”) stay in the garden, in the shade of the big cedar. They’re relaxing, we tell each other, my sister and I, they’re calm, they’re “among themselves.” We pretend to believe they’re discussing some topic or other, but the truth is, they don’t do discussions. Luc gets bored. Afterward, he says that Ville-d’Avray depresses him. Christian cooks slices of beef on the barbecue. The barbecue’s in the back of the garden, and we watch him standing in the greasy smoke, sticking his big fork into the meat and turning it over on the grill. From across the yard, he asks us, “Medium or well done?”
Little by little, as the afternoon progresses, we’re seized by an anxiety that has no apparent cause. Pollen settles on our coffee cups. Wind blows the paper napkins onto the grass. Luc kicks me, more than once, under the table so that I’ll give the departure signal. Driving home, he keeps his eyes straight ahead, says nothing, and looks gloomy—which is not a good sign. At last he blurts it out: “Frankly, if I had to live all year round in Ville-d’Avray, I’d kill myself!”
I don’t reply. I think I know what he means to say, or rather what he’s escaping from at such high speed: those neatly aligned gardens, each with its number; those numbered lives that go on, once the house is in place, in the contemplative silence of the garden, until the little hitch—which is, after all, inevitable—occurs: the day when the doctor comes in with the “bad results,” when the doctor says further tests will have to be performed; when time, which has been slowly flowing along—punctuated by the flowering of the lilacs (my sister has one in her garden), the rather dreary neglect of the summer days when everyone’s on vacation, the collecting of the fallen leaves, the filling of the boiler, the maintenance of the English lawn, closely mown and sponge-soft—when all that suddenly seems to tip over into the void yawning just behind it.
Very often, during such afternoons, I observe my sister on the sly, wondering if she feels what we’re feeling. She doesn’t look unhappy. But with her you never can tell. As we’re leaving, I always say, “It was delightful! How pleasant your garden is! How lucky you two are!” But something shows me she’s not fooled. Every time she leaves a gathering at my house, she declares, “You have such nice friends!” Yet it’s quite clear to me that she doesn’t think so at all.
I even remember a conversation we had years ago. Claire Marie abruptly turned to me and asked, in her direct, slightly ingenuous way, “Are there ever times when you dream of something else?”
“What do you mean, something else?”
“I don’t know, I…,” my sister sighed. “Does your life satisfy you?”
I said, “Yes, why? Everything’s fine.”
I have to be honest: that wasn’t true. I’d felt it the moment I said it; my relationship with my sister, I must admit, is much more ambiguous than it appears to be. Her question had stirred up something buried in a secret corner of my mind (or my heart), the old, vague, passionate dream, the never-forgotten images of an overblown, schmaltzy romanticism: the pasteboard reproduction of the manor house, the flames of the fire, the drama, the banks of artificial fog, and looming up from them, “Orson Welles,” the dashing cavalier, the ideal man, the tormented “master”!
It was a remnant of childhood, I knew it. Our life with Rochester—my sister’s and mine—isn’t acceptable to anyone; our childhood isn’t acceptable to anyone. It weighs on us. But we can’t manage to get rid of it. It makes us exiles. I’ve tried to conceal it, I try to bluff. I try to appear liberated and modern (not an easy goal to accomplish, you have to admit, given the heavy burden of our upbringing on my sister and me). I’ve tried with all my strength to adjust.
That was why I resented my sister. That’s what’s so irritating about her. She rattles you. Our conversation upset me so much that I brought it up that very evening: “You know what Claire Marie asked me?” I said to Luc, quite casually. “She wanted to know if I didn’t dream of something else, if my life ‘satisfies me.’ ”
I was ensconced on the bed, painting my toenails. Luc was in the bathroom; I couldn’t see his reaction. He didn’t answer me, and so, sitting there on the bed with my toes spread apart, contemplating the ten little red rectangles while waiting for the nail polish—Rouge Passion, carefully chosen at the Champs-Élysées Sephora—to dry, I wondered whether he’d heard me. Or maybe he was brushing his teeth. The water was running in the sink. I don’t like to hear water running. I get the feeling that time is passing, that the globe’s resources are being used up. I get the feeling I’m losing something.
I called out, “Can’t you turn off the faucet? Do you hear me?” And then, “What do you think about what I just told you?”
I hardly dare reveal the answer I was waiting for. I’m ashamed of it. I was waiting for the wind-buffeted moor to replace the bathroom corridor. I was waiting for a dashing cavalier to emerge from it and take me in his arms and press me against him “like a frightened little bird.” I was waiting for him to say to me, “Jane, sometimes I feel as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string somewhere in your chest. And if that cord of communion should snap, Jane, I have a nervous notion I would take to bleeding inwardly.”
“What do you expect?” Luc said, coming out into the corridor in his pajamas and standing under the hall light with his toothbrush in his hand. “You know very well how your sister is. That’s just pure Ville-d’Avray.”