39 WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
39
W HAT D O Y OU W ANT TO B E W HEN Y OU G ROW U P?
Roger listened to the whole story, motionless. Then, he recounted where he’d been, ending with Marcel’s return. Barbara had inhabited Margaux’s voice and Zucca’s skin, and he’d entered the scene.
“What a life your grandmother has lived. And so many twists and turns.”
“Mamie was telling me about the meeting, word for word, and I couldn’t believe it.” A yawn escaped from Barbara after her night of not sleeping. “Look, for my work, I read all types of plots, but her story doesn’t lag too far behind any of those.”
“You should publish the book. Take Jasper’s writing and add this final chapter. The meeting with Zucca.”
“It feels like a lie that she hadn’t told me about it before. She’s so secretive about some things. She told me, ‘It wouldn’t have been useful for you to know it before, girl.’ And I said, ‘Mamie, nothing is insignificant, and nothing should be forgotten.’”
“That’s exactly why you should do the book.”
“I’m not an editor.”
“So? Go to Giresse and Trésor, tell them you have these materials, and they’ll rip it out of your hands.”
“It’s all so clear to you, huh?”
Roger was ready to respond with a quick “They’ll even translate it into Norwegian.” But he knew when to drop a bad mood, and he continued like nothing happened. Things that aren’t spoken don’t exist.
“What’s the problem?”
“I don’t know, I thought about it. I’m not saying no, but ... You can tell it’s not your family history.”
“That’s true.” Roger forced a smile. “A lifetime harvesting apples doesn’t make for a storyline. Three generations of boxes, hailstorms, and harvesting apples ... So much routine would make for a boring book. We could maybe bring something interesting out in the end with my father, but my brother won’t let us stick our noses into that.”
“Your brother!” She jumped up quickly. “Where’d you leave him? Where’s Marcel?”
“Good question. Where is he? I have no idea. Taking a walk, I suppose. He’ll send signs of life soon.”
“And what’s your plan?”
“Me?” It surprised him. “I don’t know. And you?”
“I was asking in case you want to accompany me to the retirement home. Mamie told me she has something for me ... It’s nice out. We could walk there.”
“You don’t have to meet up with the Norwegian editor today?”
“The one from Cappelen?” The question caught her off guard. “We finished our business yesterday. Anne Delacourt’s novel is his. Arnesen flew back to Oslo this morning.”
Roger waited for Barbara, in case she wanted to add something. She, meanwhile, was counting down the seconds for things to explode. There was a restlessness in the back of her eyes.
“Better that way, huh?”
“Yes, better that way.”
And they never spoke about it again.
Sometime later, they descended Montmartre to the statue of Churchill and turned at the pont Alexandre III. They walked leisurely along the river. They looked at the bouquinistes kiosks, and from time to time, they browsed the fashion magazines or postcards of Parisian skies from another generation. After, to avoid the horns of cars, they went down to the riverbank in search of eternal peace. There are places that haven’t changed in sixty years. The outskirts of the Seine are one of them. The people change: the ones who walk there, who laugh there, who plant down their easel to paint a smoking moon, who lie on top of a mattress to spend the night, who pee against a wall, who seal their love with an improvised dance, who steal a watch from a clueless tourist. The stage is always the same there, tranquil. The rocks, bridges, and trees resist the years. Only the characters change. None of them remain. Nor the words uttered. Everything has evaporated. Everyone has moved forward without slowing down, true passersby of life.
“It was impressive to see how many people sunbathed here in the middle of the war at Zucca’s exhibit. This is the pont du Carrousel, right?”
“This is where my mamie and grandfather swam. It’s one of the most beautiful passages in the book. Jasper described it perfectly.”
“I remember. You even became emotional when we read it.”
“It’s so horrible to think of everything that happened here. And the Nazi soldiers swam here. They took off their uniforms and weapons, and ... It makes me shiver to think about places where time erases the important things that have happened. And the place remains intact, like a virgin each time. Who would’ve thought that here Mamie Margaux—” Barbara suddenly stopped, and her face shifted. “I have an idea.”
Roger caught her drift. Her catlike eyes revealed it.
“Don’t look at me like that, Barb. I’m not jumping in.”
“You wouldn’t do it for me?”
“You want to contract tetanus? You’ve seen how the water runs.”
“You wouldn’t do it for my grandparents?” She was docile. “This is where they lived their most sublime hour.”
“You still surprise me sometimes. You would swim in this water?”
She knew how to delay the moment until she responded.
“Me? Not even in my dreams!”
She took off running. Roger followed her, careful to avoid her heels. He liked sprinting behind that hair that bounced on its own. You could sense a friendly beauty in Barbara’s laugh.
Once he caught up to her, they walked together in silence, holding hands, and recovering their breath on the peaceful journey. To switch banks, they crossed the pont des Arts and continued on the eroded cobblestones. Notre-Dame’s towers served as a sort of lighthouse in the background. Roger accompanied her to the door of Viviani.
“I’m going back home. Marcel wrote to me. He’s coming by to pick up his things. I’ll take the metro and go up.”
“Do you have to help him?”
He took the oboe key chain out of his pocket.
“He doesn’t have his key, and I’m going to say goodbye.” Sarcastically, he added, “If you give me permission, of course.”
“You make me so angry when you act all innocent.” She pinched his hand. “Don’t go away with Marcel, you hear?”
“You read my mind. How’d you guess? You have superpowers, Barbara.”
“You’re an ass!” She playfully slammed her fist against his chest. “At the very least, don’t laugh at me.”
“You remind me of your mamie.” He decided to put on his good-boy face. “Can I tell you something?”
Barbara opened her hands. “Go ahead.”
“I like that you tend to her.”
“No, don’t be mistaken. I also like to think I take care of her, but she’s the one who is caring for me.”
When they reached the oldest tree in Paris, they gave each other a long hug, like they would never see each other again.
Mamie Margaux smelled like fresh perfume. Knowing that Barbara was about to arrive, she’d sprayed herself with the bottle she kept on the nightstand, just in case. She didn’t want Barbara to smell the rancid stench of the retirement home, or think she was looking bad. She combed back her hair. She thought the pillow marks on her face were a sign of old age, and she had an obsession with always being nicely coiffed. She forced a cheery voice when her granddaughter entered the room:
“Good morning, beautiful.”
“You’re still alive, Mamie?”
“Still, my love.” She forced a smile. “One day, you’ll ask that, and I won’t respond.”
“I’ll leave these chocolate cat tongues on the table. Hopefully, they’ll last you a few days.”
“Milk chocolate?”
“Milk chocolate. How are you?”
She couldn’t pretend. Barbara knew her too well. When she entered, she had seen her looking sad. And she didn’t waste any time in asking why.
“These are hard days. I didn’t think Jasper’s death ... The days go by slowly here. You have a lot of time to think, and you think and remember. In the end, I decided to do something. I don’t know. Let’s see what you think.”
She opened the drawer of the nightstand, returned her comb, and took out an envelope.
“A letter?”
“Yes.” She gave it to Barbara.
“For me?”
“No, I finally decided to respond to Anine. You know, the woman in the room next door—”
“Who doesn’t know where her head is.”
“The one who always asks me the same thing five times a day.”
Barbara unfolded the letter. There were four single-sided handwritten pages.
“Can I ...?”
“I asked you to come so you could read it.”
“It’s an honor, Mamie.”
“I spent a lot of time on it. It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything, and I don’t know if it’s worth much, anything an old hag like me can say.”
“Please.” Barbara sat on the tall armchair next to the window. “Don’t say those kinds of things, Mamie.”
“Let’s see ...” Mamie felt that old kind of nervousness, like when you’re awaiting your exam grade. “Let’s see what you think.”
Dear Anine,
You ask me what I want to be when I grow up. You ask me time and time again with this persistence of your circular ideas. And it’s time for me to respond, now that I am a tired woman. Rest assured that I say it without complaining. It’s simply like this. The moment has come for us—I think you share in this—when we wake up tired, and we go to bed tired, without having done anything to merit it. But when you ask that question, and I see the renewed innocence in your eyes, time and time again, I sense that you want me to respond like you were seventeen or twenty, or whatever age at which life is still an immense spring meadow opening up before your very eyes. Ready for you to jump, scream, pray to the heavens, and run across it, looking for the path among the hedges that seems the most fun to you. Youth is, Anine, the age where we have become stuck. I’m not scolding you for it. Quite the opposite. Sometimes, settling back into that playful happiness must be a small inner paradise. Believing that your four grandparents, all alive and well and still charmants , are watching you while you cross the brook to eat a snack next to the fountain is a feeling of peace like no other.
But you and I, my beloved friend, are not twenty years old anymore. We have multiplied our joys and sadness by four, and today, grandmothers like us and so many of our friends at Viviani who look out the poet’s window at the oldest tree in Paris have also grown old. It’s a blessed consolation to know there will always be someone more wrinkled than we, isn’t it?
In the end, the big secret of aging is signing a cordial pact with solitude.
What do you want to be when you grow up, you ask me.
I acknowledge that your question has made me think. And I’ve never wanted to respond to you randomly with the first job that pops into my head. Given that thinking is still free, I have made the most of it. And if there’s anything we do here inside our rooms, it’s think. So, I’ve been ruminating on how best to respond to you. In such a way that this peaceful afternoon, when our sun has lost its rage, I pick up the pen to tell you, at once, what I want to be when I grow up.
I know it now.
I want to be an inventor. An inventor of time.
Maybe it would have been easier to answer that I want to be a nurse, not so much to clean the wounds of a bike fall, but so I could place a gauze on jealousy, which is humanity’s silent evil.
Maybe I could have said I want to be a schoolteacher when I grow up, not so much to teach geography, but rather to learn history. What use is there to explaining the rivers that sprinkle Europe’s maps if you can make an impact on the intensified hate that has jumped borders, annihilated people, and destroyed whole populations mercilessly?
If I were more ambitious, which I’ve never been, instead of a teacher, I could say school principal. Who knows if I could have been like Yvonne, the principal of my school, the one in front of the house, where I learned many things without realizing it and knowing I would carry them until now. The principal of l’école communale des filles was an authority figure because she knew when to discipline and when to coddle. In the middle of the war, however, she disappeared. We later discovered she’d been deported as a member of the resistance, first to Ravensbrück, then to Auschwitz. Three years ago, I saw they renamed the street of the school with her name. Yvonne Le Tac. A whole street for her. A street forever. Can you imagine it, Anine, what that means? Posterity. She deserved it. But maybe she never lived in the hopes of becoming a memory. You have to have a certain kind of vanity for these things. One time, she wanted a life, and that was it. And now it’s a home address where a man delivers pizzas. Even worse. Yvonne Le Tac is a tourist path on the way to Sacré-Coeur.
That’s why, when I grow up, I’d like to be an inventor. An inventor of time to marry things to the time when they’re supposed to happen. An inventor of time to discover the formula that lets me manage the anxieties plaguing me at each age. The three silent anxieties. Fear, embarrassment, and mourning.
The three anxieties with inconvenient timing that usually arrive too early or for which we find solutions too late.
Fears, I said. They grab us when we are too tender, when we still don’t understand that, after the darkness of night, a dawn will come ready to illuminate it all again.
Embarrassment perhaps makes us suffer less, but it follows us for too long. It always follows you, like a loyal dog. You know what I’m talking about, my friend? It’s the feeling of not being up to speed. Sometimes, out of ignorance. Or for saying something inopportune or inappropriate. At other times, it’s the gap in your teeth or your big ears or the sensation of a stench only you can smell that you think you leave behind like a skunk’s trail. I said the word “sensation.” And I say it to you, now that we are in each other’s confidences, as someone who got pregnant at a very young age and who felt like she’d dishonored her whole family. With the years—now I can’t tell you how many—you learn that embarrassment depends on each person. Only when we grow up do we realize it’s not worth it. At a good time, huh, Anine?
Mourning, however, comes when it comes. There isn’t an age where you learn to live with this pain, silent and cruel, that gnaws at you forever. You and I know nothing is a gift in this world. Life gives us a deal. It gives us a lot, but it compensates for it with absences. Mourning is a punishment.
Everyone knows their people, my friend.
I lost love when I was young. I lost my daughter when I was old. It was never the right time. “The side effects of war are well-known,” they told me. “An accident can happen to anyone,” everyone who didn’t know what to say after édith’s death said. But no one should have to bury a daughter. Or a husband before her thirties.
I loved one man, and I lost him twice.
Now that, thanks to your question, I’m forcing myself to write, I realize that poor Damien is, to this day, a number in the middle of a list in an extermination camp. He is, also, one of those freed from Buchenwald in another list of names ordered alphabetically. A simple name lost on a list. But for me, he was everything, and I didn’t want to let him go. I wanted to cling to him. The oboe, the case, the dedication in a book, the first kiss, the bells ringing over the waves, the farewell hug ... a nostalgia for the ups and downs. Every memory with édith, a daughter born of happiness, something of that nature. Her school albums, the first word she said, her tricycle, the personal conversations when she became a woman, the birth of Barbara, my granddaughter, who is still hope and salvation ... Forgetting is impossible. The past invades. Don’t get rid of all that, but my invention will help us know if there’s a time where we have to let go of the dead. You have to let go of their hands. Damien’s, édith’s, my parents’, or any one of the people we’ve loved or who we’ve held on to. The day comes to untie the bow around our fingers and let them fly. Don’t abandon them, Anine. We only free ourselves to continue. By the pure necessity of looking forward. For the survival itself of those we want to play with a little longer. Don’t you see how good milk and cookies still are every afternoon?
Anine, I’ve made my decision. When I grow up, I want to be an inventor of this engine that tempers rampant anxieties. Until now, I’ve led a modest life. A whole career as a salesgirl in a shoe store on Saint-Honoré, where we supplied shoes for all types. I’m not complaining. Being a salesgirl like my mother—attending to women, having a salary, always having a smile ready for everyone, looking for the right shoe size for every Cinderella—was fun. With more than fifty years of customer service, you can be sure I’ve seen it all. All kinds of feet, and shoes of all prices. Nothing, however, like those wooden-heeled shoes that click-clacked like clogs and could be heard from the other side of the street. Those became fashionable at the end of the forties. When Paris returned to being Paris.
I hope to have answered your question, Anine. Without your question, I maybe would have never had a day as nice as today. It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything, and you can see I still have a steady hand. Who knows if I could maybe take the oboe out of its case and play it a bit.
Your friend, now and forever,
Margaux Devère