6 With a Bottle of Beer in Hand #3
“They were inseparable as girls. The two, Paulina and Júlia, were only children, and that’s why, as you can imagine, they were more sisters than cousins.
Neither of their families were overflowing with money, so, in order to save, they went on vacation together.
They rented a cottage in Sant Pol, and the two girls spent the whole day glued to each other.
Together they went to the beach or jumped rope in the town, or did homework on the porch, which, from what they tell me, there was shade there and it was the breeziest place in the Can Botey home.
They were so in unison they would synchronize their breathing.
In fact, they slept in the same room, and they alternated summers sleeping on the highly coveted mattress next to the window.
Once they got older, my mom wasn’t one for school, but her cousin was sharp.
Júlia won a scholarship and went to study at the Sorbonne, where she met Alain, tall as a giant. They fell in love and stayed in Paris.”
“At whatever-it-is-sur-Seine.”
“In Croissy, exactly. Obviously, my mother went to the wedding. She didn’t just attend.
Júlia wanted her to be the maid of honor.
Recently I saw Alain and Júlia’s wedding album, and my mother is in all the pictures, absolutely radiant, with and without the newlyweds, holding the bouquet .
. . My mother was beautiful. Like me, but even more so. ”
They laughed again with the frankness of a friendship between schoolmates who haven’t seen each other in twenty years, but still understand each other with only a glance.
“Alain and Julie, which is what they called her over there, had two daughters. My cousins. Actually, Fabienne and Laurence are my second cousins, but because there are so few of us in this family, we don’t pay attention to the degree of parental separation.
Six months ago, just after the holidays, Fabienne called me crying early one morning to tell me that her mother died of a heart attack in the garden of her house while grafting some geraniums. I dropped everything, I canceled classes at the university, and I went to Paris to be with my French cousins.
A whole drama. Well, just as it is everywhere for all families, when someone dies before their time.
And it’s even worse when it’s so sudden.
What I mean is that there’s nothing that makes it sadder or more tragic or different from the obstacles everyone experiences and has to bear, if you get what I’m saying.
I get there, and Alain is a mess, obviously.
Collapsed on the sofa to the point that you can’t even get him to react.
Just imagine a philosopher who is suddenly left without answers.
Fabi and Laurence are also shattered. But on we go, we did a nonreligious burial, with a woman who spoke beautifully and some musicians who we got the sheet music for ‘The Emigrant’ for a string trio so that they could play it as best they could.
I spent two days at their house keeping them company.
On my last morning, Fabi, who had asked for the day off to accompany me to the airport, went through her mother’s wardrobe to make piles of clothes for donation, grouping shoes to throw out, and sorting boxes and hats and .
. . All very French, just so you know, somewhere between pretentious and old-fashioned.
Nothing I would wear ever. And there in my Tia Júlia’s wardrobe, inside a square beige box that my cousin said she had never seen, she took out a handful of papers and began to page through them.
She looked through, read them, went back, and organized them on top of the bed.
Suddenly, she said, ‘Gina, I don’t get it.
This doesn’t belong to my mom. It belongs to yours.
’ She spoke to me in French and really emphasized the possessives, but despite that, I didn’t really understand.
So I said, ‘Sorry?’ And, among the papers, she took out three letters, without a return address, addressed to Julie Homs, number 2 on some street in Croissy-sur-Seine, with a heading, under the postmark, that said within parentheses, ‘To Madame Paulina Homs’s attention.
’ That is my mother. Two of the letters were open, one just waiting to be opened.
As if no one had ever read it. Of course I opened them, of course they moved me, so much that on the return flight I read them however many times more, and that since then, and it’s been a couple months, I’ve just tried to reconstruct what it all means and who my mom really was.
Biel, I don’t know if I should tell you that I would like you to come to my house one day so you could give these letters a look and see if you find another clue. ”
“I would love to.” He cut himself off. If he could be with Gina, he’d be happy. “Do you still live in a student apartment?”
“No, now I live in a professor apartment, if that’s any better.” Gina got up, with an impulse that was reminiscent of her classmates. “Should we go dance?”
“You go dance. I’m gonna get a gin and tonic.”