Inseparable Page 3

  “Me? Not at all!”

  Andrée stared at me somewhat mockingly. “Don’t you ever dream about things? Doesn’t that ever happen to you?”

  “No,” I replied humbly.

  What would I have dreamed about? I loved Andrée more than anything, and she was here with me.

  I didn’t dream, I always learned my lessons, I was interested in everything. Andrée made fun of me a little; she made fun of just about everyone. I happily took her teasing. Once, however, she hurt me badly. That year, unusually, I spent the Easter vacation in Sadernac. I discovered springtime and was ecstatic. I sat down at one of the garden tables with some blank sheets of paper and for two hours described to Andrée the new grass dotted with cowslips and primroses, the scent of the wisteria, the blue sky, and the great emotion in my soul. She did not reply. When I first saw her again in the school’s coatroom, I asked her about it.

  “Why didn’t you write to me?” I said reproachfully. “Didn’t you get my letter?”

  “I got it,” said Andrée.

  “Well then, you’re damned lazy!” I said.

  Andrée began to laugh. “I thought you’d accidentally sent me the homework about your vacation . . .”

  I could feel myself blushing. “Homework?”

  “Come on, you didn’t churn out all that prose just for me!” said Andrée. “I’m sure it was a study for a composition: ‘Describe the springtime.’”

  “No,” I said. “It was probably bad prose, but I did write that letter just for you.”

  The young Boulard children were coming over to us, curious and talkative, so we left it at that. But in class, I messed up my Latin analysis. Andrée had found my letter ridiculous, which hurt me; but more importantly, she had no idea how much I needed to share everything with her. That was what saddened me the most: I had just realized that she had absolutely no idea of my feelings for her.

  We left school together; Mama didn’t take me anymore, and I normally went home with Andrée. Suddenly, she linked elbows with me: it was a surprising gesture, we always kept our distance.

  “Sylvie, I’m sorry about what I said to you before,” she said quickly, “it was pure spitefulness: I know very well that your letter wasn’t vacation homework.”

  “I suppose it was ridiculous,” I said.

  “Not at all! The truth is, I was in a foul mood the day I got it, and you sounded so joyful!”

  “Why were you in such a bad mood?” I asked.

  Andrée stood silent for a moment.

  “Just like that, no reason; just everything.” She hesitated. “I’m tired of being a child,” she suddenly said. “Don’t you find it endless?”

  I looked at her in astonishment. Andrée had much more freedom than I did; and even though things weren’t much fun at home, I had no desire to get older. The idea that I was already thirteen frightened me.

  “No,” I said. “The life that adults lead seems so monotonous to me; all their days are the same, they stop learning things . . .”

  “Oh! Studying isn’t all that counts in life,” said Andrée, sounding impatient.

  I would have liked to protest: “There isn’t just studying, there’s you.” But we had changed the conversation. In books, I thought with sadness, people declare their love or hatred for each other, they dare admit to everything they feel in their hearts; why is that impossible in life? I would walk for two days and two nights without eating or drinking to see Andrée for an hour, to spare her any pain: and she had no idea!

  For several days, I sadly hashed over those thoughts, then had a revelation: I’d make Andrée a gift for her birthday.

  Parents are unpredictable; normally, Mama found my ideas absurd a priori, but the idea of the gift was approved. I decided to use a pattern from La mode pratique to make a handbag that would be the height of luxury. I chose some red and blue silk and gold brocade, thick and lustrous, that looked as beautiful as a fairy tale. I mounted it on a wicker frame that I made myself. I hated sewing, but I worked so hard that once it was finished, the bag was really beautiful; it had a cherry-colored silk lining and a patch pocket. I wrapped it in tissue paper, put it in a box, and tied it with a ribbon. The day of Andrée’s thirteenth birthday, Mama came with me to her party; people were already there, and I felt intimidated as I handed the box to Andrée:

  “This is for your birthday,” I said.

  She looked at me with surprise.

  “I made it myself,” I added.

  She unwrapped the sparkling handbag and her cheeks turned slightly red. “Sylvie! This is amazing! You’re so kind!”

  I thought that if our mothers hadn’t been there, she would have kissed me.

  “Thank Madame Lepage as well,” said Madame Gallard in a friendly voice. “Because she was undoubtedly the one who did all the work . . .”

  “Thank you, Madame,” Andrée said quickly. Then she smiled at me, in a way that showed she was touched. While Mama was protesting somewhat, I felt a little knot forming in my stomach. I had just realized that Madame Gallard didn’t like me anymore.

  TODAY, I admire the insight of that vigilant woman: the fact is, I was changing. I was beginning to find our teachers total fools; I enjoyed asking them embarrassing questions, stood up to them, met their observations with impertinence. Mama scolded me a little, but when I told Papa about my quarrels with the teachers, he laughed; and that laugh removed any scruples I might have had. Besides, I couldn’t imagine for an instant that God would be offended by my misconduct. When I went to confession, I didn’t bother with childish things. I took Communion several times a week, and Father Dominique encouraged me to follow the path of spiritual contemplation: my secular life had nothing to do with that holy venture. The sins I accused myself of concerned my conscience: I’d lacked enthusiasm, forgotten about the presence of God for too long, was distracted when I prayed, thought about myself with too much indulgence. I had just reached the end of explaining these faults when I heard Father Dominique’s voice through the peephole: “Is that everything?”

  I sat dumbstruck.

  “I’ve been told that my little Sylvie is no longer the same as in the past,” said the voice. “It seems she has become distracted, disobedient, insolent.”

  My cheeks turned bright red and I couldn’t manage to get out a single word.

  “From now on, you must beware of those things,” said the voice. “We’ll talk about it together.”

  Father Dominique absolved me, and I left the confessional, my face on fire; I ran out of the chapel without doing my penance. I was far more shaken up than the day when a man in the Métro had opened his raincoat to show me something pink.

  For eight years, I had knelt before Father Dominique the way you kneel before God: and he was nothing more than an old blabbermouth who prattled with the teachers and took their gossip seriously. I was ashamed to have opened up my soul to him: he had betrayed me. From that point on, whenever I saw him in the corridor in his black robes, I would blush and run away.

  During the end of that year and for the following year, I went to confession with the vicars at the Église Saint Sulpice; I changed where I went often. I continued to pray and meditate, but during the summer vacation, I had a revelation. I still loved Sadernac, and went for many long walks, as in the past; but now the blackberries and hazelnuts in the hedges bored me, I wanted to taste the milk of the euphorbias, bite into the poisonous berries the color of rust that bear the beautiful, enigmatic name “Solomon’s seal.” I did a great deal of forbidden things: I ate apples in between meals, secretly took novels by Alexandre Dumas off the top shelf in the library. I had illuminating conversations with the tenant farmer’s daughter about the mystery of birth; at night, in my bed, I told myself bizarre stories that put me in strange moods. One evening, lying in a damp meadow, looking up at the moon, I thought: “I’m sinning!” but I was resolutely determined to continue to eat, read, speak, and dream in whatever way I pleased. “I don’t believe in God!” I thought. How was it
possible to believe in God and deliberately choose to disobey Him? I sat stunned for a moment by this revelation: I did not believe.

  Neither Papa nor the writers I admired were believers; and while the world probably could not be explained without God, God really didn’t explain that much, and besides, no one understood anything about Him. I easily adjusted to my new frame of mind. Nevertheless, when I got back to Paris, I was overcome with panic. You can’t help thinking what you think: but still, in the past, Papa talked about shooting the defeatists, and the year before, one of the older pupils had been expelled from school because, or so it was whispered, she had lost her faith. I would have to carefully hide my fall from grace; at night, I would wake up in a sweat at the idea that Andrée might suspect.

  Fortunately, we never talked about either sexuality or religion. Many other problems had begun to preoccupy us. We were studying the French Revolution; we admired Camille Desmoulins,* Madame Roland,* and even Danton. We endlessly discussed justice, equality, propriety. On such matters, the opinions of the teachers counted for nothing, while our parents had old-fashioned ideas that we no longer agreed with. My father happily read L’action française.* Monsieur Gallard was more democratic; he had been interested in Marc Sangnier* in his youth. But he was no longer young and explained to Andrée that any form of socialism necessarily brings with it a dumbing down and the abolition of spiritual values. He didn’t convince us, but some of his arguments worried us. We tried to have discussions with Malou’s friends, older girls who would have known much more than we did; but they thought like Monsieur Gallard, and such questions didn’t interest them much. They preferred talking about music, painting, and literature, in a rather stupid way, actually.

  When Malou was entertaining, she often asked us to come and serve the tea, but she felt we had little respect for her guests, so she tried to get back at Andrée by acting superior. One afternoon, Isabelle Barrière, who, very conveniently, was in love with her piano teacher—a married man with three children—brought the conversation around to romantic novels. Malou, her cousin Guite, and the Gosselin sisters took turns saying which ones they preferred.

  “What about you, Andrée?” Isabelle asked.

  “Romantic novels bore me,” Andrée said, quite definitively.

  “Really!” said Malou. “Everyone knows that you know Tristan and Isolde by heart.”

  Malou added that she didn’t like that story; Isabelle did like it; she declared dreamily that she found that epic of platonic love very moving. Andrée burst out laughing.

  “Platonic, the love between Tristan and Isolde! No,” she said, “there’s nothing platonic about it.”

  There was an embarrassed silence.

  “Little girls shouldn’t talk about things they know nothing about,” said Guite, curtly.

  Andrée laughed again without replying. I stared at her, confused. What exactly did she mean? I had only one idea of love: the love I felt for her.

  “Poor Isabelle!” Andrée said once we were back in her room. “She’s going to have to forget her Tristan: she’s almost engaged to an awful bald man,” she sneered. “I hope she believes in love at first sacrament.”

  “What’s that?”

  “My aunt Louise, Guite’s mother, claims that the moment the engaged couple says ‘I do,’ they fall madly in love with each other. You can see how useful that theory is to mothers; no need to think about their daughters’ feelings: God will provide.”

  “No one can believe that’s true, surely,” I said.

  “Guite does.” Andrée fell silent, then continued: “Mama doesn’t go that far, of course, but she does say that once you’re married, you’re blessed.”

  She glanced over at the picture of her mother.

  “Mama was very happy with Papa,” she said hesitantly, “yet if Grandmother hadn’t forced her, she wouldn’t have married him. She turned him down twice.”

  I looked at the photo of Madame Gallard: it was strange to think she’d once had the heart of a young girl.

  “She turned him down!”

  “Yes. Papa seemed too austere to her. But he loved her and wouldn’t be discouraged. She started to love him too after they got engaged,” Andrée added without much conviction.

  We thought for a moment in silence.

  “It can’t be much fun living day in, day out, with someone you don’t love,” I said.

  “That must be horrible,” said Andrée. She shuddered, as if she had seen an orchid; her arms broke out in goose bumps. “They teach us in catechism class that we have to respect our bodies: so selling yourself in marriage is just as bad as selling yourself outside of marriage,” she said.

  “No one is forced to get married,” I said.

  “I’ll get married,” said Andrée, “but not before I’m twenty-two.” She suddenly put our collection of Latin texts on the table. “Shall we get to work?”

  I sat down next to her and we concentrated on the translation of the Battle of Lake Trasimene.

  We no longer served tea to Malou’s friends. Decidedly, to answer the questions that preoccupied us, we had to count only on ourselves. Never had we talked as much as that year. And despite the secret that I did not share with her, never had we been as close as then. We were allowed to go to the Odéon movie theater to see all the great classics. We discovered the literature of the Romantic era: I raved about Hugo, Andrée preferred Musset, we both admired Vigny. We started planning for the future. It was agreed that after my baccalaureate, I would continue my studies; Andrée hoped she would be allowed to take courses at the Sorbonne. At the end of the trimester, I had the greatest joy of my childhood: Madame Gallard unexpectedly invited me to spend two weeks in Béthary, and Mama agreed.

  I expected Andrée to be waiting for me at the station, but when I got off the train, I was surprised to find Madame Gallard. She was wearing a black-and-white dress, a large black straw hat decorated with daisies, and a white silk ribbon around her neck. She moved her lips toward my forehead without actually kissing me.

  “Did you have a good trip, my little Sylvie?”

  “Very good, Madame,” then I added, “but I’m afraid I’m all covered in coal dust.”

  In Madame Gallard’s presence, I always felt vaguely guilty. My hands were dirty, my face as well, most likely; but she seemed not to care, she seemed distracted. She smiled at the employee out of habit, then headed toward an English-style carriage with a bay horse. She untied the reins from the stake and quickly climbed in.

  “Come along.”

  I sat down next to her; she held the reins loosely in her gloved hands.

  “I wanted to speak to you before you see Andrée,” she said, without looking at me.

  I stiffened. What advice was she going to give me? Had she guessed that I was no longer a believer? But then why did she invite me?

  “Andrée is upset, and you have to help me.”

  “Andrée is upset?” I repeated, like an idiot.

  I was embarrassed that Madame Gallard was suddenly talking to me as she would to an adult, there was something suspicious about it. She tugged on the reins and clicked her tongue; the horse started to move, slowly.

  “Has Andrée ever spoken to you about her friend Bernard?”

  “No.”

  The carriage followed a dusty road, lined with locust trees. Madame Gallard sat silent.

  “Bernard’s father owns the estate next to my mother’s,” she finally said. “He comes from one of the Basque families who made their fortune in Argentina: that’s where his father lives most of the time, along with his wife and other children. But Bernard was a frail child, he couldn’t take the climate there: he spent his entire childhood here, with an elderly aunt and private tutors.”

  Madame Gallard turned toward me.

  “You know that after her accident, Andrée stayed at Béthary for a year, lying on her back on a stiff board; Bernard came to play with her every day. She was alone, in pain, bored, and, of course, given their age at the t
ime, it didn’t matter,” she said in a remorseful tone of voice, which confused me.

  “Andrée didn’t tell me about that,” I said.

  I felt a lump in my throat. I wanted to jump out of the carriage and flee, like the day I had rushed out of the confessional, away from Father Dominique.

  “They saw each other every summer, went riding together. They were still only children. Only they’ve grown up.”