Inseparable Read online

  Madame Gallard looked straight at me; there was something in her eyes, something like pleading.

  “You see, Sylvie, it is absolutely out of the question that Bernard and Andrée ever marry; Bernard’s father is just as opposed to the idea as we are. So I have forbidden Andrée from seeing him again.”

  “I understand,” I ventured, stammering.

  “She’s taken it very badly,” said Madame Gallard. Once again, she shot me a look that was both suspicious and imploring. “I’m counting on you a lot.”

  “But what can I do?” I asked.

  The words came out of my mouth but made no sense, and I didn’t understand the sounds reaching my ears; my head was full of noise and darkness.

  “Distract her, talk to her about things that interest her. And then, if you have the opportunity, try to reason with her. I’m afraid she will fall ill. Right now, I can’t say anything to her,” Madame Gallard added.

  She was clearly worried and unhappy, but I wasn’t moved by her: quite the opposite, at that moment, I hated her.

  “I’ll try,” I murmured, grudgingly.

  The horse trotted along the avenue lined with white oak trees and stopped in front of a large manor house with walls covered in Virginia creeper: I’d seen a photograph of it on Andrée’s mantelpiece. I now knew why she loved Béthary and the horseback riding she did there; I understood what she was thinking about when she stared out into space.

  “Hello!”

  Andrée walked down the front steps, smiling; she was wearing a white dress with a green necklace, her short hair was as shiny as a helmet. She looked like a real young lady, and I suddenly thought that she was very pretty: it was an incongruous idea; we hardly attached any importance to beauty.

  “I think that Sylvie wants to freshen up; and then you can come down to dinner,” said Madame Gallard.

  I followed Andrée through the entrance hall that smelled of crème caramel, fresh wax, and an old granary. Doves cooed; someone was playing the piano. We went upstairs and Andrée opened a door.

  “Mama’s put you in my room,” she said.

  There was a large canopy bed with spiral columns and, at the other end of the room, a narrow divan. How happy I would have been an hour earlier at the idea of sharing Andrée’s room! But now I went inside with a heavy heart. Madame Gallard was using me: so she would be forgiven? To distract Andrée? To keep an eye on her? What exactly was she afraid of?

  Andrée walked over to the window.

  “When there’s clear weather,” she said listlessly, “you can see the Pyrenees.”

  Night fell, there was no clear weather. I washed and fixed my hair, and talked about my journey without much enthusiasm. I’d taken the train alone for the first time; it had been an adventure, but I found nothing more to say about it.

  “You should cut your hair,” said Andrée.

  “Mama doesn’t want me to,” I said.

  Mama thought that short hair made you look disreputable, so I pinned my hair back in a boring bun.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” said Andrée. “I’ll show you the library.”

  Someone was still playing the piano and children were singing; the house was full of sound: dishes rattling, footsteps. I went into the library: the complete collection of Revue des deux mondes,* from the very first issue, the works of Louis Veuillot* and Montalembert,* the sermons of Lacordaire,* the speeches of the Count de Mun,* everything by Joseph de Maistre.* On the pedestal tables were photographs of men with sideburns and old men with beards; Andrée’s ancestors: they had all been militant Catholics.

  Even though they were dead, you could feel they were at home here, and amid all those austere gentlemen, Andrée seemed out of place: too young, too delicate, and, especially, too alive.

  A bell rang and we went through to the dining room. There were so many of them! I knew everyone except the grandmother: she had white hair that she wore coiled around her head and the classic face of a grandmother; that was my only impression of her. Andrée’s older brother was wearing a soutane; he had just entered the seminary. He was having a discussion with Malou and Monsieur Gallard about women’s suffrage, which seemed to be a regular topic. Yes, it was scandalous that the mother of a family had fewer rights than a drunken laborer, but Monsieur Gallard objected that in the working classes, there were more women Communists than men; when all was said and done, if the law passed, it would serve the enemies of the Church. Andrée kept silent. At the end of the table, the twin girls were throwing bits of bread at each other; Madame Gallard smiled and did nothing. For the first time, I clearly realized that her smile hid a trap. I had often envied Andrée’s independence; suddenly, she seemed a lot less free than I was. Behind her, she had this past; around her, this large house, this enormous family: a prison whose exits were carefully guarded.

  “Well? What do you think of us?” said Malou, getting straight to the point.

  “Me? Nothing, why?”

  “You’ve been looking all around the table: you were thinking something.”

  “That there were so many of you, that’s all,” I said.

  I told myself that I had to learn how to keep my face from giving me away.

  “You should show Sylvie the grounds,” Madame Gallard said to Andrée as we got up from the table.

  “Yes,” said Andrée.

  “Take your coats, it’s cool out at night.”

  Andrée took down two loden wool coats hanging in the hallway. The doves were asleep. We went out the back door that led to the servants’ quarters. Between the storeroom and the woodshed, a wolfdog was whimpering as she pulled at her chain. Andrée went over to the doghouse. “Come on, my poor little Mirza,” she said, “I’ll take you for a walk, poor thing.”

  She untied the animal, who leaped joyously on her, then ran off ahead of us.

  “Do you think that animals have a soul?” Andrée asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “If they don’t, that’s just too unfair! They’re just as unhappy as people are. And they don’t understand why,” Andrée added. “It’s worse when you don’t understand.”

  I didn’t reply. I had waited for this evening for so long! I’d told myself that I would at last be taken into the heart of Andrée’s life; yet never had she seemed so distant: she was no longer the same Andrée since her secret had a name. We walked silently down poorly kept paths where mallow and cornflowers grew. The grounds were full of beautiful trees and flowers.

  “Let’s sit down over there,” said Andrée, pointing to a bench at the foot of a cedar. She took out a pack of Gauloise cigarettes. “Do you want one?”

  “No,” I said. “Since when do you smoke?”

  “Mama forbids it; but when you start to disobey . . .”

  She lit a cigarette, sending smoke rising into her eyes. I gathered my courage:

  “Andrée, what’s going on? Tell me.”

  “I suppose that Mama put you in the picture,” said Andrée. “She insisted on going to pick you up . . .”

  “She told me about your friend Bernard. You never told me anything about him.”

  “I couldn’t talk about Bernard,” said Andrée. Her left hand opened and closed in a kind of spasm. “Now it’s public knowledge.”

  “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” I said quickly.

  “With you, it’s different,” Andrée said, looking at me. “With you, I do want to talk about it.” She diligently inhaled a bit of smoke. “What did Mama tell you?”

  “How you and Bernard became friends and that she’s forbidden you from ever seeing him again.”

  “She’s forbidden me,” said Andrée, throwing the cigarette on the ground and crushing it with the heel of her shoe. “The night I arrived, I went for a walk with Bernard, after dinner; I got back late. Mama was waiting for me, and I could tell right away that she had a strange look on her face; she asked me a lot of questions.”

  Andrée shrugged. “She asked me if we had kissed!
” she said, sounding annoyed. “Of course we kissed! We love each other.”

  I lowered my head. Andrée was unhappy and I couldn’t bear that idea; but her unhappiness was strange to me. The kind of love that involved kissing had no reality for me.

  “Mama said horrible things to me,” Andrée said, wrapping her coat tighter around her.

  “But why?”

  “His parents are a lot richer than we are, but they’re not part of our social circle, not at all. It seems that over there, in Rio, they lead an odd kind of life, very undisciplined,” said Andrée, sounding puritanical. “And Bernard’s mother is Jewish,” she added quietly.

  I looked at Mirza, motionless on the grass, her ears pointing to the stars: I was as incapable of translating what I felt into words as she was.

  “And?” I asked.

  “Mama went and spoke to Bernard’s father; he agreed completely: I wasn’t a good match. He decided to take Bernard to Biarritz for the summer vacation, then they’ll head back to Argentina. Bernard is quite healthy now.”

  “Has he already left?”

  “Yes; Mama forbade me from saying goodbye to him, but I disobeyed her,” said Andrée. “You can’t know how awful it is to make someone you love suffer.” Her voice was trembling. “He cried; how he cried!”

  “How old is he?” I asked. “What’s he like?”

  “He’s fifteen, like me. But he knows nothing about life,” said Andrée. “No one ever cared about him, I was the only one he had. I have a small photograph of him,” she said, searching through her handbag.

  I looked at the young boy I didn’t know who loved Andrée, whom she had kissed, and who had cried so much. He had large, pale, bulging eyes and dark hair cut in the style of the Roman emperor Caracalla; he looked like Saint Tarcisius, the Christian martyr.

  “He has the eyes and cheeks of a real little boy,” said Andrée, “but you can see how sad his mouth is: he seems to be apologizing for being on this earth.”

  She leaned her head against the back of the bench and looked up at the sky. “Sometimes I tell myself that I’d prefer him to be dead; at least I’d be the only one suffering.”

  Andrée’s hand convulsed again. “I can’t stand the idea that at this very moment, he’s crying.”

  “You will see each other again!” I said. “You’ll see each other again because you love each other! One day you’ll be adults.”

  “In six years: that’s too long. At our age, that’s too long. No,” said Andrée in despair, “I know very well that I’ll never see him again.”

  Never! It was the first time that word struck my heart with all its weight; beneath the endless sky, I repeated it to myself, and wanted to cry out.

  “When I got home after having said goodbye to him forever,” said Andrée, “I climbed up onto the roof of the house: I wanted to jump.”

  “You wanted to kill yourself?”

  “I stayed there for two hours; it took two hours to make up my mind. I told myself it didn’t matter if I were damned: if God is not good, I don’t want to go to His heaven.”

  Andrée shrugged. “But I was still afraid. Oh! Not of dying, quite the opposite, I so longed to be dead! But fear of hell. If I go to hell, it’s for eternity; I would never see Bernard again.”

  “You will see him again in this world!” I said.

  “It’s over,” Andrée said, shaking her head.

  She suddenly stood up.

  “Let’s go back. I’m cold.”

  We walked across the lawn in silence. Andrée tied Mirza up and we went upstairs to our bedroom. I slept in the canopy bed and she slept on the foldout sofa. She turned off the light.

  “I didn’t admit to Mama that I’d seen Bernard again,” she said. “I don’t want to hear the things she’d say to me.”

  I hesitated. I didn’t like Madame Gallard, but I owed Andrée the truth.

  “She’s very worried about you,” I said.

  “Yes, I suppose she’s concerned,” said Andrée.

  ANDRÉE DIDN’T mention Bernard during the days that followed, and I didn’t dare be the first to bring him up. In the morning, she played her violin for a long time, and almost always sad pieces. Then we’d go out into the sunshine. This part of the country was dryer than where I’m from; along its dusty roads, I discovered the acrid scent of the fig trees. In the forest, I tasted the pine nuts, licked the drops of resin that had solidified on the pine trees. When we got back from our walk, Andrée would go into the stable and stroke her little chestnut horse, but she never rode him again.

  Our afternoons were not as calm. Madame Gallard had decided to see Malou married, so to camouflage the visits of boys who were more or less strangers, she opened up the house to all the “respectable” young people in the area. We played croquet or tennis or danced on the lawns, made small talk while eating cakes. The day that Malou came out of her room in an ecru silk shantung dress, her hair freshly washed and curled with a little curling iron, Andrée poked me with her elbow.

  “She’s dressed up to meet someone.”

  Malou spent the afternoon with a very ugly man from the Saint Cyr military academy who didn’t play tennis, didn’t dance, didn’t speak: every now and again, he would pick up our tennis balls. After he left, Madame Gallard locked herself in the library with her oldest daughter; the window was open, so we could hear Malou’s voice: “No, Mama, not him: he’s too boring!”

  “Poor Malou!” said Andrée. “All the guys she meets are so stupid and so ugly!”

  She sat down on the swing and took hold of its ropes. Next to the shed, there was a kind of open-air gymnasium. Andrée often practiced on the trapezium or the horizontal bar; she was very good at it.

  “Push me,” she said.

  I pushed; when she’d picked up some speed, she stood up and gave a mighty kick: soon the swing was flying toward the tops of the trees.

  “Not so high!” I shouted.

  She didn’t reply; she flew upward, swooped down, soared even higher. The twin girls, who were playing with the sawdust from the logs next to the dog’s kennel, had looked up, interested. You could hear the dull thud of tennis balls being hit in the distance. Andrée was skimming the leaves of the maple trees, and I was starting to get frightened: I could hear the steel hooks on the swing creaking.

  “Andrée!”

  The entire house was peaceful; through the basement window, muffled sounds rose from the kitchen; the larkspur and money plant that lined the wall barely moved. But I was afraid. I didn’t dare grab on to the seat of the swing or plead too much; I thought the swing was going to turn upside down, or that Andrée would be overcome by dizziness and would let go of the ropes. Just watching her flying up and down in the sky like a pendulum gone mad made me feel nauseated. Why was she swinging for such a long time? When she flew close to me, straight and tall in her white dress, her eyes stared blankly ahead, and her lips were tightly shut. Perhaps something in her mind had cracked and she could no longer stop. The dinner bell rang, and Mirza started to howl. Andrée continued flying through the trees. “She’s going to kill herself,” I thought.

  “Andrée!”

  Someone else had shouted. Madame Gallard came over to us, her face furious. “Come down at once! That is an order. Come down!”

  Andrée blinked and looked down at the ground; she bent her knees, sat down, and used her feet to brake so forcefully that she was flung forward onto the lawn.

  “Did you hurt yourself?”

  “No.”

  She started laughing; her laughter ended in a hiccup and she stayed glued to the ground, eyes closed.

  “Of course you’ve made yourself sick!” said Madame Gallard harshly. “Half an hour on that swing! How old are you?”

  Andrée opened her eyes. “The sky is spinning.”

  “You were supposed to make a fruit cake for tomorrow’s tea party.”

  “I’ll do it after dinner,” said Andrée, standing up. She put her hand on my shoulder. “I’m reeling.”<
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  Madame Gallard walked away; she took the twins by the hand and led them back to the house. Andrée looked up at the tops of the trees.

  “I feel good up there,” she said.

  “You frightened me,” I said.

  “Oh! The swing is sturdy, there’s never been an accident,” said Andrée.

  No, she hadn’t thought of killing herself, that was settled; but when I recalled her staring eyes and tightly closed lips, I was afraid.

  After dinner, when the kitchen was empty, Andrée headed downstairs and I went with her; it was an enormous room that took up half the basement. During the day, you could see things passing by its little window: legs, guinea fowl, dogs, human feet. But at this time of day, nothing moved outside, only Mirza on her chain whimpered softly. The embers were purring in the cast-iron stove; no other sound was heard. While Andrée cracked the eggs and added the sugar and yeast, I surveyed the walls, opened the sideboards. The copper pans sparkled: rows of saucepans, cauldrons, skimming ladles, basins, bed warmers that, in the past, had warmed the sheets of her bearded ancestors; on the dresser, I admired the set of enameled plates in simple colors. Made of cast iron, earthenware, stoneware, porcelain, aluminum, tin—countless covered pots, frying pans, casseroles, stewpots, oven dishes, porringers, soup tureens, platters, metal tumblers, strainers, meat cleavers, mills, molds, and mortars! What a variety of bowls, cups, glasses, champagne flutes and coupes, plates, saucers, gravy boats, jars, jugs, pitchers, carafes! Did every type of spoon, ladle, fork, and knife truly have a particular use? Did we really have so many different needs to satisfy? This secret world should have been revealed above ground through enormous, sophisticated celebrations which, to my knowledge, were unique to this place.

  “Is everything used?” I asked Andrée.

  “More or less: there are heaps of rituals,” she said. She put the pale cake batter in the oven. “You haven’t seen anything,” she said. “Come and have a tour of the cellar.”

  We first crossed through the dairy: glazed earthenware jars and bowls, polished wooden churns, blocks of butter, shimmering fromage blanc cheese covered with white muslin: this sterility and the smell of babies made me want to flee. I preferred the wine cellars packed with dusty bottles and little casks full of liquor; but the abundance of hams, dried sausages, piles of onions and potatoes overwhelmed me.