Inseparable Read online

  “This is why she needs to fly up into the trees,” I thought, looking at Andrée.

  “Do you like cherries in brandy?”

  “I’ve never tried them.”

  There were hundreds of pots of jam on the shelves: each one had a parchment label with a date and the name of the fruit. There were also jars of fruit preserves conserved in syrup and liquor. Andrée took one of the jars of cherries and carried it into the kitchen. She put it down on the table. Using a wooden ladle, she filled two bowls; she tasted the pink liquid right from the ladle.

  “Grandmother was heavy-handed,” she said. “You’d get drunk pretty easily on this!”

  I grabbed the stem of a faded piece of fruit. It was a little wilted, wrinkly: it no longer tasted like a cherry, but I liked the warmth of the liquor.

  “Have you ever gotten drunk?” I asked.

  Andrée’s face lit up.

  “Once, with Bernard. We drank a small bottle of Chartreuse. At first, it was funny: everything was spinning around even more than when I got off the swing; but afterward, we felt nauseated.”

  The stove hummed; we could just smell the slight scent of baking. Since Andrée had mentioned Bernard herself, I dared to question her.

  “Was it after your accident that you became friends? Did he come to see you often?”

  “Yes. We played checkers, cards, and dominoes. Bernard could have bad tantrums back then; once, I accused him of cheating, and he kicked me straight in my right thigh; he didn’t do it on purpose. I fainted from the pain. By the time I came to, he’d called for help and they were changing my bandages; and he was sobbing at the foot of my bed.”

  Andrée stared out into the distance.

  “Never had I seen a little boy cry; my brother and cousins were brutes. Once they’d left us alone, we kissed . . .”

  Andrée filled our bowls again; the smell was getting stronger; we could tell that the cake in the oven was turning golden brown. Mirza wasn’t whimpering anymore, she must have been asleep, everyone was asleep.

  “He started loving me,” said Andrée. She turned to look at me. “I can’t explain it to you: that made such a change in my life! I had always thought that no one could love me.”

  I flinched. “You thought that?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why?” I said, outraged.

  “I thought I was so ugly, so awkward, so uninteresting,” she said, shrugging. “And it was also true that no one cared about me.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “Oh! A mother has to love her children, that doesn’t count. Mama loved all of us, and there were so many of us!”

  There was disgust in her voice. Had she been jealous of her brothers and sisters? Had she suffered from the coldness that I could feel in Madame Gallard? It had never occurred to me that her love for her mother might have been an unhappy kind of love. She pressed her hands against the gleaming wooden table.

  “Bernard was the only one in the world who loved me for myself, just as I was, and because I was who I am,” she said passionately.

  “What about me?” I asked.

  The words had just slipped out: I felt outraged at so much injustice. Andrée stared at me in surprise.

  “You?”

  “Didn’t I care about you for who you are?”

  “Of course,” said Andrée, sounding vague.

  The warmth of the liquor and my indignation made me bolder; I wanted to say things to Andrée that are said only in books.

  “You never knew this, but from the day I met you, you’ve meant everything to me,” I said. “I’d decided that if you died, I would die immediately.”

  I was speaking of the past, and tried to sound detached. Andrée continued looking at me, confused. “I thought it was only your books and studies that truly counted for you.”

  “You came first,” I said. “I would have given up everything not to lose you.”

  She kept silent.

  “You didn’t know?” I asked.

  “When you gave me that handbag for my birthday, I thought that you really cared about me.”

  “It was a lot more than that!” I said sadly.

  She seemed touched. Why hadn’t I known how to make her sense my love? I had believed she was so admired that I thought she was fulfilled, happy. I felt like crying over her, and over me.

  “It’s funny,” said Andrée, “we’ve been inseparable for so many years, and I now realize that I don’t know you well at all! I judge people too quickly,” she said, sounding remorseful.

  I didn’t want her to blame herself.

  “I didn’t know you that well either,” I said with feeling. “I thought you were proud to be the way you are; I envied you.”

  “I’m not proud,” she said.

  She stood up and walked over to the stove.

  “The cake’s ready,” she said, opening the oven door.

  She turned off the oven and put the cake in the pantry. We went up to our bedroom.

  “Will you take Communion tomorrow?” she asked while we were getting undressed.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then we’ll go to High Mass together tomorrow. I’m not taking Communion either. I’m in a state of sin,” she added coolly. “I still haven’t told Mama that I disobeyed her, and the worst part is that I’m not sorry.”

  I slipped under my sheets, between the twisted columns. “You couldn’t have let Bernard leave without seeing him again.”

  “I couldn’t!” said Andrée. “He would have thought I was indifferent; he would have been even more devastated. I couldn’t,” she said again.

  “Then you were right to disobey,” I said.

  “Oh!” said Andrée. “Sometimes, no matter what you do, everything is bad.”

  She got into bed but left the blue light on her night table on.

  “It’s one of those things I don’t understand,” she said. “Why doesn’t God tell us clearly what He wants of us?”

  I didn’t reply; Andrée shifted in her bed, rearranged the pillows.

  “I want to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do you still believe in God?”

  I didn’t hesitate; tonight, the truth did not frighten me.

  “I don’t believe anymore,” I said. “I haven’t believed in a year.”

  “I thought so,” said Andrée.

  She propped herself up against her pillows.

  “Sylvie! It isn’t possible that there is only this life!”

  “I don’t believe anymore,” I said again.

  “Sometimes it’s difficult,” said Andrée. “Why does God want us to be unhappy? My brother tells me that’s the problem of evil, that the priests in the Church resolved it a long time ago. He repeats what he was taught in the seminary, but I’m not convinced.”

  “No,” I said, “if God exists, evil is not comprehensible.”

  “But maybe we have to accept that we can’t understand,” said Andrée. “It’s prideful to want to understand everything.”

  She switched off the night-light.

  “There’s surely an afterlife,” she added softly. “There has to be an afterlife!”

  I don’t know exactly what I expected when I woke up, but I was disappointed. Andrée was just the same, so was I, and we said good morning as we always had. My disappointment continued over the following days. Of course, we were so close that it was impossible to get any closer; saying a few things doesn’t carry much weight after six years of friendship. But when I thought back to that hour spent in the kitchen, I was sad to think that, in truth, nothing had happened.

  One morning, we were sitting under a fig tree, eating figs; the fat purple figs sold in Paris have no taste at all, but I loved this pale fruit, bursting with grainy jam.

  “I talked to Mama last night,” Andrée told me.

  I felt a twinge in my heart; Andrée seemed closer to me when she was distant from her mother.

  “She asked me if I’d take C
ommunion on Sunday. It upset her a lot that I didn’t last Sunday.”

  “Did she guess why?”

  “Not exactly. But I told her.”

  “Ah! You told her?”

  Andrée pressed her cheek against the fig tree.

  “Poor Mama! She’s so worried about everything now: because of Malou and now because of me!”

  “Did she get mad at you?”

  “She said that as far as she was concerned, she forgave me, and the rest was between my confessor and me.” Andrée looked at me, her face serious. “You have to understand her,” she said. “She’s responsible for my soul: she can’t always know what God wants of her either. It’s not easy for anyone.”

  “No, it’s not easy,” I said vaguely.

  I was furious. Madame Gallard tortured Andrée, and now she was the victim!

  “Mama talked to me in a way that devastated me,” said Andrée, filled with emotion. “She went through difficult times herself too, you know, when she was young.” Andrée looked around her. “Right here, on these very paths, she had hard times.”

  “Was your grandmother very strict?”

  “Yes.”

  Andrée was lost in thought for a moment.

  “Mama says there are blessings, that God limits the tests He sends us, that He will help Bernard, and He’ll help me the way He helped her.”

  She looked straight at me.

  “Sylvie, if you don’t believe in God, how can you bear to live?”

  “But I like living,” I said.

  “So do I. But that’s just it: if I thought that the people I love would die completely, I’d kill myself immediately.”

  “I don’t want to kill myself,” I said.

  We had left the shade of the fig tree and gone back to the house in silence. Andrée took Communion the following Sunday.

  Chapter 2

  We took our baccalaureates, and after many long arguments, Madame Gallard allowed Andrée to spend three years studying at the Sorbonne. Andrée chose to major in literature, I in philosophy; we often worked side by side in the library, but I was alone in class. The language, behavior, and words of the students frightened me; I remained respectful of Christian morality, and I found the other students too liberal. It was no accident that I discovered I had things in common with Pascal Blondel, who had the reputation of being an observant Catholic. I appreciated his perfect upbringing and beautiful, angelic face as much as his intelligence. He smiled at all his friends but remained distant from everyone, and he seemed to be particularly wary of the women students, but my philosophical zeal overcame his reserve. We had long intellectual conversations, and all in all we agreed on almost every issue, apart from the existence of God. We decided to team up. Pascal detested public places, libraries, and cafés: I went to his place to work. The apartment he lived in with his father and sister resembled my parents’ apartment, but the banality of his bedroom disappointed me. After I left the Adélaïde School, young men seemed to belong to a rather mysterious brotherhood that I imagined much more advanced than I was in the secrets of life, but Pascal’s furniture, his books, the ivory crucifix, the El Greco reproduction, nothing indicated that he was a different species from Andrée and me. For a long time, he’d had the right to go out alone at night and to read whatever he pleased, but I quickly realized that his options were just as limited as mine. He’d been educated in a religious institution where his father was a teacher, and he loved only his studies and his family. At the time, all I thought about was getting away from home, and I was surprised that he felt so comfortable at his. He shook his head: “Never will I be as happy as I am now,” he said, sounding as nostalgic as elderly men who missed the past. He told me that his father was a man to be admired. He had married late, after enduring a difficult childhood, and found himself a widower at the age of fifty with a little girl of ten and a baby who was a few months old; he had sacrificed himself entirely to them. As for his sister, Pascal considered her a saint. She had lost her fiancé during the war and decided she would never marry. Her chestnut-colored hair, pulled back into a heavy ponytail, revealed a high, intimidating forehead; she was very pale, with soulful eyes and a harsh, dazzling smile. She always wore the same style of dress: dark colors and elegantly austere, brightened up by a large white collar. She had energetically taken charge of her brother’s education and had tried to steer him toward the priesthood. I suspected that she kept a private diary and imagined herself to be Eugénie de Guérin.* While darning the family’s socks with her thick, rather ruddy hands, she must have been reciting Verlaine’s words to herself: “The humble life, with boring, easy tasks.” A good student, a good son, a good Christian, Pascal was a little too well behaved, I found; I sometimes thought that he seemed like a young unfrocked student from a seminary. On my side of things, I irritated him over more than one issue. And yet, even later on, when I had other friends who interested me more, our friendship held fast. He was the one I brought as my escort the day the Gallards were celebrating Malou’s engagement.

  Thanks to circling Napoleon’s tomb, breathing in the scent of Bagatelle roses, and eating Russian salad in the forests of the Landes region, Malou, who then knew Carmen, Manon, and Lakmé by heart, finally found a husband. Every day since she had reached the age of twenty-five without being married, her mother had said, “Enter a convent or get married; celibacy is not a vocation.” One evening, just as she was leaving for the Opéra, Madame Gallard had announced: “This time, you must take it or leave it. The next opportunity will be for Andrée.” So Malou agreed to marry a widower who was forty years old and afflicted with two daughters. An afternoon tea dance was given to congratulate her. Andrée insisted that I come. I slipped on the gray silk dress my cousin had left to me after entering the convent and went to meet Pascal in front of the Gallards’ house.

  Monsieur Gallard had obtained an important promotion over the course of the past five years, and they now lived in a luxurious apartment on the Rue Marbeuf. I hardly ever set foot there. Madame Gallard said hello to me, reluctantly; for a long time now she no longer kissed me and didn’t even bother to smile at me. However, she looked at Pascal without disapproval: all women liked him because he seemed simultaneously intense and reserved. Andrée gave him one of her standard smiles. She had rings under her eyes, and I wondered if she’d been crying. “If you want to freshen up your powder, you’ll find everything you need in my room,” she said. It was a discreet invitation. The Gallards allowed the use of powder, but my mother, her sisters, and her friends forbade it. “Makeup ruins the skin,” they affirmed. My sisters and I often said that considering the sad state of their skin, the prudence of those ladies was hardly rewarded.

  I smoothed my face with a powder puff, combed my badly cut hair, and went back into the living room. The youngsters danced under the tender eyes of the older women. It was not a pretty sight. Taffetas and satins in colors that were far too garish or sugary, boatneck dresses, awkwardly draped wraps, all these things made the young Christian women look even uglier, trained, as they were, to forget their bodies. Only Andrée was pleasant to look at. Her hair was lustrous, her nails shiny, she wore a long, pretty dark blue flowing dress and stiletto heels. Yet despite the circles of rouge she’d painted on her face to make herself look healthy, she seemed tired.

  “It’s so sad!” I said to Pascal.

  “What is?”

  “Everything!”

  “No, it isn’t,” he said cheerfully.

  Pascal shared neither my moments of harshness nor my rare enthusiasm; he said that in every living being, you could find something to love. That’s why he pleased people so much: under his attentive gaze, everyone felt likable.

  He asked me to dance, then I danced with other young men; they were all ugly. I had nothing to say to them and they had nothing to say to me; it was hot, I was bored. I kept close watch on Andrée; she smiled in the same way at all her dancing partners, greeted the old ladies with a little curtsy that was a bit too perfect for
my liking. I didn’t like seeing her so easily fulfill her role as a young lady of society. “Would she allow herself to be married off, like her sister?” I wondered, somewhat anxiously. A few months earlier, Andrée had run into Bernard in Biarritz, at the wheel of a long, pale blue car; he wore a white suit, had rings on his fingers, and was sitting beside a pretty blonde who was obviously a prostitute. They had shaken hands, having nothing to say. “Mama was right: we weren’t meant for each other,” Andrée had told me. Perhaps he would have been different if they hadn’t been separated, I thought, but perhaps not. In any case, Andrée only ever spoke of love with bitterness after that.

  Between two dances, I managed to walk over to her.

  “Is there any way we could chat for five minutes?”

  She touched her temple; she definitely had a headache, which happened to her often back then. “Meet you on the stairs, top floor. I’ll find a way to sneak off.” She glanced around at the couples who were changing partners. “Our mothers won’t allow us to go for a walk with a young man, but they smile ecstatically when they see us dancing; they’re so naive!”

  Andrée often said bluntly, out loud, what I was quietly thinking to myself. Yes, these good Christian women should have been worried as they watched their daughters yielding, modestly, faces flushed, in a man’s arms. How I had hated my dancing lessons when I was fifteen! I had a vague feeling of queasiness that resembled an upset stomach, weariness, sadness, though I could not understand why. After realizing what it meant, I became defiant; it seemed so irrational and annoying that anyone, simply through physical contact, could affect my feelings. But most of these prissy virgins certainly were more naive than I was, or at least had less self-esteem: now that I had started to think about it, I got annoyed watching them. “And what about Andrée?” I wondered. Her cynicism often forced me to ask myself questions that scandalized me the moment I thought of them. Andrée met me on the stairs; we sat down on the highest step.