Enchantments (2 page)

I had seen her in the home of our housekeeper, Paquita, who was born in Alicante, Spain, and at fifteen had many suitors. One Sunday afternoon she took my sister and me to her parents’ home. They acted as concierges in a building in our neighborhood, and the whole family
slept in one room, which had a gas ring and a sink. The toilet was in the courtyard.

On one wall was a poster of a bullfight with El Cordobés and a pair of castanets as shiny as chestnuts, and two small mirrors that deformed my face. Seated on the bed, crowning the exotic charm of the place, was the doll. I was dazzled by it, different as it was from the little dolls my sister and I played with.

For all my begging and wheedling, I had to wait a long time before my parents gave me one, and at night in my bed I imagined her lying beside me. I could feel her cool, slightly grainy skin, and I knew her eyes were closed just like mine: a twin, only much more fascinating than I. Finally, one summer day, my father won her for me by shooting a cardboard bear in the mouth at a country fair.

Papa had just bought an ancient Tuscan villa near his native town. It was called Schifanoia—an ugly name and on top of that ridiculous. It means Repel-Boredom, and for a long time I was embarrassed by it. When we went there for the first time, the house was almost entirely empty.

They show me around. Here and there in the large, frescoed halls we see a few dark and
imposing pieces of furniture. A smell of mold. Our footsteps echo. And yes, squeaky doors and an inlaid, wooden staircase that creaks with every step. At the top, a door with stained glass in the middle of which gleams a winged dragon.

I'm not at ease in there, and I keep my new doll (not much smaller than I) tight against my hip. The tulle of her pale pink dress scratches my arm and occasionally drags on the ground, which worries me. Then they tell me, “You can go out if you want, but don't go too far. There are Gypsies around.” With some hesitation I venture as far as the threshold of one of the glass doors overlooking the park, and I immediately hear a rustling noise in the bushes and see something flash in the green leaves. I step back into the large, vaulted hallway and I call: my mother, my father, my sister. No one answers. I'm afraid I'll get lost if I go looking for them. So I sit in an armchair and arrange the doll on my knees, carefully spreading out her skirt so that I'm hiding behind her. In that deserted and silent room I am pierced by a feeling of unease: it's the villa, it's the Gypsies and the uncertain border dividing us from them, a tribe of nomads camping in a place that doesn't belong to them. And at that moment I find a name for my doll, a magic name, an exorcism
that instantly dispels my fear: her name will be Esmeralda, like Gina Lollobrigida in the movie
The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
the Gypsy girl who is as alone as I am now, unhappy and proud, and she will save me from her brothers, furtive shadows in the bushes with an occasional sparkle from an earring or a dagger.

Every year we spent three months of our long summer at Schifanoia, so the fear dissolved, reduced to a bit of mystery I carried in my pocket when I made a foray up to the attic or down to the cellar.

My sister and I made friends with the daughters of the sharecroppers who lived in the farmhouse just below the villa, on the other side of an old iron gate that left a fine red dust on our hands. Their names were Mirella and Annarita. They were cousins, about the same ages as us. We played together every day, but not the whole day, since they had chores. We went to get them; they never came to the door of the villa. Early each morning Clara and I rushed down the lane, past the gate, and burst into their house through the
door, which was almost always open. We said right off, “So—shall we go?” without saying good morning. We were sure they'd say yes because it seemed to us in the nature of things that children played during the summer. What else should they do? Every once in a while Mirella's long face or Annarita's looking off sideways made us see it wasn't going to happen. “No, we can't. We have to do things.” Sometimes Mirella's mother, a vigorous jolly woman, cut it short. “There, chickies, come back tomorrow.” That was disappointing— Clara and I would have to play by ourselves, and it felt like wearing a dress that was too tight.

Sometimes we did their chores with them, which ended up making them take a lot more time. Even slopping the pigs became a game for us. Pigs are so mean—when they hear you coming with their feed they throw themselves at the gate of the pen, grunting in a terrifying way. My sister and I would creep closer and closer, and then as soon as the pigs got near us we'd break away with shrieks of laughter and alarm.

When piglets were born, the castrator came. It was a big event. Mirella and Annarita announced it the day before, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

With his hat firmly on his head, the castrator sits on a little bench in the farmyard. By his
feet he places a small basin into which he pours a purple liquid, a purple so vivid that you see it forever. Then he spreads a handkerchief on the ground, and on it he lays a straight razor that he's taken out of a leather pouch. All of Mirella's and Annarita's families are there. They have a respectful attitude toward the castrator, who is a professional, serious and silent. All of them help, trying to catch the piglets who are running helter-skelter in the pen, flinging themselves from one end to the other, squealing with terror. When they catch one, they put it on the knees of the castrator, who immediately spreads its legs, douses the groin with the purple liquid, picks up the shiny razor, and—zip—a little cut out of which pop two little pink balls which he tosses into a pail without batting an eye.

I watch, hypnotized. What this ritual signifies I don't know, and I don't dare ask. It's a half-closed door to a dangerous room that both attracts me and terrifies me. Behind that door— besides the castrator and besides playing doctor with our friends—there was Saint Maria Goretti, the favorite saint of Mirella and Annarita (my sister and I had picked as our favorite Saint Clara because she was the friend of Saint Francis, who could talk with wolves). Mirella and Annarita took turns telling us their saint's story.

It was a puzzling story because it was never clear what the saint had refused to do before she was killed. They liked telling it that way with shy giggles of embarrassment, and we liked that understanding and not understanding, which made you want to hear it all over again. We never told that story. It was the exclusive repertory of Mir-ella and Annarita, as was the song “Mario, So Young,” which was about a soldier, Mario, who was in love with a girl, “a swallow of spring.” Mario was sent to the front in Montenegro, and she betrayed him with a lieutenant. When Mario came back, he found out and “even though he lived on poetry,” he shot her dead. When the two cousins sang this—and they chanted it as intently as a hymn, with a look of bleak fatality— I got goose bumps and it made my head spin, as if I were foreseeing the risk I would run by growing up and becoming a woman.

In the small garden of our first home in Paris I kept a turtle, Ruga. One morning, when I brought her a leaf of lettuce, I noticed she was gone. So I cried and despaired, but they sent me to school anyway.

That same day at four, on a winter afternoon that was already dark and with the lights on in the living room, the governess who was coming to take care of my sister and me rang our doorbell for the very first time. Even though our avenue was lined not with cherry trees but with horse chestnuts, I nourished the hope of finding myself in front of Mary Poppins, or someone like her in the ways that mattered most, which for me, obviously, were the abilities to tidy up without lifting a finger and to jump into a landscape drawn on a
sidewalk and enter a world of merry-go-rounds and cotton candy. Such a person, moreover, would immediately know where Ruga had gone.

As soon as the doorbell rings, Clara and I rush to the door, and never have I been so exasperated by my mother's measured steps. I shout, “Come on, Mama, she's been waiting for ages.” Finally, here is my mother opening the door, but I still can't see anyone, because I'm behind her, and all I hear is a voice greeting us from the threshold, and I'm disappointed, the voice doesn't match. Then the governess comes in: the age isn't right, immediately confirming my fears, because Mademoiselle Bernard is already well advanced into that barren zone of gray-white hair and curved backs. The attire also doesn't fit the image, since it's missing two main items: the large handbag and the umbrella. The small hat is there, thankfully: it's not identical, because this is a beret, but at any rate it's there, where it should be, some evidence of deeply desired extravagance, maybe hidden in the large brooch with the end shaped like a Moor's head.

We settle in the living room, and, while talking with Mama, Mademoiselle occasionally smiles at Clara and me, revealing two prodigious, prominent incisors separated by a black hole.

But since Mama always says that neither people's age nor their appearance is important, I resolutely aim for her soul, searching for some disembodied affinity between her and Mary Pop-pins. I am scrutinizing her when Mademoiselle pulls from her little purse a transparent plastic box with a gold lid and offers each one of us a red gumdrop.

That's all: that gesture was enough to make what hope remained in me collapse. No matter how you looked at it, Mademoiselle just wasn't cut from the same cloth as Mary Poppins, whose magical qualities were blended in my mind with her brusque and proper manners. So I said good-bye and went to play in my room, until Clara came to tell me that it was settled: Mademoiselle would come every day, except for Saturday and Sunday, from three to six.

Dame Dame, as Clara rechristened her, had been born in 1899, and at some point, a three-headed Hydra (War, Bankruptcy, Divorce) had ruined her life. Her father, Henri, had been a rich textiles manufacturer; her mother, Jeanne, had been a very beautiful woman, as documented by a photograph that showed her in a white lace dress with a tiny umbrella over her chignon, which was as soft as a nest of feathers.

“You know, girls, it was the
années folles,”
Dame Dame would tell us, and Jeanne and Henri, elegant and in love, made their appearance during afternoon walks in the Bois, at the Longchamp races, at the balls of the Count d'Orgel and the Marquise du Plessy; they went to Deauville and La Baule in summer. War came, and the plant in Poissy went bankrupt; Henri, in despair, began his foolishnesses (Dame Dame never said what, exactly), and Jeanne left home with the three girls. A few years later came the Divorce.

In the beginning, Dame Dame followed my father's uncertain business affairs with an interest tinged with anxiety. And it was enough for Mama or Papa to hint at some difficulty for the Hydra to loom over her yet again. Then Dame Dame, once again, had to face each one of those monstrous heads one by one, so that in her attempts to decapitate them with words she would be compelled to tell her own story from the beginning. It was the Hydra's fault that she had had to look for work very early on without finishing her studies. And later, so as not to leave her mother alone, she had broken off her engagement with André, who had taken her on picnics every Saturday in the Forest of Fontainebleau. For several
years she had worked as an assistant to a goldsmith, even at one point designing a ring (which she wore on special occasions) that had received an award at the World's Fair.

Her most ordinary daily gestures were imbued with an aura that brought to mind rare and precious things. For instance, Dame Dame didn't shop in stores but in what she called “maisons.”
“Oh, oui, je I'ai acheté dans une Ms bonne maison, très ancienne, à Filles du Cal-vaire.”
I was fascinated by the exotic names of the Métro stops I had never set foot in, and which gave me the sudden dizziness associated with the mysterious and live metropolis beyond the confines of my bland residential neighborhood, and I was fascinated by those “maisons,” which I translated literally and imagined as houses, with beautiful old wooden furniture and ladies who received clients in the living rooms and offered them such exclusive goods that they felt like presents.