The funeral was only for family. We thought that included us, but Loic said it didn’t. They buried her beside Théo in the de la Roque family plot near Chantilly. After the service, Loic and Gaspard returned to the house with their family, which included Séraphine’s niece and nephew and their spouses, and an older woman I later
learned was Loic and Gaspard’s mother, Nicole. They went into the salon and closed the double doors behind them. Loic came out two or three times, calling for the maids to bring them fresh coffee and something to eat. Hours passed. A few of us gathered by the stairs on the second-floor landing, trying to guess what was going on.
The next morning the maids went around knocking on the bedroom doors summoning us to a meeting held over breakfast in the dining salon. At nine, all the girls were seated and present, though some of us were still in robes, while Loic and Gaspard sat side by side in two chairs at the head of the table. They looked almost like twins that day in their white button-down shirts and black trousers, their eyes worn with the same rings of weariness dipping down to their cheeks.
Gaspard put his palm to his brother’s back as if to give him the strength to speak.
“I apologize. I haven’t had much sleep.” Loic cleared his throat. “Let me begin by saying I know you are all grieving as we are. The past few days have been difficult as you may imagine, but with the participation of other family members, we have come to some decisions. We hope you will find them agreeable.”
“The House of Stars will remain open through the summer,” Gaspard continued as if they’d been assigned their lines. “But we will close the house at the start of August, at which point we will begin liquidating its contents in preparation for it to be placed on the market in September.”
“We’re being evicted?” asked Tarentina, the designated spokesperson for our group.
“Believe me,” Loics sounded regretful, “my brother and I would like nothing more than to keep the house open, but we are not the ones responsible for this decision.”
“Who is?”
“Our mother.”
Dominique uncovered the full story later. Nicole, with additional support from her cousins, who were due to inherit a small percentage of Séraphine’s estate, decided to sell the house as Nicole had always wanted, promising her sons their share so they could each buy a small apartment. Loic and Gaspard had argued that the house was a treasure and they’d be fools to give it up. They said they’d assume responsibility for its upkeep and maintenance, if only the family was willing to hold on to it. They loved this house in a way none of the others did. But Nicole refused.
We got a good look at her the next day when she let herself into the house. She was an especially pale woman with a drinker’s face, a kerchief of short blonde hair, with no feature in common with her mother beyond those de la Roque aquamarine eyes. She wore no makeup and was thin like her sons, dressed in ill-fitting navy pants and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar that appeared on its fourth or fifth wearing without a wash. She was followed by the real-estate agent she’d appointed to find a buyer.
“The house needs a lot of work,” I heard her tell him as they walked through the grand salon, “but I insist it be sold as is.”
She led him upstairs and knocked on each of our doors to show the man our bedrooms, pointing to walls that could be knocked down to create larger rooms. She never introduced herself or asked our names. Cato and I waited silently by my doorway as she stood in the middle of my room telling the man, “The house will of course be much easier to show once the tenants have cleared out all their belongings.”
And then she received a call on her mobile phone.
“I’m just finishing up some business here,” she told the caller in near-perfect English. “You wouldn’t believe the headache it’s been. I’m looking forward to the day when I can leave Paris and never think of this house again.”
A month passed and the house was still somber, cool with Séraphine’s death, yet outside spring flooded Paris in a lagoon of blooming flowers. I still felt her presence, heard her voice call my name every time I passed through the foyer upon recognizing my footsteps from the boots she hated so much. I’d gone to plenty of funerals for people my family knew but none for someone I’d known as dearly as Séraphine, who’d talked to me like an old friend, offered me all her truths when she felt I needed them. Even though she’d likely distributed those same truths to a hundred girls who came before me, she let me believe I was as unique to her as she was to me.
Cato knew death. He understood it early in life from losing his mother, the bomb, and the threat of his illness. He took in Séraphine’s death with solemnity, watching over me as I adjusted to her absence as though he knew, more than I did, that I’d have to learn this particular strength on my own for another day.
The loss of Séraphine bound the residents closer and we spent most days gathered together, conscious that our days as a group were coming to an end. I’d managed to convince my parents to let me stay an extra month into July, so I could witness the spectacle of the World Cup hosted by France. But just weeks later, we’d be locked out of the House of Stars. I’d no longer be able to speak to Maribel through the cottony wall that separated our bedrooms or fall asleep to the hum of Saira’s TV overhead. There would be no more late-night bossa nova
and cachaça-swigging fests in Tarentina’s room and no more gossip sessions over breakfast in the dining salon, though the maids would be remaining in the house as employees of the new owners.
For the rest of the girls, there was the matter of making other arrangements, trying to piece together a future that would keep them from drifting apart. There was no apartment big enough to house more than a few girls. For some, letting go was easier. Saira announced that she’d move into her family’s apartment on rue Royale; Stef wasn’t allowed to visit her there but she said they’d figure something out. Dominique considered making a fresh start in London, and Maribel, who only had one year of school left until graduating, would room with a Mexican friend on rue Pergolèse while the others planned on taking an apartment together as close to our original address as possible.
Tarentina, however, toyed with the ideas of returning to Brazil though she had no family left, only a few childhood friends, or of finally letting herself be adopted by the Professor. She was endlessly intrigued by the subject of my family, how my parents, two dispossessed children, had managed to create their own devoted clan, though she often teased that when I spoke of them, it sounded like I was speaking more of a cult than of a family.
She didn’t know that, as a child, I’d often wondered what it would be like to be parentless like her. As a little girl, I’d been terrified of reliving my parents’ painful past by becoming an orphan myself. Yet as I grew older, when passing a pair of panhandling New York runaways, or cast-off Bogotá street children selling gum at street corners, I’d indulged in a passing fantasy of being forsaken, wondering what it would be like not to be accountable to anyone else. I wasn’t sure I would know what to do with that kind of freedom.
“I’ll only tell you this once,” Tarentina told me one May afternoon when I joined her for a cigarette on her terrace. “I really envy you. It must feel good to know you have a family waiting for you to come home. Sometimes I think the only person who will notice if I die is my accountant.”
“I’ll notice.” I smiled.
“Will you?” She sounded less self-assured than I’d ever heard her.
“Of course. But you’ve got to promise not to disappear.”
“You’re the one who needs to make that promise.”
I stared at the garden below us, the trees still decorated in candy-colored lanterns Saira had hung up for her design school’s fashion show a few nights ago.
“If I had the money, I’d buy this place myself and keep it forever just the way it is now.”
“Don’t be stupid. I’ve been here five years and I do have the cash to buy it, but I wouldn’t take this house if it were given to me. I’m afraid I’d end up like Séraphine, all alone in my bedroom with nothing but stories, guarding this house like it’s a fucking fortress. You’re free now. We all are.”
“Do you think we’ll all stay friends after we move out?” She knew better than I did how these things went.
“Some of us will keep in touch. Others will fade away. It’s always like that.”
“Really?”
“We’ll see each other through weddings and children, I hope, and if there are divorces, we’ll see each other through those, too. We don’t need this house for that. Remember, they call this place the House of Stars, but
we
are the stars. Without us, it’s just a house, and we’ll go on being stars whether we live here or somewhere else.”
If in Paris I was finding a slow peace, completing the last of my term paper orders for the girls ending their semesters, the windows of the house opening to the debut of summer, what I heard about my home in New Jersey was the opposite, imbued with creeping tension and anxiety because my little brother was declining, the positive effects of his latest treatment wearing off. He’d regressed to his occasional catatonic states, suicidal ideations, and refusal to speak to me when I called. My family hoped that my return would, at least temporarily, help to improve his condition.
I didn’t want to burden Cato with these details, as if I could keep our own panorama pristine. But he heard my end of phone conversations with my parents and Santi, and even though we spoke in Spanish, he could see the trepidation on my face. As much as Tarentina proclaimed it, I was not free at all.
When we were kids, Santi and I used to say, even though we held dual citizenship, we were not American or Colombian. We were del Cielo, our own country. When we learned the pledge of allegiance in school, we made up our own pledge to our family. Ours was the only home I’d ever imagined knowing, and even now, I felt the pull on my heart.
Cato wanted me to stay.
One night in bed he’d said to me, “The way it happened between us, I don’t think it could happen again with anybody else. Not like this. Do you?”
“No. Not like this.”
He looked up at the ceiling and back at me on the pillow next to him.
“I don’t want you to go.”
“I don’t want to go either.”
I saw that he was beginning to depend on me in the way one depends on family, a love taking root beyond the early tumbles of new romance. I said, and believed, that I still had the choice and that I wanted to stay in France beyond my scheduled departure. For another year or two or forever. He believed me, too, even when my certainty slipped into negotiations: I could do both, return home for a while, then come back to France. I could live in both places. I could find a way to be everything to everybody.
Loic arrived at my door holding a small tissue-paper bundle like a pigeon in his hands.
“Gaspard and I have been going through our grandmother’s things, you know, before the others start scavenging and leave us nothing to remember her by. We found this and thought you might want to have it.”
He handed it to me and within its folds I saw Séraphine’s silk kimono blouse with the dragon painted on the back.
I wore the blouse that night when Cato and I went for a walk to Île Saint-Louis, a bottle of wine in hand, settling onto the edge of quai Henri IV amid a crowd of lovers and friends. At nine in the evening the city was just beginning to darken, the Notre Dame lights radiating a golden sheen over the river. We found an abandoned padlock on an empty patch of concrete, probably fallen off one of the bicycles lining the quai. Cato decided to keep it. Later, when we started on our way home, we passed in front of the cathedral where painters and artists stood by easels offering cartoonish portraits to tourists. Cato asked one artist if he could paint our names on either side of the lock. The artist, who said
she was an art student from Shanghai, used a tiny brush to print our names in yellow paint, and Cato held the lock by the tip of his fingers as it dried, and we crossed back onto the Left Bank, walking the long stretch from quai de la Tournelle to quai Voltaire, where Cato led me to the wall overlooking the water.
He held me, his face warm against mine.
“I want you to know that if you leave me you won’t ever leave me.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“But if you do go, it will be all right. We will both be all right.”
He pulled apart from me and threw the painted lock with the most force I’d seen come out of those arms, so far across the water that it was impossible to know where it broke the surface.
He took my hand to his lips and kissed my palm.
“I think we should get married. Nobody would have to know. Just us.”
“We already are married,” I said, as if it were the most natural thing, and for that reason I knew it was true, in the only way that mattered.
Antoine de Manou’s prior criticisms of the French national team became the mockery of every newspaper headline as the multiracial équipe Française ascended game by game through the World Cup to hero status. Romain’s boss had a television installed over the bar at Far Niente, so we crowded around our favorite table along the wall to watch Brazil beat Scotland and committed to watch the rest of the tournament there together because there is a sporting tradition dictating that wherever you watch your favorite team play their first match is where you should watch all their games or you’ll break the spell of luck.
The night that Les Bleus beat Croatia in the semifinal—a particularly humid one, with no air-conditioning in Far Niente, the doors and windows opened to let in the steamy street air—the restaurant crowd vibrated with jubilation, knowing it meant France would face Brazil, the defending champions, in the final. The Cup turns people into patriots, but as our teams, Colombia, the United States, Italy, and Morocco were knocked out in the early rounds, most of our allegiances shifted in support of our host nation, except for Tarentina, forever faithful to her Brazil.
Romain had the day off, but he still came back to the restaurant to watch the match with us. I sat between him and Cato, and when the match was over and we were on our feet, with victory chants and screams, he threw a bet on the table: If France won the Cup, he’d jump to his dream and book a flight straight to New York the next day.
We’d only come to the last pages of
Martin Eden
a few days before. I admired his tenacity—months of reciting each word slowly until there were no slips in his pronunciation and he glided through paragraphs and pages without needing to halt for my correction. He’d only stop himself when he became puzzled by a piece of the narrative, like how Martin could still love Ruth, even after she’d doubted him, questioning his poverty and dismissing his dreams of being a writer. He didn’t understand how a man could love a woman who didn’t believe in him.
“That’s not love. Love is showing up every day, money or no money.”
“She did love him.” I found myself defending her. “But she had to make a choice. She trusted that her parents knew what was best for her.”
“I’m repulsed by that type of woman. Mindless and spineless like a jellyfish.”
“She thought
he
was the selfish one for being more devoted to his passion than he was to pleasing her and her family.”
“She only wanted him back when he became a rich man. She was a coward. And so was he, for loving her for so long.”
When he came to the end of the novel Romain lit us a pair of cigarettes relishing each word of the final page until there was nothing left to read. We were quiet, and when he was down to a nub of filter, Romain said, as if he’d given the matter serious thought,
“I can see why the guy killed himself rather than give her another chance. He was already dead. Me? I’d find another way to go on.”
That night of the semifinal victory, everyone toasted Romain’s vow to himself, and I wondered what it would take for me to wager my life on a match.
It was after midnight when Cato and I left the others in the street celebration that formed by the Odéon. Despite the noise of car horns and singing oscillating against the city walls, Cato and I walked home slowly, as if neither of us really wanted to arrive.
Les Bleus won the 1998 World Cup by three goals and the city didn’t stop vibrating until after Bastille Day, one of the most climactic national celebrations in France’s history; parades, crowds, and fireworks shows, a pedestrian ecstasy, marauding revelers flooding every inch of Les Champs-Élysées from La Défense to Place de la Concorde, down rue de Rivoli all the way to the Bastille, where the strong bodies climbed their way up the Colonne de Juillet, a blanket of pride covering the nation with its leaders proclaiming that this team of diverse faces represented the integrated dream of the future of France.
It would be a glorious, almost holy moment for the country.
But by then, I would be gone.