The Suitors (5 page)

Nanny

I’m ten years old. No one suspects a thing. Not even Marie, who is incapable, luckily, of imagining Nanny’s duplicity. So I keep quiet. Just as I keep to myself all the terrible ways she mistreats me. Because I don’t want to spoil Marie’s fragile happiness by revealing how our governess tortures me as soon as we’re alone together. That madwoman actually beats me, using any pretext to take her resentment out on me with vicious blows. And I am in such fear of these violent episodes, which leave me staggering in terror, that I live mesmerized by her moods, like an appliance plugged into a wall socket, picking up on the fluctuations of her emotional current and preparing myself for the next crisis
.

Her anger comes on like wind billowing a sail: I can see the rage course through her, taking over, and I await in despair the moment when Nanny will take me away with her,
out of sight, to vent her fury by attacking me like an evil giant. A formidable opponent, she has endless tricks up her sleeve
.

She has decided, for example, that I am absentminded and has made it her mission to root out this flaw that seriously threatens my chances in life, when in reality I have found in daydreaming a way to escape from the nightmare she forces me to live. The upshot is that Nanny spends her time testing me in front of my sister and parents by sending me to fetch a certain paper in the library, or a phone number in her address book, or some object on the night table in her room, when the object is actually in her closet
.

Off I go, my eyes already blurry with tears. Beginning my search, I lose time looking without seeing, hunting without thinking about what I want to find in the room. Like Gretel, I am lost, as surely as in a forest at nighttime, but Gretel didn’t know how lucky she was to have Hansel by her side when she met the witch who ate children. I am alone when Nanny walks in, supposedly to help me in the task she has set me. “You’re useless, you stupid girl,” she screams, “clumsy and pathetic! You’d better hop to it, you hear me? Or I’m going to lose my temper!”

She often pulls my hair or slaps me, when she’s not throwing dictionaries, chairs, or even small tables at me. Sometimes she just crosses her arms and hisses through her teeth, “Go on, look, show me how you do it. Oh, you’re a fine sight,
with your runny nose and that hair in your eyes, you poor thing, I feel sorry for you.” And before I find anything, always before I can succeed, she points a long finger at the object I seek: “And that? What’s that?” I bow my head in submission and defeat, but she piles on humiliation, stoking her fury: “What is that? Are you going to answer me or not!”

Then I tell her what she wants to hear, but I already know that her excitement has crested and must subside. And in fact, sated with violence, she quickly emerges from her trance to tell me coldly, “Go wash your face, it’s an ugly mess.” Then she turns on her heel to rejoin my parents, my sister, and the eventual guests before whom she immediately plays the model employee who has just had to deal with the teary tantrum of a poor neurotic child. And when I reappear, she pats me on the head, pretending to forgive me: “Oh! She’s still all upset …”

An apparently well-meaning exclamation I correctly interpret as an extra insult intended to let me know that my face is swollen from crying, so I now look a fright
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“There’s no reason to make such a fuss, after all!” she concludes, letting me know that the incident is closed, that I’d better not tell my mother about it, because Nanny is the boss, able to disguise her cruelty as affection and turn my tears of suffering into the whimpering of a little girl prone to overdramatize. I could have killed her
.

After such episodes, Nanny avoids my eyes for a few hours,
no doubt unnerved by the hatred she can read there, as well as my understanding of her pitiful attempt to dominate her charges by buying the good graces of Marie—who looks up to her—while trying to destroy me, even though I could unmask her
.

She hasn’t even enough goodness in her character to realize that I would never do that, wouldn’t ever deprive Marie of the illusion of having a kind governess who dotes on the delightful little girl in her care. For that would spoil the tiny bit of joy my sister finds in her relationship with the woman we’ve nicknamed Louis XI because she shares that sour, stern profile found in our history books. I can tell that Marie quite often pretends to be happier than she feels. Why let her know about the vile injustice I endure? Complaining about it would make me seem jealous, as if I envied Marie instead of taking comfort in her naïveté for accepting at face value the simulated love of a substitute mother. For I have already understood that despite appearances, our governess doesn’t love Marie any more than she does me
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In reality, my sister isn’t better off than I am. When she worries about receiving bad grades in school, for example, Nanny tells her it isn’t serious instead of encouraging or helping her. Scholastic achievement, she says, is useless because the world is full of intellectuals with fine diplomas who amount to nothing in life. A speech offering the triple
advantage of telling my sister that since she’s not an intellectual, she’s probably an idiot; informing me that my successes in school and supposed intelligence will get me nowhere; and playing the two of us off against each other, as usual
.

Deep down, our governess is a fool. Wishing to dominate us, but incapable of fulfilling her ambition, she must both clip our wings and divide us, for fear that we might denounce her if we finally find strength in our true beauty and intelligence, and pool our forces to put together the puzzle pieces that will reveal her weakness
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Nanny always wore a white smock and was dreadfully ugly, with skin tanned by the sun in Egypt, where she had spent much of her life. She had a slender hooked nose, lips as thin as a scar, red-rimmed, washed-out blue eyes, and breasts that rested heavily on her stomach. Marie’s beauty so bewitched Nanny that she really seemed never to tire of it. She would take Marie in her arms, touching her as if somehow to strengthen her claim on the child, and she photographed her everywhere, all the time.

Did my mother, who lived in constant fear of our governess giving notice, find this attachment convenient? Or did she allow herself to be swayed by our nanny’s
preferences? In any case, following her lead, our mother crowned my sister the star of the family. Our closets contain entire albums devoted to Marie at all ages: an infant as perfect as an Ivory Snow baby, a giggly little Goldilocks, a mischievous young lady miraculously untouched by the indignities of puberty. And hundreds of snapshots of the ravishing and lissome blonde she became are tacked to the walls of my mother’s private rooms, framed on the chintz-skirted tables of her boudoir, or displayed on silver easels on the mantelpiece.

My mother could thus claim to have gone perfectly gaga over Marie, at least in the etymological sense of the word, as she literally spoiled her silly with the toys that cluttered our playroom: pretend grocery stands, playhouses shaped like castles (where we tried to hide from the governess), rocking horses with real horsehair manes (to which I was allergic), and pedal cars that seated four. In short, these expensive and exquisite playthings were accessories intended for the nanny’s own satisfaction, objects she could then parade before her colleagues to show off
urbi et orbi
the extravagance of her employer’s taste, lifestyle, and love for her children. Above all, this avalanche of toys allowed Miss Ross to savor the sight of Marie on a horse, in a car, or playing lady of the house, enjoying everything our nanny had
never had as a child. Because she was really playing dolls with Marie, dressing her, arranging her hair, constantly asking my mother to buy my sister new clothes with matching barrettes and bows.

Of course, my mother didn’t buy clothes and toys only for Marie. I had some, too. But when she gave Marie a miniature kitchen with a working oven and real china, I received an exercise mat as well as a children’s encyclopedia intended to make up for the difference in the cost of our presents. Her unfairness to me was not that obvious, for my mother simply thought she was granting wishes we had supposedly expressed to our nanny and was thus taking into account our respective characters, which Miss Ross was actually inventing to gratify her own desires.

The same thing happened with our clothes. When it came to Marie, the governess would insist that we were growing so quickly that our mother needed to replenish our wardrobe. In my case, however, she thought it best to have my mother save a little money. So I often wound up wearing my sister’s old clothes, so tight they turned me into a sausage. In other words, I looked like the shabby plump one, trotted out as a foil for Marie’s charm when we were summoned to politely greet the guests. Even if we were already in our pajamas, we had to get dressed
all over again, complete with matching hair ribbons, to perform to perfection our role of model little girls who knew how to bob a curtsy: Bonjour, Madame, how do you do …

With feigned modesty, our governess would caress Marie’s hair before pinching my cheek, in a brusque gesture of apparent affection and reinvigorating comfort for my desperate fate as a homely little ingrate. It was as if she were trying to say, Don’t worry, your mother loves you anyway, even if you’re not as pretty as Marie. While she was wearing a fake smile to fool my mother and her guests, however, she was really pinching me, and it hurt. She was punishing me, I realized sadly, punishing me for being less lovely than my sister and thus spoiling the pretty picture she wanted to present to these society people, and I steeled myself not to cry in front of “the grown-ups.”

I was too young, unfortunately, to confide in Marie about how I suffered from our mother’s neglect, or even to reveal the nanny’s treachery toward me, since her cruelty was so insidious that Marie would never have believed me and might secretly have thought me mean and twisted. This must have been what led me to psychoanalysis: the desire for enough knowledge and authority to persuade mothers not only to take a real interest in
their children, but also to be intelligently aware of their own behavior, for mothers may well be irreplaceable—and with the wisdom of my experience (bolstered by that of Alice Miller, D. W. Winnicott, and Melanie Klein), I was certainly in a position to know!—but they may also do more harm than fathers, if they are all-powerful like the unhinged matron in charge of my upbringing.

As for my father, he paid hardly any attention to us at all. Like many men, he had handed over to his wife the bothersome chores of daily life, including the raising of their children. And so, vacillating between gratitude and guilt, he felt our mother was acquitting herself splendidly of this task through the aid of a governess, and he never gave a thought to protecting us. In any case, he considered our mother’s lack of interest far healthier than the obsessive attention mothers these days lavish on their children.

As a result, I did not know my father. Rather, I knew only what my mother said of him: “Hush, your father is sleeping” or “He’s working.” He was the figure at the end of the upstairs hall. A blond giant with bushy eyebrows, who made silly faces and smiled kindly when addressing his children. Although hardly a stranger to us, he was inaccessible, a sphinx enshrined in work that was never, ever to be disturbed. He was the Man of the House. And
we were brought up in the cult of his well-being, thus burnishing the halo of prestige with which our mother had endowed him. Isolated by all this deference and devotion, however, my father was like a walk-on dignitary in an operetta: he never had a say in anything. My mother was merely giving him the illusion that he was the center of her life, for no matter how often she claimed that “between her husband and her children, she had chosen her husband,” I just could not believe in her self-styled role as a loving wife. Because in my eyes, she was as incapable of caring about her husband as she was about her children.

Given the adults in our lives, L’Agapanthe was a fixed point in an unreliable world. Our life there was comfortable and unchanging, in spite of the onerous rules and prohibitions Marie and I had to observe, which left us with a faint but constant melancholy ennui. We knew that this misery sprang from a noble motive, which our parents called education. Ours was Jansenist in inspiration, except that far from inculcating in us a characteristically aristocratic and religious contempt for money, our austere upbringing made us familiar with luxury while forbidding us to enjoy it. As a result, impressed by the sumptuous décor of the house, guests at L’Agapanthe imagined us living pampered lives they would never
have conjured up for us had we been observed in a house in Brittany or on a farm in Limousin, and they never suspected that not only were we excluded from the privileges reserved for adults, we were also deprived of their pleasures, such as swimming, which we could enjoy only while they were napping, and with strict instructions to abandon the beach under some pretext as soon as any grown-ups showed up, so that we would not be a bother to them.