A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (14 page)

“I’m in love with you a little bit,” he said. He lifted his right hand off his arm and made a little pinch with his thumb and index finger. “Just a little bit,” he said. “It used to be much worse a few years ago but now I’ve got it under control. And I’m frightfully jealous of all those boys you like. And I’m tired of pretending I don’t care.”

“You’re crazy, Francis,” I mumbled, and shook my head, because I did not know what else to do.

He shrugged, as though bored, then turned and went back down the stairs. He’d never intended to come in at all.

The lights went out again and I stood in the darkness. He’s lying, I thought, he’s just trying to make me mad. But I felt invaded; he’d taken advantage of me, pretended to be my friend and gotten to sleep at the foot of my bed. He’d entered my father’s castle in a way no boy had ever done and probably never would again.

But even if that was true, he was still the best friend I’d ever had. Why say such a thing to me now? Why burn bridges?

During the next few days, as my family packed up to leave for the summer, I vacillated between missing him and hating him.

Finally, I told my father, because, after all, he would probably be able to explain what Francis had meant. My father gazed at me steadily and said, “Poor Francis.” I began to feel choked up.

“I hate him,” I managed to say.

“No, no. You mustn’t be angry,” my father said. “He probably meant it. He just didn’t know how to say it all along. The only way he could get close to you was by being your best friend. Poor guy.”

The next day, we left for Normandie. It took only a few days in a new environment for Francis to move into storage in my mind.

Upon my return in September, I did not call him and he never called me. During the next several years I would run into Francis every now and then on the Rue des Deux Ponts. He was usually with a friend, different boys. At a loss for words, I would ask him if he still played the violin, and he’d vaguely say no, that he’d given it up ages ago. His friends seemed impatient to get him away from me. I supposed it was because people never like to be interrupted by a third party in the street, especially when the mutual friend, in embarrassment or as a simple oversight, fails to introduce the two strangers.

CANDIDA

Often, when I was little, I’d sit quietly, perched on the edge of the kitchen counter while Candida cooked, or cross-legged on a little rug beside her as she shined our shoes, or sometimes straddling the wide end of the ironing board, and listen to her talk. Nothing comforted me more than the sound of her sad and gentle voice and the sharp smells of household chores.

It seemed to me that Candida and I were bonded forever, that we were in life together for the long haul, against the rest of the world. The rest of the world included my parents and Billy.

Perhaps I felt bound to Candida because she never disagreed with me or crossed me. And she was like a child herself, living under my father’s financial protection and his laws. She loved and feared my father, who was a strong and equable man with a fierce and unpredictable temper. But she forgave him this the way she forgave God for earthquakes, thunderstorms, and the misery of the world, for she believed that my father had rescued her from what would have been an unhappy life.

Candida was twenty-five when she came to us. She had left Portugal to become a nanny in Paris because the farm near the town of Porto, where she’d spent all her life with her mother, had finally become unmanageable, a lost proposition. Before that, she’d never traveled farther from home than the three hundred kilometers to Lisbon.

When Candida talked to me about her own father, she called him “that no-good
filho da puta
.” Her mother, Castelha, had never tired of reminding Candida about the night her father had run off like a thief, with Castelha’s dowry and inheritance and all the jewelry and cash in the house. Candida had been a girl of twelve when this happened.

“We used to be rich. We used to have a good life,” she’d tell me one day, and the next day, forgetting, she’d tell me that her mother liked to exaggerate. Candida did not remember life before her father left as easy or comfortable at all. There had been a few more cows, chickens, sheep, and goats on the farm, and several men to help, but altogether the men, especially her father, had been cruel and violent and lazy. Candida and her brother and sister had to work after school and on Saturdays until dark.

Candida had a recurring nightmare: Her father, brandishing a thick rope, is chasing a baby goat around the inside of the house. The baby goat runs to Candida who is in the kitchen—tries to hide behind her with its tail between its legs. “No, no,
Pai!
” she cries as her father shoves her out of the way. The baby goat makes it under the table but her father gets down on his hands and knees, swearing, and catches it. Then he cuts its throat.

“But it’s only a dream, right, Didi?” I said in a worried and shaky voice when she first told me this. She wouldn’t look up from her ironing. Her face was flushed pink, the air filled with the crisp baked-cotton smell of laundered sheets. It was miraculous how close to my knees the iron came and never touched, carried by her swift and certain hand.

“You’re right,” she said, and shrugged. “It is only a bad dream.”

Candida’s younger brother and sister had grown tired of the endless work (it seems Castelha could not control them as she could Candida); they had left without glancing back as soon as they were old enough. The brother went to Brazil, and the sister married an English sailor. Neither sent money home and their letters were infrequent, which Candida resented more than the fact that they had left.

Castelha, letting out a tight little sigh, would tell Candida flatly that she was not surprised to be forgotten by her own rotten children. “You forget those two,” she’d say. “They inherited the temperament of their father. You, Candida, you are the only decent child I had from that no-good
filho da puta
. You love this big old sack of potatoes. You don’t run away from trouble and hard work.”

“They didn’t mean any harm to us,
Mae
,” Candida would respond in a soothing tone, feeling pious and enjoying the compliment, although she did not like for her mother to talk of them as though they were dead. It was bad luck.

“And I’m going to die young, working like this, and no one will care but you.”

Finally, when the farm had to be sold, commiserating friends and neighbors told Castelha that Candida should go to Paris. They had relatives who had gone, who wrote home that there was good money to be made, and even enclosed money orders in their letters.

It took a good deal of persuading, but Castelha finally agreed that there was no other solution. Candida wrote to the neighbors’ relatives and a position was found for her in a proper French family.

The farm was sold and Castelha managed to pay off most of her debts. She moved to Porto and began to sew for a living. She was an extraordinary seamstress and had secretly always wanted to make a living that way. Castelha herself told me this five years later, when she came to Paris to pay us a visit, and made me the most perfect red velvet party dress with a white lace collar and cuffs and a white satin ribbon at the waist. I watched this miraculous enterprise for three days, while she babbled away in a mix of Portuguese and French, in the happiest of moods.

“Sewing makes me happy,” she told me, “like nothing else in the world.” She was a short, round woman who somehow did not seem flabby. Maybe she wore some tight girdle that kept her all pulled tight. She reminded me of a big rock.

Her voice went maudlin and she added, “I miss my Candida terribly in Porto.”

I didn’t like this comment one bit: Every moment Castelha was with us I feared that she’d take Candida away with her at the end of her stay.

“She’s my Candida as much as yours,” I said to Castelha in a little hard voice, which made her laugh heartily.

Candida’s first three months in Paris were unhappy ones. The French
patrons
reprimanded her the first time she took an orange from the refrigerator without asking, and she never did it again. Every week they withdrew money from her paycheck for food and for her train ride from Portugal, and half of the rest she sent to her mother with joyful, enthusiastic notes, because she did not want her mother to worry.

The French
patrons’
two children were sweet and well-behaved, but they did not seem to need her and she felt no warmth from them. This bothered her most.

Her room was a tiny garret on the top floor of the apartment building on fancy Avenue Foche. She spent a good deal of time in her room, sitting and thinking. She told me once, when I was a bit older, that she had not minded being unhappy because she believed that all forms of human suffering were God’s tests, and therefore good for the character, and that the better you behaved under duress, the better you’d be rewarded later on.

When I repeated this to my father (I was about eight at the time), he winced uncomfortably and suddenly turned quite crimson.

“And that’s exactly why I hate priests!” he cried out. “They’re liars and hypocrites, they use religion to keep poor peasants like Candida under control!” His voice grew louder as he spoke until he was finally shouting at the space before his nose. “They tell them, ‘Be patient, it’s better in heaven!’ While they, the goddamn pious PRICKS, LIVE LIKE KINGS OFF THE MONEY OF THE RICH!”

I sat there, stunned, while he thought in silence for a moment. You could never be sure what would throw him into a fury. Some things just hit him the wrong way. It was disconcerting, and everyone was terrified of his fits. Sometimes he broke things, or punched a wall.

“But don’t tell Candida I said that,” he added, his voice soft again. “You’ll just upset her.”

I kept my mouth shut and had my first seriously ambivalent thought. Who was right? My father, I knew, was smarter than Candida, and did not lie, although he sometimes confused what he’d written in a book with reality.

Candida, as far as I knew, never lied either. So who was right?

Candida had arrived in Paris with the phone number of one young woman from Porto, a girl she’d gone to school with who’d had a bad reputation. There had been rumors of flirtations that had gone too far, of a rich landowner showering her with gifts—but Candida paid little attention to such things. The girl’s uncle had slipped Candida the phone number when Castelha was not looking; Candida had slipped it into her pocket without saying a word.