Enchantments (3 page)

Dame Dame was very elegant and cared about how she looked. (I did too, experiencing some satisfaction in noticing her perfect color combinations.) Hats were her forte. She had many: green, pink, purple, with feathers, veils, or flowers, in all styles, and each one left her hair
flattened a certain way: shaped like a cloud, a bird wing, or an upside-down bowl. If Dame Dame had taken her hat off and suddenly she thought she heard my father's voice in the corridor, she'd quickly put it back on because he gave her compliments. That was a task he never failed to fulfill, picking on this or that detail that made her look good, maybe with a tinge of irony or a mocking light in his eyes. But Dame Dame was happy anyway.

When she left us at six, she went to work for an old shrew, who on top of it was heavy and an invalid, and she was her companion until the next morning. The old lady was called Madame Rodin, and she was the widow of some sort of philosopher, very famous, and she drove Dame Dame to distraction. She was spiteful and mean, Dame Dame told us. She had driven her mad making her look for one of her little tortoiseshell combs, maybe accusing her of having lost it, until it had turned up under the pillow. “But why don't you get angry?” I would ask Dame Dame, indignant at the old lady's wickedness. She would just shrug her shoulders with an air of superiority. But I was sad to see her leave when it was dark, in winter; I imagined her inside the endless tunnels of the Concorde station, where she changed trains, one hand holding on to her hat,
the other one on her coat, both disarranged by hot and metallic gushes of wind; then again outside in the cold, climbing up the rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, up, up, all the way into the witch's lair.

In summer, Dame Dame spent a month at the property that Madame Rodin owned in the country near Colombey-les-deux-Églises, Charles de Gaulle's chosen country. And during that month came the epiphany that rewarded her for all that year's hard work, her hard fight against the world's mediocrity, and brought back from a great distance, from before the War, the Bankruptcy, and the Divorce, an air of grandeur: the meeting with the General.

De Gaulle had been Rodin's friend, and every year he made a courtesy visit to the widow. Dame Dame had the honor of meeting him at the door and showing him to the living room.

“Bonjour, mon général,”
she would say to him, and he would answer,
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle Bernard, je me souviens de vous Van dernier.”
The scene always played itself this way, and every year, when she was back from the holiday, Dame Dame would tell us about it, her face flushed with pride and emotion, and stupefied that the general would remember her and her name, moved by his munificent memory.

In France, there was Papa's work, school, and Dame Dame; there were months and months of winter and a few friends of my parents with children who looked sad and pale from too many hours spent in the classroom. As I saw it, France was the country where money was real and good for all seasons, whereas Italian money was fake and good only for summer playtime. There were unequivocal signs of this difference. Italian bills were absurdly large and made our summer wallets look like laundry cupboards overflowing with folded sheets. In such excess I saw proof of their falseness, the way one exaggerates when telling a lie. There were also too many zeros. I preferred the modesty and sincerity of the French, who had eliminated two or three. As for the coins, there were two things that didn't work with the
lira: weight and color. Too light the first, gray and devoid of shininess the second, whereas a French coin shone as brightly as a tiny moon in the palm of your hand. But for me, sealing the fate of this monetary duel was the Marianne with her Phrygian cap who adorned the ten-, twenty- and fifty-centime pieces with her young profile and windblown hair, while she appeared full-length on the one-franc coin, as if in the midst of a mad dash, one hand gripping the bag slung across her chest. Where could she be going? And why is she running like that? I wondered. As I could find no answer, the Marianne made me nostalgic for something that I would never know or see, able only to imagine it.

Between the two languages, on the other hand, French was the one that found itself confined to an ephemeral and half-fictitious existence. It appeared on our horizon only at three, with the arrival of Dame Dame, tracing a brief orbit during our games with the “Frenchkids” at the Champs de Mars, only to set abruptly at six when Dame Dame left. We never spoke it at home, and as for school, we attended the Italian one. We wore French easily, like an old outfit with a purpose—gym clothes, a tutu—until we shed it with one casual gesture.

Clara and I had made friends with several
Frenchkids (the two words soon became one in our lexicon). However, Carlo and Pietro couldn't stand Frenchkids. They returned from the park furious and livid with resentment at having been mocked with cries of
“Olé,
torero, Italians-spaghetti-paella.”

Once we all got together to record a tape for Grandma Irene, Papa's mother. Carlo declares, into the microphone, “Dear Grandma, Paris is a big and beautiful city. But we don't like Frenchkids, they're conceited and arrogant and they don't even know geography. They mix us up with the Spaniards, and that makes us so angry that the other day we almost got into a fight and for sure the next time they won't get away with it.” I'm very struck by how serious Carlo sounds. Usually I don't care what happens to my brothers, but now I think back to Ettore Fieramosca and Barletta's challenge in the school textbook, and so I identify my new role: from now on I will be the sister of the patriots to the rescue, a role that requires a careful balance of apprehension and dignity.

That part, however, soon bored me, because my brothers started getting into fights with Frenchkids too regularly and too eagerly.

For us children, France was Paris, and
when, at the end of summer, we returned by car from Italy, the French countryside looked to us like a vast gray sea that reflected the melancholy that accompanied the end of the holidays. It was the last days of September, and already it rained incessantly on the deserted land that we were crossing. The Frenchkids had started school a while ago, that school that lasted hideously through the afternoon and where there always had to be so much cramming to win some prize or other for honor or excellence. When my parents tried to put me into a French school, I revolted with such violence and determination that they abandoned the idea: Did they really want me to become as pale as the Frenchkids? A sad little grind? Did they really want to bury me alive? No, that's not what they wanted—let's not talk about it anymore. But did they understand me? No, they didn't understand me. France had impressed upon their faces a look of constant stupefaction, as if faced with an enduring miracle. My father, who had lived off income from his properties, having found no joy or success in many jobs (as a country lawyer, a salesman of Florentine linen goods in America, a sales rep for a cigarette company in Venezuela), once in France had thrown himself wholeheartedly into a
construction venture that made him rich in a few years and gave a heretofore unknown stability to the whole family.

Paris intoxicated them, and they never tired of going out to see it, packing all four children into Caroline: Come on, we're leaving, all the way up to Montmartre to see the city from the top, and at night a whirl around Place de la Concorde, another, and then another and still another.

Papa loved Notre Dame, Mama the Eiffel Tower. I envisioned Notre Dame as a damsel lifting her train with slim arms, and the Eiffel Tower as a playful girl dressed in metal. I imagined that they were friends and, not being able to talk to each other over the din of the metropolis, entrusted their messages to the pigeons who flew tirelessly from one to the other.

My father liked the Louvre, my mother the Orangerie, where the Impressionists were. While visiting the Louvre, I decided that I would be an archaeologist when I grew up, so that I could one day, digging the dead earth, recover the white arms of the Venus de Milo. At the Orangerie, in front of the painting of the cathedral in Rouen at different hours of the day, I decided that I wanted to be an outdoor painter. But one evening
my father told me that I was a weather vane, and even a popinjay, changing my mind so often about what I wanted to do when I grew up and shouting it out to the four winds every time. I was upset by that and even felt like telling him that he had changed jobs an awful lot, but I said nothing and from then on tried not to come up with any more ideas, or at least not to go telling him about them. One time, however, I just couldn't hold myself back.

It's Sunday, lunch. We're all sitting at the table in a restaurant called Chez Jeannette. It's an endless bore—it takes them ages to serve us, the conversation languishes, we have nothing to say to each other, it's truly tiresome, and it's just the beginning because, after lunch, our parents have planned to go to the Marché Suisse, an antiques market, and there's nothing Clara and I fear more than a Sunday afternoon (already depressing in itself) spent wandering around stalls of old stuff. Finally we get to dessert and, in front of those bowls, one steaming with a chocolate soufflé and the other dripping with vanilla ice cream, I turn into such a chatterbox that I amaze my whole family. I'm shoveling in a bite of soufflé, a bite of ice cream, bite after bite, and then I take a spoonful of each and swirl them
around on my plate until there's a disgusting mishmash, and the whole time I'm talking, I'm saying everything that pops into my head, a bunch of nonsense—that Italy and France are cousins, but I don't know why the French seem like the grandparents of the Italians, grumbling grandparents always a little sad, and the other day when they interviewed me on television and they asked me, “And how about you, young lady, do you prefer Italy or France?” And right there and then I didn't know what to say, because I was thinking of all the beautiful things that are in both countries, but in the end I told them that, at any rate, I wouldn't give up spaghetti not even if I were dead, but I wouldn't give up French sweets either … I'm talking and I'm laughing and I'm eating and I'm talking to fill the emptiness that is in me and between us, and in the end it comes out: “You know, Papa, what I'm going to be when I grow up? The best French-Italian cook of pasta and chocolate soufflé with vanilla ice cream.”

My mother laughed, and so did my father, but then he added that I was really completely silly.

I was almost seven when my father, an ex-cavalry officer, fell in love with horses again. And perhaps all I said was “Horses are my favorite animals. I'd love to know how to ride.” With a magical father like mine, I no sooner made a wish than it came true in complete galloping reality. By the time I turned seven I had two Avelignese horses, Usci and Ubi, and two English Thoroughbreds, Blue Lady and Palmyra Rose. These horses were “mine,” but Papa also had another, Gonda, a black Friesian mare who seemed to have come straight from Hell when she danced her Witches’ Sabbath. Every time my father let her loose in the ring, it was a spectacle. First she would rear, lashing her tail like a whip, her long mane flying up to paint the blue sky
black, and when, rejoicing in her power, she beat the earth with her huge fringed hooves and rolled her eyes, she seemed possessed. Then, after she'd calmed down a bit, she would trot along the railing, around and around—one lap, two, three, ten, twenty, fifty Inexhaustible, she would go by us, shaking her marvelous head, her neck arched high, and my father would say, “Go on, Gonda, go on, you beauty.” I said nothing, struck dumb with admiration.

From time to time we hitched her to the driving carriage. That was a long ceremony, what with all the complicated pieces of harness that I was always getting wrong. But then we were off—the creak of the wheels, the crunch of the gravel, and Gonda. If it was winter she steamed and puffed like a locomotive, and at any time she might flick up a pebble that caught you in the face. But above all there was the breeze—not the violent whirlwind coming through an open car window and not the lighter breeze you get on a bicycle that you pay for with sweat—but that movement of air you get in a horse-drawn carriage or on horseback, perfect for humans because it goes so well with thinking.