Two days before Christmas, I’m on my way to Marseille. We’ve agreed that my mother will come and meet me at the Saint-Charles station, and as I wait on the platform, burdened, anguished, drained, thinking she’s forgotten to come, or that this whole affair is so unlikely that it can’t possibly culminate in the actual arrival of my actual mother, I see a smiling woman approaching, wearing my mother’s unattractive glasses, followed by a man — and, on that man’s arm, a little girl. The woman is bare-headed, and her hair is dyed red and cut short, her brow draped with bangs that she regularly tosses out of her eyes with a jerk of the head. Her makeup is impeccable, very ladylike, she has fine hose, high-heeled strapped shoes, etc. I stare mutely, knowing it’s her, my mother, but unable to feel it in anything about her. She’s tall, poised, and, for what she is, perfect. She kisses me politely, without tenderness, and I note that her manners too, and her gestures, are more elegant than before. She introduces the little girl, whose name is Bella, and the father, a certain Rocco. Nothing leads me to believe that she finds this situation at all odd or disconcerting, since she speaks to me as naturally as can be, in that metallic voice that was even long ago hers. She smiles continually, her wide smile without warmth, perfectly at ease, a woman of the world. I fleetingly sense that my mother’s gaze is not in unison with her smile, that behind her slightly distorting lenses an anxiety hovers, even a panic, unbeknownst to her. But is that certain? A second later her gaze is bright and joyous. Is that certain?
And so I follow this new little family out of the station, then into a complication of narrow streets, dark despite the blue sky and the bright winter sun. My mother and Rocco walk a few paces ahead, and every so often the child turns around, perched on her father’s shoulders, to look at me with an astonishment full of suspicion. She’s a pretty little girl, her eyes dark and hard, elegantly garbed in an orange corduroy coat with big brass buttons. Not once do my mother or her husband look back to be sure they haven’t lost me. Rocco is much younger than my mother — yet who could ever guess my mother’s age now? Rocco must be about as old as I am. And suddenly I discover, as I consider her briskly swaying hips, her delicate calves swathed in shimmering hose, that my mother is a kind of green woman I haven’t yet come across — and what fate is it, I wonder, that demands that my mother herself must now cross my path as a green woman, to convince me that such is my destiny? No need to see her actually dressed in green — we’re well past such childishness now, in a way. She’s dressed in pink, in a suit cut from an inexpensive fabric that manages to put up a good front all the same.
We turn into a dank alleyway, so macerated in its own damp that you can easily conclude the sunlight never touches it. Rocco opens a door and we walk down a dark hallway, where a second door gives onto a room shrouded in semidarkness. My mother hurries to open the curtains, but the room is scarcely lighter than before. It’s small and cluttered, thick with the odors of a stingy, shabby existence. Rocco kindly offers me a sandwich and something to drink. Meanwhile, still standing, one foot perpendicular to the other, my mother looks as though she’s struggling to keep the alarm and embarrassment out of her gaze. Whenever she lets down her guard, I see her eyes darting uneasily this way and that, never looking straight ahead. She then raises her hands to take off her shawl, forgetting she’s not wearing one. Seeing that I’ve seen her, she furrows her brow.
I spend three days in Marseille. With each passing hour I am more resolved never to come here again, never to have anything more to do with my mother’s new family. She struggles valiantly to bring order to this new life of hers, but the forces at work overrun her on all sides. Little Bella is prone to tantrums of paroxysmal violence. Although my mother does all she can to keep it from me, I finally learn that Bella lives with a host family during the week, joining her mother and Rocco only on weekends. Rocco is gentle and amiable, but regularly spouts bellicose anti-Arab rants that leave my mother mortified. She blushes and lowers her eyes, and her anger and shame burden me with a sort of ineffectual pity. It pains her to see me judging that repellent side of her Rocco’s personality. But, I ask myself, why should I care? Why should I care, in the end, what becomes of her, so long as she’s not being beaten? In his everyday behavior, Rocco is a peaceable man. Of my two sisters she won’t say a word, and no doubt she knows nothing. Losing custody of Bella during the week must have hurt her terribly. But in all her destitution she makes a great show of superiority and ebullience. I look at her, bewildered: can the fact that she’s come to understand, as my father thought he’d realized many times, that she hasn’t led a worthwhile life, and that her time on this earth will come to an end two or three decades hence, can that really explain such a renunciation of the woman she’d so stubbornly striven to become? All the same, I can only admire her bravado, however joyless. They’re in difficult straits, forced to keep a careful eye on every meager expense. Has she found work again? And Rocco, what does he do with his days? What of their income? She eludes my direct questions, gives me abstract answers—“for as long as this world’s been around, everything’s always worked out in the end,” “the job market is a snake that swallows its own tail,” “we’re holding our ground”— while, sheltered behind her enormous glasses, her eyes dart wildly this way and that, in search of a rescue she can’t define.
The day I leave, I give her a green silk scarf. She immediately drapes it over her head, then changes her mind and wraps it oddly around her hips. I tell her about my children.
“Ah,” she says, deliberately cutting me off, “aren’t children the salt and pepper of our dull little lives?”
* * *
My mother is a woman in green, untouchable, disappointing, infinitely mutable, very cold, able, by force of will, to become very beautiful, and able, too, not to want to. Where are they now, my mother, Rocco, and Bella? I won’t write them and they won’t write me, until one day, perhaps, a letter might appear from some unknown place, accompanied by photos of unknown people who will happen to be my family, to various degrees — a letter whose authenticity, even if it’s signed “Maman,” I will dispute, and which I will then stuff away in some spot where it will never be unearthed again.
* * *
December 2003 — The floodwaters now surround Katia Depetiteville’s house. She’s in no danger, but, isolated to a degree difficult to bear even for someone who lives in such solitude, she asks us on the phone to put her up for a while.
Jean-Yves hoists the rowboat onto the roof of the car, drives till the road disappears into the water, parks the car, takes the rowboat down from the roof, puts it in the water, and climbs in. The water has almost reached the threshold of Katia’s house. Katia is waiting on the second floor, on her balcony, with a little pack on her back. Jean-Yves tells me all this later, staring at something invisible in the gray mist. With one single oar, he gently brought the rowboat under Katia’s balcony, and then Katia straddled the balustrade and, without warning, threw herself off.
“Fortunately she landed in the rowboat,” says Jean-Yves, “but she almost capsized us, and in any case, what was she trying to prove with an idiotic stunt like that?”
An absolute woman in green, Katia Depetiteville never shows any trace of gratitude for a favor that’s been done her. Comfortably settled in with us, she exercises her rights as a houseguest with a voracity, almost a brutality, that I never see when I stop by her place for a cup of coffee, when the monotony of her life and the dreariness of her house so weigh on her that a gentle numbness is all she’s capable of. Now she’s come back to life, she speaks out, butts in with her opinions, lets herself be served and coddled. One day, she pulls on her green wool pants and her bottle-green sweater and she and I set off for Bordeaux to catch the Paris train and pay a call on my two sisters, whose existence I suddenly recalled as I was reading a biography of the Papin sisters, and that memory of their obscure presence somewhere in the suburbs filled me with anxiety and contrition, making me think that although I could live perfectly well without seeing or thinking of them, it might perhaps be different for those two, who, apart from my now-exiled mother and indifferent father, have no other close relative than me. I scolded myself for rashly dismissing certain rumors concerning their dependence on alcohol and some sort of drug, respectively. And so I overcome my reticence, my repugnance for anything to do with my family. I fortify my resolve with Katia’s company, Katia who’s perfectly thrilled to be getting away from the Gironde, assuring me she hasn’t been out of the region for a good twenty years, which I find doubtful, without saying so. I never point out Katia Depetiteville’s flagrant inconsistencies to her face.