As I grow older, gradually too lanky still to be able to place an arm on the armrest in an elegant attitude, I will be positioned half behind her, possibly with my fingers on the woodwork of the back, right next to her head, as if the roles are gradually being reversed and it is I who am protecting her. But the composition would mainly express the respect of a daughter for her mother, who is allowed to sit: she assumes the dominant position.
Now that I am talking about this and distilling the scene from a multiplicity of separate memories rather than calling a well-defined event to mind, I can suddenly see myself looking down at her neck as I stand behind the back of the sofa on which she has sat down. I have always known that the birthmark in the nape of her neck, under her earlobe, close to the hairline at the back of her head, was there, but I only seem to see it properly now: not clearly outlined, more a point where her southern complexion is concentrated. Above it her locks of hair anchored to her skull by a wide-toothed tortoiseshell comb, whose grip not one hair escapes — and all of it so clear and close up. I have to restrain myself from putting my hands over her eyes to surprise her, in the hope that she will turn round and I will be able to see her face, as sharply as the back of her head. Not the face with the veil of habit over it, the greatest common denominator of all my mothers from all my memories, but her quintessence.
I myself could still wear my hair loose, or in thick plaits, but not for much longer. The phases of life used to have fewer intermediate seasons. There was less no man’s land between childhood and adulthood. I won’t have any more dresses with sailor collars hanging in my wardrobe. As I approach twenty, my dress will increasingly resemble my mother’s, in her weekday outfit, with a long ankle-length skirt, and over it a blouse buttoned up to the neck. Soon I will have to wear my hair up too, and from then on for ever. A woman who has been promised or married puts her hair up. Loose hair, loose morals.
You can’t simply imagine my father next to me, that’s not right. Unless I’m an only child, but that isn’t the case. Mothers have their portraits taken with their daughters, growing sons surround their father. Only in a family portrait do fathers and daughters come together. Then I’m allowed to share the sofa with my mother, since I am now not only her daughter, we are both first and foremost the woman, the weaker sex. The thought can still make me grind my teeth, especially because of the naturalness with which she assumed her role. I fought with her more than with my father, who was far too soft to be a patriarch. But perhaps all fathers are soft, and easier to kill than mothers.
Probably he will be standing with one hand on the armrest and the other on the back of the sofa, bending over my mother and me: a gesture that suggests love and devotion, but also clearly shows his place in the whole. He is the paterfamilias, the cornerstone of the family, and my brother Edgard, a few years older than me — he is wearing a suit that seems to be a replica of his father’s — would be positioned on my side of the sofa next to me or behind me, but more formal than my father, in his role as son and man.
When I see such portraits again later, I read mostly the lie in them. Not ours — my parents love each other and we love them. We need less hypocrisy than other people to keep the idyll intact and we have no more taboos than the taboos of the age. The real lie is the world itself, by which I mean: the maps with the aid of which we were supposed to get our bearings in those years, and which were supposed to steer us through life, turn out in hindsight to have be more fantasy than guide.
We are well-to-do bourgeois, belonging to an extensive caste within which an extremely subtle hierarchy requires constant repositioning with regard to the others. In that period I can never estimate properly where precisely we are located in that whole system of unspoken laws and commandments. Some of the girls in my class are allowed to accompany me to and from school, I can sit at the same desk with them, our mothers can converse cordially, but it would not be fitting for them to come into our house. Conversely there are girlfriends who can come and play at our house, which does not mean at all that I can just drop in to see them at home, and if I am invited some ordinance or other requires that I take my leave well before supper and not too long after coffee.
There are also people who are allowed “inside” at home, that is, upstairs, in our living room; while others must content themselves with the antechamber in the front hall, its stiffly grand armchairs and chairs, and the cool air — only if it is really cold outside is there a fire. That room makes a haughty impression even on me when I happen to enter it.
Twice a month my mother has Emilie, our maid, arrange the chairs in a circle and light the lamps on the side tables, to receive her friends from the sewing group. When she gives me my own sewing box when I am about eleven, with an air as if it is a gold chest from Ali Baba’s cave, I am expected from then on to take part in that enervating, fiddly activity. A half-hour at most to start with, it’s impossible to keep me still any longer, but the sessions are systematically extended, and you can see me sitting there, messing around with embroidery frames and needles, swaying my legs until my mother says something and I crackle with rage inside.
“O plongeur à jamais sous sa cloche! Toute une mer de verre éternellement chaude…” I recite to myself, to while away the time and my impatience. “Toute une vie immobile aux lents pendules verts!” And I glance at my mother, dressed for the occasion with careful informality, since although her friends all belong to her circle of intimates, it still requires a whole ritual before a woman looks informal — at least if I remember everything well, if memory has not added extra colour to my mother’s official portrait, as she has seated herself there in the Louis Philippe chair, a cascade of linen and lace, in a dressing gown of lined satin with piping and five or six long undersleeves that fan open from the elbow, so that her hands appear from them like the mobile stamens of an exotic flower, and over it a stole of Irish lace, and in the cold seasons a fur boa.
When after her death I am emptying her rooms with my daughter and we are piling up corsets and garters that have been out of fashion for decades, the countless scarves and veils, thin as snakeskin that has shed time itself, in boxes in that old front room, ready for the rag-and-bone man, I have the feeling that I am clearing up the moulds of a monumental female statue, or the bones and ribs of some prehistoric animal.
“We can start our own museum,” I said. “Musée royal d’Histoire naturelle de ma Mère.” My daughter found that disrespectful.
I never wore my hair up. I resolutely banished from my wardrobe clothes expressing the expectation that I had to become a maquette of my mother, and embraced the fashion of the inter-war years, with its scandalously bared ankles and calves, its low waists, its frivolous accessories like diadems and long necklaces and hip ribbons, alongside which my mother in her still largely nineteenth-century outfits looked as if she was in armour, a stranded cruiser, as formidable as it was impotent. She in turn considered my clothes “hopelessly frivolous”.
“Our Helena has the craziness of my father’s side in her blood,” I heard her say more than once while she was embroidering with her friends. She was proud of her French origins, her Latin blood, which in my view explained her caprices, although the fact that she was French had more to do with the vagaries of history than with any merit of hers. I listened with a mixture of awe and mockery to the Cartesian clarity of her native language, as it had been brought to refinement and discipline by generations of court poets and philosophers, while in her view the French that we learnt to speak was full of glitches and was at most a language for harlequins and poets with a high opinion of themselves — a sneer at me.