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CHAPTER 1
PART 1
Cécile opens her eyes. In the dawn, her eyes are gray as the dawn, gray as the dew, gray as the morning fog that stretches itself over the earth, and then rises lightly upward, only to vanish in a few moments with the arrival of the sun.
With the arrival of the sun, Cécile's eyes will no longer be gray. They will turn blue. Of course, her eyes are blue, says Myette, who ought to know. But her friend Anette declares that Cécile's eyes are yellow, yellow as corncobs dried in the sun.
It's dawn again, still another dawn that has been given her. Cécile doesn't budge; her eyes — gray, blue, yellow — are as unblinking as the eyes of a cat. She listens. The garden is barely awakening, under her window; this is the hour when the plants speak and the birds still cry out in their sleep; if one listens well, one may hear the snails gliding along the humid leaves.
And this is hers, hers alone. Cécile always awakens all of a piece, instantaneously; life takes hold of her with open hands, and in a single movement she is sitting up in bed; throwing back her heavy braid with an impatient toss she looks out the window to see what time it is; the rosy ray making only the tiniest rent in the sky is enough for her — it's time. She lifts two long, thin arms toward the low ceiling of her room, stretching her narrow bust, while two small breasts, pointed and hard, rise up beneath her nightgown.
In another single moment she now flings her legs out of the bed. Uncovered by her nightgown riding up to her thighs, they might well be the legs of a boy, bronzed, excoriated, with knees as distinctly carved as the features of a face. There is nothing round or soft in these knees, glossy-skinned, all tendons and bones — unusual for a girl. Cécile's legs lash the air like a pair of leather thongs, and she's on her feet on the red flagstone floor, shivering under her nightdress. She is always easily cold — she loves the sun and heat. Quickly, she seizes hold of an old turtle-neck sweater flung over the nearest chair, insinuating herself into it with an undulating movement of her neck, shoulders, and back, like some shivering salamander. Picking up a pair of denim trousers trailing on the floor, she manages, even while sticking one leg after another into the jeans, to get over to her window. Outdoors, the dawn is still gray, and Cécile's eyes are two little dawns of exactly the same shade.
These eyes are quite handy as a subject of conversation — their mysterious changeability has already on many an occasion saved the situation, when the common remark about "an angel passes" was not enough to break an awkward silence and restore some animation to Myette's salon. With an impatient movement, Cécile has thrust the tails of her nightgown into her canvas trousers; spitting on her index finger, she slicks her eyebrows, while with the five spread fingers of her other hand she combs the hair tangled all around her head.
What else does she need? On all fours on the floor, she fishes her espadrilles from under the bed, then she seizes a basket from the table, and a pair of garden shears from the top of her dresser.
With tiger bounds, she descends the stairway. All is still asleep in the house; this is the hour that belongs to her alone. The cat sleeps, rolled into a ball on the rocking chair that doesn't rock, even the birds are still asleep in the trees; the plants sleep in the garden, beneath the dew. Cécile closes the kitchen door gently behind her. Because everything still sleeps, it seems to her suddenly, at this hour alone, that she is bigger, stronger, wiser in her freshly wakened awareness, she is no longer merely a simple gamin of nearly eighteen. This feeling fills her with joy, a special joy grown out of her solitude and freedom; she knows that she belongs to herself, that she is she, that everything awaits her. Everything? What, then? She doesn't know what — the important thing is to be ready. During the day, when she is in the midst of her school friends, or in the village, or in the house, there are too many distractions for her to constantly stay ready. During the day, what awaits her may so easily escape her.
But at dawn, in this solitary silence, in the midst of nature itself, nature all one and single, she can listen, and she can awaken one more day for herself, and tell herself, "I am here, here I am, life, I am ready for everything you want to bring me, oh you marvelous life! All your delights, all your loves, all your tastes and scents and feelings! All, because I am so entirely virgin, and so impatient to live ..."
Bending over the rosebushes, stooping to the strawberry plants, she fills her basket; from the lettuce leaves she pulls off the snails — they are tinted a beautiful pale yellow like newborn chicks — and she replaces each tenderly on some other leaf, more handy than the lettuce. She licks the dew from a pear, breathes the exhalation of the grass, smiles to the flower buds as to a row of babies.
Something warm has just rubbed against her leg; it's Minou, up at last, come to join her. Cécile lifts her, hugs her to herself, scrutinizing the golden eyes of the cat, unblinking eyes like her own.
Beyond this garden — this fortification — people keep killing each other; the full-grown adults are killing or finishing with their killing of each other. It's the summer of 1944, and the Germans have been driven from Paris, but they still put up their fight, some distance beyond. The youth-time of Cécile has known nothing but war — a rather distant war, it has touched this little village only lightly, but it has laid its hand heavily on her family.
During the last four years she has lived with her godmother, Myette, in this village in Gascony, while her parents have been interned in a prison camp. "They'll come back," her grandmother tells her, and Cécile solemnly nods her head. The adults have stolen her childhood from her — and will they also steal her grownup life?
Cécile looks around her anew, absorbing the garden, the sky — everything that is hers alone, at the dawn of each day.
And it is only when she is at last again replenished with the acidulous scents, with the tangy bitter flavors of macerated grasses and leaves, when she is at last enveloped in the final shreds of fog, when she is already warmed by the first stroke of the sun on her neck, and invaded by peace and joy, that Cécile can again close her eyes — these gray eyes already turning blue, and that will turn to yellow, presently, when the cocks sing out in the deliverance that every morning brings.
END OF SEPTEMBER, 1944. The summer of deliverance, the warm summer's end of that year. School has begun again, and after class Cécile hurries over to her best friend, Anette. Anette always put on her white gloves before going home; she is small and round; her hair is short, but her school uniform is a little longer than the fashion. The fashion at a convent school is always one war behind.
"Oh, I'm so hot!" Anette sighs. "The minute I get home, I'm taking off my stockings." For the convent school requires that gray cotton stockings be worn with the blue sailor dress, the white gloves, and the round felt hat that compose the uniform.
"I —" says Cécile — "I'm taking off my stockings as soon as I'm out, behind the courtyard door."
"That's just like Cécile!" thinks Anette. "Cécile isn't afraid of anything! She's an anarchist, she doesn't care at all what people may think, she does whatever comes into her head." Anette is desperately envious of Cécile's free ways, and divided in her soul between jealousy, admiration, and rancor.
An entire battalion of right-thinking, well-established, well-organized folk rises up in her to disapprove of her friend, whom she wants so much to resemble. "It's just not done!" Anette pronounces this decisive formula, yet she knows that she is beaten in advance, that Cécile will only laugh and say, "All the better!"
Cécile has an irritating way of looking at her, of gazing at everything with her multicolored eyes, and speaking of the present as though it were already in the past. "You remember, yesterday ..."
Yesterday is almost today, for Anette, for Louise, for Vincente, it's part of the present time, it isn't a period to be remembered and judged. But Cécile speaks of this unfinished time already with a distance, as though it were something in a fable. She seems to find pleasure in pulling out everyday happenings, as though out of a basket, and spreading them before her friends, like a magician turning everything into a trick — the laughter of Louise, the joke played on Vincente, the quarrels of Anette, are spread out and suddenly relived. "You remember," Cécile says, "when Louise promised us to come to school in silk stockings and when Mlle Mazoyllet —"
Mademoiselle teaches literature, and everyone knows that Cécile adores her. "What's Louise got to do with —" Anette begins, for Cécile leaps from one thought to another with a logic that Anette can never follow. "Come on!" Cécile commands. She hasn't put on her gloves — with her, the gloves are always worn inside her pocket! Behind the carriage entrance she bends over; already she's rolled her stockings down to her shoes, like ankle socks. "I've got an idea — but take off your gloves. Anette, you're ridiculous wearing gloves in the heat — we'll go swimming — but don't say a word to anyone, or else they'll all want to come — let's run to the river."
"But," says Anette, "I don't have a bathing suit."
Cécile raises a thin, disdainful shoulder. "What of it, there's never anyone down there, and besides, it's much more pleasant to swim in your skin."
What nerve she has, that Cécile, and what extraordinary things she knows! Anette has never gone swimming in the nude, but this Parisienne Cécile is afraid of nothing.
Cécile laughs as she runs, her schoolbag flung up atop her head, and steadied with one hand, Bedouin-fashion, as though by instinct. If Anette but knew it — neither has she ever been swimming naked anywhere! But the idea pleases her, and it's just as well to give the impression that she knows all about it, otherwise Anette, with her country-girl timidity, will at once refuse. Besides, Cécile likes to appear more daring, more extravagant than she really is. It's sort of a role to play, and has become second nature with her. She doesn't know how she started this role. Was it her arrival in the village at the beginning of the war, and her appearance at the convent — the only girl from Paris — arousing a murmur of astonishment, of stupefaction that has followed her ever since, her advent creating and maintaining a level of wonder to which she herself must constantly rise? Or is it she herself who has created, for her friends, this exciting personage who is afraid of nothing, who has "read everything" and "seen everything" in Paris, and who thereby is entitled to queen it over these little village girls of Gascony?
Once more Cécile has proposed something shocking, and yet here is Anette following her, as always.
As they run, the sun enters into Cécile and Anette through all their pores; it blinds them and leaves them deaf to the world. Anette puffs and blows. Small, rounded, and dark, she quickly becomes hot, and her sweat runs down her back. Already, she has begun to regret having let herself be dragged along. She tells herself that one shouldn't swim when one is so hot, she'll surely catch pneumonia and die. And besides — to go swimming altogether naked — it must be even more dangerous!
But Cécile gallops along, laughing.
Luckily, the pathway opening before them is filled with shade, pierced only by strands of light like those that play through the windows of a cathedral. The two girls run, their schoolbags bouncing on their heads, while brambles reach out their fingers to stop them, catching hold of their skirts, and letting go only regretfully, detaching themselves with little cracklings of anger.
And as always, Cécile feels as though she were detaching herself from her own person, that she is moving over while another Cécile begins to run alongside her, and today the second Cécile is pursued by bandits — that's why she's running so hard — they want to catch her, they will violate her — hurry! She must flee at all costs!
Cécile throws a hurried look at Anette just behind her. Anette is her maid, following her and carrying the baby — that large, maroon-colored bundle in her arms — the bandits want to kill the baby — the baby is the son of Aga Khan — "Oh, I'm so hot! I'm going to die!" Anette gasps. She lets herself drop to the ground, fat maroon schoolbag tumbling, too, and disgorging books and note papers. Cécile's dream is interrupted, and she too halts, irritated.
"Come on, then! We're nearly there!" Cécile cries. "Don't stop now, when we're only a minute from the river!" But she kneels for a minute alongside Anette, and her eyes, golden in the shade, crinkle with laughter. "I was telling myself a story while I ran, and you've spoiled everything; you interrupted my story!"
"What story? Tell me, while we rest?"
"No, not now — after — tonight ..." Disappointed, Anette slowly gets up; strands of hair are still pasted to her cheeks; she bends and gathers her books and her note papers. Cécile's stories have woven a tapestry through her life, during the three years of their friendship. There are the stories that Cécile reads — for her godmother lets her read whatever she wants, even the authors forbidden on the Index, like Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas. Anette is allowed to read only a few selected works of theirs — expurgated, of course. Mère Stanislas has a predilection for certain stuffy authors like Boileau or Corneille. Three-fourths of French literature is studied without being read — while Cécile, for her part, relates to Anette all sorts of astonishing things that take place in the pages of Baudelaire and Musset, and to which she adds whatever she makes up in her own head — episodes that are even more astonishing! What sort of a story, then, has she just made up?
Anette gathers her schoolbag without realizing that but an instant ago this schoolbag was the illegitimate child of the Aga Khan.
The river is there in the hollow before them, bordered by weeping willows rinsing their hair all along its banks. Not a soul is about — for who would be so crazy as to come under the open sun in this heat?
Without waiting, Cécile flings her bag to the ground, and atop it fall her slippers, her gray stockings, her sailor-blue skirt, and her uniform blouse.
Modest Anette undresses behind a bush, folding her garments one by one as though she were in her room at home.
"Oh! It's so cold!" cries Cécile.
"It's cold?" Anette worries. She emerges from behind her bush, still dressed in her white cotton slip with its eyelet embroidery, and she tests the water with the tips of her toes. Then she kneels at the edge of the clear stream, and splashes her face and neck and arms.
Cécile is already afloat in the midst of the river — she has cast off — she is far away — her braid floats on the water alongside her, like a serpent of the sea — her white naked body is imprinted with trembling shadows from the creepers and branches that line the narrow river and form a green roof above it. Floating like that, Cécile's body has the look of a martyr's tied with ropes and made ready for torture. Or else — is she Ophelia? Ophelia lost, Ophelia mad, Ophelia dead?
But no, she is neither lost nor dead — happiness penetrates her, through every part of her being; she is turned toward the sky, and at this moment happiness, total happiness, is this roof of living green, pierced by hundreds of suns, all the suns that sing! Happiness is the water, so fresh, caressing her shoulders, her back, her thighs, happiness is the transparency of the river and the marvelous enchanted pebbles that scintillate in the river's bed.
How is it possible? Here, this peace, this silence, this overwhelming happiness, and there, the war that is not finished, and hunger, misery, and her parents perhaps under torture, perhaps dead. Paris is still plunged in darkness and cold.
It is unjust, it is monstrous, and how can she alone have the right to be so happy at this moment? Isn't she guilty of a monstrous selfishness?
Cécile begins to feel cold; she shivers, turns over, and swims vigorously toward the shore, presently catching hold of a branch hanging over the river. Anette is still there, her legs in the water, sitting on the bank in her slip, and she looks at Cécile's naked body with a shocked air.
"If someone should see you!" she mutters under her breath, as though she were afraid of attracting some witness by the sound of her voice.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "By Cécile"
by .
Copyright © 1991 Tereska Torres.
Excerpted by permission of Feminist Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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