loose ends, my curly hair and curvy figure creating an impression of undisciplined excess, the way words can sometimes outrun thoughts.
When we were children, though, we had even more reason to feel different from each other. Taking her lead from our nanny, Miss Ross, our mother had declared that Marie was the pretty one and I the smart one, insisting all the while that she simply doted on both daughters, a charming affirmation we learned to periodically reinterpret as time went by. In fact, our mother never quite knew what to do with us or, what’s more, what to make of us. Beginning with our conception. What if pregnancy spoiled her figure? True, she was a beauty. A tall, whippet-thin brunette with superb cheekbones, she had glowing skin, an aristocratic nose, slightly almond-shaped black eyes, and she carried herself like a dancer, as truly beautiful women so often do. Her anxiety over losing her figure soon gave way to that of losing her marriage, and she resigned herself to pregnancy only under pressure from a husband so resolute that he threatened her with divorce. She was determined, however, never to become one of those “loving and frumpy mothers who devote themselves to their children and give up trying to look attractive,” as she put it. So she hired an Englishwoman in her sixties to take charge of our upbringing, an undertaking with which our mother was most careful not to interfere.
Nanny
I’m ten years old. No one suspects a thing. Not even Marie, who is incapable, luckily, of imagining Nanny’s duplicity. So I keep quiet. Just as I keep to myself all the terrible ways she mistreats me. Because I don’t want to spoil Marie’s fragile happiness by revealing how our governess tortures me as soon as we’re alone together. That madwoman actually beats me, using any pretext to take her resentment out on me with vicious blows. And I am in such fear of these violent episodes, which leave me staggering in terror, that I live mesmerized by her moods, like an appliance plugged into a wall socket, picking up on the fluctuations of her emotional current and preparing myself for the next crisis.
Her anger comes on like wind billowing a sail: I can see the rage course through her, taking over, and I await in despair the moment when Nanny will take me away with her, out of sight, to vent her fury by attacking me like an evil giant. A formidable opponent, she has endless tricks up her sleeve.
She has decided, for example, that I am absentminded and has made it her mission to root out this flaw that seriously threatens my chances in life, when in reality I have found in daydreaming a way to escape from the nightmare she forces me to live. The upshot is that Nanny spends her time testing me in front of my sister and parents by sending me to fetch a certain paper in the library, or a phone number in her address book, or some object on the night table in her room, when the object is actually in her closet.
Off I go, my eyes already blurry with tears. Beginning my search, I lose time looking without seeing, hunting without thinking about what I want to find in the room. Like Gretel, I am lost, as surely as in a forest at nighttime, but Gretel didn’t know how lucky she was to have Hansel by her side when she met the witch who ate children. I am alone when Nanny walks in, supposedly to help me in the task she has set me. “You’re useless, you stupid girl,” she screams, “clumsy and pathetic! You’d better hop to it, you hear me? Or I’m going to lose my temper!”
She often pulls my hair or slaps me, when she’s not throwing dictionaries, chairs, or even small tables at me. Sometimes she just crosses her arms and hisses through her teeth, “Go on, look, show me how you do it. Oh, you’re a fine sight, with your runny nose and that hair in your eyes, you poor thing, I feel sorry for you.” And before I find anything, always before I can succeed, she points a long finger at the object I seek: “And that? What’s that?” I bow my head in submission and defeat, but she piles on humiliation, stoking her fury: “What is that? Are you going to answer me or not!”