Amandine by Marlena de Blasi Read Free Book Online Page A

me as we bent to gather vine trimmings, sat tying faggots of them round with hemp weed
.
    “But Maman, I’ve just come home. Were not two years of my being away enough for you? Were they not penance enough to suit you?”
    She didn’t answer. She looked at me as if she would speak but then touched her hand to her mouth—as though to close it?—went about her work. All this silence. The convent, the farm, barely a difference save the bells. Everyone sealed shut, even if they speak, especially when they speak. No one can ever know another. I watched Maman then, sat back on my heels and watched her wrapping the hemp round and round the twigs, tying a loop knot, slicing the hemp with a rusted chestnut knife, piling the faggots into her apron
.
    “Let’s get to the kitchen, Solange
. La joute
for this evening. From the cellar we’ll need a cabbage, some potatoes, a string of sausages, two thick trenchers of ham. The chickens are dripping in the barn sink. Here, take a basket.”
    Maman, slow down, Maman, look at me, I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t. Rather, I took the basket without even looking at her. She knew what Grand-mère knew. About suffering, I mean. Could it have been that she, too, would have liked to save me from it, and so, in her powerlessness, she was awkward? Ashamed? She turned away from me so I would love her less. Was that it? Was she warning me?
    “Don’t love me so much, Solange. I’m hardly worth it, I can hardly bear it, this blind devotion of yours. Worse now than before you went away. I’m only a woman, perhaps not yet a woman. I have borne three daughters, and still I am trying to find my way. How can I help you when I know so little myself? Don’t love me so much.”
    Was that what Maman told me with her diffidence? Did she steel herself so that, once again, she could part with me, and I with her? I forgave you, Maman, for sending me away. For choosing him. But I’d come home. It was all okay. He wouldn’t have come near me, Maman, and had he, I wouldn’t have been afraid of him. I wouldn’t have let him, Maman
.
    Mothers and daughters. Jealousy, envy. How is it that a mother can feel jealousy and envy even of her daughter? Maman’s defense of me back then was quick, singular. That night when she followed Papa. Watched his back from behind my door. From the door opened only a chink, she watched him sit on a chair near my bed. Watched him kneel, then bend his head. His mouth. Watched him slide searching hands flat over my body. His hands under the thin blue quilt. She watched him, and I watched her. At last, she threw open the door, stood there, hands clutching her face, no words, no screeching. Stood there making sure of what she saw. By his hair, she dragged him away. I watched as she kicked him then, moved him down the narrow, dark hall with her feet. Never resisting her, she kicked him about the face, the loins, centimeter by centimeter across the stone floor. She left the heap of him outside their room. I could hear him weeping
.
    But after that, it was “Solange, that dress is ready to pass down to Chloe. Solange, cover your hair at table. Solange, is that rouge you’re wearing?” Not he, it was I whom you watched. Not I, it was he whom you chose. You chose him. How you began to look at him, Maman, as though none of us were there. And when you both thought none of us
were
there, you would let him turn you about to face the wall, let him pull you to him from behind, bury his face in the nape of your neck, separate your buttocks, press himself up against them to make a cleft of your skirt with that part of him. When I saw that, I remembered his hands from another time. A time when I saw him pick a melon from the vine. He stood there in the dirt, pushing together the sides of it, softening it, twisting it, ripping it open, raking out the seeds with his fingers, sucking and chewing at its heart, the juices dripping from his mouth, his chin, heaving down what was left. Knowing I