The Vexations Read online

  Joseph wouldn’t be dispatched to boarding school unless it was over my own corpse, I informed them. “Eric hated it there. And it just isn’t necessary. Joseph can stay here. I’ll educate him.”

  “You’re barely educated yourself,” Cannu said.

  “I think I know more than a six-year-old,” I said. You found me educated enough to court, I thought, but did not say. Maybe he’d always found me ignorant but had considered it an advantage rather than a drawback.

  “At some point he’ll need to be prepared for lycée.”

  That was years off, I said. Either I would keep far enough ahead of him, or we could figure out something else when the time came.

  Cannu clearly thought the second option was more realistic than the first, but grudgingly agreed that, for the time being, I could educate Joseph at home.

  I’d spent my years at Bellenau plowing through the library, but my newfound expertise was more in novels than in anything else. I’d read the complete works of Victor Hugo, but the sample exam packets Cannu sent me from a lycée in Cherbourg were far more impenetrable. I received the message he intended: I had some English but no Latin, no advanced math, no science but what Pierre-Joseph had taught me in the garden. I had plenty of Catholic theology, but the state schools no longer tested that. The exam questions made a mountain I had only half realized existed, much less knew how to climb. I began our lessons already dreading the day I would have to admit that Cannu was right, and my anxiety made me a fussy dictator in the schoolroom. When Joseph rebelled, our lessons sometimes devolved into shouting matches, and eventually I surrendered. We went back to reading fairy tales in the library and drawing pictures of the heroes and villains; we found insects in the garden and I let him invent their names, since I rarely knew the right answers. He made up racing games with elaborate rules and we dashed between trees together. I let him play with the sons and daughters of the remaining groundskeepers, and only sometimes tried to scrub his speech of their influence.

  Both Fortin and Cannu found me far too soft. Fortin, when he visited, would lob some of the same questions at Joseph that I remembered him lobbing at me. His dismay at Joseph’s not knowing the capital of Belgium was palpable. It wasn’t just his letters and numbers, Cannu scolded. The real trouble was that I was failing to instill proper habits of mind.

  Only at the piano was I a skilled schoolmistress, perhaps because I hoped Joseph would learn to love it. If he learned math by brute force and hated it ever after, well, that was much the way I had been taught math, and I had survived. But I wanted him to feel at home with and in music. I suppose I thought it was the one thing—not the house, the garden, the dwindling Lafosse wealth shielding us from the rest of the world—that was mine to pass down to him. He showed little aptitude or love for music, but he was young still, and I could wait. I felt that way about the entirety of our desultory schooling: he seemed so young and so happy, and I had been so unhappy as a child, that his joy in the world was worth safeguarding to me at nearly any price.

  Cannu eventually confined his opinions about Joseph’s education to occasional lectures, although I had the impression he was only biding his time until Joseph was older and demanded a wider world for himself, or I was forced to acknowledge my own limitations. Fine, I thought, because I was biding my time as well: once Madeleine died, what was left of Bellenau would be sold and the proceeds divided between Albertine and Joseph. He and I would lose our home, but we’d have an income with which to find another one. It would be my son’s income, not mine, and I occasionally felt shame about waiting for it: waiting, constantly, for someone I was fond of to die, for a child to inherit money I would then spend. But what else did I have to wait for?

  That was how I taught Joseph geography, when I taught him geography: where might he want to live when the gilded-cage door opened? We invented impossible lives—as Eskimos in the frozen north or settlers in the Congo. We swam with penguins in Antarctica and drank tea in China. In South America we herded llamas in the Andes and ran from jaguars in the Brazilian jungle.

  The library at Bellenau had enough fuel for these fantasies, but many of the books were out of date, and Cannu sourly offered corrections when he overheard us. “Buenos Aires is perfectly civilized these days,” he said. “There aren’t cattle roaming the streets.”

  “Have you been there?” Joseph asked.

  “No,” he said. “But I’ve seen pictures. It looks like anywhere. It looks like Paris.”

  “Paris is hardly anywhere,” I said.

  “It looks like a large, fine city,” Cannu said, meeting my pedantry with his own. “Buildings of stone, paved streets with lights. Banks and government buildings and an opera house and so on.”

  The harshest of Cannu’s opinions about Bellenau, or about Madeleine or me or Joseph, he did not express in front of his wife, and I wished Albertine would accompany him more often. But she stayed in Cherbourg for months at a time, even as Cannu’s responsibilities at the estate expanded. For years she claimed that Bellenau’s growing shabbiness depressed her too much to visit. Then on one visit she asked me again to go rowing with her. It had happened only the one other time, when she informed me of Pierre’s illness, and I braced myself for whatever woeful tidings this rendezvous might divulge. The little boats were by now so rotted that water seeped in through the boards and puddled at our feet. As a result we had to curtail our excursion, and she hurried to explain, with the water rising, how hard the past years had been, trying for a baby, and waiting and trying and waiting some more, all the while with a nephew who’d been conceived in the space of a month living in her childhood nursery. She knew this wasn’t Joseph’s fault, or mine, and she was trying to set it aside, she said, and be warmer toward us.

  Sometimes she was, and sometimes she treated me as if I was something unpleasant left behind after Pierre’s death, like the debris on a beach after a storm tide has receded. She’d send Joseph funny postcards for no reason, then ignore his birthday and name day. Sometimes she looked at him with the same expression she wore while sorting through Cannu’s early winnowings of the estate, the piles of antiques and unfashionable paintings he’d earmarked for sale: This should have been mine. You should have been mine.

  At dinner there’s a new guest at the boardinghouse, the poor man like chum in the conversational waters. In the decades since my arrival in Argentina, the country has latched its gates much more tightly, even as the whole world seemed to catch fire. Newcomers are so much rarer these days that the building goes a little wild for them. What news have they brought? What can they tell us, about either their personal sorrows or those of the world we’ve left?

  This guest turns out to be a disappointment: an agricultural consultant from Uruguay, just passing through Buenos Aires on his way to Río Negro province. I imagine the Italian girl sighing with boredom, although she’s moved out already, and I don’t know where she went. With the situation in France, he says, the vineyards here would be foolish not to maximize production in anticipation.

  “In anticipation of what?” I ask from the neighboring table, although I promised myself I wasn’t interested in the stranger. I make my accent sound very French, and he shifts uncomfortably.

  “It’s a thirsty world,” he says. “That’s all I meant. Maybe more now than ever.”

  He corners me the next day at breakfast—he didn’t mean any offense, he says, but one can’t help reading the newspapers.

  I tell him I took no offense. “Besides, they don’t grow grapes where I’m from. They grow cows.”

  Do I still have family there? he asks. Are my people all right?

  I tell him I don’t have any family.

  I can sense the man wash his hands of me at that moment. He was only trying to be polite in the first place, and now I’ve revealed myself to be an old sourpuss with no one left alive who loves her. What is the point of an old woman who hasn’t managed to make herself a family? What is she for?

  That’s all right with me. I do
n’t really want to talk about the war, especially since the débarquement started, with the Allied forces landing on the beaches of Normandy, and the newspapers became a bizarre roll call of the places of my former life, including even tiny Saint-Côme-du-Mont. I don’t want to talk about it partly because I have loved and been loved in these places, and their destruction is not a conversation I wish to have with a Uruguayan viticulture consultant over breakfast. But also because there is a small vicious voice inside me that has read about the German occupation, that now reads about the Allied invasion, and whispers: Burn. Let them all burn.

  While Madeleine continued to hold on, Estelle passed away when Joseph was eight, the year the century turned. Fortin and I mourned her together, but I didn’t know if he would keep coming to Bellenau alone, once the fresh edges of our grief had worn away. I was pleased when he did, even when he seemed to have saved up his bluster to unleash on me and Joseph. He was a man who liked to be listened to, and once Estelle was no longer there to indulge him, we were expected to rise to the occasion. Joseph found him very forbidding, and he was, but he was forbidding in all the same ways he’d been since I was a girl, and I took some comfort in this.

  I had regular letters from Conrad and the sporadic ones from old school friends and from Eric (who had ensconced himself, rather inexplicably, in a new apartment in some industrial enclave far south of the city). I had the library, including all those Hugo novels. I was partial to the orphan Cosette’s wild swerves of fortune in Les Misérables. Only a half orphan, like me: her father abandons her but doesn’t die. Unless he dies later in the novel, and I’ve forgotten? I think he simply disappears, winks out of her mother Fantine’s life and the book for good. Félix something-or-other. I suppose I could look it up.

  What if Pierre had winked out of mine, before we were ever wed, before he ever brought me to that château, with its orchids and its wolves? What if I’d said yes to Cannu and never earned his wrath, never met Pierre? What would Fantine have wanted if she could see the future? To keep her hair, her teeth, her life, no doubt. But then she would have also had to wish her child out of existence. It’s an impossible question, the undoing of entire lives, both mine and my son’s.

  When Madeleine died, the year after Estelle, Cannu acted much the same as he had following Pierre-Joseph’s passing, which is to say that he wasted no time in the apportioning and sale of assets. Nor should he have, in this case—I think all of us were ready, or at least told ourselves we were ready, to let go what was left of Bellenau and see what came next. Joseph was ten by then, and everyone, including me, was beginning to find him slightly feral. He needed other boys, other children. He did not need another mother, I thought sourly, watching Albertine cosset him. She seemed to have finally replaced her stiff distance with a smothering affection that even a much younger boy would not have borne willingly. Joseph let her kiss him, then wiped at his cheeks.

  “It hurts Aunt Albertine’s feelings when you wipe away her kisses,” I told him when she wasn’t listening.

  He argued with me, insisting he was doing no such thing, but later he paused with his hand raised to his cheek, his eyes widening in realization. He started to lower it, then brushed it through his hair, a clumsy effort at concealment, but an effort. My little gentleman.

  I misestimated how hard everything would be on him after Madeleine died. I shouldn’t have. It should have been obvious that Bellenau was his entire world, Madeleine and Pierre-Joseph two-thirds of his heart. I’d trusted too much in the fact that he’d still have me, his mother. That was the loss that had unraveled my life, and so I failed to fully understand what Joseph’s other losses, including the phantom loss of his father, meant to him. A mother is everything, I’d wanted to believe, but in truth a mother is only a mother.

  Cannu and Fortin offered to host us in Cherbourg or Le Havre, to spare us from witnessing the preparations for the estate sale, the stream of buyers haggling over everything from gardening tools to the house itself. I wanted to stay at first to monitor Pierre’s things, to make sure Joseph had anything he wanted from his father. But there was very little that meant anything to Joseph. A few books, some specimen cards in his father’s handwriting, a monogrammed handkerchief. As the house continued to disgorge an impossible, overwhelming number of possessions—Pierre’s old school papers, a great-grandmother’s wedding china, clothes that had been out of fashion for seventy years—I had the feeling that Joseph expressed interest in items of his father’s only to please me, afraid to say when he did not want something.

  Pierre’s bicycle appeared suddenly, standing in the courtyard beside piles of old horse tack. It had sat in a hallway for nearly a year after his death. Then Pierre-Joseph had said he was going to throw it in one of the canals, and Madeleine had said she should try to return it to the manufacturer, and I’d said no, I wanted to keep it. I put on a pair of Pierre’s trousers and tried to teach myself to ride. I fell off, over and over again, and would like to say I got the hang of it, but I eventually gave up. I limped with the bicycle into the stables and propped it in a corner, and did my best to forget that it existed.

  I was relieved now to see that it was in perfectly good repair: one of the groundskeepers, it turned out, had been using it to commute back and forth to his home in the village. I asked Joseph if he knew how to ride a bicycle and he shook his head. Of course he didn’t. It had been my responsibility to teach him, or arrange for him to be taught, and I’d neglected to do it.

  “Let’s have a go,” I said.

  One of the stablemen lowered the seat for us. I’d still never learned how to ride it myself, and I wasn’t dressed for trying, so all I could do was push Joseph from behind while shouting instructions I only half understood. He was game at first, but once it was clear he wasn’t going to take to it immediately, he started to complain. Not about his skinned palms, but about the collection of stablemen and other staff who had gathered in the courtyard to watch his progress. No one was mocking him, but his face was bright red with embarrassment, and I let him dismount and took him inside to clean his scrapes.

  “You just need to practice,” I encouraged him. “It isn’t an easy thing to learn.”

  “Not in front of them,” he said, and I saw, more than the embarrassment of a boy, the embarrassment of a lordling. Master of the manor, last of his line.

  I’d thought the pain of watching Bellenau dissolve was only (only!) the pain of losing his home, but it was more than that—he was heir to an estate we were dismantling around him, and there was nothing he could do to stop us. “None of this is your fault,” I told him. “There is nothing you could have done to change any of this.”

  “But can I buy it back someday? If I have enough money?”

  I had failed to anticipate this conversation, and I picked my startled way through its shoals. “If you have enough money, I suppose. And if whoever owns it then is willing to sell.”

  “Why wouldn’t he be willing?”

  “Maybe he’ll have fallen in love with the place.”

  “But it will still be mine,” Joseph said. “He’ll understand that. He’ll understand that it should have been mine.”

  Who had given him his thwarted sense of responsibility, of ownership? I didn’t think it was me, a woman who had never felt like a lady of the manor, who knew I had never been more than an accidental guest. I also couldn’t imagine it was Cannu, after his decade-long campaign to keep any of us from getting too comfortable here. Nor Albertine, who still alternated suffocating affection with spasms of resentment, both of Joseph’s existence and his claim to Bellenau.

  “Your father would be very proud of you,” I told him.

  “For what? I haven’t done anything.”

  “For you. For who you’re becoming.”

  “I’m not anybody. I’m just a boy.”

  “Even so.”

  “How do I make enough money?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person.”

  “Who is the right one? Unc
le Cannu?”

  I groaned, inwardly. “You’ll have to be very clever, and work very hard, whatever you choose. So for now, let’s make a start by agreeing to be better about your lessons. We’ll both work harder.”

  “I want to go to school,” he said.

  “Now? Or after we leave?”

  “Can we leave now?”

  “We can stay here some months yet. We don’t have to go.”

  “I want to,” he said. “I don’t want to be here any longer.”

  Diego is late for his lesson, and Mr. Valera offers a gruff apology. “He went out earlier to play with the hooligans downstairs. I told him to be back in time, but he must have lost track.”

  Both of us feel too old, or at least I do, to go hunt down the hooligans. Besides, it isn’t my job. I hope he doesn’t think there will be no charge if Diego doesn’t turn up. Even if I wanted to be generous, I can’t afford not to charge him. My balance sheet is delicately balanced, month by month and week by week. Fortin, look at me, I sometimes think, as I make the numbers work. But whatever respect or guilt he might feel would be outweighed by his disapproval of the meagerness of the figures and the precarious match between the column of expenses and my income.

  What will you do when you get too frail or ill to work? I imagine him asking me.

  I’m never ill, I reply.

  You’re seventy-six years old, he says. You’ll get ill someday. Someday soon.

  You’re dead, I say. You don’t get an opinion anymore.

  “Did you ever remember it?” Mr. Valera asks, and it takes me a moment to return from the conversation I’ve been having in my head. “The old friend’s name? When he was in Tarragona.”

  “Oh. No. Alas, it’s gone forever,” I say, trying to sound casual. But I want to know what happened to Philippe, and I don’t, and won’t. Eric can’t tell me, and I can’t look it up, not like trotting to the library to find the surname of Félix-whoever in Les Misérables. Philippe is lost to me entirely—truly and forever.