Based loosely on Constant’s own experiences, Private Property is at once deeply moving and intellectually exacting, an exploration of identity, home, and the tenuous relationship between mothers and daughters.
Based loosely on Constant’s own experiences, Private Property is at once deeply moving and intellectually exacting, an exploration of identity, home, and the tenuous relationship between mothers and daughters.
Private Property
192
Private Property
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Overview
Based loosely on Constant’s own experiences, Private Property is at once deeply moving and intellectually exacting, an exploration of identity, home, and the tenuous relationship between mothers and daughters.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803234802 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bison Original |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2011 |
| Series: | European Women Writers |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Paule Constant teaches French literature at the University of Aix-Marseilles and is the author of several novels, including Trading Secrets, winner of the Prix Goncourt; White Spirit; and The Governor’s Daughter, all available in Bison Books editions. Margot Miller is the translator of Constant’s Ouregano and the author of In Search of Shelter: Subjectivity and Spaces of Loss in the Fiction of Paule Constant. France Grenaudier-Klijn is an academic and literary translator and works as a senior lecturer in French at Massey University in New Zealand. Claudine Fisher is the director of Canadian studies at Portland State University.
Read an Excerpt
Private Property
By Paule Constant
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2011 Paule ConstantAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3480-2
Chapter One
The senior girl was helping Tiffany adjust her celluloid collar. A quick glance at the cuffs, the pleats of the skirt. It seemed alright. They had to hurry now, to catch up with the others. They were running. The refectory was that way, and over here, the bathrooms. Now they were tearing down the stairs. The infirmary, the laundry, the chapel, the parlor. At the back the classrooms, and at the far end, the gymnasium. Back that way, the kitchens. Here the playground.In the schoolyard were many boarders already: younger ones, less young ones, older ones, all in navy blue: pleated skirts with collars biting in their whiteness. So many of them! Some walking two by two; solitary ones standing, their backs against the wall; groups forming enclosures so tight that they seemed to fit into each other like puzzle pieces. They were everywhere. Her guide had disappeared. Near the door, a nun was saying her rosary.
Should she interrupt a conversation or a sorrow to interfere where it wasn't her place? Tiffany felt in the way. Beating a retreat, she approached the nun, silently muttering away, hands in her sleeves, each quiver shaking the beads of the Our Father. Tiffany stopped. She watched this pendulum-like mechanism, passionately looking for the replicating gestures. Tap-tap, repeated the sleeve. The tongue was darting over the dry lips, a sigh, the duration of an invocation, and then the nun was lulling herself into the Hail Marys.
The nun opened her arms, the hands emerged from the sleeves, and the rosary appeared, black, shiny. She brought the silver cross to her lips, to her forehead, and in the same movement began to coil up. She was about to close her eyes when she noticed Tiffany, very near, watching her with surprise. She ordered her to go play. Tiffany, who wanted to stay, replied that she didn't know how. The nun told her that she just had to make SOME FRIENDS! Her remark had suspended her gesture, which she now completed in slow motion. She curled up.
Why hadn't they come? Tiffany examined the door, postponing the visit in her mind, thinking there must have been a delay, prepared to wait. It was just a mix-up of the time, a misunderstanding. How long would they let her wait? Her watching, the longer it lasted, would seem inappropriate. To endure the delay, she forced herself to let nothing show, above all not to seem to be waiting. A glance toward the opening door would give her away. She looked from underneath her eyelids, motionless, or, over the comings and goings, to take in a larger space, so as to catch in the whole space the ones who would come.
It seemed to her that if she stayed close to the nun, a little apart, they would find her more easily. She allowed herself this last chance, the door of the schoolyard. The nun opened her eyes and Tiffany moved off. She was going to play. With whom? At what? She had no idea. She would play against herself, outside of herself, breathless with anguish, beaten with anxiety. She reached the middle of the schoolyard, she was sinking like a stone. In the blue and black wave that was taking her under, she was suffocating, unable to come to the surface.
* * *
Approach the others, how? Introduce herself, in what way? Her age, her name, even where she came from corresponded to nothing the others could imagine, in short, to nothing real in fact. She didn't belong to these nearby cities or even those far-away ones whose names were known or intimately recognized. She wasn't from Paris; she wasn't from P. She came from OUREGANO. From where? From OUREGANO. What did that mean? Names of places had to make sense. Tiffany was from non-sense; she was from no-where.
How could she cast over this past even the vaguest light? How could she choose a first name that was strange to her and the all too familiar nickname, which, in its preciousness, defined those who had given it to her more than it did her? Marie-Francoise or Tiffany? What part of herself should she reveal? Nothing or nothingness? Which one? There was no way around it, though, and it would reduce everything to a time she understood no better than the time of day. Time belonged to an abstract order that did not concern her. It was six in the morning or six in the evening. Either way she was nine years old.
They didn't even let her finish saying her full name. What did yet another Marie-Francoise matter here? As for her age, if she proclaimed it like that, she'd be showing off, saying she was ahead of the others. So what. What did it matter to them that she was ahead ... And Africa, Ougouga, how do you say it? Ougougou, La-di-dah! They made fun of her with big guffaws: You're a Negro! Tiffany protested: she was not a Negro. To her ears, this word resonated crudely, almost insultingly. Back there, no one said Negroes. They said: Blacks, Africans, whatever, but not Negroes. Even the colonists who put on the bar ebony busts, with pointed breasts and thick lips, didn't say Negroes, or said it under their breath.
Since the girl had felt her slur hit the mark, she pointed at Tiffany: She's a Negro, she's a Negro! Tiffany turned away, asking here or there, the closest girl: What is your name? A little blonde girl tossed out a Jacqueline something-or-other. The others jealously guarded their anonymity. Mind your own business! Tiffany no longer saw them. What she had said was pointless, and it marked her in a different way to the girl who called her a Negro. She uses vous! Tiffany was a Negro who used the vous form, a nine-year-old sixth grader who put on airs! By opening her mouth Tiffany had disturbed an entire culture, organized a resistance, provoked her own hell. Over there, the door remained closed.
* * *
The day closed in a thundercloud of bells. They were ringing over her head, leaping in her chest, terrifying, heavy with noise, hammering, an end of the world. The chapel backed up to the convent while the wall of the chancel bordered the playground. Raising her eyes, Tiffany noticed the stained-glass windows protected by trellises. What balloons would have lost themselves overhead, if not those acid-colored helium ones escaping from a half-opened hand, straight ahead, flying irresistibly toward the sky?
For the boarders, the call didn't come from on high. It was a sign, a daily order. They lined up. Closer and closer, the bells, with nothing of the divine about them, echoed the call more and more disjointedly, their noise thinner and thinner. Tiffany looked for a place in the line, according to size more than to liking. She placed herself at the height of an eighth grader, then a ninth grader, not thinking she might be too short. She was a big girl now.
Bounced from place to place, carried on the crest of this blue wave already so powerful, she moved further forward, which was a mistake—the front becoming tighter and tighter—then to the back, in the loose tail end made up of all those who didn't feel the urgency of the call or the need to group up: the isolated, the troublemakers, the new ones. This was where the nuns, instructed by experience, detected the signs of moral decline, hems coming out, hints of self-assurance. On this particular evening, between two seniors who were repeating a grade, Tiffany was discovered. She was sent back among the younger girls. And once more the child had to work her way back upstream, hurl herself against the flawless wall of sixth graders who had been fifth graders, which gave them absolute power. We can't, Madame! We're two already. They stuck together, shoulder to shoulder. So, the Lady put Tiffany in the middle, all alone.
Go back along the hallways, to what? Having to recognize the ramp, the door, the crucifix of the parlor. Her step slowed imperceptibly, just enough to dent the line with a hiccup, the encounter with the first eighth graders, who waited for no one. Go on, they said to her, loudly enough to be heard by the Lady, and the last seventh graders felt authorized to turn around and look. Everything went quiet when the Lady, whose attention had been attracted, repeated, looking at Tiffany: Let's go, let's go. In line, please! Under the heat of their stares, Tiffany was blushing.
She was moving forward among the little girls, her eyes on their heels, carefully matching her solitary steps to their combined ones. The wooden floor metamorphosed into stone, a black diamond, a white diamond, black, white, absolute refraction. The extraordinary light expanded, swelled, now suddenly torn by a piercing sound, now magnified by the patter of the boarders' feet finding their places. Only Tiffany, seized by this resounding splendor, stood in the center of the aisle. She was astounded by this sumptuous cavern, stunned to the core of her being by the two large golden angels who unfurled their metal wings, from one end to the other, over the Lord's Table with its cloth of liquid red. She was entering an unknown world, streaming with light, noise, and violence, offered up to the one she didn't know, the all-powerful, God.
She succumbed to His revelation. And the fact that she discovered Him on this October afternoon, amid the devastation created in her child's heart by the abandonment she was subjected to, and by the petty terrorism of a species of child she had never before rubbed up against, that He alone was born in the throat of an instrument equally unknown to her, in the deep perfumes, bitter and heavy with incense, in His theater of gold, and His velvety operatic vestments, it overwhelmed her like an apparition.
The priest turned slowly around, the inside of his chasuble glinting in the candlelight. He carried the sun at arm's length. It was too much for the congregation. In a single movement, the Ladies and the little girls fell down. In a fevered murmur, they said they were only dust. Tiffany followed the monstrance rising to the point where no one can bear to look any more. Her head thrown back, her lips parted, she admired it all.
* * *
Having just stood up again, the little girls intoned a chant mellowed by linked modulations. She was seated; they were standing. As she stood, Tiffany saw them kneel down. Kneeling, she got up to follow the row that was going out. Softly, softly, commanded a Lady at the entry to the refectory. Softly, softly, said the one in the hall, and when the line emerged near the dormitory, hearing the flood advancing irresistibly, the nun on duty muttered, between two Hail Marys, several more Softlys, a nightly litany.
The little girls had nothing to learn. They knew The School from mothers to daughters, destined from birth to accomplish the gestures they had probably practiced at their mothers' sides. Each one imitating the other, the gestures had, in the course of time, lost all semblance of individuality: they were the gestures of The School. Later they would be the marks of their adult femininity, which would in turn be the model for other little girls, handed down to the end of time, little girls of the little girls. At the very most, their practice manifested itself most vigorously in the younger ones and softened in the older ones, where enthusiasm was waning. In their brand new appreciation, the little girls were unconquerable. They were good because they performed well.
Amid the minor bustle of the evening, Tiffany was lost. As long as all she had to do was to follow without understanding, she allowed herself to be carried along. Since she was careful to move at the same rhythm, her step had fallen in with theirs, adopting their reassuring cadence. Washstand, bed, armoire. Washcloth, towel, nightgown, bathrobe. So many objects to get used to, especially the bathrobe. Did you put it on before, during, or after?
In the aisles, between the beds, the boarders, whether crouched or lying prostrate, had completely disappeared into their bathrobes. What dexterity in these vague movements, these soft agitations, these palpitations of Pyrénées wool that enfeebled their mysterious gestures. They unhooked, unbuttoned, slipped out of one, slipped into the other, in a soft warm obscurity, almost maternal. Standing in front of her bed, Tiffany was undressing.
They knelt down on the left side of the bed and got into it from the right side. They folded their hands under their chins. Deo gratias. The light went out. There were sighs and sobs. Many were crying. It was normal, the first night, the first day! It was their right, their duty even. Tiffany listened to these great sorrows, these sharp sufferings, these enormous sadnesses that disturbed the night, filling the dormitory from one end to the other. To see the afflicted little girls, weak and human, struck her with an anxiety far greater than what she had felt in keeping to the rigid line.
* * *
Very near Tiffany, in her ear within the darkness that brought them together, closer than she had ever been to anyone, a boarder was crying. She applied herself with abandon to the tears dampening her cheeks, to the sobs making her chest heave. At times, she stopped to blow her nose, with loud sniffling. She gave in to her sorrow and consoled herself at the same time; she was the child and she was the mother. Tiffany turned away from this damp thing, which disgusted her.
The infernal motion she'd had to maintain until then, now the muffled disorder of the night, not to mention the enormous sorrow that the little girl poured out by her side, made Tiffany feel dizzy. There, in her narrow bed, lying very straight, quite rigid, her nose in the air, her eyes closed, she was trying in vain to find herself again, soft sensations, the warmth of her thighs, the mildness of her hair. The whole School had invaded her. She was drowning.
To be born again she would have had to return to the world of the past, revive her memories, grasp in all its warmth a bygone happiness, a joyful certainty, the flash of an emotion. But she must not look back. She carried the weight of a curse. She could not say Mama or Papa without calling down the avalanche of a bitter, unbearable sorrow. She could not even turn toward little things, the place of an object, a friend, a pet she had loved ... The past offered terrible traps, all the more malevolent because they hid behind innocent lures, a father, a mother, a friend, a pet. Only Tiffany knew its price, she knew what it would cost her just to hear their names. A mother, a father, a friend, a pet. A tiny pet, a miniscule pet, was gnawing at her heart.
There was still the future. On this front, too, loomed misery. The future wasn't her, but the others, and among all those she would meet, the ones she waited for. Because her grandfather and grandmother had not come, she had no future anymore, no happiness, only apprehension about what had put off or prevented their coming. The future was sickness and perhaps death.
And thinking about what would happen filled her heart with such terror that she feared she would not be able to keep from crying out. So she waited, between past and future, in the little rectangle of her bed, restraining her grief to keep it from spilling out, repressing her imagination and crushing her memories. All her gestures had been those of waiting; they had sent the day headlong into the night. She wanted only to sleep; she wanted only the unconsciousness that would carry her into the following day, which she would live anesthetized until the next night, to get through to the end of time, to reach them.
Next to her the little girl had finished with her sorrow. Dried up and clean in the letdown that follows an excess of tears, she exhaled in short sighs the lightness of her being, surprised that Tiffany felt no sadness. She asked when she had arrived. This afternoon, said Tiffany. And your mama, bleated the little girl, threatening a return to the tears evoked by this delicious word. My mother is dead, replied Tiffany. Four little words, a complete sentence, closed and tight. The other burst into sobs again as if it had been her own mother, herself.
* * *
The children were sinking into deep sleep. A great silence was ravaging the dormitory. Awake, Tiffany waited. Pushed by an invisible force, the door opened. A Lady, black in the black night, entered; as she passed by, Tiffany felt on her cheek the cold draught displaced by the immense skirts. She heard a rustling sound, scraping, as if the sharp skirts could, by their very motion, carry out an eternal order for absolute correction. As the Lady passed, Tiffany drew in her feet.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Private Property by Paule Constant Copyright © 2011 by Paule Constant. Excerpted by permission of University of Nebraska 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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