Jeanot had once asked Guénolé, “Why don’t you like Mathurin?”
The maid had made a spitting sound, even though they were indoors. “That’s not a dog,” she said. “It is a sac de merde.”
Jeanot more or less agreed.
Tatie’s house was filthy. There were large balls of dust, dog hair and stuff Jeanot couldn’t identify on the floor and caught in cobwebs on the ceiling. Guénolé never cleaned. A woman came twice a month to dust and push a wheezing vacuum cleaner across the threadbare rugs, but it didn’t make much difference. Papa and Maman brought their own bread when they visited and refused everything but sardines from cans and hard-boiled eggs from which they peeled the shells themselves. Papa said it was the only way to make sure Guénolé didn’t actually touch what they were going to eat.
Tatie herself survived mostly on white chicken meat smothered in mayonnaise, so that’s what Jeanot ate, too, when he visited, though the mayonnaise always made him queasy. Sometimes there were croissants, occasionally a piece of cheese and some carrots. Jeanot didn’t come for the food, he came for the adventure.
Tatie’s house was a museum, a repository of ancient military uniforms and kepis, ceremonial swords, single-shot infantry rifles, the lower leg of an elephant, and a large rug made of jaguar skins stitched together with three heads on it. There were African spears mounted on one wall, a harpsichord that made dainty sounds, medals and certificates, a full suit of armor so delicate Jeanot thought it must have belonged to a child, an elk antler coat rack with burnooses and ao dais from French Indochina.
Outside under an oil cloth was an old motorcycle with “Vincent” in faded gold on the gas tank. Jeanot wondered who Vincent was but was afraid to ask. Tatie, he knew, had lost someone—either a son or a husband, he wasn’t sure—to a horrible illness contracted in Madagascar; a French colony, he knew, and an island as well. No one was allowed to talk about it. He hoped Vincent wouldn’t come back and claim the machine so maybe he could have it when he was older. He’d ridden on the pillion of a motorcycle just a year earlier and it had been the most exciting thing ever. The thing roared like a lion, accelerated like a dragonfly, vibrated in such a way it made his crotch feel good.
He liked to accompany Tatie when she went shopping. Guénolé no longer went to the market daily since she’d lost her teeth there sampling a peach. Jeanot had been there when it had happened. The dentures had popped out of the maid’s mouth with the peach and fallen to the ground. They were then kicked into the storm drain by a passerby. Guénolé made such a scene that the firemen came and lifted the nearest manhole cover to see if the teeth had survived but of course they hadn’t. The maid returned to Tatie’s house and locked herself in her room. Tatie didn’t seem to care. Guénolé, Jeanot knew, was a moody creature known to not speak for days and who often cursed and attacked the carrots and celery she was peeling with a butcher knife. This self-imposed solitude was nothing remarkable in comparison.
The next day, however, Guénolé and Jeanot went to the market, and the maid spied a pair of eyeglasses on the offending peach seller’s stand. She stole them. She wore them around the house for a week though they made her blind and she bumped into the furniture, but as she explained to the boy, this was an honest exchange. “They took my teeth, I took their eyes. This is how the world works, boy, and you’d better get used to it.”
Jeanot said, “Really? Papa says you should never steal. It’s wrong.”
The maid replied, “I didn’t steal, I borrowed. When they return my teeth, they can have their glasses back.”
When Tatie shopped, she never bought one or two, she bought six or eight. The merchants all knew this and greeted her effusively; very few people, Jeanot thought, bought a half-dozen saucissons or eight wedges of Camembert cheese at once, or, for that matter, six baguettes. It never seemed to bother Tatie that no sooner did the supplies come through the front door than they went out the rear, hidden, Jeanot suspected, under Guénolé’s capacious skirts. He’d caught the maid exchanging them at the local café for two early morning shots of Cointreau.
Tatie only disliked one person as far as Jeanot knew, and that was her own nephew, Yves. Tatie knew, of course, that Oncle Yves was an accomplished pianist, friends with Ravel and Poulenc, that his fame reflected well on the family and by association on Tatie herself. Maman had said as much. None of these things mattered, however. Oncle Yves was a grande tapette, Guénolé once explained gleefully to Jeanot. He was a “sinful homosexual” whose mores were shameful, indecent, and unworthy of French citizenship.
Later, when Jeanot hesitantly asked Babette what the maid had meant by “homosexual,” he was shocked by her explanation. He was also reminded of the remark he’d once heard at home, when Mathilde had mentioned Oncle Yves’ attraction to Jeanot’s own Papa. Jeanot considered mentioning that episode to Babette, but ultimately he decided Papa would probably not have approved of the gossip, and that Maman would have been horrified if indeed this behavior was as “sinful” as Guénolé led Jeanot to believe. No, she wouldn’t have liked anyone outside of the family to know about it, and so Jeanot kept it to himself, for the time being at least.
Tatie once said that she believed Oncle Yves’ preferences stemmed from an incident dating back to the 20’s when her brother, Jeanot’s Grand-père Léopold, trying to impress a billiard-playing crony, bought an expensive Brunswick & Balke table and had it installed in its own room in the rear of the apartment. The table had to be craned in, windows removed from their frames, and reinforcing steel bars inserted into the floor to ensure the table’s level.
Oncle Yves was 12 at the time, already acknowledged as a prodigy. He was forbidden from entering the billiard room, nor was he allowed to touch the cues or the ivory balls. One day, however, he did. When Grand-père and his second wife Emma (to whom Jeanot had never once spoken) were attending the matinee premiere of Léopold’s long-awaited opera Mona Vanna, Oncle Yves racked the balls, chalked and tested a cue as he had seen his father do, drew back and hit the cue ball with force. The shot was low and the stick’s tip ripped through the green felt with a rending sound, exposing the polished slate bed.
Oncle Yves, immediately aware of the catastrophe’s immensity, stared at the split fabric for a moment before surrendering to terror.
Then and there he decided to run away. In minutes he had packed a change of trousers, underwear, shirt and socks, and a pair of black deerskin gloves in the small rattan suitcase used for vacation travel. He also took with him an unfinished symphony he had been composing since age eight. He bolted out the door, down the stairs and into the street at the very instant that Grand-père and Emma, back from a hostile audience’s reception of Mona Vanna, alit from a cab. He was carried sobbing back into the apartment where Grand-père, already staggering under the weight of his failed musical efforts, went straight to the billiard room.
The next day a tailor came to strip the felt from the table. A week later, the bright green cloth was a three piece suit that Oncle Yves was to wear at every social occasion until he outgrew it two years later.
Tatie was convinced the fabric’s color had somehow warped Yves’ sensitivities. “J’en suis persuadée,” she would tell Guénolé who paid scant attention, or Jeanot, who wasn’t sure he understood.
Over the years, Tatie became certain Oncle Yves’ proclivity was the wellspring of everything that was and could go wrong with the family. When Grand-père’s very last opera, L’Oiseau