Tita Read Online Free Page A

very slowly in procession from side chapel to side chapel, between the parts of the mass, and we sing. In front of saint Régis, I do my solo, Au ciel dans ma patrie , about the bliss of joining the Virgin Mary in heaven. I’d love to die and be forever ecstatic, but I don’t feel any special attraction to the Virgin. Except I’d like to give birth in a stable, like her. Not to the son of God, though. I want daughters. Four, like in Les Quatre Filles du docteur March .
    Mother is pleased because I look good in my new white dress, white ankle socks, white patent-leather shoes, crown of tiny white roses on my dark ringlets (her work of the morning, with a curling iron). Father has come too, and he doesn’t look disgruntled. The host is fine. You feel something smooth and quiet on your tongue, but solid, not slippery. It sticks a bit, and after a while it dissolves. Hardly any taste at all. I wish I could live on hosts.
     
    After mass, we all drive to the Cabarrou with Grandmother, my two brothers and two sisters, a few friends of my parents’, and my friend Eléonore. The Cabarrou is our park, but it isn’t attached to our townhouse, or even very near. To get there, you have to walk for ten minutes to the other side of the railway tracks, into the vineyards.
    Today, as soon as we open the gate, a foul smell attacks me. Barbecue. I run all the way to the other end of the park, but I can’t find a cranny that’s free of the reek. Behind the pine trees it isn’t so bad, but once in a while you get hit by a wave of burning flesh. My brothers are the ones who instigated the barbecue. They said they’d take care of it.
    The only good thing about a barbecue, especially when there are people coming, going and jostling around, is that nobody pays any attention to what I eat. Or don’t eat. Except for my brother Etienne, but he’s not going to rat on me. “You should taste this lamb chop,” he says. “It’s perfect.”
    “No, thanks.”
    “If you had a choice between eating this and having your eyes gouged out,” he asks, “what would you do?”
    “Try to find a quicker way to die?”
    Etienne shakes his head. “You know, you must be a Cathar.”
    “A Cathar?”
    “From the Middle Ages. Simon de Montfort massacred them. They didn’t eat any meat or cheese. For them, Matter was a prison. They were vanquished, but they survive in you!” He takes my waist between his large hands, throws me up, catches me and sets me back on the ground. Then he runs to tend the barbecue.
     
    I try a tiny radish, and it hurts the whole inside of my mouth. People seem to gobble them as if they were figs, or cherries. Many are sticking wedges of butter on them. I ask Justine why anybody would want to do this, and she says, hoping her vocabulary will dazzle me, “It assuages the pungency.” As if people had to eat something that stings their taste buds in the first place.
    At the end of the meal Father starts pouring Champagne. Eléonore drinks hers in one gulp, and shivers. I taste mine slowly. After every sip, my tongue keeps on tingling. Then someone gives us more, and I drink it up although I already feel dizzy. I’m not sure what happens after that. I climb some trees with Eléonore and Coralie. A branch snaps. Coralie slides into the pond and gets her blue dress all muddy. Justine rescues her. “You’re lucky I happened to be around. I wonder how you all manage to stay alive when I’m in Paris.” Right, Coralie was going to drown in two feet of slime.
    Eléonore wants to play ballerinas, and my sisters agree. Justine suggests a corny choreography inspired by the film Violettes Impériales , and Coralie says she’ll provide acrobatics. I roll my eyes, and leave — they’re so busy plotting their entrechats, they don’t even notice. As I walk about the park trying to think of something to do, I bump into my oldest brother Maxime, hard at work taking photos of lilac blossoms. I can only see his back, all bent and awry as