Tita by Marie Houzelle

was back at work just a week after I gave birth. The salon couldn’t do without me. Obviously. All the clients were asking for me. So I had to go back. I couldn’t keep them waiting for ever.” I’ve never thought about it, but I start wondering. Who was taking care of me when Mother was in her beauty salon all day? I was born in Lyon, four hundred kilometers from here. And I don’t think Father ever left Cugnac. Why did we stay in Lyon? How long did we go on living there?
    Lyon, according to Mother, is a wonderful city with a lot of stores, chic restaurants and cafés where she has all these friends from the time when she was young and single, with her own booming business. She loves staying there at her goddaughter’s, a niece who married the owner of a large sewing-machine store. She often says that Cugnac is a one-horse town where people don’t even speak proper French.
    Cugnac has only seven thousand inhabitants, but every Wednesday lots of villagers come from far away to our open-air market. We have three cinemas, a busy promenade, many cafés. And our accent is different from hers, but she only knows French, whereas here we also speak or at least understand Occitan, Catalan, and some Spanish too, because we’re not far from the border. For Mother, the only real language is French. She looks down on all the rest. According to my brother Etienne, the Greeks (a long time ago) were like her: they called all foreigners “barbarians”.
     
    Downstairs, in the dining room, Grandmother is sitting near her favorite window, the one with the best view of the railway station forecourt and the avenue. I wait until she’s done with the Cugnac page of L’Indépendant . When she resumes her knitting (a brown sock), I ask, “Did Mother go back to work after I was born?”
    “As soon as she was out of the clinic. She stayed there five days, because the doctor made her, but she couldn’t wait to get out.”
    “Who took care of me then?”
    “I did. We stayed in the apartment. I cleaned, I cooked, and we went to the park in the afternoon.”
    “Was that in Lyon?”
    “Yes, up on the Croix Rousse.”
    “So I wasn’t with Mother much.”
    “Only on Sundays. On Sundays your father came to visit, and they sometimes took you out with them. When they didn’t go to the cinema. On Mondays she didn’t work but she had to check out new products, go to the stores.” She adjusts her glasses, looks at her knitting. “You always wanted your mother,” she goes on. “You howled when she left, and in the evening you never went to sleep before she was back.”
    “So you fed me, you changed my diapers?”
    “Yes. I prepared your bottle early in the morning while she got ready for work. But you never wanted it until she was gone. When she was around, you were too excited.”
    “How old was I when I stopped wearing diapers?” I ask.
    Grandmother frowns. “You started walking when you were eleven months old, and you still had them then. But after that... I’m not sure. When you and your mother moved to Cugnac, I went to stay with my sister Julie for a while. Your father had a maid who looked after you, what was her name? The one before Jeanine.”
    So I was not a complete freak. “How old was I when I came to Cugnac?” I ask.
    Even before I finish my sentence, I know I shouldn’t have asked. Grandmother stands up, puts her knitting back into her work table. “I’ll go and see about dinner,” she says.
     
    In the evening, I decide to try Mother. As she runs our bath, I ask again, “How old was I when we came to live in this house?”
    “Oh,” she says. “We came here... just after you were born.”
    This can’t be. We were still in Lyon when I was walking . And what about the clients she went back to? But I won’t badger her about these incongruities. I wonder why. In school, when there’s something I want to know, I ask. When the answer doesn’t satisfy me, I insist. If mademoiselle Pélican doesn’t like it,