Ghosts by Daylight

by Janine di Giovanni

  It was the saddest birthday, the day of his last drink. Not because I grieved for the passing of his alcoholism, but because I knew, instinctively, that he would change and never again be the man I married. Because, in fact, part of that love was based on the passion, the drink, the fury, the rage, the anger, the drive, that made him so intense. Without it, there was a smaller person who looked sad and hardened by life.

  He opened the wine. My mother-in-law brought out a lamb casserole she had baked in the oven all day, and the house smelled of beautiful spices from Provence. Bruno toasted, ‘To my wife,’ and gave me a long white silk dress that wrapped and wrapped and wrapped around my body with metres of soft gauze. Then he drank a glass of St Amour, said it was his last ever, and went to bed.

  I sat up with my French family, drinking a home-made digestif brewed from herbs that came from the mountains not far from our home, but all of us were aware there was someone missing. When I went to our room, I saw Bruno curled in a ball, sleeping fitfully in the big wooden bed that had belonged to his great-grandfather.

  He shouted in his sleep, he cracked his bones, he tossed, turned, like someone absolutely miserable in his own skin. He was, I decided, a wounded animal, a tiger or a lion. Eventually, he gave up trying to sleep at all. Near dawn, I heard someone outside, and I could see him, standing near the basin of spring water that came from the mountain above the house, staring into the grey light at nothing.

  February has always been a hard month, a seemingly long month, a grey month. The exception was the year Luca was born. That year, one cold day passed into another so swiftly and I woke with my fears, but I woke joyfully, rushing to the baby’s crib to scoop him up. I was cocooned in happiness. That year, even February, with its impossibly dark mornings, its chill and fevers and hacking coughs and early, depressing dusk, had some joy.

  Four years after our wedding and three years after Luca’s birth Bruno tried to go sober. The first February of Bruno’s recovery, when he went to an AA meeting every day and isolated himself from everyone and everything in an effort to reconstruct himself, something also happened to me. The cocoon of my family life opened a crack, and I walked into France for the first time.

  In the early years in France, Bruno protected me from everything. He told me that Saint Bruno, after whom he was named, meant shield. He shielded me emotionally and physically, from his alcoholism, from bad things happening, but he also protected me from the complexities of French bureaucracy: the dossiers; the long lines at the mairie to present various folders of papers; the telephone company; the complicated social security. Even the army of Polish builders at our new apartment were off-limits to me. ‘I can do it,’ he’d say when I would show up to help.

  It was true that he was, as he described himself, a control freak, but it was also true that I had willingly given away all of my power. I had wanted to. I arrived in France fragile, pregnant, somewhat broken. It was the first time in my life, since I was very small, that someone else took care of me.

  I thought briefly of my Italian grandmother, Antoinette, who arrived in America when she was forty with four children. My grandfather, Costantino, was authoritarian and stubborn: he spoke English, and had his own business, but she must have been terrified enrolling her children in school and shopping for food in a language that was not her own. He wrote the cheques and paid the bills. She stayed in the kitchen, or saw her enormous extended family, all of whom also spoke Italian.

  Even though a similar arrangement could be made in Paris for me – there is a parallel world that exists for Anglophones that includes schools, doctors, tax services and lawyers – I suddenly realized that I was going to stay in Paris, and I had to become a part of it. My tiny world of my husband and my son, keeping us insular and safe, had to open.

  I had stubbornly, for some time, tried to hold on to my identity because I had fought so hard to create one – was I an American of Italian origin, as Bruno described me, was I British, which was my nationality and described the place I had passed all of my adult life, or was I now French, which meant I belonged, in some ways, to my husband and his culture, and not my own?

  One day, I dreamed in French which was the beginning, really, of my life in France. Luca’s school was a French one, and there was also Alice who helped me. Alice wore leather trousers and silver necklaces with tiny jangly butterflies, had a small dog named Clive and a cat named Louis. She lived in a garret in the 7th, off the rue de Sèvres, six flights up, no elevator. She spoke English like a character out of Agatha Christie, but she was French born and bred, as were her parents. Her grandparents had been British bohemians who arrived in Paris in the 1920s, lived in Montparnasse and collected art, but she had not really learned English properly until she went to a British boarding school. She was obsessed with grammar, in any language.

  I went to Alice to learn how to write properly in French – to master the impossible tenses like the passé simple and the futur antérieur that I had learned in college and then promptly forgotten, because soon I would be doing my son’s homework with him. And Alice loved tenses. She thrived on precision, she cringed if I used the passé composé instead of the imparfait. She told me the thing she hated more than anything was when people used the subjunctive badly. She hated hearing people speak French and make mistakes. She also hated it when English was not used properly, and she used grammatical terms I had not heard since the third grade, when the nuns had used pointers to break down sentences. She winced if I used slang I had picked up from Bruno.

  She loved punctuation and homework and exercise drills. She said my French, which had served me fine for five years, had horrific grammatical mistakes. She said miserably, ‘I wish you were a débutante. Now I’m going to have to undo all of your bad habits.’

  Bruno had told me the mistakes were endearing, my accent was sexy, and not to worry about grammar. His English was fluent – learned from Clint Eastwood movies and working in Anglophone countries. When I asked him about the passé simple, he shrugged: ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  When I explained this to Alice, she frowned. She looked slightly wobbly. ‘This is terrible,’ she said. ‘Grammar is so important.’ She produced an enormous book of grammar, the kind I had studied when I was fourteen, and said that I had to memorize every noun and its gender. ‘There are more than three thousand,’ she said solemnly. ‘And there is no way around it other than to memorize every one and know which is masculine and which is feminine. That’s the way it’s done in French schools, and that’s the way your son is going to do it.’

  Meanwhile, my son spoke French at school and French with everyone but me. To me, he spoke English and when I asked him a question in French, he ignored me. I once heard him explain to a shopkeeper, ‘Ma maman est en train d’apprendre Français,’ – my mama is in the process of learning French. I have friends who have ‘mixed’ parents and they have always told me how mortified they were to hear their mothers open their mouths to speak French with strong New York accents. So I did this weekly supplice with Alice partially for Luca. A victory was doing devoirs with him as he was sounding out letters, and him giving me the thumbs-up: ‘Mama! You said it perfectly.’

  Twice a week, I climbed up Alice’s crooked stairway. I dragged the heavy book back and forth, often cursing, it, and did my devoirs – my homework – which was usually a written essay, while lying in bed. It had been a long time since I studied, done homework, or drills with someone pointing a pencil at me, someone getting annoyed when I made a mistake with complex verb tenses. But it was for that reason – I did not want Alice’s displeasure – that I kept on going. And I read the newspapers every day in French, and bought novels by Louis Aragon and poems by Baudelaire and struggled at night with Proust, then gave up and bought the English versions. And I knew, somehow, that this was all about self-improvement and independence from Bruno, about breaking out of my bubble.

  We did endless dictées, where Alice read from complicated art magazines and I copied down her words;
we had conversations about the difficulties of mothers or men, but mostly we studied grammar. It was mind-achingly boring, but somehow strangely satisfying, like going on a stringent diet and seeing the results.

  Through Alice, I felt that somehow I had made my peace with France. I remembered going to the Monoprix with the Mary Poppins nanny in the earliest days of Luca’s arrival, Luca strapped to my chest in his kangaroo carrier, and literally freezing in terror of the rows and rows of dairy products: what was the difference between fromage frais, fromage blanc and faisselle? Was crème legere sour cream or whipping cream? What kind of butter did I need when there were twenty different varieties: salted, unsalted, some for baking, some for cooking? And why couldn’t I find the pasta I had always used, the mozzarella, why couldn’t I find a pizza in Paris that was not made by Tunisians?

  I chastised myself, because I had shopped in these kind of places all over the world and managed: factory-sized Jordanian supermarkets to buy supplies for Baghdad, with rows and rows of food identified in Arabic; crowded and noisy Jakarta food markets to bring tinned tuna and juice cartons and vitamins to East Timor; under-stocked outdoor stalls in Zagreb during the war to bring siege food to Sarajevo. That was fine. This, the act of feeding my family and having to do it in another culture, was – like the birth – daunting.

  My friends at Monoprix, the people who comforted me with their soft smiles and their own stories of homesickness, were the Sri Lankan cashiers who told me about their families and how they missed the wild landscape of their country, and how to choose the best and cheapest apples by the kilo. And later, I would come and see them crying when the tsunami hit, and they could not reach their brothers, their sisters, their mothers. I identified with these sad and lonely and lost women, not the chic French women in tight trousers holding a near-empty basket with a few slices of jambon, a bottle of Badoit, and a pot of yogurt.

  Alice also taught me other things that my mother-in-law or Bruno did not: after a man riding a bicycle on a pavement nearly knocked me off my feet then shouted ‘Dégages!’ at me, she told me to give it back to the French in the same manner they gave it to me. She told me to not allow shopkeepers at Le Bon Marché, the elegant Parisian department store, to get away with insolence. She said it was her personal mission to do battle with every single Parisian shopkeeper or waiter who had bad manners (this seemed completely pointless to me, but never mind) and she taught me exactly how to do it. She told me where to buy cheap bath mats and how to bargain for prices; she told me stories of her girlfriends’ online dating adventures; she told me about the difficulty of French men. ‘Never go near,’ she once said sternly, ‘any man who dyes his hair.’ She told me where to go to get the best skin cream in Paris for the best price, and gave me the name of a dermatologist. Soon the sessions were more like going to a shrink, but in French, and with the occasional correction of the passé composé.

  The second wave of relenting to French life was to learn how to cook French food. This I resisted for the longest time. Even though I felt I was now liberated by being able to curse in French at shopkeepers or people who deliberately tried to run me over with their bicycles on the rue de Rennes, I felt I would lose that identity – whatever it was – if I started cooking like my mother-in-law, with all those rognons au riz or pot au feu.

  I resisted selfishly even when Bruno – who never complained, who ate everything I cooked, when he did eat – occasionally spoke longingly of his mother’s mousse au chocolat, which she heroically produced by the basinful at our wedding, and which was gone in an instant, along with the foie gras she made from scratch, painstakingly picking out the veins of the goose liver.

  I would resist when we were on holidays in the mountains in Grisail; when she tried to show me how to debone a lamb shank or make a flourless chocolate cake, I would feign boredom. I daydreamed when she and Monique, her glamorous best friend who had long blonde hair well into her sixties and looked like another Brigitte Bardot, took me to the organic vegetable nursery and bartered over courgettes and peppers and pumpkins, and showed me how to pick the best ones, and how to make confit and jams and pastries.

  I rolled my eyes in boredom when she talked to me about the wonder of Picard, the French frozen food market that is beloved by French cooks because everything is so beautifully done and packaged, and because you can serve coquilles St Jacques at a dinner party and no one would know you had not cooked it yourself. ‘This is how easy it is to puree leeks,’ she said, washing the stalks one by one in a basin of cold water.

  My resistance to making a daube or a tarte aux pommes was also something to do with lingering homesickness, being in exile. When I cooked, it was the food that came from my family: risottos, pasta and chocolate chip cookies for Christmas, Easter eggs dyed red, like the Greeks did, in April. When I went out, I did not want foie gras. I craved food I never used to eat. Cheeseburgers, for instance, or turkey sandwiches. Once, I saw an American friend who had lived in France for many years walking down the rue Princesse smiling to herself. She had just come from a Parisian coffee shop renowned for serving American-style food. ‘I just ate a tuna fish sandwich,’ she said in a dreamy voice. ‘And my entire life in New York City flashed before my eyes.’

  While I was pregnant, in the isolation wing of the hospital, and then after Luca was born, all I wanted to eat were tuna fish sandwiches, which are not easy to find in Paris. Bruno would bring them to me, but they weren’t the crustless kind on white bread that you got in an American deli – they came on baguettes with lettuce and sliced egg. And so, for these reasons, trying to maintain my own piece of America, I dug my heels in firmly and refused to learn to cook French.

  Eventually, I found the only Italian restaurant that did not use Tunisians as cooks, and another place thirty minutes away on the metro that had real mozzarella. I paid outrageous prices for a jar of Skippy peanut butter and when people came from America, I made them bring me Pepperidge Farm Goldfish and Arm & Hammer baking soda instead of trying to abandon my cravings and eat what the French ate – rognons, snails, oysters, quivering foie gras (the fresh kind, cooked with apples and served slightly raw), tarte au saumon and macaroons from Pierre Hermé on rue Bonaparte that people loved but that I thought tasted of fish.

  My yearnings were satisfied by less satisfactory equivalents of what I desired. So the pizza I finally found after five years searching in the 18th arrondissement was not ever going to be the Neapolitan pizza that you eat at long tables and that is as thin as air. And the Anglo-style bakery, Bread and Roses on rue de Fleurus that served Earl Grey tea and a very good carrot cake was lovely, but it was not Tom’s in Notting Hill that served pink fairy cakes and ginger cookies and fried eggs and ham. And the waitresses in Bread and Roses, who charged seven euros for a glass of iced tea, were charmingly pretty but extraordinarily rude. ‘Yes, seven euros for iced tea, and what of it?’

  One day, like the resistance to speaking the language with the proper grammar, I gave all this up. I was in France. Why was I fighting my internal battles through the cuisine? I went to London at least once a month and could eat curry and chilli squid there. Also, there was Moineau.

  Moineau did not have daughters – Bruno was sandwiched between an older and younger brother – and she always treated me like the daughter she never had. The first time I met her, she opened a bottle of champagne and kept the bottle, always, on a kitchen shelf in Grisail. She gave me a sapphire and diamond pendant when Bruno and I were together for a year, which her father had given her. When things grew difficult with Bruno, she would phone me, to make sure I was all right.

  But my memories of my mother-in-law will always be about food. The first meal she made for me in Grisail was like eating a burst of sunshine: it was a tagine of lamb and aubergine in a tomato sauce that she had baked for hours in the oven, and a citron tarte for dessert. At our wedding in Grisail, our lunch was roast lamb, gratinée potatoes, and a pièce montée – the traditional cake for weddings, births baptisms and communions, made
from small circles of glazed hardened sugar, stuffed inside with cream and towering in a triangle: an act of love.

  The day after the wedding was Bruno’s birthday. Moineau cooked the picnic lunch: prawns, foie gras and her flourless chocolate cake. At Luca’s birthday parties, she did not make the American Duncan Hines cakes with frosting, she arrived with elegant creations that came in small boxes and were as neat and perfect as she was. When she picked Luca up after school – the tradition is that French grandparents come once a week to collect their petit-fils – she arrived with a white cardboard box tied with a pink ribbon and inside was one perfect, nearly warm caramel éclair. I knew that Luca would grow with this memory of food, of his grandmother at the door of his little school, with something sweet and delicious and loving for him to eat. She even got him to eat pureed leeks. And it was Moineau who had fed him his first bite of solid food when he was three months old, a spoonful of carrots with crème fraiche.

  And slowly, very slowly, I fell in love with France.

  I once read somewhere that French women have the most difficult job on earth, the job of being perfect in every way, and that they consume more antidepressants than any nation on earth. When I look at Moineau I understand the enormous pressure these women feel, which is perhaps unique in the world because there is such an emphasis on perfection. Now I understood why the midwife had been so scornful of the sugar I had eaten while pregnant; I had gained more than 20 kilos while carrying Luca. The competition in France for women is fierce.