Five Quarters of the Orange Read Online Free PDF Page B

not a compliment but a statement of fact, some distaste, some awe.
    “She left me her book,” I told him. “The one with the recipes in it. The album.”
    His eyes widened. “She did? Well, you were her favorite.”
    “I don’t know why you keep saying that,” I said impatiently. “If ever Mother had a favorite it was Reinette, not me. You remember—”
    “She told me herself,” he explained. “Said that of the three of us you were the only one with any sense or any guts. There’s more of me in that sly little bitch than the pair of you ten times over . That’s what she said.”
    It sounded like her. Her voice in his, clear and sharp as glass. She must have been angry with him, in one of her rages. It was rare that she struck any of us, but God!…her tongue.
    Cassis grimaced. “It was the way she said it too,” he told me softly. “So cold and dry. With that curious look in her eyes, as if it was a kind of test. As if she was waiting to see what I’d do next.”
    “And what did you do?”
    He shrugged. “I cried, of course. I was only nine.”
    Of course he would, I told myself. That was always his way. Too sensitive beneath his wildness. He used to run away from home regularly, sleeping out in the woods or in the tree house, knowing that Mother would not whip him. Secretly she encouraged his misbehavior, because it looked like defiance. It looked like strength. Me, I’d have spat in her face.
    “Tell me, Cassis”—the idea came to me in a rush and I was suddenly almost out of breath with excitement—“Did Mother—do you ever remember if she spoke Italian? Or Portuguese? Some foreign language…”
    Cassis looked puzzled, shook his head.
    “Are you sure? In her album—” I explained about the pages of foreign writing, the secret pages I had never learned to decipher.
    “Let me see.”
     
    We looked over it together, Cassis fingering the stiff yellow leaves with reluctant fascination. I noticed he avoided touching the writing, though he often fingered the other things, the photographs, the pressed flowers, butterflies’ wings, pieces of cloth stuck to the pages.
    “My God,” he said in a low voice. “I never had any idea she’d made something like this.” He looked up at me. “And you say you weren’t her favorite.”
    At first he seemed more interested in the recipes than anything else. Flicking through the album, his fingers seemed to have retained some of their old deftness.
    “Tarte mirabelle aux amandes,” he whispered. “ Tourteau fromage Clafoutis aux cerises rouges . I remember these!” His enthusiasm was suddenly very young, very like the old Cassis. “Everything’s here,” he said softly. “Everything.”
    I pointed at one of the foreign passages.
    Cassis studied it for a moment or two, and then began to laugh. “That’s not Italian,” he told me. “Don’t you remember what this is?” He seemed to find the whole thing very funny, rocking and wheezing. Even his ears shook, big old-man’s ears like blue-cap mushrooms. “This is the language Dad invented. ‘Bilini-enverlini,’ he used to call it. Don’t you remember ? He used to speak it all the time….”
    I tried to recall. I was seven when he died. There must be something left, I told myself. But there was so little. Everything swallowed up into a great hungry throat of darkness. I can remember my father, but only in snatches. A smell of moths and tobacco from his big old coat. The Jerusalem artichokes he alone liked, and which we all had to eat once a week. How I’d once accidentally sunk a fishhook throughthe webby part of my hand between finger and thumb, and his arms around me, his voice telling me to be brave…. I remember his face through photographs, all in sepia. And at the back of my mind, something—a remote something—disgorged by the darkness. Father jabbering to us in nonsense talk, grinning, Cassis laughing, myself laughing without really understanding the joke and Mother, for once, far