Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Read Online Free PDF

Au revoir. God bless you,’ so he couldn’t be a heathen. My cousins – aged from ten to twenty – certainly behaved in a strange way: they used to throw pebbles through the railings of the park at the boys and girls in the street outside; they were always fighting; they used to torment a poor little feeble-minded orphan girl who lived in the house; at night, to frighten her, they would drag out of their father’s study a skeleton draped in a sheet. Though I found them disconcerting, I saw no real harm in these anomalies; I couldn’t discover in them the pitchy depths of real evil. I played quietly by myself among the clumps of hydrangeas and the seamy side of life still remained beyond my ken.
    But one evening I thought the end of the world had come. My parents had come to join us. One afternoon Louise took me with my sister to a fair where we enjoyed ourselves immensely. When we left for home dusk was falling. We were chattering and laughing and I was chewing one of those imitation objects I liked so much – a liquorice braid – when Mama suddenly appeared at a turning in the road. She was wearing on her head a green muslin scarf and her upper lip was swollen: what sort of time was this to be coming home? she wanted to know. She was the oldest, and she was ‘Madame’, so she had the right to scold Louise; but I didn’t like the look of her mouth or the tone of her voice; I didn’t like to see something that wasn’t friendliness in Louise’s patient eyes. That evening – or it might have been some other evening, but in my memory the two incidents are intimately connected – I was in the garden with Louise and another person I can’t remember; it was dark; in the black façade of the house, a window was open on a lighted room; we could see two moving figures and hear raised voices: ‘There’s Monsieur and Madame fighting again,’ said Louise. That was when my universe began to totter. It was impossible that papa and mama should be enemies, that Louise should be their enemy; when the impossible happened, heaven was confused with hell, darkness was conjoined with light. I began to drown in the chaos which preceded creation.
    This nightmare didn’t last for ever: the next morning, my parents were talking and smiling as they always did. Louise’s snicker still lay heavy on my heart, but I put that behind me as soon as possible: there were many small things which I was able to banish thus into the limbo of forgetfulness.
    This ability to pass over in silence events which I felt so keenly is one of the things which strike me most when I remember my childhood. The world around me was harmoniously based on fixed coordinates and divided into clear-cut compartments. No neutral tints were allowed: everything was in black and white; there was no intermediate position between the traitor and the hero, the renegade and the martyr: all inedible fruits were poisonous; I was told that I ‘loved’ every member of my family, including my most ill-favoured great-aunts. All my experience belied this essentialism. White was only rarely totally white, and the blackness of evil was relieved by lighter touches; I saw greys and half-tones everywhere. Only as soon as I tried to define their muted shades, I had to use words, and I found myself in a world of bony-structured concepts. Whatever I beheld with my own eyes and every real experience had to be fitted somehow or other into a rigid category: the myths and the stereotyped ideas prevailed over the truth: unable to pin it down, I allowed truth to dwindle into insignificance.
    As I had failed in my efforts to think without recourse to language, I assumed that this was an exact equivalent of reality; I was encouraged in this misconception by the grown-ups, whom I took to be the sole depositaries of absolute truth: when they defined a thing, they expressed its substance, in the sense in which one expresses