Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

the juice from a fruit. So that I could conceive of no gap into which error might fall between the word and its object; that is why I submitted myself uncritically to the Word, without examining its meaning, even when circumstances inclined me to doubt its truth. Two of my Sirmione cousins were sucking sticks of candy-sugar: ‘It’s a purgative’, they told me in a bantering tone: their sniggers warned me that they were making fun of me; nevertheless the word they had used incorporated itself in my mind with the sticks of candy-sugar; I no longer liked them because they now seemed to me a dubious compromise between sweets and medicine.
    Yet I can remember one case in which words did not override my reason. During our holidays in the country I was often takento play with a little cousin; he lived in a beautiful house in vast grounds and I rather enjoyed playing with him. ‘The boy’s half-witted,’ my father remarked one evening. Cendri, who was much older than myself, seemed to me to be quite normal, because he was someone I knew well. I don’t know if I had ever been shown what a half-wit was, or had an idiot described to me: I imagined idiots as having a slobbery mouth, a vacant smile, and a blank stare. The next time I saw Cendri, I tried in vain to apply this image to his own face, but the mask wouldn’t stick; perhaps without showing it on the outside his essential nature resembled that of an idiot, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. Driven by a desire to clear the matter up, and also by an obscure resentment against my father for having insulted my playmate, I asked Cendri’s grandmother: ‘Is it true that Cendri is a half-wit?’ ‘Of course not!’ she retorted with some indignation. She knew her grandson well enough. Could it be that Papa had made a mistake? It was very puzzling.
    I wasn’t terribly attached to Cendri, and the incident, though it astonished me, didn’t particularly upset me. I could perceive the sinister effect of words only when their black magic clutched at my heart.
    Mama had just been wearing for the first time an orange-yellow dress – tango-coloured, we called it. Louise said to the housemaid from over the road: ‘Did you see the way Madame was got up today? Proper eccentric she looked!’ Another day, Louise was gossiping in the hall with the caretaker’s daughter: two storeys up Mama was accompanying herself at the piano: ‘Oh!’ said Louise. ‘There’s Madame at it again, screaming like a macaw!’ Eccentric. Macaw. These words sounded awful to me: what had they to do with Mama, who was beautiful, elegant, and sang and played so well? And yet it was Louise who had used them: how could I counter their sinister power? I knew how to defend myself against other people: but Louise! She was justice in person; she was truth itself, and my respect for her forbade me to pass judgement on anything she said. It would not have been sufficient to question her good taste; in order to neutralize her malevolence, I should have had to put it down to bad temper, and therefore to admit that she did not get on well with Mama; in which case, one of them must be in the wrong about something! No. I wanted to have them both perfect. I endeavoured to drain Louise’s words of their meaning: certain strange sounds had issued from her mouth, for reasons which were beyond my ken. I was not altogether successful. From then on, whenever Mama wore a new dress or sang at the top of her voice, I always felt a certain uneasiness. Moreover, knowing now that it wouldn’t do to attach too much importance to what Louise had to say, I no longer listened to her with quite the same docility as before.
    I was always quick to turn a blind eye on anything that seemed to threaten my security, and so I preferred to dwell on ‘safe’ questions. The problem of birth did not bother me very much. At first I was told that