Tita Read Online Free PDF Page A

pale, and looks serious. A bit timid, perhaps.
    Ginette is now rubbing the piano keys with something sour-smelling from a bottle. She lives across the back street with her husband and daughter, and she’s been working in this house for ever, every day but Sunday. “Did you know my aunt Marta?” I ask her.
    “Of course I did. My mother used to work for your grandmother, and I sometimes came along. Marta was three years older than me, but she was nice. She read books all the time, and she lent me quite a few good ones.”
    “Did she ever do forbidden things? Did she climb roofs?”
    Ginette laughs. “I never heard about that. But she was lively enough. When she went out with the maid, she always wanted to take some of her dolls with her. Said they needed the fresh air.”
    “I have this porcelain doll, Jacqueline, that used to be hers. Do you remember her playing with it?”
    “Yes, and she broke both Jacqueline’s legs trying to get her to do somersaults. Her mother, your grandmother Clara, said the doll would have to remain legless — that would teach Marta. Then, after what happened... your grandmother gave me some of Marta’s toys, and put away the rest. But just before your second birthday she went to the linen garret, found this broken doll, and took it to the repair shop in Narbonne, in the rue Droite. She wanted you to have it. From the beginning, she said you were very much like your aunt Marta, and I guess that’s why she called you Tita.”
    “Was Tita her...?”
    “Yes, Tita is what we called your aunt Marta. I think Marta made it up herself when she was little. People called her ‘Martita’ sometimes, so... Then, not long after you came here, your grandmother took a fancy to you and started calling you Tita. After a while, everybody followed suit. Do you remember your grandmother Clara? Probably not, you weren’t even three when she died.”
    My grandmother Clara. People, when they mention her, say things like, “She was such an amazing lady, walking tall in her long black dresses and her high white chignon. So refined, so imposing.”
    I do remember her, but not like that. “She always stayed in her room,” I tell Ginette. “She read me fairy tales. She let me play with her fans, she had a whole drawer of them. With her scarves too, and her embroidered handkerchiefs.”
    Two tears slide down my cheeks. Ginette puts down her duster, pulls me up from the stool, takes me in her lap, and kisses me a few times. I kiss her back then go downstairs, across the garden and out through the back door into the street. The dirt road on the left leads down to La Fourcade, our rambling orchard. I sit on a wood bench under a fig tree, thinking about my name. If I were Marta, if I were dead, would I like someone else to get my nickname, the name I made up for myself?
    There are worse things in the world than feeling uneasy about your name. There are enormously worse things than I and my friends are ever likely to experience, as mademoiselle Pélican reminds us every other minute with her stories of miscellaneous martyrs and Chinese children who not only go hungry but haven’t been baptized, so they will be sent to limbo at best when they die.
    I don’t intend to fall into self-pity. I should be grateful to Grandmother Clara: if she hadn’t thought of calling me Tita, I might be stuck with my legal name, the one Mother chose for me: Lakmé. Mother says that she looked forward to having a daughter just for the sake of naming her Lakmé, which is the title of her favorite opera and the name of its heroine, an Indian girl who falls in love with an Englishman who abandons her so she kills herself at the end, with poison. I can’t imagine a more ridiculous thing to do than killing yourself over some man. Mother said that she had a lot of trouble with the registry officer at the clinic, Lakmé was so unusual. But she told him about the opera, sang the beginning of Sous le ciel tout étoilé , and he couldn’t