Tita Read Online Free PDF Page B

girl,” she says. Then she carries me to my bed, where I leaf through a bunch of old Lisettes and Fillettes from the night table, because I’m too tired to go and look for a book.
    After a while I fall asleep. When I wake up, the gold clock on the mantelpiece, held up by three curly-haired naked boys with outstretched arms, says twenty past five, and I feel like getting up. I walk slowly downstairs (I’m still dizzy) and into Father’s study. I can vaguely hear Father’s voice coming from the office, in conversation with Simone (the secretary) and Berthe (the accountant), while on the other side, in the sitting room, Mother is having tea with her friends.
    I slide into the sitting room, as noiselessly as I can, and sit on a low stool between the wall and a wide armchair that has a full square back and straight legs. The women are all at the other end of the room near the windows, in flimsier chairs with curved legs, with their teacups on small painted tables, all of slightly different sizes so you can stack them if you like. Nobody notices me. I often try this, and succeed about half the time. I do it as an experiment, to find out how invisible I can be, but today I also have a practical reason: if Mother saw me she might, instead of asking me to pass the cakes and then forgetting about me, send me back to bed.
    Cami Espeluque, my friend Anne-Claude’s mother, plump and blooming in a low-cut yellow dress, is telling the others about her two-year-old twin boys, who have colds. “Can you believe those rascals? They get a kick out of sneezing into each other’s faces!” Mother often says that Cami “has no conversation” because she tends to go on about the twins, but the twins are a pretty good topic, I think. More entertaining than hats. Mother talks about her children too, but she never tries to be amusing. Or maybe she doesn’t know how.
    But I am the topic right now. “Tita too has a cold.” Mother announces. “She’s in bed! Again! Throat infection, cough, the works. She’s so delicate, and such a bad eater. I don’t think this climate is good for her — all this dry wind, it’s enervating. I do everything I can to make her stronger, I never stop. Every morning I give her cod liver oil, nose drops three times a day, enemas every evening. I wonder what would happen if I didn’t. I guess she wouldn’t be alive by now.”
    I’ve often wondered why Mother lies so much. Thank God she doesn’t wield cod liver oil every day. Or enemas! She does inflict those torments on me, but not very often. So why “every morning, every evening”? A lot of what she says is like that. For instance, last week, the owner of the fabric store in Narbonne said, “This ochre silk is perfect for you, you have such a beautiful complexion!” Mother looked delighted. “Thank you!” she said. “And you know, it’s absolutely natural. I never do anything to my skin other than wash it with savon de Marseille, never use any kind of cream or lotion. Ever!”
    When actually she keeps a whole array of pots and bottles on her dressing table — she brings them back from Lyon, a big city far away near the Alps, where she used to live before she married Father. She often visits there because that’s where all her real girlfriends are, from the time when she had her own beauty salon. Through her friends, she can still get the wholesale price for serums, oils, masks, toners, moisturizers, foundations, powders. She uses a few of them evening and morning, over and above the concoctions she creates from fruit and vegetables.
    I can’t imagine why her words are so at odds with the facts. I tried to discuss this once with Justine. She rolled her eyes at my instances of Mother’s mendacity: “You can’t call this lying! It’s hyperbole .”
     
    “I’m not sure Dr Barral is up to scratch,” Mother goes on, “so I called a specialist in Béziers, Dr Viala. Have you heard of him? He was written up in Le Midi Libre , sounds like