In the Moon Page 6

  At meal times when Father was not there, Mother generally enjoyed Raimond’s chitchat. She was a lot more down-to-earth than Father—a bit surprising considering their respective backgrounds. Still, she was careful not to trigger Raimond’s avalanche of words too early in the meal, and she cautioned Brenda and me to follow her example, explaining that she didn’t want to abet what could become a bad habit.

  There were meals during which Mother didn’t address Raimond at all, and I’d see him fidgeting, rocking back and forth from one leg to another, biting his lip, dying to say something based on our conversation at table. When not serving, Raimond usually stood behind and to one side of Mother, so she couldn’t see his torment. I would give Raimond a little smile to let him know I understood his problem. He usually acknowledged me with a wink and, when the meal was over and as soon as he found me alone, he would tell me all about what he had wanted to say in the dining room.

  It was Raimond who launched me on my career as a gondolier. My parents had started a subscription to National Geographic magazine, which I devoured visually until I was old enough to read it as well. In one issue, I saw an article on Venice and was entranced by the thought of a city where the streets were canals and the vehicles were boats. It seemed so utterly perfect, and I asked Raimond why they had not transformed Paris into a city of canals like Venice. After all, didn’t he always maintain that Paris was the most beautiful city in the world? Surely, there was no arguing that canals were more beautiful than streets and boats and barges more beautiful than cars and trucks.

  Raimond pointed out that many of the streets and boulevards in Paris were not horizontal, and that locks (like the ones I saw along the Seine) would be needed wherever there was the slightest hill. That would make movement around the city too slow for Parisians, who generally liked to go fast, he explained in all earnestness. He had obviously given the matter some thought himself.

  The article on Venice stirred my interest in gondolas and started me thinking about ways I could have a gondola of my very own. We had an old perambulator Mother had used when Brenda and I were toddlers. The pram resided, discarded, in the back of our spacious chicken coop where its well-upholstered interior served as a comfortable (if unofficial) place to lay eggs. The sight of this pram relegated to such an ignominious fate had always struck me as lamentable. I had already eyed it as a candidate for conversion to something of a more worthy nature. Now, at last, I had found just the thing. With Mother’s permission, I talked Raimond into sawing off the top half of the wooden body of this large pram and removing its push handle. Raimond thoroughly scrubbed and restored the interior upholstery to near-pristine condition. Et voilà! I had my Venetian gondola, complete with a rounded undersurface at each end.

  I poled (or “punted”) my wheeled gondola happily along various garden paths with a broken rake handle, pretending I was a gondolier on the Venetian canals. I didn’t know that they don’t pole their craft, but poling is a reasonably close visual approximation of what gondoliers do. When Raimond saw how seriously I was taking my gondoliering, he nailed onto my craft a carefully scroll-cut board to represent a classical gondola prow. Then he painted the whole thing with shiny black enamel and embellished it with other rococo-style painted decorations like the ones on gondolas seen in the National Geographic.

  The gondola was big enough so that Brenda and her dolls enjoyed being my passengers in upholstered comfort, though I never sang for her as gondoliers serenade their female passengers. The magazine mentioned the serenading but did not mention the song “O sole mio!” It was just as well—I have never been able to carry a tune.

  Raimond’s artwork didn’t alter the fact that Father disapproved of my graceful craft, which he described as “tawdry, at best,” and which he didn’t want to see in the front garden when he was home. He promulgated his edict to me through Mother, who took the double precaution of having Raimond scan the front garden before Father’s expected return from work. On weekends, when Father was home, I couldn’t use my gondola because most of the paths in the back garden sloped enough to make punting of a wheeled craft impractical—it rolled backwards every time I lifted the pole and moved it forward for the next stroke.

  A playful camaraderie quickly developed between Raimond and me, and I soon came to regard him as my closest friend and someone I could trust.

  In the meantime, since Brenda and I were still very young, Mother continued her search for a nanny or, more correctly, for a governess because we were no longer babies.

  The first one she hired was a German girl. Despite the fact that Pia was barely eighteen, she was authoritarian and devoid of any warmth or humor. She had a stern look about her and was severe in nearly all her dealings with us, and Brenda and I were terrified of her from the start.

  Pia’s relations with Raimond and Françoise were scarcely better. One day, Pia was receiving some tutoring in French from Raimond while the two of them sat at the kitchen table shelling peas in the presence of Françoise. Something Raimond said caused Pia to laugh—a rare enough event in itself. Françoise immediately assumed that Raimond was flirting and flew into one of her famous rages.

  The incident was our first encounter with Françoise’s hot temper. Explaining later, Raimond staunchly maintained before Mother that he had not been flirting and that he had simply been explaining to Pia some word usage which had sounded funny to her. At the time, it seemed unlikely to me that someone of Raimond’s stature would find it easy to be friendly with a sourpuss like Pia.

  Raimond and Pia came running to Mother in a state of alarm, begging her to intervene on their behalf. They had both tried to assuage Françoise’s anger but had failed. Françoise was now hurling epithets and kitchen utensils at anyone who so much as poked a nose through the doorway to the kitchen.

  Mother wanted no part of it, so she hastily rounded up Brenda and me, as well as Pia, and took us for a drive in the country that lasted until sundown, leaving Raimond to his own devices. When we returned in the early evening, we found Raimond waiting at the front gate, profuse with apologies and explaining that Françoise always recovered quickly from these fits of anger. Mother asked him if it happened often, and he replied that it was seldom, and that her anger was always directed at him—him only, he insisted.

  We later discovered that the mere presence of Brenda and me could cool the fiery Françoise temper. One day, unaware that anything was amiss, I entered the kitchen through its garden door and started a conversation with Françoise, who was kneading some dough and had a rolling pin on her worktable. She proposed that when she was through kneading, we go out to the orchard and pick some gooseberries for the pie she was making.

  As Raimond later recounted the story to us while serving us lunch, he had evidently overstayed a visit with Auguste, our neighbor’s gardener. When he returned home, one of Françoise’s temper tantrums had come upon her, and he had been forced to make a hasty exit into the dining room. Fearful for the safety of anyone who might want to enter the kitchen, he valiantly stood guard in the dining room. Then, remembering that there was another door into the kitchen, he set about stealthily moving a large buffet against the door he was guarding and transferred his furtive surveillance to the kitchen’s garden entrance. It was there, spying from behind a large gooseberry bush, that he saw Françoise and me happily picking gooseberries. It was quite obvious that the crise de colère had subsided.

  “I knew all she had to throw was a basket of gooseberries,” he told us. Nonetheless, he approached Françoise with caution, but the gooseberries never flew. She had calmed down and was acting as though nothing had happened; Raimond silently joined Françoise and me in the berry picking.

  Thereafter, Brenda and I were the ones called upon to be the oil on stormy seas. Mother enjoyed no such immunity, and more than once had to duck flying utensils. However, during Françoise’s six years of service, these blowups only happened a few more times, and
we soon learned how to deal with them. Most of the time, Françoise was pleasant and amicable, a devoted servant, always ready to do her absolute best on any occasion, and patient to a fault with Brenda and me.

  That spring, we went to Condette (on the north coast of France) for the Easter holiday. There, one afternoon, Mother left Brenda and me with Pia to play in the sand dunes near Hardelot while she went off for a round of golf. A very dark and threatening sky gradually materialized, and by the time we began our picnic tea, the sounds of distant thunder were growing closer and louder. Brenda and I became terrified.

  On a previous occasion, Mother, Brenda and I had set out on a long afternoon’s walk in the forest of St. Germain near Ville-d’Avray. Thunder had begun rumbling almost from the start of our walk and the sky had grown steadily darker. Despite constant pleas from me, Mother had insisted on continuing in a direction away from our car. Finally, the downpour started, thunder was all around us and, in pelting rain and hail, we had to run for cover in a woodsman’s hut. Each time a thunderclap had sounded, I had been paralyzed with fear. I never understood why Mother hadn’t turned back at the first sound of the approaching thunderstorm.

  And now, here we were, once more in the path of an ominous storm, without a car or hut to which we could run. It started to rain, and Pia walked the two of us to a nearby pine tree under which she hoped to find shelter. The large tree stood alone, not far from the main forest of Hardelot and was roughly a hundred yards from the road. We had a car blanket we had placed on the sand for our picnic and, when it started to rain hard, Pia tried to cover us with it as we stood under the tree.

  In a state of panic, I wriggled myself free of the blanket and told Brenda to come with me to the edge of the road where I was sure we would soon be picked up. I shouted to Pia, the way people do in heavy wind and rain, that Raimond had once told me never to stand under a tree in a thunderstorm if the tree stood alone or without other taller trees nearby. I begged Pia to take us to the edge of the road, telling her that I expected Mother to appear with the car at any moment.

  Angrily, Pia ordered me to get back under the blanket and to stay put. I was having none of it. I grabbed Brenda’s hand and, dragging her behind me, started to run towards the road. About a hundred feet out, I stopped, turned and saw Pia running after us with the blanket draped over her head. I could barely hear her shouting at us through the din of the storm. I resumed running, with Brenda still in tow, and reached the edge of the road. There I stopped, not knowing what to do next. Pia was almost upon us, and I couldn’t see Mother’s car coming from the direction of the golf course.

  As I watched Pia approaching, there was a blinding flash and a deafening crash. The pine tree we had been standing under became filigreed in light and instantly engulfed in a fountain of sparks, like fireworks. Although I had been watching Pia running towards us when it happened, she was roughly in line with the lightning strike, and I can still clearly see the entire tree glowing momentarily, like a light bulb filament. I also remember the multicolored tree outlines and the ensuing shower of sparks that darted across my vision for some time afterwards. Lightning had struck the tree under which Pia had wanted us to take shelter.

  Pia hadn’t seen the lightning strike as she rushed headlong after us, shrouded as she was in the blanket, but when she reached us, she shouted, “That was very close! I hope it doesn’t get any closer!” I told her what I had seen, and she replied, “I don’t believe it! Now we go back to the tree, so the rain doesn’t hit us so hard!” Then she grabbed Brenda and me by the hand, and tried to lead us back to the pine tree. At that moment, I looked up the road and saw our car coming towards us.

  By the time we were in the shelter of the car, Brenda was crying hysterically and, through faltering sobs and the chattering of my teeth, I was angrily chastising Mother for not having come sooner. I was sure she had dilly-dallied this time, as she had in the forest of St. Germain; it was clear to me that was her way of acting before an approaching storm. I was sure she had heard the rumble of thunder early in the afternoon, as we had, and remonstrated that she had chosen to keep on playing golf until the downpour had forced her to stop. I was livid and continued to heap protestations and condemnations upon her.

  My caterwauling did not improve my credibility when I told Mother about the lightning strike I had witnessed. Neither Brenda nor Pia had been facing in the direction of the pine tree to see what I saw and so could not substantiate my story. Pia conceded that there had been no time interval between the flash and the thunderclap, that it had been the brightest flash and loudest noise she had ever known, and that she had felt as if “a wave of wind” coming from behind had almost knocked her over. Mother still refused to believe me.

  That entire Easter holiday was a disaster for Brenda and me. Mother had taken us there so she could shop around for a beachfront villa in Hardelot that she and Father hoped to rent the following summer. The seaside resort, so cheery and colorful in summer, now looked more like a ghost town, with its villas still boarded up for the winter and not a soul around. The beach, a half-mile wide at low tide, was completely desolate. Under a dense, gray April sky it looked like the loneliest place on earth. But there was worse.

  Hardelot had no hotel, and the beautiful Grand Hotel du Golf on the road to Condette was still closed for the winter. Mother was forced to settle for the next nearest hotel, which was in the tiny farming village of Condette, about six kilometers inland from Hardelot. The shabby-looking Hotel Metropole fell far short of its grandiose name. It was a dingy, low-priced hotel used by traveling salesmen and by hunters during the hunting season. South of Condette was a forest that was well populated by pheasant, rabbit, deer, and wild boar and was a veritable mecca for hunters.

  The Hotel Metropole’s drab, dreary dining room possessed just one decorative feature, if you can call it that. This was the head of an immense wild boar, stuffed and mounted high up on the wall, from where its sinister glass eyes angrily surveyed the entire room.

  I remember the boar’s head as being a yard in height and protruding out from the wall about as far. The head of a mature rhinoceros could not have been any larger. The hotel proprietor, whose pride and joy the boar’s head apparently was, could not resist the temptation to regale the hotel guests with its story. He boasted that it was the head of the biggest boar ever killed in the Pas-de-Calais, a region that stretched roughly fifty miles east, north and south of Condette.

  Three bullets fired by hunters from a distance of a hundred meters had hit the animal, but had not mortally wounded it. Streaming blood, the enraged boar had charged towards the hunting party as the men continued to reload and fire at it. The beast plunged into a pack of hunting dogs and managed to kill two of them, then turned its fury towards one of the men who had approached the melee in an attempt to save the dogs. The man was severely gored as the other hunters struggled to find a place to aim their rifles at the debacle before them. The hotel owner’s grandfather had been the leader of the hunting party, and it was he who had finally succeeded in delivering the coup de grâce to the boar.

  To substantiate this tale of gore and horror, two huge tusks the size of goat horns protruded from the stuffed head’s lower jaw. The boar’s mouth, which dangled half open, revealed a further array of fearsome teeth and was festooned with “drips” of red sealing wax intended to suggest blood. The taxidermist had doubtless been carried away in his zeal to portray the animal’s ferocity and viciousness, and the gleam in the wild boar’s eyes was one of pure hatred and fury.

  This superb piece of taxidermy was hardly conducive to sustaining a healthy appetite in two young children. The sight of the boar’s head completely overwhelmed Brenda and me. In fact, it was quite impossible for us to sit in that dining room and eat anything at all. We tried sitting with our backs to it, but that was no help to me because I kept visualizing the creature creeping up behind us and I constantly looked over my shoulder to make sure
the boar wasn’t there, which in fact it was.

  We tried sitting at a table directly beneath the head, where we could not see it, but that only placed us even closer to it. I kept glancing up, afraid that blood would drip down on us. We ended up having to sit at a small table in the hotel’s kitchen, which proved to be only a minor improvement, as the cook eviscerated a steady procession of chickens, rabbits and fish on a worktable in full view of where we sat trying to eat our meal.

  The pernicious influence of the boar’s head extended to all other aspects of our stay. Nightly, Brenda and I had nightmares in which the beast chased us. In the daytime, when we were left in the sand dunes to play in the company of Pia, we feared the creature would stumble upon us as it foraged for food. The hotel proprietor had cheerfully assured us that there were still plenty of boars about and that they roamed the region freely, though perhaps they might not be quite as big as the one displayed in his dining room! We couldn’t wait to return to the tranquility of Ville-d’Avray. However, when we returned to Ville-d’Avray, more excitement awaited us there.

  Shortly after our return from Condette, Pia disappeared. Mother, who had spent the day shopping in Paris, returned in the late afternoon to find Brenda and me alone in our playroom. She asked where Pia was, and I told her I didn’t know. She went off to interrogate Raimond and Françoise, and when she returned a few minutes later, Mother wanted to know how long we had been alone. I replied that I was sure Pia had not been with us since lunchtime.