The Seven Fires of Mademoiselle

  ESTHER VILAR

  The Seven Fires of Mademoiselle

  VINTAGE BOOKS

  London

  Published by Vintage 2009

  2468 10 97531

  Copyright © Esther Vilar 2004

  Translation copyright © Martin Wagner 2009

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain by Vintage in 2009 Vintage

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099531647

  A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

  Only four per cent of convicted arsonists are female. Most fires started by women with criminal intention have their origin in suppressed emotions, amongst them most commonly jealousy.

  Stephen Barlay

  Fire: an international report

  ‘Why don’t you come over and play with Caroline some time?’

  In everyone’s life, there are sentences you don’t forget. Not least because the people around you won’t let you forget them. In my case it was this sentence that would forever be imprinted on my mind. For the place where it was spoken was Washington DC, the playground mentioned was the White House, the person who uttered it no less a person than John F. Kennedy and the proposed playmate was his little daughter, Caroline.

  We are Argentinians and had only moved from Lima to Washington two months earlier, where my father, a diplomat, had been offered a new post at the Argentinian embassy. I had just turned twelve and when the ambassador and his wife invited the children of South American diplomats to their yearly Christmas party there was no way to get out of it. No one had really counted on a personal appearance by Kennedy. They had been prepared for Jackie and the two children, but not the President himself. But suddenly he was announced and a few minutes later he entered the room, without his wife, but hand in hand with his daughter. She was wearing a dark brown satin dress and seemed to be just as enthusiastic about the whole thing as I was.

  I still remember that at that time I was rather unhappy. Like most children of diplomats, I spent much of my childhood moving from one country to the next. As I already mentioned, our previous domicile had been the Peruvian capital, Lima, where I had managed to make real friends with another child for the first time. Her name was Irina and she was one year older than me, a skinny girl with funny pigtails, who read only science fiction stories and was, as far as I was concerned, the most amusing person on earth. And she was precisely the reason why I hated everyone and everything at that time: my parents who had separated us so heartlessly, the large house we occupied here, the elegant people who visited us day in and day out, this town, this country, this reception.

  There were about forty of us children dressed up to the nines, who had to stand around a gigantic Christmas tree in the embassy’s reception hall. Inside this circle, the President of the United States and his daughter moved from child to child, shaking hands while trying to come up with a few appropriate words to say. Behind each of us stood the adult who had accompanied us to these festivities and who was now trying to prevent the worst. In my case it was my mother, wearing a garment that she had bought just for the occasion and which to me looked like crumpled pyjamas. When I had told her so in the car, she said that our taste in clothes would probably never be the same.

  ‘And who do we have here?’ The President’s friendly expression was in clear contrast to his daughter’s.

  ‘Tell the President your name, darling,’ my mother encouraged me, with a voice cooing with tenderness. She was Viennese, but as the offspring of a nouveau riche industrialist family, she had been carted off to English boarding schools as soon as possible and hence her English was completely without accent.

  My name? Very well, if they insist: ‘Carlitos.’

  ‘Isn’t that a boy’s name?’

  ‘Yes.’ I was nudged in the back and corrected myself: ‘Yes, Mr President.’

  Of course Carlitos wasn’t my real name. It’s Carlota. But in the one and a half years I spent with Irina, we had fallen into the habit of changing our first names every few months, forcing everyone to call us by whatever the latest creation was – at least everyone who wanted to get a reaction out of us. Just before they separated us so heartlessly, we had decided on boys’ names, which we wouldn’t give up as long as they kept us separated. Irina called herself Stanislav, after her favourite writer Stanislav Lem. I acquired, far less imaginatively, the name Carlitos. It was a pity that my friend couldn’t witness that even here, confronted by the most powerful man in the world, I was sticking to our agreement.

  ‘You have amazing pigtails, Carlitos. Who plaited them for you? Your mother?’ My mother and plaiting! What a joke! She hated this hairstyle, and as I am a blonde as well, had even gone as far as telling me that it made me look like the child of a Nazi. But it was an exact copy of my faraway girlfriend’s hair and a further manifestation of my protest. Every time they looked at me, my parents should be reminded of their cruelty.

  Before my mother could nudge me for a second time, I decided on a reluctant murmur: ‘Mademoiselle.’

  ‘I can’t hear you, son.’ The President leaned down to me with such a broad smile that I could have counted his shiny white teeth, that is if I had wanted to.

  ‘Mademoiselle does it for me!’

  ‘Our nanny, Mr President,’ hurried my mother. ‘She comes from France.’

  ‘Then one can only hope she likes it here.’ The remark was clearly directed at me. After all, this was a children’s party.

  That was my big opportunity and I shouted: ‘No, she doesn’t like it here, and nor do I!’

  The silence was brief, but absolute. The small Mexican boy next to me turned and looked at me, his eyes wide open.

  ‘Well, maybe you haven’t made the right friends yet?’ Kennedy said. And then came that historic sentence: ‘Why don’t you come over and play with Caroline some time?’

  ‘What a wonderful idea, Mr President!’ I had rarely heard my mother’s voice so excited. ‘I really think she is a little lonely!’ I exchanged a short glance with the girl named Caroline, whose expression had turned from one of boredom into open disgust. How old could she be? Not older than seven. Couldn’t her father see that I was a whole head taller than her? But before I could protest, he had moved on to the Mexican boy.

  When we were finally sitting in the car, against all my expectations, my mother wasn’t angry at all. She brought the sentence home with her and passed it on to my ecstatic father, who from then on would repeat it to everyone who came to visit us. And of course there were no more complaints about my hairstyle.

  Introductions now went something like this: ‘And this is Carlota, our daughter. Carlota, come here and shake the senator’s hands.’

  ‘What a beautiful little girl! And what delightful pigtails!’

  ‘Indeed. Even your President has a weakness for them. As soon as he set eyes on her, he invited her to the White House to play with his little daughter.’ At this point he tended to turn to me, as if he couldn’t remember her name: ‘Caroline, isn’t it?’

  Eleven months later, after Kennedy’s assassination, it became even worse: ‘Kennedy? But of course we knew him personally. Our daughters had started a big little friendship with each other. Caroline, poor child!’ Complete nonsense, of course, as neither then nor later did I ever play with Caroline.

  I hardly noticed the tragedy in Dallas. For only a few days after this reception, December 24th to be precise, my life was freed from all gloom overnight. To this day I think that the months between Christmas ’62 and the day Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots were the most exhilarating of my life.

  For on Christmas Eve 1962, at around eight o’clock, Catherine Loucheron, our gorgeous French nanny, whom we never called anything but Mademoiselle, started the first of her fires. And amongst the men in the approaching fire engine was Nick Kowalski, a fireman of Washington DC’s fire department.

  In those days, my parents liked to consider themselves politically on the Left, at least in private circles. But as much as I tried, I couldn’t find any practical evidence for this. The ivy-covered brown-stone house in the fashionable district of Georgetown that we moved into – not three hundred metres from the one where the Kennedys used to live before their move into the White House – was certainly one of the most modest in my long chain of childhood domiciles. But as far as I can recall, it still sported a good dozen rooms, a basement apartment for the servants, two garages and a small garden, overgrown with bamboo. At the end of the garden was a swimming pool, complete with a little house for changing in. If my father ever shared his diplomat’s salary with some needy people, I hadn’t heard anything about it.

  This leftist label was also hardly appropriate considering our origins. My Argentinian grandparents were living in a villa in Buenos Aires that was so large that I regularly got lost in it when I was very little. When one summer holiday I planned to walk around their estate in one of the northern provinces, I was informed that this endeavour would take the best part of two weeks. My mother’s family on the other hand gave the appearance of bei
ng more modest, but that presumably had more to do with European sensitivity than matters of wealth. My Viennese grandmother’s long-distance calls were feared, as once she got started it usually took a hundred years before she would replace the receiver.

  ‘What does “left” actually mean?’ I once asked my father.

  ‘When you’re on the side of the weak.’

  ‘So you give them your money?’

  ‘That would be more like charity. A true leftwinger will treat every person as an equal amongst equals. For example, being left can also mean that one is nice to one’s servants.’

  That must have also been, why it was the most natural thing in the world for Mademoiselle to eat dinner with us, at least for the first weeks after her arrival. Not only on those rare occasions when we were dining alone, but also when we entertained guests, no matter how high-ranking they were. Anyway, she wasn’t a normal kind of nanny: she came from Biarritz, where her father ran a successful night-club, and she had passed the French baccalaureate, known as one of the most difficult examinations in the world. And she was not exactly employed to take care of me – when Georgetown Day School’s yellow school bus dropped me back home it was already four o’clock in the afternoon – but to teach me as much of her exquisite French in my free time as possible. As my father had his eye on the French embassy, my parents had insisted that a cassette accompanied all applications for the post of nanny. When the time came, their beloved daughter must not have been allowed to fall into a linguistic vacuum.

  However, it soon transpired that God wasn’t very good at thanking my parents for their penchant for social equality. Of course we had already recognised Mademoiselle’s enormous beauty when we picked her up from Washington’s airport and first saw her coming through customs. Despite the fact that she was wearing a rather boring woollen jumper and had neatly knotted her magnificent hair behind her neck, my father, drilled at diplomats’ school in the art of casual conversation, was at a loss for words. ‘The face of a Madonna and the body of a whore,’ I once heard him describe her to a friend on the telephone. ‘No, not in a million years,’ he added – presumably replying to an enquiry about whether the caller would have a chance with her. ‘Forget everything you’ve heard about French women, pal. This one’s made of stone.’

  Not even my usually so instinctive mother was able to foresee what effect Mademoiselle’s looks would have on her dinner parties. Every good hostess likes to have attractive women at her table, as she knows that they will stimulate the other guests. And not only the male ones, as, according to one of my Viennese grandmother’s bons mots, men and women basically have only one interest in common: women. But Catherine Loucheron’s beauty was too spectacular to be of service to my mother’s ambitions as a hostess. It soon transpired that her presence made any normal dinner conversation impossible. As much as you tried to exude an air of disinterest, you simply had to look at her.

  Not even I, the child, was immune to Mademoiselle’s spell, even though today, three decades later, I can’t really put my finger on where it originated. It was probably the combination of many things. Her magnificent pebble-grey eyes which, due to a slight squint, always looked a little surprised – as if whoever she turned to had just said something unbelievably exciting. Her thick dark-blonde hair, which she usually carelessly tied in a knot so that a few strands would always fall across her high cheekbones. Her – at least according to conventional standards of beauty – much too large mouth with the always unmade-up voluptuous lips which, when she was laughing, revealed absolutely perfect white teeth. Even though back then I had nothing to compare it with, her figure must also have been quite impressive. To this day, I can hear the enthusiastic whistles of the workers at a building site on N Street, which we passed on the way to my piano lessons.

  On top of all that, the Americans must have been smitten by her French accent, as they never tired of asking her questions, no matter how superfluous:

  ‘You grew up by the sea, mademoiselle? You must be a good swimmer?’

  ‘Yes, I am, monsieur.’

  ‘Would you agree that the French cuisine is the best in the world?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never really travelled much.’

  ‘But where did you learn to speak English?’

  ‘Our nanny taught me. She was English.’

  A nanny with a nanny, would you believe it? However, as my parents’ friends also pretended to be broad-minded, no one wondered about that out loud.

  As Mademoiselle must have been aware of her special situation – presumably she had experienced nothing else since puberty and I can imagine that even at kindergarten she attracted more attention than the other children – she spoke as little as possible. But as she was hired, amongst other things, to supervise my table manners, as soon as she uttered the slightest criticism any conversation would come to an immediate halt. No one wanted to miss out on the tone of her voice, the elegant line her neck made when she leaned over to me, the movements of her delicate hands when she showed me how to deal with a lobster claw. Should her serviette fall to the floor in the course of this, everyone rushed to her help so she wouldn’t have to bend down. If she asked for one of the salt cellars, arms extended from everywhere. The smile she acknowledged it with was obviously more interesting than any political controversy which one had concerned oneself with just moments earlier. Male guests especially tended to deliver endless monologues, as they hoped that this would be the quickest way to impress her. If someone knew a snippet of French, he’d repeat it again and again: ‘N’est-ce pas, mademoiselle?’ And when at the end of the meal she leaned back to smoke one of her Gauloises Bleu, everyone wanted to be the one to light it for her.

  When someone handed my mother a newspaper clipping during an especially important dinner, and she asked Mademoiselle to fetch her reading glasses which she had left in the library, it was, as they say, the straw that broke the camel’s back. Immediately three men jumped up to spare the beautiful nanny the trouble, and my parents’ remaining love for equality evaporated in an instant. An excuse was found quickly. After all, the child was still at school at lunch, and as far as dinner was concerned my mother found the ingenious solution of moving my bedtime forward. The child looks tired, the child needs more sleep. From that point on, Mademoiselle and I were eating on our own, an hour before everyone else, in the small breakfast room next to the kitchen. Only at weekends, when there was no school the following day, were we still allowed at the formal dinner table. But then my parents usually went out anyway.

  As the idea about my going to bed early was quickly forgotten, the new regulations suited ‘the child’ down to the ground. At last I wouldn’t have to bear any more boring dinner conversations and was no longer disturbed in my thoughts with an ‘And what does our little Carlota make of the new amendment?’ My thoughts generally concerned epoch-making inventions. Besides I was unbelievably proud to finally have the much-coveted Mademoiselle all to myself. Our conversations were quite amusing, at least as long as she didn’t insist on speaking French with me. And in contrast to the other grown-ups, she would even let me talk to her about my inventions.

  Unfortunately, it quickly transpired that I couldn’t talk to her about the other two subjects that interested me most at that time: sex and religion. I have to admit that to this day I haven’t found topics of conversation that fascinate me as much as they do. Sex concerns the art of enjoying nature’s preprogrammed, people-making instinct without actually making any. Religion concerns the art of circumventing nature’s pre-programmed death by believing in some form of continuation. In the end, sex stands for life, and religion for death. What could be more interesting, even if only as a topic of conversation?

  But Mademoiselle was a Catholic, and that must have meant that the pleasure of sex without making humans wasn’t allowed to her, while an afterlife in paradise was guaranteed, even in writing. So why should she get worked up about my favourite subjects? Just my bad luck.

  Of course we didn’t talk about our banishment to the breakfast room either. But the reason was perfectly clear, even to a twelve-year-old: Mademoiselle would never be an equal amongst equals – her beauty not only set her apart from the poor, but also from the rich. In this case, it wasn’t just my parents who lacked social justice, but the Creator himself, as evidently He had created this spectacular ‘class enemy’. You can give away your money, but how can you share your beauty with the underprivileged? Should Mademoiselle have disfigured herself in order to be more like the other women at my parents’ dinner table?