Laura is too young to be aware of the magical nature of her house, of her bedroom that is like no other—there is a hatch inside her wardrobe that leads to another hatch inside her parents’ wardrobe and sometimes, when she has friends to tea, her mother allows them to play at passing through from one room into another—her wooden toys, her birds on the wall, her little princess’s cabin in the garden. She likes going to see her best friend, Sophie, whose parents have an apartment in the city with a big TV and wall-to-wall carpet in the living room. She could spend hours at the window watching the cars speeding along on the boulevard down below.
Her mother talks to her, with many an “oh” and “ah” and “hmm,” about the faraway island where she was born, but Laura has never been there on the plane, she only knows the car in which they sometimes drive for hours on end—her parents call it going for a spin. All the time they keep saying look, Laura, look—they go to the sea, to the mountains, to the lake. In the winter they light a fire in the fireplace and perform puppet plays written by her mother.
“Where is my prince?”
“He’s been swallowed by the dragon! It’s all over for him. Kaput.”
“What am I going to be when I grow up?”
“You’ll be president of the republic!”
Sometimes she would prefer things to be simpler, for the princess to be reunited with her prince and for the dragon to be killed with the sword of truth and love.
Laura is a little girl people call “good.” She is not one of the ones people swoon over. She has a frank stare that can be unsettling, as if she knew things, as if she has a sixth sense about the nature of men and women. Her parents would like to glimpse what she carries within herself: her mother’s passion, her father’s good looks, a talent for perceiving and transforming, an original mind, a luminous spirit? They are impatient to see her grow up, impatient to know what elements of themselves she will carry within her.
It is in the evenings above all that Laura wishes she could be with them. When the hour for her bedtime has long since struck, when the books have been read, the kisses given, the day talked through, the songs sung, and she can hear her parents living another life down below. There they are talking, laughing, sometimes arguing, drinking and eating, watching films and listening to music, and on some evenings when sleep will not come, she feels as if she were a total stranger to them, as if she could disappear, no longer exist, and they would not notice her absence. Later on her mother comes softly upstairs and closes the door to her study. Her father goes out and she sees his tall figure walking, softly as well, across the grass, and a moment later the lights come on in his studio. What they do at night, each of them in their own space, is something mysterious from which she is kept firmly at a distance.
Her mother has less time these days. She talks on the phone a lot—with a much more animated and high-pitched voice than usual—she is never far from her diary and on occasion she argues with her father about this. She has a meeting and so has he, what is to be done about the child?
The child the child the child.
She wishes they would stop calling her that. She would like a dog, a little sister, she believes the secret promises she makes there in her bed at night (if I have a sister, I’ll stop listening at doors; if I have a dog, I’ll stop looking through your stuff, Maman). At school they ask her why her mother is black and when she goes home and puts this question to Anita she replies crisply: “I’m not black, I’m brown. Can’t you tell the difference?”
She feels both poor and rich, both adored and neglected. She has all she could wish for and is alone.
Then at the start of spring she meets Adèle.
It is a Saturday afternoon and fine enough for her to play in the garden. A checkered tablecloth, a frilly dress, shoes with heels, bracelets, a tiara. Real little cookies on little blue plates, real fruit juice in the red teapot. Her father is sitting cross-legged and she has just made him put on a cardboard crown that she had saved from their Twelfth Night celebrations.
“Would you like another cookie, Your Majesty?”
“With great pleasure, Your Highness. This is delicious. Did you make them yourself?”
“Yes, Your Majesty. I used flour, eggs, sugar, and chocolate chips baked in the oven. Would you like some fruit juice?”
“Yes please, Your Highness.”
Adam and Laura are more than transformed. They are magically transfigured by the game, the dressing up, the setting, the green lawn scattered with dozens of cloverleafs, all the tiny things that have to be held with the tips of the fingers, this cup, this saucer, this perfect moment. The truth is, thinks Adam, it is our children who raise us onto a higher plane, there will never be any painting, any monument, any house, any friendship, any lover, any book that can
