The Book of Proper Names Read online

  And then there was the fact that she was the prettiest of them all. Even at seventy-seven pounds, she didn’t look like those corpses whose thinness the teachers praised. Her dancer’s eyes lit up her face with their fantastic beauty. The teachers knew, without mentioning it to their pupils, that prettiness plays an enormously important part in the choosing of star dancers; in this respect, Plectrude was the most fortunate.

  She was secretly worried about her health. She didn’t talk to anyone about it, but at night her legs hurt so much that she had to stop herself from screaming. Although she knew nothing about medicine, she suspected the reason: she had cut all dairy products out of her diet. She actually noted that even a few spoonfuls of low-fat yogurt were enough to make her feel “bloated” (and what she meant by “bloated” may be hard for the rest of us to grasp).

  Indeed, low-fat yogurt was the only form of lactose permitted in the school. Doing without it meant eliminating any intake of calcium, which cements adolescence. Sadistic as the adults at the school might have been, none of them recommended doing without yogurt, and even the most emaciated of them consumed it. Not Plectrude.

  This deficiency very quickly led to atrocious pains in her legs whenever she remained motionless for a few hours, as she did at night. To get rid of the pain she had to get up and move about. But the moment her legs started moving again came agonies worthy of a torture chamber. Plectrude had to bite on a rag to keep from crying out. Each time, she felt as though the bones in her calves and thighs were about to snap.

  She realized that decalcification was the cause of her torment, but she couldn’t bring herself to start eating that wretched yogurt again. Without knowing it, she was falling victim to the internal machinery of anorexia, which considers each fresh privation irreversible except at the cost of unendurable guilt.

  She lost another four-and-a-half pounds, confirming her conviction that low-fat yogurt was “heavy.” During the Easter vacation, her father told her she had turned into a skeleton. Her mother immediately went into raptures about her daughter’s beauty. Clémence was the only member of the family Plectrude was still happy to see. At least she understands me. Her sisters, and even Roselyne, looked upon her as a stranger. They didn’t feel anything in common with that assemblage of bones.

  Since dropping below seventy-three pounds, the dancer had even fewer emotions than before. Their rejection of her caused her no pain.

  * * *

  PLECTRUDE ADMIRED HER LIFE. She felt as though she was alone in her battle against gravity. She waged war upon it armed with fasting and dance.

  The Grail was flight and Plectrude was the most likely, of all her fellow knights, to attain it. What did pain matter in the face of the immensity of her quest?

  The months and years passed. The dancer was integrated within her school like a Carmelite within her order. There would be no salvation outside its walls.

  She was the rising star, discussed at the highest levels. She knew that.

  At the age of fifteen, she still measured five foot two, which meant that she hadn’t grown so much as an inch since entering the école des rats. Her weight: seventy pounds.

  It sometimes seemed to her that she had had no life before this. She hoped that her existence would never change. Other people’s admiration, whether real or imagined, was emotionally satisfying enough.

  She knew too that her mother loved her to distraction. Although she didn’t show it, awareness of that love served as her spinal column. One day, she mentioned the leg problem to Clémence. “How brave you are,” was all her mother said.

  Plectrude savored the compliment, although deep inside she had the sense that her mother should have said something very different. What, she didn’t know.

  * * *

  THE INEVITABLE HAPPENED. One November morning, when Plectrude had just got out of bed, biting her rag so as not to howl with pain, she collapsed. She heard a cracking noise in her thigh.

  She couldn’t move. She called for help. She was sent to the hospital.

  A doctor who hadn’t seen her before studied her X rays.

  “How old is this woman?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “What? She’s got the bones of a menopausal sixty-year-old!”

  They asked her some questions. She told them straight out that she hadn’t had any dairy products since she was thirteen—the age when the body craves them.

  “Are you anorexic?”

  “No, of course not!” she exclaimed with sincerity.

  “Do you think weighing sixty-five pounds at your age is normal?”

  “Seventy pounds!” she protested.

  “What difference do you think that makes?”

  She resorted to Clémence’s arguments. “I’m a ballerina. It’s better not to have curves.”

  “I didn’t know they’d started recruiting dancers from the concentration camps.”

  “How dare you insult my school!”

  “So what do you think about a place where a teenager is allowed to self-destruct? I’m going to call the police,” said the doctor stoutly.

  Plectrude instinctively leapt to the defense of her order.

  “No! It’s my fault! I stopped eating it in secret! No one knew.”

  “No one wanted to know. The result is that you’ve broken your tibia just by falling on the ground. If you were normal, a month in a cast would do it. In your condition, I don’t know how many months you’re going to have to keep it on. Not to mention the rehab you’ll have to go through afterwards.”

  “Does that mean I’m not going to be able to dance for a long time?”

  “My dear girl, you’ll never be able to dance again.”

  Plectrude’s heart stopped. She sank into a kind of coma.

  * * *

  SHE EMERGED FROM IT a few days later. She passed through that exquisite moment when you recall nothing, then she remembered the sentence passed on her. A nurse with a pleasant manner confirmed it.

  “Your bones are seriously weakened, especially in your legs. Even when your tibia is mended, you won’t be able to start dancing again. The slightest jump, the slightest impact could bruise you. It will take years to bring your calcium levels back up to normal.”

  Telling Plectrude that she wouldn’t dance again was like telling Napoleon he wouldn’t have an army again. She was being deprived not of her vocation, but of her destiny.

  She couldn’t believe it. She interrogated every doctor she could. Not one gave her the faintest glimmer of hope. They should be credited for that. If even one of them had given her a hundredth of a chance of recovery, she would have clung to it, fatally.

  Plectrude was surprised that Clémence hadn’t come to her bedside. She asked to make a phone call. Her father told her that when the terrible news had come, her mother had fallen seriously ill.

  “She’s running a fever, she’s delirious. She thinks she’s you. She keeps saying, ‘I’m only fifteen, my dream can’t be over yet, I’m going to be a dancer, I can’t be anything but a dancer!’”

  The idea of Clémence being in pain was the final straw for Plectrude. From her bed, she studied the intravenous drip that was feeding her. She became convinced that it was injecting her with unhappiness in the guise of food.

  * * *

  WHILE SHE WAS forbidden to make the slightest movement, Plectrude remained in the hospital. Her father sometimes came to visit her. She asked him why her mother didn’t come with him.

  “She’s still too ill,” he replied.

  This went on for several months. Aside from her father, no one came to see her, no one from the école des rats, or from her family, or from her former school. It was as though Plectrude no longer belonged to any world.

  She spent her days doing absolutely nothing. She didn’t want to read anything. She refused to watch television. She was diagnosed as suffering from deep depression.

  She couldn’t swallow anything. A good thing she had her IV. But it disgusted her: it was what connected her wi
th life, in spite of herself.

  * * *

  WHEN SPRING CAME, she was taken to see her parents. Her heart pounded at the idea of seeing her mother again, but her wish was refused. “But why not? Is she dead?”

  “No, she’s alive, but she doesn’t want you to see her in this state.”

  It was more than Plectrude could bear. She waited until her sisters were at school and her father had gone out, then she got out of her bed. She was able to move around on crutches.

  She reached her parents’ bedroom, where Clémence was sleeping. When she saw her mother, the girl thought she was dead. Her complexion was ashen, and she seemed even thinner than her daughter. Plectrude collapsed at her side, weeping, “Mama! Mama!”

  The sleeping woman woke up and said, “You’re not allowed in here.”

  “But I had to see you. And anyway I’ve done it now, and it’s better that way. I’d rather know how you are. As long as you’re alive, nothing else matters. You’re going to start eating. You’ll get better. We’re both going to get better, Mama.”

  She noticed that her mother was still cold, and that she wasn’t reaching out to hold her.

  “Hold me! I so need you!”

  Clémence remained inert.

  “Poor Mama, you’re too weak even for that.”

  She stood up and looked at her mother. How she had changed! There was no longer any warmth in her eyes. Something within her had died. Plectrude didn’t want to understand it.

  Mama thinks she’s me. She’s stopped eating because I stopped eating. If I eat, she will eat. If I get better, she’ll get better.

  The girl dragged herself to the kitchen and found a bar of chocolate. Then she went back to Clémence’s bedroom and sat on the bed.

  “Look, Mama. I’m eating.”

  The chocolate was a shock to her mouth, which was no longer used to food, let alone such a rich confection. Plectrude forced herself not to reveal her nausea.

  “It’s milk chocolate, Mama. It’s full of calcium. It’s good for me.”

  So this was what eating was? Her organs shuddered, her stomach revolted. She fell to her knees and vomited.

  Humiliated, disconsolate, Plectrude remained motionless, contemplating her work.

  It was then that her mother said, dryly, “You disgust me.”

  The girl looked at the glacial eye of the woman who said this. She didn’t want to believe what she had heard and seen. She fled as quickly as her crutches allowed.

  * * *

  PLECTRUDE FELL ON HER BED and sobbed her heart out. Eventually she fell asleep.

  When she woke up, she felt a strange sensation: hunger.

  She asked Béatrice, who had come back in the meantime, to bring her a tray.

  “Victory!” applauded her sister, who brought her some bread, cheese, jam, ham, and chocolate.

  The girl refused the chocolate, but she devoured the rest.

  Béatrice exulted.

  Plectrude’s appetite had returned. This was not bulimia, but healthy, ravenous hunger. She ate three hearty meals a day, feeling particularly attracted to cheese, as though her body were communicating its most urgent needs. Her father and her sisters were delighted.

  She quickly put on weight. She regained her eighty-eight pounds and her beautiful face. Everything was for the best. She even managed not to feel guilty, which, for a former anorexic, is really quite extraordinary.

  As she had predicted, her recovery meant her mother’s recovery as well. Clémence finally left her room and saw her daughter again, not having so much as glimpsed her since the day she had vomited. She looked at Plectrude in consternation. “You’ve gotten fatter!”

  “Yes, Mama,” stammered the girl.

  “You were so pretty before!”

  “Don’t you think I’m pretty like this?”

  “No, you’re fat.”

  “But Mama! I weigh eighty-eight pounds!”

  “Exactly: you’ve put on eighteen pounds.”

  “I had to!”

  “That’s what you say to ease your conscience. It was calcium you needed, not weight. You don’t look like a dancer now!”

  “But Mama, I can’t dance anymore. I’m not a dancer anymore. Do you know how much pain I’m in?”

  “If you were in pain, you wouldn’t be so hungry.”

  The worst was the hard voice with which the woman delivered her verdict.

  “Why do you talk like that? I’m your daughter!”

  “You’ve never been my daughter.”

  * * *

  CLÉMENCE TOLD HER everything: Lucette, Fabien, Fabien’s murder by Lucette, her birth in prison, Lucette’s suicide.

  “What are you saying?” moaned Plectrude.

  “Ask your father—or rather, your uncle—if you don’t believe me.”

  Once over her initial shock, the girl managed to ask, “Why are you telling me this today?”

  “I was going to have to tell you some day, wasn’t I?”

  “Why in such a cruel way? You’ve always been a wonderful mother. Now you’re talking to me as though I had never been your daughter.”

  “Because you’ve betrayed me. You know how much I dreamt of you being a dancer.”

  “I had an accident! It wasn’t my fault.”

  “Yes, it was your fault! If you hadn’t stupidly decalcified yourself!”

  “I told you about the pains in my legs!”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Yes it is, I talked to you about it! You even congratulated me on my courage.”

  “You’re lying!”

  “I don’t lie! Do you think it’s normal for a mother to congratulate her daughter on having pains in her legs? It was a cry for help, and you didn’t hear it.”

  “That’s right, say it’s all my fault.”

  Plectrude was speechless.

  * * *

  HER WORLD COLLAPSED. She had no future, no family, nothing.

  Denis was kind, but weak. Clémence told him to stop praising Plectrude for regaining her appetite. “Don’t encourage her to get fat, for heaven’s sake!”

  “She’s not fat,” he bleated. “A little plump, maybe.”

  That phrase, “a little plump,” told the girl that she had lost an ally.

  Telling a fifteen-year-old girl that she’s fat, or even “a little plump,” when she weighs eighty-eight pounds, is the same as telling her not to grow up.

  Faced with a disaster of this scale, a girl has only two choices: fall back into anorexia, or bulimia. Miraculously, Plectrude didn’t succumb to either. Her appetite, which any doctor would have considered healthy, and which Clémence declared to be “monstrous,” continued to grow.

  In fact, Plectrude’s body was telling her to be hungry: she had years to catch up on. Thanks to her frenetic consumption of cheese she grew an inch and a half. Nonetheless, for an adult, five foot three and a half was better than five foot two.

  * * *

  WHEN SHE WAS SIXTEEN she had her first period. She told Clémence as though it were a marvelous piece of news. Clémence shrugged her shoulders contemptuously.

  “Aren’t you happy that I’m finally normal?”

  “How much do you weigh?”

  “A hundred pounds.”

  “That’s what I thought. You’re obese.”

  “A hundred pounds, five foot three and a half. That’s obese?”

  “Face the facts. You’re enormous.”

  Plectrude, who had regained the full use of her legs, went and threw herself on her bed. She didn’t cry, she felt a pang of hatred that lasted for hours. She struck her pillow with her fist. An inner voice howled, “She wants to kill me! My mother wants me dead!”

  She had never stopped thinking of Clémence as her mother. She was her mother because she was the one who had really given her life—and now she wanted to take it away.

  In her place, many teenagers would have committed suicide, but the survival instinct was deeply rooted in Plectrude. She got up, saying in a l
oud, calm voice, “I won’t let myself be killed, Mama.”

  * * *

  SHE TOOK HER OWN life in hand, insofar as that is possible for a sixteen-year-old girl who has lost everything. Since her mother had gone mad, she would be an adult in her place.

  She signed up for drama classes. She made a great impression. Her first name helped. Being called “Plectrude” was a double-edged blade: either you were ugly and the name emphasized your ugliness, or you were beautiful and it increased your beauty a hundredfold.

  The latter was true in her case. People were already struck when they saw that girl with the wonderful eyes and the dancer’s grace entering a room. When they learned her first name, they looked at her even more closely, and admired her sublime hair, her tragic expression, her perfect mouth, her ideal complexion.

  Her drama teacher told her she had a “physique” (She thought it was a strange expression. Didn’t everyone have a “physique”?) and advised her to start going to casting calls.

  That was how she came to be selected to play the part of the teenage Geraldine Chaplin in a television film. When Chaplin saw her, the actress exclaimed, “I wasn’t as beautiful as that at her age!”, but there was an undeniable similarity between their thin faces.

  That kind of role brought Plectrude some income but, unfortunately, not enough of one to help her get away from her mother, which was her intention. In the evening she went home as late as possible, so as not to bump into Clémence. But she wasn’t always able to avoid her, and was always greeted with something like “Hey! Here comes the fat girl!”

  That was if she was lucky. The worst was, “Evening, Blubber!”

  It would be hard to express how hurtful such comments were, or the air of disgust with which they were delivered.

  One day, Plectrude dared to reply that Béatrice, who weighed sixteen pounds more than she did, never got such insults. To which her mother replied, “That’s irrelevant, as you know very well.”

  She wasn’t bold enough to say, no, she didn’t know very well. All she knew was that her sister was allowed to be normal, and she wasn’t.

  * * *

  ONE EVENING, WHEN PLECTRUDE had been unable to find an excuse not to have dinner with her family, and when Clémence gave a scornful expression every time her daughter swallowed a mouthful of food, she finally protested, “Mama, stop looking at me like that! Haven’t you ever seen anyone eating before?”