Читать книгу Undressing Emmanuelle: A memoir - Sylvia Kristel - Страница 16

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Once she was a wife and mother – just a few years after that first ball – my mother stopped dancing. She worked. My mother no longer did the thing she loved. She became obsessed by the beneficial effects of hard toil, austere as a matter of duty, irritable, often sad as she witnessed my father’s slow flight.

She concentrated on her daily tasks, on the hotel and her children. She concerned herself with our homework, our health, our cleanliness and the perfect ironing of our clothes, which she often made – with some skill – herself. My mother was unable to express her affection other than through faultless material care. We were scattered around so as not to disturb hotel business. I was often in my bedroom, Marianne with our neighbours – kind, cigar-selling shopkeepers – and my brother wherever he pleased. He was the family’s little man; he called the shots.

People say they miss the deceased. I missed my father and my mother when they were still fully alive. They travelled through my childhood in the same way they moved around the hotel: my mother industrious, hurried, hidden; my father drunk, flamboyant, alone.