Читать книгу Undressing Emmanuelle: A memoir - Sylvia Kristel - Страница 27

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The apartment is a little cramped but we are at home, immovable. My brother and sister argue all day long. Marianne is now a serious, determined, devoted girl. Nicolas is still a roaming kid, his hair has grown and my mother often threatens him with her sewing scissors but can’t catch him. My mother is trying to create some semblance of order, to put on a brave face. She has found work. The judge decreed that my mother had no need of maintenance and must work for her living. She does, working hard as is her way, altering clothes in a smart boutique.

‘We’re a real family now! We’re going to eat healthily, and we DO NOT ARGUE!’

My mother hammers out the words to get the attention of Nicolas and Marianne, who are squabbling even as she is making these resolutions. My mother has changed, become softer, warm. She is making a real effort. It’s a bit late, but it’s nice. ‘Better late than never’ is her new motto. By repeating these banal words she is trying to get a grip on time and on this wait; she is living in hope.

My mother is bringing us up at last. She is aware we are all she has left and that nothing will change this. She encourages me, telling me I can do anything, that I have the potential to succeed. What? I listen to this sudden promotion. I wonder, and cling to it. It’s so different from the old indifference, from what I used to feel, but I try to believe in it. I will need my mother to tell me from morning till night, sober and drunk, happy and unhappy, for every remaining day of her wretched life, that she loves me and that I have talent, the real talent, the talent to be loved, for me to – hearing it so often – start to inhabit this new love, and believe that these words, this change in the air, are more real than what went before.

My mother managed a year of healthy living, without alcohol. She went back to it with the passing time and the never-ending wait. Slowly, gradually, surreptitiously; in a few months she was back to her old levels of consumption. Alcohol and tobacco would be her pastime, her painkillers, till the end.