Read Online Amandine by Marlena de Blasi - Free Book Online Page A

HAND NOW, DON’T run. You musn’t run. Amandine, stop now and look at me. You know you must not run. And I can’t pick you up right now, don’t you see all that I’m carrying in my other arm? Hold my hand, walk slowly. Père will wait for you. All right, now you may go alone.”
    Philippe holds his arms out straight as the two-year-old—willful against the rules—runs to him at startling speed, shrieking his name. Bending to catch her, he holds her to him, stands and swings her about then in his awkward fashion. Dear Philippe. His great Gallic nose, rutilant badge of the good Languedocian abbé, his soutane fluttering, the long black muffler wound about his neck, even in summer, a tail of it flopping against the hunch of his back, how vehement he seems in his ceremonial meandering about the gardens, among the vines, head down, prowling in the sunstruck southern light as though bent on crucial enterprise. How late his muse came. Lisping, wan, adoring.
    Through high parched grasses, the three walk down to the creek bank, to a soft, earthy rise under a walnut tree. Solange makes a pallet with a quilt for Amandine, takes out a pillow for Philippe. Dismissing the quilt, Amandine climbs into her place in Philippe’s arms. Solange opens three paper-wrapped parcels—thick slices of black bread laid with butter and applesauce. As he does each afternoon, Philippe falls asleep during his telling of a story to Amandine while she continues to quietly champ at the last of her bread. She closes her eyes then and forces out a sound like Philippe’s snore. The grasses sway like the swishing of a full brown skirt, and the two are prone beside them. Solange spreads the quilt over the sleeping pair and walks back to the convent. She will come to wake them before vespers.
    By the time she is three, the sisters’ shared care of Amandine with Solange has taken on its own rites and rituals. There is a place arranged for the child in every part of the convent, so that, for instance, when she is in the care of the cooking sisters, she is propped on a cushioned stool near the worktable. Given her own dose of bread dough or pastry, she works along with the others, rolling, shaping, chattering. An old parlor chair placed in the washhouse is where she naps in the late mornings while Marie-Albert runs yellow-striped dish towels or heavy cotton petticoats through a wringer, flings them into a basket. The sounds comfort Amandine and, should Marie-Albert interrupt her work for a moment, the child sits up, urges her to get on with things, then settles back down. On Mondays and Tuesdays, when Marie-Albert washes the sheets from the narrow beds in the sisters’ cells and hangs them, taut and even, with wooden pins onto pulley lines strung in the shape of a quadrangle, Amandine likes to sit and sing inside the roofless, wet, white house with the flapping, bleach-smelling walls. Marie-Albert, conforming to the house rule which dictates that all underclothing be hung out of the sight of any possible passersby, pins the sisters’ off-white linen brassieres and pantalets to another line strung inside the house made of sheets. And since it so happens that many of the younger sisters seem to have theirmenses at, more or less, the same time, each month there is a long line of pantalets swaying dreamily on the line. Amandine asks Marie-Albert why her own pantalets are not hung there and so, rather than wash and dry the child’s things in their rooms, Solange begins to bring Amandine’s clothes to the washhouse. When Paul first sees the sisters’ pantalets, along with her own and the longer, larger woolen ones of Philippe, waving beside Amandine’s tiny, ruffled ones, she reaches for her handkerchief, pats her upper lip.
    Amandine delights in the outdoors. She wanders about, touching, smelling, inspecting, Solange or one of the other sisters close by but not too much so. She scrutinizes a swallow’s nest, windblown and landed in the herb beds, and often