Page 39 of Vianne

For a moment I look around, expecting the Man in Black to appear.

But the only priest I can see is dressed all in angelic white, with thick gold stitching on the sleeves and down the front and on the hem of his garment.

The service is already underway. Hundreds of people sit in the pews, some of them holding prayer books.

There are children too, children like me, all in their best Christmas outfits.

And the music sails in like a galleon laden with beautiful treasures.

I look around for somewhere to hide. My mother will be following.

I dash down the left-hand aisle and find a little wooden closet; a door just wide enough to slip inside, and a wooden bench, with a curtain drawn against the multitude.

It was a confessional, of course, though I had never seen one.

But it was warm and safe inside, and I could hear the music.

Through the gap in the curtain I could see the Holy Mother.

In her long blue gown, her veil, her hair caught up in a nimbus of stars, she looked nothing like my mother.

My mother’s face was angular; her hair a mess of tumbling curls.

Her face was all extremes; a face incapable of moderation.

All her clothes were in carnival prints; clashing flowers and polka-dots and stripes and swirls of bright brocade.

My mother was a butterfly in a colony of moths, and yet she knew how to pass unseen, to change her colouring to suit the city’s crazy camouflage.

It was the first thing I’d learnt from her.

You don’t have to blend in to go unseen. You have to look as if you belong.

But I don’t want to look as if I belong. I want a place of my own. A bed that I don’t have to share with you. Books. Friends. To go to school. A mother who buys toys, bakes pies, and never has to go on the run.

Once more I looked around me. The tiny cubicle was dark, but there was light coming in through the screen that stood above the wooden bench.

Looking through, I could see another bench; a little ledge; the mirror image of my own.

It could have been a closet, but there was no rail on which to hang clothes.

What then? Storage for prayer books? A place for agoraphobes to sit?

I could stay here. Claim this space. There’s room to sleep, and it’s private. During the day I’d venture abroad. And at night, when all the people are gone, I could come out and explore, and run along the empty aisles, and climb up into the organ loft, and dance between the pillars.

I was only eight years old. And yet I remember that feeling.

At eight, I could already forage for food among a city’s markets.

I knew where to shower, where to drink, where to find shoes and clothing.

So many things are thrown away in a city like this one.

All it takes is a sharp eye, and the skill of passing unseen.

Yes, I could make this my sanctuary. I could escape my mother.

I know that sounds ungrateful – na?ve. Especially now, when I miss her so much.

But at eight, the world is a different shape, built around different perspectives.

And the loss of Molfetta was still too raw for me to feel any gratitude for our special status.

All I wanted was to be like the other children; to have a home, and a toy, and a bed; to put aside magic for comfort.

Around me the scent of incense was like a warm woollen blanket.

The murmur of voices in Latin was like a well-worn lullaby.

And I prayed to Madonna and Isis and Santa Muerte to keep me safe, and protect me so that my other mother would finally give up and leave—

Of course, she didn’t. She found me. She guessed where I was hiding.

Or maybe she used the cards, or the runes, or the vapours in a coffee cup.

In any case, I awoke to the sound of voices and movement as the congregation dispersed, and felt her arms around me as she carried me from the confessional – Oh, chérie!

Let’s get you home – her voice a little over-loud, her eyes fixed on the big church door as if someone might try to prevent our escape.

Two hours later we were on a night bus out of the city.

I remember it only as one of so many identical journeys; the street lamps arcing incessantly; the roadside coffee and cigarette smoke and the sweat of other people.

My mother said nothing about my escapade, but I could see it in her eyes; that fearful expectation.

I had tried to leave her once: I would try to leave her again.

And later, much later, in New York, when the cancer was working its way through her like a saw through rotten wood, when she was out of herself with morphine, she would still cling to me and say: Don’t leave me, ’Viane .

Promise you’ll stay. Promise, Viannou. Promise—

I never realized before what loneliness lies in motherhood.

I was a lonely child, of course – siblings, friends and family all sacrificed to the pull of the wind – but it never occurred to me that my mother felt it too.

I was enough for her, she said. We were enough for each other.

Except that in my darkest heart, I knew that she was not enough; that one day I would break away.

And now the germ of my daughter sits inside me like a piece of my heart, and I already feel the absence of her, that pull of inevitability.

She will leave me, as daughters do, as surely as the dandelion seed will fly from the plant.

And my mother’s voice says, See? I said you’d understand one day.

And the streets of Marseille are bracketed with neon lamps, just like that night, and it smells of coffee and cigarette smoke, and we are on the move again, always on the move, and now comes the autoroute – superstrada, freeway, snelweg, Autobahn – all those names for the same long road, a road that switches back and forth across decades and continents, and somewhere along it I fall asleep and dream of the confessional, and awake at first light in Toulouse, alone in another new city.