Being Here by Marie Darrieussecq & Penny Hueston

Author:Marie Darrieussecq & Penny Hueston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2017-05-29T04:00:00+00:00

The winter of 1903 is harsh in northern Germany. Paula arrives to snow and storms. The tulip shoots have frozen, the fruit trees are damaged, little Elsbeth is cooped up in the house. But it is peaceful at home after her emotionally charged time in Paris. Elsbeth, known as Bettine, calls her Mother. Paula makes an effort to answer her countless questions. From the window, the two of them watch a couple of robins. They eat roasted apples, skate on the canals with the local children. A new servant, Lina, is taken on (but she has to be supervised…what a bore). Elsbeth gets the measles. Elsbeth learns to read. Elsbeth makes too much noise for her father—Paula escapes to the Brünjes’ studio. ‘A very stable, routine life’, punctuated by Otto’s fits of anxiety about his health. Lina spent sixty marks at various merchants! Fortunately the Modersohns could take it out of her salary.

Paula sleeps at her studio when Otto is not around. She dines on boiled eggs and stewed fruit. Or simply pears and bread and cheese.13 She loves these dinners that are not really dinners, ‘not nearly enough to keep Otto alive’, no table to set, no cooking to do. The servant does that. She gets Lina to make Bierkaltschale, a dessert sweetened with beer, cream and cinnamon. Or else ‘rice pudding with quarters of stewed apples and raisins’. Paula paints these rustic or childish meals (today we might say ‘regressive’): dairy products in a beautiful blue-and-white enamelled plate. A Parisian baguette on a bright studiously folded tablecloth. Fried eggs, lots of apples, as many pears, a few cherries, lots of pumpkins, and a vase, a ceramic pot, a jug. These so-called still lifes are in fact alive and appetising. One delivery day she paints some bananas. She asks her sister in Italy to send her a branch from a lemon tree.

And the joy of living alone: she reads while eating dinner. Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child by Bettina Brentano. She reads George Sand in French, her fascinating masculine liaisons, her style that ‘suffers a little from a lack of feminine restraint’. And she marvels at finding herself ‘happy almost every time Otto and I are apart’. She tells herself that she takes pleasure in thinking about him when he’s away. It’s when she becomes Paula Becker again. And that is pure joy.

‘Half of me is still Paula Becker, and the other half is acting as if it were.’

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