Leaving Tomorrow by David Bergen

Author:David Bergen [Bergen, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443411400
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2014-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

I HAD ARRANGED, VIA LETTERS AND HALTING TELEPHONE conversations that took place in broken French and English, to live with a family named Godbout (Carmine et Pierre et leur petit fils Christian) in the suburb of Rueil–Malmaison. Nous habitons en banlieue, Carmine wrote in one of her letters, and I dutifully translated this with the help of my French–English dictionary, discovering that I would be living in the suburbs, a long Metro ride from the centre of Paris where the centre of the world existed. I discovered that the Godbout house was not far from the Château de Malmaison, the summerhouse of Napoleon’s first wife, and upon learning this I was amazed and moved. I knew that Julien Sorel had been very fond of Napoleon, had even seen him in real life, and given that I was modelling myself in a slight way after Monsieur Sorel, one of Stendhal’s greatest creations, I believed that providence had led me to Rueil–Malmaison.

The connection to the Godbout family had come about by chance. A distant cousin of mine, Greg, who worked at a school in Germany’s Black Forest, came home on holiday, and one Sunday, while he was eating lunch at our house, my mother said that I had unrealistic dreams to live in France. She chuckled, as if this were farfetched and impossible, and just one more impractical dream that her youngest son harboured. Greg didn’t see it as farfetched. He said that he knew a couple in France who were looking for an English speaker, a young man preferably, who could teach their eight-year-old son. And so I made contact with Pierre and Carmine, and the chips began to fall into place. In one of her letters Carmine wrote, “I am happy to know that you grew up in a religious home. That is important. We want our son to be influenced by someone wholesome.”

Carmine was an anxious woman with a thin face and smooth arms who always dressed as if she were waiting for something grand just around the next corner. I never saw her in anything but dresses of various subdued colours, or blouses and skirts, of which my favourite was night-green and pleated, verging on too short. Her hair was dark, and when streaks of grey appeared, she resorted to applying a medium-brown dye that accented her dark eyes. She had some Tunisian blood in her. She wore flat shoes, alternating between black and brown, and the shoes were always dully polished. She was a very conservative dresser. Her husband, Pierre, was often absent. He worked for an aid agency and travelled in sub-Sahara Africa.

Eventually it became a habit, when Pierre was travelling, that once or twice a week Carmine invited me to eat with her and Christian, the son, who was polite and timid and quite intelligent, though he was prone to mixing up his personal pronouns when speaking English. We always ate late, à peu prés neuf heures, and Carmine insisted we speak English for her

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