Black Forest by Valérie Mréjen

Author:Valérie Mréjen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 2019-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

THE CHILD HAS GROWN INTO a teenager, and the rift between the two of them has widened, her mother telling her over and over that her very presence is exasperating, that she sucks up all the air, she poisons everything, and these words are not taken lightly; the girl soon begins to see herself as a sort of thing or blob or shapeless monstrosity, something fleshy and sluggish that never fails to disgust people the moment they lay eyes on her unpleasant figure. Over time, she comes to terms with this version of things and even takes it a little further, elaborating on the idea that she is a blight on the community, picturing herself a social pariah and murmuring cruel words under her breath as if to better stoke this fierce little flame whose warmth she will almost come to appreciate.

Sitting around the large Formica table with extension flaps, a table bought at the same assemble-it-yourself furniture store as many of the other new fixtures in their home—a chain that has just opened a location on the outskirts of Paris and which people describe with excessive enthusiasm, as if it were a sign of divine providence—sitting around this smooth, white, austere table, facing a giant poster of a paradisiacal landscape bordered by groves of coconut palms, they finally decide to talk things over, to set down the facts and establish a kind of official report. They play lip-service at first, then gradually come out with the truth, each admitting how, for years now, she has seen herself through the other’s eyes: a bad mother who’s done so much harm that it’s impossible to feel any sympathy for her, and a daughter disdained for her countless flaws and right to loathe herself.

The girl had assumed the role of the burden-arrived-too-soon, of the nuisance that kept the young princess, drawn to the freedom and audacity of the student movement in the late sixties, from thriving, never mind that she’d married before she was twenty-one and had rushed to imitate women of earlier generations, heading—just like all the bourgeois women in her family—toward a destiny that looked very much like that of a housewife. And now, fifteen years later, they decide it’s time to settle their differences, to clear up the old misunderstandings; but in the end, guilt over words spoken in anger rises from one side of the table, while from the other come reassurances that all is forgiven, that there isn’t a drop of resentment left. It’s not worth ruining this moment since there might not be another chance, and anyway, the truth is everything will be different from now on. A drop of salt water glistens on the rim of the teenager’s heavily made-up lower eyelid; she tries to delay its fall for as long as possible, but the moment she blinks it spills over the dam, a spring erupts and quickly begins to flood part of the scene, most of all the things near the Formica tabletop: a

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