This Tilting World by Colette Fellous

Author:Colette Fellous
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Published: 2019-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

Of them all, Madame Henry is the most fanciful. With a single sip of Kélibia muscat, she reappears, every hair intact. Her face, her gait and bearing, her dramatic gestures, so I would really understand. The rise and fall of her voice, she too like a song. She lives in a thatched house at the Ry turnoff, on the road to Buchy. I like that her surname is my father’s first name. At the age of forty, she left her husband, when her father-in-law died. In her distress, she’d realized that it wasn’t her husband she had loved but his father, a superb man, cultivated and amusing, who used to live with them, a well-built man, she says: she draws his body in the air, so I can picture him. When that gentleman died, she had looked again at her husband and found suddenly that there was no substance to him, suddenly it was plain that he’d always been colorless, dull, coarse, and clumping. How had she managed, never a real conversation, not one fine gesture. She’d always seen the father in the shape of the son: she is trying to explain it to me and at the same time she is wondering if a love like that is possible. So this is what she did: she took her son and daughter and she moved them all to Ry. Luckily they were already quite grown-up, that made it simpler. She never saw her Gustave again, she thinks he must be dead now. She recalls the moment she decided to leave him. She was in the kitchen peeling some carrots and all at once, she did a funny thing, she slipped the knife blade under her wedding ring. She frightened herself, so she went to lie down on the bed, she lay and thought, thought deeply, and then after half an hour she got up and said that’s it, I’m leaving him. Up to that point, they’d been living near Gisors, in the La Lévrière valley, in a huge house, all windows, with views over the river, they wanted for nothing, life was easy, the neighbors envied them and tried to be like them. She had set up her own small business selling built-in kitchens and that had allowed her to live comfortably for several years, she’d even been able to put some money aside.

She had moved to Ry to be closer to the landscape of her childhood. Her parents used to have a farm near there. It had been difficult during the war. She would smile very strangely every time she mentioned that farm, her gaze would look back to skies invisible to me, but she never said more, and I never asked her any questions. If you only knew, I could have made a novel out of my life, but it’s too late now. Only if you… I would be happy to tell you a chapter every day and you could do what you liked with it, I present you with my life, here it is.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.