You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [11]
We moved to Senegal when I was ten years old. My dad was the Counselor for Public Affairs at the American Embassy in Dakar. I went to school at ISD where I was taught to speak French by a Senegalese woman, one of the few locals employed as a teacher.
Because I was in love with her I learned to speak French. I followed her everywhere and believed that we’d get married. I did whatever I could to be close to her and I listened carefully to everything she said. I’d never seen a woman like that. She spoke Senegalese French and taught us to speak like she did.
She wore a purple dress and smelled like garlic and onions. We cooked in her class and sang Senegalese songs. By the end of that year I spoke French well. I never exchanged an English word with Madame Mariama and when I left for the summer I cried in the car home.
She was fired when a group of parents complained that their children were speaking like the natives. Our new teacher was a pale Parisian ice cube. I refused to change my accent and I hated her. She hated me back.
That first summer in Paris I thought about Madame Mariama often. I loved speaking French. I got to know my neighborhood and found that I had more freedom there than anywhere I’d ever lived. We’d been in so many dangerous cities, behind so many gates in expatriate compounds, that arriving in Paris felt like being released from prison. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t have a driver or a guard.
* * *
As the story goes, they fell in love here—my mom just out of college and beautiful. In the photographs she has long dark hair and dark skin. After graduating from Berkeley, she flew to Paris in 1980 and rented a little apartment. She wandered around with a leather-bound notebook. My grandparents had given her, as a graduation gift, an around-the-world plane ticket and some money. Paris should have been the beginning of a long series of adventures.
There’s a photograph of her in black and white. She’s sitting on the Pont Neuf with her head cocked to the side. She’s wearing a thick turtleneck sweater, the sleeves drawn over her hands. She’s wearing jeans and a beat-up old military coat.
The photograph is one of the few things I’ve kept. I study it for clues of her life before my father. There’s a box of Gitanes beside her, a silver Zippo, a leather satchel at her feet. It’s a great photograph, the light on her face, her closed eyes, the shadows, her lips just barely parted as if she were speaking to someone. She says she doesn’t remember who took it. I don’t believe her.
I imagine she’s always dressed this way—big sweater, used coat. She’s smoking cigarettes, sitting in the sun, men chasing her. She’s full of ideas—places she’ll go, paintings she’ll paint, love she’ll find. I can see her walking along the Seine with nowhere to be, a little money in her pocket but not too much. She’s at bars, in cafés, one of those women who prefers men, who is loved by them, who flirts with strength rather than weakness. She’s smiling at everyone and everyone is in awe of her or in love with her. The bartender, the butchers, the florists, the cheese man, the fishmonger, everyone in her neighborhood protects her, keeps an eye on her, hoping, with their protection, that she won’t leave them, that she’ll love them in return.
Beautiful Annabelle Lumen, twenty-two, smoker of French cigarettes, wanderer of the city, who loved art so much but had never entered Paris’s greatest museum.
She’d waited, “preserving my virginity,” she says, spending days sitting in the sun, eating her lunch, reading in the muted quiet of the Cour Carrée, listening to the musicians. She sat on the steps and sketched tourists. She waited until the weather got colder, until the tour buses were fewer. She waited for the winter to come and then, one cold day at the end of January, she walked from her apartment on the rue Montmartre into the grand courtyard, passed through the gleaming new glass pyramid and descended slowly into the dark center of the Louvre.
The story of how my parents’ romance began is family