Free Tita by Marie Houzelle Page A

to be careful: there are five decades, five stops in front of chapels, and it doesn’t look good if we spend all our petals too soon and then have nothing to throw but air.
    For each stop there’s a different hymn but in between chapels we go back to C’est le mois de Marie, where Mary is compared to the spring, to a lily (pure), a violet (humble) and a rose (loving). During the last decade, the Virgin is taken to the middle of the chancel, and everybody faces her to recite her litany. In Latin, not in French like at school in the Sacred Heart room. The Latin invocations sound so much more thrilling: Rosa mystica, Turris eburnea, Domus aurea, Stella matutina . As if ivory, gold, morning were burned into the Virgin’s substance, had become part of her body. The Latin, the sweet scents, the songs waft me above the ground, and I seem to swing there, light and swift. Giddy.
    The organ, silent during the litany, booms again in full glory to tell us it’s time to go. In the aisle the two schools mix again as we stroll out of the church. Our baskets are empty now, so we can skip and romp through the narrow winding streets around the church and into the avenue, greeted as we pass by the many older people who sit in cafés, or on benches and chairs outside their houses, enjoying the fresh air and the action. Among the adults, all but a few devout women eschew the Mois de Marie ceremonies, which take place around the usual dinner time. But at nine thirty, when we children walk home, the whole population of the town is out.

 
     
Artichokes
    As we sit down to lunch, Father announces that he’s managed to sell Le Cabarrou, our park. He sounds relieved, and wretched. He enunciates cautiously, as if his voice couldn’t proceed without a walking stick. Mother’s face is rigid, her eyes on the Pyrenees behind the railway station. I think she knew already. 
    Father keeps selling bits of property, that’s what we live on. I don’t think his vineyards or his business really make a profit. When he sells a piece of land, he usually says it’s “for peanuts”. Not this time, though. Maybe we’re going to be fine for a while? Maybe he got a lot of money for Le Cabarrou. It’s huge and beautiful. There’s a chalet, a pond, a tennis court, lots of almond trees, lilacs, irises. Also, at the back, beyond the laurel bushes, an old railway car.
    The people who bought the park aren’t exactly friends of our family, but we’ve known them for a while because their daughter, Noëlle, is in my class, and her father is our dentist. They have an apartment in town, above the dental practice, with a puppet theater where we sometimes put on shows. Noëlle makes all the puppets, and she paints all the sets. She has a younger brother, and her mother is pregnant again. Now they’re going to build a house on the tennis court. No more tennis. I’m happy for them, because their apartment is so small, and in the new house Noëlle will have her own room; I’m happy for myself too, because there are few things I hate more than tennis, and as long as the court was there I had to play every Thursday and Sunday (except when it rained, but it hardly ever does). Mother likes tennis, though, she’s good at it. And she’ll miss being the hostess, the owner of an attraction that fostered so much social activity.
    The sale creates a link between Noëlle’s family and ours, even though people here, adults, tend to be wary of newcomers — Noëlle’s parents came to Cugnac just after Noëlle was born, but they’re still outsiders. Mother says that at least Le Cabarrou won’t go to the kind of people who already have too much and never needed to work for it. I think she’s more sympathetic than most to those who haven’t been here for ever, like Noëlle’s parents.
    With Father’s friends, even though the women invite her and the men compliment her, she tends to be wary. When they allude to something that’s foreign to her, like troubadour poetry or