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though he wears a gold signet ring engraved with his initials.
Poor Sittier. Who still thinks he s got a chance with
smart girls, and who goes on first dates with his cell
phone in a plastic cover attached to his belt, and his car
radio under his arm.
Poor Sittier. If you only knew how my sisters talk
about you . . . when they talk about you at all.
You never know what s going to happen how things
are going to unfold, or when the simplest things are sud-
denly going to take on demented proportions.Take me,
for example. My whole life turned upside down because
of five ounces of gray silk.
For five years and not quite eight months I ve lived
with my sisters in a twelve-hundred-square-foot apart-
ment near the Convention metro station.
In the beginning, it was just me and my sister Fanny.
She s four years younger than I and a med student at
René Descartes University. It was our parents idea, to be
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146 Anna Gavalda
1 economical and to make sure the little one wouldn t get
2 lost in Paris. She d never known anything but our home-
3 town,Tulle, its high school, its cafés, its rebuilt mopeds.
4 I get on well with Fanny: She doesn t talk much, and
5 she s always okay with anything.
6 For example, if it s her week to do the cooking and I
7 bring home, say, sole, because that s what I happen to be
8 in the mood for, she s not the kind of person to whine
9 that I m upsetting all her plans. She adapts.
10 It s not exactly the same with Myriam.
11 Myriam is the oldest.We re not even a year apart, but if
12 you saw us, you wouldn t even imagine that we were
13 brother and sister. She talks nonstop. Sometimes I think
14 she s a little off her rocker, but that s to be expected, I
15 guess she s the artist in the family. . . .
16 After she finished her studies at the Beaux-Arts, she
17 did photography, collages with hemp and steel wool,
18 video clips with paint stains on the lenses, stuff with her
19 body, creations of spaces with Loulou de La Rochette (?),
20 demos, sculpture, dance, and I forget what else.
21
22 These days she s painting stuff I have trouble understand-
23 ing, no matter how much I scrunch up my eyes. Myriam
24 says that on the day they handed out artistic ability, I
25S stayed home. She says I don t know how to see what s
26R beautiful.Whatever.
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Clic-Clac 147
The last time we got into it was when we went to the
Boltanski exhibit together. (But whose idea was it to take
me to see that . . . seriously. Can you imagine what a
dumbass I looked like trying to figure out which way you
were supposed to walk through the exhibit?)
Myriam s a real artichoke heart she s always falling in
love.Every six months since the age of fifteen (which must
make it about thirty-eight times, if I m not mistaken), she s
brought us the man of her life. Mr. Good, Mr. Right, Mr.
White-Wedding, Mr. Okay-This-Time-It s-For-Real, Mr.
Last-One, Mr. Sure-Thing, Mr. Last-of-the-Last-Ones.
All of Europe, just for her: Yoann was Swedish;
Giuseppe, Italian; Erick, Dutch; Kiko, Spanish; and Lau-
rent, from Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Obviously, there
are thirty-three others. . . . At the moment, their names
aren t coming back to me.
When I left my studio to move in with Fanny, Myriam
was with Kiko. A brilliant future director.
At first, we didn t see much of her. Every now and
then the two of them would invite themselves to dinner,
and Kiko would bring the wine. It was always very good.
(A good thing, since that s the only thing he had to do all
day long choose the wine.)
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148 Anna Gavalda
1
2 I liked Kiko. He d give my sister a doleful look and then
3 pour himself some more to drink, shaking his head. Kiko
4 smoked some bizarre shit,and I always had to spray honey-
5 suckle deodorizer the next day to make the smell go away.
6
7 Months went by. Myriam came over more and more of-
8 ten, and almost always alone. She and Fanny would shut
9 themselves in the bedroom, and I d hear them chuckling
10 until the wee hours. One night when I went in to ask if
11 they wanted some herbal tea or anything, I found them
12 both stretched out on the floor listening to an old Jean-
13 Jacques Goldman cassette:  Siiiince you re leaeaeavv- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]