A woman I loved died this morning in my hometown, in the South of France.
Fanette was one of my closest friends' mother. We grew up together, Zaza, her sister and I, our parents close friends, our childhoods a common territory, Fanette a constant presence.
The afternoons spent in the cavernous stone house deep in our old medieval village, two little girls playing in the stone shed full of magic off the patio, later watching dubbed American TV series in the cluttered room under the roof where Fanette sometimes accompanied us, later still, adolescents, listening to punk rock on the radio in Zaza’s room, her sister Sophie not quite as close but still. Fanette, towering in the art supplies store she owned a few blocks from their home, the smell of paint and pastels, her tall, bony, straight figure commanding and slightly frightening.
It is as if I had grown up in that family as much as in my own’s, Fanette’s taste for traditional French cooking the kind my mother never cooked, her brisk manner, the reassurance of her total authority, Fanette and Jacques, always uttered in that order by my mother and father, their friends Fanette et Jacques, these words mapping my childhood as much as the rooms of my home and roads of my village, the old dark stone village house full of paintings, sculptures and artifacts that secretly scared me, the family were avid collectors and art lovers, the cavernous house and its smells, the smell of polished wood, of stone, of the magical territory of my child mind, that house the realm of my childhood, Fanette, its implacable captain.
She died this morning, at home, surrounded by her family, peacefully my mother told me.
My friend lost her mother, and I a piece of myself too.
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