When my son was in kindergarten he announced to his teacher that his mother was a professor at the Eiffel Tower. Did his five year-old mind imagine me taking the glass elevator up to the summit to conduct class to the capital below? Maybe the Tour Eiffel missed its higher calling as a University of the Firmament. Better that, I say, than a sky harbour of overpriced restaurants and television antennae, but then again, I’ve never dined at the Jules Verne. Have you?
I had forgotten all about my supposed teaching stint at the Iron Lady but was reminded last weekend after a visit to La Résidence Pirandello, where my husband’s grandmother Beatrice lives. Beatrice is one hundred and one years old and has survived two genocides: the Turkish massacre of the Armenians and the concentration camps of World War II. Actually she didn’t get sent to Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Flossenburg, but her husband did and she suffered the anxiety of a spouse fully aware of the horror. Beatrice has told me many of her stories including how, when her family escaped to France from Istanbul, she had sown the family’s jewels into the underside of her dresses. One of these pieces she gave me a few years back; a locket.
La Residence Pirandello is an old folks home near Gobelins. It is exceptionally clean and light; a pretty garden of hydrangeas and rhododendrons outside the glass walled dining room offers a terrace with tables for guests and residents in the warmer months. Beatrice once ran a cobblers shop and made a steady but humble living; the cost of her “residency” if I may call it that is mostly paid for by the sécurité sociale. I have to wonder if an American Beatrice would have access to equally fine accommodations. Something tells me she would not (perhaps a call from my mother last night informing me a friend of ours was denied urgent medical treatment by a doctor who saw her Medicaid would not cover it!). Recently, Beatrice had a bad bout of bronchitis, which left her hooked up to oxygen, weak and emaciated, her breathing belabored. Given her age and frailty I wondered how she was going to pull through, but my husband had no doubt she would. ”You can see,” he said, “that she’s not giving up.” Really? What I saw was a frail, suffering centenarian holding onto life by a thread. My husband was right though, and last week when we met her in the dining room, she was dressed in her purple and gold Sunday suit, sitting up at a table. She didn’t entirely recognize us though she knew we were family. My son sat next to her on the right near her good ear; she asked him about school, then, noticing his two front teeth, congratulated him on his belles dents. “Look at mine,” she said to him, opening her mouth and pointing to her gums “all gone! But not to worry. They’re growing back.”
Perhaps if you make it beyond your hundredth year, you start to expect the whole business will begin again. Anything is possible, I suppose. I’ll have to ask one of my science colleagues at the Eiffel Tower about it.
Beatrice mistakes my husband for her own son; she speaks to him in Armenian, which he doesn’t understand. “In French, in French,” he shouts into her bad ear. “Are you the boy’s grandmother,” she asks looking at me. “Sa maman,” I correct. “Where’s your father?” she asks my son. “Is he upstairs?” “But look, Great Grandma Beatrice, he’s right there!” My son points to his dad, her grandson, sitting at her left. Beatrice looks at my husband and rattles off in Armenian. And around we go… La Résidence is Beatrice’s home, but it is also her theatre where dramas and one-act plays spring forth from her memory’s repertory. Clearly we are lousy actors who haven’t learned our roles; what’s worse is we have the gall to claim that she, the metteur en scene, has made a mistake in her casting.
We suggest a round of Go Fish. My son gets a deck of cards from Beatrice’s room and the game begins! Beatrice is right there with us; she has no idea how to play and doesn’t seem to care. What’s important is that she stays in the game. The hand is going fast, mostly because my son, the buckaroo, who in his own private theatre is playing poker at the First Chance Saloon, keeps taking two turns in a row. Beatrice puts her cards down on the table revealing what we are not supposed to see. Still, she is doing better than me. Clearly I am losing, mais peu importe! There is something exciting about playing Go Fish with Beatrice in her theatre. The four of us are pulled into a circle of energy where rules are momentarily suspended, where lost teeth reappear and the Sorbonne perches in the heavens.
I think of a line by Emily Dickinson but alter it:
It might be more possible without the possibility.
A sign made by my son to dissuade men from peeing against the Eiffel Tower.