A Saint From Texas

An excerpt from Edmund White's new novel, A Saint from Texas, that traces the extraordinary fates of twin sisters, one destined for Parisian nobility and the other for Catholic sainthood:

For my spring semester abroad I arrived at the big old-fashioned apartment of Pauline’s grandmother on the Avenue Mozart (she’d taught me to say “Moh-Zar,” not “Moht-zart” as we pronounce it—correctly, I might add) with 17 pieces of luggage and an extra taxi. For the door on the ground floor Pauline had given me the “code,” whatever that was. I saw a panel with some numbers and punched them and wedged my hat box in the heavy wood door, lacquered teal blue and adorned with a heavy round brass knocker. Though I’d tipped them extravagantly the drivers had just dumped my bags on the sidewalk. I moved them all into the big entrance hall to the building of rather dirty black and white tiles and smelling of fish (cod, as I later learned, since the concierge was Portuguese and ate nothing but bacalao). She looked suspiciously out through her lace-curtained window and disappeared. Wasn’t it her job to help me?
The elevator was big enough for only two people. I decided to haul everything up in three trips to the fifth floor and the entrance to Mme de Castiglione’s apartment (in French with two ps, appartement). When I got everything up there I sat on my suitcase for three minutes till I stopped perspiring, then rang her bell. I didn’t expect her to hug me exactly, but I did expect her to greet me in slow but precise French with a formality and a certain warmth.

Instead she looked at my mountain of matching Vuitton luggage, put her hands on her hips, and snarled, “Mais non! C’est impossible! Vous exaggerez, ma chère. You have rented only a chambre de bonne, a maid’s room one floor up, and you can never fit all that—” She made a wide, despairing gesture and tilted back her head, lips downturned.
“This is not the Ritz. Oh, non, full of American clothes, no doubt.”
Still clucking like a broody hen, she gave me a key to my room and said, “I’ll see you at eight for dinner,” then slammed the door. I sat down on my biggest suitcase and sobbed. But I decided to be peppy and happy, like a true Tri-Delt, and within three minutes had pulled myself together, carried all my bags up in three elevator trips, found the right door, and let myself into a maid’s room with a sink, no toilet, one window, a room no bigger than my closet in Dallas, the narrowest bed I’d ever seen with the thinnest mattress and just one coffee-stained blanket and a pillow, which, if you peeked under its crisp white pillowcase, you saw had turned tobacco-yellow with years of sweat. Other people’s sweat. There was no closet and no armoire, just three wire hangers stuck into cracks in the wall. Everything smelled of old copper wire—or was that roach spray?

I discovered the toilet behind a curved door halfway down the stairs. It had a bare bulb, nothing to sit on, just two scored ceramic tiles on the floor, where you were supposed to place your feet, squat, and let fly into a stinking hole in the floor. The whole thing was no bigger than a phone booth. I couldn’t see any trace of toilet paper, though some scraps of a newspaper—Le Figaro—were probably intended for mopping up, which might have been okay if you had a bidet, which I didn’t. I assumed the shower was in Mme de Castiglione’s apartment.
No, the whole thing was impossible! I would rent a proper hotel room nearby where I could leak in comfort and hang my clothes and bathe but I would pretend to live here so I could still have my total immersion in French (if not in soapy water) and eat French food and participate in the life of impoverished aristocrats.

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