Whenever she saw her mother lifting a piece of sugar to her mouth before drinking her tea, Jacqueline would set down her own glass and retreat to her dry and dusty pigsty, leaving all three of them behind, her grandmother, her mother, and her mother’s sister, with their hair dyed black, their closely knit eyebrows, and their wide, doelike, disapproving eyes-there in her mother’s room which doubled as a living room, there where, besides, the fourth female, the maid, ended by resembling them. Grandmother, mother, aunt, and even a maid-four women ranging in age from fifty to seventy, strident, heavily made up, smothered beneath their onyx and their black silks, sobbing and wailing at four in the morning in the faint red light of the icons, with the cigarette smoke swirling thickly about them, four women drowning in the clicking of tea glasses and the harsh hissing of a language Jacqueline would gladly have given half her life to forget-she was going out of her mind having to submit to their orders, to listen to them, merely having to see them. “Family” was a gross misunderstatement: it was a clan, or rather a horde. It was because of her hovel, which O was frank enough to have mentioned to René, that René made a proposal which was to alter their lives, but it was because of her family that Jacqueline accepted, René’s suggestion was that Jacqueline should come and live with O.
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