Lapis lazuli for Aunt Irène

Tartine (an open-faced sandwich in French) with cream cheese, the sweetest roasted tomatoes, and fresh basil. To roast tomatoes like this, you cut them in half horizontally, rub with olive oil and a pinch of coarse sea salt and put them on a sheet of baking paper (the “inner” side of them, with the seeds, facing up) in the oven at 275F for 3-4 hours. Use on sandwiches or in salads. They are very tasty.

Aunt Irène was not my aunt, but the aunt of my friend Edith. But since Edith and I were both only children from small families, we shared what we had. I had a second cousin that I shared with Edith, and she in turn shared her aunt with me.

When Aunt Irène was young, she lived with a rich Italian businessman on Via Bruno Buozzi in Rome. He dealt in shoes. When he married someone else, Aunt Irène had a nervous breakdown and was sent back home to Toul, a small town in north-eastern France, where her brother Henri (my friend Edith’s father) and his family lived in a large stone house with a mansard roof.

It was here that I got acquainted with my adopted aunt. I first saw her sunning in the garden hammock wearing a turban, an amaranth-colored silk dress, and golden gladiator sandals. I realized I was in for a ride. The three of us, Aunt Irène, Edith and I, kept a list of “Dead But Attractive Men”. It sounds quite macabre now, but back then, in the garden on Rue Rigny in Toul, it seemed perfectly normal and it was quite entertaining. The list was in a constant flux and we had endless arguments about it. Aunt Irène loved Napoleon and wanted him to be number one on a permanent basis. Edith preferred Jean Gabin, the French actor, and I always threw in a vote for Elvis Presley, the most perfect dead man I could think of. The trick was to match these Dead But Attractive men so that they worked well astrologically too. Aunt Irène knew everything about astrology and things like that, so clearly she had the upper hand. She always said:

“I’m a Scorpio, with the moon in Aries.”

Anyway, she would tell us about Napoleon crossing the Alps in such a way that we’d all be in tears.

“Napoleon!” she cried, with her arms raised like a goddess, “the greatest Leo that ever lived!”

And then she showed us her gemstone collection, which she kept in a piece of turquoise cloth. She taught us that these stones had “properties”; the amazonite relieved stress, the lepidolite was for optimism, and the garnet brought success to a business and so on.

She held up a blue one in the sun, closing in on it with one eye:

“The prettiest of them all. The one the Egyptians used. Lapis lazuli.”

Soon afterwards, she married Frédéric Damas. Fred, that’s what we called him, looked like a movie star with black, shiny hair and razorblades for cheekbones. He was supposed to be a traveling salesman, but in reality he just cruised around in his company car looking for love, sending a dozen red roses to a brunette in Bar-le-Duc or a dozen pink ones to a blonde in Domrémy.

Something wasn’t right with Aunt Irène. Her nerves were too frayed for this Earth. Her talents in astrology, gemstones, and dead men weren’t marketable, “pas commercialisables”, is what they used to say. She started to sink into craziness. She started to not go out, remaining in her bed all day long. She peed in the flowerpots and did not eat for days. It wasn’t good.

I was studying in Paris, when Edith called to say that there had been an accident and that Aunt Irène had fallen down the stairs in the house, and had been taken to the hospital, where she later lapsed into a coma. I took the next train to Toul. Edith’s father Henri met me at the train station. He was a huge man with a great big old heart, but he was crying as he picked me up in his beat up Renault.

“I don’t think my sister will live,” he said.

And indeed Aunt Irène, chère tante Irène, passed away just days later. All her beautiful pieces of clothes and all her books were willed away. Since I wasn’t technically a member of the family, I didn’t expect anything, but sure enough, a few weeks after the funeral a package arrived in Paris addressed to Mademoiselle Eva Stenslar (they never learnt how to spell my name correctly in France). Nobody had ever willed me anything before, so I was a little apprehensive, but when I opened the package, I recognized the turquoise silky material. I unfolded it and there were the gemstones.

I didn’t visit Aunt Irène’s grave for some time. I simply couldn’t bring myself to. But when I finally did, I picked out the lapis lazuli stones from the rest of the gems, and put them on top of her headstone. Because just like Aunt Irene, they were the prettiest of them all.