When Rat was little, she used to spend almost every weekend at Mémé Catherine’s. Mémé Catherine lived in a complex of identical houses called Les Glycines at the top of Collioure. From the end of Mémé Catherine’s street, you could see the harbor, flanked by a church built from the rocks, whose clock tower was an old lighthouse. The coast of Collioure wasn’t flat and sandy, like Saint Féliu, but sheer jagged cliffs and tiny coves, where the rock was dark gray schist.

Mémé Catherine was a gardener: Rat remembers the gaudy magenta of the bougainvillea that climbed her garden wall, the more sedate lavender of the wisteria over the doorway. The garden was pocket-size, but it had everything: lettuces, tomatoes, strawberries, melon; carrots and potatoes in the winter. Even a quince tree. When Mémé Catherine sent Rat home, it was always with a carton full of vegetables and homemade preserves. “Oh fuck,” Vanessa would groan. “Not another jar of fucking quince jelly!”

Rat’s room at Mémé Catherine’s was a bare cubicle with tile floors. Over the dresser, a crucifix decorated with dried Palm Sunday fronds, and a picture of Baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary. It used to be Vanessa’s room, but any trace of Rat’s mother—the batik spreads and incense cones, the rock ’n’ roll posters, or torn pages from fashion magazines with which Vanessa invested any lair that was hers—had been expunged. Only the window giving on to a side alley, through which Vanessa says she used to escape for nocturnal sorties, bore a kind of negative witness to Rat’s mother.

Mémé Catherine always called Rat Celia, and Vanessa by her real name, which was Agathe. (“Can you believe she named me after a martyr who got her tits sliced off? How castrating is that?”) Mémé Catherine was pretty, with a pale freckled heart-shaped face, like Vanessa’s, and fair hair faded to gray. She was smiling, but strict. If she did something for you, you said thank you, and then she showed you how to do it for yourself.

Rat used to help Mémé Catherine with the housework. They mopped the floors; they beat the carpets out the window; they hung up the wash. In the morning, Mémé Catherine would send Rat down the hill to the baker, where she picked up an extra loaf for Mémé Catherine’s neighbor, Madame Brunet, who was crippled, and a newspaper for Monsieur Oms.

To her neighbors, Rat realized, Mémé Catherine was not a grandmother, but a strong vigorous young woman.