Fates and Furies

Mathilde reconciles with her past of abandonment. She tries to side with the rational part of herself: that it is unfair and too harsh for a family to remove their love completely from a 4-year old child for making “a baby’s mistake” (386). She tries to create one true story out of two versions: one bad and one good.

The good version has Mathilde absentmindedly moving her leg, which her baby brother was leaning on for balance. This accidentally causes him to fall down the stairs headfirst like “thrown laundry.” The bad version has her 10-year-old cousin witnessing the chain of events and seeing the leg twitch as a malicious and intentional kick of her baby brother, in order to knock him down the stairs to keep him quiet.

Mathilde can’t place which memories are fabricated and which parts are absolute truth after so many years. All she knows are the facts: that once she had been beloved and that her parents couldn’t forgive her. She doesn’t understand, accident or not, how her family couldn’t learn to forgive her and love her once again.

This chapter offers a final sweet memory of Mathilde and Lotto’s wedding. When they say I do, the idealistic Lotto thinks about how beautiful their children will be, while Mathilde thinks about how she has finally found a home in Lotto.

Mathilde drinks tea in her London apartment, in her golden years. Memories come swirling back to her as she watches the sunset out her window. She concludes that “more than the highlights, the bright events, it was in the small and the daily where she’d found life” (389).

Her only regret in life is that she never let anyone in. Lotto had broken through against all odds, but she feared he had only ever loved his idea of her, rather than who she truly was. Mathilde wishes she was good and kind and everything Lotto had believed her to be. She regrets not living up to the ideal, even if it was only in her mind that she failed to do so.