While the Gods Were Sleeping (36 page)

Times had changed. My brother took over my father’s business and brought it to new prosperity, and I left my daughter with my parents in order to follow my husband on his travels and study history. History. In my mother’s eyes an idiotic but otherwise innocent pastime, a form of flower-arranging for decadent people like me. I didn’t stick at it for long, I had a child that wanted breast-feeding, and noticed that knowledge infected my writing, impoverished my thoughts till they became nothing but sociology set to music. History, that prosthesis cobbled together with erudition from scraps of paper, potsherds and bone fragments, on which we limp through the annual accounts as if time were full of signposts. I gave it up. My mother triumphed, for once without a word.

I still judge her and her life too unjustly, the narrow niche that she was able to carve out for herself in time, which without her choice or will was hers, as if the dubious freedoms I was able to appropriate were a personal achievement—as if time is the work of my hands.

How could I not look back with at least mild mockery at the little hussy I now see reflected in my mind’s eye: a child that smoked cigarettes in cigarette-holders to make a sophisticated impression and adorned herself with affairs and friendships which all too soon went flat or sooner or later turned to melancholy, mine or theirs. As I found moving around town increasingly difficult, looking more and more often at the
ground, frightened of the slightest unevenness in the paving stones of the pavement, I looked increasingly inwards, into my own rooms.

I wish I could keep life in my fingers, so it would show the compactness and brilliance of a diamond. I would turn it over and over, study each of its facets, absorb every play of the light, until it extinguishes in my palm because my fascination has finally been quenched. Melancholy turns out to be no more than a thin, transparent membrane, the umpteenth amnion surrounding a human life until, having become brittle, it tears open or springs loose and we stand a little closer to our original nakedness.

When I had trouble walking, I took the tram to scour the city, got off at certain stops and made short journeys on foot, to the next stop, and later still I could usually persuade my daughter to take trips in the car. She did it devotedly; no one could act as scornfully as she could. As long as we didn’t have to spend too long in one room, searching for words that didn’t sound too untrue, she was prepared to do anything for me.

It was she who found my husband. While waiting for the taxi that was to take him to the airport he had lain down on the bed for a moment. The taxi came, the driver hooted. No one came down. My daughter ran upstairs and was gone some time. The taxi hooted again. When I went upstairs I found her in the doorway of my bedroom. She was standing speechless watching my husband on the bed, in his light-beige summer jacket, his hat on his chest, feet hanging over the edge of the mattress, next to the valise. When the taxi driver hooted again
she went back downstairs. “I’ll send him away,” she said. “He’s not needed any more.”

I never saw her cry, and I couldn’t either. We sat through the funeral service like stiff dolls, my insides seemed to have turned to zinc, dry rain pipes in which my heart pounded dully. My only thought was: it was just about time. His eyebrows were starting to get bushy, his nose hair too. Down appeared on his ears, he already had a double chin. He wasn’t made for old age. What more is there to say?

He stays away from my dreams, like my child. I sometimes imagine that the two of them are enjoying themselves royally somewhere in a part of my head, some convolution of the brain to which they had mislaid the key. I stand at the door and knock in vain—all I hear is an echo of zinc. Only once did I dream of him. He was sitting here in the chair by the bed when I dreamt that I woke up. He had lit a cigarette; I also caught the smell of the nylon of his summer jacket. He inhaled and blew out the smoke.

“You do know, don’t you, Helen, my lovely, why I drop by so seldom?” he asked and went on smoking. He looked dejected.

After his death I asked my child to take me every year at the end of the summer to the house where my mother had been born; the others had dropped out, being too old by now, too weak, too dead. She always acceded to my sighs with infectious reluctance and on the way there we were as silent as the grave. Once we had arrived and she had parked the car at the foot of the hill, near the path leading upward, she didn’t even need to refuse ostentatiously to go any farther with me. She knew that it
was quite enough to get out, light a cigarette leaning against the bonnet and search for a scarf in her eternal handbag, the scarf that betrayed the nun
manquée
in her, like her belly, the belly of a virgin in a panel by Memling, apple-shaped, swelling, as if her skin, her membranes enclosed not a womb but a clenched fist.

I blamed myself for years for having sent her, in a fit of conformism or to please my mother, to the nuns’ school from an early age. I saw her change over the years into a bigoted type, against whom my mother, for as long as she lived, would never hear a word said, since for her everything was preferable to a creature like me, who mostly got things wrong in life.

She only survived my mother by a few years; just before her death she got one of the nuns to call me, a colleague of hers, at that girls’ boarding school where she had hung on after her schooldays as a teacher of religious studies and practical nincompoop. The nun said I must hurry. In her voice lay the dregs, I imagined, of the repeated reproaches she must have heard from the mouth of my child, but I did not even pay my respects to her body. I didn’t even know she was ill.

I’m sorry to be overloading these final pages with corpses; I’ll be as brief as possible. She supervised, she taught, she died. She wore suits of tailored insignificance and devoted herself to a cult of virginity that looked very like grass widowhood. The pupils called her the chalk line. For a while the rumour circulated that she was having an affair with the head, a priest. I would have been delighted, but when I asked her cautiously about it, she shot me a grimace of contempt that immediately gave me intestinal cramp. I blamed myself for not removing her from the school in time, not having encouraged her father more
often to pay her a little more attention. Not having told him to his face that
I
might be happy to be the dovecote at which he could alight at will in between his adventures, but that the child hadn’t asked for it. But one day, I can’t remember when, let alone whether we were having a fight or not—one day we were standing staring out of the window and she said, with a calm that still sends shivers down my spine: “How else can I atone for the shame of being your daughter, Maman?” She turned away with a scornful little laugh. I was in pieces. I didn’t glue the pieces together, for years I walked over them ritually in my bare feet and absorbed the stabbing pain.

The first time I dared to return with her, a few years after the death of my husband, it was a fiasco. I felt her eyes boring into my back after I had left her by the car; she maintained a stupid silence. I had first, with my legs half out of the door, exchanged my footwear for a pair of boots and then taken the path to the back gate. When my husband was still alive, the last owner welcomed me like a princess for a while. “
Eh bien voici
,” he would cry. “
Not’ châtelaine
.” He showed us the silos and the milking plant, and the new barn or the potato cellar, but his pride hid a man frightened to death who knew he was deep in debt and liked a glass too many to anaesthetize him against the fear. He had my uncle’s beard, in which the smoke from around the hearth eternally lingered. As the years went by, at the long table in the back kitchen of the annexe where my mother had heated so many kettles, he poured us increasingly generous shots of liqueur, while behind his back his mistress of the moment, as angrily as the previous or following one, scoured pans and counted the glasses with resignation. We drank and indulged
ourselves in stories which I have repeated far too often to do it again here. Around us you could almost hear the ivy and the grapevine anchoring the shutters to the window frames and the moss covering the slate roof with wet cushions.

The last time I went there with my husband, the gate was closed. We went to the only surviving café in the village to ask what had happened. A few village elders recognized me, the daughter of the lovely Marianne, the Fleming,
comme nous, nous sommes aussi des Flamands, au fond, écoute
—and spoke to me in the language I remembered from my childhood. A language like crude ore, like flint. A Flemish that rose from the chalky soil and became flesh before my eyes.

A factory-owner from Calais had bought the property for a song after the bailiffs had seized everything. He had rented out the surrounding land, and had the house locked up and the contents auctioned off.

“There’s nothing there, madame,” he informed me when I rang him to ask him if anyone in the village had a key to look after things. “The place is a ruin. Much too dangerous.”

When the following year my husband died, going back would have affected me too deeply. My life was one great map strewn with places to avoid, a flight from the curse of memory.

Four or five years went by. The day when I finally put the boots on and set off, I felt my daughter’s eyes in my back. I could almost hear her thinking: she’s still not over it, poor old dear, still looking for her forgotten paradises.

I had to return without accomplishing my mission. The back gate was overgrown with brambles, elder had woven its branches
between the railings, there was no way through. You should have seen the pity, the haughty pity on my child’s face when I came back to the car with twigs and thorns in my clothes, a gash in my calf and dead leaves in my hair. She said nothing, she was always like that. Too cowardly to say what she thought, always letting other people do the dirty work, intriguing, and letting other people play through her fingers like bobbins, threading the lacework of her cosy little intrigues and always washing her hands in cups of rancid innocence—how did something like that come from inside me, I wondered. I gave birth not to a child, but to a rusty nail.

A few weeks later I forced her to take me there again; I sent her off to the seaside and she left me behind with great pleasure. In the pockets of my overcoat was a big pair of secateurs. I cut loose the branches around the gate until I could use the handle again, and made my way through the brambles and nettles around the first row of stalls, past the chicken runs and reached the inner courtyard, stumbling over the tufts of grass shooting up between the gaps in the paving stones. They were largely buried under sand and rotted leaves, the subsoil seemed to be sucking them up, as if an invisible titanic effort, an army of worms, were burying the house by gradually pulling it into the ground.

At first I couldn’t open the side door, the door on the south front. A lead weight was leaning against the wood on the other side, and only after I had pushed for ages, with my full weight, did it give way and fall with a dull thud on the floor. A shiver of rustling went through the climbing plants across the stones of the house front.

Someone must have put one of the old mattresses, those ponderous pre-war mattresses, against the door, perhaps to discourage intruders or vandals. The monster lay heavily at my feet, leaving just enough room to push the door open thirty centimetres or so, so that I could get in.

Now I look back on it, it is as if old Moumou, the primeval mother, was pushing against the inside of the door to keep me out with the full force of her primordial size, her femininity without frills—as if wanting to say: “Stay away, child. That’s enough, we’ll manage by ourselves. Decay takes little effort, we can do it alone.”

And when I went through into the kitchen and saw the gap in the floor tiles, the wound of sand where the old stove had stood which the rag-and-bone man had obviously ripped out, of course to sell the steel, the desolation almost assumed the bitterness of a reproach. I saw the dust rings in the wall that marked the silhouette of the saucepans as they had once hung from large to small like a scale of copper above the chopping blocks.

And the farther I went, the heavier the atmosphere became, the more hands seemed to press against my trunk and exhort me to retrace my steps—but I wasn’t there to gape. I had come to mourn, that house was my burial chapel, the storehouse of all my dead, for whom I could weep only there. I wanted, up in my uncle’s library room, to surrender myself to the handful of memories that could transform the sound of zinc inside me into a requiem, take possession again of the longing that seized me in the days when my husband was recovering on the other side of the Channel and my mother guarded me with a restlessness in which I now increasingly detect the signs of the
flu that was to confine her to her bed for weeks and release me from her clutches. I wanted to be able to pull that longing over me like a mourning cloak.

Only up there could I escape from her restlessness, flopping on the chair by the table, next to my uncle, who was doing paperwork with mittens on. It was winter, and one of my mother’s attempts to keep a grip on things was to skimp on firewood and coal. My uncle blew on his fingers; I meanwhile pretended to be writing letters.

“The irony, child,” he whispered into his beard, meanwhile listening to check whether she wasn’t coming upstairs again, my mother, for the umpteenth time, supposedly looking for something in the room next to ours, eavesdropping as she rummaged about to the drumming of her heavy heels. She must have been the only spy who hoped that by being conspicuous her presence would not be noticed. “The irony is”, said my uncle, “that we’re not doing at all badly at present. In the past I had to fatten two pigs to get the price they’re now offering for a single ham. We don’t really want for anything.”