While the Gods Were Sleeping (6 page)

At that time I play the role of capricious daughter with abandon, but inwardly I also long for her reprimands. For the telegraphic succinctness of her sentences when she loses her patience: “What are you on about, I can’t understand a thing. Finish your sentences and try to breathe.” Her rebukes cause shame in me that is nothing but a blushing veil over the guilty satisfaction when I succeed in irritating her.

I have always shown an inclination for breathlessness, for an ecstasy that cancels out the world, time and finally consciousness itself, and instinctively I have always sought out words or bodies
that could stem my boundless yearning, could set my passion on the ground and bring me to a halt. How I would have liked to pronounce an infinitely long sentence that incorporated in itself everything that was, the way a lady of the court from the periwig period, in whose locks an armada of pearls capsizes, lifts her countless petticoats as she mounts the steps of the opera house—or the ladder to the scaffold.

My mother and her companions prided themselves on being a respectable sewing group, and potential new members were first invited on a trial basis. If they turned out to be too
loose-tongued
, all too fond of gossip, their stay did not extend beyond that one occasion, which intensely disappointed me: at that time gossip was the only instruction about life that reached my ears.

When I got older I had the feeling of being an insect that voluntarily encapsulates itself in the silken threads in which a spider wraps its prey, the feeling that I was tying myself tighter and tighter to the habits of being a woman, had to cross a Sahara of yarn and thread, with that sandalwood sewing box as luggage, a doll’s house version of my womb, decorated with thimbles and follicles and ovaries. Around me arms went down and up again when my mother’s friends pushed the needle through the material and pulled the thread tight. We were like flightless birds dropping their beaks into the water of an oasis and then stretching our long necks to swallow.

The word that is regularly on the tip of my tongue at that time is eunuch. Not just the word itself and its piquant connotations, but particularly because I have read that eunuchs keep their severed testicles in a jug in order to be buried as a complete man, more or less as my mother and I lugged our sewing things
around with us. I’m certain that she, if I had spoken the word testicles out loud, would have had to pick half her friends off the carpet, if she herself had not fainted from a combination of horror and over-tightened corsage. Certain terms belonged only in dictionaries and encyclopaedias, wrapped in a safe neutrality and the hospital smell of carbolic. They weren’t intended to be allowed to fly around indoors like tame parakeets.

“
Va-t’en
,” she usually says after a while, when my impatience starts to make her restless. “Go on.” And I run upstairs, through the rooms with their velour wall-covering, their rugs, their table covers, curtain cords, antimacassars and doilies and pillowslips and footrests and fireguards and lampshades, their palm motifs and fern leaves, that welter of textures and surfaces that gives off the sultriness of a rainforest, fermentation, mould, wet earth.

Or I go farther down, into the basement kitchen, where Emilie resides. She scrubs the floors there every day. She splashes a spring tide of caustic soda over the tiles and scours the saucepans clean with a sponge of steel wool, which produces a sound that strikes my ear as perfectly circular, the singing of the steel on tin and the impact of the cleaver in the next day’s roast—the music that accompanies my weekly penance.

W
HAT CLARITY AND HONESTY
prevail there. Walls don’t hide their stones. Wood is rough from brushing and generous scoops of soda, like Emilie herself, to whom I ascribe a secret wild life, with men and drink, and fights over her rustic earthenware charms. She has her room right at the top of the house, by the roof-tree, more a built-in cupboard with airs than a real room. How strange that at the two extremes of the house, which she occupies, the world is turned on its head—that the basement kitchen, where the storage cupboards and the crockery trays are, lets in a sea of light from high windows, while the attic, closest to the firmament, keeps its membrane of tiles closed and preserves a grey darkness, in a corner of which, as the only point of light, Emilie’s room cowers.

Every few weeks she hangs out our linen to dry over the whole length of the attic. Her room is then hidden in a labyrinth of motionless ghostly apparitions, a Platonic world of sheets without a wrinkle, alternating with vests pegged to the line by their sleeves, so that they display the dumb, aggrieved air of those hanged, after the last convulsion. That silent execution is repeated there again and again, a form of inquisition for all the textiles that must be so close to the skin of our heretical flesh.

Emilie doesn’t seem to fit into those surroundings. Her surface, full of grooves and calloused hills bearing witness to that display of strange symmetries, comparable with the profile of the tops of dunes in the desert, seems more fluid, more organic than the ethereal perfection of the sheets which she hangs up
and later, with arms spread wide apart, as if she were a figure in a Baroque deposition from the Cross, slides into her baskets. Women are beings who bear, be it washing or merchandise, be it the next generation or the memory of the dead. Emilie herself seems to be almost the symbol of that: broad, jug-shaped, battered, an ancient cracked amphora; she who cuts meat and wrings water from shirts.

Every few months the attic next to her quarters remains empty, and all the white wash goes to the bleacher’s. My mother provides a separate sum of money for the carriers whom Emilie drums up to lug the whole load out of the house and later to bring it back cleaned. Usually they are women from the neighbourhood where Emilie grew up and where she mostly spends her weekly day off. My mother insists that the army comes no farther into the home than the wash house near the back kitchen, where Emilie has put out the baskets ready.

While she is away I sometimes enter her room, not to rummage around, because there is very little to nose about in. She can scarcely write, she seldom reads books. I absorb the nakedness of the scanty things in the interior. The bed with the metal rails. The cupboard enclosing a sparse wardrobe: two or so aprons, the pinafores she had to put on when there were guests for dinner, the accompanying caps, some underwear of epic proportions, two pairs of shoes, the lightest for indoors, the heaviest, sturdy lace-up boots, for outside. And then a coat and skirt and a couple of blouses: the uniform of ordinariness that she dons on her day off, when the other one, that of service, constricts her.

The mirror above the water jug has areas which have gone dull, as if Emilie’s face, on which dark smudges regularly appear
and disappear, according to a rhythm that seems to me as mysterious as the cycle of sunspots, has infected the mirror glass, and perhaps even the nature of the light itself, with her affliction.

Sometimes I put my head close to the glass, about as close as Emilie does when she washes in the mornings and evenings, in order to appropriate all her impurities and imagine I lead a life like hers, however unknown it remains to me, apart from those few traces and scars.

No one suspects the stirrings of an ecstatic soul in that moulded body, but on her day off, “my Tuesday” Emilie calls it herself, she usually comes home late, mostly a while after sunset. From her hesitant tread on the stairs, during the longest climb that anyone has to undertake in the house, my mother deduces that Emilie is going as silently as possible to her crow’s nest in order not to wake any of us, and she praises Emilie’s tact. The first quality in a servant consists in the ability not to stand out, if not a gruesome talent for invisibility. But I have seen more than once in Emilie’s eyes the haziness, the nirvana you are served for a few centimes in glasses not an inch high, in the pubs that lay hidden in the nooks and crannies of the town, the side alleys that descended from the main streets to the poor who lived by the river. More than once heavy showers turned to wild streams in those dark clefts. For days afterwards the water stood in puddles and children who seemed kneaded from mud floated sloops of twigs or straw on it.

Whenever during a walk we have to pass one of those alleys because making a detour is not possible, my father invariably quickens his pace. He takes me by the hand, pulls me along and I laugh. It doesn’t occur to me that a grown man like him
can know fear, the element that dominates childhood and loses both its brilliance and its darkness as one grows up—an awakening that in my eyes has always seemed more a long-drawn-out process of falling asleep.

One anaesthetizes oneself against the lucidity that brings fear with it as one grows up. The unbearable sharpness of vision that it opens in us admits of only three responses: flight into blind panic, lethargy, or confronting the situation as it is in order to act decisively.

My father is too calm by nature to panic. He is the cell wall that surrounds my mother, my brother and me in order to protect us from the dangers of the outside world.

“We’ve got to hurry a bit, my girl,” he says. “It’s not healthy for you here, with that stinking water down there.”

I try to take as big steps as he over the paving stones, but I can’t. I stroll behind him, scanning his steps with the syncopated dance of my heels and soles. Only later does it strike me how much the route of those walks meanders, how small the area of the town covered by our promenades is before they encounter unmarked limits, so that in retrospect our excursions seem to me to resemble the hopeless pacing to and fro of a predator behind bars at the zoo or the circus.

I miss the bustle of the streets in those days. The swarming of the masses, the hats, the caps, the umbrellas, the thronging about among the horse trams, the coaches, the carts. The festive chaos in the time before the car enforces its segregation between pedestrians and bicycles on the street can impose itself on me with such sharpness that I wonder: did I really see all this? Have I stored all those scenes, all those still lifes, unwittingly
inside me? The delight of unleashing them is too strong for my constitution, too unadulterated.

I remember the pleasure that took hold of me during family New Year parties, because God, or Time, or whatever, was kind enough to make us a gift of a whole new year, still for a little while as pristine and quivering like the pudding on the silver salver that Emilie brought to the table for dessert.

Our days were dome-shaped, exhibition palaces in steel and glass. Beneath their translucent womb wall were the resplendent palm gardens of our lifestyle, heated with coal and gas.

“What a brilliant stroke of inspiration Belgium is!” chuckles my father during the banquet. The wine frees up the mild irony with which he is always able to disarm me.

He raises his glass. “To Belgium! Our mountains are not too high, and our rivers not too deep. Not too big, not too small. Belgium is completely accessible and navigable.”

A country like a Liège waffle, I think now. Crispy outside, but with a heart of white-hot dough. The morality of the Father, king and law forced its rigid system on the town, which divided satiety in unequal portions among the countless throng who hungered and thirsted after pleasure, and what they did not get they would sooner or later steal. That’s how it has always been, and so it shall be for all time—history is another word for hunger, and hunger does not speak but gnaws.

If I was to believe the nuns at the school where my mother sent me when I turned eleven, the Almighty Himself had created Belgium, a second Genesis in a minor key. Just to bring Belgium into being He had sent a succession of disputes and revolutions raging through the old Europe like earthquakes,
and had made other countries clash until cracks appeared and somewhere a splinter shot out, which was knocked into shape until Belgium was there. Back in the days when the Romans made camp here, and long before that, when humanity was messing about with flint, He, Whose work the nuns regarded as a heavenly form of needlework, had refined the idea of “Belgium” further and further. Old atlases preserve the outlines of his first patterns. He had drawn chalk lines, stuck in pins, changed His mind and begun again, and once more and again till gradually His Very Own Nation took shape and everything was finally where it obviously had to be: between the accursed heretics in the north and the despicable revolutionaries in the south. God’s own garden, His second Eden, in which a new Adam this time had, thank God, given everything nice French names and soon filled the air with the hammering of his energy and industry. For we Belgians are hard workers, exulted the nuns and praised the Lord.

But when we went to the sea annually on the train at the end of spring, like everyone who could afford the luxury of a few days off, the country looked so small, so diminutive, that the thundering of the locomotive and the carriages seemed to continue right up to the borders, as if we were nothing more than a nation of cardboard, a painted background for a group portrait or the backdrop for an operetta.

For all the frail ladies’ toes that preciously tested the coolness of the waves from the steps of the bathing carriages in Blankenberge, De Haan or Ostend, elsewhere children’s fingers were dipping matchwood into steaming cauldrons of liquid sulphur, girls’ hands carded cotton, threaded yarn onto
spools or chain cylinders, from siphon to shuttle, and twined and twisted, and beat jute and plucked felt, or sewed the gloves that my mother and I put on to stroll along the promenade. It was a world I saw only later, when my brother was instructed to take me out for a breath of air, although it was under my nose all the time, in the corners of the town that my father avoided on our walks.

If there was a pub at the bottom of the alleyways on the steep slopes by the river, which my father always walked quickly past, one of the pubs in which Emilie got up to God knows what on her days off, there was often noise from down below: laughter, screaming, violent disputes, the surf of a volcanic euphoria which could turn into its opposite at any moment. Papers, which my father hid in vain from my brother and me, reported that in those parts of town eruptions spread to adjacent properties, and perhaps without the intervention of the gendarmes would have reached our better neighbourhoods.