While the Gods Were Sleeping (8 page)

Gradually her tirades faded into muted, unarticulated lamentations. Her words seemed to crumble, throwing off their crust of consonants and as it were revealing their melted insides. Her hypersensitivity to sound had usually gone by then. The tentacles disengaged from things, slapping back onto her body like extended elastic and recreating it in an imploding universe of pain.

Emilie lugged up even more blankets and pillows, and with the slow body language of a tortoise shoved side tables over to the chaise longue, set out bottles, tubes, flacons, a basin of water, soap and white linen cloths. Meanwhile she had closed the blinds on the whole floor, banked up the fire in the antechamber below and had plonked us down like exiles in the armchairs.

“If the
patron
agrees, I can serve him and the little ones food down here for the time being,” she whispered, and without waiting for an answer slunk off upstairs, into the twilight world.

Now and then muted sounds penetrated through to us, a vague groaning followed by the tripping of Emilie’s padded slippers, “my cat’s paws” she called them, over the parquet floor.

This situation did not usually last long. When I was small my father was in the habit of sending me out on reconnaissance after a day or two. He pushed me in through a chink when the door was ajar. In the dark I could only make out my mother
with difficulty, but I could hear her breath. Only when I moved closer could I distinguish her head, largely buried in soft pillows at the foot of a mountain range of blankets that swelled and shrank to the rhythm of her breath. If she turned to me and sleepily stretched out an arm towards me, and didn’t turn away abruptly, submerging completely in the pillowslip, my father would know she was on the mend.

Twenty-four hours later she would arise from her linen cocoon. Emilie would pull up the blinds and wind up the clocks, my mother would smother me with kisses at breakfast, run her fingers teasingly through Edgard’s blond locks and kiss my father on the forehead, the picture of good humour.

I am sure that her suffering was real. My God, if there is anything I have despised about the fact of being a woman, it’s the monthly madhouse of my glands. But I wonder whether she did not partly transform her discomfort into a gentle but nonetheless throttling holding-hostage of my father, my brother, me and Emilie, who as the goblin-like servant of a malevolent queen interceded between the upper and lower world in our house, which closed round us like an oyster.

As soon as everything had calmed down our rooms breathed out audibly, and I did too, behind glass, on the veranda, in the completely walled-in back garden, where otherwise I roamed impatiently along the path, back and forth, back and forth, in the hope that I could hypnotically anaesthetize my yearning for room to breathe, for horizon.

And when I heard the schoolchildren passing behind the fence, exuberant at their few hours of freedom after lessons before they were expected back home, when I heard them
swimming in the mild warmth of late spring days, I almost burst with anger. The slamming of the front door, after my brother had thrown off his satchel, had drunk milk in the kitchen and joined his pals outside, sounded to me like an affront. The fun they had, under the window of the room where in the evenings, when the light had lost its force, I was able to take some sun under my mother’s watchful eye, aroused pure resentment in me.

I heard them egging each other on, exchanged playful blows. I eavesdropped on the galloping of their heels on the pavement when they set off to one of the pubs on the edge of town, on the banks of the river: establishments where I could only go when accompanied by my father, an uncle, sometimes my brother, and preferably on a Sunday, when the bourgeois aired their bridal bouquets, ordered beer and brawn with mustard and secretly eyed the waitresses.

I was sick with jealousy when Edgard came back from those outings with a Bacchanalian grin on his lips, the grin that forged a conspiratorial link between him and Emilie, and melted my mother’s heart to such an extent that she cooed at his wettest jokes like any schoolgirl. If anything could make me even more furious, it was the slavishness of my own sex, the passivity with which they nestled in their shackles and let the reins be tightened and then from their wasp waists poured venom over any woman who did want to break out.

My mother excelled at this. She became the sullen idol I spat upon. The congealed version of a goddess with two forms, of which Emilie embodied the boiling dimension, the fury and ecstasy of womanhood which, when it comes down to it,
respects no morality, negates all principles and casts us back into the glow of the melting pot.

These were the years under the sign of the Magna Mater, because the time called adolescence remains the most female season in a human life. Our qualities haven’t yet caked solidly around us, and always, I am certain, a core in us remains white-hot and boiling. Its impulses influence the fluctuations of the magnetic field that I call our being, or our soul, or whatever—since words are only words, congealed screams.

In my schooldays, at the venerable institute of the Cistercian Sisters of the Holy Word, my sympathy, although I should rather say fascination, invariably focused on the largely invisible nuns in their godly termites’ mound, which was divided by a high wall from the classrooms and covered playground. The young ladies who gave us instruction, young bourgeoises for whom marriage heralded the end of their career, seemed to me much more sterile than those black Fates, who in self-elected virginity glided over the immaculately polished tiles of their corridors with the rustle of canvas around their calves—the wing beats of the Holy Ghost, whom they worshipped in their chapel at dead of night, until in the first light of morning they prostrated themselves before the altar like scorched moths.

My mother thought it important to send me to a religious school. The belief in a supreme being was for her at best a form of edifying poetry, very useful in bringing up children, while for me the true God was the God behind the tabernacles, the totally silent scream between the lines of the Living Word, which made galaxies collide and drove chicks from their egg.

“Stop talking nonsense, child,” she would snap at me if she were here with us. “There’s nothing on high.”

She regularly took little offerings to the nuns; sums of money, food, in May flowers from our garden, for the statue of the Virgin. Then she would converse for a while out of politeness with the sister in charge of guests in the parlour of the convent, sitting on one of the chairs that exuded the smell of furniture wax and were reflected a hundredfold by the copper of the flowerpot-holder and the old kitchen utensils on display. She treated the nuns with the respectful incomprehension she also reserved for doctors, whose knowledge she appreciated, but without the will to share in it. She seemed to find the finesses of the sacred as unappetizing as a view of the opened wall of an abdomen with an inflamed appendix throbbing in it.

If I look at the nuns through her eyes, at the portion of the cloister that I could see from my desk in the class, and the ghosts that shuffled past the pointed-arch windows every day at the same times, on their way to the chapel, I don’t see a convent but a machine, a generator whose imponderable mechanism converted hymns, litanies and acclamations into a psychic gravity designed to keep morals and habits in their place.

I have always disliked the fearfulness attaching to every rite, although I know: a ritual without useless exactitude precisely loses its purpose. Behind this lurked the fear of the Egyptians, whose priests begged the sun god all night long to rise again from the kingdom of the dead, or the frightened cunning of the Incas and their attempts to anchor the heavenly disc to the sun stone, like a sheep on a chain, or like a child tries to prevent his mother leaving him by clinging to her skirts.

I don’t know exactly how old I was when I suddenly began to suspect that the rituals were meant to keep in check a huge fear of the Word itself, God’s Own Name, which there in that chapel had to coincide reassuringly with itself. The circular days of perpetual adoration, the perpetuum mobile of songs and invocations, yes, even the style of the holy in itself, suddenly seemed to be incantations meant to avoid the godhead disintegrating, or, as the sun will one day do, exploding and unleashing a storm of meanings gone adrift.

Wouldn’t that be a spectacle? And how would it feel to dissolve in that explosion, and never, never again be able to be completely expressed?

W
HEN I CAN’T
get to sleep, I like looking outside. I ask Rachida before she goes not to close the curtain over the window next to my bed. I want to see the teams of cleaners who work in the middle of the night in the offices on the other side of the water: the olive-coloured worker bees—veiled girls, young men with raven-black hair in light-blue smocks. I like following those kids as they go from floor to floor and make draughtsboard patterns of light and dark slide across the front of the building. In honeycombs of light they dust, scrub floors, empty waste-paper baskets, soap window glass and rub it dry, and I receive the impersonal blessing of their work as a sacrament. At such moments I have the feeling that I am calm enough to be able to survey the splendour of the earth as it is: not beautiful or ugly, but living and dying, pulsating in all its plants and animals.

I like the few hours of desolation at the crack of dawn, the emptiness and the first birds, which for a moment don’t have to share the silence with anyone, before the cars drive under the crowns of the trees into the multi-storey car park with glowing brake lights. I like listening to the rumble of the first trains, which at this early hour penetrates far into the centre of town, until the hubbub of life getting under way drowns it out: the buses, trams, cyclists, the footsteps of clusters of schoolchildren, in whose satchels pens or pencils are rattling to the cadence of their tread on the pavement—the glorious everydayness of the world and its banal, but oh-so-vital peace.

Then I wait till the bell goes downstairs, the signal Rachida gives me to let me know she’s in the house. It may be the other one. I can tell from the ring what awaits me. The other one doesn’t so much ring as send a shrill reproach upstairs. Then I pretend to be asleep, squeeze a half-hour’s freedom from the night, pull the blankets in a cocoon round my bones and sulk, and realize I’m like my mother, when she was young, when every month her tissues rang the hormonal alarm bell. I grant her those little resurrections now more than I used to.

If it takes a while before I hear someone coming upstairs, then I’m sure it’s Rachida who will wake me. Although she knows full well that I’ve been awake for ages and don’t really need to be woken.

I don’t want her to find me asleep. I want to say good morning to her. One day she’ll knock and there’ll be no reply. I’m far too old for an illness that drags on, so know what’s in store for me. Cerebral haemorrhage. Heart attack. She always laughs when I say it, but I know why it takes a while before she comes upstairs. First she takes her coat off and puts her apron on, but when she comes in in a moment, you must pay attention to her coiffure. There won’t be a hair out of place. She takes time to brush her long black hair. In front of the mirror in the hall she takes her hair in one hand and brushes it firmly and then arranges it over her shoulders again with the back of her hand, first over one, then over the other—that earthy, oh-so-earthy gesture. That’s how I imagine it at least: I’ve never seen her do it, and I haven’t been downstairs for ages, but I know she wants to look nice, in case I should be dead in bed or in the chair already with the beginnings of rigor mortis, with the curtains drawn, because I always ask her to draw them in the afternoon.
Unlike in the past, I dislike the pedestrian light between twelve and four. Grey and twilight suit me better these days, or the sheen of the still-unblemished morning.

I like seeing how she is preoccupied with her work, the sacred calm that emanates from her concentration when she reveals the room and me to the day. While I breakfast in bed, she takes a dress or a number of skirts and blouses out of the wardrobe, always about three so that I can choose, and when I have made my choice she looks in the drawers and boxes on the dressing table for the earrings and necklace that go with them, because “being old, Mrs Helena,” she says, “is not a disease with us”.

The suppleness of her fingers especially can delight me. As one gets older the days increasingly assume the character of light-footed barbarities, peevish conspiracies against the liturgy of habit, in which the body becomes more and more hopelessly entangled. Her dexterity is like a consecration. The way she picks the earrings out of the velvet of their boxes, fishes the necklace out of the box and runs it over the palm of her hand to smooth out any kinks or knots—and I see myself again, on afternoons that are long ago now, going into my mother’s dressing room and, in the line of light that the
half-open
top curtains cast over the dressing table, pulling open the drawer of the chest in which she keeps her jewels, and the way that light at the bottom of that drawer, in one of the boxes, the lid of which has shifted slightly, makes a necklace slumbering there glitter with the treacherous splendour of a poisonous snake.

I find it a shame that I can’t see her at work when she is preparing lunch in the kitchen, how she peels onions, elicits baroque curly peel from potatoes, cuts carrots, chops meat, just as Emilie, in her brightly lit quarters in the basement, used to carry out her own sacrifices, or the maids in the house in France around the steaming oven set in motion a ballet of spoons and skimmers and guards, which unleashed its own music—and I wonder whether, who knows, she briefly interrupts her work without thinking in order to wipe her hands on her apron, a vision which invariably filled me with a strange ecstasy.

As time goes on I miss such ostensibly insignificant details of those who are no longer there. The thousands of tokens of the camaraderie or armed truce we enter into daily with life increasingly fill me with emotion. Usually I only notice them when they have died away for ever and leave me with the feeling that a whole language has been struck dumb, the complete vocabulary with which a person closes a book or arranges a dinner service like no one before or after them; or the way my husband used to slip out of the sheets beside me and run to the bathroom in the chill of the morning, pee standing up and produce a powerful stream because he knew it gave me childish pleasure, and then come back in in his boyish nakedness, with—forgive the word, Rachida—his prick at half mast between his thighs, and finally eased his bum into his trousers and with one hand swept the change on the bedside table into his other hand.

I didn’t venerate those things enough. I didn’t anoint them enough. I betrayed the mysticism of their everyday ordinariness. I just hope it isn’t one of the thoughts that I speak out
loud by mistake, which has been happening to me more and more often recently.

She didn’t hear anything. First she took away the tray with the remains of my breakfast and subjected me tactfully to the ritual of defecation and cleaning, then put me on the chair next to the bed and now she is buttoning my blouse. As she does so, she bends slightly forward, so that were are almost looking each other in the eye, but she focuses on her fingers, which squeeze the small, mother-of-pearl-covered buttons into the buttonholes.

“And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.”

“What was that, Mrs Helena?”

“Nothing, child.”

She has almost finished. “Is that not a sight to behold?”

She smiles without looking up.

Her fingers rustle under my collar, against my throat.

“Those who can behold everything go mad, Mrs Helena.”

The day my brother died I knew as soon as she knocked, and actually even before. She had only just started working for me. I had heard the telephone ring downstairs. Almost no one called any more. She had answered, it took a long time. She had taken off her apron. She was wearing that long, dark-brown blouse I had seen her in often and underneath her black trousers. Instead of the wooden-soled slippers she usually wore at work, she had put on respectable footwear, mules. Her veil, which she usually wore round her neck like a wide shawl, hung loose over her hair with its dead-straight central parting.

She knocked, came in, closed the door behind her and stayed some distance away from the bed: “Your brother Mr Edgard, Mrs Helena…”

I didn’t let her finish. “So the bastard’s gone.”

I saw her go pale.

“Yes, ma’am…”

A month or two previously he came to visit for the last time. As usual he climbed the stairs in full regalia, or rather he hoisted himself up a step at a time by the banister, with all the accoutrements befitting a gentleman of his class, with the weight of his years in his made-to-measure but by now fairly baggy suit, and especially that still-elegant but perfectly useless walking stick under his arm.

The ascent took more time each week. After the death of my husband I offered to share a house with him on various occasions. What was the point of us each occupying a huge place, and in his case such a way out of town, in that admittedly extremely convenient property surrounded by a large garden, where the windows admitted charming light reflected by the river water, and where on the carpets and Kelims in the stairwell, the library, the drawing rooms a discretion shod in the softest leather constantly crept across the floors behind my back when I was still able to visit him?

He needed a quarter of an hour to get his breath back, and sat in his chair gasping and clearing his throat, the walking stick against the arm. The other stick, the one he actually used, an aluminium shaft with a rubber cap on the bottom, rested between his legs.

Rachida brought the coffee, thank God the nice set, on the tray with the silver. Not the plastic mugs that the other, that golem, digs out of the kitchen cupboard to give me the feeling that I’m a child who spills everything.

“Is Mr Edgard well?” she had asked, carefree as always while she put the cups on the drawing-room table, the jug of cream and the sugar.

“I’m like the donkeys, child. Their legs wear out first too, it seems.”

He had poured a dash of cream in his coffee. As he stirred it, he said: “It’s about time there was an end to it, if you ask me.”

Only when I felt Rachida taking my glasses off my nose to dry the lenses and I, after she had put my glasses back on, saw my brother looking into his cup in embarrassment, did it dawn on me that I must have called out and cried.

My hands were trembling. I saw Rachida’s helplessness, she was looking furiously for a single light-hearted sentence to break the embarrassed silence, and it went right through my heart.

Finally she went away.

My brother waited till she had left the room, got up and came over to me. As usual he tried to put his fingers under my chin so that I would look up, but I turned away and stared outside while he cursed my stubbornness.

“I don’t know, Hélène,” he sighed, “what
matière
you’re made of inside…”

Matière
, I thought, how frivolous. But I said: “Concrete.”

A few weeks later came the news that he had broken a hip and was in the hospital with a prosthesis. Later, that he was to
move into a boarding house. I wondered who had arranged that for him.

A courier delivered a package. Inside were a set of keys and a note with the pre-printed heading
house of evening pleasures
—how deep can you fall, I thought.

“I’m sorry, my little gazelle, but I don’t think I’ll be returning to my house,” he wrote. “Keep the spare keys, you never know whether you’ll need them one day…”

I saw the question burning on Rachida’s tongue, whether I shouldn’t visit him. I sensed her disappointment, but I very much appreciated the fact that she remained silent.

My brother always cultivated a form of impermanence, a quality that made all contexts slide off him. He shrouded himself in a sniggering secrecy that reminded me just too much of a cult, and his death did not really put an end to his impermanence. It simply became absolute. I mourn for him by polishing up his mysteries.

I never knew which of the young men who regularly hung about in his house, even when he was well into old age, slept with him. Who were lovers and who were not, as far as that distinction could be made. As time went on they looked younger and younger, though they remained constantly between their mid-twenties and about thirty-five, but he himself naturally got older. They were more like symbols than people of flesh and blood. Radiant emblems of youthfulness, snooty young eels in their smart clothes, their collars starched so razor-sharp that they constituted a danger to their carotid artery, which I could see beating under their tender skin when they were introduced to me.

Nervous and polite to the point of hysteria, meticulously coiffured and manicured, at family gatherings or dinners they put their feet under the table and were silent, longing all too visibly for invisibility, having been first announced “as a friend of Edgard’s”—pronounced with all too audible quotation marks.

I wondered which of them he could stand to have with him at night, whom he admitted to his sleep and whether during their slumber they let their fingers wander to the scar on the sleeping trunk half under, half next to theirs, instinctively in search of the vein, the fracture, the line of morbid growth which ran from his hip, via his abdomen and his ribcage, to below his right shoulder, thank God the right side of his body. It looked like a careless line of welding or an aerial photo of a mountain chain. I thought it would feel scabby, dry and crumbly, but when he once allowed me to touch it, it gave way, warm and rubbery under my fingertips. I was frightened of hurting him, but he said: “Doesn’t matter, can’t feel a thing there.”

Except on stormy days, the sultry days, the days when summer seemed about to tip over into autumn. Then he had the bath filled with cold water and stretched out in it because the cold numbed the phantom pain that shot through that long vein. I wonder if his “friends” kept him company, dried his back, helped him into his dressing gown afterwards. They seemed more like tasty morsels, titbits that his tongue longed for when he was satiated with coarser fare.