While the Gods Were Sleeping (15 page)

“Excellent piece of roast beef,” he sighed, imitating my father. He had finished his roll and laid his napkin next to his plate. “And apart from that, there are plenty of Habsburgs, there in Vienna. It’s not the first horse they’ve had to replace.”

W
E ARRIVED LATE
in the evening. A servant of my uncle’s was waiting for us with a coach and there was another carriage for our luggage. As soon as she got out, the same transformation had taken place in my mother as happened every year. Her usual surly air had gone. I saw a lively woman who chatted cheerfully with the stationmaster, gave the porters a generous tip and actually spoke to the servants in the familiar “
tu
” form, in a French that sounded a lot less precious than at home, where it seemed constantly imbued with an undoubtedly didactic precision. Now, suddenly, the terse, clipped diction of her native region broke through in her sentences.

Even when the servant, after we had got in, handed her a basket containing a jug of wine and three tin beakers, she did not refuse the offer in an aloof tone but passed the basket to my brother. “Come on,
mon ami
. Pour us a drink…”

The servant pulled on the reins, and the coach began moving. The grinding of the wheels over the cobbles echoed with a hollow sound against the walls of the houses in the streets, where downstairs, behind the window, glass lamps were being lit, and upstairs open windows let in cool air and oxygen. In the market the chairs for that afternoon’s concert stood folded in rows against the walls of the kiosk and on the terrace of the local brasserie the last customers were emptying their glasses while behind their backs, in the illuminated restaurant, the landlord was wiping the chairs and putting them on the tables.

The evening was turning blue. It was not long before we had left the houses behind and the coach was taking us through the fields beyond the fringe of woodland that surrounded the town. There the smell of summer hit my nose, the specific odour of sand and grass and corn. The landscape rolled gently and in the shallow valleys the mist was creeping up behind the alders lining ditches and streams.

I took deep breaths and saw my mother observing me contentedly. She seemed to be revelling in the unanimity she presumed between us, delighted as she was herself to be able to return to the spots where she must have spent so many happy hours during her childhood. Perhaps she returned every year out of nostalgia, and although I took over the ritual from her for as long as the house in France existed—I accompanied it, like her, to its deathbed—it was never nostalgia for a bygone age that drove me there, or the longing to house the past in more durable accommodation than transient flesh or eroding stones. It demands an equally intense labour of the imagination to live in the present, as it does to evoke the past or probe the contours of the future. We make room, we create space. No one can appropriate time without accommodating it in an architecture of hope, or at least in the pavilions of fantasy, in order to provide it with rhythm and proportions, since everything is music. The beauty of the landscape that surrounded me that evening might, according to my uncle, be unintentional, secondary, but it filled me with great contentment—and if I could talk to him now, I would say that what stretched out all around me was indeed not purely natural beauty, but was beauty. Nothing was untouched by human hands, from the land itself, where the first inhabitants of these regions had picked up the roughest
stones to make the soil workable, to the church towers, and all of that formed a vast, horizontal cathedral, on which men had laboured for centuries and which remained for ever unfinished.

“Aren’t you getting cold, child?” asked my mother. She got out a blanket and laid it across my and her knees. “We’re almost there.”

“I’ll keep warm, don’t worry about me,” said my brother, with feigned anger that he had to make do without a blanket. He refilled his beaker, and my mother did her best to look piqued, but she was too good-humoured to be convincing.

Meanwhile the road was climbing the familiar, gently undulating slope. The fields and the blooming verge, full of singing crickets, gave way to trees under which it was already dark. Farther along, where the wood thinned out again, we had our first glimpse, blue-grey in the twilight, of the wall with the gate and, just below the eaves, the small arched windows of the stables which during the day let a small amount of light in, so that it always seemed like night-time there. When I was very small nothing could fill me with such sublime fear as the eternal darkness in there, where you regularly heard chains clank, and something that breathed or snorted and stamped with heavy feet on the brick floor. And there was always that moment of breathless astonishment, of expectation and terror, when the grooms entered the stables and a little later came out leading horses by the reins—creatures that seemed not so much horses as locomotives of muscles and manes, and strangely sensitive skin which was constantly shot through with nervous twitches. They were huge, mechanical animals, Trojan horses, whose nostrils issued steam on cold mornings. Beside them the horse
that pulled our coach seemed a frail ballerina. The animal began to snort and picked up speed now the destination was near. The servant whistled, behind the wall dogs started barking. The gate opened for us.

We had scarcely come to a halt in the inner courtyard when screaming children surged round the coach, and laughed or peered at us with shy grins, while the oldest, slightly more reserved, looked on in the background and nodded to us. They were the children of the many servants and maids who lived in smaller farmhouses all over the estate of my mother’s family and also worked in the stables and barns around the house where we were to stay for the next few weeks. My relations had long since stopped working the land themselves, except sporadically, during the harvest when they were always short of labour; but basically my uncle, who had watched our arrival from a distance, was mainly a businessman.

After he had made his way through the pack of children and first helped my mother alight, I saw, as they greeted each other with two kisses, that her eye lingered for an instant on the luxuriant hairdo on his head, his beautiful grey and white mane, always a little dishevelled, which invariably seemed to remind her that there was something untamed, something wild in him.

“Marianne…” he said between the first and second kiss, and she responded with “Théo…”, with an intimacy that needed no further syllables and, certainly from her side, the resignation with which we can love members of our family deeply without liking everything about them.

I myself was very fond of him, and precisely because of his indifference to all kinds of conventions, which my mother
attributed to a touch of bad blood on her father’s side, a few drops of which, she feared, had found their way into my veins.

“I see my little fortifying something for the journey was well received,
Petit
,” he laughed, when he saw my brother getting off the coach in a fairly unstable manner.

“Splendid wine…” hiccupped Edgard. “Really!”

They shook hands, my uncle squeezed my brother’s shoulder and took his chin paternally between his thumb and forefinger. “I’m very pleased. Someone who takes the trouble to do my cellar the honour which is its due…”

They let go of each other, and I knew he would say my name now and for the umpteenth year in a row would exclaim that I just went on growing and that this summer he would definitely have to top me like a poplar, “because you know, dear niece, poplars start wobbling when young”.

One by one the servants came to greet us, hat in hand, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, slightly bent over the respectful distance maintained by their handshake, as if we were a delegation of diplomats, finally arrived at a foreign court—and it looked like that, too, within the enclave that protected the high walls of the stables and barns, the vegetable garden, the chicken enclosure, the orchard and the berry garden from the rest of the world: a microcosm with its own customs, most clearly embodied in the figures of my uncle’s wife and her older, unmarried sister, whom my brother, with my father’s irony, always, except when she was around, called “the inseparable shadow”. Now too, now they come out of the house, and look in turn at their lined slippers so as not to slip on the bluestone steps leading up to the front door; they both seem, in their light kimonos, with hair
worn up and cheeks powdered all too extravagantly, to radiate a dim light. I hear the soft tinkle of the gold dangling from their ears, and as always it astonishes me, now we greet each other, how soft their skin, which has already lost much of its youthful springiness, feels beneath my lips—almost like the filling of a chocolate marshmallow, despite the thick layer of make-up which from afar gives their faces a cool, almost jade-like glow.

As a child I was intrigued by the isolated existence they lead within the walls of the house where my mother was born. The part of the residence occupied by them and my uncle is a suite of spacious rooms, divided from each other by wide double doors. The parquet on the floors nips in the bud with a dastardly creaking any attempt to sneak around in secret, so that I can never spy on them as if I’m not there while, in their intimate boudoir between the dining room and the drawing room, they let the large pages of the fashion magazines rustle through their fingers while exchanging little cries of glee. Everything is as subdued and padded as they are. In their ponderous dressing gowns, vaguely inspired by what they see in the fashion magazines, but apart from that largely modelled according to their eccentric tastes, they are very like giant silkworms, enclosed in a cocoon of extravagant textiles, without ever bothering to grow into butterflies.

Their boredom is of the superior kind. They spend the greater part of the day fixing each other’s clothing and coiffure, followed by a whole disrobing ritual when they prepare to retire in the evening, so that besides silkworms, they are also reminiscent of some tropical plant which spends all its energy on a flowering which is not only as rich as it is short-lived, but
is also particularly punctual—on a certain day and a certain number of full moons after the equinox, and only during the brief period when the sun is directly above the earth, or some such thing, since my aunt and her sister were actually not occupied with changing their clothes and fixing their hair in the afternoons.

The kimonos they were wearing that evening as they tripped towards us in their slippers had the kind of frills that my mother rather disapprovingly called “undressed dress”, and to make matters worse the two sisters hailed from Tourcoing—the very way my mother pronounced that place name betrayed the fact that it would have been better if fate had had you born elsewhere. “Tourcoing!” she could sometimes conclude, as if the word itself were sufficient condemnation.

After the sisters had joined us at table under the beech tree, where my uncle had prepared a small evening meal, they pressed cloths smelling of lemon verbena oil to their delicate ankles, to keep off the mosquitoes that buzzed high above our heads in the last warmth.

My uncle was meanwhile discussing “that incident” and whether it would have consequences.

“A lot of fuss is what we’re going to have,” exclaimed my brother, who had not denied himself the umpteenth glass of wine.

“Doubtless,” replied my uncle. “But where? As long as they’re at each other’s throats in the east, to be honest, I’m not going to lose any sleep.”

“If you have any fuss, comrade, it’ll be with me,” interrupted my mother. “That’s your last glass. Understood?”

“
Oui, mon capitaine!
” cried Edgard, making a clumsy salute.

“Leave him be,” soothed my uncle, and to my mother: “If you’d like to go to bed, dear, your room is ready. I’ll keep an eye on them…”

“That’s very reassuring…” she replied, and no one could fail to hear the sarcasm in her voice, but nevertheless she got up, tugged my brother’s blond quiff by way of a good night kiss, whispered, “Brigand…”, gave me and my uncle a pat on the shoulder and withdrew into the house.

A little later the light of a paraffin lamp flickered at one of the upstairs windows. Only downstairs was there electricity, but not even there in every room, only in those where the sisters and my uncle spent a lot of time.

“Cigar, Edgard?…” he asked conspiratorially.

“Oh, why not?” replied my brother nonchalantly, stretching in his chair.

My uncle retrieved a small cigar-holder from his inside pocket, snapped it open and offered it gallantly first to my brother then to me.

I declined. I always found his fixed intention, carried out each year with varying success, to teach us a few of the vices that add spice to life, as he put it, sufficient unto itself. The sins one doesn’t taste keep their aroma longest.

The sisters took one too, which they shared after they had lit it. “Nothing better against the mosquitoes, isn’t that so, Josine?” cooed my aunt.

“Absolutely, Yolande,” echoed her sister.

We were silent. Around me three orange points of light glowed whenever the sisters, my uncle and my brother puffed on their
cigars. I enjoyed their pleasure and listened to the sounds of the night. A cow coughing somewhere beyond the stables. The first call of the owl. The high-pitched, ethereal squeak of the bats which sailed round the tops of the beeches and the crunch when an insect was ground up in their jaws. Only above the roofline at the far end of the inner courtyard was there a band of fading light.

“We’ll have to wait and see what tomorrow brings,” said my uncle at last. His voice suddenly sounded deeper, because of the tobacco.

He exhaled. “Wait and see…” he said again, more softly this time.

I looked on as they finished their cigars and saw how their faces glowed briefly as they sucked oxygen into the tobacco, and how afterwards darkness took possession of us all.