While the Gods Were Sleeping (3 page)

Then, standing by my chair for a moment, she can sometimes look down at the board and the old exercise book, the yellowed pages, and my very young handwriting, with her hands on the waist of her apron and the duster in her hand, as if glancing into a cradle or a sarcophagus, with the same compassion and tenderness that we reserve for the dead and newborn infants.

“Do you still remember writing all that down, Mrs Helena?” she asks cheerfully, always cheerful. Sometimes it is as if, through my fragile, almost transparent bones, she is addressing the child with the broad-brimmed straw hat and the long ribbons in her collar, skipping over the gaps in the paving stones holding her father’s hand—a game I invented myself to dispel the monotony of our walks.

I shake my head.

I never reread myself. Never ever. Never.

I open those exercise books to establish whether I have vanished sufficiently from the lines, faded with the walnut ink
bleached by the years, and whether I have gradually become alien enough to find myself unreadable, reduced to score marks that I survey rather than read, as you study a painter’s brush strokes.

I follow the cadence of my handwriting and search for the silly lust, congealed in letters, of the girl I must have once been, the child who on the threshold of her adolescence pulled her writing as tight as the thin leather laces with which she tied her bootees—how she forced the flesh of the words into the
whalebone
of syntax, until her own flesh was full of wheals and she longed to break out! The lust of the flagellant and the libertine is equally insatiable. Lashes and love bites wound and soothe in equal measure. And no one, I say, Rachida, no one can ever escape from the almighty god of grammar.

She goes without shaking her head in disapproval, the angel. She knows when I am addressing her for her own sake and when I am focusing on her impersonal presence, which for me is another word for our soul. I’m glad that she senses when she must leave me alone, and that she lets me sleep when she brings me soup or fresh tea and finds me dozing off. She leaves the pen in my hand but puts the top on loosely to stop the nib drying out. Or she gives the glasses that have slipped out of my hands a polish and lays them on the board with their arms open.

Perhaps she takes the time to have a longer look at my strokes and my scrawl, the calligraphy of my intoxication or my irritation, set down at the time when my daughter was still a babe in arms and demanded all my waking hours, sucked my life dry, my existence—and the haste and the furious pleasure with which in a nocturnal half-hour I could let the ink splash raw
from my pen for a moment like fountains of milk that welled up from my nipples the moment the little mite so much as stirred.

“Massage my feet, Rachida,” I ask, “Would you? Knead my soles with your thumbs to get my lazy blood flowing again. You have soft hands, soft and adept. You know that I don’t want to ask the other one, she always leaves me crippled, in worse agony than I’m already in.”

I’m glad at the natural pride she exudes. When she kneels down by the pouf on which my legs are resting, she gives off no air of servility, no subcutaneous arrogance which is usually the sour face of humility. A sovereign intentness flows from her fingers over my shins, my instep and my toes. Sometimes, with my ankles in her hands, she can look up and run her eyes over my calves and thighs, over my pelvis, my belly and breast. She can look me in the eyes with an almost amorous concentration and seems to peel the years away from me. Her look is the look of a woman. We understand each other. Under the eye of the woman every man becomes a little boy with a pop gun. Their love is so childlike.

Sometimes I see her looking at the exercise book resting in my lap, the fig leaf with writing on. For a second an embarrassed smile crosses her face, perhaps because my scribbles remind her involuntarily of pubic hair, the pubic hair that a child would draw, if we were to ask children something like that, just as we ask them:

draw a sun for me,

a house,

a tree,

a soldier, a horse.

From the moment she lays the board on my lap and opens the notebook, the delight of a child who sees the tin of chalks or watercolours being taken out of the cupboard wells up in me. The euphoria and expectation, the same earnest pleasure with which a child, the tip of its tongue between its half-opened lips, draws lines, recreates things, repeats the millennia-old ritual of the hunter summoning up the spirit of his prey on the wall of a cave. The world seems to be paying court to me: write me out, duplicate me. Trace my air strata, my earth strata, my cloaks and my sick memory, and all the gradations between being and non-being that only a human, the most excessive creature that crawled up from my slime, can bring to life.

If she were to wonder why I have never added a volume to the library room next door, when there were still books in there, I should probably reply: one must wait until one is dead before letting go of one’s writings. But that would be a lie, or at least an excuse. People who write are sneaky. You claim a space alongside time. A place where you can sit chuckling to yourself, that is what those who write want to hollow out for themselves, a room at the back. So be consistent, I think then, and wait until you’re dead.

I have finally got rid of all my books. I realized my childhood dream and gave away the whole library, boxes at a time. I don’t know where all those volumes are now. All I’ve kept are the exercise books. Shakespeare was allowed to stay too, out of a sense of duty. Like St Augustine, because of his nailed-shut doubt, very amusing. And
Yoga for Your Dog
and a few similar titles: titles that my husband brought back from his travels, or that friends have given me as presents because like him they knew that I’m
crazy about absurd literature. I love the inexhaustible energy with which someone documents themselves for decades before leaving as a testament a
Concise History of the Corset
. I don’t make fun of them. To each his own monsters.

I have also kept the dictionaries. Not to find there, as in a herbarium, the arid pleasure I could experience in dictionaries as a girl, when their columns stretched out before my eyes as if they were gunpowder magazines. From their racks I stole the ammunition for the bursts of buckshot that I let loose on the world. Now I read dictionaries because they’ve gradually become the only novels I still like.

Daily I absorb a few pages, my way of reading a breviary. I mumble what I read aloud, the rows of words ordered from A to Z that are not able to gloss over their stupid coincidental nature. Word upon word, an eye for a tooth.

I run my finger over the page down the entries. Each word resounds like a cry for help, clawing up from the page like a drowning man’s hand; and see how the words, the other words, the ant words, the soldier words, rush to help that dying word, to support it with their lances, throwing rescue ropes towards it, hauling it ashore and forming behind it like a praetorian guard.

Morning roll-call for definition.

Salute the Flag.

Azalea and Azimuth.

The tumult of meaning bursts out from under my fingers.

For years I haven’t been able to listen to what people said. I heard them speaking, but I couldn’t listen. Everything sounded
equally insignificant, charming and light-footed as the notes of songbirds in March on the first warm days. I couldn’t bring myself to speak, to chat, not in the restaurants and the cafés where we gathered, my brother, my husband, myself, the others. I submerged myself in the bustle. I let the surf of the hubbub wash over me. I looked around, took in the chandeliers, the fug of tobacco, the velour draught curtains, the palms in brass pots, the nodding ladies’ hats, the waiters with their aprons and the routine way they arranged cutlery on the table or cleared plates, carved roast meat, uncorked bottles, the choreography of the habitual cycles. And I thought: they’re like migrating birds. Landing after the great crossing, the survivors shake the dust out of their feathers and twitter melodies of relief.

When I read Proust for the first time after the war, it made me almost sick to my stomach. I didn’t hear time, great dead time roaring through his sentences—his Loire sentences, his Mississippi sentences, his grammatical River Congos and syntactic Nile deltas, pregnant with sediment.

I heard ambulances wailing,

the wheels of hospital beds scooting over uneven floor tiles,

the hurried steps of stretcher-bearers,

and tinkling scalpels and surgical clamps,

and the bunches of keys on the sisters’ belts,

and the hiss of sterilizers,

the calling and long-drawn-out groaning in the largest field hospital in literature,

where the great healer covers bones with periosteal membrane,

injects cavities with pulsing blood-red marrow,

and forces cartilage between joints,
and attaches muscles to tendons,

and covers them with arteries and main arteries,

and folds up intestines in the hole in an abdomen,

and places the liver on top,

and moulds fat on it,

and connecting tissue, layers of skin;

dermis,

epidermis,

epithelium

—just put the lashes in the eyelid, sister,

with the tweezers.

For a long time I couldn’t put a sensible word on paper, furious as I was, a great sulking child that pressed its lips together and with a flushed face full of reproach gaped at the world in the hope of making an idiotic impression. Until I realized that writing is the only way of answering the world back with silence. Does each act of speaking then imply deep contempt?

Don’t look so worried, Rachida. I really do still have all my marbles. Speak French to me again. I like your French, it acquires ochre tints when you talk, whereas my mother’s sounded ceramic, not dull and not full.

I can deal better and better with sometimes hearing her voice unexpectedly and suddenly, in a flash, seeing an image of her, as she was, at about thirty-five. The moment of stasis on Sundays when she was completely made up to go strolling in the park and before she left the house, with her regal quantities of fur; the feathers in her hat and her parasol paused for a second in the hall and looked at my father to check that everything was in order.

I believe that I am only now capable of seeing the splendour of it all, the shimmering of the morning light on the marble in the hall, the awesomely fine textures of all the material with which the woman who was my mother clothes, decorates, arms herself.

The expectancy on her face seems to extend farther than the prospect of her weekly excursion, as if she suddenly knows she is free from my sarcasm and irritation, because for a long time I considered her a pitiful marvel of the petit-bourgeois fear of life, which was only distinguished from a fossil by the fact that it occasionally moved—but now, now, now…

When she suddenly turns up here and presses her cheeks, hidden behind the grey-white veil of one of her summer hats, against the cheeks of Tatante, my father’s younger sister, that is, and stretches out her arms, with her fingers in gloves of wide-meshed crochet work, as we said goodbye, that summer, when we left for our annual vacation with our relations in northern France…

If I suddenly remember her now, in the sepia light that the panes of the glass roof, which have become dulled by soot and dust, strew onto the platform, where the engine spews clouds of steam and hissing sounds from its joints, and the porters load the skips and cases that pursued us like a stream of associations whenever we made the journey, with my brother and me somewhere in between, reduced to luggage that must not be left behind…

Am I capturing her in these syllables, or are the words, which are never simply ours, making a place free in the great throng of things, a well-circumscribed empty space, in which she can here and now take up residence?

W
HERE ELSE COULD SHE BE?
None of the places where I spent my childhood still exists. I needn’t imagine that I can hear the crumbly earth crunching under the soles of my shoes again, on one of the country roads around the house where she was born, with on both sides the bright yellow stubble or newly mown barley under a blue sky from which memory has sifted all impurities, or that I can hear the drumming of the hail on the battered glass of the station concourse, when my brother Edgard and I returned to our town after years away—I can hear it whenever I want. Some travellers dived for cover when the hailstorm struck, but my brother took my hand in his and said, with unusual lyricism by his standards: “These are the wings of Nike.”

We went to see her side of the family every summer. I didn’t have a particularly weak constitution as a child, indeed I was reasonably robust, like my brother, but we lived in town, under the belching smoke of industry. It could do no harm, she felt, to build up our strength for a few months in the healthy air of her native region just over the border with France, where in the summer above the horizon in the west there hung the typical azure of sky over sea. I could look at it for ages, at the window of my room on the top floor of the house, which the local people had dubbed the Crooked Château.

It hung between two forms of living, between the utilitarian and the ostentatious, as if it had at some time got stuck in
a difficult metamorphosis from farmstead to country house. But the eccentric combination of the living quarters, in their half-faded grandeur of pilasters and fluting and heavy pediments above the windows, with the much older sections of more sober stables and barns that surrounded them, marked off a spacious inner courtyard, partly planted with ash and beech, partly paved with hard bluestone, on which on August afternoons the sun could blaze down so fiercely that the heat came close to ecstasy.

“Child, for goodness’ sake go and sit in the shade,” I hear her call out, while in the cool under the trees she bends over the tub and with one of the maids puts the wash through the wringer.