While the Gods Were Sleeping (7 page)

On one occasion I see, during the annual Whitsun fair, in the big square in front of the abbey, children not much older than me, loudly encouraged by the adults around them, throwing mud and horse manure at the front of the collegiate church where a service is going on.

My mother pulls me briskly away from the scene. She seldom has a good word to say about priests, but religious matters are among the things in life that a person, as she usually says, can better “leave well alone”.

As she pulls me after her through the crowds of visitors to the fair to the other side of the square, the roundabouts and swings suddenly seem more than ghostly machines that unleash
nothing but pleasure. Their mechanisms appear, if not finely enough tuned or insufficiently calibrated, able to put natural laws out of action and release unprecedented energies. Festivals and fairs suddenly strike me as pregnant with a hidden power that provoke a disaster that my parents only ever admit into their conversation in the most covert terms.

“
Encore des grèves
,” mutters my father one day at breakfast, with the paper in front of his nose. And although his face is his hidden by the opened pages, I detect from the way my mother raises an eyebrow that they are exchanging a token of understanding, as intimate as a bedroom secret, but clearly less frivolous.

“
C’est une menace
,” echoes my mother.

For the greater part of my childhood I call Emilie and Co. “
les grèves
”, just as you once had the Huns, or the Vandals, and Emilie herself I dub “
La Menace
”. It sounds mysterious and Oriental, like Herodias or Scheherazade. My mother speaks the word sufficiently under her breath to strengthen the suspicion that it is a term that belongs to the outer suburbs of language, but precisely because of that it acquires for me the charge of a magic formula, itching my tongue when I see Emilie at work in the house.

Perhaps I once—now I suddenly see her face in front of me again, the weathered yet smooth face of a woman who is both young and old at the same time—perhaps I once actually addressed her by that
nom de guerre
.

She half-turns towards me by the table downstairs, where she is using the mincer. At once fleetingly and closely she surveys
me with a look that hesitates between astonishment and private amusement. Only now do I read in her bright-green irises, above which a lock of hair that has come loose always bobs while she is at work, the pride that my unintended indiscretion must have awakened in her.

More a cat than a maid, there is no sign in her of the abject servility with which the servants of family and friends reduce themselves to being part of the furniture. She doesn’t read, at least not books. She dusts them with a caution tending to suspicion, as if a curse were etched into their bindings. But later I discover that she reads our old papers from beginning to end before she wraps the potato peelings in them.

Undoubtedly she is just as literate, if not a virtuoso, in vocabulary that written characters consider far beneath their dignity. Where else does the jollity come from with which she returns from the bleacher’s with her sisters in calamity, with our white linen and that of neighbouring families folded in the baskets—undoubtedly spread out, held up to the light, examined by scores of fingers for the ethereal cuneiform script of nocturnal vices, fear of death, forbidden embraces, of solitary sins and lonely drunken bouts, which had left its traces in those flexible clay tablets?

The pleasure of her and the other girls sends a threat of uproar through our rooms, our world of mutedness, of secrecy out of habit. Conversations, even disputes seldom disturb the order of things more seriously than the sound of the brush strokes with which someone clears up a fallen vase. Our parties are wrapped round with table linen of the finest sort, and feminine silver, and the satin bands of etiquette, to keep the primeval forces that are hidden deep in partying, the suppressed
memories of ritual slaughter or human sacrifices, under a lid. Our melodies are bourgeois tunes, at most saucy, and even then you almost need two eardrums to be able to register their ambiguities.

In contrast, what a heathen tumult resonates in Emilie’s breast when, after her nocturnal escapades, still with a hint of alcohol on her breath, she launches into frank songs at the draining board and without looking up senses my presence. She knows my ears are pricked up and that I am wobbling in my shoes from sublime horror, when her filthy words get through to me.

Without really seeing me she suddenly brings her fist right in front of my face.

I can examine the hair on her finger joints, half eaten away by caustic soda or bleach, down to its roots. Stiff, dark-blonde hair, almost man’s hair.

She holds her fist against the tip of my nose.

A soft, continuous grunting churns through her ribcage.

Something inside her is seething through cavities.

For a moment I’m frightened she will start growling like a cat, open her hand and sink her claws in my face. But she just pushes her fist still closer against my nose and grunts: “I says to her, I says, Miss Picture Postcard, stay away from him, he’s mine. And if you’re deaf, sweetie, I’ll draw a cauliflower or two on that little mug of yours.”

I
N HER WORLD
money is “brass”. “A man must have brass and balls,” is one of her sayings. For her my father can’t be a real man. Even though he certainly has more brass than she has ever seen in one place, he probably lacks a lot of the second, while my brother, to judge by the way she can sometimes sit and ogle him when he drinks milk at her kitchen table after school, presumably does have enough virility on board, but is still too young for a fortune of his own.

“Balls and brass,” it gives me a niggling pleasure to repeat the words under my breath as I sit waiting on the couch in the middle of the hall lined with counters in the bank in the Place d’Armes, during my father’s visits. Our walks regularly lead there, supposedly by chance; often they are nothing but a long detour to reach the branch where he has accounts.

Everything that revolves around “brass” bathes in the same atmosphere of euphemism and embarrassment that hangs around bathrooms, bedrooms and brothels. We call money “
des moyens
”, and you have enough or not. When Emilie talks about brass, her speech takes on an indecent flavour, as if she is unexpectedly pulling down your underpants.

She seems to take pleasure in intriguing my brother and me with her coarse vocabulary. Perhaps she does so to mark her territory, like some savages stick the shrunken heads of their enemies on stakes at the edge of their village, but possibly she also sees us as temporary companions in
misfortune, creatures who like her are only noticed when they misbehave.

When, waiting on the couch in the hall with the counters, I repeat her words like that, I taste something like revenge on my tongue. Balls and brass. Everything exudes the silence of cathedrals or hospitals, and coolness, and bathes in the immaterial sheen of travertine. Through the dome that crowns the hall filtered light falls on the motionless palm pots among the couches on which ladies, as motionless, as vegetative as I am, can sit while their husbands or male relations pass their transactions to the clerks on the other side of the balustrade: gentlemen with the self-conscious politeness of lackeys, who speak to each other and the customers in whispers and when they count out sums wear white gloves to muffle even the rustling of the notes.

This is the temple of euphemisms, the antipode to the subterranean caverns where Emilie, I suspect, celebrates her pagan cults.

“Balls and brass.” I don’t know how old I am, it must be shortly before the war, in the vague time just after my first menstruation, that I find myself on one of those benches again one afternoon and am looking at my father, who is making as if to leave. I see that he takes his gloves out of the pockets of his topcoat, but some coins come out with the gloves. Under the cupola the sound of copper and nickel careering across the floor resounds like a curse.

One of the clerks comes out from behind the balustrade like lightning, kneels, quietens the spinning coins with the palm of
his hand, as if treading on flying ants, picks them up and hands them to my father, who is visibly upset. I also see the minuscule but oh-so-sharp mockery on the face of the clerk as he slides the money into my father’s hand.

For years I wanted to re-experience the scene, to rewrite the scene by going up to my father, throwing my arms round his neck and giving him a kiss on his cheek, instead of appropriating that spiteful condescension and in my adolescent way relishing the humiliation he inflicted on my father. A real gentleman doesn’t keep loose change in his pockets.

The incident lasted scarcely half a minute, but for years after I made the naked ring of coins boom through my head like the ringing of the alarm bell.

My father and his fear, of the people “beneath” us, who bought plates, cord, washtubs, matches and household utensils at prices that were almost as cheap as those of the co-operatives which caused him such worries. Under his respect for the upper classes above ours a truth lay hidden that a handful of falling coins could instantly reveal: that he would never be seen as amounting to anything, the eternal grocer; he may be heir to and the conscientious owner of a chain of businesses, but he would always remain a grocer.

Perhaps I visit Emilie in her basement so often in those years to do penance. To allow myself to be lashed by her indiscretions and provocations: I, the flagellant in the family.

“If you’re quiet you can stay, but be quiet, mouth shut,” she hisses. She knows the fat would be in the fire if my mother finds me there in the kitchen too often.

I sit down on the chair where in the mornings a supplier usually waits for a dram and maybe a little more, a grab under her skirts and the accompanying slap or unexpected French kiss, and watch her bring the dish from the pantry, pull off the cloth over it, lay the piece of meat on the chopping block, fetch the knife from the hook under the shelf by the wall, and wait.

I think I have come to hear the blade first slice through the soft muscle tissue, the white and red, the limp pink stone. And she also knows that I am waiting for her to divide the pieces with the heavy cleaver.

She raises the weapon slowly and holds it in the air for a while, until she can tell that in my imagination my head is on the block, closer to her apron.

When she finally brings the cleaver down so that the bone cracks under the iron as if it is my own neck vertebrae, I have long since squeezed my eyes tight shut.

I
N A CERTAIN SENSE
the milieu in which I grew up adopted the sense of duty of the highest classes, the sense of honour from the nobility, but without the hypocrisy that made it viable. And we had transformed the enforced grubbing and hard labour of the workers “beneath us”, out of whose midst we had nevertheless once climbed, into an idea of application and industry, but without the explosions that temporarily destroyed all morality and duty.

Women constituted the coat of arms of all that, the becalmed figurehead, and I cursed it. Working-class women like Emilie enjoyed more freedom of movement, the freedom of the insignificant, than we, precious young ladies of the bourgeoisie, doomed to an existence as a human artistic bouquet: colourful, elegant and dust-free under a glass cover so as not to spoil our maidenly tint.

My way of escaping the vacuum consisted of reading and writing. Others lost themselves in their children or married an older rich man, in the hope of a premature widowhood and accompanying independence.

Some, those who had no other safety valve, competed for a starring role in the varied theatrical programme of hysteria, with its paralyses and limbs full of cramp, its monumental fainting fits and the deliriums which you can find in old psychological manuals, and which you can equally well see as a concise introduction to the dramaturgy of the muzzled femininity of my young days—a Sistine Chapel of bourgeois
pathos. The slightly more acceptable variant consisted of chronic stomach ailments, migraine-related twilight situations and other maladies that required periods of isolation in partly or wholly darkened rooms, punctuated by cleansing rites with alternating hot and cold baths and compresses, powders, infusions and tinctures.

Even my mother could periodically abandon herself to these with a pleasure she herself did not recognize as such. Her periods assumed the character of litanies, full of self-pity and vengefulness. The calamity usually announced itself with hypersensitivity to children’s voices and the tap of cutlery on plates. When she snapped at me or my brother that well-brought-up children never touch the porcelain of the dinner service with their knife or fork, everyone in the house knew what was what. In the kitchen Emilie shrugged her shoulders even higher than before, fearful of the fury that might descend on her. My father let out a resigned sigh. Edgard hit his head with his hand as if he had forgotten an important appointment and I tried to breathe as little as possible.

For the next few days it was as if my mother’s body was sprouting countless fine tentacles. A network of ethereal threads stretched out around her and linked every nook and cranny in the house with her nervous system. The slightest movement was transmitted over that invisible system. Vibrations produced vibrations. Even turning a page in one of my picture books, though they were cut from reasonably stiff cardboard, penetrated to the boudoir next to the dining room, where my mother, supported by a geological formation of pillows, lay on the chaise longue, vibrating with anger.

“Child, use the carpet when you go upstairs. The car-pet! Has no one any respect for my eardrums here? Please, Edgard, do your mother a favour and don’t trot through the house like a pack of dragoons. Put an old tea towel in the bottom of the washing-up basin, Emilie, I’ve asked you a hundred times…” And so on.