by Jean Frémon
“He’s got a point Sam; be a sport.”
“OK, OK, so there are different kinds of social responsibility . . . But, you — you should get back home, Louise,” he says. “It’s not the weather to be hanging around outside. Three hundred and forty-seven people have already died of this ghastly heat — you want to be number 348?”
“Always preaching! Do I stick my nose into your business?” I say. “You should be worrying about that old clunker of yours, getting that bumper fixed. Its days are numbered — it’s frankly dangerous — a real hearse! I’ve never seen a yellow hearse with checkered stripes before!”
“375-1515, Louise, just call me anytime, if you need anything — Sam’s always there for you. And Jerry — what’s he up to? Why does he let you loose in the streets in such weather?”
“Jerry’s in Paris, having a fine time, no doubt. At this very minute, he’s probably at the Flore ogling the girls. Do you know Parisian women, Sam? Their legs! You don’t see that from a lousy taxi that never gets beyond Lower Manhattan. Not your usual fare — lovely young women with slender legs perfumed with Shalimar and laughing over private jokes — eh?”
Jerry is in Paris. And before that, he was in London. Jerry is installing the exhibition. In London, in Paris, everywhere, Jerry has become the exhibition installer, and you, you’ve become a spinner of yarns. They call them sculptures because they’re made of marble or iron or wood, but they’re really yarns, brief stories from the past that got stuck in your throat, pills that wouldn’t quite go down; you blurt them out, mumble them, ruminate over them. And then they show them in Paris. Ah, how you would once have loved to go to Paris, to show all of Paris your stories of iron, marble, and wood. Too late. There’s a time for everything, and that time has passed; you don’t travel anymore.
Jerry phones every day; he talks, you listen, you say nothing. He knows better than you. You don’t say anything, but you want to know everything; you’re all ears. The sculptures that nobody wanted ten years ago — not even in New York, where everything and anything is accepted, even lauded, and more loudly than anywhere else — and now they’re doing a retrospective, putting them into custom-made packing cases with infinite care so that they can be zoomed off in a plane to the four corners of the earth, insured for a fortune. Huge crowds will show up to see them. Your stories ignite controversy all by themselves, you don’t need to go along to fan the flames. But the revenge is insipid — it’s come too late. Teenagers lionize you; to hear them, you’d think you were their dream grandmother, another Miss Daisy, and you, you’re only thinking about how to get back at all those who are long gone. All underground somewhere in Choisy, Sceaux, or Antony. But in trying to do one thing, one in fact often does another. That’s life; you bow to it, you doff your cap, as if to say “Who makes the rules here?” It’s certainly not you; you only bow to them, polish marble, carve gashes in wood, and send messages to the dead that the living intercept. That’s revenge. What good would it be to go to Paris, eat petits fours, smile to all around, bow down to the ministers? No, the signs are better here.
So you take out the old photo album for a bit of nostalgic cure. There’s Louison between Father and Mother on the steps of the Promenade de la Mer at Le Cannet. Louison is wearing a beret and black bobby socks, Father and Mother, wearing hats; one leans on a cane, and the other on her umbrella. The ensemble creates a hybrid creature with eight legs. And here’s Father in his chair in front of the fireplace in the living room, under the bust of Marie Antoinette. And Mother reading, leaning her elbows on a small round table in the tapestry shop. And here’s you again, at Choisy, alone and looking lost in the park in front of the house. It was the day of Pyrame’s funeral — how could you possibly forget that? And Louison as a geisha, in a large flower print silk kimono with a paper umbrella on your shoulder. And again at Le Cannet, one day when you went to visit Bonnard, and you and Mother went to great lengths to impress him. Photographs engender nostalgia, it’s their nature.
The beings that you miss. Isn’t missing what all human beings do? Isn’t it what they know how to do best? And to be missing. To betray you, deceive you, leave you, and leave you missing them. With beings, don’t put the bar too high; you just end up kicking yourself. For a long time, I kicked myself. OK, true, you must admit, it was you who left; it was you who put an ocean between you, between you and those beings, and it was you who seemed shocked to find that you missed them, and that you miss them still. But isn’t that why you left, because you were already missing them, because you’d never managed to do anything but miss them, because they were, in fact, impossible to keep ahold of. You said, “Hold me, in your hands, in your arms, with a word.” You said, “Do something, by God, just do something!” And they said, “Bon voyage! How lucky you are, going to America — don’t forget us! Write!” Not a gesture, not a word, not the one word you waited for, never. That’s the way they insult you; that’s how cheeky people can be. So you left, cursing them, sobbing away entire days, braiding and unbraiding your hair, that hair that fell far below your waist, your childhood hair, your hair from back there, never cut. You brought France with you in your hair. You dried your tears with your hair. You tore your hair out as you sobbed, then you brushed it slowly and braided it again. And you drew tangles of hair, endlessly, with a bamboo tip dipped in ink. In the hope of finding peace. For a moment at least.
You dried up. You felt the cold, a dry cold, rising inside you. A cold and a drought that cut you off from the world. You thought you’d die if something didn’t happen. Die just like that, from not being able to live. Die of cold and drought. Die from being cut off from the world. There was nothing to do but let it go, the cold, the drought, the being cut off, and then it would happen. You remembered the cold of the Bièvre when you’d leapt into it to complete the being-cut-off, to finish the abandonment, to end the dying that was life. The same cold, as if the water of the Bièvre ran in your veins and paralyzed you.
So you went up onto the roof. To escape. The roof — it’s also the sky. The huge pale blue sky of Manhattan in winter, very high, very pure. The roof held the temptation of the void. And each time, the small victory of not giving in to it. A strange way of gaining a foothold. You remember in summer feeling the soft, black asphalt of the rooftop under your feet. In a corner near the chimney stood your stock of wood, long narrow pieces, sheltered. You picked up each piece, one by one, turned it over, felt its weight, and when one of them stood out, calling to your hands, you began to carve it, turning it into a small person, an impoverished understudy, an avatar, an ersatz, call it whatever you want, a pale replica, a placeholder for one of the beings that we love — or don’t love — but that we miss, that we’ve always missed. Finally calmed, resigned, the blood having little by little warmed up in your veins, you came back down into a world in which everyone went about his own business, miles from imagining the journey you had made among the shadows of the past.
Little by little, you reconstructed a small family by proxy. Some appeared as couples, with one leaning in toward the other, as if listening, while others resolutely refused proximity, draping themselves in their supposed dignity, the borrowed dignity of a small wooden person.
With the fragile feet of the uprooted. Like you. In fact, they’re all a little bit you — how could they not be? At first they had no bases, no plinths, no stands, so that you either had to stab them into the ground or lean them against a wall to stand them up. You liked the latter solution because it was precarious. You took them out, you put them back, you hauled them around from place to place, cradling them in your arms like children, like animals, and you lined them up along the wall of the house. Which made you see them anew, lined up like that, like prisoners, like hostages. A bit off-balance. And still stand-ins. Frail substitutes, lacking the solidity of their originals, those traitors, those whom you’d always been wrong to love. And always been wrong to wait for their love. Father, mother, brother, sister. Ah, but that’s not to say that Mother betrayed
you — goodness itself, and patience, and wisdom, but you’ll miss her now for good, gone one beautiful morning in 1932.
I still tremble when I think about it. I cry her name on the stairway like I did back there in the big house in Choisy. I still hear the stairwell echoing with my cries. During the two or three weeks that Father thought appropriate for a display of measured and ebbing grief, he regarded me as a wild animal that it was probably better not to try to tame. For those couple of weeks, he stopped going out in the evenings; he put playing cards, drinking with friends, and flirting with the maid all on hold. But little by little and one by one, he resumed his usual occupations.
So, into the Bièvre, at the bottom of the garden, with no warning, plop! fully dressed; you can still feel the cold going straight to your bones. And then, of course, Zorro arrived, there in an instant, throwing himself into the water to haul you out. What a hue and cry! From that moment on, his only thought was to get rid of you. Foist the problem off onto someone else . . .
Why the staircase? Go figure. You cried. At the foot of the stairs. Crushed. Later, you made flights of stairs that went nowhere. For no reason except to express the grief of a stairway. The oppression of a stairway. Seven or eight wooden steps that rise, that crush you. Behind one of them, you’ve hidden a red heart, red and large, in wax. At the foot of your stairs, there’s a small crushed person. Crushed because abandoned. You don’t see her, but she’s there, always, at the foot of every stair. No one sees her, but you know she’s there, crying in silence. Abandoned.
Mother was the only person with whom you felt secure. The warmth, the intelligence, the tolerance. She was never in the dark about Father’s affairs. She wasn’t fooled for an instant. Father had decided that we, my brother, sister, and I, were going to speak English, and this, of course, also applied to the two little cousins. He decreed that, therefore, we would have an English governess, and everyone agreed. He left for London, where he had connections and clients, saying that he knew just how to find and bring back the pearl that could teach his children. He talked Mother into it, saying that it would spare her this trouble and leave her with no obligation but to love us. She’d be free to go to the theater in the evenings and to travel. Said despite the fact that Mother quite clearly had no yearning for the ports of the world nor for the world of the stage. And not long after, Father was joining Sadie in her room at night, and their knowing looks across the family dinner table relegated the rest of us to the sidelines. You’d hear them giggling on the stairs, brushing up against each other in doorways. She simpered; he swaggered. She sashayed; he strutted. She played hen, and he, rooster. You looked at Mother, who looked away. Mother pretended to be on top of the situation — which pretty much amounts to being on top of it if you can’t change it. And maybe, in a certain way, it even worked for her. Go figure . . .
And yet she was more than a little satisfied when she whispered in my ear with a knowing look, “I’ve been to his room . . .” A woman’s revenge.
*
She’s always been in my drawings, in the form of a spider. People don’t usually like spiders — they’re afraid of them. Women leap onto stools and scream, and men step on them with the self-satisfaction of having done a good deed.
But you, you love spiders. They’re beautiful, they’re clean, and they manage to be simultaneously both quick and calm. They wait, motionless, in corners, never flustered, never obsessive, never hysterical; they’re serene beings, holding themselves apart, watching. With an animal patience. And they destroy various things that make life unbearable, such as flies and mosquitoes. Ah! the mosquitoes in Easton! How we could have used a good herd of spiders! And it must be said that they take good care of their young. You watch them, in the garden, in the attic, on the stairway, in the basement. They’re not all the same. You identify them and describe their varied behavior. Once on a trip to Paris, you found an encyclopedia of the spiders of the world at Boubée & Co. and brought it back. You have your favorites — more on that later — you don’t need it all at once; have a little patience, dears.
Molly, the woman who comes in twice a week to try to restore a little order, just doesn’t understand. She’s not allowed to touch a thing, and above all, not the spiders or the spiderwebs. She pushes the vacuum cleaner vaguely around in the center of the rooms, avoiding the corners. “Raising spiders — good Lord — that’s not Christian. If spiders aren’t the Devil himself, they’re at least his ambassadors,” she declares. In the large house where you now live alone, they spread out, proliferating from the cellar to the attic. You think of Mother watching over her brood. There she is; you see her in the corner, watchful, on the lookout, ready for sacrifice. You never get tired of drawing her; you’re drawing Mother.
Mother was also a kind of weaver. She was in charge of repairing the tapestries that Father bought on his routine visits to castles in the vicinity. Visits was the term he used; it seemed apt — and each time, a new affair. Once the tapestries were restored, he sold them in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. All the while, Mother was hunched over her work, wielding her needle. Petit point. How you admired her patience, her application.
In the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells us how jealous Minerva was of Arachne, the Lydian, so famed for her skill at weaving. But Jupiter’s daughter didn’t punish Arachne for her talent as much as for her insolence in so accurately depicting the turpitudes of the Olympian gods. Jupiter, Neptune, Phoebus, Saturn, the great, the beautiful, the strong, the wise, the super-duper, all quite happy to disguise or transform themselves into bird or snake in order to take advantage of the first nymph who came along. Suddenly, the spotlight was focused on their mischief and duplicity.
It was to defend the family honor that Minerva destroyed Arachne’s work. And the latter, humiliated, tried to hang herself by one of her threads, when Minerva, suddenly magnanimous, saved her, but, because every debt must be repaid, she condemned her to stay suspended at the end of her thread, then sprayed her with a poison, specially got up by Hecate, that ate away at her little by little, shrinking her until she was no more than a belly with eight scrawny legs, which she nonetheless kept working in order to weave the web that would be her refuge from then on.
The web, a marvel of design. You loved the logarithmic spiral obliquely intersecting the vectors radiating out from the center, getting ever closer to it without ever reaching it, endlessly circling in, tighter and tighter, barely discernible. Glory to the universal geometer. And in the morning, with the dew on it, what light . . .
Mother, the weaving princess — I see her diadem. And the frolicking Olympian gods, if I know them . . . At the beginning of the century, the tastes of the New England upper class who bought Father’s tapestries for their neo-Gothic apartments on Park Avenue (with paneling imported directly from the Périgord) were rather puritan. Love was OK, but sex, no. So, from all the bacchanals in the forests and on Olympus, the corpus delicti — the genitals — had to be removed. Mother cut them out, excising them, censuring them. And, as they discovered that you were gifted at drawing, it fell to you to draw the leaves, fruits, and branches that would replace the sexual organs of satyrs and lovers. Mother kept the woolen sexes she had so artfully removed in a cookie tin, the lid of which was printed with a fête galante à la Fragonard, hinting with delicious euphemism at the censored details that had replaced the original cookies. It was your job to create the appropriate foliage and then to arrange it to fit the resulting gap. Mother would then weave it into place.
Father lit his pipe, tucked his thumb into his watch pocket, and verified that the substitution had worked; the crime had been masked over, and his sale was secure. “Well done, Louison,” was the usual compliment. Terse with compliments; profuse with mockery.
The photographer Nadar wrote a short story titled “The Spider.” A friend brought me a copy from Paris. In it, we see the narrator going out in the middle of the night, candle in hand, to a shed at the bottom of an old garden. As he walks in, he sees an entire nest
of spiders scurry away. One alone, enormous, stays where it is, on the wall, and stares at him defiantly. The man raises his candle and lights the spider on fire, and as the glistening body writhes and sizzles on the ground, Nadar hears the spirit of the myriapod — is it a myriapod? I’m afraid not, eight legs, that’s not enough — say to him, “I ask nothing of you, I cost you nothing, and I serve you like one of your closest friends for nothing, and you hate me, you iniquitous man!
“I have taken it upon myself to deliver you from flies and their relatives, which would eat you alive if it weren’t for me; I do whatever I can to make your summer nights peaceful and your warm evenings lovely, and I even at times thwart the horrible bacteria that are about to kill your best-loved child. But you find me ugly, and to reward me for my services, you murder me with impunity — and it’s fully within your rights, you being the stronger. Murderer! Coward! Ingrate! Imbecile!!!”
Wednesday, September 14, 1932, an Olympian god, a murderer, a coward, being ungrateful, imbecilic, or merely jealous, struck Mother with his decree.
You find her again in spiders that you draw and those that you observe. You keep a catalogue of spiders, a catalogue of mothers. You use your finest handwriting to copy out passages from the Boubée encyclopedia. Copying out the description of a species of spider has become a kind of ritual; it’s a little like tending your mother’s grave. You live by proxy among the spiders.
Copied from the Boubée encyclopedia:
The male diadem spider signals to the female by rhythmically vibrating one of the strands that anchor his web. This string serenade seems to diminish the female’s dangerous tendency to devour anything it sees. She freezes, as if hypnotized, bewitched, and then the musical male gingerly makes his approach . . . and honors his spouse. The act completed, he beats a hasty retreat and is never heard from again, while Madame seems to wake up from her dream and, little by little, get back to hunting.