The Parti National Populaire is, against all expectation, increasingly successful and claims it will win seats in the National Assembly at the next election. It has already found favour in our village. Party backing ensured that my Uncle Claude received the nomination for mayor. It was in fact on the day that he was installed in office and took up his sash in the newly renovated mairie that he dropped my bear cup on the kitchen floor, where it did not so much smash but exploded with a dull crump. That day also happened to be my tenth birthday. It was the only time that Uncle Claude actually marked my birthday. In a few weeks’ time I will turn sixteen and I can tell you I won’t be surprised if Uncle Claude celebrates by burning my clothes or hiding my tapes. He insists that I attend the big rally to be held in the village square by Monsieur Cherubini on Saturday. Monsieur Cherubini, says my uncle, is the true guardian angel of the Party and a model for any young person.
‘A paragon of strength, purposeful and honest, a vital force,’ remarked Uncle Claude. ‘A simple, passionate follower of science and truth.’
Men are the fools boys grow into. It’s not enough that Uncle Claude should have spent his life shut away, contemplating the mysterious origins of the universe and then one day think he is fitted for the job of mayor. But he is also determined to woo converts. From his bedroom in my grandmother’s house, where he still lives, he has been catapulted into the brutally refurbished mairie, an elegant house built before the Revolution into which the Guardian Angel has introduced his ideas of preservation. A steel brace supports the roof, great glass panels prevent access to the central courtyard though they allow a glimpse of the gleaming interior, polished like a tooth; the façade is stripped to what he insists is its original severe purity. It looks like the face of an ancient actress caught in the cold light of dawn before she could apply her make-up. It’s cruel, what they’ve done to the old house, even picking out its birth date, 1673, in gold paint on its scrubbed face. My Uncle Claude goes to that place every morning and pretends to be busy. There really is nothing to do. He places the cards showing the temperatures of the day in their wooden slot; he squares off the maps of the lake and the mountains; the timetable for the ferries that cruise between the villages around the lake is moved a little to the left or the right; the prices of the tennis courts and the times of the church services are similarly adjusted and then he sits in his new office for a few hours signing papers. At twelve o’clock he goes to his room and his real work.
Uncle Claude is an atheist and a cosmologist. The order is important because the first depends for proof on the second. He studies the latest developments in the search for the origins of the universe with great excitement. His talk is all of the Higgs Transition. He is determined to prove that belief in God is so much ‘intellectual excrement’. This is Uncle Claude’s mission in life.
‘I have now advanced to the point where it seems to be clear, and will seem to everyone else undeniable, that God has been beaten back to the very rim of time and is clinging there by his fingernails. A terminal figment. It cannot be much longer before he is released from his misery and drops unlamented into the abyss. And the further the faster!’
I do not like this view of things. Taking a different tack, I hear noises, I hear his scream. It changes pitch as he falls. This is called the Doppler effect. A similar observation, applied to the movement of galaxies by the astronomer Hubble, showed the famous red shifts. The red shift told Hubble the galaxies were rushing apart at many thousands of kilometres a second. The most distant galaxies were travelling at the greatest velocities – or, in Uncle Claude’s words: ‘The further, the faster!’ Another is: ‘The earlier, the smaller!’ This refers to the fact that as we trace the inflation of the early universe back through the first few minutes, it becomes smaller and smaller until it gets to a point so tiny it may not exist at all.
What concerns cosmologists is what they call the first four minutes of creation, beginning at zero time, or T equals nought, when the very young universe begins to expand furiously, fifteen to twenty billion years ago. During this very early, fabulous period of expansion there was created all the matter in the universe which became in time the great swirling clouds of gas and dust from which evolved all the galaxies, all the stars, suns, comets, asteroids, planets, all the solar systems, all the heavenly bodies (if we can still use this phrase without embarrassment), all the worlds that are or ever will be. Zero time marks the point when there occurred the unimaginably violent primary explosion known with rather affecting understatement as the ‘Big Bang’. This is the chosen field of Uncle Claude’s enquiry. But in a sense, the bulk of these four minutes is not very interesting to him, for while the most extraordinary things happened in that time the actual business of creation was already under way, the show was running, the clock had started and most of the really important developments took place in a period of time so brief it is quite impossible to imagine. Uncle Claude will say that it was about a millionth of the time it takes light to cross a photon, or the first billion trillionth of a second after Big Bang. But then that’s Uncle Claude’s opinion and of no use to anyone. At any rate the really important thing, it seems, is to get back to the moment when it all begins, to push back through the four minutes to that fragment of time, that alpha point at which absolutely nothing very suddenly became something. It is essential to press back towards this point in order to deal with religious fanatics who claim that no matter how big the bang, someone had to set it off. Who demand to know why there should be anything at all and not just nothing.
‘Childish, metaphysical ignorance! We will answer them once and for all when we can push back to the earliest moments. We can get back now to the fragment of time when the universe was about a millionth of a second old. But that’s very late in the day, Bella. By then, the universe is already about the size of our solar system. The time of the quarks. But we must get back further, to the very first beginnings of the flash. Then we will find answers to what we already know to be the case. The unity of all the forces.’
Uncle Claude believes that in the beginning there was GUT, and in GUT there were contained the four Universal Forces: the ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ nuclear forces, the electromagnetic and gravitational which, in the old times, were one. GUT is also called Grand Unification Theory. Before the creation of the universe and before the beginning of time unity existed in the divine speck of nothing, or next to nothing. And only then. When the speck exploded, GUT went with it, the four forces of the apocalypse broke up and galloped all over the universe. Ever since then people like my Uncle Claude have been trying to put the forces together again.
‘When we do that, we’ll have TOE! The Theory Of Everything! What do you think of that, Bella?’
I think I’d like to smack his face.
Uncle Claude only asks questions to which he knows there are answers. The answers send him crunching towards the ‘shivering figment’ clinging to the precipice of time by his fingernails. The tread of Uncle Claude’s boots echoed through my dreams. In my dreams I saw them cruelly studded, nearing the edge of the cliff where the fingers clutched, the blood blushing beneath the divine nails. I heard the cry as the poor figment plunged into the abyss and I woke sweating and crying and Grand-mère would bustle up the stairs in her pink flannel gown and sit by my side smoothing my hair until I had calmed down. To add further to my fear Uncle Claude made sure that I knew from a very early stage that the universe was not infinite, nor was it eternal. Our sun would one day run out of nuclear fuel, grow into a huge red giant and incinerate all life; eventually it would shrink and grow cool and dark and dead. So would we. Then also there was no point in snatching at some dream of the universe as expanding forever, infinite in size, unending in its glory. The universe had an edge. Astronomers were reaching out further and further with the electronic cameras and would soon be bumping up against the very limit of the universe, millions of light years away.
But what is this edge? Is it w
hat a fly must feel when it is trapped in a bottle and bumps against the sides?
‘Bella, stop being foolish. With you everything is birds or flowers or bees! There is no bottle. There is no fly.’
‘Then what is there?’
‘There is nothing. The universe simply runs out.’
This is it then. At the beginning, according to Uncle Claude, there had been nothing and then the next minute there was something. There was a speck of matter, which exploded, then there was a lump of matter about the size of a grapefruit which kept on inflating and suddenly everything came into being. At the end of space time, says Uncle Claude, where there was something, there will suddenly be nothing.
‘That’s it. There we are. Or rather, there you are.’
He gives an impish smile when he says this, as if his pronouncements contain a delicious irony, but one which can be savoured only by atheist uncles.
‘You ask stupid questions, Bella,’ says Uncle Claude. ‘It’s as well you have your looks, my girl. Because you’re going to need them. There is nothing beyond the edge. Nothing!’
It was in this mood of spiteful glee that Uncle Claude abused me when I was small. Not physically but arithmetically, not with his fingers but with figures. He would watch me slyly, sneaking up on me when I was playing with my doll, Gloria, and he knew I was utterly absorbed. Gloria was a plump, porcelain creature with silly red hair, much darker than mine, and grass-green eyes, perfectly lashed. She was also far older than me and some accident had robbed her of three fingers on her right hand. I played hospital with her, being both the doctor who gravely shook his head and called for bandages at the sight of Gloria’s poor hand, and the nurse who put her to bed and bound the injury. I would feel Uncle Claude’s presence before I saw him because his shadow fell on me as I played in a corner of the garden beneath the great chestnut tree. I wore white often in those days – it made me feel medicinal and Grand-mère would tie my blue sash around my waist in a plump bow, with a matching ribbon in my hair.
My darling Gloria! She lost her fingers in not one but in a series of tragic accidents. Once she had been sailing on a lagoon in Tahiti, leaning back on the purple cushions of a barge and trailing her hand in the water when a shark had taken the fingers. Then she had been waylaid in a dark wood on the way home after selling her grandmother’s last pig at the market, a silver coin clutched in her hand. She ran home to the hovel where her poor, ailing grandmother lay in bed calling weakly for the soup that would save her life when suddenly a cutpurse, reeking of woodsmoke and onions, stepped from the shadows and seized the coin. Gloria bravely resisted and the thief sliced off her fingers with a razor. Finally, she had also been a violin prodigy until a mysterious wasting illness infected her hand and the doctors were forced to amputate – oh! how dreadful! Whenever she heard the Beethoven Violin Concerto her fingers miraculously bled. I began unrolling my precious strip of bandage, rather grubby I fear, and retaining only the merest hint of its old antiseptic aroma. The doctor (whom I became) gave instructions to the nurse (whom I would become) and Gloria’s green eyes shone with love and gratitude.
‘Would you like some of these?’ Uncle Claude’s familiar words when he proposed an assault. And what were ‘these’? These were always the same: golden coins stamped with the head of Napoleon and the frieze of the Arc de Triomphe all silvered with sugar button eyes, or bicycles with spokes so fine you felt they had been spun by spiders – but always chocolate: white, brown, dark, sweet or bitter. He chose his moment. He knew my weakness. How could it be otherwise? Each summer I sailed through the blazing months like some tiny craft on an ocean huge and empty, glittering like a mirror in which I saw few faces but my own. Papa was in Africa, Mama was photographing America and Gloria was ill with a damaged hand. Of course he knew his moment.
And so I went with him to his room. Den might have been a better word. Or lair. There among his books and journals on stars and quasars and mu-mesons, he prodded me with his figures.
‘If nine men with ten wheelbarrows excavate an area of eleven cubic metres in twelve days, how long does it take three men to excavate the same area?’
The warm sweet taste of the chocolate was still on my tongue, guiltily cloying, as I forced my mind to go down this path. I got no further than the first two figures. Never. After that my understanding darkened, sweat broke out on my upper lip. I was lost.
At about this time I began growing my nails. Grand-mère objected: ‘At your young age, you cannot do that. What do you want with long nails?’
‘I’m frightened by some men.’
‘Which men?’
‘Claudistes.’
My uncle gave me that grim and yet strangely happy, tight smile. ‘Come Bella, let me hear you. At least let me feel your thinking.’
I grew to resist this assault. To fight back tooth and nail. I learnt, bit by bit, how to reprove his heated probing and teasing. I thought, yes – I thought of the nine men. Were they fat or thin? Short or tall? I saw their hands calloused from the heavy barrows, their boots thick with the dust of the soil they excavated. Were they married? And did their wives love them? Did they not object to being sent to work by Uncle Claude? Set in motion to satisfy a mathematical whim?
‘What are they called?’
‘That’s besides the point.’
‘What’s their nationality? Are they Turks?’
‘There are no men, Bella. They have no names. They are just words I used to explain the problem to you.’
‘Then shall we say they’re Turks? Or Arabs?’
There it was. They were created by him just to illustrate the workings of numbers. These men could expect no help from Uncle Claude. Just as the poor figment clinging by his nails to the precipice could expect no mercy as the stubborn boots crunched closer and closer, and I awoke crying in the dead of night.
There was also the damn grapefruit. The conceptions of the universe, as I remember them from my earliest years, changed, according to Uncle Claude’s teaching, in the light of new discoveries. When I was very young I remember his saying to me that the universe probably began in its very earliest stages as a lump of matter about the size of a grapefruit, fourteen or fifteen billion years ago. Everything that now is was compressed into this ball. Of course even then, and I couldn’t have been more than five or six, I learnt not to ask what size the grapefruit was, and whether it was the small African variety or the fat pink fleshy fruit from Florida. For I knew the answer to that – ‘Bella, there is no grapefruit!’
Then there was the problem of how life came to be. We came, Uncle Claude taught, out of the primeval soup which existed on the cooling planet aeons ago. In this soup were, among other things, proteins and nucleic acids. Necessity and chance mated in the watery Eden and life grew out of this chemical brew, evolved into microbes and gave rise to us. We are the result of collaborations of the first primitive cell creatures. We are their cathedrals. Cells are machines for translating messages. Molecules associate and life emerges. And what is the meaning of the message contained in the elementary proteins from which we are formed? Why – we are the meaning of the message.
Can you truly say that you’re surprised that I talk, and sometimes walk, in my sleep! ‘Amino acids!’ I cry, to the alarm of my grandmother who speaks no English but rises hurriedly from her bed seizing her black walking-stick with its silver duck’s head handle, knocking over the photograph of Marshal Pétain, and calling on my Uncle Claude to save me from the ‘ameenos!’ whom she believes are in the pay of the hated English. Chains of DNA, pulsing like jellyfish, swim through my dreams!
There you have Uncle Claude’s two lessons. In the beginning, the universe grew from a grapefruit; and man is descended from soup. There is the difference between us. Uncle Claude believes in equations, I believe in God. My problem, too, is that it is a lot easier to believe in God than it is to believe in Uncle Claude. And a lot more interesting. I foug
ht back. I read his books. Reading is revenge! I found out about something called the Planck Wall. It seemed you could go back only so far into the very first moments of the Big Bang; at 10-43 seconds after ignition you hit the wall. Everything broke down. Nothing could get past the wall. Next time he picked on me I said:
‘So what about the Planck Wall?’
He got really shirty then. ‘Who told you about that?’
‘Nothing can get past the Planck Wall. We’ll never know what’s on the other side.’
‘You’re too young to talk about such things!’
One day Gloria disappeared. I think I know what happened. Just as Uncle Claude had smashed my favourite cup, he had kidnapped Gloria, stolen into my room one night while she slept beside me and carried her away. I was so convinced of it I expected a ransom note:
‘Stop lying about the world. Do your sums or Gloria gets it!’
I searched Uncle Claude’s observatory at the top of the house where he scans the heavens for comets – he is determined to have a comet named after him – and where he does his experiments into the origins of life on earth, a smelly mixture of chemicals in a glass tank he calls ‘the soup of life’.
In my dreams Gloria appeared to me in grainy videos, looking thin and pale, with a sign around her neck: prisoner of the claudistes. I’m sure he tried to get her to learn the names of all the subatomic particles, to confess that soon all the world would recognise the historical necessity of the rule of quantum-mechanics.
But I knew my Gloria. She was brave. She had her nursing experience to fall back on. And if she had kept her fiddle she would cheer herself by playing defiant snatches of the Beethoven Violin Concerto.
My Chocolate Redeemer Page 3