Still, I knew she was gone. And I could not even send her notes, or money, the way Mama did. One day she would turn up in a shoe box, or a drawer, or at the back of a cupboard, or in a car boot … with her neck broken, or a bullet in the back of her head.
It’s mid-morning and the sun is blazing in a perfect sky. Over the rocky mountain that forms the curving right arm of the little bay, the hawks are hunting. At first they are so high above the mountain that they appear like specks, floating scraps of blackened paper after a fire. It’s only when they swoop lazily lower that you realise that these are serious killers. They spread their wings and glide lower still, like planes waiting to land. I know they will hunt all day, rising and falling on the thermal air currents, suddenly plunging for the kill. An unobservant creature might imagine them to be wind-blown specks, distant, unimportant and harmless. Such creatures, no doubt, make perfect prey.
Beneath the slats of the wooden jetty the lake water curls and slides like dark green silk. In the sunlight it has a thick folded quality, while in the shadowy corners it ripples like black cream. Ria and Beatrice, the young blonde daughters of the Dutch couple, have removed their tops and are taking it in turns to oil each other’s breasts. The mother, Magda, is tall and auburn-haired with a fussy, aggressive manner; she bullies her blonde daughters on whose perfect faces there appear no traces of emotion. They are as smooth as soap. Magda resents their shining perfection; she sends them back to the hotel time and again for her wrap, her book, for drinks, for more suntan cream. She is one of those curiously shaped women with very long legs, though the upper half of her body is packed into a black swimsuit and has a dense, oblong look. Her bottom is spreading and there are wrinkles around her neck. She wears white mules with thick heels which emphasise the distance between her shaggy footwear, which gives her the look of standing somewhat bizarrely up to her ankles in snow, and the tops of her thighs where rolls of brown and rather leathery flesh mar the line of what are otherwise very good legs. Her husband, Wim, reclines beside her in his deckchair; he wears short white socks and sandals and he studies De Telegraaf through large, gold-rimmed glasses. A handsome man who seems younger than his wife, he is clearly the source from which the daughters derive their blonde good looks. Doubtless this is a constant source of frustration to the mother who gazes down the long length of her legs to where her daughters sit on their towels rubbing oil into their breasts. They have the most perfect breasts. Beatrice must be about seventeen and her breasts have the dense, chubby compactness of peachflesh. Ria would be about twenty or so and is very fully developed. Her breasts have a lovely lolling quality to them, firm yet elastic with delightful natural bounce. Now that they are oiled and gleaming they lie back and close their eyes and offer their breasts to the sun. The mother was beautiful once and that is surely the real source of her dissatisfaction. That is why she bridles at the unruffled surface her daughters present. That is why she harries them for drinks, books, attention. The daughters speak seldom and seem joined in some secret which faintly amuses them. When she can’t stand it any more, the mother pulls the costume to her waist and her pendulous dugs tumble alarmingly into view.
Raoul, the escapee from the Foreign Legion, is watching the girls. He cannot keep his eyes off their breasts. He pretends to be watching the water-skiers, the windsurfers, the hawks overhead, but I can see what he is really watching and what he is thinking. He wears a pair of rather wide, full, very old-fashioned swimming trunks. The impact of those breasts on Raoul’s imagination is being registered in the centre of the swimming trunks which appear to be made from some material resembling old and grubby parachute silk. There I see the pointer or indicator or dial of Raoul’s emotions rising noticeably, deep within his deeply unfashionable swimming trunks. In this manner I imagine Red Indians once raised their tepees. Poor Raoul! Does he not understand that those breasts are not the objects of desire he imagines? They are exposed solely and simply for browning beneath the solar grill. Their aim is not to seduce, they rebuff glances as they would a caress. They are not here for that. His swelling prologue lacks a theme. Uncle Claude would explain what is happening in basic, biological terms. He would recognise that erectile tissues are responding to the stimulus inspired by well-oiled mammary glands. What could be more natural or inevitable? The boy’s organ is responding to signals, a nervous reaction takes place, his penis rises. Simple, natural – and what is natural gives Uncle Claude fierce joy. Doubtless, he would say, the boy’s brain tells him that he likes the look of the Dutch girls, or that their breasts are beautiful, but these are pretty strategems by which we humans trick out brute reality. The girls are just bait, flowers for the bee.
Uncle Claude worships the understanding. He believes it is omnipotent, he believes his own eyes, though of course he is willing to change his mind in the light of the evidence. Evidence means a lot to Uncle Claude, the facts of the case. There were, for instance, the facts of the case of the postboy Clovis and me in the bar of the Priory Hotel a few nights ago. The bar was rather cold and so we were sitting close together in the corner booth with its pink plush benches and marble tables. The ceiling is low and groined, short squat pillars support the roof. Were it not for the bar in the corner you might think you were in a crypt. You’d not be very far wrong because the bar of the Priory was in fact the infirmary of the old monastery where the sick and dying lay under the eye of the infirmarian, according to the very strict rules of the order. For everything in the house of the Carthusians was ordered, written down. Indeed, a visit to the infirmary was likely to be the only time the monk ever left his cell, except for his visits to the chapel for lauds, matins and vespers. For the rest they were always alone in their hairshirts and their silence. Dying, however, was a communal affair, particularly if illness attended one’s departure. Dying was a time of bells. If one was very weak, a time of soup and perhaps a little fish, even a taste of meat, forbidden on all other occasions. When a brother lay dying he entered what they called ‘the agony’; the monks came to pray by him and the Paschal candle smoked in the corner. Now it was Clovis and I who sat in the old infirmary and Clovis had something almost like the agony on him. But there was no priest, no candle, and only Emile the barman fiddling with his drinks up at the other end. As Clovis leaned his head on my shoulder, I held his hand. It wasn’t much but I felt for Clovis and that’s not surprising. The idiot had this enormous black boot he was forced to wear because of the polio he had contracted when a child. His right leg was not more than a stick of bone and he dragged it behind him with a great heavy hoof attached to it which made him walk as if he were continually beginning to climb a flight of stairs and missing his step. The bar was cold, clammy, damp and dull – but we drank beakers of Emile’s coupe maison as if we hadn’t noticed. Clovis had dyed his hair bright green and wore it in a stiff wedge, like an axe-head of grass.
‘The Party is anticipating a wonderful rally in the Square,’ Clovis told me excitedly. ‘The biggest ever. Speakers will come from many large cities. Lyons, of course, and even Paris. You and your family have honoured places on the platform. I am to act as an aide as well as to help direct the cars to their places. The Chief of Police is designating the entire village a parking area. I am to have a new uniform’ – he pressed his mouth to my ear – ‘even a new boot! Of crystal!’
‘People park everywhere as it is.’
‘Yes, but this time no one will be permitted to complain.’
‘The Angel has arranged this?’
‘Naturally, together with the Mayor.’
‘The Angel is a shit.’
‘Bella, I implore you – speak softly.’
Clovis buried his head in my shoulder as if this would hide him from anyone listening.
Note the ostrich logic. The silly fool was at the mercy of the world and as if having to drag around that great black weight at the end of his withered leg were not enough, long suffering had made him simple and his wish to be loved had plac
ed him in irons.
Uncle Claude entered at that moment and believed the evidence of his eyes. He brushed past Emile the barman, who endeavoured to cheer him up or slow him down, or perhaps (am I unworthy in my suspicions?) to ingratiate himself by offering him a ‘cup of the house’ which was, I should say, a subtle blend of lime and kiwi fruit on a base of sparkling wine spiked with vodka and garnished with a sprig of peppermint, an apéritif of his own devising offered with a full heart to guests of the Priory. He needn’t have bothered. Uncle Claude brushed him aside with an expression of exasperation and disgust, as one might reject the salaams of some beggar or street drunk. Just as well none of the guests in the hotel was present in the bar to witness this display of rudeness – not, I fear, that my uncle would have cared a straw if there had been – but I felt for myself, my family and the unfortunate Clovis on whom my uncle bore down with a look of puffy self-importance that made me want to shriek.
He planted himself in front of our table. ‘I’m despatched by your grandmother with instructions to escort you home.’
Clovis lifted his head from my neck at the sound of my uncle’s voice and blinked with the sweet bovine glassiness of a cow lifting her head from the manger. Poor dear fellow! It is true that he pressed close to me. It’s true that he was stroking my arm, but in the way that a child will do, in order to give comfort to himself not to stimulate me.
‘Good evening, Monsieur le Maire.’
My uncle ignored this salute and as he did my look of extreme displeasure mingled, I hope, with contempt. I went with him not out of any sense of obedience, but because I knew he was capable of causing a scene and Clovis did not deserve that. But I ignored the arm Uncle offered me and side by frosty side we passed out into the night. Emile the barman caught my wink and lifted a glass of the ‘cup of the house’ in ironic salutation. Clovis stared after us with bloodshot eyes.
What Uncle Claude hates about Clovis is his limp. His boot. That’s strange, given that my uncle laughs at the foundation of the world and stamps on the fingernails of the divine figment until blood spurts all over his shoes, and shrugs about the heat death of the universe as he blows on his coffee. The sun may expand into a red giant and cook us all, or the universe may reach the outer limits of its expansion, may go into reverse and deflate like a child’s balloon popped at a party, running backwards into a point of singular nothingness – it can do all this and Uncle Claude will look on with a grin and a wink. But show him a boy bitten by a bug in his babyhood and my uncle throws his hands to his eyes and runs away like a medieval peasant faced by a leper. It makes him feel ill, unclean.
‘Nothing distinguishes us from the more primitive life forms – except perhaps the number of accidents in the replication of the genetic material over a very brief period – cosmically speaking.’
You heard him say that? You’re my witness, aren’t you? And I tell you, it stinks. Because it sounds like science and all it is is a complaint about behaviour.
‘Uncle Claude, does a virus have a conscience? Can it sin?’
‘Don’t be silly.’
Do you understand the nature of the lie being told? Every blink of his eyes is a lie.
What drives scientists is the same thing which drove priests long ago. Power. Knowing secrets.
‘Clovis is my friend. That’s all.’
‘The lad’s no good for you. A fugitive from reality. So much space in his attic you could fly owls up there.’
‘The Angel thinks he could be useful.’
‘Monsieur Cherubini, if you please. The patron takes a wide view. Political considerations, Bella, make for unexpected associations.’
‘Strange bedfellows.’
He shivers. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It’s an English expression.’
‘Of course. Someone said that wisdom begins with the rejection of English ideas. The point is that you’re here now with us, in France. Your family. What do you think I feel if I have to go out at night and find you drinking with the postboy in the Priory, which is full of strange types. Some of the worst among the management. Closely followed by some of the guests. If you won’t consider my feelings, think of your grandmama. She feels the responsibility since your mother left.’
We were walking slowly up the hill to our house at the top of the village. The air felt warm and fat and carried the smell of jasmine. In the moonlight the lake kept its large eye on us.
‘I wish you wouldn’t always personalise issues, Bella. For you everything must be individualised. That’s bad because it prevents clear thought. Remember that evolution only takes account of transmissable mutations, exterior forces acting by chance, over time, on strains within the population. Single deformations don’t count. Freaks are a sideshow. Bad science.’
I reach up and touch his neck suddenly in the moonlight and he flinches.
‘You jumped! You’re frightened of freaks, you think you’ll catch something! Shame on you!’
‘Don’t do that, Bella!’
‘I’m your prisoner, aren’t I? Like Gloria.’
‘Gloria?’
‘You know who I mean. I know you stole and hid her. Well I’m not staying for long, I promise you. I’m just waiting.’
‘And for what might you be waiting?’
‘For Mama to come back.’
‘I don’t think she will, you know. She’s left for good.’
‘Then I’ll wait for Papa. When he calls.’
‘From Africa? What makes you think so?’
‘I don’t think so, I know so.’
I knew nothing of the sort but I said it all the same and I made it sound as if I meant it. I think I did mean it.
‘Now, Bella, don’t cry,’ says Uncle Claude. ‘I know it’s hard to be young. I was young too.’
Another lie. My uncle purports to be my father’s younger brother. By five years! What a bloody joke that is. When Uncle Claude was a boy he must have looked exactly as he does now, stooped, lined, his little sharp beetle face pecking at the world. He’d be much shorter then, that’s all, a middle-aged dwarf, who went about terrifying his friends as soon as he could talk. Telling them that there was no bright heaven presided over by a loving father; instead the universe was a dead loss. It wasn’t even particularly majestic, or infinite or filled with zillions of worlds. It was dark, cold, empty and probably stone dead. I saw big-little Claude jumping out of the bushes with questions about whether the universe was open or closed. When he was a young-old man they thought it was closed. Now that he’s an old-old man, they say it’s probably open. Big deal!
Much more important seems to me his complete misreading of Clovis. The boy is too wild, too weak-willed, to be trained for the sort of thing Uncle Claude and the Angel have in mind. His problem isn’t love, it’s drugs. Wherever he gets them, whatever they are, he takes them all the time and jumps on his yellow post-office autocycle and tears up and down the streets of the village like a madman, his face ice-white, the wretched little two-stroke machine bucking and coughing like the sad mechanical incompetent it is, not the modern invention the post office passes it off as. Mind you, to Clovis in his bombed-out, smashed state of euphoria, I suppose it’s a celestial steed, a Pegasus, and he is Hermes, messenger of the gods. His long green hair scything the air has the sheen you see when the wind presses and polishes a patch of grass. He moves too slowly to be much of a danger, except perhaps to the hard of hearing, and the very old, as he putters through the hidden lanes, covered in clematis and ivy, climbing roses and bougainvillaea, which run between and behind the lakeside hotels, and connect the few steep roads plunging to the waterside, riding with remarkable composure, but absolutely gassed to the eyeballs. Owl-eyed, rigid with dignity, out and about on his business as if commanded by some heavenly general. There’s a big number 4 on the front mudguard of his bike. This does not mean that there are three other postboys, no – ther
e is only Clovis, rushing at heaven knows what speeds down what his stoked-up head tells him are the boulevards of his dreams. And likely to write himself off, sooner rather than later. Now the Angel has told him he is also an integral part of their new political movement and that at the very next rally he’ll be in charge of the motorised communication division. What worries me is that Clovis just doesn’t sniff and smoke his drugs, he injects them as well, and he has no money for fresh needles. If hepatitis doesn’t get him, something worse will. Uncle Claude thinks that I make love to Clovis. This shows pretty clearly how very little he really knows about the world. Who makes love nowadays? What I give Clovis is cash intended for clean needles, because I worry about him. But he spends it on more pills and powders. It’s not myself I press on Clovis, it’s my money. The Angel and Uncle Claude and their Party wish to employ Clovis when they have made their revolution. He tells me that he will be dressed in ‘light’ colours when they have, as they say, ‘chastened the channels of communication’ of which the postal services, being the most democratic and closest to the people, deserve the fiercest attention. ‘Pornography clogs the mails just as foreigners bloat the slums’ – that’s the cry of the Party. Clovis and the police chief Pesché, for their own reasons, are recruits to the Party.
My father detested and scorned these dreams. If he could see how the Party has grown in strength, the rallies, the looked-for seats in the Assembly, he would turn in his grave, that’s if he has a grave in which to turn. It’s odd that someone should disappear so completely. His grave is unknown, his memorial service forgotten. Our apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement sold and the officials in Papa’s government department shrugging their shoulders and looking blank whenever we ask them for news of what was happening to him, or where he lay buried, for Papa’s disappearance from the face of the earth and from the memory of the government he served is total. He is as if he never was. ‘Lost in Africa’, the shoehorn official told us after we sold the apartment and he added, as if this would encourage spiritual acceptance, ‘and Africa is a big place’.
My Chocolate Redeemer Page 4