The neighbours saw us get back from the beach, us nicely tanned and her a shrimpy pink. They must have been taken aback, and the neighbour’s daughters opposite told mother, go on, throw him out, we’ll help you if you want. She didn’t understand them, smiled and said yes, yes, but they must have seen they were going nowhere fast. Then they ran their fingers through their perms and used me as a translator. They forced me to hear words I didn’t want to hear and made me say things I didn’t want to say. What are they saying? asked mother, what’s she saying? they asked. I’d have shouted, nothing, nothing, nothing, shut up if you don’t understand each other, but mother was already too trapped behind the bars over the window from which she was talking.
Mother told me, what can we do, it’s what God’s written for us, and I didn’t yet think: then that God’s a bastard. He’s left the straight and narrow, but he’ll come back sooner or later, God willing. I wasn’t old enough to think father had strayed so far from the straight path he’d now need a map to find his way back, but that was the door to hope.
By this time I was tired of hearing mother talk about Rosa and Rosa about mother. About father, about both of them, from both sides. Mother had nobody to talk to and she told me Rosa had asked father to send us back to the village, so he’d be alone with her, that this situation couldn’t continue. It was such a mess.
When father was with her he acted one way, and when he was with mother, another. He’d tell Bottle of Butane look, I’ve stopped sleeping with her, she’s just the mother of my children and I can’t leave her high and dry like that, if it weren’t for them I’d have kicked her out long ago. Mother listened to him while she was washing up or passing the mop around and he’d say, can’t you see she’s just a Christian and that it’s you I love, but it’s the way God has chosen to punish you, it’s out of my hands. I’ll get as much from her as I can and that’s all. Can’t you see she helps me make the business run well, she’ll be my secretary and I won’t be in such a state with my papers. She went on mopping and clicking her tongue ironically, suspiciously.
Then I decided to don my cape and breeches again and save everybody, not sure why and not really aware of what was happening.
A piece of paper from my school book, folded in half and pinned to the door of the workshop she had at the bottom of the street. For Rosa, it said. Father came in waving it and I thought this time I’ve really landed myself in it, but I was his favourite and he’d never hit me. No, he’d be angry, but he’d never hit a girl who was his favourite. He was more likely to hit my brothers, or mother.
Did you write this? Did you write this? Answer me! I barely had time to move my head before I felt my nose dripping, cold blood at first, then warm blood pouring out of my nostrils. A sudden, sharp slap, and she said, no Manel, I didn’t give you the paper so you’d hit her, no, Manel, don’t hit her.
I don’t know whether I cried or not, even today I don’t know if he hurt me enough to make me cry, but he did it in front of her, in front of the neighbours, and I’d have rather died than that happen.
Mother said why did you sign your name, you silly? What did you write? Nothing really, I didn’t know if I was crying or laughing, because mother was laughing, nothing very much, it said ‘leave my father in peace, you whore’ and then I’d put my signature. Fa, the fourth note on the musical scale, fabàcies, papilionaceous, fabària, plant.
8
Flying glasses and knives
It has to be said in Bottle of Butane’s defence that thanks to her we celebrated our first Christmas. Mother insisted on forcing me to do housework, teaching me to cook meals that didn’t look like dog sick, which was what she said my stews looked like, to leave the sink clean after I’d rinsed the last dish and not just wash them and leave it full of dirty water and foam. She nagged and nagged. I shouldn’t need to tell you, you should know by now what you’ve got to do. She kept harping on and I kept forgetting and had to be constantly reminded by her what I was supposed to be doing.
Then Rosa would say that girl does too much for one so young, that girl shouldn’t have to work so hard at home, and father would tell mother to let her be, she’s only little. If two weren’t fighting over what I should do, three were, and each took a different line. Mother wanted to teach me to do the things she’d been taught to do, Rosa was simply sorry for me, but not sorry for her own situation, and the only thing father wanted was for me not to bother either of them and accompany him everywhere as always.
We went up in the world just before Christmas. The lady on the second floor, whom we hardly got to know, died. They rented us her place, where lots of things had been left. Things nobody bothered to fetch. It was sad, but we’d gone up in status and that overrode everything else. Despite it reeking of death, smelling because it had been shut up or, worse still, stinking of naphthalene that would never go away. It was on the second floor. That man with the marks on his baldpate and hair combed to one side brought us receipts written in a scrawl you couldn’t read that said what father had to pay. Manel, I trust you, he said, though in fact he never did trust him entirely.
Manel began to do things we’d never seen him do as Mimoun. He said he’d keep renting the ground floor where we’d lived till then because it was so cheap and because his pigeon loft was there. Sometimes mother was more like Colometa12 than Mila, she’d cleaned up so much dry excrement from the wooden planks that were under the pre-fabricated Uralite roofs. Except she’d not come from any war, or so it seemed.
We tried out all the furniture up there that wasn’t new. We immersed all the different glasses in soapy water and mother put them in the dark brown glass cabinet, where you could and couldn’t see them. Everything got cleaner when mother got her hands on it, and I don’t know what I’d have done if it hadn’t been so clean. We no longer had to put our clothes in the dining room cupboard because we had cupboards in the three bedrooms. Reeking of wretched poverty or whatever. Boxes where they’d bred mice and the baby mice made you feel soft-hearted. The washing machine upstairs spun better than the one downstairs, the clothes dried quicker and the clothesline mother had hung in the passage was easier to use than the one downstairs. We could only see the wavy roof of the pigeon loft.
But things were happening downstairs we’d never anticipated. And ‘we’ always meant mother, me and my brothers.
Amazing developments I never imagined I’d see. Father said he was fed up with so much toing and froing so the area of the ground floor that wasn’t office space would be Rosa’s. And her young daughter’s, because the elder one was a racist who didn’t want him to be her mother’s partner and she preferred to stay and live with her grandmother.
And that’s how father decided to see to everything he’d not bothered to see to when we lived downstairs. He plastered the hallway walls again; to no avail, because after a few months they started to ooze and turn a mouldy grey. He got a plumber to come to repair the plumbing, a man who’d not yet gone all paunchy and drenched himself in baby eau-de-cologne. He changed the base of the shower and cemented the backyard, as he was going to install a swimming pool in the summer, he said. He bought a bed, but used the same mattress, a woollen one mother had never worked out how to wash. White flowers entwined on a red background.
But the most amazing development of all happened the day Rosa brought her things to the ground floor. That same day, a few hours earlier, I’d seen father do something nobody had ever done. He’d taken a broom and swept every corner of the apartment, mopped the floor with that soap that smells of forests, dusted and cleaned the windows. And so deftly, a deftness I’d never thought him or any man capable of.
I told mother. I have to wash his shitty pants, the bastard, and he cleans her apartment for her. But I don’t think she said anything to him, at most she clicked her tongue.
Once this new order was established, we celebrated our first Christmas, the only one for a long time. Mother wanted me to be at home helping her, but father said you’ll find it more fun coming w
ith us to buy the Christmas tree, the coloured balls and the lights that blink on and off. I told them at school: we’re celebrating Christmas this year, and everybody must have thought, look, these people belong here now, what an open-minded father they’ve got.
I didn’t know if their type of party was what we organised. Father and Bottle of Butane bought lots of bottles and mother told him if you want to drink, you do it outside my house. Go on, don’t be angry today, it’s better if I’m inside with you than outside, getting up to mischief. And I’ve persuaded her to leave her family to be with us, why should you worry? At least you’ll know where I am. Mother half laughed when father started to dance, swaying his shoulders and flourishing the broom handle to the voice of that woman who sang we’ll go to the city to buy jewels and such like, but Rosa didn’t understand the way he was moving or the lyrics of the song or why we were laughing so much. And suddenly she put on, go, forget my name, my house, my face and don’t ever come back, father knew almost all the words and sang along with her.
Everything was going well, the coloured lights flickered on and off, I was happy to have a tree like that, although mother said how stupid, you’re all crazy.
It must have been very late and everything was going with a swing. I don’t remember what father asked me or if I answered back cheekily, in a way he mostly tolerated because I was his favourite girl. The words came out of my mouth all in a blur, but luckily I had mother there, to react and say leave the girl alone, don’t you touch her. Hit me, if you want, but don’t you touch her. The first thing he did wasn’t to hit me. I was the other side of the dining room and he was hugging his beloved Bottle of Butane when I did or didn’t say something. Father does this kind of thing. If he gets angry, he’ll throw the first thing that comes to hand at you, and that night he suddenly picked the knife up off the table and threw it at me. I didn’t see it coming, but mother did, and she made a kind of block to protect me and not be hit herself. But she was hit, a cut on the elbow that would go on hurting for days, but she’d managed to save my eye, which is where the kitchen knife was heading. My glasses wouldn’t have been enough protection. Then father picked up a glass and said get out of the way, you can see she’s no daughter of mine, get out of the way, I’ll kill her. Mother said go on then, if you’ve got the balls, but me, not her, in the end he smashed the glass to smithereens against the wall. Fragments of glass rained down.
I’d like to be able to remember what I said to him, but perhaps I didn’t say anything at all and he’d just been knocking it back with Rosa too long. Gabar, to praise, gabarrines, a kind of material, gabella, a tax.
9
The show
It was fun going all over the place with father. When it wasn’t term time, we visited sites, visited customers and suppliers and they all said oh, how well you speak the language and you’ve been here no time. We’d go to see pig farms where those animals licked their shitty behinds, and we’d go to see father’s friends.
Mother was still saying it’s not right, a girl should be at home, and he retorted not a daughter of mine, I love her so much I want her with me everywhere. So then we’d visit the men who lived alone near the river. With more stench from tanning than on our street, damper than our house and all as dirty as we’d found father’s apartment when we arrived. There was that friend of his who made us laugh with his jokes about wolves and hedgehogs, with his fringe cut so high he looked like a doll. Did you know, they’re going to throw him out, because he’s a tramp and won’t stay put where he’s supposed to. So round, white-skinned and fair.
There father smoked those cigarettes he first had to unroll and then he calmed down for a good while, stopped gritting his teeth and talked about women we didn’t know and women who didn’t even have names. He’d stretch out in an armchair that had shed its arms and was such a dubious dark colour you’d never have sat there, but he didn’t mind.
Before or after we’d drop by his friend Manel’s house, who’d been called that from the day he was born, not like father. A Manel I liked a lot, bright-eyed, with a fair moustache that didn’t look as if it belonged to him. Who made you laugh, not at his jokes, he made you laugh. In Manel’s place, father or he would take out dark brown bars they called chocolate, but I never tasted any because they never invited me to try. Then they’d take a very small lump and burn it in the hollow of their hand. They mixed it with tobacco and rolled a cigarette with butterfly-wing paper. Go and play with my daughter, Manel, Manel said, and Mimoun said, off you go, she’s got lots of toys. And they never gave us any chocolate.
But the most fun was waiting for the October fiestas in our barri. We played at breaking the piñata and if we hit it right, a shower of sweets and confetti fell on our heads. I never won anything in the drawing competition, but we joined in the sausage and chocolate binges. I especially looked forward to the day of the show.
That year Rosa was angry because father took mother and not her. Mother didn’t want to go anywhere like that, but father said don’t you argue with me and even took her to a hairdressers, where they couldn’t think what to do with that strange hair of hers and she still looks at the photo and thinks good heavens, how stupid I look with that pigtail up there. It’s the fashion, they told father, but she was used to gathering her hair with a hair slide at the nape of the neck and parting it to the side, making waves with olive oil at the top, and not frizzing it at the top.
We were there all night. Father with a plastic cup he’d fill now and then, sitting on folding wooden chairs and watching the girls walk by wearing next to nothing, lots of feathers and stones glinting on their bras and knickers.
Mother said I don’t want to see this, let the children come home with me. Wait a minute, dear, better not leave me on my own, you know I end up in a bad state if you leave me alone. But look at them, they’re dead tired, and he said all right but the girl stays with me, right? I said yes, trying to hide the interest that spectacle aroused in me, an interest that wasn’t normal in a decent girl. After mother had gone, a girl dressed as a man came out with a chair. She shimmied around, stripping off bit by bit and all I could think was how far was she going to go, if she’d stop at her bra and knickers like the other girls or what. The men around me kept shouting and whistling and father tried to look as if he wasn’t interested.
I don’t know if it was the spotlights that made the girl’s thighs shine or her oily skin or not knowing whether she’d strip off entirely or not, but it was the first time I’d felt something stir in my groin. All the gentlemen seemed completely captivated by the charms of the girl who swung round and started to undo the clasps on her bra with a flair and panache I’d never seen in any woman. She swivelled round, still holding the loose bra against her breasts, everyone held their breath while she wondered whether to take it off or not. Will I, won’t I, she went as she danced, then swivelled round again and threw the garment over the heads of her audience, her hands still covering her breasts. She addressed the audience again, et voilà!, greeting them with open arms, her breasts so firm they didn’t budge. Stripped almost naked, teetering on her high heels, she started to stroll among the spectators in the front row, father included. She came so close he must have been able to sniff the bottom of her soul, but then moved off and finished her act by whisking her knickers off, with her back to the audience and her hands touching the ground. She turned round and, modesty incarnate, covered herself, but decided to walk very sveltely across the stage while we all, absolutely all of us, held our breath until we saw her slip through the curtain.
Then came the act by the effeminate boy who wore his trousers so tight you could see which side he slotted his member. All sparkle and glitter, like a bullfighter, and accompanied by another girl. In principle he was supposed to make people laugh, and excite them, but father probably thought he’d strip off. So he said go home, rather angry at this unexpected twist in the show’s programme.
I got into bed thinking I wasn’t excited by a naked man or by a man wi
th his testicles in a tutu. Maybe I was old enough for this kind of thing, because I couldn’t not touch myself down there and stifle a faint moan against the pillow. Although I’d had my first orgasm it wasn’t enough to get rid of the poltergeist. I went on with my reading. Ha, very difficult to define; habeas corpus, that’s a kind of immunity; hàbil, able, suitable, skilled at something.
10
Ants
There once was a time when nobody asked where father’s troubles came from. We no longer heard magical or determinist explanations or any other kind, because we’d long ago banished from our lives all those people who gave us light relief and cause to hope. Even mother went on less and less about the straight and narrow and whether he’d come back to it or not.
Rosa no longer lived downstairs, she said the neighbours gave her evil looks and he’d never send us back to our village. Your father does a lot of damage, you know? What I didn’t know was why all father’s women insisted on telling me what he did to them and how nasty he was. What did they expect me to do?
Father occasionally slept at home, only when he brought clothes to be washed, and we didn’t know if we were half-orphaned or not. I still don’t know if that was punishment for mother: waiting for him to come so she had money to go shopping, relying on us as her only interpreters and links to an outside world that scared her so.
Nevertheless, I think she was at her calmest then. She did the usual. She got us up, gave us our clean clothes before we showered, then complained that we still wet the bed. You started doing that here, she said, things were different before. When we went to school she carried on the same routine: tidying the dining room, starting with the table, where we’d covered the oilskin top in little circles of milk from our cocoa drinks, sweeping, mopping, washing up and tidying the kitchen. Loading and emptying the washing machine, hanging out the washing, cooking lunch, kneading bread and baking it as best she could in that kind of frying pan, that’s not the same, I know, but it’s all I’ve got.
The Last Patriarch Page 15