The Shattered Sky

by Bernard Uzan

  If Monique calls me I’ll hang up on her … I hope old Richard will call so perhaps I can make fun of him, make him hope that something is possible, that I’m thinking of him and would like to see him again and then laugh at him; perhaps I can also make him suffer… An old man with white hair who could be my father and looks like my brother, kneeling in front of me with his head between my legs. That never did happen to me but it must be quite surprising; well not really. It’s actually pretty disgusting.

  “Dad, let’s wrestle!”

  “No, not tonight. I’m too tired! But you can lay down next to me if you want.”

  And he took me in his arms and we took a nap and I believed it was someone else caressing my cheek, who was holding me in his arms; I got a bit scared; and what if it was a different man who would take advantage of me and do things; they say you must be wary, you never know the kind of person you can encounter. Perhaps it’s another man who is wearing my father’s mask and is taking advantage of me. I’m sure another man is wearing my father’s mask, and it is not my father, because I believe I was adopted when I was young. Yes, I know, every child thinks that but in my case I know it’s true.

  I often looked at pictures of myself when I was younger to see whether I resembled someone in the family but I don’t, I don’t look like anyone… So? Then I dream sometimes of things I can’t repeat to anyone. I often have a wonderful dream I think about:

  I’m thirty and I’m walking along a blue beach. I’m no longer limping and actually I never did limp in the past. I’m very good looking and women, all the women, look at me and smile, and I start running very fast and they’re all running after me but they can’t catch up with me because I’m running on the water, so they remain on the beach yelling and screaming out of frustration.

  There are scores of women. Then they take off their clothes and are stark naked and show me their bodies by posing seductively and I ignore them and keep on walking on water without looking back. I walk, I walk, at times I fly using my arms as wings and I look at them from above, from high up in the sky, they are completely naked, and I am still flying and I reach a different land where scores of other naked women are also expecting me. They applaud when I touch the sand, they scream that I’m so beautiful, that I was the one they were waiting for and then they all jump on me as if they want to devour me. I close my eyes and feel great warmth overtaking my entire body, I shiver and I smile. If my Daddy knew what I’m thinking about when we take a nap together he’d be very angry!

  Maybe I’ll tell him someday; maybe he’ll think its fine and he’ll also tell me stories about naked women… I read in a book that sex begins at birth, so it’s not because I’m unable to walk, I’m a cripple, that I’m not supposed to have any desires. Once, while they were having dinner I found in Dad’s dresser under his shirts some pictures of naked women and men touching each other and doing revolting things, so he must have quite a few stories to tell. There were dozens of pictures but I didn’t find pictures of Dad and Mom. I must admit that I felt heat and shivers all over my body…

  My maid Pina’s voice interrupted my pleasure as I was looking at those pictures: “Dinner is served!”

  My mother must always bother us just when…

  Madam my mother with her beauty, her servants, her lovers, her children, her husband, in that order of importance…her this, her that, her other…

  I hate Madam my mother.

  When I think that right now she’s in the hospital in a public room, alone like a poor woman, and that they all turned away from her, her lovers, her friends, her family, her brother, all of them fearful of having to do something, perhaps even to offer her some help. They just ignore her like they ignore me; we don’t exist, we should have, we should, we must disappear, and we represent nothing. They all go on with their mediocre little lives and let my mother go on with hers. She’s no longer young, nor so beautiful; she no longer dresses fashionably: she looks like a poor Jewish woman who works as a cleaning lady. She had all of Tunis at her feet. Now she’s kneeling at the feet of the whores in the rue St. Denis as she shortens the hems on their skirts for a few francs.

  She, who never was a good mother, has now become the mother of all the hookers in the rue Blondel: they confide in her. Those ladies who come from just about everywhere and wind up in the same street have a personal story, always an original and pathetic one to tell. They talk about their childhood, their family, sometimes about their children. They all say they won’t be in this business forever, that it’s only a passing moment in their lives, a stage, a pit stop so they can finally organize their lives. They tell Mom the complicated stories of their pimps: Yugoslavs, Arabs, Senegalese, or Corsicans. They describe their customers with their habits, their manias, their obsessions, and their perversions in the greatest detail. Mother, who suffers from asthma, must work all day in a smoke-filled miserable little shop with her packs of Marlboro that she’s chain smoking and mixes with the smoke of the cigarettes smoked by those half-naked ladies who stop by to purchase sexy dresses and skirts, or request that she shorten the hem but rarely to make it longer…

  As they all cough together, the ladies have coffee with Mother, whom they have nicknamed Mami, and relax between customers as they confide their joys and sorrows and Mother, who had always been thoroughly incapable of managing her own life, is now the special counselor and confidante of a bunch of two-bit whores. She works from eleven in the morning to ten at night and then returns to her hovel a few doors down the street near the Porte St. Denis. She lives in two rooms on the sixth floor of a dilapidated building, drinks coffee with milk all evening, smokes nonstop, and eats only canned food. Her only remaining pleasure in life is her poodle Pamela, a big change since she used to hate animals before but now adores this ridiculous little dog and treats it better than she would a child. She feeds it filet mignon that she can’t even buy for herself, gives her a bath, brushes her hair, dresses her in winter coats and even in summer clothes and looks at it smiling with happiness.

  And I, the unemployed actor, am unable to offer her any kind of help.

  Now that her beauty has vanished, that her pride is defeated, that her bad temper is dissolved, she finally needs me, she hangs on to me; without me she has nothing left!

  She was never able to defeat me; she was never able to conquer me.

  Poor mother, now I look at you, and…. I can’t even speak, I’m overwhelmed with remorse, with pain, with emotion, it wasn’t your fault, you… you knew nothing. You had been thrown into life like some kind of beautiful piece of merchandise; you were only a young Jewish-Italian girl from Tunis, with an abusive, alcoholic father who was actually half crazy, a barbarian. He had the gall of having himself called Papi and even tried to impose his madness on Fabien and on me but Dad stopped him immediately.

  “Nino this is my house! You shall respect my rules or you will no longer be welcome here.”

  My father and Papi Nino never spoke again and we practically never saw him but the stories of his extravagant behavior remain in everyone’s memory.

  Mother, do you remember the cakes he used to throw out the window every Sunday because his wife, your mother, complained that he had bought too many? After three Sundays of that circus all the kids in the neighborhood were waiting outside the window for the rain of cakes and that lasted for several months.

  Angelina, my Mami, your mother tried to defend you but couldn’t really do anything against the Barbarian. Angelina, my grandmother whose name means little angel in Italian, with her sweet compassionate face where you could read the signs of pain left by her years spent with the Barbarian.

  Her face exuded a gentle kind of wisdom and resignation, but also the silent rejection of any compromise. Every other Thursday afternoon Mami Angelina used to come and pick me up at home to take me to the La Royale tea room for cakes. I would go with the greatest pleasure because I enjoy being with my Mami. I love the cream puffs and chocolate éclairs. I even agree to have Pina disguise me in
a sailor suit and comb my hair with a part on the side so I look like the little Prince.

  And best of all my Mami used to come with a horse-driven cab.

  I’m always hoping it will be a white horse. They get me settled into the cab and Mami sits in front of me and we’re off. Mami looks at me and smiles. I smile at her, the horse trots off slowly and I can hear the Sicilian coachman whistling between his teeth and from time to time he yells out to stop the horse or drive him on faster. I’m in a stagecoach and look down on the passersby and I’m so proud. Mami is also happy to enjoy a short moment of rest away from Nino, far from the silence she has chosen. Forty years of silence with the barbarian…

  But from time to time she says to him in a firm voice that I can still hear:

  “Nino, ma basta! Enough! Let your wounds heal. You’re not the only one to have suffered; let life take its course; look at the sky in a different way.”

  My grandfather would listen and calm down for a few minutes; then Nino the barbarian would take over once again. He breaks his own son’s arm with a stroke of his cane only because he expressed the desire to accompany him to a soccer game. No one was allowed to say a single word in his presence; he must have thought of himself as Mussolini, that nut case, so then, Mother, no one allowed you to be or to express yourself or give the possibility of becoming a real person? The idea of love had been poisoned in you at birth.

  So the beautiful young maiden you were was married off at seventeen to escape the abuser, the soul breaker, the barbarian. Your new family, Dad’s family, didn’t help you understand life and its ways any better. They were a Tunisian family while you were of Italian origin. A Tunisan family with a multitude of brothers and sisters and a hoard of children. It was a patriarchal system where the grandfather rules with an iron hand in a velvet glove over his family and its affairs… Nothing escapes him; he controls everything but with kindness, wisdom, and understanding, especially when you agree with him. He even keeps watch over the melons and watermelons that he hides under his bed that no one is allowed to approach or even look at… Everyone knows they’re there under his bed and waits with undisguised impatience for the great day to come. Finally the whole family, some forty people in all, is present in the big room where we generally celebrate Passover because the great day has arrived. I’m sitting on a big wicker armchair. Papi Isaac arrives as proud as a conquering general; he is wearing his white silk djellabah, used only on special occasions, with a satisfied smile on his face and he carries a huge watermelon draped in a white cloth as if it were a precious child. He places the watermelon on the table, touches it a little, pressing his fingers on the most sensitive parts; he leans carefully over it and finally gets his ear closer to it as if he were hoping for a heartbeat. Finally without averting his eyes he asks for the knife with the mother of pearl handle that they hurry to bring him. With the precision of a surgeon he cuts open a thin long and longitudinal slice of watermelon, puts it in his mouth, and begins eating and chewing on it slowly….

  The flies stop buzzing around and land on the furniture near the watermelon; there’s not a sound in the room; we’re all holding our breath awaiting the verdict… Only my grandmother, who is tired of that circus and must have seen this and other nonsense many times, opens her snuff box and snorts loudly a few times, rolling her eyes, barely able to contain her impatience….

  After chewing for one or two minutes my grandfather turns toward us; he has a big smile on his face and we are all relieved because he’s happy. He looks at us all for a long time and finally announces solemnly:

  “The watermelon is ripe and we can eat it.”

  Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and starts talking all at once. Papi Isaac now cuts the watermelon in long strips and I must say it is very beautiful with its three colors, green, red, and black. The children run up to ask for a slice, the parents comment on the taste of the cucur-bitaceous plant, the older ones are comparing it to the taste of the watermelon from the week or the year before; we’re happy, we’re all family, we share the same pleasures and we are all watermelon experts.

  I look at my mother, who doesn’t seem to understand what is going on; my father is sitting in a corner, silent and with other things on his mind.

  Poor mother, did you have your place in that strange world? Did you trade the insanity of the Barbarian for the craziness of the watermelon eaters? Poor mother…you knew nothing, you understood nothing, and now you are nothing.

  I remember how much I spied on you, I remember… I used to hide under the bed to listen: she is making a phone call, she is calling her lover; I had a hard time getting under her bed; first I had to put down my crutches, then I had to lay on the floor and crawl under the bed pulling and dragging my legs but I’m sure she will call so all this effort will not be wasted; she’s going to call Carmelo.

  “Hello, Carmelo, is that you, darling?”

  Why is she calling him darling? What gives her the right? I should be able to get up and hit her across the face with my crutch, to teach her, to show her that you don’t call someone else darling.

  And now she’s laughing, a big, hearty, and throaty laugh.

  What can he be telling her to make her laugh so much? A lot of dirty things, no doubt, I’m sure of it, I know it.

  “But of course sweetheart, I’ll see you this afternoon, you know that I feel like seeing you.”

  She feels like seeing him? What for? To act like the pictures I discovered under my Dad’s shirts? But this is my mother! No, it can’t be possible, she can’t be my mother, a mother doesn’t do those kinds of dirty things. Does that mean women, all women are like that? They all do dirty things?

  Fabien was right when he would say: “We’re unlucky, it had to happen to us; look at all the mothers around us; when I get out of school I see all the mothers that are waiting for their kids at the door, but there’s never anyone waiting for me; or if she is waiting it’s because I’ve done something wrong. And when I come home she’s not there. Charlie’s mother gets him a snack and waits for him. Is he lucky!”

  My poor brother, he had tears in his eyes when he said that; had he known he was going to die so soon, the whole story would have seemed so silly to him. He’d lived a life without a single scratch and he died; his death was as pathetic as his life. Also without a single scratch, “whiplash,” “the rabbit punch”... You fall asleep, just like that, you fall asleep in your car seat on your way to a holiday resort, a friend is driving, a friend you trust implicitly, a friend called Bobby. But then Bobby suddenly goes through a red light at an intersection, a car is coming on the right and it’s whiplash, the “rabbit punch”! The smack! The lumbar vertebrae are severed and you’re dead.

  When I was told the news, I was hoping, I thought, I was absolutely convinced that there had been some mistake, that it had to be his friend Bobby who had died, that there had been a mistake in the paperwork. I wanted that dog Bobby to die so badly, and come to think of it Bobby is a dog’s name anyway. Poor Fabien, when I think I was jealous of you, that I hated you and that when you died you were a child, you were my age.

  “Yes, yes Carmelo! But of course I’m careful with Julien... Yes, yes I know he’s very sensitive... But yes, I know... He’ll never know... But why should he hate you...?”

  Why do I hate him? As if she could know what hatred really is.

  Why? Why do I hate him?

  But when I see him next to my father I feel like bursting with rage, with shame, with disgust! So then my father has no balls at all! He knows, he cannot not know and he says nothing; he either doesn’t give a damn or he’s a coward! No, he just doesn’t give a damn, that’s it! My father can’t be a coward, that’s not possible!

  When it’s close to dinnertime and I see the place setting ready for Carmelo—the name of a jerk if ever there was one—I feel like going under my bed, I feel like hiding, disintegrating, or...or...disappearing into thin air.

  I’ll have to endure him for another full meal, with that rotten
accent of his, those rough manners of a successful laborer; his face resembles Raf Vallone! He does look like Raf Vallone, the bastard! And above all, Carmelo is tall,

  “Julien! Julien! Come to the table! But where are you? Julien! Julien! Ju...lien! Ju…lienju ... lien! Ah! There you are at last. You must have become deaf. I’ve been calling you for one hour; you’re doing it on purpose.”

  Yes, I am doing it on purpose, I don’t want to sit with all of you, I don’t want to feel ashamed, I don’t want to feel my heart sinking. You’re not going to ask me once again to perform like a circus dog like the other night in front of your guests. Pina comes and gets me in my wheelchair and takes me to the center of the living room. She has placed a blanket over my legs extended in front of me, to avoid offending the guests with the awful sight of my two shriveled stubs.

  “He looks so good!”

  “He’s just adorable!”

  “He looks like he’s in great shape!”

  “His eyes are truly like burning embers.”

  “He has his father’s forehead!”

  “And he has his mother’s mouth!”

  Fabien is laughing silently in a corner, my mother is pink with pleasure, my father is tapping on the table impatiently and I am all drenched in sweat, I am red in the face, I feel like peeing, or throwing up, I hate all those well-dressed guests.

  “Come on, Julien, say something, tell us a story, ‘The Three Little Pigs’ or ‘Mr. Seguin’s Goat’; you’ll see he has a slight lisp but he’s so cute and so sensitive, he recites with such heartfelt emotion, he’s a real actor.”

  “Come on, go ahead, just to please us!”

  Soon they’ll be offering me candy.

  “We’ll give you candy!”

  There! Exactly as I said!

  They all think I’m retarded. “Mr. Seguin’s Goat”? Why not “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”? They all forget I’m five years ahead in my class work and I read Shakespeare and Nietzsche, James Joyce, and Jean-Paul Sartre.