I do make an effort, though; I’m a perfectionist in my own way. In the early stages my energy and inventiveness perform miracles. Was I not an exemplary mother?
I try to stick the two halves of the grape back together. They fit perfectly. The salt from my tears stings my cheeks.
Wasn’t I a perfect mother?
Not a trace of the knife left on the skin of the fruit, no scar, the grape is intact, protected by its translucent sheath.
Wasn’t I an irreproachable mother?
The tears quicken. My hands are shaking. I drop the grape which falls to the floor, splattering open.
His sweaters always soft. Not one scarf that was scratchy. Not one ridiculous hat. His trousers never too tight at the waist. His T-shirts clean, so clean. His shoes comfortable and welcoming. Every evening a story, a fairytale, a Greek myth. On the table, fresh brightly coloured food, platefuls that looked like flowers, like a patchwork of fields, a landscape. On the ceiling in his bedroom I stick all the phosphorescent stars as per the picture. I almost kill myself climbing up the step-ladder but I don’t give up. In the evenings before he goes to sleep we read the map of the stars together. I name the constellations one by one. When we go to the theatre or the cinema we take a picnic to have on the way, a delicious snack of almonds, dried mangoes and Turkish Delight. On the way back we talk. Hugo is wonderfully articulate. He understands everything. He’s very quick to establish connections between the different shows he’s seen. I’m fascinated by his intelligence, just as I am by the absence of noise in the cosmos. It leaves me with a chill sense of amazement.
For years and years I stay on the look out, waiting to hear the gong sound, the gong of maternal love to set my heart reverberating. Sometimes I forget to think about it, my moment of respite. My every gesture and consideration so perfectly mimes this inaccessible love that I catch myself believing in it. I tell myself I’m a mother like any other, a little more conscientious perhaps. The pain dissipates. I can breathe. But it never lasts; I only have to see a real mother, to hear her talking to her child, watch her gazing at her baby, listen to her singing to her toddler. I recognize all that because the three days I spent loving Hugo left a very particular mark on me, like a burn all along my spine. I watch them and the wound starts to ooze again. I haven’t got the flimsy foot-bridge which would get me over that 2000-metre deep gorge. It’s barely there. The abyss separating me from my child is so narrow. A rope thrown from one side to the other would do the trick, because it’s not a wide breach, it’s appallingly deep, but a tree trunk lowered across it, a length of twine… And I’m drawn towards the chasm. Longing to jump, to be done with it, it’s exasperating. Perhaps in those moments my expression isn’t entirely well-meaning. My eyes might even look like those of a murderer. I resent him so much, this poor child who isn’t to blame in any way.
One night I dream I’m delving through his innards trying to find my love, as if he’s confiscated it and hidden it inside himself. When I wake up I’m frightened. I take a few drops of Rescue Remedy, tell myself I’m going mad, persuade myself everything’s fine and go back to my rituals: perfect care routine, model upbringing. I arrange to talk to his teachers at nursery school, then at primary school. They’re surprised to see me, more accustomed to meeting the parents of problem children; they are consulted in cases of hyperactivity, recurring low marks, behavioural problems. Actually, they’re usually the ones who ask to see the parents. With Hugo, it’s me who wants the meeting and every year it’s the same: a stream of compliments. He’s bright, he’s good at sharing, he has a brilliant mind, he’s a kind friend, he has a strong sense of fairness. Some even go so far as to mention his looks, explaining that having such a delightful child in class helps them with their lessons. It leaves me cold, I know all this. I’m waiting for something else. What exactly? I’m naïvely hoping that one of these childhood professionals will uncover the horror of our situation. I picture the scene:
You can’t fool me, you know. Everyone knows that the children who look the best looked-after are the ones who suffer the most. All these good results, the fact that your son seems to be flourishing, radiant even, it’s suspicious, extremely suspicious. Where my colleagues might talk of good qualities, I would call them symptoms.
I run the gauntlet of paediatricians, anticipating my punishment. Nothing. I’m congratulated on his growth curve, his admirable teeth, his tonsils which needn’t be removed. Every appointment is over in five minutes. ‘Oh, if only all my patients could be like you!’ they tell me.
Have I committed the perfect crime?
Hugo and I never kiss. Until the age of six he holds my hand to cross the road. His palm feels dry and inert against mine. Sometimes I panic: if he falls over, if he hurts himself, if he cries, then I’ll have to take him in my arms to comfort him. I can’t even imagine it. But Hugo never falls, he’s agile and careful. He doesn’t cry. He knows what he’s dealing with. When he was tiny I gave him his bottles at arm’s length, with him on a pillow and me sitting alongside, reaching over. I said it was to avoid backache. Everyone believed me.
He learned to read and write very young. One of the few advantages of boredom (and it’s very boring spending your days with a child you can’t manage to love) is that you generate excessive amounts of activity destined to disguise it. At two, he’d exhausted the possibilities of play dough, at three papier mâché had no more secrets for him. Water-based paints, oil paints, pottery. Before he was four I suggested we played with letters. I had bought a wooden alphabet: clowns in red clothes and black hats worked alone or in pairs to mime out the downstrokes and curves. The first word Hugo wrote was ‘OR’. I think the position of the acrobats had something to do with this choice: the O was him, a supple little clown closed in on himself, constrained to self-sufficiency; the upright of the R was his father, close-by, straight-backed, stable… and the rest was me, an upside-down clown in a posture of slightly ludicrous flight, with feet stuck to the head of the upright clown, knees bent so that the buttocks were stuck to the father’s hips, then the torso and arms launching in the opposite direction as if diving into space. I made no comment. I wrote ‘HUGO’, he wrote ‘MYRIAM’. I wrote ‘MUMMY’, he wrote ‘QTSUBYG’.
One night Hugo had a temperature. It was bronchitis. The doctor had said not to worry. I sent him to school with a silk scarf round his neck as if the luxurious fabric could protect him from a more serious bout. When he came home that evening his eyes were shining. I asked him if he was all right. He said yes and shut himself in his room. He must have gone to sleep because he didn’t come to the dining-room at supper time. We didn’t worry about it, saying he must have needed the sleep, must have been having a growth spurt. I didn’t hear him moaning at three o’clock in the morning. What alerted me was the fact my husband wasn’t in bed. I called him. He didn’t answer. I got up and looked for him in the kitchen and the bathroom. I didn’t think for a moment that he could be with Hugo because the child had never woken us. He’d been sleeping through the night since we came home from hospital. But as I went back to bed I heard a sound from behind the door decorated with the four wooden letters that spelled our son’s name. I turned the handle and saw them. Madonna and child, by moonlight. My husband sitting on the ground and Hugo in his arms, streaming with sweat and tears. His father’s big wide hands gently stroking his burning head. I closed the door on them and walked back to bed on unsteady knees. With my pillow in my mouth I sobbed, stifling my cries in the feathers. The next day I went to see a doctor and told him I was a bit depressed. He prescribed me some pills. From that day onwards my existence became calmer. I lived underwater, in a submerged cathedral, my sorrow had become inaudible even to me and I smiled, stupidly.
Ben returns, triumphant. He takes four grey files from his bag and brandishes them like bouquets of flowers.
‘We’re going to sort everything out,’ he announces, putting the files down on the desk. He has also bought file-dividers in a range of delicious colours.
<
br /> ‘We’ll put bills that need paying here. Those that have been paid here. The ones that can’t wait can go here, then the ones that can hang on for a while. We’ll stick all the admin stuff in the second file. The third is for the bank.’
He punches holes in pages, slips them into place, clears the congestion. Once this work is done, he takes a giant calendar from his bag and hangs it on the wall. ‘This,’ he tells me, ‘is our schedule for payments.’ He uses a pink felt-tip to tick off dates.
‘Are you pleased?’ he asks me.
I can’t seem to answer. I’m thinking of the traces of salt on my cheeks, of my eyes which must be red. Ben deserves so much better than this.
Hesitantly, he takes a rectangular package from his jacket pocket.
‘This is for you,’ he says, his voice unsure of itself.
‘What is it?’
‘A present.’
I tear the paper. Ben has given me Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.
‘Do you know it?’ he asks. ‘It’s my favourite book.’
‘I really like it too,’ I tell him.
‘But you haven’t got it,’ he says, pointing to my bookshelves.
‘No, you’re right. You’re so kind.’
I leaf through the book. I know some sentences by heart: ‘Force yourself to love your questions themselves, as if each of them was inaccessible to you, like a book written in a foreign language.’ I would like to tell Ben why this cult anthology doesn’t feature in my nomadic book collection. It’s too soon. I tell him I’ve lost it.
We open late this morning but our regular customers don’t grumble. It’s impossible to hold anything against Ben. There’s a sort of magnetic field around him which makes other people keep a respectful distance. Which is just as well because otherwise, with his uncoordinated limbs and skinny frame, he would constitute easy prey for the dissatisfied of every kind.
It’s my favourite time of day, a fully realized glimpse of utopia which happens every morning. Ben serves people coffees, fruit juices, hot chocolates, sometimes they ask for bread and butter. Sometimes what they really want is a boiled egg. Not a problem, the water’s already boiling. On the other side of the counter, protected by my zinc work-top, I’m getting lunch and some elements of dinner ready. I work at incredible speed, my hands going more quickly than my mind. This requires tremendous relaxation and enormous concentration. You have to abandon the idea that the brain is in control, staking everything on nerves and memory. It’s a pre-conscious state, like reverting to purely instinctual responses. No one can talk to me when I’m doing this. I’m quite incapable of answering, I might lose the thread. People know that; they don’t try. They watch me and enjoy the smell of cooking. I can hear their conversations, catch snatches of them. They’re commenting on the menu, the weather, occasionally they complain about someone who’s not there, someone I’ll never actually identify but who gets a real eyeful. As winter deepens and the streets get colder I sometimes hear their voices getting louder and angrier: the door isn’t properly shut. ‘Were you born in a barn?’ someone asks. I don’t need to read the papers any more, every news item is tackled. I correct the seasoning, a bit less salt in the local news, a bit more spice in international relations, some pepper in the economy. The world comes to me. I’m at the heart of a great open concourse. I witness the inevitable simplification: the food-processor of conversation smoothes out the most tender subtleties and destroys any nuances. I consider the indispensable banality of this sort of exchange of words. While I strive to get the seasoning right on different foodstuffs, bringing out their most secret aromas without ever letting one overrun another, I wonder why people unfailingly come out with the same trite nonsense. Smoothed out, smoothed out, everything always has to be smoothed out. The steamroller of consensus moves from one continent to another as my customers talk about places they’ve never been to and refer to populations they will never meet. They confuse and compare things, obsessed with parallels: ‘It’s like the Nazis,’ they often say. Everyone agrees on this point, it contains its own kind of power somewhere half-way between fascination and intellectual abdication. I notice that men adore catastrophes and what they really love is predicting the worst. ‘We’ll all be dead in two years’ time!’ one of them claims. The others nod in agreement. It’s because of a mad cow or a chicken with ‘flu. The melting glaciers will drown us before the terrorists wipe us out with an atomic bomb, or is it the other way round? Don’t let’s forget the impact of chemical weapons. The stakes are constantly being raised. Voices get louder, vying to announce the worst end for the world. I’m worried by this passion for how it will all finish. How can they keep their heads? How come they don’t know the recognized fact that, unlike bad news which is always preceded by some omen, good news comes as a surprise, when we least expect it? True, we know more about our subject when we’re talking about destruction, given that its opposite - construction - is often enigmatic. If Cassandra had been a man, I think to myself, she would have led a far more peaceful life. She wouldn’t have worried about the horrors in her dreams, but would have made use of them to thrill her mates: ‘Hey, guys, guess what, Troy’s going to fall. Our heroes are going to be decimated. In a couple of weeks this place will be in ruins.’ And her friends would have ordered a round of drinks to celebrate.
Vincent apologizes for not coming in for a couple of days. He had a very grand wedding to do.
‘They even ordered doves,’ he exclaims.
‘Did it go well? Did the birds crap on the food?’
I have finished my preparations and can sit down and have a cup of coffee at last. I can feel my every joint from my toes to my hips. It feels as if they are made of iron. Rusted iron.
‘I nicked this for you,’ Vincent says, handing me a white orchid with a scarlet heart. ‘It’s indestructible,’ he makes a point of adding.
So flowers aren’t always perishable.
‘It’s so pretty. It looks like it’s got a face!’
He frowns. He thinks I’m a tad too flippant. He reminds me of my husband.
‘They’re worth a lot of money,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Orchids, white ones, like that, they’re worth a lot.’
He probably thinks I’m not showing enough gratitude for this sumptuous gift. I take his hand, force myself to look him right in the eye and, with my face so close to his that anyone would think we were about to kiss, I say very quietly, ‘It’s really, really kind. It’s beautiful.’
I notice that his breath smells of aniseed. I’d like to congratulate him but I can’t see how to go about it without upsetting him. His hand stays in mine, the skin feels smooth, the flesh soft. My skin is rough, my palm scored with muscle and cuts. I feel like apologizing for it. I wonder how I could ever fall in love again. How anyone could fall in love with me. Can you make love if your hands are as calloused as your feet? Can you make love when you’ve got a big crease down one side of your face, like a gash, from your nostril to your chin? Why does skin have to show wear and tear like that?
‘How old are you?’ I ask Vincent.
‘Thirty-nine.’
‘I’m older than you,’ I say with false pride.
‘You wouldn’t know.’
There is obviously a flicker of doubt on my face.
‘Small women always look younger than they are,’ he says.
Well, that’s just given me a full set in my anthology of bar-room philosophy.
I know that from behind I really can trick people. Once when I was walking down a street with Octave a man behind us shouted out, ‘Hey, you two youngsters’ because one of us had dropped a glove. He couldn’t see any difference between us. As far as he was concerned, I was fifteen. Like Octave. Octave picked up the glove, took my chin between his thumb and forefinger and said, ‘So, my little one’. I fainted inside. I was still standing but, somewhere in the middle, all the dams had collapsed. I wasn’t expecting it. How could I have foreseen that and w
hat sort of news was it? Good or bad, a miracle or a catastrophe? Cassandra herself wouldn’t have known.
Little boys’ friendships. A silent country, in spite of the shouting, in spite of the fights, in spite of the voices cutting across each other and competing: ‘Well, my dad…’, ‘Well, my dog…’, ‘Well, my teacher…’. From their position at the centre of the world - which is roughly the shape of the stool they are sitting on - little boys confront each other at tea-time. Then they lie down on their tummies and play, with the carpet tickling their navels right where there’s a gap between their trousers and T-shirts. They hold their toy soldiers with the tips of their fingers, at arm’s length, as if to erase their own bodies which shouldn’t be there because, right now, their minds have taken up residence in that little plastic figure. Their new home is ten centimetres tall. It’s small but you can do loads of incredible stuff in there, like flying or falling off a cliff and getting straight back up again. You can smash into each other making weird noises. When you’ve had enough, your fingers loosen their grip. The little figure is abandoned, sometimes it rolls under the sideboard and is lost for ever. Who cares? You want to play football now. You kick a foam ball, launch yourself flat out to stop a goal, smack your head on the bed-post, bleed. But you don’t care. Afterwards your hair’s wet, clinging to your head, you’re dying of thirst.
The first time Hugo mentioned Octave was when he was seven. Octave was eight. ‘There’s a boy in my class with a music name,’ he told me.
‘Ludwig,’ I suggested.
‘No, weirder.’
‘Wolfgang?’
‘No, much weirder.’
I scratched my head.
‘I’ve got it! I remember!’ he cried so suddenly it made me jump. ‘Octave! He’s called Octave!’
I laughed.
Chez Moi Page 10