Wednesdays and weekends are black days. Myriam is bored. She wants to kill her husband and kill her son: ransack the place. Friends who drop by for a cup of tea, whoosh, napalm them. Her mother, gerplonk! Remove her. Her brother, zap! In the bin. She listens to Chopin’s Nocturnes and Prokoviev’s second piano concerto, hoping to hear ever wider intervals between the notes. An octave! For pity’s sake, an octave! cries her heart. But octaves are inaudible, mere echoes, the same. Myriam concentrates. She gets hold of a treatise on harmonies but doesn’t understand a word of it. She’s disappointed, disappointed by everything, she burns everything on her non-stick pans, can’t eat, can’t sleep. She thinks about the next exhibition she and Octave might go to. What an extraordinary new life! How could she have guessed? She feels much more beautiful, much more intelligent. She’s growing. Filling the world. She muses about the scarf she will give… what should she call him? Her friend? My special friend, she tells herself, the only living being who understands me. A white cotton scarf, perfectly simple, to protect Octave’s throat from the spring breeze. She goes shopping, buys herself T-shirts, jeans, skirts. There are piles of clothes strewn over her bedroom floor. She spends a lot of time trying them on. She has no idea what’s happening to her. In front of a painting of Nicolas de Staël, Octave puts his hand on Myriam’s neck. She’s trying to read the name of the painting on the plaque. The letters dance. Impossible, she thinks, I’ll never know the name of this picture. She narrows her eyes as something extraordinary, something un-hoped for happens between his hand and her neck. Myriam comes back. She takes a great leap back. Into the past. She has to make quite an effort to stay standing because beneath her torso she no longer has legs and beneath her legs, there are no longer feet. If she falls the hand will peel away from her skin. She absolutely must not move. Slowly, the ice field melts. Great blocks of ice break away with a thundering crunch like giant jaws. Icebergs float away, dotted across the dark blue water. My goodness it’s hotting up! How it glitters!
Vincent is under me on one of the tables in my restaurant.
But it isn’t him, and we’re not here.
It’s Octave who has his arms round Myriam and is biting her in the deserted toilets of a museum at eleven o’clock in the morning. She is white as porcelain, she, the squaw, is white as a revelation. He is honeyed, he gently licks the nape of her neck. ‘What am I doing?’ she asks. She would like him to stop. She would like him to go on. ‘What am I doing?’ she cries quietly. ‘You’re kind,’ he tells her. ‘You’re so kind. They don’t know how lucky they are. You’re the best of wives and the best of mothers. You’re a gift.’
‘What’s going on?’ Vincent asks. ‘It feels like you’re dead.’
That was yesterday evening and I’m now looking at the table where our bodies uncoupled. The substance of it reminds me of a coffin.
‘I don’t feel very well,’ I told him.
He stood up while I gathered together my clothes, which seemed to have been scattered by a storm.
‘I’ve never…’ he stammered. ‘I’ve never…’
He didn’t know what to say next. I told him I liked him very much, aware of everything that this phrasing withheld.
He won’t come today. I’ve betrayed him, cheated him, humiliated him. But tomorrow who knows?
Anyway, I seem to be up in the clouds today. A little too much so perhaps. I should be helping Simone, organizing her revenge or helping her find wisdom. I should slice up the livers before they start going black in the middle, keep their hearts pink and achingly soft. I should. I should but I’m dreaming. A hand - a new, deft one - appears from behind me and takes the pan off the hob. Ben puts the giblets onto the chopping board, cuts them up and lays them on their bed of spinach and grapefruit. He’s learnt from me, without my saying anything, without my even showing him. I watch him put the sage and pancetta flans in the oven. I sit on the counter smoking a cigarette. Not doing a thing.
The only problem is I can’t work out whether it’s happiness or sorrow that washes over me as I exhale those scrolls of bluish smoke.
We finished just before midnight. My eyelids crackle over my irises. I dream of a bedroom. A simple square room with just a bed and two bedside tables, sheets, a blanket and a crocheted bedspread. I dream of a bathroom, or a shower room, I don’t mind, tiled throughout, with a porcelain basin. I would also have a little wardrobe to hang my clothes; at the moment they are rolled up in a suitcase hidden behind the bar. My clothes never smell of washing powder. Even clean they smell of Chez moi. It’s been six years since I’ve had a house. It was the same at Santo Salto, permanent insecurity. When someone new turned up I had to clear out straight away and move in with a friend in her caravan to make way. Only circus costumes were hung up, everything else was crammed into bundles. It made me think of the exodus. The sound of cartwheels on the road, the patchwork of canvas, the burlesque heaps of frying pans, books and chamber pots. I don’t know which of my ancestors undertook that sort of journey. None of them, perhaps. Or it could have been my ancestors in books and films. I can no longer distinguish between true memories and those that have been grafted onto me by fiction.
At Santo Salto I felt I was alive again, not in the sense that I had rediscovered a lust for life, but rather that I was rerunning a former fate. Everything was familiar, the stoves, the mattresses and cushions stuffed with old clothes, the crates which served in turn as tables, chairs, ladders, cupboards and even as swimming pools in the summer when we lined them with a thick blue tarpaulin. The lawless existence, the days spent circumventing administrative obstacles, the unenforceable rules, the agile minds matching agile bodies.
One spring morning when I was sitting down peeling carrots Rodrigo, who wanted to become a sword-swallower like his father, asked me, ‘So where’s your husband?’
‘I don’t have a husband.’
‘And your children?’
I couldn’t tell him I didn’t have any. I didn’t know what to say.
‘I can tell you’ve got children,’ he announced, indifferent to my silence.
‘How can you tell?’
He shrugged.
‘I can tell, I just can.’
He was walking on his hands, head down, circling round me.
‘Is it difficult?’
‘What?’
‘Walking, like that, on your hands?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s just as difficult as walking on your feet,’ he explained after a while.
With his knees bent, he jigged his lower legs on a level with my face.
‘Do you remember?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘When you learned to walk, do you remember it?’
‘No, not at all. Do you?’
‘Yes, I do. I remember everything. Do you know what my mother calls me? She calls me Memorial. Do you know what that means? It means someone who remembers everything. It’s my nickname. I remember the first time I tried to walk on my feet, before that I used to walk on my knees. I remember the first time I said a word…’
‘What was it, Mummy or Daddy?’
‘It was clementine.’
I didn’t believe him.
‘Clementine? I’d be surprised, that’s a very long difficult word for a baby.’
‘I wasn’t a baby. I was three years old. I’d done a lot of practising in my head. I chose that word specially.’
‘And was your mum proud?’
‘No, she’d have been happier if I’d said Mummy.’
‘Could you teach me to walk on my hands?’ I asked Memorial.
He dropped back down onto his feet, told me to get up, then looked me over. He touched my hips and thighs, then stood on tip-toe to feel my arms and shoulders. He shook his head.
‘All your strength is down below. Your arms are all floppy and your legs all hard. You should have started earlier. You have to start everything early.’
’Can we try anyway?’
Thanks to Memorial’s lessons I now know
how to do a handstand for just a few seconds. I can’t go backwards or forwards. He was surprisingly patient with me. As a thank-you I gave him a book, Wilhelma Shannon’s Three Adventures of a Shy Lion.
‘I can’t read,’ he admitted, slightly put out.
‘Well, I’ll teach you.’
‘Is it difficult?’
‘No,’ I told him, very sure of myself.
Memorial must now be about thirteen or fourteen. I don’t know where he is. In my purse I still have a piece of paper folded in four on which he wrote his first word: MEMORIAL in capital letters with the ‘E’ facing the wrong way and the ‘A’ upside-down. I never unfold it. I’m afraid of damaging it and it’s too painful. In my head I draw a clown’s costume on each of those capitals, and I can feel the weight of his pencil strokes inside my handbag like imps carved of wood. He had no difficulty learning, but I had all the trouble in the world teaching him, my throat tight and my eyes heavy with tears. That mania for reliving everything, the inability to find anything completely new. Why does it have to take me so long to understand? Why do I have to keep retracing my steps in the hopes of finding goodness knows what needle lost in a roadside haystack?
This evening I feel like sleeping in a bedroom again. I count the cracks on the ceiling, like the lines of a giant hand resting above my head.
‘I swear to you,’ Ben insists. ‘You don’t have any choice. It’s pure logic.’
He picks up a pen, writes down some figures and circles them.
‘Look. I don’t even know why I’m asking you what you think, there’s no getting away from it.’
He’s drawing squares inside circles and circles inside squares. He can’t think what to come up with next to make me subscribe to his cause.
‘I’ve never had any ambition,’ I tell him. ‘I can’t abide capitalism. I don’t want to expand. I want to stay as we are. We’re happy like this, aren’t we?’
‘No.’
Ben is serious. He’s angry.
‘There isn’t enough room in the kitchen,’ he says fierily. ‘Yesterday evening we missed two take-away orders—‘
‘The people weren’t annoyed,’ I say, interrupting him.
‘People are never annoyed with you, Myriam. But that’s no excuse. If we carry on like this, we’ll have to pay taxes. Look, it’s here.’ He shows me a very large figure underlined three times. ‘We won’t be able to.’
‘They’ll let us defer it.’
‘Stop!’ he’s shouting now. ‘Stop! Shit, it’s not like this is complicated. Do it for me, at least. You just have to take on the lease for the haberdashery next door. We’re not chucking anyone out. We’re not hurting anyone. The “To Let” sign’s been up there for two months. We pay, we take down the sign, we do the work and we expand!’
’With what money?’
‘We borrow it.’
‘He’s right,’ says Vincent in a quiet voice.
I can’t get over the fact that he’s here. Where is your pride, wounded man? I stare at him, my eyes a bit too wide. He runs his hand through my hair.
‘Listen to him,’ he advises as he sits down next to us.
There’s a white lily stamen hanging from the collar of his pullover. His every move produces a tiny saffron shower. He isn’t trying to avoid my eye. This is peace. Vincent is here as a neighbour.
We haven’t cleared the place yet. The dishwasher’s running but the bins still need emptying, and everything needs cleaning. I look round. I wish I could tell them I haven’t the strength. I’m already so tired.
‘You also need to think about taking on staff,’ Ben tells me gently.
‘What a thought!’
I jump up, grab the broom, wring out the floor cloth, descend on the bins and wipe all the surfaces down.
‘I don’t want to take anyone on, Ben, do you understand. No one! It’s you and me, and that’s all. If you stop, I stop. If it’s too much for me, I’ll close. I couldn’t give a damn about closing. None of it means anything to me, this restaurant, this shitty life, I’ll give it all up, with no regrets, give it all up. Don’t need anyone. Look.’
I tip buckets of scalding water over the floor, squirt washing-up liquid into the dirty casseroles, run a cloth over the chairs and buff up the banquette.
My banquette, my little banquette for the ladies that I bought from a charity shop. I lie down on it, and the cool moleskin welcomes my cheeks flushed from my exertions. I’m crying. I don’t know how to explain to them that this wasn’t at all what I intended. I just wanted… I just wanted… I’m trying to find the word. It won’t come. I clutch at another one. I wanted to do something good. No. That’s not it. It’s the sentence next to it that I’m trying to say, but I can’t seem to. I can’t find it any more.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, sobbing. ‘I’m sorry.’
That’s the word I was looking for.
Ben and Vincent wait for me to calm down. They don’t come over. I would rather have spared them this performance. They don’t know anything about my life and don’t understand why I’m crying. I’m worried they both think they are responsible; when neither of them is. After a while, when my sobs are spaced further apart, Vincent decides to speak.
‘Anyway, it would be good for the area,’ he says. ‘As a shopkeeper myself…’
He’s so neutral, so professional. Vincent isn’t afraid of being down to earth, he’s my pragmatic genius.
‘As a shopkeeper myself, it’s in my best interests for your… your…’
‘Her restaurant,’ Ben prompts.
‘Yes, that’s right, for your restaurant to get bigger. It’ll give everything else a boost.’
There then follows a discussion between him and Ben about the inevitability of growth. They very soon forget I’m sad, and even forget I’m there. They exchange opinions - which, to their great delight, are the same - about my venture, well thought-out orders, and the longevity of neighbouring businesses. Bit by bit, they build me an empire, taking on waiters, waitresses and an accountant. The word ’chef’ wakes me from my torpor.
‘Oh no!’ I say hoarsely. ‘You’re not putting anyone else in the kitchen instead of me.’
They laugh, glad to see me defending myself. They talk all night and I think to myself that our lives are like glasses. Glasses that need filling. We pour in love and desire and longing. I came very close to being the liquid in Vincent’s glass. I got away, and he’s pouring something else in there now. I wonder what I’d like to find in my own at the moment.
‘DRINK ME’, read the inscription on Alice’s little bottle. She drank and felt herself getting smaller like a telescope. ‘EAT ME’, read another inscription, on the cake. Alice ate it and stretched up like a sapling. Too small, too big, my life keeps changing proportions and I’m never the right size for what I’m trying to do. I would so like to get back to my original size, the one which meant I could slip into the glove of each day without feeling either too exposed or too cramped.
My pair of tempters, who have had a little too much to drink, beg me to join them in their ambitious dreams. I’m resisting. I don’t want anything to change, but they talk over each other and in unison, telling me what I want is inadmissible. It’s market pressure, they say, expand or perish, those are the only options.
‘How can people always want more? Doesn’t it make your head spin just thinking about it?’
‘She’s read too many books,’ Vincent decrees.
‘Or not enough,’ Ben suggests. ‘Not the right ones.’
I’ve read books in which greed is punished and modesty rewarded. I’ve read some in which it was the other way round, success stories where people climbed up the ladder. I’ve read tales where love happens without ever being declared, and where it is declared without ever happening. I’ve followed the adventures of a billionaire who started his career with a nail in his pocket, nothing else, just a nail. I’ve read fables populated with talking animals and people turned into creatures: a toad/ prince, a young man/coc
kroach. I’ve read stories of murder, stories of rape, those about war, those about boredom. I’ve lost the titles and forgotten the authors and now all I have left is Alice, Alice who’s trying to solve the hopeless equation of time and space: she needs to get smaller to go through the tiny door but once she has shrunk she realizes she’s left the key on the table that’s now four times her height, so she has to stretch again, to grow bigger by biting into the magic cake, to make amends for her previous negligence. I’m never the right size either.
Chez Moi Page 16