I heard stories of her death only when my grandfather was nowhere nearby. It must have been gruesome. The water made her lungs swell to such a size that her heart was pressed flat, which is said to cause unbearable pain. She spent her final days begging for death, and in her last hours once again told my grandfather that he was “released from his duties toward her”—words it was said could still bring tears to his eyes fifty years later. She died in his arms, convulsing in pain that grew with the pressure on her heart; after she fell unconscious, he held her motionless form in his arms until she had let out her final breath.
His grief was too terrible for words. He considered suicide, and his mother threw the pistol he had kept after the war into the Scheldt. He fell ill again and hoped the Spanish flu would permit him to “join her in the presence of Our Lady and our dear departed father.” But he did not die. He was as tough as an alley cat, hardened by the foundry, his life of poverty, the war, and all his other hardships, and he lived on against his will, like a plant on a rock. In any case, he was too devout a Christian to kill himself: we must humbly accept the fate that the Lord has chosen for us. On Maria Emelia’s memorial card, which does not show her photograph but a crucified Christ—that sweet, sacred heart of Jesus—she herself wrote words of consolation for him the last day she was fully conscious: For you, my heart’s beloved, with whom I hoped to make a happy hearth, I pray that the Almighty may give you strength in your hour of need.
—
Her parents had befriended his mother and went on visiting regularly. They invariably brought their eldest and sole surviving daughter with them: the shy, unforthcoming wallflower Gabrielle, already well into her thirties and therefore an old maid, as they still said unself-consciously in those days. After a few months, her father, Ghys, had a man-to-man talk with my grandfather and urged that splendid young fellow not to let the family down. He got the message. Urbain pulled himself together, asked for a week to think it over, and then the soldier in him did what he’d always done: he said yes, because he’d been asked. À vos ordres, mon commandant.
—
So it came to pass that in 1920 First Sergeant-Major Urbain Joseph Emile Martien—decorated veteran of the Great War and recipient of three medals of the Order of Leopold including one Cross with three palms, and one badge of the Order of the Crown with one palm, as well as the Knight’s Cross for exceptional merit, the Military Decoration with a striped ribbon, the War Cross with three palms and two lions, the Yser Medal in the color of the Order of Leopold, and various other medals and decorations—was married, just before reaching the age of thirty, to the timid Gabrielle Ghys, three years older, who would remain his wife for almost forty years, and for whom he would always cherish a sincere affection, as he might have said.
On the feasts of All Saints and All Souls, regardless of the weather, they would wend their way to Maria Emelia’s grave, where he would force his wife to say the Lord’s Prayer for her dead sister for hours on end. His own prayers grew increasingly fervent; Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows became the icon of his own dead Maria Emelia. Once, when he heard the name Maria sung in Scarlatti’s Stabat Mater, it left him so short of breath that he needed a cortisone injection on the spot. But that takes us far ahead of our story, into the mid-1950s, when he was committed to the psychiatric ward. Because there is no photograph on the memorial card for her funeral, I wondered for many years what Maria looked like exactly, in spite of all the stories I had heard. However precisely language can describe a person’s appearance, it never adds up to a physical identity.
When his daughter, my mother, was born, he insisted that she be named Maria Emelia—and what could Gabrielle do but say yes? Why shouldn’t she pay homage to her dead sister, who had been better, smarter, more graceful, more dazzling in every way? Many years ago, my father told me in confidence that Maria Emelia Ghys must have been a passionate woman, like my mother, and he left no doubt as to what he meant by that; I know that throughout their marriage my parents remained intensely and physically enamored of each other, and perhaps my grandfather would have found the same intimacy with Maria Emelia. Instead, he whiled away his life at the side of a good-natured but passionless woman, who wore a raincoat to bed because of her husband’s occasional animal urges, which sometimes made him so reckless that he tried to embrace her. My family strongly suspects that he only had sexual intercourse with the woman a couple of times. Those were his only experiences of physical love, and one might wonder how satisfactory they were. According to family legend, Gabrielle went to his mother after becoming pregnant to insist that she rein in her son, because there was no more call for that kind of vulgarity now that she was pregnant.
The rest is buried in silence, piety, prayers before countless altars of the Virgin Mother, devotional prints, reproductions of seventeenth-century Venuses, Aphrodites, Salomés, Majas and Dianas, Madonnas, Our Ladies in white and blue, the young girls of Ingres, finely drawn damsels, dryads and rustic fairies, oil paint, art and mortification, guilt and atonement, knowledge of sin and repentance, sorrow and transcendence—endless silent Sundays like the one when I caught him with tears in his eyes, staring at the reproduction of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. Allegories of the sorrowful body. The greatest irony of this whole story may have been that he met the same fate as his stepfather—his mother, at least, must have grappled with mixed feelings. The constant refrain in our house was that we must humbly accept the fate meted out to us by the Merciful Lord. In any case, the Maria Emelia who became my mother, cheerful, warmhearted woman that she was, wept for her father in silence, bowing her head and saying, “Maybe I should have had a different name. That might have helped to ease his mind.”
The image of the aged couple sitting side by side, chastened and peaceable, is permanently etched into my mind. It is Saturday afternoon; they are about to go into town together. She has draped her black mantilla over her head, and it falls over her shoulders and gray coat, complementing her stern features. He sits up straight, looking dapper in his midnight-blue suit, turns his intent gaze on her and says, “You look good, Gabrielle, come on, let’s go.” And with a wistful smile, she stands and says, “Oh, Urbain, you’re such a charmer.”
They pull the door shut behind them. The house is quiet.
Driving, by the way, was a skill he never chose to learn. Gabrielle was opposed to it; he was much too nervous for that type of thing, she explained.
—
What must it be like, spending your whole life with your true love’s sister? Seeing flashes of the flamboyant Maria Emelia in the timid Gabrielle, a woman who spurned his embrace? Did it allow him to stay close to the love of his life? Or when he saw some of her features, her mannerisms, resurface in that other woman, did it torment him? Should he have avoided the situation at all costs? Isn’t love’s illusion built on the principle that the beloved is irreplaceable and unique? Doesn’t the near-duplication of the beloved, and the accompanying sense of not-quite-rightness, strike at the heart of this notion? Isn’t it intolerable to the other woman, who is doomed to resemble her predecessor and doomed never to resemble her enough? Does that explain my grandmother’s civil disobedience in the bedroom—did she wordlessly sense this fact, understand it, suffer the sting, and feel the humiliation? In his efforts to be more intimate with his wife, was he really courting his fantasy of her dead sister? And if so, wasn’t he committing a kind of adultery whenever he tried to embrace his wife, an embrace that was tragically rejected time and again? Did that add a second torment to the original loss, a torment that recurred throughout his life? How did he make the shift from his early infatuation with the flamboyant Maria Emelia to his deep personal bond with the restrained Gabrielle?
I don’t know enough about neurology to say exactly what happens when you’re knocked off your feet by the particularities of a person’s figure, the look in their eyes, the way they hold themselves, something that instantly sets that person apart from all others for you. I suspect that very complicated thi
ngs coincide in that instant, a kind of associative explosion that produces the impression of uniqueness, the feeling that all this has absolute, immediate, and unconditional meaning and depth. A person in love sees symbols in the most trivial things. What seems trickiest to me is the seamless merging of the physical appearance of the beloved with a tangled mass of psychological and emotional effects on the lover’s brain. In my grandfather’s case, there was a third factor: the resemblance, in physical appearance and character, between his adored mother and the object of his passion. Or was that resemblance partly his own fabrication? But what about my elderly relatives, who remember her as looking like his mother?
My grandfather spent his life within this tetragon of women—his mother, his dead love, her older sister, and his daughter with the fateful name. His only escape was into the fantasy world of painting: Giorgione’s and Raphael’s idealized, eternally youthful figures, the young woman in Palma il Vecchio’s exquisite portrait or his nude Diana with Callisto, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, the scores of sensual young women in Tiepolo’s frescoes, Ingres’s Grande Odalisque—yes, they were a different sort of woman, yet in the sheaves of torn-out reproductions he left between the pages of his books, I found mainly dark-haired beauties, worldly women of bygone days, posing in mythical settings, as well as portraits of proud bourgeois women, sometimes laying one hand on a bodice of gold brocade or resting their fingers on a delicately illuminated throat, one simple pearl turned toward the viewer under their pinned-up hair in a small, half-hidden ear.
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—
There are few records of his life in the 1920s. They lived in a small place at first, “across the river.” In 1929, the year of the great stock market crash, he was able, with financial assistance from his parents-in-law, to buy a long, narrow plot of land on the other side of the Scheldt, along a disused towpath. The land was cheap; it was on top of an old, buried prewar dump. There was no such thing as soil remediation in those days. The snug villa with its Dutch bonnet was built on what may well be an ideal late-nineteenth-century archaeological site. I remember how often I dug up the skeletons of small animals from the lean black soil. I laid out rows of bones in the jerry-rigged tent that my grandfather had made for me out of coarse canvas “left over from the war.” I can only assume he meant the Second.
My mother was born in 1922. She was a frail child, and asthmatic, like her father and grandfather, but lively, lighthearted, in every way the opposite of her taciturn mother: a dancing, frolicking bundle of energy with wavy blond hair, an entirely different creature, who gaily subverted and contradicted the muffled world of her parents’ home. As she grew up, she was confronted with the strict morals of her prudish parents. When she announced at the age of thirteen that her first period had begun, she received a box on the ear from her father for using such shameless language and a stack of flannel cloths from her tight-lipped mother.
The house was comfortable. The kitchen was in the back, with two metal hand pumps over the sink, one for rain water and one for well water. They drank the well water—which came directly from the buried dump—as much as they pleased, without boiling it. In fact, the well was also right next to the cesspool, which was under the blackened coal shed. I remember the spring days when my grandfather would empty the cesspool with a bucket attached to a six-foot pole. The manure was used to fertilize the grapevines, the roses and gladioli, the irises and tulips, the plum and pear trees, and the currant and gooseberry bushes. It had a sweet, penetrating odor, bound up with spring and sunshine.
—
It was there, in that dreamy house on the banks of the Scheldt, that my grandfather should have found happiness and peace. He remained at the Belgian Railways until the mid-1930s, when he started to show symptoms of his first psychological breakdown. He was examined by doctors and, in 1936, at the age of forty-five, pensioned off owing to signs of mental exhaustion. They lived frugally. Ever since the war’s end in 1918, the Ministry of Finance had paid him a pension for invalid soldiers, listed in the “Ledger of Disbursements Pertaining to the National Knightly Orders.” The amount of this pension was 150 Belgian francs a year, which comes to about $4.25. My grandfather’s old carnet de pécule, or savings book, lists precise figures by date—figures that varied from two to five Belgian francs. A note accompanies the last recorded payments: Arrêté à la somme de cinq cent quatre-vingt-un francs septante centimes, le 23–12–1919, Le Quartier-maître ff. On January 17, 1922, he received a pension certificate and an updated listing in the Ledger as no. 954. This document was drafted in Mont-Saint-Amand-lez-Gand, the French name for the Ghent neighborhood of Sint-Amandsberg in the days when the Dutch language was taboo in official correspondence. By 1939, seventeen years later, that war pension was many times the original amount, but it remained modest. In a yellowed document dated November 9, 1939 (a day after the attack on Hitler in Munich, and exactly fifty years before the fall of the Berlin Wall), I find a specification of the annual payments to my grandfather: a military pension of 1,269 francs; a premium of 2,248 francs for soldiers who fought in the front lines; and a payment for members of knightly orders of 748 francs a year. This adds up to 4,265 francs a year, or about $120. His military pension remained so small because his meritorious service during the war had never been rewarded with promotion to a rank above sergeant-major. That filled him with bitterness: all the Walloon sergeants had been promoted to lieutenant on merit, he said, and so had his own Flemish brother-in-law David Ghys, just because he lived in Wallonia, and even though (according to my grandfather) he had never been wounded. Meanwhile, despite my grandfather’s medals and his wounds—he sometimes spoke of a fourth and even a fifth wound, but these go unmentioned in his memoirs—he remained a sergeant, “like so many Flemish lads.”
That may account for his newfound sympathy for the Flemish Movement. He began spelling his name in the Flemish way, “Urbaan,” and sometimes spelled his wife’s name “Gabriella.” He griped that the Flemish lads had been royalists in the trenches and the Walloons republicans, but the royal house had rewarded the French-speakers, and not the Flemish, after the war—and since this shameful act of discrimination, he fumed, the French-speakers had acted as if they were God’s chosen protectors of the royal house against the Flemish. “Here is our blood, when will we have our justice?” he would say then, quoting the notorious words written on the Merkem Stone by an anonymous Flemish soldier, and he would bite his lower lip in anger.
—
Painting was a comfort to him, but he never went beyond still lifes, which are too finely painted to have any character. His penchant for displays of virtuoso skill deprived him of a certain force that might have made his work more intense. He despised Cézanne, Van Gogh, and all the other “daubers”; they paint with the wrong end of the brush, he would say with a sneer. He made a warm and loving portrait of his daughter, Maria, with a doll in her arms, sitting wide-eyed in a wicker chair. Her blue eyes, which she inherited from her father, gaze into peaceful nothingness. He seems to have painted every hair, but realism, as he well knew, is a question of well-planned effect.
—
Strangely, I can find no mention of the death of his beloved mother Céline—there is not a word in his memoirs, and the few surviving family members have no stories to tell. By the time of her death in September 1931, he is a man of forty, employed in the workshops of the large Belgian Railways complex in Gentbrugge, the father of a nine-year-old girl, the husband of his true love’s sister, and the owner of a house under construction on the banks of the Scheldt. A photo passed down in the family shows him next to his wife, who is next to his mother; it may be the last photograph of Céline.
This picture could easily have been the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, at least judging by the atmosphere and the setting. The three of them are sitting in a row: my grandfather; his wife, Gabrielle, with a fashionable hat in the late 1920s style; and a portly old woman with a moony face, who in no way resembles the stylish lady of his yo
uth. In this stage of her life, Céline looks more like a matronly farmer’s wife, with her pudgy hands in her black lap and a vague shadow on her upper lip that suggests a light dusting of hair. She too is wearing one of those round hats from the final years of the Roaring Twenties, and she smiles broadly in his direction, looking highly amused. He himself is wearing his fedora, black boots, white shirt and dark suit, a badge on his lapel, and of course his indispensable bow tie with tails like a dress coat—albeit fairly short ones in this picture. They are seated on a grassy slope, with dozens of people behind them who are staring at something we cannot see. My grandfather’s still-young face contrasts strangely with the clothes so familiar to me from his later years—this image of a man of forty in those dark, severe garments says something about the regimented emotional world in which he lived. Today, the average forty-year-old man looks completely different: in his jeans, T-shirt, sneakers, and optional baseball cap, he radiates a boyishness that shows we find it much harder to give up life’s illusions. My grandfather, wearing the uniform of that strict, middle-class epoch, seems to have put away childish things with an almost thoughtless ease. He is sitting and looking at something outside the picture frame; I think he is talking; he has his hands in a strange position, as if pinching an invisibly thin conductor’s baton between the tips of his fingers. The scene brings back my summer memories of the beach in Ostend, and I realize his appearance must hardly have changed in the twenty-seven intervening years. On the back of the photo he wrote, in a fine dip pen:
My Dear Mother was one of the first two hundred to make the Pilgrimage of the Yser to Diksmuide Cemetery: we see Her here at the last meeting that She attended there, in August 1930. 250,000 Flemings paid tribute to their dead that day.
Until 1924, the gatherings known as pilgrimages took place at various sites of remembrance around the Yser. After that, these pilgrimages were held in Diksmuide, where the photograph in question was taken. The IJzertoren (Yser Tower), erected in Diksmuide to commemorate the Belgian soldiers killed on the Yser front, was also a symbol of Flemish pride (and still is today). A little detective work reveals that the original, smaller, IJzertoren was consecrated on August 24, 1930. My grandfather is said to have been listed on this tower, with a photograph, among the heroes of the Battle of the Yser. That tower was blown up in 1946 and replaced with the present, larger, one. All traces of the list of war heroes were wiped out in that attack, which is officially “still unexplained.” The demolition is said to have been ordered by senior French-speaking army officers, in cooperation with Resistance veterans, to take revenge on those among the Flemish who collaborated with the German occupiers in the Second World War.
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