Poum and Alexandre

by Catherine de Saint Phalle

  My favourite story in the Iliad is about the captive princess, Briseis. When Achilles has to give Briseis up to Agamemnon, his momentous sadness permeates the fighting and fills the war cries with a wave of humanity. Poum is like Briseis. She’s a trophy from the hidden war none of them understand. My father, like Achilles, has plundered her from her plundering family. Briseis’s city was burnt and the king, her father, and her brothers were all killed by Achilles, but Alexandre doesn’t do such a good job. There is no loophole for Marie-Antoinette. Even love is a kicked-in door. When she casts her wild, reassuring gazes on me, I feel they are only escaping her for one short second, as other eyes stare her down from all sides in anger and resentment.

  Not only is she Briseis, she is also one of Priam’s daughters; maybe not Cassandra because she doesn’t have Cassandra’s common sense. I decide she is Priam’s daughter-in-law, Andromache, Hector’s wife. When Andromache is a very young bride, Troy replaces her childhood home because, just after her wedding to Hector, Achilles destroys Andromache’s father, seven brothers and her birthplace, Thebes. She addresses Priam more as a father than a father-in-law. But Andromache will lose all that too when Achilles finishes the job and kills Hector. Just like the Theban princess, Marie-Antoinette will consistently lose homes of flesh and spirit. After Achilles has dragged Hector seven times around Troy, Andromache will face his dead body, lay her hands on his remains, touching the broken puzzle of the man she loves. She hardly has time to recognise an elbow, an eyebrow, a jawline, the curve of a hip before she is given to Pyrrhus as a spoil of war.

  Poum always feels like a spoil of war to me, someone who has no real choice and who observes her life from the ramparts. Yet she is strong like Andromache is strong. Andromache threw Hector’s son, Astyanax, to the flames rather than let the Greeks lay a hand on him. In my bones I know all this has happened to Poum. She may not be like the other mothers I see at school, who hug and fondle their children and wave to them and cuff them and smile proudly at them, but she would never give me up to the Spartans. She is Andromache on the ramparts and prefers to throw me into the flames of life. Her gift is to let me go. When the Spartans come, she looks into the middle distance, and when they talk to me, she calls to Sylvia to whisk me away.

  There is something in Marie-Antoinette that awakens people’s power to hurt and jeer. The only Spartan who always kisses her hand is my half-brother, Jacques. He does it tenderly, in mock courtesy, but his eyes do not mock her like so many other eyes do. He owes his life to my mother. She saved him during the war, several years before she met Alexandre. When Poum was working in Madrid at the French embassy, in exile from her family after her refusal to marry Pange, her brother asked her to help a friend reach de Gaulle, the representative of Free France in London. The friend was my half-brother Jacques. With his torn clothes and blistered, bleeding feet he stood out a mile, with Resistant written all over him. He had just crossed the Pyrenees in leather boots. Madrid was alive with Falangists, the Spanish Fascists. The French Vichy embassy, in collaboration with Nazi Germany, was not the best place to help a Resistant, but she organised to meet him in the embassy gardens – the last place they would search for him, she decided. She bought him a pair of espadrilles, hid him with some Communist friends, brought food to him for weeks and finally got him away safely. My brother Jacques is not really my mother’s friend, but he is grateful to her for many years. Then, like the memory of a blister fading away, he starts talking to her as others do.

  When Jacques was back safe and sound with the Liberation, my father wished to thank the girl who saved him. Her brother took her to have lunch with Alexandre. She was still working for the family, while her two younger sisters danced at balls. Like Iphigenia, she revelled in her sacrifice and let it give meaning to her life. But maybe something in her was wearing thin. Fresh from the episode with Pange, the escapee from the bear cage sat at the restaurant table staring around her with eyes that gaze right through walls and tumbled-down fortresses – the eyes that see nothing close and everything far away. My father thanked her while her brother scooped the meat off her plate, explaining that it was wasted on her because she didn’t like it. Like Perseus, Alexandre swooped on her and offered her a job as a secretary with double pay. Her brother accepted for Andromeda, on the spot, and her Gorgon family approved wholeheartedly.

  ‘What was her work?’ I once ask my father.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘she just followed me around with a notepad and her indecipherable handwriting.’

  Poum writes as if a bomb has just exploded in the kitchen. For a while before that, after her return from Spain, she read fairytales on the radio because she is the great-granddaughter of Sophie de Ségur, the children’s writer. One day it was raining, a great big puddle had flooded the kerb, and as they hesitated to cross the street my father said matter-of-factly: ‘I’m going to have to carry you, Poum.’ And suddenly he had lifted her right off her feet and was striding across the road. Marie-Antoinette tells me this in a bus between place de la Concorde and rue de Rivoli. I am so small my feet don’t reach the ground, but I still know this was a tipping point. When was my mother ever carried, instead of being put aside?

  I understand very quickly that, like Poum, my father is frightened of his own family. They talk together in hushed tones and call Sylvia to bring me into the room at such and such a time. They wait for the doorbell and run together to the hallway where they lock gazes and share the same deep breath before opening the door. Then you hear them exclaim and pat the Spartans on the back. Alexandre slips into a jovial mood, phrases slip off his tongue as he grasps his son and daughter’s shoulders. He keeps talking and exclaiming as Poum plays with her food. She has to stay and stay. When I walk in, she hardly looks at me. She stares at Sylvia, giving her a bright, desperate smile.

  My mother loves women. Once she says to me it is a great shame when women don’t have the sisterly feeling. After eight hundred years of Arab occupation, something Arabic has seeped into Spain, she tells me. The spirit of the harem, the gynaeceum, where women have real tenderness for each other, is the spirit of refugees, prisoners. It’s not a chatty club, it’s a hand on the shoulder, a touch, a reassuring smile, a pressed kiss on a tear-stained cheek, as soon as one feels another woman failing or humiliated or just in plain need of tenderness. Marie-Antoinette relies on women and unashamedly calls for that kind of silent help. Sylvia stares back at her stolidly. I feel my mother’s spirit alighting on Sylvia like a gull on a rock to find the strength to carry on. The room is a blur of yellow, because of the yellow damask curtains closed against the night and the yellow toile de Jouy wallpaper.

  I don’t find the Spartans very exciting at first. They’re just magic and strange. But so many things are magic and strange when I come to see my parents that they fall into a general limbo of glamour. Sylvia and I go back to our room, our closed world. As time goes by, my father starts popping more brothers and sisters at me. These are quite new; I had never heard of them before. They seem more real somehow than the flesh-and-blood brother and sister I already know, maybe because the new siblings feel like one of my father’s stories.

  I am called to my mother’s bedroom. She is sitting in her bed, which is where she usually takes refuge until twelve o’clock, even though she wakes up early. The routine is always the same. She dives into the bathroom, brushes her hair, powders her nose and rushes back to bed in a clean nightdress, tucking her feet together under the sheets like birds swooping under the eaves. My father rustles and pads about the kitchen, then brings her a large tray laden with his bear-breakfast dowsed in honey and the coffee which she sips. This is the moment he chooses. ‘You know, little one, there is the situation.’ His words become more involved and elliptic. Suddenly one of them makes sense.

  ‘A sister, a brother?’ I am overjoyed. ‘Where are they? Why don’t we live with them? Would they like to come for breakfast?’

  My mother jumps out of bed. As if one of her empty boxes had swallowed her who
le, the bathroom door closes on her with a little snap. A silence falls on us.

  ‘They are a little too old for that,’ whispers my father.

  ‘Too old for breakfast?’ I whisper back.

  ‘They are married, you see. They have a wife or a husband. In fact, your brothers have had quite a few,’ he says. That means they don’t go to school anymore. I stare in fascination at my father. How does he do it? If he had whipped a giraffe out of his hat I wouldn’t be more surprised. He takes me downstairs to my bedroom and gives me a book to read, then runs back to my mother. I hear him bounding up the stairs to her bedroom, two steps at a time. He was fifty-six years of age when I was born, the age of a grandfather, he often tells me. But no one would guess his age. He is supple and strong, in spite of his weight. ‘Doctors,’ he says, ‘tell me I have the heart of a football player.’

  Their revelations are no surprise to me. I know my parents have a guilty secret. It is there in the air, at the bottom of drawers, behind the cushions of the sofa, in the gaze of strangers, in the sighs and the suddenness of their moods. I have always known it. I am used to it.

  Another morning, Sylvia is not there and I am invited up to breakfast. The window is open over the heads of the Élysée Palace trees, where de Gaulle sleeps in his great bed. It is spring and Poum is in her bed-boat, books all around her, and she is sighing again. I know she wants me to go, but before I can get up I hear an unearthly wail from the staircase. I look around. My mother has her gaze firmly fixed to the ceiling. My father has vanished. The wail becomes deeper and deeper and higher and higher. I can make out words. ‘Please give me a piece of bread for poor Mrs Rat, poor little boy rat and poor little girl rat … who have nothing to eat … Please … Please …’ I should know the wail is from him, but I don’t. His stories have too strong a grip on me. It goes on and on in a crescendo, an awful whining, begging voice. I stare at my mother in horror. There is a croissant on her tray, a croissant she hardly pecks at. Suddenly, the door opens a chink.

  ‘He’s coming in,’ I whisper. But Poum does not seem concerned. She’s not impressed by my father’s games. Then suddenly Mr Rat is there; he has a wheedling, shifty look on his face. I am thunderstruck. How has he got into their apartment? If someone told me this was my father imitating a rat, I would laugh in disbelief. His voice invades every nook and cranny of the room. Mr Rat squirms even closer. I move cautiously to the other side of the bed. And while this is happening, instead of looking frightened and anxious as she usually does, Poum, thoroughly unimpressed, is thrumming her fingers on her monogrammed sheets.

  Again I am awed by her power and mystery. Something about her always escapes definition. Why is she not afraid? Why doesn’t she yell for my father to come? I stand and wait. Mr Rat ignores me but creeps towards Poum with his horrible claws stretched out. ‘Please, please, give me a little piece …’ He can go no further; my mother leans forward royally and dumps the whole croissant in his slimy paw. ‘Ah, thank you, thank you, good lady …’ Now he is backing away hurriedly. Leery and ratty, he reaches the door, bending over double in an obsequious bow. Soon we can hear him on the stairs, as I stare open-mouthed at my mother. She has folded her arms, her eyes reading Braille on the ceiling again. There’s an awful slurping, swallowing, biting, ripping, gobbling, gulping and licking of chops.

  ‘He’s eating it!’ I exclaim.

  Suddenly my father is back with us. He walks into the room airily. He hasn’t even noticed Mr Rat on the stairs, just like he doesn’t notice Madame Carmel the concierge.

  I rush to him, indignant words tumbling out of my mouth: ‘He ate the whole thing? Left nothing for poor Mrs Rat? Poor little boy rat? Poor little girl rat?’

  To my relief, my father heartily agrees with me. No insult is tough enough for Mr Rat. ‘The nerve of Mr Rat. How awful, how disgusting, how dreadful!’ My mother, after a sigh, opens The Odyssey and immerses herself in it.

  Sometimes I wonder if this isn’t how Sparta was created.

  5

  IN THE LAND OF HELPLESS LAUGHTER

  My parents are Catholics but neither can take communion. It’s because of the situation. The word has become a permanent fixture in their communications with me. The situation floats in, explains, erases and smoothes out any of my questions. The situation keeps me in pagan limbo.

  Because of the situation, catechism is not an option. Because of the situation, Alexandre finds a school with American nuns. They don’t seem to mind as much as French nuns about the magic and mysterious things that worry my parents. Christianity is nothing more than a whiff of incense or my mother’s nervous sign of the Cross. I am on the outskirts of Christianity. Instead of God or the Virgin Mary, Julian the Apostate is my hero. Maybe that’s why my mother’s laughter seems more sacred to me than the priests’ shenanigans.

  Some Sundays, when he doesn’t disappear to the country, my father takes me to St Joseph’s American church on the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt. We walk there together. This is my piece of heaven even before the priest promises it to us if we are very, very good. I know my father is not good. He tells me all the time. I don’t care. Achilles, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Constantine and especially Julian the Apostate were not good either. The church is a blur of light, people and incense, but all I can think of is my hand engulfed in my father’s pocket.

  More of a Voltairian, my mother likes to chuckle about priests and tends to find excuses to skip Mass: she is tired, she has one of her mad headaches, ‘like a great bell ringing in my head’, ‘like a flock of birds pecking at my brain’. My father never contradicts Poum. He rushes at her and I see her hands fluttering behind his head. He also can suddenly scoop her up as she ineffectually fends him off. Everything he does is sudden. There’s no escape. Her laughter and her cries are smothered. His soldiers have burnt her palace, her past and her future. She can call him her bluebird or her fat bluebird; there is no way back to what she was, to that strange freedom that floats in her eyes when she sits on ruins or engages in her own small, mysterious acts of plunder. Alexandre hates those tiny moments that are utterly hers. But I breathe them in. They are what she truly is, what no one can conquer.

  Poum becomes very Spanish when she does go to Mass. She whips out a black mantilla, a special pair of black leather gloves from a drawer, and sets off dutifully. She even takes me with her once or twice. I walk next to her in the street. The way she fits her gloves more securely feels like she is tightening her horse’s girth before battle. She usually wears gloves, but never black ones, they are only for Mass. Her many rules are bewildering, but she breaks them coolly. Once she tells me, ‘You have to know all the rules, to break them well and be free, little one.’ Her hands are slim and beautiful. They could be in a Velásquez painting. My mother does not value her beautiful eyes or anything about her body, but she is inordinately proud of her hands. She loves them like two friends at the end of her arms. Every week they are religiously manicured and the nails painted with bright red varnish, with the lunulas untouched so that a tiny moon sits at the base of each nail. She moves them like conductors’ batons. They have an independent life of their own. But I don’t like them. They are the only things about her body I fear. There is something of the Spanish Inquisition about those hard red nails.

  Her sister meets her. The Spanish church is a sea of mantillas. Thanks to the American nuns I have just had my first communion, and so after consecration I go to the altar. As soon as I return, I open my mouth to show my mother the round, slim, white wafer before it melts on my tongue. I whisper: ‘I am not munching into it. They told me not to. Maybe they think his bones are still in it.’ I know she can’t have her own wafer because of the situation. I’d love to give her half of mine. But, before I can whisper anything else, in a swift movement, her hands are over her face and she crumples over her prie-dieu as if in an agony of prayer – or as if she has become a sudden cripple. The priest is mumbling in the background and the people are swaying to his words, kneeling, standing up and d
own. I am worried about my mother. Her fervour is disquieting. I put a tentative hand on her shoulder, as I know she doesn’t like being touched by me. But this time she shudders and shakes but doesn’t shrink away. As she crumples even further over her prie-dieu, I bump into her sister’s disapproving glare on the other side of her. Is this the situation again? Then, suddenly, inexplicably, I realise my mother is succumbing to paroxysms of laughter. She is in stitches; her whole body is convulsed. She’s still kneeling; her face buried in her hands even though everyone else is standing up now. My aunt pokes me from the other side but I stick beside her. I even slip my hand under her shuddering arm.

  I realise this is happening because I showed her the wafer on my tongue. She was perfectly normal a second before. Her laughter is worth enduring the long Spanish mass. At the end, I help her out of the church as if she were very sick. When the sun hits her face, she recovers slightly and gazes at me with near fondness, a bit like a mother in the playground. ‘You little devil,’ she moans, ‘you nearly killed me. Oh, the pain, I thought I was going to faint with laughter. Oh, oh … Munching the bones of Christ …’ And, right there on the square, in the throng of people, Christ’s bones set her off again. My aunt has moved away from us and is talking to a lady who is also my aunt but will not speak to my mother. Usually, my mother nods gently and moves away. Now, as I lead her towards the bus stop she is collapsing again, out of the reach of any aunts. ‘Oh, oh, I can’t bear it anymore. You dreadful child.’ She clutches at me and I breathe in the wild lilies of her smell.