Poum and Alexandre

by Catherine de Saint Phalle

  Laughter is my mother’s dark sun. She can’t control it. It takes over like a tide and she has to dissolve, slide, reach out frantically to withstand its onslaught. I follow her in the streets of Paris like a private detective hired by a lovesick husband. There are many clues to collect. She springs on booksellers unawares, often with an urgent question. I hide outside the window and I can decipher the owner’s answers by his stupefied expression. She loves ancient, musty bookshops and can stay hours poring over an old volume with a bewhiskered, gnarled hunchback who breathes her in just like I do. Sometimes, I stop following her and lose her trace to walk back to the hunchback’s shop and check out the book she was looking at. It’s often some obscure medieval text about Gnosticism or alchemy. The old man still has a dreamy look on his face in the wake of her visitation, and he talks to me kindly. Drops of her recent presence fall on me like dew.

  She rarely moons at shop windows but sails inside like a small ship. She always knows exactly what she wants – some unreasonable piece of information or some object that has not been sold on the premises since the Crusades. She hops out again, younger, more carefree than I ever see her in her home. I stare at the fascinating stranger, who is truly herself at last. But that is not the mother I live with.

  The mother I live with is afraid. She holes up in her bedroom and reads. Apart from rare, precious friends, the only people she sees are the family she is addicted to. They hardly wait for her to leave the room before ripping her to shreds in the mistaken belief that children are deaf. Nevertheless, she begs for more – and invites them every Sunday. However uncomfortable she is with the world, she is on excellent terms with herself. I often catch her nodding companionably to herself in an empty room.

  One day I’m on the other side of the street, hiding behind trees and around corners like an international spy. I needn’t. She never notices anything and has to bump into you to recognise you, because her eyesight and her fear of the situation keep her in a twilight zone. I am cautious nevertheless. I know I am trespassing on these expeditions. The Iliad has taught me about sacrilege. I could be shot at dawn by the Spanish Guardia Civiles in patent-leather hats. I peer round my tree trunk but she has gone, vanished. I scan the large, nearly empty avenue Gabriel. Nothing. There is only an old tramp woman, obviously drunk, slumped against a wall. You can even see a bit of her knickers. Then I recognise something: the coat, the red nails. This is not a tramp. This is my mother. She is now clutching a réverbère, one of those ornate rococo Parisian streetlights, and her body is swaying, wracked with spasms of agonised laughter. I can see nothing visible that could have started her off. Some memory, some thought must have triggered this fit of helpless laughter. A man appears at the end of the street. Like all survivors, Poum can sense his presence. She looks straight back at him with her wide, wide eyes, as if saying: Have you never seen a real woman laugh before? As I watch her from a safe distance, little by little, the flow subsides and she brushes her clothes with a dignified, nearly jaunty flick, and walks on, abruptly grownup, as if nothing had happened. She doesn’t even turn around to check if he’s still there, but whisks herself round the corner and disappears. The man is left staring. I go home after that. My cup is full.

  But helpless laughter can get her into trouble. One Saturday morning my father invites me upstairs. There is an awful silence in the room. Alexandre kisses me briefly. My mother is squirming uncomfortably. To my surprise she extends her arms and gathers me in one swift hug. Before I can cling to her, she has pushed me away. I sit in a daze near my father, who is now reading his newspaper in silence. For the first time Poum throws me that sisterly look I know so well from when she throws it to others. I know what to do. I shake his arm and ask questions. She nods and smiles at me encouragingly. My father then loosens and flings down his paper. ‘How could you, Poum? Didn’t I specifically warn you, beg you?’

  My mother clasps her hands: ‘You did, you did, Alexandre.’ No bluebird this morning. My father stares at her awfully.

  ‘And what did I tell you?’

  She sighs and admits to it freely: ‘You said that we were going to dine with a very important client of yours. You warned me about his speech defect, his stutt …’ She starts stuttering herself but suddenly, without warning, her face is drenched in tears and she has crashed against her lace pillows. ‘But how could I help it! It was inhuman!’ she wails. ‘Alexandre, have pity. When he started saying my Cur-cur-nel, my Cur-cur-nel, my Cur-ne-nel to the Colonel. It was more than flesh and blood could stand!’

  My father’s mouth is twitching slightly. He lifts his arms to the ceiling. ‘Did you have to pretend to be sick and literally crawl to the bathroom? And then stay there an eternity until I had to get up from the table and carry you bodily out of there back home – in disgrace?’ He frowns again like Jupiter in his cloud. ‘Can’t you control yourself, Poum?’

  She has flung herself on her pillows again, her hands over her face. ‘No, no, it’s impossible – it was impossible. I could still hear his stutters through the bathroom door. Oh Alexandre, forgive me.’ But lost to waves of laughter, she can speak no more. My father turns away in disgust and addresses himself to me.

  ‘They thought she had a miscarriage or terrible diarrhoea!’ He brandishes his hand. ‘And I had warned you about him!’ My mother is helpless against the pillows. My father presses on. ‘And what did you say?’ A muffled moan comes from behind her hands. He supplies me with the information. ‘Your mother had promised, she said: “Why, Alexandre! The poor man, who do you take me for? How could I laugh at someone in such a situation?”’

  My mother peels her fingers from her face and their eyes meet. There is a sudden silence. Then, just as the sunshine bursts into the room, something happens, something is torn away. I look up.

  Jupiter has forgotten his wrath.

  6

  GALLOWS HUMOUR

  My mother is soothed by death and blood. A tale about the guillotine, the garrotte or some death row quip will relax her shoulders and bring her eyes into focus. Sometimes, instead of Penelope’s suitors, my parents may have a few of Poum’s ill-assorted friends over, or a stranger my father produces out of nowhere. With a geisha’s tender care, he pours old cognac from his cellars, springs to his feet to welcome a woman, seizes her hand and purrs against it or falls into one of his sudden snoozes. When there’s a lull in the conversation, my mother can be relied upon to embark on one of her grisly anecdotes.

  Sometimes I am brought in my pyjamas to say goodnight. As Sylvia pushes me forward on a scaffold dripping with blood or under a hangman’s noose, she stares my mother down with heavy disapproval. While we wait for the executioner’s complete satisfaction to be able to say goodnight, Marie-Antoinette returns Sylvia’s eyeful with a happy smile and continues her unrepentant tale. In private, as she blinks back wide-eyed, Sylvia often tells her off: ‘This is not for children,’ she admonishes severely, or, ‘Remember, Catherine is only a child.’ Most of the time Poum defers to Sylvia in everything and treats her as a PhD on child rearing, but on certain subjects she disregards her ruthlessly. ‘The English are so squeamish.’ She smiles, shaking her head. ‘Does no one die in England? What about Mary Queen of Scots’s head being brandished to the people? Why are they suddenly shocked by a little execution?’ One day she rolls into the library in stitches: ‘I have just told Sylvia she must visit the tiny guillotine, the small gibbet, made exclusively for children in the Louvre! Aaah, aah, and she believed me! She thinks the French capable of anything,’ she gasps in my father’s arms, wailing with delight.

  But now as we wait for our chance to say goodnight, heads dropping around us like flies, Sylvia’s hands rest on my shoulders and her sweet peppery smell surrounds me in a net of safety and Pond’s soap. The guests sit aghast, sucked back into their armchairs, their hands feebly clutching at the armrests, their lungs robbed of air – while Poum spins her tale of murder and bloodshed. At the end of it, in the awful oozing silence, my father’s eyes, now f
ully awake, are bright and tender. He looks around proudly and breathes: ‘Isn’t she sweet?’ There will be a rush for the door and he will help them with their coats, bundling them happily out of the apartment and – as Poum smiles on benignly – exclaiming with a sigh of satisfaction long before they are safely out of earshot: ‘Aaah, I think they were delighted!’ I spy their frazzled visitors from my bedroom window, trickling down into the street, bloodless, their brains filled with guts and gore, looking at each other like incompetent thieves, because they have come and reaped nothing. Death has swept by them magnanimously and they are not enjoying life any more than before, while Poum and Alexandre are darkening the dark hour with one last death rattle or dagger thrust, giggling themselves to sleep in their bedroom up the stairs.

  When my mother is not rushing me to deathbeds, she is filling me in on any death I have missed out on. The way my fastidious grandfather’s hand brushed a stain from his sheet with his long fingers and said ‘it’s nothing’ gave Poum the sudden knowledge he would not survive the day – and he didn’t … Or the Russian grandmother unearthed by grave robbers and her hand, found lying perfectly preserved outside her coffin, lace falling over her wrist, because she was buried in sand (which, as everyone should know, preserves corpses better than any embalmer) are as present in her conversation as a garden gnome on a suburban lawn. Historical deaths also spice my parents’ days: Madame du Barry’s last cry sundered by the guillotine, or Hector’s corpse left rotting in the sun at the foot of the walls of Troy. The pity of executioners and the scornful comments of priests, or Danton’s humour on his way to his own execution, will set her off in delighted chuckles.

  My father is, in his own way, just as keen on death. He describes how a Revolutionary Cordelia, Marie-Maurille de Sombreuil, takes a jeering jailor at his word and drinks a glass of blood from a decapitated head to save her father’s life. Alexandre swoops down from the sunshine by the Seine to grab me: ‘Would you do that for your father?’ I nod in horrible certitude. But the cup of blood is quickly swallowed and he is picking me up in his arms so we can both look at the river glitter. In the sudden reflecting, twinkling silence, the city sounds die away. As the Seine blinds us, as it reels past us with its shining, golden cords of water, he remains in thunderstruck oblivion, holding the river, the falling sky, the silver clouds and his daughter high on his chest in a warm, urgent embrace. Then he puts me down hurriedly and tells me all about Joan of Arc burning alive and his ancestor Godefroy de Bouillon, the man who could slice three Saracens’ heads off their shoulders with one swish of his sword and lift his horse under him with his legs by grasping a retaining ring under an archway.

  But I learn other things too. I learn how the other world is just behind a curtain. So close, so natural, so organic – you can feel it breathing down your neck. Death, according to my father, is but a step away. He takes it in his stride, just as he takes sex in his stride, women, war, children on either side of the blanket – especially those spawned by his sons – ‘your brothers can’t look at a woman without changing the demographics’ – just as he takes in the hills of France and Navarre, the downs of Sussex, the fires of Troy, the rape and plunder of conquering armies and the roaring bite of cannon balls.

  The familiarity of death is part of life at rue du Cirque, but even as a child I wonder at my mother’s particular brand of fascination for it. For Marie-Antoinette, death is the victor. Unlike my father’s, her vision of death leaves no room for the imagination. Instead of flirting with the other world, it’s destruction in this world that haunts her. Her mind needs to dwell graphically on how Ravaillac was drawn and quartered and she will guffaw about his understated comment on the morning of his execution: ‘This day is going to be rough.’ She needs to relate in exhaustive detail how a dry garrotte is more painful and how a kind executioner keeps the garrotte wet. She can describe the crusaders walking knee-high in blood at Antioch, but can’t bear to touch raw meat and washes the butcher’s change in the sink. A natural vegetarian, she’s horrified by animal pain. When she sees sheep or cows in a lorry on their way to the slaughterhouse, she buries her face in her hands as if personally responsible for their plight. Alexandre will gaily order pig’s feet and suck the bones, holding them with his bare hands while my mother looks on fondly, blindly.

  The difference between them dawns on me gradually. My father has no fear of death; my mother’s connection to it is more mysterious. In the bus, always a good place to waylay her confidences, she lets out suddenly, ‘I am afraid of death,’ gazing straight through the window onto the flat sidewalk. There, carried by the kilometres, bodily taken from one place to another, she admits to bald facts. As I stare back at her in disbelief, scaffolds, nooses, straining horses, axes and the cold dawns of summary executions flash through my mind.

  I am as incompetent as usual and can find no words of comfort. She has a small haul of a supermarket bag and two bottles to recycle in a basket. They peep out like condemned heads from a tumbril. We have carried them off anyway because we both love to throw rubbish out. When the bus stops, she hops out eagerly. I spring out too. ‘No! Let me do it!’

  She runs straight to a rubbish bin, wrenches it open, peers in, flings the bags, peers in again, then slams the lid down and only addresses the recycle bin afterwards. Usually she leaves the rubbish to others and reserves the bottle bin for herself: a moment of glee, as if all her worries and all her fears also fall and clatter down its huge mouth – removed, swallowed, recycled. When the ceremony is over, we dust our hands and walk away grinning at each other. Not this time.

  Now Marie-Antoinette’s face is set as she trots along. After a blank moment, she bursts the bubble of silence: ‘Ah, how terrible it would be, Catherine, to lie there in the dark with all those awful things heaped upon one. The smell … The leaking gloom …’ She shudders and gives me a tragic smile. Her fear of death is physical; it’s all about yawning coffins and rotting corpses. That’s why she can’t bear to be touched except by Alexandre. That’s why, when I made my unfortunate way out of her body, I spelled out her own mortality to her. She was drawn and quartered by my birth, but as I tore her apart she did not utter a cry. No wonder she giggled at Ravaillac’s spunky, understated comment. Giving birth out of wedlock, in the shadow of sin in the fifties, was like robbing a bank. Death hovered; Deimos and Phobos, the gods of anguish and terror, were at hand to snatch us from a disapproving world. Every self-respecting Spaniard knows that a baby born out of wedlock goes straight to Purgatory if he or she dies unbaptised and stays there in limbo for ever and ever. No wonder they summoned a priest to the hospital in indecent haste so I would be baptised still warm from my mother’s womb.

  Sometimes she needs to throw bombs from the kitchen window, as if she’s a Native American medicine woman or Dionysius himself. The residential street is begging her for a gulp of havoc. When the cook is safely out of range, Poum fills a small plastic bag with vegetable peelings and sends her bomb flying over her shoulder straight out of the window. As she crouches against the wall, stifling agonised laughter, a torment of glee painted on her face, the bomb sails down from the third floor and lands with an enormous bang on the quiet, unsuspecting street.

  Even the idea of a bandit getting off scot-free and making the police look ridiculous gives her some form of relief. During the Algerian war, she walks up back stairs and brings provisions of cheese, wine and saucisson to OAS insurgents, unbeknown to my father. She is not in political sympathy with them, but ‘you can’t let someone be hounded.’ I ask her if she would help a real criminal – ‘Oh, I would, I would … But!’ she lifts her index finger, ‘if someone touched one hair on your father’s head, I would shoot them in the neck on the spot – of course.’

  ‘Then,’ I ask her, ‘what would you do if that same someone was trying to escape the authorities?’

  She hardly pauses for breath: ‘I would help him too – of course. How, on the spur of the moment, could you not when someone is hounded? Why, I would have
hidden Ravaillac.’

  On our way home from one of these expeditions to the OAS insurgents, she tells me how her father walked her home after dark during the occupation of Paris by the Germans. He would wait for her outside radio stations or embassies, where she worked for the family’s benefit, against his better judgement. In his book, daughters do not work for unknown men. Yet he let it happen. His health and strength were leaving him and it was the war. She is also Iphigenia, after all. Those night walks with Golé, as his friends called him, stain my mind in some strange way – to me they are steeped in death. The man had hundreds of friends, especially women, who gave him that nickname. He was a slave to friendship and a lover to his wife. He thought the French were demonically intelligent and admired their culture, yet stayed irrevocably Spanish. More streetwise than intellectual, he had a human, emotional understanding. His daughter’s obsessive reading was alien to him, yet the streetlights dimmed by the alerts, the German boots, the curfew, are less sinister to me than his guilt.

  They walked through France together, slept in fields in 1940 to escape the Germans with thousands of other French people. She alludes to it only once. He was obsessed with her being raped by the Germans. That’s why they fled Paris on foot. I don’t know where the rest of the family was. I don’t ask. Her charming, charismatic, fastidious father – another presence surrounded by awe – relieved himself behind trees, slept in ditches, suddenly so physically present. They were together and the privateness of it sweeps through her words – as if it were the only time she really touched him, sensed him as a human being rather than a distant god. Death and Life met when, in fear of their lives, father and daughter slept close to each other for warmth. Soon after Golé’s death, though, the most Spanish of his daughters, the only one to speak his language fluently, was sold to the highest bidder and cut adrift. Golé’s leaving is an ongoing thing, the dusting of his sheet, the letting go of her hand. Little by little she’s unsewn, unstitched and even her Spanish needlework, the fairytales she writes, the wine she drinks, the friends she loves, the insurgents she helps, even Alexandre cannot save her. The land on which she stood has been pulled out from under her. Only Alexandre’s strength prevents her ship from floundering; whenever he goes, an ocean of fear engulfs her again.