Poum and Alexandre

by Catherine de Saint Phalle

  I wish we could just leave – but I know we can’t. It’s like those god-awful merry-go-rounds my father puts me on. Up and down they go and each child has to hook up the rings hanging from a stick as they ride by. Alexandre always waits in the shadows, punching his fist in his palm like a bookie, but I never hook any rings, not once. It’s the same here, no rings, no sticks, just a merry-go-round of Spanish spinning round my mother and me as we sit, up and down, on these manic horses.

  Finally we are leaving and it’s a Spanish custom for the whole family to come to the airport when one of its members catches a plane. My mother’s Spanish relations are left with their waves and receding cries of farewell. In the no-man’s-land beyond Customs, Poum and I drink a glass of wine as we wait. She looks at the airport around her and murmurs: ‘Sometimes one has to lend oneself, Catherine, not give oneself.’ We are just the two of us in a way that never happens. That makes everything worth it. She sits on the high stool with her knees sideways, her elbow on the bar, and her lovely fingers floating backwards as she talks, or visiting her brow to touch or quell some feeling in her mind. In that small time, we both belong – no traveller is an outcast. But in the plane back to Paris, Poum is very silent. I read at her side, wishing I was older than nine.

  Even in spirit, my father is strangely absent from this venture. He doesn’t ask about our trip and makes no comments. Yet when he speaks of the Spanish world, he is always carefully polite. He often whispers to me that he is so relieved that I have blue eyes. I feel that this has something to do with the Magna Carta. You couldn’t in your wildest imagination think of the Spanish dreaming up a Magna Carta. Freedom is the least of their concerns. Little by little, I fathom that it is my parents’ main concern. Even though they are scared, even though their families’ disapproval casts them into gloom, it is their freedom I feel all through my childhood, as if nothing and no one can control their footsteps, their gestures, their decisions, their youthful exclamations – not even them.

  Even though Marie-Antoinette has chosen my father unreservedly, some part of her will always loosen and be lost when she sees the aunt who saved her from Pange and looked after her when she had her breakdown. It makes me think of the door in the tower, kicked open by a booted foot. As soon as anyone comes near that door, Marie-Antoinette loses all her power of discernment. Tía Carmen is the polar opposite of my father in my mother’s life. Yet, a bit like Thanatos and Eros, both of them have elements of death and life.

  I had met Carmen once before in my life, but I have no memory of it. On our return, my mother’s sister makes it her business to tell me about it. ‘Why,’ she says, ‘Carmen only met you once in the street in your pram to avoid coming up to the apartment in the rue du Cirque. I don’t understand what reasons your mother finds to fawn on her.’ It suddenly occurs to me that Carmen broke up a marriage that was supposed to restore the family’s fortunes.

  Just as she reads Saint-Simon about the French, my mother reads Galdós about the Spanish. One thing all the Spanish have in common is the Catholic Church. When Communist soldiers are to be executed at dawn, they still have to be confessed. When there are neither enough confessors nor enough time, their solution is to have only the officers confessed. ‘Sooo Spanish,’ my mother comments delightedly. ‘The officers will take them to heaven, like they took them to battle.’

  She pinches my cheek. She breathes in wild Spanish air that no Spaniard today seems to remember. ‘And did I tell you about the two guardias civiles with their patent-leather hats taking a man to be shot at dawn in a closed horse-drawn carriage? The condemned man is sitting in the middle and comments: “The morning is as cold as the Great Whore.” One of the guardias civiles answers him: “Yes, but think of us who have to return afterwards.”’ I hear the clip-clop of the hooves in the crisp, freezing air. I wonder if the man has a chance of getting away, but I know from my mother’s face it’s no use asking. Poum never seems to notice the atmosphere created by her stories. It’s as if some Spanish knife inside her cuts through whole clouds of it unconcernedly. She looks down at my face and I see the two planets of her eyes, where everything is unknown to me. She is laughing away, so happily. The description of that dawn has soothed some indescribable pain inside her that can find no other way of expressing itself.

  I know this, as certainly as I know that red is the colour of blood.

  10

  GUERLAIN

  Guerlain is a temple, a religion. The Guerlain mothership is on the Champs-Elysées. Its painted portals and stuccoed ceilings are ripe with Greek goddesses, and the scents of the place are so subtle that they circle you like invisible dolphins and ferry you away to mermaid land where the feminine reigns. The frères Guerlain were two noses. Noses are people who can conjugate a scent in its different tenses. They know the notes of smell like the scales of moonlit sonatas. They know that there is vanilla in mother’s milk. They know the subtle information that hides in the very belly of knowledge, long before poets and philosophers start writing about it. Deep in the hairy corridors of their noses, all the mysteries of the world of women and men are explained. My mother’s steps slow down when they approach Guerlain and she strolls in like it’s her home on earth.

  She has a way of looking at women as if she were grading them. She checks them out solemnly as they pass us by. She scans them and, when clothes, shoes, neck, walk are up to par, when she can’t find fault, she has a satisfied sigh, a relieved nod – a bit like a football coach congratulating his players: ‘Ah, good, very good.’ A woman is an island, a country, a bottle of wine, a village, a piece of writing: quality is essential. When she sees a vulgar trait, a coarse choice of clothing, an ungainly, pretentious gait, she sighs painfully.

  ‘Poor woman, oh, her worst enemy wouldn’t have dressed her up like that. With those legs, how can she, oh …’ The pain of it is writ on her face. She once makes the sign of the Cross when a very obese lady wheezes up the steps of the bus.

  ‘What a relief not to be so fat! Just look at her. How could she let herself …’

  ‘Oh, the poor woman …’ she whispers to me in English. Long before I discover political correctness I sense that Marie-Antoinette hasn’t a taste for it. She bears the load of wounded femininity for a few steps along with the object of her pity.

  ‘Just look at her. She is my age, I am sure. Why, I could be her daughter … Poor woman …’

  It’s not all about beauty or elegance, because an ‘ugly beauty’ will elicit enthusiastic praise and awed respect: ‘Look, Catherine, Saint-Exupéry was right, “the beauty of the princess comes from within”.’

  I know my own mother’s femininity, even by French standards, is dizzying. Her silk and lace slips, her stockings, her shoes, her Spanish Inquisition nails, but most of all her smell, which is never the same yet always the same – it’s a bouquet made of every different flower on earth, it’s one exquisite rose – make her like no other mother, like no other woman. Once she takes me to Guerlain with her. The slim, tender doctors of the mysteries, the young priestesses in white blouses and the female clients alike stare at me as if a duck had just waddled in, as if they had never seen a child in their lives before. Here, Poum is different; she exudes a quiet, grave, reflective power, a strange authority. She solemnly tries new scents and the priestesses confer over her extended wrist. To Marie-Antoinette, who is usually the ineffectual one, the ‘interruptable’ one, the lost, flustered, pooh-poohed one, they speak with a kind of awe, and even affection, as they nod their heads at her comments.

  She hardly even spends money there. Their scents are such good quality they last for years and usually my father gets them for her. He has taken me there too, but the experience is quite different. He almost runs in, stalks a priestess, pulls out his cash, grabs a bottle all in one flowing action, a bit like a tennis player seizing the ball from his pocket, placing it at the heart of the racket, reaching back to the hilt and striking out to some unknown, but precise, spot. The attendant priestess smiles softly and
reminds me of Leda. She grows feathers on her neck and is on the verge of becoming a beautiful swan, ready to land in my father’s arms with a squawk.

  No tennis for Poum; she comes to immerse herself in Artemis’s pool and can stay an hour while the other shoppers respectfully wait in line for her deep exchange with the attendant nymphs to end. The day she takes me with her, just before forgetting all about me, she swivels round and says with a proud, subtle smile on her lips: ‘You have to learn, Catherine.’ I am busy writing down car numberplates. I am an international spy trying to glean all the information that will get Sylvia back. Even though Guerlain is nice and I feel the dolphins conveying me away, my whole being is yearning for Sylvia’s smell. I would kill for a whiff of Marmite on toast. Nevertheless, Guerlain’s scented path to femininity creeps inside me.

  After a long while, Poum’s attention suddenly swerves back to my person and her mood becomes matter-of-fact. ‘Please, do what you can for this child. She is hairy, I am pretty sure, by now.’ She extends her two arms and pushes me over the ramparts to one of the priestesses. ‘Epilate her, please! We can wait no longer.’ The woman blinks at my mother. ‘Madame, she’s but a child.’ Something in me feels like speaking English, but there is no Sylvia to turn to. My mother shakes her head vigorously and gives me another push. She will brook no nonsense. They take me to a small, white room. I am told to take my clothes off. This is worse than at the doctor’s, where you have to stand in your knickers in a cold room full of shining instruments. I am told to climb onto a sacrificial altar. The beautiful attendant looks rather doubtful as she bends over me with a magnifying glass and sets off on a safari for hairs under my arms and on my legs. She finds three that she plucks out in triumph. My mother looks at her with a smirk: ‘You see, I told you!’ I am embarrassed and ashamed as the smooth and patient face above me probes. Poum stands in the corner of the room with her arms folded in the posture of the medieval executioner. ‘Why are you not heating the wax?’

  ‘I see no other hairs, Madame, none. Fair children don’t tend to have very many.’ My mother puts her glasses on to stare deep into the priestess’s eyes, then, with a quaint bow, her whimsical smile flashes: ‘I trust La Maison Guerlain.’

  My mother’s love, I now know, is unrelenting. The proof is in the plucking. Every time I epilate, I pluck out any floating doubt about her affection. Her love just lives in places love usually shies away from, places where other mothers fear to tread. When she tries to pay, Guerlain waives the bill and she leaves the palace of scent on a high, escorted by three priestesses to the door. For a short while, silent, scented words flow between us. On the Champs-Élysées, her mood changes. She stops walking and pokes me with one red nail. ‘Promise me always to epilate. A woman with hairs is not a woman.’ She then solemnly gives me her hand to shake. She has also taught me how to do this.

  ‘You have to give your palm to the hilt, each valley between thumb and index finger must be firmly met.’ Her grip has a quirky virility, which pops out of her from nowhere. Like two samurai, we face each other in the Paris sun.

  ‘I promise,’ I say.

  She looks at me squarely. ‘Some things are important, Catherine. Death is better than forgetting them. If you had a weak handshake, or started shaving your legs, I would rather have strangled you at birth.’

  She walks on again with her bag between us clasped to her rib cage. I hover as close as I can get. ‘Last night,’ she continues, ‘I dreamt of a red executioner. He was sitting in a room on a high stool with his arms folded across his chest. He was dressed in red from head to toe like a bishop without his mitre; he had a red skullcap fitted around his bald head. He had thick legs with red shorts at mid-thigh and his arms were so bulging with muscle he could hardly fold them. I was in a corner of the room but I could see the door on the other side of him. I had two choices. I could creep round him very slowly and try to escape or I could sidle up to him and try to befriend him.’

  The Champs-Élysées is whirling round us. Its wide sidewalks, the lazy pace of its shoppers and tourists, its flickering windowpanes, its concerto of fountains ahead of us, all seem a dream to me. The inescapable reality is the executioner. ‘What did you do?’ I breathe.

  She throws me a quick, strange look, as if she were dreaming her dream again, as if I were interrupting her. More than anything in the world I want her to tread silently past the executioner, to get away safe, to close that door behind her, to lock him out. She flicks a hand in the air in her usual way, yet her expression is one of concentration. ‘If I crept past him and he guessed I was trying to hide from him and escape, in a second he would reach out a hand and slowly strangle me. Yet I had a chance to get away. He had not yet seen me, the door was not far and he was staring straight ahead in a kind of stupor.’

  I can’t help myself. I touch her arm. ‘What did you do?’

  She gives her head a tiny shake, stares steadily above my head and takes a deep breath. ‘Slowly, with very small steps I approached him. I climbed on his knee and nestled against him. There, I fondled his face. I patted his chest and whispered to him sweetly.’ The horror of it strangles the breath in my throat. I look at her in misery. She nudges me. ‘Now, Catherine, tell me, wasn’t that a strange dream?’

  I cannot be weaned from my shocked silence into ordinary life again. I give her a sick nod.

  She grabs my hand. ‘I wish you hadn’t such wet palms. Why didn’t you inherit my hands? Yours are like a butcher’s hands.’ She is right. My hands are wet and clammy as I see her climb on the executioner’s knee over and over again. She often makes comments on my body. My legs are too short. I have a low bottom. Her observations are matter-of-fact and have no cruel tinge. It is as if I have to pass a woman exam, a Guerlain exam.

  I must pass muster or the executioner will get me.

  11

  KLEPTOMANIA

  Something is missing. Poum is always searching for that lost part of herself. I know it every time I look into her eyes. That’s why she has to leave every afternoon and wander Paris. Her missions are complex. Sometimes she goes to buy some herbs in a tough quarter and stays for hours in a tiny shop sitting on a bag of coffee beans or manioc speaking to an African shopkeeper in his biblical robes. Or she disappears with her Russian Flamenco dancer friend, or just travels in the Metro to the other end of the city and I can’t keep track. She also spends hours with her painter friend, an alchemist who will die of a burst pancreas, a common death for alchemists. (You only have to read Nicolas Flamel, Fulcanelli or the divine Paracelsus to see that this is true). She regularly needs to be in rue Daru, the Russian Church, and comes home laden with stories. There are so many expeditions. Just like the magic carpet of her bed, these places take her away from the rue du Cirque, for my mother can’t bear to stay there for too long a time – she has to vanish. I know that.

  Marie-Antoinette flirts with the esoteric while her deeply Catholic Spanish upbringing bursts in on her unawares, urging her to make the sign of the Cross at the most unexpected moments. At Mass itself she is too busy having unclerical fits of helpless laughter. If her tendency is to follow arcane traditions to the letter, her overriding urge is to break the rules. You can see this urge well up in the sudden surety of her movements, the sudden unnatural glee in her eyes, the sudden quiver at the corner of her lip, and the sudden eerie grace of her movements. It’s a tidal wave of wisdom and folly, so tightly knit you can’t distinguish one from the other. It’s the needle of my childhood compass.

  Rules are not for either of my parents. They have never been to school. Poum had tutors and Alexandre was tutored by his father. When childhood was over, the war was thrown at them. What’s left are memories of grandparents and eccentric uncles, of long corridors of gloomy ancestors, of gruelling interviews about imaginary sins, of endless lessons at home, Latin Masses and wild siblings. What’s left is a medieval hodgepodge that can fit nowhere in this explicit world. I will never fathom their childhoods. There are only lightning reminiscence
s, suddenly stencilling in the lost worlds for which they yearn. Something from that time has been irretrievably lost. It floats in their eyes and in the fumbling emptiness of their hands. They look at me in surprised wonder as if I have a key and can give that time back to them. They suddenly swoop or disappear on me, to surprise or jerk their lost infancy out of my being. They stare at my childhood as it unfolds before their eyes. I am robbing it from them, but they do not recognise their lost treasure.

  When mysterious objects appear in the house, my father is always suspicious: ‘Poum, where does that come from?’ Alexandre is a soul of honesty and my mother’s kleptomania makes him quite ill. Every strange object brings on a mini row that my mother pooh-poohs. ‘I beg of you, my bluebird, don’t worry. As if I could do anything to displease you.’ Her reassurances do not pacify him and he keeps a weather eye on her.

  The first object is a cannon ball. My parents and I visit a fortress in Switzerland with an enormous drawbridge. On each side of its no less enormous doorway is a pyramid of hand-hewn stone cannon balls. As my mother trots by, she coolly picks up the one on the very top and slides it into her handbag. My father, haunting her footsteps, mutters into her neck: ‘Poum, put that back … Poum … you can’t do that … Poum, it’s not yours.’ As they tramp through the castle, as she chats with the guide and thoroughly investigates every turret and every dungeon, Alexandre follows in a cold sweat, a sombre wake. Poum emerges from the visit refreshed and, as soon as we are out of earshot, receives the scolding waiting for her with a clear brow. As he berates her, she blinks up at him, her face full of peace, her smile motherly. He can shake her and try to make her take her booty back till he is blue in the face. No dice. He has reached the outer reaches of his authority, the frontiers of his dominion. A quiet happiness covers her like a coat of mail. She waits, eyes brimming with serene power. He gives up, and very soon he is chatting to her again, telling her to breathe the air because ‘it’s like Champagne’, digging his hand into the crook of her arm and piloting her where he wants to go. He has to be indignant, just as my mother has to read all day on lace pillows and sometimes has to steal – because both reading and pilfering things relieves her of invisible harrowing pain.