Books can conjure exactly the expression kleptomania brings to her face. On the Road is one of them – the last book my father expects her to understand or like. When he reads passages of On the Road to her, she laughs till she cries in a despair of mirth. Hugging her chair like a teddy bear, she gasps. When she sees me laughing too, she cries: ‘Oh, oh, Catherine, you are my daughter.’ It is something she always tentatively seems to doubt, for I do not look like anyone she is familiar with, anyone alive, only a long-dead Russian great-grandmother. Soothed and understood, hearing her rituals enacted, she begs my father for her favourite character, Remi Boncoeur, over and over, again and again. ‘Please, go and get Kerouac and Remi Boncoeur for me.’ Remi Boncoeur steals to soothe his heart, to appease the angry gods of his childhood. What did her angry gods do to her? I can only piece together her pain in Kerouac, in cannon balls, in sacrilege, in blasphemy, in stolen roses, in her suffering laughter.
As a drunkard despises an empty bottle, she is utterly indifferent to the material proofs of her kleptomania. The cannon ball stays orphaned on the bookcase. That’s when my father starts circling round it like a shark. First, a glance from afar, then a look, then a closer stare, day by day, step by step, in concentric ripples, he zeroes in closer. Until one evening, I see him touch it lightly, nearly absent-mindedly. Next comes a small caress, a pat, until finally he grabs it and weighs it delightedly in his palm before hurriedly putting it back. However, the pull is too strong and he returns to the scene of crime to hold it and fondle it boldly. He clears his throat: ‘Catherine, this cannon ball has been hewn by hand. It was thrust into a cannon and then it ripped through the air bursting through regiments of soldiers, shattering limbs and lungs. Afterwards, they had to go onto the battlefield to get all the balls back. They would wipe off the human remains from it. Look, there’s still a little bit of blood left.’ He points with a careful finger. We both peer at the cannon ball. All the soldiers are scattered in the furrows, limbs blown apart, lost smiles on their faces, surprised by death, clean of terror as birds circle overhead to clean their bones of flesh. My father is in full swing. Suddenly, my mother steps into the room. He swiftly puts the cannon ball back on the bookshelf. She notices nothing – ever. But eventually his hand will irresistibly reach for it, even in her company. I am there that first time. He needs me there. Never does he allude again to the fact that it’s stolen. She sits placidly as he spins stories of drawn-out sieges and of how cannon balls slowly made fortresses redundant. The strangest of all is her total lack of interest in the object of her theft. I look at her closely. She will never even acknowledge its presence – in a magical sleight of hand it has become my father’s – a gift from her to him. They both love bloodshed. She could not have found a more tender offering.
My mother is a wolf, an eagle, a blind bird, a cat; her gifts come from the wild, not from money or shops. Now there’s an ivory umbrella leaning against my father’s bookshelf. I see her take it. When I am about nine, she brings me to an old and gaunt great-aunt. As if Dickens had turned Spanish, I look for cobwebs in her cavernous house, but there are none. By some strange mystery, her name is also Carmen. She and my mother speak in the forbidden tongue. Poum kisses her hand. I sit and wait. My father never goes there, his name is never mentioned, erased from the race of the living. The old marquesa pats my hair with a distant hand but never looks at me directly. I sit and sit – a sin on two legs. The aura of sinfulness around me keeps me in a trance, as if I were floating in formaldehyde. My mother throws me her shipwrecked glances filled to the brim with a strange foggy sadness, as if she were partly drunk in this woman’s presence. When she gets up to leave, she stands in front of the gaunt face like Iphigenia before Agamemnon and kisses the old hand one last time. She must accept the deal; there is no going back, no explaining, no bargaining. Only Artemis can save her now. She must turn away without looking back, robbed of redemption. A woman in a black dress called Marie escorts us to the door. In the large hallway, Poum thanks the female Chiron but, as we leave, before the door can close firmly on our backs, my mother’s hand slides out and snatches an ivory umbrella forsaken against the wall and takes it away with her. As soon as we reach the street, the umbrella flies open and we walk back to the rue du Cirque under it. My mother clutches the ivory handle with a dazzling smile. Oh, to steal, oh to come away with one’s plunder, says her exultant gaze.
We return to see this aunt several times. We are even there when she is dying. Poum has me sit near her rasping, gasping breaths. She stands there looking down at the wrecked body, the shuddering lungs and the hawk-like nose holding the whole skin that houses Aunt Carmen like the ridge of a tent. Marie is praying quietly. I look round at her but she is staring straight ahead. So I turn back to my great-aunt and watch her life draining from her. I wonder where her soul will go. She is supposed to have loved her unfaithful husband to death. Will he welcome her into the underworld or will she wander, gasping for air evermore? I breathe as deeply as I can, as if I could make the river of air between us widen. I don’t feel sorry for her. I feel no dread. I just want her to breathe painlessly and go to sleep. My mother stands there for hours and we wait. There is nothing else to do. But she still doesn’t die. Marie takes us to the door. The only thing my mother steals this time is the air in her lungs.
She is pensive on the way back. I walk at her side, hoping she will say something. Suddenly, her hand flashes out and grabs my wrist: ‘Come, my bird.’ She walks boldly into a café and cries out to the owner behind the bar: ‘Two glasses of spicy warm wine!’ The man straps his apron tighter over his middle and scurries. I recognise the lilt in her voice even before the alcohol touches her lips. She hasn’t stolen anything, but she has stepped into her magic mood. With a wide, tender smile on his face, the unknown man seems to sense this too. He lays a hand on my mother’s shoulder. ‘Life,’ he murmurs. She smiles up to him: ‘Merci,’ she says, thanking him for much more than the wine. He disappears behind his bar and pulls out his white dish towel to shine his zinc-covered bar for new elbows to lean on. Poum lifts her glass to him and takes a wild gulp. She leans towards me. ‘This stranger is a real patron, little one, a healer of souls, a French shaman. He knows how to shoulder pain, like the man who bent down to share the load of an old horse, like the man in the New Testament who helped Jesus to carry his cross – a priest among men.’ She takes a breath and stares through me. ‘We will not go and see your great-aunt again. No, we will not.’ I stare and stare at my mother and know she is in her element: death and wine. She grins and clinks her glass against mine, holding my eyes safe in secret communion with her own.
The next thing she steals is in England. My father is driving and I am there too. It’s raining; the hills are awash. My mother and father are talking at the top of their voices about the Crusades or Big Feet Bertha, Charlemagne’s mother, or maybe Alexander the Great. Javelins are flying, cities are burning, blood is flowing, while the English rain steadies my father’s erratic driving. People beep their horns. Alexandre snorts: ‘Another one in a hurry to get to his fiancée.’
Suddenly Poum sits up. ‘Look at that little church lost in the hills! Let’s visit it!’
My father comes to a halt with a screech of tyres. ‘Let’s!’ He dives out of the car, takes the umbrella from the back and rushes round to open my mother’s door before conveying her carefully across the lopsided tombs towards the church. I run after them. When I go in, they are both exclaiming in loud whispers about the beauty of the architecture. Hugged around the altar, a small, devout Mass is going on. My father makes the sign of the Cross. My mother lifts her hands in mock horror. ‘Protestants,’ she whispers. My father shrugs and pulls her down to sit beside him. He even goes to communion and pulls me along. I happily swallow the Protestant host. I’d dance with the devil if my father told me to. The old priest looks at us in disbelief as we crunch the bones of Christ. My mother is waiting in glee. Sacrilege, smile her lips, blasphemy, shine her eyes. My father’s proud arm s
urrounds her shoulders and drags her against him. She flutters in protest, but is irresistibly squashed against his wide girth. He holds my hand on his other side. For a second we are all together – a real family, in a forbidden church, disobeying the rules. My mother rests her cheek an instant against his sleeve in total surrender. ‘My Alexandre,’ I hear her murmur.
Before we walk out of the church my mother ducks and I notice her fingers move out laterally. Then an old prayer book on the table in front of the door is no longer there. My father, sailing ahead to pounce on the priest and shake his hand with gusto, sees nothing. The rain has stopped. Marie-Antoinette is herded back into her seat. The car plunges back into the rain. The object of her pilfering lies in her lap. It’s in leather and has strange drawings. Alexandre’s wandering eyes fall on it and his flat foot lands on the brake with a thud.
‘What is that, Poum?’
She looks at him dreamily: ‘What, my bluebird?’
He lays his hand on the book: ‘That.’
She stares at him with a wide, happy smile: ‘I stole it.’ The bald effrontery of it hangs in the car like one of my great-aunt’s gasps. There is nothing more to be done. Nothing.
He looks at her long and full. ‘Poum,’ he says, ‘Poum.’ For an awful minute the weight of silence crushes the road under the car. Then Alexandre’s head is chucked back against the headrest – tears are falling down his face. ‘A Protestant prayer book! Oh, Poum.’ The car rocks with his laughter. My mother has her serene look.
I have taken some in Catholic churches too, say her eyes, her peaceful smile. One has to be fair.
The first theft I remember I am so small I am being carried. Everything is enormous. My mother is walking ahead. We are in the Jardins de Bagatelle, a prissy, perfect garden of roses where humans hardly dare to tread. Roses are Poum’s favourite flower – one of the things, along with Guerlain, she is totally serious about. Roses seemed to be lined up in defence of her. To my mother, every rose has a face and something to say. Every rose is a woman in disguise, the face of a drunkard or a forgotten old whore, or maybe just the very fat lady who lives down the street. I know this as surely as I know Poum will die one day and I will be left with all her scented traces, floating away just beyond my understanding. A guard is on duty with a blue uniform and a disapproving stare. My mother wanders in the sunlight, just out of reach. Floating, it seems to me, between clouds, sunlight and roses. She steps into a flowerbed and plucks a rose in full bloom, just before its peak, right under the guard’s nose. The cut is swift and sure and she holds it in her hand, sniffing it as she walks away, as my father stares in horror. The guard moves not an inch. He seems not to see her. It is downright magic.
Only magic brings some missing things back.
12
MARRIAGE
After several aborted explanations from my father, I finally fathom that my parents are not married. I can’t believe it at first – why should I? They seem so established, as if they have always lived at the rue du Cirque, eyed by their disapproving relatives. But they’re really not married; they’re like Diane de Poitiers, John Lennon, Jacques Brel, Boris Vian rolled into one. Not married? I find this the most exciting news I have ever heard. I proudly tell everyone at school. But soon there is this problem with the American nuns.
Now when I bring back invitations to parent–teacher meetings, Poum and Alexandre no longer run to each other with the news, as if it were a party where they could go together to the nuns’ school with measured, grown-up expressions on their faces, where they could make polite noises of approval and contain themselves enough to clap with the right note of tepid enthusiasm, trying desperately to fit in, because they don’t understand anything, because they slip and slide and wander down the wrong aisle and kiss the priest’s hand and bow like Confucian scholars to the nuns and are chummy with the drunken gardener because he likes roses.
When I hand over the nuns’ invitation, my mother reads it upside down without putting her glasses on and then hands it over to Alexandre. They stare at it quietly, then at each other. It could be a death sentence or a tax invoice. Something happens to the air: it twists and turns, it’s like a chemical reaction – that’s when the paper is suddenly forgotten on my father’s desk, crunched into a ball, or can be seen magically fluttering away. Yet my parents haven’t moved an inch. The next instant, they are gone; they have scrammed. I hear the bedroom door slam happily at the top of the stairs. They are safe again. They have defeated the American nuns in a strange, paranormal way. Not ever having gone to school, it’s a weird new world for them. They often ask me about it as if I had been to the moon. ‘What did they say?’ ‘Have the nuns asked you about us?’ Sometimes when the bell rings I wonder if it’s not the nuns coming to get my parents to haul them away.
I can relate to their fear. They are right. There is a place called school in outer space where Alexandre and Poum’s world does not exist, because their world is ground into the dust by every heel in the schoolyard, by every teacher’s intake of breath, but especially by the sighs of Mother Garnier, the main nun, the aloof one who appears to hold their destiny in the palm of her hand. I see them only once in her company. They become abject courtesans, sycophants in some Japanese emperor’s court. They approach her like supplicants and she does not give them one smile. Tight-lipped, smooth-browed, she lets them into her office like repentant children. I hide behind a tree and ask the garden to help them. Boughs and branches are kinder, leaves and roots are more compassionate than a virtuous Catholic nun. When they come out, Mother Garnier walks them to the gate and I see them go like Adam and Eve clutching at their nudity. They bow over her American hand and whisk themselves away. After a few seconds, as I walk along the wall, I hear Alexandre’s high tones: ‘Well, that went very well! She was quite happy, wasn’t she? What a wonderful woman! A saint! An icon! You can see she has read the Magna Carta!’ Then his voice dies down. I hear his car’s familiar plunge into the wrong gear as frightened horns bark out while he swerves into the traffic. Then even the sound of them has vanished and school closes around me again.
I am a cosmonaut shuttling back and forth each day from one distant planet to the other. Another smooth-faced nun comes up to me and asks me what I think about sex. I know it has to do with my parents. She doesn’t ask any other child. I look up at her blankly. All I can think of is Madame Carmel, the concierge, and what I think of as ‘the underground organisation’. A year later, the American nuns no longer wear their habits and there is a course on sexuality. I tell my father about this and ask him what it’s for. He glares at me and jumps to his feet, runs to his typewriter and bashes at it. He can type faster than any living being – you can hardly see his hands whizzing over the keys. I love seeing him do things so fast and so sure, like the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain. Only my father is not a disappointment at the end of the Yellow Brick Road. He is truly there – the magic ruler of my childhood, holding the whole world in the palm of his hand. I watch him ram the carriage return, whip the paper out and sign his Hokusai wave of a signature. I watch him fold the letter manfully, put it in an envelope, lick it and stamp it fast with his pounding fist. Now he sighs and opens his arm and his leg to grab me close. ‘Catherine, you are not going to learn about sexuality on a blackboard. They must be out of their minds. Oh, no, no, no.’ He hugs me to him and I breathe his smell of honey. He eats about a kilo pot a week. The letter will be pinned to my pinafore because I am not trusted to remember. My mother walks in and he tells her the awful news: ‘The nuns have gone mad, Poum.’
I have always understood that the gods decide marriage and you can just as well be married to a swan or a bull as to a woman or a man. Surely marriage only means that the sacred words of the heart are said. But in the Paris of the sixties, married people and unmarried people are separated by a red sea of sin. Something scurrilous, embarrassing and painful is attached to the unmarried state, something I can feel but cannot name. I think of Sylvia’s parents, Mummy Joyce and
Daddy John. They were married. They both slept in the same bed. They lived in the same little cottage where nothing was hidden or whispered. They breathed the same air. They had a child together, even two. Sylvia had a sister. Of course apart from that, things were different. Daddy John had to vomit in a potty because he had an ulcer. He drank wagon-loads of tea, while my parents drink wine. My father goes to an office and Daddy John preferred gardening. I try to find other parallels between my two sets of parents. The ones that are here now and the ones I have lost. Mummy Joyce kept her cigarette coupons in the sideboard, an ugly piece of furniture that seemed only to exist to house the millions of cigarette coupons. She showed them to me once and for an instant I had the feeling of what a millionaire really was. The stacks of coupons bursting in every nook and cranny of the sideboard suggested wealth, and possibility, like thousands of airplane tickets ready to fly you anywhere. Only they stayed in the cupboard; I never heard them ‘happen’. I didn’t understand what they were there for or what value or function they had. Mummy Joyce never used her cigarette coupons or won anything with them. But she was irredeemably married to Daddy John and all the cigarette coupons in the world couldn’t change that, nor the fact that even though Poum has never heard of a cigarette coupon, she and Alexandre are not married at all.
Poum and Alexandre Page 9