Poum and Alexandre

by Catherine de Saint Phalle

  Mummy Joyce once drove somewhere with me. I can’t remember why I was in the car or where we were going. But we were alone together for an hour or two, which never happened because she was usually too busy baking cakes or being a private nurse or listening to the radio or making jam to be with me. But this time, her car drove us through the afternoon, past rows and rows of parallel English houses and twisting roads and briar lanes. She told me she had loved a man called Mr Swan. She was going to marry him but he died in the war, so she married Daddy John. Once she went back to see Mr Swan’s mother with her two little girls, one of whom was Sylvia. Mr Swan’s mother broke into tears when she saw them and said they could have been her granddaughters.

  I understand that Mummy Joyce’s true love was Mr Swan. I know that’s why Daddy John kept vomiting in a potty, why they were both imprisoned in front of the television or on their own in the shed or in the kitchen. I know that’s why the bathroom was never clean, even if I washed it so it smelt nice for them when they brushed their teeth. I know marriage has nothing to do with love. Love was in the greenhouse where small spiders slept in dusty flowerpots, where the dry, sunbaked, mouldy smell met the warm green womb, replete with carefully mothered seedlings, young shoots and moist earth. Love was in the larder with the library of jam pots each with its name in a beautiful serif, coiffed with a frill of cotton. Love was in the shed, sleeping in the wood shavings, near the cosy tools worn smooth by Daddy John’s hands, old friends, waiting for his familiar touch. Love was lying in Mr Swan’s grave. Mummy Joyce retired into garrulousness and frivolity and Daddy John into his blue-eyed silence. They never met though they lived side by side. Mummy Joyce was a good woman but her presence in the house wasn’t loving, it was busy – as if busyness replaced care.

  Poum couldn’t handle Daddy John. They both seemed to know she was some sort of fraud, some Briseis, pretending she was still in her father’s court when it had long been burnt to the ground, salt poured over its ashes so nothing would grow there. The compassion in Daddy John’s eyes made her fumble in his presence. Daddy John was the king of an invisible castle of simple truths and devastating reality. He knew her family were a gang of liars. When he happened to meet them, he retreated to his shed and took me with him. I would sit in his wheelbarrow and watch his hands repair and smooth broken bits of wood. There were mice in his shed but they didn’t scare me when he was around. He wheeled me back and forth and we talked about robin redbreasts and rain and chives so tall and bright with dew and how it was good to be a socialist even if he did stand up for the Queen when she appeared on television because she was a good woman and represented good old England. To make him feel better I told him I also vomited every time I had to go to school and, with tears in his eyes, he hugged me tight. I don’t know if he was crying for himself or for me or for us both. Sometimes I wished I belonged to him and we could live in his shed and I could sleep in his wheelbarrow.

  My relationship with Daddy John happened in the garden, in the greenhouse, in his car, in the sweet shop. We couldn’t relax unless we were alone with the tread of our footsteps and our hands resting in each other’s palms. Something healing and quiet happened then as if the rest of our lives were a hurry and a waste. We both liked to walk slowly, hold hands and sit by the pond near the water lilies. We both wished Mummy Joyce would stop speaking so loudly. We both wanted to stay and belong, but life was carrying us far away from each other. Daddy John was a real place for me. To which real place can my mother return? Or has it vanished like Odysseus’s men in The Odyssey?

  Once Alexandre and Poum have informed me of the guilty secret about their not being married, Alexandre again insists that I am in exactly the same position as William the Conqueror and quotes Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples: ‘From this irregular, but romantic union, a son was born: William.’ He holds his finger aloft: ‘Irregular, Catherine, not illegitimate. You are out of wedlock, but you carry your father’s name thanks to the Magna Carta.’ He drops a kiss on my brow: ‘Whatever anyone says, remember that you have Bordeaux wine in your veins.’ This is why my mother was rushed to England: so I could be born on British soil and have an English passport. I understand now that this is why I had Sylvia and lived in a cloud of English before ever speaking a word of French. It all seems fine by me and the exotic allure of it does not wear off. To think that all the long faces I have seen were only about this: my parents are simply not married. Rather than the carcass of the mammoth I expected, I am landed with the skeleton of this mouse in the cupboard. There must be something else, some darker secret straight out of the Escurial, they have not yet revealed. When I ask why it matters so much, Poum makes the sign of the Cross and my father reverts to the Magna Carta. Reality recedes once again. When I try to reassure them both and say that I don’t mind at all about them not being married, they wince. Neither of them can bear to hear the word ‘marriage’.

  Just after the war, rules and regulations went out of the window, even for two people whose families went back to the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades. But the war has long been over and my appearance on the scene gives them a new crime on two legs to mull over.

  Marriage casts the shadow of the valley of death upon my parents. There are so many adepts of marriage around. Big Brother is nothing next to them: policemen, lawyers, teachers, old aunts, nuns – eagled-eyed grown-ups at every corner.

  In three seconds flat, they know my parents are frauds.

  13

  THE UNDERGROUND ORGANISATION

  It’s easier for Poum to speak of death than to speak of sex. Her easy syntax, her precise eighteenth-century French will suddenly become medieval and sibylline or turn to cloudy vagueness when sex is broached. For Marie-Antoinette, the world below the belt is an overshadowed, floating territory, a Hades of the flesh. Yet I am unembarrassed about asking her anything. While the nuns slide technical information in my direction without looking me in the face, Poum always stares me straight in the eye and gives me an obscure answer on the spot. Once, I hear a teacher or a pupil speak about ‘tampons’ and I ask Poum what they are. Her wide gaze alights on me, then beyond me, an unfocused laser beam, an eagle sighting its prey. A metaphysical rabbit from school is daring to enter her home. She is getting ready to dive down and dig her talons deep into it – a quick, painless, efficient death for stupidity.

  ‘Catherine! Tell me! If you had a cold, would you stuff Kleenexes in your nose? Well, tell me!’ I shake my head carefully. ‘So!’ She smiles, taking a deep breath and jerking her head towards her bedroom stairs. And then, with a short sniff and another wide smile in no one’s direction, she stalks off, dusting off her hands like Pontius Pilate.

  After this I still don’t know what tampons are; even when I find out, I stay clear of them all my life. She has slain the stupid rabbit. My doubts, my questions are beheaded in one clear swish of her sword. Her vague urbi et orbi, ex cathedra symbols, grow to create living constellations. Her images are more powerful than any nun’s rational grids that pack thoughts into neat compartments where thinking can neither flow nor grow. Somehow her message is that deep in this mysterious land below the belt is something sacred, something incomprehensible. Something feminine that requires no explanations. It must be lived and discovered in its secret, unfathomable way; a way no one can teach me. Not even her.

  You can get mired in information. I know that from the atoms. We are studying them in science class. Atoms are whirling worlds with their nuclei and their protons. They are like tiny galaxies hidden in matter. I ask the teacher if they are a mirror image of the ones in the sky, but he gives me a bad grade for that. I learn very early to shut up in school. I can’t wait for the years to leak out of that punishing place. Yet scientists peer so close at the atom that they manage to separate it from itself and that’s when the atomic bomb happens. I know my mother’s whirlpool thinking will never break atoms in two and end up with an atomic bomb. She leaves them alone to do their atom thing, swirling and swirling in
their secret galaxies in that world below the belt.

  When I read 1984, I recognise the fear everyone lives in at 6 rue du Cirque. I know from observing Big Sister – the concierge, Madame Carmel – that the underground organisation is dangerous. It reels everybody in, even closet proles like my parents. Somehow they are under scrutiny. Death seems to be implied if you get caught. A word, a glance, a comment, the dedicated pursuit of relentless humiliation, is Big Sister’s business and she slays you in the end – your face locked up with the rat in the rat cage.

  Any great city, any cave, is still a village: slander is what gets my mother – it’s a mined ground that leaves her nowhere to tread. Soundless, invisible shrapnel bursts under, over, around her. There’s no escape for Poum, except in her bed with a book or outside in a maze of spurned, hazy, faraway streets unknown to the rest of Paris, yet full of African and Arab seers with long coats and bare heels, prostitutes in short coats and high heels, eyes full of wisdom and desolation. That is her secret home ground, far from residential quarters, far from her sister’s parish and bloodthirsty respectability.

  I marvel at her bravery. In spite of them, she descends into the underground organisation with Alexandre. But when she comes to the surface again, she is on her own. Somehow it doesn’t seem to affect my father so much. You can see it in the way he breezes past Madame Carmel. And so I feel my mother is the brave, faltering one, crossing the Styx into the unknown world where the dead talk to you in whispers, where excitement is knife-deep and pain a caress. Alexandre jumps back and forth over the Rubicon with ease and glamour. His bravery is of a different order. In the light of his sudden decisions it flashes, in that moment where all could be lost. ‘Dogs bark but the caravan passes’ is one of his favourite sayings. He always quotes it on the eve of battle, his countenance darkened, meditative, nearly withdrawn. The next day or hour he will stroll in, relaxed, his hands in his pockets, a glint in his eye. He hugs Poum. ‘My baraka is still strong.’ He rarely uses forms of endearment, just her name – ‘My Poum,’ he says as his hands hold her in a sudden epiphany and they smile at each other. Bandits on the run, they have come clear, they have emerged unscathed from the underground organisation – safe yet again, in the teeth of suitors, neighbours, families and foes alike.

  ‘Women,’ I announce to my mother, ‘have to go to special doctors called gynaecologists.’

  She jumps out of her skin. ‘Gynaecologists!’ she spits. ‘I have never seen a doctor of that kind in my life, except to have you and I never went near one again. Gynaecologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, Catherine, are all insane. Did Eve see a gynaecologist?’ She sighs. ‘Poor Eve, that story with the snake is so ridiculous. She gave an apple to that idiot Adam. So what? It was nice of her. He didn’t have to eat it, did he? She didn’t shove it down his throat. Such a fuss about nothing.’ Poum reads the Bible back and forth. While my father sticks to the New Testament, she keeps to the Old. She strides through it, writing on the pages in red. It’s the only book she submits to such treatment. I find a heavily underscored line in Deuteronomy: ‘For I am a jealous God punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.’ In Ecclesiastes, she underlines ‘to me yesterday, to you today’ and also ‘I haven’t delivered you to the hands of David and yet today you charge me with a guilt concerning a woman!’ And in the Psalms: ‘How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your children against the rocks!’ The translator, Chanoine Osty, says in his introduction: ‘Nowhere is there substantial affirmation of the resurrection of bodies.’ This is boxed in shaky red ink. Her terror shines through. No forgiveness, no loophole for Poum. She must lie on her bed of nails.

  Like all law-breakers, my parents need luck, but, strangely, they can both be without mercy. My father grabs me: ‘What? You think they shouldn’t execute a criminal who has raped and killed three little girls?’ I nod my head. I won’t budge. It just feels wrong to me. What’s the use of killing one more person when three are already dead? Poum is highly offended. She’ll try to make me change my mind many times. To her, criminals enter a pact with death. My parents suddenly seem as grid-like as the nuns. Something in me leaves them then. Yet my father once confides that he never had to kill anyone, either in the Resistance or in the war. To them, death is the necessary companion of life, the solver of the mysteries, the conjuror that will get them out of their worries. Death explains and unravels. Ravaillac, Charles I, Mary Stuart, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, all walked to their deaths. It’s obvious: death and the underground organisation stride hand in hand. They both accept that they deserve to die on the spot, yet they’re still alive, stealing roses and umbrellas, gambling with taboos.

  14

  SPRING

  In spring, the streets of Paris are wide and mellow. Birds sing with absent-minded abandon. Swathes of forgiving air push the lid of clouds impossibly far away. Buses are late because no one wants to take the Metro anymore. Even schools open their prison doors a few minutes early. Children step out in a daze onto streets strewn with oak blossoms as if being a child were suddenly allowed. Cafés bulge and pour their tables onto the sidewalks. Parisians don’t snarl anymore. They even smile at each other.

  The respite only lasts a few days before they get used to it, before the heat becomes a burden or before, inevitably, the lid of clouds snaps shut over the treetops again. But in spite of all this, spring is Paris’s season. It’s the open sesame, the magic place in time where anything can happen.

  Spring is Poum’s season, too. Poum is on the run. She ups and goes from the apartment in a twinkling, disappearing until late, but always reappearing ten minutes before my father’s return. The intricate system of buses and the good old Metro hold no secrets for her; they are her second home. She’s a tireless traveller. Alexandre had taken her to Istanbul, Athens and all along the Persian Gulf but she says my birth put a stop to this. Yet her foot is still loose, her step still keen. She returns from her voyages of discovery so careworn and relieved, you could believe she leads a double life. In a way she does. Conversations with utter strangers, bizarre incidents like those one collects in distant lands, set her world to rights. At home her identity is nibbled and gnawed at like that magic piece of donkey skin Balzac called the skin of sadness, which grants your wishes but grows smaller and smaller. They’re all nibbling at my mother’s skin of sadness, being granted wishes while she wastes away in fear. But in spring, I have a roaming sense of her presence being renewed. Her scent will be fainter in the apartment, her bedroom windows wide open, the bird music in full swing, her absence as wild and comforting as a strange song heard beyond the hills.

  I jump off my school bus thanking the driver as he throws his disapproving, sexually charged glance over me. He’s a taciturn, crop-haired, black-browed, macho guy, but his eyes are tight and his jowl is heavy. He snaps at me in French and ignores the other American students. What am I doing in an English-speaking school in Paris anyway? He knows I am French. He doesn’t know my father is an Anglophile and lived in New York for twenty-four years. He doesn’t know about the situation, which makes me ineligible for the French Catholic school.

  I am sixteen, my father a glowing seventy-two and Poum fifty-seven. I am learning to disappear and vanish in the spring streets just like my mother. My days are still full of unanswered mysteries, my parents still worried, often frightened out of their wits, their feverish conversations still switching off when I turn up. Nothing outward seems to have changed. Unlike other people of my age, I am never asked where I go. My parents both disappear themselves. Freedom has never really been a goal for me. It’s always been more of a household pact.

  My childhood is belatedly ending; the bus driver’s glance tells me that. A man starts calling me on the phone. I met him at a party I was shepherded to by my father. He is a bearded, bow-legged, forty-five-year-old painter as short as Toulouse-Lautrec, and he is fun. His curly beard, bulging eyes and short strapping figure are reassuring. With his voluminous ey
ebrows bobbing by my shoulder, we take to walking across Paris, stopping to drink a small ballon of wine in a sunny café billowing out beyond the kerbs where cars snatch at women’s scarves with their rear-view mirrors. He speaks of writers I have never heard of.

  In spite of his deep mistrust of any man approaching me, Alexandre does not even check on this man. The mere mention of his name is enough to make Alexandre beam. ‘Why, his ancestor’s coat of arms floated next to ours at the Crusades!’ This makes the painter as safe as an old aunt. My father’s rules are for hundreds of years ago; he just doesn’t seem to have any rules for today. Today does not seem to matter at all. Poum nods on benignly.

  Having a grown-up friend to take my mind off things is nice. He speaks about the women in his life in a cheerful, confiding way. This is nothing new to me; I am used to my father telling me about his mistresses in America, his ‘successive sincerities’, and his interest in the pornographic cinemas on his way to work. ‘Poor, poor men, their needs are both secret and compelling; it’s not their fault,’ says my father. ‘If you marry one day, you will have to let your husband be happy with mistresses and pornographic films because if not, he could become quite depressed. Poor men,’ he sighs. The painter heartily agrees with these ideas. He has orgies, he explains. I nod encouragingly. I’m primed for this. Why, even my hero, Julian the Apostate, had orgies to promote paganism and rout the priggish, patronising Christian bishops.

  The Virgin Mary had a baby after the Visitation. The same thing could spring on you if you’re alone in a room with a man without wings. But it’s all right to walk with them in the street speaking of Antoine Blondin and André Hardellet. Suddenly, after my full approval of orgies, the painter pats my hand in a new and very strange way. He wants to marry me, he says, sooner rather than later. He does not feel like a friendly troll anymore. I smile and retreat into a polite cloud. Thanks to the suitors, thanks to Madame Carmel the concierge, respectability always feels shady and unclean to me. Poum and Alexandre’s obvious love for each other shines apart from my uncles’ and brothers’ serial weddings. Suddenly burdened with homework, I say I must be getting back to my parents’ apartment.