Poum and Alexandre

by Catherine de Saint Phalle

  We are so alone that day, I hardly believe him when he suddenly claps a hand on my shoulder and announces for the first time: ‘You know! You have a brother!’

  A brother …

  Each time he talks of my brother, new attributes fall from his lips. Sometimes my brother is fair, sometimes he’s dark; sometimes he’s a brave soldier fighting in a far-away country, peopled with other strange brothers.

  ‘One day, Catherine, your brother will come and get you. He’ll take you away in his car, he’ll …’

  ‘When?’ I ask.

  ‘Soon, soon, surely, surely.’

  Alexandre becomes thoughtful. The invisible presence of my multifaceted brother is there, sitting in the car with us. According to my father he’s incredibly handsome, strong, agile and brave. I imagine him as a trapeze artist. From the start, family members feel like ghostly heroes to me.

  Then he suddenly interrupts our silence.

  ‘If you counted all the kilometres I have under my belt, I’d have driven round the world three times – and without shedding a single drop of blood!’

  That instant his Peugeot hits with a bump the grassy mound between the two lanes of traffic. We are sailing above everyone. Then with a jerk of the steering wheel, he makes the car land down flat on its four tyres again and we are back on the autoroute. He has a slight frown.

  ‘I think I’ve made a little mistake. What luck I have such good reflexes!’

  Processions of indignant drivers honk their horns in our wake. My father has an indulgent smile.

  ‘They’re all in a hurry to get back to their fiancées.’

  As for my mother, she’s never touched a steering wheel in her life. When in the car, she sits in the front seat like a delicate piece of Meissen china precariously swerving, her hands folded in her lap, serenely gazing out of the window or chatting happily to my father. Now, amid screeching gears, because he believes in barely touching the clutch, he swings his eyes off the road and captures my gaze.

  ‘Did you know that Caesar was very short and bald? He was called the “bald seducer”. All the women were in love with him, as they were with Vronsky, as they are with your brother!’

  ‘Is my brother bald?’

  ‘Of course not, whatever gave you that idea?’

  I know Vronsky much better than my brother. He’s poor Anna Karenina’s wicked lover. She threw herself underneath a train because of him. My parents often talk about her. I think she’s a friend of theirs. I shake my head.

  ‘That awful Vronsky.’

  He nods.

  ‘That’s right, Catherine, he was a good-for-nothing. Caesar was worth a million Vronskys.’

  I nod.

  ‘My brother is also.’

  He smiles. ‘Yes, Catherine, absolutely!’

  This exchange has made his pensive mood go up in smoke. As soon as he speaks of Caesar’s campaigns, his enthusiasm returns. When other drivers glance at his animated face, they drop their speed. Even when they happen to walk by him in the street, people are stymied and stranded in his wake on the pavement. Now his hand soars up towards the clouds behind the windscreen.

  ‘Caesar had conquered Egypt. Queen Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, ordered a precious carpet to be brought to the Roman. When they opened it at his feet, Caesar found her rolled up inside – naked.’

  ‘What did Caesar do?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, he couldn’t resist.’

  ‘Resist what?’

  He looks at me in amazement. ‘Cleopatra, of course! He had to sleep with her straightaway!’

  ‘On the carpet?’

  My father smiles at me.

  ‘Why not? What good ideas you have, Catherine.’

  He drives on contentedly, while I ponder Caesar going all the way to Egypt to sleep with someone on a carpet. I don’t ask for further details. Each story is an egg delicately poised in my mind, full in itself – a world I don’t want to challenge or alter in any way. I know there isn’t enough time for him to say all he has to say to me, even if, when we are in the car, it feels like we’re riding through time.

  Then he is frowning again.

  ‘You know, Catherine, women are equal to men in every point, except in physical strength. You must remember that. You can do anything except beat a heavyweight in the ring. I saw Dempsey fight once in New York. He was very gentle, nearly childlike, but he had a talent: he knew exactly where and when to punch.’

  I assimilate this.

  ‘A talent like Camille Claudel’s?’

  ‘Yes, exactly. They both had a gift and they found out how to use it. Do you understand that?’

  I nod. I ask him what his gift is. He looks at me a long time with his pale blue eyes. I can see a fingernail moon around them. It’s very rare and only his eyes have it. I can feel he wants to describe himself completely. Nothing must be missing.

  ‘My gift, Catherine, is my baraka! My luck!’

  My invisible brother is still floating in the car; his absence is a powerful presence. When I have learnt some French and hear the other children talking about their brothers, they’re so relaxed about it. They see them every day and even complain about them. When I ask, ‘Really? You have your breakfast with your brother?’, they stare as if I were a Martian. ‘Of course, you idiot. We live in the same house.’ I digest this information in silence. When I can’t help asking, ‘Then at night, at night you …’, all I can see are their eyes – their clever eyes that know all the answers. ‘At night, we see them too. We even have pillow fights.’ That takes my breath away. I am deep in Enid Blyton … pillow fights. This brother is a seed my father has put in my head. It’s growing like ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. At first my father speaks of him in general terms, but little by little the descriptions become more specific.

  Now, the car swirls away from the centre of Paris and drives into the Bois de Boulogne again. Alexandre parks, making a large smear in the gravel. He’s soon walking briskly along the path. It’s colder today and, to my relief, there’s no sign of returning to the lake and to Mr Crocodile. Winter is still resisting spring, not one leaf on the trees.

  My thick coat itches. With one of his sudden gestures, he leans over a wall, without noticing the twigs and leaves all over his jacket. Then, in quite an ordinary way, his gaze still fixed on the trees in front of him, he suddenly comes out with: ‘You know you have a brother!’

  I nod. ‘Yes, you told me in the car.’

  His gaze swivels up at the sky.

  ‘This is another one.’

  I catch my breath – another one.

  ‘Yes, he crossed the Pyrenees to join de Gaulle. After that, he fought in a tank regiment. A tank is very big, it can destroy a whole village, but it’s very fragile too. All you have to do is throw a hand grenade inside it and the whole thing bursts into flames!’

  He stops a second, looking around him as if an explosion were echoing right now in the quiet of the park, with bits of tank scattered everywhere amid the strolling people. He squeezes my hand until the dust settles.

  ‘Your brother was alone in the forest with his machine gun, walking in front of the first tank, to protect the line of tanks from snipers. The caterpillars of the enormous machines roared behind him. He was always the one they chose, because he was so cool-headed. You have to be, not to lose your nerve.’ He flashes a smile at me. ‘German soldiers were lying in wait behind the trees. He had to spot them first or be killed with all his unit.’

  He talks without looking at me. My cold hand nestles deep in his pocket against his palm, which is always warm because he’s a marcou.

  ‘You know, your brother was scared of nothing. He’s very, very brave.’

  For the first time, he turns towards me. His blue eyes have a paler, more metallic gleam than usual.

  ‘Then, suddenly, his machine gun burst into fire and he turned around crying (my father cups his palm around his mouth to imitate my brother’s cry): “I think I got one, Captain!”’

  An old lady with
a walking stick gasps and stumbles on the gravel behind us. My father doesn’t notice; he never notices anything when he’s telling a story. But he immediately senses when I am not entirely in the forest with him and grabs my arm.

  ‘Do you know what happened?’

  I shake my head vigorously.

  ‘He had cut the German soldier in two. His captain was the one who told me about it.’

  I ask if the German soldier was killed or if they could sew him up. My father slowly shakes his head.

  ‘No, they couldn’t sew him up, Catherine. He was dead. It was war. If your brother hadn’t killed that poor German, the three guys inside the tank would have been killed instead, and your brother too.’

  Each of my brothers has his own particular story, his stamp, a tone I recognise from the start. This brother is a Spartan, for sure. Yet even his familiarity with machine guns doesn’t make me realise that I’ll never see him in his pyjamas, or have pillow fights with him. It is as if he had sprung, like Cadmus, from the earth fully dressed and clothed with habits I know nothing of. When schoolkids are waiting for their siblings, in spite of myself I expect my brothers to turn up too. They’ll sit next to me, put a hand on my shoulder and shake it, with that intimate and gentle gesture people use when they have known each other forever. Even though it seems to take so long to happen, I know that somehow, somewhere, it will. I often ask myself if it did my brothers any good to be dreamed about so much and so often and to have so many stories told about them. Were they luckier at exams? Did they have more success with girls? Or were they just happier?

  On the way back in the car, it’s the first brother’s turn again. I recognise a particular quality of yearning on my father’s face. He coughs as he gazes even further into the distance than usual.

  ‘He had the face of an angel and couldn’t bear anyone hurting animals, Catherine. He was so sweet-natured, everybody loved him. Then he went off to war in Indochina. He returned, covered in medals, without a scratch, but a completely different person.’

  I ask what happened to him. My father shakes his head.

  ‘He killed people too, in close combat. He slit men’s throats. There was no choice. He had to obey orders. I was so lucky, during the whole war I never had to do that. It’s the luck of the draw, I suppose.’

  My father sighs, with a worried frown. His face is empty and sad. His enthusiasm, like the tide in Bognor Regis, has disappeared from the beach.

  ‘He has never spoken about it to anyone, not even to me.’

  I can’t believe that.

  ‘Really? Not even to you?’

  ‘No,’ he answers, whipping out his arm to hug me against his tweed jacket, before sighing and dropping his hands between his knees. His rounded shoulders look bereft and unhappy. He repeats the two syllables of his son’s nickname … Vinvin … The sky above our heads is grey and tormented. It starts raining. We don’t move an inch, as if the pattern of the drops were a code.

  ‘My brothers can’t help being Spartans, can they?’ I whisper.

  Alexandre beams at me.

  ‘No, little one, they can’t.’

  19

  THE CARTHAGINIANS

  Summer in England is Alexandre’s favourite time and place for talking about the Carthaginians. Bareheaded, in his baggy linen bermudas and short-sleeved linen shirt, my father gets very brown. He breathes in the golden morning.

  ‘Ahhh, the air is like Champagne!’

  As we walk along the Bognor Regis esplanade, my hand swallowed in his, the Sussex summer, the striped deckchairs, the funny hats on the beach are all included in the jingle of the ice-cream van. Suddenly, he disappears into a shop. He moves so quickly, I’m left on the pavement. When I enter in his wake, his hurried presence has already jerked the sleepy shelves and their stilted rows of cameras out of their sleep. He’s now whipping out his pocketbook and buying one. I feel sorry for the pale man behind the counter. Startled, he hands over the box as if it were being taken from him at swordpoint. When I look back, he looks bereft – Hannibal has just vacated the premises with all his elephants.

  We move on to the beach and wander on the flat, wet, grey sand in what seems to me an eternity of joy. My father stops and pulls the camera out of its box and shows me how to use it. It’s much easier than learning how to ride a bicycle. All you have to do is press the button. I take photos of him standing on the pier in the pose of a Carthaginian general. He’s looking out at sea having just vanquished Rome.

  At one point all my father’s stories revolve around the Carthaginians. Around their bravery and spunk, their generals, even their baths and heating systems, which were better than the Hilton Hotel’s, but mainly about their refusal to bend to the Roman world. The Gauls, the Iberians, the Greeks, so many peoples were assimilated by the Romans – but not the Carthaginians. Unlike the Romans, they were no imitators of the Greeks; they were truly themselves. Their steadfast wildness wouldn’t give in. At any point in the story, when they torture their enemies or lose a battle or betray anyone, my father and I exchange glances. However badly they behave, we are both secretly on their side. In a fight you have to choose, and we have chosen.

  He jumps down from the pier and grabs my hand again.

  ‘Did I tell you Catherine, about the Roman general Marcus Atilius Regulus?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Rome was having a lot of trouble with the Carthaginians. The Punic Wars were going on and on. The Roman senators decided to send their star general Marcus Atilius Regulus to engineer some peace talks. They had to do something. They were exhausted, the army was exhausted, the Roman people were exhausted.’

  I stare at my father. This is usually my mother’s word. It’s the first thing she says when she returns from one of her expeditions to the other end of town, solemnly depositing a tiny bag of spice or coffee at his feet as if it were made of lead: ‘Alexandre, I am exhausted!’ We both know exactly when she’s going to say it and in what tone. ‘It’s like a piece of music,’ he tells me once with a big smile. He’s shaking his head now.

  ‘Rome was on its knees – food shortages, soldiers on the verge of desertion, the Senate floundering. Something had to be done. Everyone in Rome was hungry, Catherine.’

  When my father speaks of hunger, he isn’t joking. He was hungry in America when he arrived there at fifteen with a oneway ticket. He was hungry in Paris during the war and, since then, he has never stopped being hungry. Often at the end of a large meal, he looks up and says: ‘Do you know, I could start that from the very first course and eat it all over again.’

  He puts his hand on my shoulder, digging his fingers between my bones.

  ‘So, Marcus Atilius Regulus set sail for Carthage in one of the last boats still in good condition, with a peace treaty in his tunic. He left his wife and family, the Senate and the whole of Rome behind, all anxiously awaiting his return. They had so little to eat, you see.’

  He muses as we walk on hand in hand, using his toothpick, made from the pointy end of a bird feather. I have never seen toothpicks like his anywhere else. When he’s not at home, like Heinrich Schliemann who discovered the ruins of Troy, I excavate little cemeteries of them in the shallow pockets of his old cardigans.

  We trudge along the sea. The screeches of gulls, and of children carrying buckets, the cries of mothers interrupted by the beach anthem of the ice-cream van, the dutiful waves and the clean English wind, vanish. I am concentrating on Marcus Atilius reaching Carthage as soon as possible. For once, I feel a bit sorry for the Romans.

  ‘Did he manage to stop the war?’

  My father throws his arm up in the air and stares at me with a kind of sombre glee.

  ‘When Marcus Atilius arrived in Carthage, he found them desperate for peace. They were like skeletons – in rags, eating dogs and cats. They immediately made him their own peace offer. “But,” they said, “now that you have seen us, you have to bring us Rome’s answer in person.”’

  I am relieved. Now, surely, thin
gs would get better. But my father grips my arm, leaving a small, pregnant silence in his story, before he continues.

  ‘Marcus Atilius returned straight to Rome and told the senators: “The Carthaginians are much worse off than us and have given me their own peace treaty, which they’re expecting me to bring back to them.”’

  My father, still squeezing my arm, continues convincing the senators in Marcus Atilius Regulus’s voice.

  ‘The Carthaginians are on their last legs. Don’t give in now! Rome may be exhausted, but Carthage is crushed. We may be in bad shape, but they are much worse off. Don’t ask for peace. Carry on with the war. You’re on the verge of victory.’

  I want to ask: Why not make peace, if everyone wants it? But I don’t. One glance at my father and the words die in my throat.

  ‘Of course he convinced Rome not to give in.’

  As he beams at me I wonder if Marcus Atilius had blue eyes too.

  ‘But what about the Roman general, did he have to go back to Carthage? Wouldn’t they be cross with him?’

  He snorts.

  ‘Yes, they would be rather cross, as Sylvia would say. But he had to, Catherine. He had given his word as a Roman general.’

  I try and find a way out.

  ‘But didn’t everybody want the war to stop?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Marcus Atilius Regulus was a great general; he knew that Rome could triumph. And that was the most important thing: Rome.’

  We stare at each other. Finally I ask: ‘So did he have to say goodbye to his wife?’

  My father retakes my hand.

  ‘Not straightaway. The Romans gave him a triumph first. They always did that for victorious generals. They put him on a small, light chariot drawn by several very fast horses that galloped at full speed around the city. All the Roman citizens, all the women, the slaves and the children were in the streets to cheer him. The clamour was like the roar of the sea.’

  He throws out his hand. The flat lips of the waves are crawling away from the beach at low tide.

  ‘The sound was so deafening, Marcus Atilius Regulus couldn’t even hear the thunder of his own horses’ hooves.’