I shake my head.
‘But he hadn’t won a battle.’
He continues walking, staring ahead.
‘No, you’re right, he hadn’t won a battle, he had won the whole Punic War for them.’
My father peers at me until, instead of being at Bognor Regis Beach, we are in the crowd of Romans, where there is no choice but Rome.
‘You know, Catherine, the senators were extremely suspicious of the generals. They weren’t wrong, either. Look what Caesar did to them later on. So, when a general had a triumph, they always put a slave in the chariot behind the general. He held a crown of laurel leaves over the general’s head and whispered seven words in his ear over and over again.’
‘Did anyone know what he said?’
‘No, only the general.’
Surrounded by a clamour louder than thousands of howling wolves, my father jumps behind me and, holding an invisible crown of laurels, whispers in my ear: ‘Remember that you are but a man.’
Then, abruptly, we’re walking again and Marcus Atilius’s triumph is over. He has to say goodbye to his wife and children and return to Carthage.
‘Couldn’t he send the Carthaginians a letter instead?’
‘No, Catherine, I’ve already told you, he had given his word – the word of a Roman general.’
I wait, still hoping something will happen to keep Marcus Atilius Regulus from leaving his wife and children. But my father’s voice maintains its evenness.
‘The Carthaginians were waiting for his return carrying the Senate’s response. That’s why they wanted him to come in person. They thought he would advise peace to save his own life.’
‘Were the Carthaginians disappointed when he told them?’
My father looks me straight in the eye.
‘You could put it that way.’
He marks a pause as Marcus Atilius, on his ship, is staring at the waves with no peace treaty in his tunic. I will my father to change the outcome.
‘Maybe his soldiers convinced him to go home.’
‘No, that’s not what happened. Marcus Atilius Regulus arrived safely in Carthage, but as soon as he left the boat, he told them the war would not end until Rome was victorious.’
His words lie like granite between us.
‘What did the Carthaginians do?’ I whisper.
‘They grabbed him and dragged him to the top of a hill.’ My father lifts me bodily and pushes my head between my shoulders. ‘Then they forced him into an empty wine barrel, sealed it, and hammered many long nails into it, before letting the barrel roll down the hill, with the Roman general inside it. As he tumbled down, the nails were pushed in, here and there, little by little, until his body was pierced through and through. It was a slow, horrible death. Then the Carthaginians opened the barrel and made a drum with the skin of his bottom.’
There is a silence. The noise of the beach rushes back and feels scary and false.
‘But I thought Carthaginians liked brave people.’
My father sighs.
‘They did.’
I think of Marcus Atilius Regulus in his barrel full of nails, hoping he died quickly:
‘The Carthaginians were seeing their children die of hunger and thirst.’
‘Yes, Catherine.’
‘And the Romans weren’t very easy on their prisoners either – they fed them to the lions in the circus.’
‘Yes, Catherine. But the Romans were the rulers of the world.’
I don’t see what that has to do with anything. We continue walking. I look at the gulls. Their hoarse cries are reassuring.
‘The Romans pulverised their old enemy. Those who were left were not worth fighting.’
‘What did they do to them?’
‘They killed all the men, took all the women and children into slavery, burnt Carthage to the ground and poured salt over the ashes, so nothing would ever grow there again.’
We don’t say anything for a while. In spite of Marcus Atilius Regulus, I can’t help being on the side of the Carthaginians. There’s something about them that slips from my grasp, something I can’t help but defend. I feel that my father doesn’t like them so much anymore, as if he found my loyalty to them slightly misplaced. Yet I continue defending them, even from him.
20
WHITE KNICKERS
I am stunned when I realise that my father had a childhood too. Like Mount Fuji in Hokusai’s paintings, he’s always existed, as he is – smoky in the distance, honey-scented up close – but, when it finally dawns on me that he was once as small as I am, his childhood self comes rushing at me from the other end of the telescope.
He lived in the country, he says. Somehow I know that; it shows in the freedom of his stride, in the way he breathes so deeply when Paris is no longer in the air. It shows in his Viyella shirts, grey wool trousers, Harris tweed and brown shoes that immediately belong when we go to woods and fields. His seven brothers and one sister also appear, filling the empty stage around him.
Twice a week, he was sent to Paris for religious instruction and took the train back home on his own. He was still very small. When he got off and started walking through the fields, the unfamiliar shape of his bowler hat bobbed along the hedges, floating through tree foliage, sharply defined in the late glow of dusk. Hatless country boys would wait for him somewhere along the way, to laugh at him, jeering, taunting, before jumping right in his path to take swipes at him. But he trudged on, his heart beating louder than the thud of their boots. He can’t remember why he was made to wear that ridiculous hat.
‘Why didn’t you take it off?’ I ask. ‘You could have put it back on when you were close to home.’
His eyes are full of shame.
‘I don’t know.’
And then I remember the time I was tied to a tree in the playground by two of my schoolmates who had me repeat over and over ‘I am stupid’. I let them do it. I obediently trotted out ‘I am stupid’. It felt natural, as if I were a captured Carthaginian and they were all Romans. When the bell rang, they finally released me in an eerie silence.
We’re on the road. He lifts his two hands off the wheel. It looks like he’s trying to catch an invisible ball. We swing this way and that in the traffic, a blood cell flowing higgledy-piggledy down an artery.
‘Do you know how your grandparents fell in love, Catherine?’
Drivers swerve past us blasting their horns. With an absent-minded flick of the hand, he sends them on their way. He doesn’t even wait for me to shake my head.
‘Your grandfather, Pierre, had just finished L’École Polytechnique and L’École Saumur. He came out seventh in his class at Polytechnique and first at Saumur. Polytechnique is the greatest of French schools, for thinkers and scientists. Saumur is a prestigious riding school for elite riders. He did that to take a rest from Polytechnique.’
As if he were on a train platform with only just enough time to explain these things, his voice is slightly breathless. My grandparents, long dead before my birth, stop receding into the mist. He brings them back, throwing me measuring glances to capture all my attention. Of course, he could choose to tell me about them on any other Saturday, but now is the slot, the right moment.
‘Then, suddenly, Pierre’s mother decided it was time for him to be married. She was a widow, dressed in black from head to foot, with a sitting room crowded with furniture – like sheep pressing against your legs. Your mother would rather be able to cycle through hers.’ He’s always explaining my mother, the strange bird he lives with. ‘Your mother has never sat on a bike or a horse; she has never swum, she can’t drive, but she needs the space to do all these things in her own home …’
He chuckles, then clears his throat.
‘Pierre accepted her idea on principle. He was raised to pander to his mourning mother, who for years had been wedded to her mourning clothes. One afternoon, he was duly invited with his mother to a little gathering, called an entrevue, which was thrown to ease matters for the meeting of in
terested parties. The eldest daughter of the house was the candidate for marriage. Their two families had married many times before in the past. Do you know, Catherine, you probably have more Chabannes blood in you than Saint Phalle blood?’
Blood is a leitmotiv for both my father and mother – blood on scaffolds, blood gushing from wounds, crusaders wading through blood in the streets of Antioch. Blood is more important than papers, than petty arrangements. Blood makes things real. Blood is what you are.
There’s a silence, maybe because the question feels open-ended.
‘The girl was called Henriette.’
Instead of being completely immersed in his story, my thoughts dash about faster than swallows. I am remembering another entrevue, where my mother was ushered by her family into the arms of a retarded imbecile. I stare at my father, but he doesn’t seem to see any correlation. Each story lives in a watertight compartment of its own. Now we are with Pierre, my grandfather; there is nothing else.
‘Afterwards, his mother asked him how it went …’
He pauses and reels me back in with a look.
‘… He answered that it went very well. When she pressed him further, he added: “But it’s the younger one I want.” This created a small scandal. But nothing could make him budge. The younger sister was your grandmother – Catherine. I gave you her name. She had fallen in love with him too. They had to wait until her eldest sister got married before they could get engaged.’
He smiles at me triumphantly as if a mathematical equation has been solved.
‘Straight after their wedding they buried themselves in the country and produced nine children.’ My father catches my arm. ‘They’d always go upstairs for a siesta after lunch.’ He smiles. ‘To be alone with each other.’
His parents’ passion glows on his face like a reflected sunset. He glances at me.
‘I was a child of love, Catherine. Just like you.’
‘And they had nine children, like you did.’
‘No, ten, if you count the baby Benoît who died at birth.’
We both think of the baby Benoît a while, then Alexandre cheers up.
‘When I was about nine, my father took me to the theatre for the first time. Living in the country, this was a stunning event for me. It was a comedy. I laughed so much, I got up in the middle of the play and yelled: “Stop it, stop it! I can’t bear it anymore!” There was such a pandemonium they had to stop the whole thing for a few minutes, for even the actors on stage had collapsed with laughter.’
‘Did your father tell you off?’
‘No, no, of course not.’
Now he has parked with one swift screech of the brakes. Leaving the car askew behind us, we are walking to church: St Joseph’s on Avenue Hoche, an American church where none of my parents’ old aunts are lurking. My mother always has a terrible headache on a Sunday and stays in bed all day to prove it. We both know she doesn’t like Mass very much. She’s like Voltaire, who spent most of his time tucked under the quilt, reading and writing with a floppy nightcap on his head, receiving flying visits from Frederick II of Prussia at his bedside. My father looks at her with a half-smile and never tries to convince her. Her bed is her boat and she can sail off in it at any given moment.
The priest drones on and on, people bob up and down. My hand is sheltered in the pocket of my father’s tweed jacket. As soon as the hymns start, he sings gustily, with me riding his syllables as best I can. When people go to communion, they don’t come back to sit next to us again. He doesn’t receive communion but sends me off to the altar, pushing me forward like an emissary, a scout, a double agent. I rather like the break in the proceedings. The look on the priest’s face is lonely and sad, swimming out towards the shore of faces before him, without quite reaching them. When I return to our now empty pew, my father pats me on the back. After Mass, we duck out quickly and walk out into the sunshine.
‘Do you think it hurts the priest’s feelings when you don’t eat his communion?’ I ask.
My father shakes his head.
‘I will next week.’
I look up, surprised. I have never seen him receive communion. He nods.
‘Yes, your mother no longer wants to sleep with me because she is fifty.’
There is sleeping and sleeping. Some sleeping has to do with sheets. Other sleeping has to do with skin.
‘Is that why you didn’t go to communion?’
He nods.
‘It was a sin, you see.’
He looks at me expectantly. I don’t quite understand, but I nod back. Sometimes the caravan can’t be stopped or bothered. We get back to the car and in no time we are on an autoroute, my father driving straight ahead. Soon the country laps against the car windows and we are away, well away from everything.
Flat fields on either side of us iron out Paris and make everything peaceful. My father drives so long that soon dusk is upon us. We only stop on our journey to raid a supermarket. We buy pyjamas, a nightdress with bears on it, instead of the plain Viyella one I usually wear. We buy a razor, razor blades, toothbrushes, toothpaste. Each ordinary object appears more exciting and exotic than the last. The car feels like our house now.
‘You know, sometimes I’d wait hours in the street after my lesson just to spend a few moments alone with your grandmother before her train arrived.’
‘What did you talk about?’
He looks at me as if the wonder of it were impossible to transmit.
‘I’d walk next to her along the platform. Sometimes she would even hold my hand.’
In the car, with the drone of the engine, my grandmother swims out of the past, breaking into the surface of our day.
‘Was she different when she was alone with you to the way she was at home?’
He turns his body towards me and we stare at each other. He talks when he has righted the steering.
‘She … was severe, nearly cold, some people said. They were frightened of her. But she was never different. Always herself. There were great wells of tenderness … To be with her, to walk at her side, was enough. Even if she said nothing, nothing at all, even if she appeared … severe … cold … she wasn’t, not at all.’ He sighs. ‘She was very busy. We had so little time alone together. Every minute counted. I remember every single one I spent with her.’
Even his face has slightly changed shape, as if he were morphing into someone he has nearly forgotten.
‘She was interested in herbs and remedies. She had studied graphology. That’s the art of reading handwriting. People write in many different ways and it reveals who they really are.’
‘Do you think she wanted to know who people really were?’
He frowns.
‘Maybe. Your grandfather was sending all his sons away. Soon I would be the next one to go. I think I was her favourite.’
I nod. I see them sitting on a bench to wait for her train together or strolling on the platform. There is something unendurable about the joy of it, something sacred.
He takes a deep breath.
‘Once we were walking along, something floated to the ground at her feet, next to the hem of her long skirt. She bent swiftly and stuffed it in her bag …’ He stops impressively. ‘They were her knickers.’
‘Didn’t she say anything? Did she laugh about it?’
‘No, she said nothing at all.’
‘Did she get on the train?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I walked home.’
We are quite alone in the car with the fields on either side, and her train has just left all over again.
21
ON THE JETTY
Frontiers seem to melt before my father. Now we’re in Ostend, Belgium, and I hadn’t even noticed. When we reach the coast, it’s raining. The light, grey veil grows on me, covering everything before I realise it’s pouring down. He stops the car and stands on the jetty like a Carthaginian general. The waves chase me up and down the stone steps descending to th
e sea. He never says: Careful, don’t slip or It’s too dangerous. Nothing is ever too dangerous. Then I run to his side again and we walk hand in hand along the freezing jetty, always close to the edge, ‘to feel the horizon,’ he says. We are not cold because his hand is so warm – the hand of a marcou. As he gazes over the slate-coloured waters, he’s reminded of the first big trip of his life.
‘When I got off the boat, my brothers got me a job in a factory in New York. Then one day I was invited to a tea party. At first, I ate as much as I could because I was so hungry. Then I saw there was a piano. I sat down and played a tune because I was bored and didn’t know anyone. A woman pressed herself against me from behind, lacing her arms around my neck. “Oh, isn’t he cute!” she said. I had never heard the word “cute” before. I couldn’t breathe. Her enormous bosoms were smothering me. I was only fifteen. That may seem old to you, but it’s still very young. You see, I had not touched a woman yet. I was very innocent.’
He may be exaggerating, I feel, for he must have touched his mother and his little sister. But I don’t say anything. In a way we are as horrified as each other – my father, retrospectively, and I, because I can’t imagine him disappearing into enormous bosoms, but rather, looming over them. The memory is there, between us, on the cold quay, as sharp as the wind, as strange as the first day of school. As if he were small all over again in my company, his childhood slaps us in the face.
‘The only women I knew were my mother, my cousins, my little sister. I wasn’t like my brother Bernard.’
‘What did he do?’
‘At thirteen, he slept with a peasant girl in the hay and she had a baby.’
I feel a tinge of pride in my father’s voice.
‘Did he get into trouble?’
‘I don’t know. Your grandfather dealt with it. You know, a Saint Phalle can’t look at a woman without making her go up like a balloon. Look how many children I’ve had.’
I think of my mother. She hasn’t produced any other children – only me. Once, I misguidedly begged her do to so. Horror spread across her face. Slowly, she shook her head as if I were proposing to invite a medieval torturer to tea. My father glances at me and, as so often happens, reads my mind.
Poum and Alexandre Page 14