Poum and Alexandre
Page 23
We climb into the car, which feels like a funeral carriage. My mother has given every outward sign of relaxation and cosiness, sitting in her chair, her mohair blanket on her knees, reading an outsized Russian novel and waving us off nonchalantly. Pilar is herself, as she is in every situation, sitting in the front with my father as if it were the most natural thing. The respectable screen for my first ball is the daughter of a Grandee of Spain and a widow to boot, but a wacky one – for she is the freest spirit in Christendom and only lends herself to this rigmarole to soothe her old friend’s fears. The whole situation is unreal. We arrive at a castle close to Paris, Breteuil, about an hour later. It’s festooned with fairy lights, but fairytales couldn’t be further from my mind. For a moment we all stare through the windscreen. We sit there quietly. We may have arrived, but it doesn’t feel like it.
We walk in, our names are called out at the door. There are so many people I feel dizzy. I look at Pilar, who tells me not to worry, it’s only a ball. My father pilots us both around, one hand under each of our elbows. Suddenly a waltz is struck. He leads Pilar to a seat and kisses her hand.
‘Do you mind if I dance with my little one?’
Pilar laughs. ‘But is that the point?’
She has a quirky sense of humour that sometimes disassembles my parents’ schemes, leaving them like broken toys at their feet.
He grabs me then and whirls me out. He’s the one who taught me how to waltz, so I know how to swim in with him. Suddenly there’s no more noise, no more voices, no more music even.
‘One, two, three,’ he whispers in my ear.
‘One, two, three,’ I whisper back, but it’s as if we were saying something quite different. Once we tread on each other’s feet, yet there is no interruption in our swimming. Because that is what we are doing, swimming away from all this, from all he wants me to strive for, because we both know, deep down, that he doesn’t really mean it. I think of Napoleon and Julian the Apostate. I think of Dutilleul, who died in unbearable pain to save my father’s life, but most of all I think of Alexander the Great.
POUM
AND
ALEXANDRE
32
A CRUST OF BREAD
A month after my father becomes a widower at eighty-seven, he and my mother rush into nuptials. Poum is seventy-two. After forty-three years of visiting his wife, the mother of my seven half-brothers and sisters, every Sunday, it’s something of an anticlimax for them. After a first impish flurry, they become reflective and slightly abashed – anxiety lingers even without its unwedded body of fear.
Catastrophes reach Alexandre in series, as if he were being gunned down. The Crash of Wall Street, the war, the death of his son, the loss of his bank and his having to start from scratch at seventy-two, these are the icebergs of his several Titanics. They happen suddenly, out of nowhere – just like his death.
When he is ninety, he will announce to Poum one morning: ‘I’m going to die tonight.’ She will laugh and tell him not to be ridiculous. He will go on to live a completely ordinary day – but by dusk he’ll be dead.
After those three short sinless years, Poum becomes a captive again. She loses her life as she knew it. It is ripped away, bit by bit. Like Hector’s from Andromache, his body is taken from her first. Put in a coffin, it is borne away from her on the shoulders of four men, crosses the threshold of the apartment and then goes down the three floors of the Hausmannian building. We look at it, standing side by side. He reminds me of a boat, the men carrying him are like a human sea removing him, in wobbly unison, especially round the corners of the staircase where he dips dangerously before righting himself and disappearing from our vision. She stands to attention, a bit like a soldier, and I stand beside her, ineffectually. That is the moment he is buried for me. The rest of the rigmarole, a few days later, has nothing to do with him.
People come out of the woodwork, cousins, nephews; the Spartans fill the apartment, checking this and that. My mother welcomes them, searching their faces for traces of him. During the reading of the will, she will gaze out of the notary’s window as if this were all happening to someone else. From then on, her hold on reality loosens.
Once I come to see her and she clutches my sleeve. ‘Do you know what I just saw? An ordinary man in a business suit climbing on that flimsy wire fence, then doing a balancing act on a lower branch of the tree to hoist himself further over. It looked like he was going to burgle something. Then I thought he was going to steal a rose from the garden beds in front of the church. But no! All that effort was only to reach a particular flower and sniff it.’ She smiles tenderly at me, at the little street where she lives now in the same quarter but in a smaller apartment, at the Paris sky above us, at the staid, old church and at me, her daughter. She envelops us all, holding us all together in her shipwrecked gaze.
In the twelve-year period during which she desultorily, almost hurriedly survives Alexandre, Poum develops new habits to counter the ridiculousness of a world without him. My mother is not a gardener but she starts picking weeds against concrete walls and transferring them to a pot of their own. ‘Look at him now in his big pot! He is just like the Abbé Suger, who was a serf and became Grand Connétable du Royaume, regent for Louis VI the Fat,’ she says. In her eighties, her sense of hope is as hardy as that weed.
When the doctor starts speaking of Alzheimer’s disease, my mother scoffs: ‘These doctors are so stupid. They think they know everything.’ We are pressured to see them nevertheless.
At the onset, on that first specialist’s doorstep, she pulls my arm: ‘We won’t listen to him, will we?’ I promise we’re just getting that other doctor out of our hair. We’re both sure there’s nothing wrong with her. We sit in front of the bespectacled specialist, his glasses squatting tight on his thin nose. He tries to order me out of the room. My mother tugs at my shirt. I refuse staunchly as she takes refuge in her faraway gazes, which are misconstrued as one more symptom. We sit in front of his desk like two refugees haggling with an officer at a frontier post. I try to explain that there is nothing wrong with my mother. She has always been like this. She’s an eccentric – not sick. He shakes his head forebodingly. ‘We will proceed with the test.’ My mother smiles magnanimously, humouring him.
He spreads his hands on his desk. ‘Well, Madame, there is a long avenue in the heart of Paris called the Champs Élysées. It leads to a famous place and a famous monument. What is the name of that monument?’ Poum cries out: ‘The Empire State Building!’ I whisper urgently, ‘The Arc de Triomphe, the Étoile,’ but she shrugs. The doctor gives me a dark look. She catches it and smiles at me reassuringly.
He smears the desk again with his spatulated fingers. I hate his guts. ‘Now, Madame, another little test.’ He moves his hands in a V motion. ‘What do you put in a container of this shape when it is filled with water?’
Marie-Antoinette’s answer rings out: ‘Pencils!’
I intervene hurriedly: ‘But she always has pencils on her desk in a vase!’
The doctor makes a church out of his hands and stares at us: ‘But not in water.’ He has won. We leave in a daze of eerie shame.
Within a year, she’s in a nursing home, lost in her shrinking body, her fumbling gaze still always staring beyond. When I drive her there the first time, I have vomiting fits and arrive so dehydrated I am laid flat on my back on the floor of her bedroom and have to have an injection before they let me drive again. Poum talks to the nurses: ‘It’s very sad, but we will have to leave her here,’ she reasons with them, smiling reassuringly. ‘You can drive me back.’ She waves at me on the floor and makes a grab for her getaway handbag. I find myself wishing she could escape. In the last weeks of her life, I push her around in a wheelchair. She loves the lift. We go up and down. She points towards the metal doors as we wait for it to come to us and says: ‘You’ll see, it will just be like going to another world.’
It is another world, amid the juxtaposed worlds of her presence and absence. It seems to me
only a few days earlier that she is hopping on a bus. I have walked her to the stop and am on the kerb, waving. She bends into the street shouting at me. Cars whizz between us. ‘Do you know that Frederick II loved his sister?’ she shouts. I move towards her between the cars. She leans out of the bus, ignoring the driver yelling at her. ‘Do you know what he wrote to her?’ She smiles as she used to when Alexandre was alive. ‘Send me something of you, even if only a crust of bread into which you have bitten.’
The bus surges forward, ripping her away from me.
Acknowledgements
A special thanks to Barb Minchinton, Kathryn Kindred, Rowland Croucher, Janet Purkis, and to Patrick Curley, who read an early draft with his big heart. If reading Poum and Alexandre feels more like sitting on soft grass, than on hay, hopefully in the French sunshine, it is largely due to Barry Scott, Tess Rice and Penelope Goodes at Transit Lounge. Any bits of hay remaining are entirely my own. I also thank Roger Averill and Elanor Tomazi, for being Roger Averill and Elanor Tomazi, and so much more besides. But most of all I thank my love, Paul Croucher, who believed in this book before I believed in it myself and without whom it would have been much more painful to write.
Also by Catherine de Saint Phalle
N’Ecartez pas la Brume!
Actes-Sud
Moby
Actes-Sud
Après la Nuit
Actes-Sud
Nous sommes tous des Carthaginois
Buchet-Chastel
Sous un Ciel Immense
Sabine Wespieser Editeur
On Brunswick Ground
Transit Lounge
Radio play of the author’s translation of On the Road by Jack Kerouac broadcast on France Culture
Radio play Conversation à Nayack broadcast on France Culture
Catherine de Saint Phalle has been published in France by Actes Sud, Buchet-Chastel and Sabine Wespieser Editeur. She is the author of On Brunswick Ground (Transit Lounge 2015), published in France as Sous Un Ciel Immense. A tutor and translator, she lives in Melbourne, Australia, where she is ensconced with her partner, a poet and bookseller. Poum and Alexandre is her first work of non-fiction.