At one time there would have been more than a dozen people living in this house, spread across four generations, and since these were the days before retirement homes, many of the rooms lodged great-grandparents and grandparents from different branches of the family. Old ladies in colourful dresses could be found in the recesses of rooms you’d forgotten were there, like bright bobbins left in drawers. The house is now empty most of the year, and sits marinading in its past for nine months out of twelve. The people who lived and died there also marinaded in their pasts, and spent a great deal of time telling me their stories, or using me as an intermediary to tell themselves their stories. All of them had one thing in common: they thought they were the last of the vieux Bouillonnais.
KEYS
WATCHING AN OLD police procedural, probably a Maigret, sometime in the early eighties while convalescing from glandular fever (an illness I experienced more as convalescence than as actual illness: I felt as if I was simply recovering from something, rather than actually having the something to recover from in the first place), it came to me: a thief pushing a key into putty so that its outline would be caught in the relief and he could copy it, then burgle the house.
That was memory, I realised: a putty with which you could make another key, which would open the same door, but never quite as well. In no time, you’d be burgling your own past with the slightly off-key key that always got you in though there was less and less to take.
COLLETTE
COLLETTE WAS DIABETIC from the age of five or six. Her life was blighted by it. It made her erratic at work, ruined her diet, made her ill and undependable and depressed. It ruined her relationships and then her marriage. She was my aunt: tender, childish, loving, delicate and suicidal, my sister and I loved her, and loved the time we had with her so much it still hurts to call it back to mind. Besides, the more I think of her, the less there is, blanking over like a photograph left in the sun, so I have to be careful, ration out what is left of her because soon there will only be a whiteness in my memory, shaped to the outline of her going.
The only time Collette wasn’t suicidal was when she had finally decided to commit suicide. I’ve seen it since, and I know now why so many people are surprised when someone kills themselves just when they seemed to have stopped being depressed, to have climbed out of the gulf and started once more to touch others.
It’s the cliché of the left-behind. It always starts ‘We all thought she had . . .’ and ‘he seemed himself again for the first time in X months or years’, then peters out into the unsaid, the unsayable. Well, the reason he and she seemed, or looked or sounded well, good, better, was that they’d decided. That normality you thought you saw – the smiling again, the answering the phone, the coming to the door and waving you off like they used to – that was them making a last lap of the circuit.
I still have Collette’s chess set, though the board is lost. As a child she wrote her name on everything, including the little box of chess pieces I am teaching my son to play with. So her name is everywhere, her old toys and books all signed, her school exercise books; even the wallpaper in her old room from when she was a child. And her suicide note. For years, and specifically from 1988 to 2004, it was kept in a drawer in the living-room cupboard with things like glue and scissors and Blu-tack, old spectacles, unpaid bills, stamps, sweets and loose change. It was the most visited drawer in the house – God knows why my grandmother put it there, where you would have to see it twice or three times a day. Perhaps it was her way of keeping it present, refusing to let go, but also trying to embed the terrible thing into routine, to dull it and wear it away with the quotidian, the way the sea works rocks into sand, so that it was no longer present as the catastrophe it was. Either way, it didn’t work. ‘A vous tous’ said the envelope. I threw it out one day, suddenly angry at having spent so many years pushing it aside in my quest for this or that moment’s object and never thinking to move it somewhere that was subject to less finger-traffic. Somewhere you’d actually have to want to see it before you did. But who would actually want to read a suicide note?
Actually, I did, sometimes, when I was drunk or depressed or feeling especially strong (in which case I might take it out and test myself, like a weight-lifter adding the extra weight-plates), I’d open it and take it in: its crisp practicality (allocation of objects, mainly), its blunt refusal to be in any way memorable, either in terms of phrasing or in terms of the quality or extremity of emotion it laid claim to. In the upstairs living room my grandmother had left Collette’s hospital bag, her last hospital bag, because she had been to many hospitals, and that too had stayed for years, pitifully wedged between the arm and cushion of the sofa where it was dropped the day she died and they brought back her things. I threw that out too.
I did something similar when my grandmother died, and then my mother and then my father. Same house, different clearances.
MY SUITS
MY LAST SUMMER before going to boarding school – I was nine – my parents decided to save money on school uniforms by getting them all made by my grandmother. Like all home-made clothes, they were both better and worse: better cut, better material, but worse because it was being better that was the problem: my grey suit fitted me too well and looked too good. The last thing you want is to stand out sartorially, especially as a child, and especially in England.
As we neared the date I was due to leave, 1 October, leaving became real, more real in fact than when I really left, when I was too disorientated and sorrowful to take it in. I could taste the tears weeks before they came. I could already imagine myself gone, so that everywhere I went I could only think about what it would be like without me there. I was told this was just solipsism (though that wasn’t the word they used), but really it was only sadness. Of course, when you try to imagine yourself somewhere you don’t know and have never been, you can’t do it – your mind slides off the surface of the images you conjure up like a finger on wet glass; can’t get any sort of purchase. It’s much easier to imagine the inverse: the place you know well without you. It hurts more that way around too, especially if you imagine the place you know without you while you’re still there – you darken the edges of your own vision, put a black border around your days and they become like leaves curling inwards, dying from the outside in. Even as you live them forwards, you’re looking at them from behind, seeing them as they would be if they were over. I spent most of my childhood with a foretaste of its pastness in my mouth.
So: I really was going – even in the slow, dilating time in which Bouillon seemed to exist, I was going.
fn1 Look: the suit is taking shape, I’d say to myself, watching it grow on the Stockman dummy as Lucie worked. The nearer it got to being finished, the closer I was to leaving; eventually it had legs and arms and was waiting for a body to fill it. It was not unlike watching your own coffin being made. That’s how it felt: I over-dramatised it, of course, but over-dramatised is how I took it in: the fact of it was the drama, something the adults never admitted they understood. Adults pretended there was a fact, and then, orbiting that fact, ancillary to it and therefore wholly separable from it, was how you felt about it. ‘Fais pas la comédie’, they’d say: ‘lay off the dramatics’.
* * *
fn1 I think every child tries that experiment where, faced with a date in the future they dread, and believing the old adages about time going faster when you’re busy or having fun, they slow down and avoid enjoying things too much, hoping to put the brakes on Time. This in turn means they don’t enjoy the present, which gives them another thing, other than its pastness, to regret about the past.
LINING
BEING MEASURED FOR clothes, you learn a lot about lining. Doublure it’s called in French, doubling. Linings played a big role in my childhood, as in all childhoods, along with an endless variation of lining-related associations: seams, hidden pockets, secret compartments, false bottoms, double folds. The lining was what you never saw but could always feel, a place of co
ncealment, in-betweenness, a gulf between skins. All children are spies, double agents, doublure agents, but spies who have to make their own privacy since children are given no privacy, and they are forced towards the accoutrements of espionage. The lining, the doublure, is the most important of these.
Lucie was fond of linings. She claimed it was because of the cold, but her real reason was that she loved the craftedness of a good doublure; she liked the way, though people rarely saw it, a lining had to be as elegant and well made as the outside of the garment. Sometimes it could be spectacular, like someone’s inner life: underneath the grey exterior the world sees, there would be a furnace of shot silk or a pool of seigneurial purple. The wearer might project the outer garment, but really their relationship was with the doublure. When the time came to discuss linings (‘Et comme doublure, tu veux quoi?’), I would ask for extra pockets for pens or sweets or, later, for cigarettes.
She was fond too of turn-ups in trousers, which she claimed gave my school uniform a Cary Grant aspect. When I was about fourteen I measured myself and sent her my details so she could make me a grey suit with turn-ups and baggy trousers and thin lapels, like the one I had seen in North by Northwest. I drew a picture of a suit and wrote down my inside and outside leg, arm, chest and waist measurements, and a few weeks later there arrived, in a brown parcel bound with string, a beautiful mid-grey suit with a silky mauve lining, that fitted perfectly and looked so good I wore it at weekends.
I think Lucie must have sewn a lining into time itself, because when I’m in her house I find myself feeling my way inside it for a whole life I hid there years before.
CARDINAL MAZARIN
‘MONNER UN TRAIN Mazarin’ – to flaunt yourself like Mazarin, to live the life of Riley – is one of those patois phrases I heard a lot. It goes back to the days when Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV’s chief minister and successor to Richelieu, passed through Bouillon, leaving an impression of such wealth and opulence that the term is still used today. I first heard it when my grandmother used it to describe a neighbour buying a colour television. By the time she had her own colour television, she was using it to describe people who had two colour televisions. It’s always someone else who flaunts themselves like Mazarin.
TRAPPIST BEER
ON ONE SIDE is a bottle of Westmalle, on the other a bottle of Orval. Both are Trappist beers. Westmalle is made in the north, in the Flemish province of Antwerp, Orval here in the south, in the Ardennes, a few kilometres away from Bouillon. Both orders are Cistercian, though Westmalle is deemed a Flemish beer, and Orval a Walloon beer. Here in Belgium, even a Trappist must choose the language in which to keep silent.
THE ARSE
MONSIEUR HANUS (YOU don’t pronounce the h, but you do the s, and with gusto too) ran a café off Place Saint-Arnould. No one can remember, if they ever knew, what his Christian name was: that’s what having ‘(H)anus’ as a surname does for you. By the traditional process of nickname-contagion his wife was known as ‘l’Anuse’. ‘Chez l’Anus’, or ‘Chez le cul’, the café was called, and though it too had a perfectly good name of its own, no one ever invoked it. You couldn’t blame them: both ‘Hanus’ and his café became known as ‘Le cul’, the arse, or, in Wallon, ‘l’queu’. ‘Dje vas tché l’queu’, my grandfather would say (‘Je vais chez le cul/ I’m off down The Arse’) every Wednesday and Sunday night. My grandmother, who when she remembered thought herself a bit above speaking dialect, would say to me around ten or eleven o’clock: ‘Descend un peu chez l’cul tu veux? Voir si l’Dènn y est’: ‘Pop down The Arse would you? See if Le Dènn’s there’.
I’d walk down the Brutz and cross the pont de Liège (po’ dî Lîdj) and find Eugène deep in a game of couyon, a complicated and specifically Walloon card game at which my grandfather excelled, and which he taught my mother, who carried its strange rules around the world with her long after she left Bouillon. I remember her trying to teach some diplomatic wives to play it in the British Embassy in Tehran, a few months before the overthrow of the Shah. Talk about a global village.
Eugène never liked leaving The Arse, though he was always gentle with me, even when pretty drunk. I never knew how much he’d had, but his way of leaving the bench at which he’d been sitting was at once precarious and precise. He would turn shakily as he rose, take his backside off the chair, twist his shoulder and lean over and into the table, rise a little higher and take his body round so he was at right angles to the table edge, then at 180 degrees, with his back facing the table and still twisting and rising, so that by the time he faced the table once again he was fully standing up. It was as if he was unscrewing himself, and it chimed with the way he looked when he sat at his café table: screwed in, part of the fixtures and fittings. We’d then walk, him puffing and wheezing but holding my hand with a faltering grip, back to Lucie’s icy welcome.
CORBION
ANOTHER OF EUGÈNE’S regular cafés was ‘Chez Mataba’. Mataba (someone else whose real name had dropped off) and his wife Germaine owned a small bar near the pétanque course, beside which was a blasted and derelict mini-golf course which seemed to have been modelled first on Chernobyl and then on the Chernobyl disaster. We played there while our parents and grandparents played pétanque. I remember the sound of the heavy metal boules, the muffled fine-gravel splash and the crisp clink of the balls as they nudged each other through what looked like a field of cat litter.
‘Mataba’ was so called because instead of saying ‘mon tabac’, my tobacco, he would say ‘ma tabac’. He was from Corbion, a small town on the border with France, where they grew and dried tobacco and were reputed to be unable to gender their nouns. Verlaine and Rimbaud had a small cottage hideaway in Corbion which is now a ruin of slates and moss in a damp overgrowth of trees: the house was in Belgium, but the stream at the end of their garden was in France. There is a sign beside it – you can still see the layout of the cottage from the foundations – that says: ‘Maison Verlaine. Ruines’. At one time, Corbion had several ‘cultivateurs’, who grew tobacco and dried it on wooden frames along the Semois. Old photographs show them drying the leaves, stiffening on wooden poles, dark and crumpled like dirty pillowcases and shot with nicotine-coloured veins. Some producers were moderately large businesses, others were single families, but it was a profitable living. ‘Semois Tabac’ cigars and pipe tobacco would be sold in Bouillon, and today only two producers still make it, mostly for the tourist market and mostly as a novelty. One of them now has a ‘Musée du Tabac’ adjacent to his business, and that says everything that needs to be said about the two-speed motion, the dual-tense, of economic decline: you commemorate what you are still doing until, little by little, doing it becomes itself the commemoration.
Bouillonnais, like everyone else, are adept at composing sweepingly universal rules from minuscule amounts of often unrepresentative data, and so ‘Mataba’ was held to be a typical Corbionnais because of his propensity for misgendering things. (My grandmother based her whole theory that people from Paliseul couldn’t hack the cold on Mme Barras, the newsagent, whose catchphrase – ‘Y fait pâââ t’chaud’ – I still hear whenever her daughter sells me La Meuse). There was also ‘Ma café’, ‘mon voiture’, and, bizzarely, ‘mon femme’, though this might have been Mataba’s deference to his wife’s beefy masculinity. While it was true that Mataba did say these things, I’ve never heard anything from other Corbionnais to justify the extrapolation that it was a Corbion peculiarity. But to us, Mataba was a representative of his people, an ambassador for Corbion and its ways.
ROBERT HAINAUX
ROBERT HAINAUX LOOKED like a successful highwayman pretending to be an unsuccessful one. He ran the garage on the main road out of town, and was, despite his appearance, a rich man and a generous one. His garage was the second-last establishment in Bouillon as you left the town for France. The last establishment was the cemetery, where my and everyone else’s family are buried: Eugène, Collette, Monique, and the rest of them, Elie and Julia and Lucie (my
grandmother Lucie’s spinster aunt, who apprenticed her as dressmaker) and Olga, Emile, Paul and Albert. That was always appropriate – with Robert’s cars you were always, one way or another, one stop from the cemetery.
When I was a child and everyone drove drunk, when it seemed there was a minimum required limit of drink before you were even allowed to climb into a car (more if you were carrying passengers: it was a matter of conviviality), Hainaux drove around Bouillon in a series of battered Fiats, throwing sweets and coins out for children like a third-world dictator visiting a loyal shanty town. His yard looked like a rally-car graveyard, and his showroom was not much better. I never knew rust could come in so many shades and textures. These days it would be called a sculpture park and the arts-council funds would be running over it like rain in a poem by Verlaine (see below, ‘Rimbaud and Verlaine’).
Other People's Countries: A Journey Into Memory Page 2