Other People's Countries: A Journey Into Memory

by Patrick McGuinness

  EVEN BRUSSELS . . .

  I USED TO think Evenbrussels was a place: ‘Mêmebruxelles’. That’s how I first heard of the capital city: prefaced always by the word ‘même’. Success of any kind has its staging posts, and for us it was: Arlon, Namur, Mêmebruxelles. As in: Lucie’s dresses are worn in Arlon, Namur and even Brussels.

  PENSION CALENDAR

  MME J— LIVED across the road from my grandmother on Rue du Brutz. This photograph, taken in 2010, is of the calendar as it hung the day they took her away to the old people’s home, 18 September 1994, where she died a short time later. There’s something about old people in their own homes: they can live in them for years without quite managing: managing the cooking, the stairs, the washing, the laundry, the bills, the heating, the water, the personal hygiene and the TV remote control. When I say ‘not quite managing’ I mean, basically: managing. In a similar way, when I said ‘managing’ I’d in fact mean ‘not quite managing’. My point is that that definition of ‘managing’ needs to be as flexible and blurred as possible, to allow the old person who is managing/not quite managing maximum leeway to stay in their own home. Why?

  Because suddenly, when their children or grandchildren decide it’s time to move them to an old people’s home where these things will all be managed for them, they decline fast or die, or decline fast and die – either just before going into the home (as my grandmother did: heart attack on the stairs on the way to the bathroom the day before they were due to take her to see the home) or just after reaching the home, as Mme J— did. These places used to be called ‘Maisons de retraite’. Now they’re just called ‘Un Home’, as in: ‘il est temps qu’elle aille dans un home’: ‘it’s time for her to go to a home’. ‘Le Parking’, ‘Le Traffic’, now ‘Le Home’. My consolation is that my grandmother never knew enough English to feel the painful irony of that foreign word ‘home’ being used to designate the place that would have dislodged her from hers. Generational repotting takes you from home to ‘Un Home’.

  Mme J—’s house hasn’t changed since she left, as the descendants can’t decide whether or not to sell, though it still gets cleaned twice a month. Just above the date in the picture below is a calendar from the post office showing on what days of the month to collect your pension. It reads, in blunt bureaucratese, ‘Mariés’, ‘Isolés’, ‘Veufs/Veuves’. It’s hard not to read it also as the order in which things happen: first marriage, then isolation, and finally widowhood. I’ve shuffled them around a few times and decided that any other order would still be preferable to that one.

  16/20

  AFTER THE WAR, some parts of Bouillon that had been destroyed were not rebuilt. On this beam you can see the old house number ghosting the new one that unemphatically overwrites it: somewhere along this street one or more houses have gone missing.

  Sixteen or twenty? As it stands it’s a perfect example of the kind of double vision of past and present I get as I walk around here: two tenses wrestling slowly while the rust closes over them.

  LE DÈNN

  ANOTHER LEGEND IN my children’s bedtime is their great-grandfather Eugène’s temper, which I greatly exaggerate for disciplinary purposes. In order to evoke his voice for them – it’s hard, he was very quiet, there are no recordings of him in my head, but of his heavy slow breathing, yes, the lungs emptying, wheezing like an old accordion – I play them a CD of the French singer Jacques Marchais belting out ‘L’bon dieu dans la merde’, a great anarchist anthem of the 1890s.

  The voice is a snarl, ‘embedded’, as Mike Davis says about anarchism, ‘in decadal cycles of class struggle and repression, and in cultures of plebeian anger’. Children don’t know about that, but something of its truth reaches them in their inquisitive minds. They know that my grandfather worked and died from work. They don’t yet know what collective grievance is, but they are wise to something about it, even if they don’t know that Eugène ruined his lungs working in a factory which then laid him off early and under-pensioned. They know that he lived at home but not that he lived essentially off his wife’s job, which was skilled work, but also work that, as he saw it, came from luxury and excess, not to mention from the disposable income of the very people who had disposed of his time, his health and eventually him. Disposer de: to dispose of in the sense of have at one’s disposal, and to dispose of in the sense of cast off, throw out, chuck away.

  Anyway, ‘L’bon dieu dans la merde’ is delivered in a great rich truculent snarl, and when the children hear it they’re consumed with excitement and a kind of awe:

  Si tu veux être heureux, Nom de dieu!

  Pends ton propriétaire,

  Coup’ les curés en deux, Nom de dieu!

  Fous les églises par terre, Sang-dieu!

  Et l’bon dieu dans la merde, Nom de dieu!

  Et l’bon dieu dans la merde.

  It’s heady stuff all right, but it has nothing to do with my grandfather. It all started one day in the car, when, having invoked Eugène to establish control of a couple of bedtime situations, my children asked what he sounded like. Theirs is a world of YouTube and MP3s, in which you can record, save, download or otherwise bank anything, so they expect to be able to hear him at the flick of a switch. What did he sound like? they want to know. ‘Sut oedd ei lais, Dad?’, what was his voice like? By way of answer I played this CD, and told them that it was their great-grandfather singing. They had no reason to disbelieve me (children don’t to begin with), and listened enraptured by the sheer daring of what was being proposed. When I eventually admitted to them that I had made it all up, that the voice was not Eugène Lejeune’s, I realised that a part of the original claim remained lodged in their minds like a splinter and would never leave, that the association would always be there.

  You can’t unsay anything, you realise. In a world where you experience things finishing all the time, irrecoverable – buildings, events, people, happenings – all gone to dust, to the great ‘Ubi Sunt’ factory of memory, the things you’ve said seem to stay, long after they were true and even if they weren’t. I too have come to make that association, so that Eugène comes back to me whenever that song of anarchy and deicide that has nothing to do with him fills the car.

  My grandfather was no anarchist, and really he had no politics because deep down I think he believed in the inevitability of the kind of life he had, in his work and his illness and in his place in the world. Things were there to be assented to and enforced, or rebelled against and changed. My grandfather, even when he was fit and well, wanted as little to do with either side of the coin – assent or revolt – as possible. He refused promotion three times because he didn’t want responsibilities, and then retired early for health reasons. Lucie held that against him, that he wanted a quiet life. They had no sort of relationship I can grasp: they rarely spoke to each other, slept apart, flared up into arguments that were always held, like dialogue in Racine, in transitional spaces – hallways and corridors and staircases. The phrase ‘stand up row’ comes to mind, but only because these two contrived to argue in places with no seating. Lucie was distantly related to the man who had killed Eugène’s father (see below: ‘Murder in Morocco’), and perhaps that was a source of contention, but most of the time they were cushioned from conflict by indifference.

  My favourite story of Eugène’s, and I think it may have been his only story, which I asked for over and over whenever we passed Cordemois bridge, was about Pato, whom my mother and Eugène rescued from drowning after he had been put in a sack, ballasted with not enough bricks to sink, and thrown from somewhere near the sewage works upriver.

  fn1 Pato was a black mongrel who became old and tetchy and died in his late teens, and was fed, in keeping with a family diet which is both a homage and an invocation to diabetes, on cubes of raw sugar. Even Pato, a hairy mongrel so black and messy that his face could not be distinguished from his backside, had a past glory I had missed, and which was always alluded to in order to contextualise the disappointment we felt in him
as children. I knew him as old and grouchy, half-blind and panting sourly in his dotage, always seeping from his mouth, his arse or the drooping sheath of his foreskin. We were too late, because by all accounts he had been a riot of young animal, affectionate and vibrant and full of personality. He was replaced by a pure-bred spaniel called Jato, an animal so stupid that even as a puppy we gave him a wide berth, and who died of heatstroke in a car because Johnny, in whose care he was left while my aunt worked, had gone to a café and left him for hours in the sun with the windows closed.

  Two memories of Eugène still hurt to call back. The first is that he once took me on the most disappointing fishing expedition I’ve ever been on, and that I was petulant and angry with him for it as we walked back empty-bucketed from Cordemois bridge. The second, which haunts me, is that he was banned from writing to me when I was at school, because his grammar was poor and he was only borderline literate, even by Lejeune standards. It was thought that this would be a bad example to me in my new situation.

  * * *

  fn1 Another disappointing thing about Eugène at the time, and which I now admire and wish I had respected, was that he was an anti-raconteur in a world of exaggeration. Many interesting things happened to him, but because he was modest, untalkative, and most of what we’d call his personality took place on the inside (that was his doublure, really), he told his stories, when he told them at all, with no fuss and no drama, and always positioned himself on the periphery of anything that happened, even when it happened to him. The story about Pato is a case in point: the first time he told it, he gave a reasonable if slightly Spartan account of the drama of the drowning dog who became a family pet. Other grandparents would have done a better job. When asked to repeat it, he would leave out more and more, betraying the children’s need for an inflated Disney-style story, until by the end he would simply jut his chin out towards the water where the dog was saved and say ‘Là’. Other old people, compendia of embellished anecdotes, would have been busy adding to the myth; Eugène stripped it down until it became less than it had been, less than it really was.

  CENTENARIAN

  THERE’S AN OLD school photograph that keeps turning up in Le Cercle d’Histoire de Bouillon, where the same photographs and reminiscences keep turning up anyway (this is why we keep reading it, for the sameness laid over change), which shows a class of boys with the legendary maître d’école, or ‘mwéte d’école’, as the patois goes: the schoolmaster, Lucien Chevy (1872–1951). All the old people remembered him, and he taught many of them, looking thirty years older than them even when he was little more than five years their senior. He is suited-up and stern-looking, with a moustache like the curtain drape in an opera house. At the centre of the front row is my grandfather: moon-faced, with big sad eyes and a beret with a little badge on its front. The photo is undated, but I’d say he was about six, and not yet an orphan, which means the picture is from about 1918. Behind him are his two future brothers-in-law, Emile and Albert Nicolas. I’m not sure where Paul is, the only one I knew well. My guess is that he was truanting, practising the black-marketeering skills that served him so well after the war. Emile died in a fire in 1940 after a bombing raid, while Albert, known as Le Pichalit, a patois corruption of Pisse-en-lit, or bed-wetter, moved about fifty kilometres away, and was rarely seen again, perhaps because of his nickname. It’s like in Thomas Hardy novels: if you move to the neighbouring county, you may as well have gone to live in Patagonia, so cumbersome to cross and mind-stretching to imagine these tiny distances become.

  In the back row, third from the left, is André Millard, one of the hostages the Germans took in reprisal for Edouard Degrelle’s assassination. Fourth from the right in the middle row is the already highly slappable face (it would only get more so) of Maurice Pirotte, who has just – 3 January 2013 – turned 100, and is Bouillon’s poet.

  fn1 Too frail to slap nowadays, he is still cheeky and irreverent and even under the tartan blanket that covers his legs and the rims of the tyres of his wheelchair has the manner of a wizened skirt-chaser, from whose lap we might still expect to see a creaking erection stirring gauntly beneath the plaid.

  Pirotte is an extraordinary character: a limited poet who perfected his limitations until they became as charming and graceful and hard as enamels. He only ever wrote about women and Bouillon; women as if they were Bouillon and Bouillon as if it was a woman. But it works. In its time and place, it works very well, its mix of sensuousness and abstraction, words like ‘soul’ and ‘void’ and ‘infinite’ sharing line-space with ‘breast’ and ‘lips’ and ‘thighs’, and covering all the bases a normal person would be interested in if they still thought poetry could do the job. ‘Je suis un homme pour qui le monde visible existe’, said Gautier, in response to accusations of poetic abstraction, ‘I am a man for whom the visible world exists’. Pirotte is never far from the flesh, and was also skilled with ink and watercolour, often scripting his poems with a thin brush, accompanied by a quick sketch of the castle or ‘Les Ramparts’ or a woman with long tresses that segued into the Semois. He knocked off these poems in the manner of an absent-minded genius (a pose he rehearsed diligently), was never without pen and paper and ink, and gave them out to people – thousands of them on people’s walls and in their drawers or in their scrapbooks. He was the nearest Bouillon had to a bohemian, a dandy of the static community.

  My uncle Guy is a believer in Pirotte, and published a handsome ‘Selected’ of his in 2009, to which I wrote a brief introduction-cum-homage. Pirotte wrote a famous – locally famous I mean – poem about the ‘ruelle du passage’, the slate-walled alleyway that divides Lucie’s house from Guy’s, and which continues as a steep cobbled path up to the castle. It’s where the Lejeune men used to piss when they were feeling lazy, which was often, and where bats hung all day and darted in and out of at night. Pirotte wrote his poem onto a piece of flowery wallpaper left over from Guy’s bathroom makeover in, I think, the early seventies, and Guy framed it and put it up at the entrance to the ruelle, where it has stayed all this time. It was probably the first poem I read, and always stumbled at the first word: ‘Ici’. Like a character in a Beckett play, I’ve always found the hardest words of all to be here and now, and Pirotte has a small but important part to play in my malady of time and place.

  The other names on the photograph I also know, because they’re all still here in some form or other, even if the people who inhabit the names are long gone: the Serson brothers live on in their grandchildren’s ‘mazout’ firm, which delivers the heating oil to Rue du Brutz three times a year; the Damilots, the Thibaults, the Parentés, the Sinnesaels and Dieudonnés are all still in Bouillon, and their children and grandchildren still carry the nicknames like genes. Only Pirotte is the last of his line, since he never to his knowledge had children, and he is still here, a hundred years old, surrounded by the long dead who are to him always freshly dead. His business, he says, is more and more with them. In the ruelle there is now a sculpture dedicated to him, a hand with a quill writing a line by Pirotte onto a blank page.

  * * *

  fn1 Maurice Pirotte died on 18 April 2013, while this book was in production.

  MURDER IN MOROCCO

  NOT MOROCCO, AFRICA, but Morocco, Bouillon: ‘Le Maroc’. Parts of Bouillon have names from across the globe. If the world is a small town, the reverse is also true: hence in Bouillon we have Le Maroc, La Tunisie, L’Abyssinie, L’Algérie, Le Congo, and other places associated with French and Francophone colonialism. The town is parcelled up into the local exotic, while local differences dictate behaviour and attitudes. The nearer you live to others, the more different you have to be from them. In this obsession with being like nowhere else, Bouillon is like everywhere else. ‘Narcissism of marginal difference’, Freud called it, the prizing of small differences until the differences themselves became the identity. Three hundred metres outside Bouillon is the hamlet of Curfoz (227 inhabitants). ‘Paysan d’Curfoz’ is a Bouillonnais insult for peopl
e who display boorish or crass behaviour. I’ve been called it for a variety of uncouthnesses, from going to the shop dressed only in pants (excusable: I was only eight) to drinking Coke with frogs’ legs (I was forty-two).

  The part of town known as ‘Le Maroc’ is the last suburb before Curfoz, and housed the lowest-paid workers. It is still the area where the highest unemployment is concentrated. Morocco is built on the slope out of town, and the streets are so steep a tyre could roll itself from one end to the other. The Lejeunes lived in a small house at the top of the Rue du Lion d’Or, the first street in Morocco. They were one of three Lejeune families living nearby, and are not to be confused with Hippolyte Lejeune, known as ‘le Polyte Lolote’, and his wife Maria, known as ‘Djô-djô’, or with Marcel and Joséphine Lejeune, who lived on the same street, and were known as ‘les Bë’.

  Emile Lejeune had two sobriquets: Emile Picard and Emile la Petite. No one knows why. Father of Olga and Eugène, Emile was my great-grandfather, and he was murdered, stabbed by a neighbour, for letting his pig eat some potatoes the neighbour had put out to dry on a wall. The presence of semi-tame but plate-destined livestock was something I caught the end of in my childhood, so I can faintly recollect what it might have been like to have pigs and chickens and rabbits. Le Maroc, like many of the poorer parts of Bouillon, is still full of rabbit hutches, and if you pass the gardens you can see the hutches and catch their whiff of wet fur, mouldy feed and piss-sodden straw. My grandparents kept pigs until the early sixties, and rabbits until the late seventies. On Mondays, Eugène or Julia would yank a rabbit out of its hutch, kill it with one brisk corkscrew twist of the neck, flay it to its blueish plum-coloured stretch of newborn baby-skin, and hang it next door to a twist of bluebottle-encrusted flypaper until Sunday, when it would be jugged and slowly cooked with prunes, its liver either eaten as a starter or added to the stew to deepen it up.