Other People's Countries: A Journey Into Memory

by Patrick McGuinness

  The murder of Emile la Petite was big news, and is amply covered in the local paper, which can be researched in the town archive. I’m relieved to read that there was a history of bad blood between Emile la Petite and his murderer, and that, however much his murderer may have over-reacted, he didn’t over-react so much that he killed a man for the sake of a few canados, as they call potatoes around here (see below, recipe for Canados aux Rousses).

  I imagine a short nasty fight with stubby knives, not the fighting knives you get these days, but the sort everyone carried around back then: to cut your food, peel your potatoes, get the grit out from under your nails, keep in your pocket or in your belt. Push into your neighbour’s kidney. Eugène and his sister Olga grew up fatherless. Olga left Bouillon and went to France. She lost touch with Eugène and no one knows what happened to her. Eugène married Lucie Nicolas-Bourland, and moved up to Rue du Brutz, the last street before the castle. They had three children: Monique, Collette and, fifteen years later, Jean-Pol or Johnny.

  Emile la Petite’s picture is in our living-room, but only because I dug it out from an archive of photos so damp they had stuck together like compacted leaves. He wears a beret, his face is touched up with colour to give his cheeks the blush of marzipan fruit, and his eyes are too close together. He has the air of a small-time trickster, a wheeler-dealer who was always going to come a cropper. The story of Emile la Petite is one I loved as a child, and my children love it now. Why? Because of the disproportion of the offence to the punishment. That’s what sets us off dreaming: disproportion, that whole anarchy of cause and effect that reminds us how fast things spin away from us; how much, in the train of sequence and consequence, the instant can open up and swallow the whole life that lay ahead of it.

  ‘AU PREMIER’

  IN SOME ROOMS it is unthinkable to do anything other than whisper. My great-grandmother Julia’s room was one such place, and it has taken me the thirty-eight years and the several refurbishings since her death to get used to speaking normally in here. It is still the room where quietness happens: I write here, I’m doing it now, at an old sewing-machine table from Lucie’s workroom, and the children repair here when they are overwrought or want to read or doze.

  Julia’s room had been furnished in the 1890s and last decorated in the thirties, though in a style that deferred to the 1890s. I don’t mean belle époque 1890s, the kind I study at university and write about: all Mallarmé and Laforgue, absinthe and can-can and Toulouse-Lautrec. No. I mean religious-provincial-industrial 1890s. Crucifixes, brown wallpaper, and furniture so big it had to be built inside the room it dwarfs.

  It was wallpapered with a dark, off-burgundy velvet flock, its pattern so dense that the room pulsed. There was a heavy Walloon oak dresser, a Voltaire armchair in which Julia sat reading her missel, a brown chaise longue and a round table with two chairs where Julia ate her meals. There was a crucifix on every wall and an elaborate trinketry of religious bibelots on every surface: Lourdes water in plastic Virgin Mary bottles, bone-china saints, antique devotionals jostling with the purest Catholic kitsch: plastic Padre Pio plates and Jesus statues with crowns of fairy lights. Rosaries were everywhere, and even today the things keep turning up, coiled up like millipedes inside matchboxes, on windowsills, behind radiators, in old biscuit tins and bedside tables. Julia went to church three times a day, and when she was too old the priest visited her most afternoons. If I ever imagine my missing Irish childhood, it involves some very similar décor, though less silence.

  Julia was utterly devout and seemed to have been planted in the nineteenth century despite having lived through most of the twentieth, not just because of the wooden clogs she wore, one of which is still in the understairs cupboard, but because of the values that flowed up through her. She was illiterate, and had worked as a chambermaid in the Hôtel des Ardennes from her early teens to her late sixties. To think of her, born in the 1880s, living in the house with Johnny and overhearing his Rolling Stones and Beatles records, gives me the same slightly heady feeling of temporal overlap I used to get when, as a child, I watched Westerns which featured both horses and early motor cars, the horses tethered beside parked cars outside a saloon or a bank. Julia had lived through both wars, lost one son to German bombers and waited five years for another to leave Stalag XIII, and spent World War Two in an internment camp working the fields for the Vichy French. On her lap, or kissing her face, it’s the mix of chasmic distance of experience and comforting physical closeness I remember. Julia was a warm monument, a statue with flowing blood.

  Her body was tall and bony and her face, creased like a pickled walnut, had a wizened serenity that we children found delightful. What I remember most about her was how, when I went into her room, she would get up slowly and smile with a radiant toothlessness, and as she rose keep falling back very slightly before pulling herself up again, as if she was unsticking herself from the shadows. Her room had a special kind of time, and her body obeyed it: slow and curdled, there was a thickness to the minutes. But whenever she went downstairs to make coffee or ‘trempinette’ (see below), she adapted to the sprightly time of the ground floor, the place of movement and commerce and busy-ness. At these times she was fast, nippy, like a 2CV threading its way through congested streets. The house had its time-zones, different trains of life.

  My sister can’t remember this, but I can: my mother picking me up after a swimming lesson in Paris, and telling me Julia had died. This is why I associate Julia with the smell of chlorine, the muffled acoustics of swimming pools (voices, splashing, klaxons), and the difficulty of putting on clothes when your body is damp.

  RECIPE: CANADOS AUX ROUSSES

  ‘FWÉRE FONRE DES bouquets d’lârd bin crôs dins ënne cass’role en fonte. Y fwére dorer des échalotes (ne ni les léchi grèyi). Mette les canados pèlés (côrnes de gade, long-plats), les léchi bin dorer; voûdî d’l’éwe d’zous l’couvercle’.

  ‘Sweat a few pieces of fatty bacon rind in a cast-iron pan. Fry some shallots (don’t let them burn) until they’re soft and translucent. Add your peeled spuds (you can use pink fir apples or any long flat potatoes), and cook them until they’re golden; drain them using the lid.’

  The recipe calls for a splash of beer and a sprinkle of chicory to give the desired russet colour.

  TREMPINETTE

  TREMPINETTE IS THE Bouillon breakfast, eaten by generations and still holding its own against the croissant, considered a new-fangled and effeminate Gallicism, and breakfast cereals, which have yet to reach here. Here is how you make it:

  Take yesterday’s bread and slice it into strips (the day before yesterday’s will do). Place bread into your trempinette bowl (a ‘djatte’), and add a couple of sugar cubes and a knuckle of butter. Re-heat yesterday’s coffee and milk and pour into the djatte. Your trempinette is ready when the bread has swollen and floats to the top of the bowl. It is sipped hot from the rim or eaten with a soup spoon.

  The key to a good trempinette is staleness, the ‘yesterday-ness’ of the ingredients: the bread must be dry and starting to harden, and the coffee must be on at least its second re-heating, so that its bitterness stands up to the sugar and the melting butter. The true Bouillonnais will not stand for fresh ingredients in their trempinette, and I love it for the way it makes use of the unfreshness of things. It is a relic of a period when nothing went to waste. Now, people actually save the fresh bread and the new coffee and put them aside so they become sufficiently stale and old to make trempinette from.

  We all do this with our food, and with more than just our food: we choose the main attraction less for itself than for the pleasures we know we will get from the leftovers.

  HORS SOL

  THE ONLY TIME I heard my mother talk lyrically about something other than her disappointments was when she described the different ways she liked eating endives, or chicons as they are called here. There were many – raw in salad or as a salad to themselves, wrapped in ham and cheese and baked, boiled and then carameli
sed in butter. Endives are grown ‘hors sol’, outside the soil, and are intensively cultivated for a Belgian population that per capita consumes, so the surveys tell us, more champagne and more endives than anyone else in the world. The Belgian chicon is grown in two stages: first the root, which is forced underground and then lifted out, and then the taut bulb of leaves, which is grown indoors in containers once the root has been transplanted into sand and left to sprout and fatten without light. It is the vegetable of displacement, transplantation and – if the word exists – regrounding, which is the same as ungrounding, which may also not exist. And the phrase hors sol has always attracted me – when the old people talked about growing things hors sol, I was puzzled, asked myself how that could be. The chicon’s leaves are heavy and white, tapering to crêpe-thin frills of green that hesitates on yellow, and that damp, shadowy, depressive sourness we like so much is the taste of darkness that has been translated to our plates.

  TROIS GANTS

  TROIS GANTS WAS the local gendarme. ‘Three Gloves’ they called him, with that Bouillon gift for the sobriquet. The story I was brought up on was this: to the 50 per cent of Bouillonnais who thought he was omnipresent, and resented or admired him for it, it implied that he had three hands. While to those who believed that he was a lazy and unreliable slacker – in other words the other 50 per cent – it implied rather that he was all glove and no hand. Both of those stories are good, though they are untrue. But I keep them in mind: like my grandfather and ‘L’bon dieu dans la merde’, they are stories that cannot be untold, unsaid, unremembered, so they linger at the edges of the true. I have since learned, after asking Claude and Guy and a few other old Bouillon hands, that the real reason he got his nickname was that he always clutched a third glove in his gloved hands when he attended ceremonies and functions. It is a beautiful detail of petty functionaridom, an image from Gogol or Flaubert via Monsieur Hulot, and even better than the two stories it displaces.

  Though his effectiveness was much debated, nobody disputed Trois gants’s ubiquity. The Lejeunes, the Adams, the Fellers, the Bourlands and the Nicolas, inhabitants of 8, 10, 11 and 12 Rue du Brutz, were among the 50 per cent who thought Trois gants was useless. Like a character in a Marcel Aymé story, putting his amazing gift to singularly unambitious use, he could be doing nothing in several different places at once: dozing on a bench on the esplanade, queuing for chips on the ramparts, drinking beer Chez Polydanias or pissing it back out at the Estaminet. Modern politicians make big claims for the deterrent effect of a police officer’s simple presence, but this would have come as big news to many of us in Bouillon, for whom Trois gants’s policing was so ‘light touch’ that his work could have been carried out by a modest breeze.

  I have only one memory of Three Gloves bestirring himself in the direction of law enforcement: during the 1976 heatwave, he once walked down from the Cordemois bridge to the riverbank and ordered my father to cover his shoulders while he was swimming.

  DEMOLITION

  THERE’S SOMETHING MELLOW and almost lackadaisical about the way they demolish things here, as if they were trying to make the pace of destruction match, more or less, the pace of building. It’s a kind of symmetry they’re after, as if they wanted to right the wrong that it is easier destroy than to build. When I lived in Bucharest in the Ceauşescu era, demolition was frenetic, unpredictable, violent in its execution and intent. It was all about humiliating the past, not just abolishing it.

  Here in Bouillon it’s more a kind of respectful attrition. The municipal lorries and cranes seem to be chaperoning the old hotel towards its end, drawing its end out of it, naturally, rather than imposing it from outside; the wrecking balls don’t so much demolish the buildings as wear them away, and appear to be engaged in euthanasia rather than murder. The diggers stand with their articulated arms hanging, their jaws slack and nosing at the ground like Meccano dinosaurs grazing on the rubble. It took the best part of a year to knock down the Hôtel de la Gare, and even now some of it still stands. It’s fascinating: two thirds of the building is a tumbled detritus of bricks and breezeblocks, piled on top of itself so high you can climb it until you’re at the first floor of what remains of the hotel, which you can enter either through the balcony, which is intact, and whose French windows are open onto a spectacular view of castle and river, or through a door, which is ajar, which swings in the breeze, and which leads onto a corridor still decorated with paintings and in which you can see, dimly, an old console table with plastic flowers and a decorative Chianti bottle with half a candle in it and a stilled spread of melted red wax. Built in the seventies, the place carries the seventies inside itself, and there’s something intimate and nearly sexual about the deep maroon darkness of the corridor: that crowded wallpaper, burgundy flock, with its relentless pattern of tendrils and fist-sized flowers, the mass-produced paintings, in plastic gold frames, of Hawaiian sunsets . . . And above all you notice this: that in all the time the building has been empty and open, parts of it unwalled and ceilingless, no one has bothered to steal anything: the pans and plates and cutlery are all still in the kitchen, the bedding is still on the bed, layered with ten years of dust. Some beds are made, some unmade. The keys still hang from the wooden box behind reception though most of the rooms are air, and the counter still sports its rack of old flyers for tourist attractions. One of them is a fold-out map of the town framed with adverts for long-gone businesses and cafés, titled ‘Bouillon, Perle de la Semois’.

  If you squinted, you’d think the place was being built, not pulled down.

  SOBRIQUETS

  FOR MANY FAMILIES, the nicknames are so powerful that their real names wither away from disuse. With some nicknames, person-specific ones such as ‘Le Dènn’, ‘Paprika’, ‘le Patate’, ‘Le Pichalit’, ‘le Zygomar’, ‘Mataba’ etc., the sobriquet shadows the real name for a while, before taking over the job. This is like a handover period, then the real name disappears and returns one last time on the death certificate.

  With family nicknames, les Pistache, les Bë, Les Pointës, les Qué-Qués, Les Cassoulet, and scores of others, the children are born into them. My uncle Guy, in reality a cousin of my mother, has always been called Pistache, but so have his two brothers Francis and Jacky, so were his father and grandfather, and so, now, are his children and grandchildren. These nicknames are different. They are part of a numinous inheritance, a link back to the past, and they function as another sort of memory: through wars and across the borders of countries and centuries, up and down the ladder of social mobility, through emigrations and homecomings, through intermarriages and extra-marriages.

  Among my favourite of these are a family nicknamed the ‘Remplaçants’, the Replacements, so-called because generations ago one of their forebears was paid to do military service in place of a wealthy man who bought himself out.

  The closest example to me of the generational nickname, or the heritage nickname, the nickname as heirloom, is Guy’s aunt and my grandmother’s cousin, Nanette (Germaine), sister of the executed Victor, Guy’s father. Nanette married an American GI in the liberation of Belgium and went to live with him in Clairton, Pennsylvania (the setting, though not the filming location, for The Deer Hunter). Her son and daughter, monoglot Americans – one is a therapist, the other was a Republican Congresswoman and Senate candidate – remain Pistaches, and are always thus called when they visit. It doesn’t matter that one sells tantric self-help to business leaders and the other stood for election to the Senate under Reagan and George Bush Senior: when they’re here they’re as much Pistaches as Guy or Jacky or Francis.

  Nanette sits in the courtyard and chats with her schoolfriends. She visits every couple of years or so, but is too old now – her last visit was in 2009 and she is nearly ninety. She looks and sounds exactly like them, though by some paradox which when you think about isn’t a paradox at all, she sounds more Bouillonnais than they do. Her accent is pickled like Degrelle’s, preserved. It makes sense: she left, it stopped. She m
ay live in a state-of-the-art condo on the Florida seafront and volunteer for an environmental group that saves rare turtles from the ravages of developers, but Bouillon-wise she’s still a Pistache and it’s still 1945. Her contemporaries and school friends from the Athénée and the Institut Sainte-Marie wear densely-patterned, stain-friendly housework-proof dresses and black aprons with zipped-up grippy fur-lined shoes. She wears a lime-green tracksuit and trainers white as a film star’s teeth. But she speaks in thicker, more patois-flecked French than they do.

  To imagine what her life must have been like, the bereavements, the geographical changes, the emotional and cultural adjustments, hurts the mind. Realising, as I always quickly do, that more people, on balance, have this than don’t, and have it harder than she did, are more lonely, more violently transplanted, and transplanted from violence to violence, are more disorientated and bereaved and alone, hurts even more, and I have to stop. As the man in Proust says about his dead wife, when asked if he still thinks about her a lot: ‘Yes, a lot, but only a little at a time.’

  Bouillon is what demographers call a static community. Nanette left, but in some ways, for all her travelling and transplantation, she is more static than those who stayed. The exile is always defined by their leaving, but also, for themselves and for others, by the frozenness of the moment of their going. Nanette brings her own stasis to the static community, and for a moment as I watch and listen to her, the roles are inverted – she is rooted in place and time and we are the ones spinning away – and suddenly everything tips over and spills everywhere: here, there, now, then, her, us, spreading uncontrollably along an endlessly smooth floor.