The Fool and Other Moral Tales

by Anne Serre

  V

  This is what happened when we went on holiday to our grandparents’ cottage in Tremble. They shared neither our parents’ morals, nor their views on life, and we would get horribly bored in their house in August. Papa and Maman had to be very careful, very discreet. Maman was never naked. She went around in a dress, sighing. Papa never dressed up as a girl. We would dart imploring glances their way, which, since they were furtive, met with no response but were waved aside with a superior air.

  In the afternoon, we would go off in the car under the pretense of doing a bit of sightseeing or swimming on some beach, at which point what can only be called “our family life” would start up again for two or three hours. The moment we pulled out of the driveway, Maman would tear off her dress and sit naked in the front seat, her face convulsed with passion and pressed up against the window for the benefit of the other motorists. Papa would change clothes at the first turnoff, and we would learn afresh how to fondle each other and copulate like beasts. We would come back less agitated, even if we missed the environment of our own home, the visits from Dr. Mars, the assurances of the insurance agent, and the sight of Maman vigorously combing herself in the mirror.

  VI

  We would spend the whole of August in Tremble, returning home on September 1st. Oh, September 1st! On the eve of our departure, we’d be champing at the bit! The sun, the fresh air, the beach and the countryside had kept us so much apart that we didn’t know where we were. Our little house on the rue Alban-Berg, with its polished furniture and the dining-room table where Maman would recline, Papa’s study, which we never tired of entering, and the hallway with the huge mirror in which Maman would examine her naked reflection — how we longed to be back there! We would arrive home, and an hour later Dr. Mars would turn up with flowers, so hard that he was bursting his trousers, and Papa would rush out dressed as a girl, even if it was a Sunday.

  VII

  For my tenth birthday, as though I had reached an “age of reason,” Maman introduced the insurance agent, Dr. Mars, Pierre Peloup, Myriam de Choiseul, Marjorie, and the Vinssé brothers into our love feasts. I particularly remember Pierre Peloup because he had a liking for me, whereas Dr. Mars, though he didn’t by any means look down his nose at us, preferred Maman, and the insurance agent enjoyed threesomes with Papa and Ingrid. I don’t know why, as she was pretty, but Chloe was less attractive to them, at least back then.

  Pierre Peloup was an optician, which is how we came to meet him. Maman needed corrective lenses for her myopia, and I went along with her. Pierre Peloup looked like a wolf, with his small sharp white teeth, his red lips always frozen in a half smile, his gleaming eyes and his thick black hair. He must have been around thirty-five. Maman thrust her breasts out the whole time she was trying out the lenses, so that the straps of her dress slid down off her shoulders and hung loose around her arms; and as she was breathing heavily and staring at him through a lens that made her eye look enormous, he was powerless to resist. When he came to the house, he was a little uneasy, like everyone the first time they came round — everyone who wasn’t part of our family, I mean. Maman had opened the door to him naked and was particularly beautiful that day, having rubbed her bush with an oil that gave it a tawny, animal glow. Her breasts were more voluptuous than ever, she had even rouged her nipples. I stood behind her in the hallway, as she had asked me to do. He was speechless, of course, but when he saw Maman’s beautiful behind passing ahead of him into the dining room, he quickly came to his senses.

  Sometimes Maman had these little flights of fancy, “which only added to her charm,” as Dr. Mars remarked. That first time with Pierre Peloup, she absolutely insisted on sitting me down on her lap, my face pressed against her breasts, and while I sucked on one nipple, Pierre Peloup sucked on the other. Maman was extremely sensitive: wherever you touched her, whatever part of her body you caressed, she enjoyed it. Her fingers were playing with my pussy, while Pierre Peloup had pulled out his sex and was entertaining us with it: it was perhaps thanks to this first encounter that he had so much pleasure with me later.

  Maman let me go out alone with him. I would climb into his car, which was parked a few streets over from ours — he didn’t want people to know he was a regular visitor to our home — and we would head out into the countryside. He loved the countryside; or perhaps it wasn’t that, perhaps he just liked being alone with me in the countryside. We would always stop by the same canal, beneath some beautiful trees, a long way from the last houses, an ideal spot from which we could make out even the haziest of silhouettes for several hundred yards in any direction. And there he would come on my face, my body, my hands as they squeezed him, or inside me. At the beginning, he was always promising to bring me dolls or toys or a million other stupid things. The promises ceased when he finally understood that I didn’t need any incentive to drive out into the countryside with him.

  You could say that Pierre Peloup was my first lover, after Papa. Dr. Mars, though he enjoyed touching us, didn’t penetrate us until later. He liked having us around when he was mounting Maman from behind. He relished our presence in the dining room with the big polished table, Ingrid, Chloe and me, or sometimes only one of us, a bit like the little naked cherubs that surround a Madonna in glory (with Maman, of course, in the role of the Madonna.) So we were present at their lovemaking — which was often hurried, as Dr. Mars was always in a rush between house calls — seated in an armchair or under the table, if that was what he wanted, or else lending him a hand if he was having difficulties that day, which wasn’t often the case. Sometimes we’d present our backsides or pussies to him, or offer him our mouths, but his own hands or mouth or sex would pass quickly over them.

  Maman was beautiful when she was with Dr. Mars. “I’m inordinately fond of him,” she would say. “He has only to set foot in the hall, you see, and I’m on fire, in tears, burning, I instantly feel like I’m a cello.” But Maman was in that state pretty much every time a visitor knocked on the door. She’d had an unhappy childhood; she needed a bit of madness.

  VIII

  I still haven’t told you what our house was like, because I was under the impression that the people I was telling my story to were interested principally in our sex life, and only incidentally in the other aspects of our existence. But I’ll tell you about it anyway, because I loved it. The house was a bit like Eva Lone’s. You came in through a garden that had no great charm, but it was ours. It lacked charm because it wasn’t full of those flowers and tall trees and hedgerows that make a garden beautiful. To tell the truth, it was more of a courtyard really, covered with gravel and closed off by an iron gate set into a low wall. There were short strips of lawn to either side of the path, and a flower bed running along the walls of the house where a few flowers eked out an existence. There was no greenery to shelter beneath in summer, not a single tree, which was why we spent so little time there. It made us feel idle and unproductive.

  You entered the house by way of a short flight of steps that opened onto a dark, tiled hall. We loved the hall: summer and winter, we would glide across its tiled floor as though skating on an ice rink on razor-sharp blades. To the left there was a coatrack, an umbrella stand, a marble-topped sideboard in dark mahogany, then a tall, mirrored armoire where Maman would inspect herself. Off to the right of the hall was the dining room, almost entirely taken up by a huge table, always freshly polished and shining like a frozen lake. It was there, as I’ve said, that we went about our affairs. A few seats and chairs were placed around the table perilous. In a corner next to the window were Maman’s armchair and sewing table, though there wasn’t much light for her to work by as the window was tiny and the room received very little daylight. On the other side of the hall was Papa’s study, which was much more comfortable, with thick rugs, shelves filled with books, and better lighting, though often as not he would draw the curtains when we went in there with him. Behind the study was a small kitchen, but Maman was too taken up
with her follies to devote much time to cooking or gardening. In general we ate poorly, just a cracker and a piece of pâté, and sometimes not at all. You couldn’t say we ever lived a life of luxury in our house, except when one of our friends came over with food from the delicatessen, bottles of wine, chocolates and dessert for a dinner party.

  Upstairs, Maman and Papa’s room consisted of a large bed, beautiful curtains and a dresser which Maman would rummage through nervously. The room was always a mess, with heaps of mismatched stockings and socks, and underwear dangling from armrests and the backs of chairs, crumpled panties and socks and dresses strewn about the floor. Spilled out across the dresser were her toiletries and cosmetics: traces of powder and overturned perfume bottles. What a contrast with the frozen, shining sobriety of the dining room, where I never once found a speck of dust! Or with Papa’s study, so comfortable and cheerful, so pleasurable and well lit. But I suppose we must have liked the contrast. A house that’s uniformly comfortable is every bit as boring, I think, as a house that’s uniformly solemn or uniformly chaotic. Our house, needless to say, was like a body or a soul: here it had its pockets of chaos, there its lakes of calm; here its icy detachment, there its velvet depths.

  I’ve been asked many times, since I began telling this story, what sort of relationship I had with my sisters. To my mind, Ingrid and Chloe were probably like the two profiles you see when you look at yourself in a three-sided mirror. We were the same and not quite the same. Our closeness in age brought us together, but I don’t recall ever enjoying with them the kind of hushed conversations or close-knit loyalties that traditionally bind siblings together. We certainly weren’t foes: our family has always abhorred and rejected all forms of hatred, perhaps owing to those carnal ties that bound us so closely together. In saying this, I wouldn’t want to appear to be justifying sexual relations with one’s family. I know only too well that it’s a sensitive issue. But since I’ve decided to tell my life story, trying to set down as precisely as possible what I felt in that situation, which was obviously dysfunctional and yet functioned so well, no one is going to convince me to tear my hair out, to cover my head with ashes and weep. Because deep down, no one is weeping. On the contrary: everyone is laughing and calling out for a dance.

  IX

  Papa’s sex delighted us. We could never get enough of looking at it, touching it. Exemplary in form, it stood out with such authority, the pleasures it dispensed were so keen, that I remember the rug woven with large flowers in his study as a garden far superior to anything by Le Nôtre. Papa wielded it with a degree of brutality that enchanted us. Maman had her madness and the wonderful smoothness of her soft, white body; Papa, his gravity and brutality. As I’ve already said, for a long time Ingrid was his favorite, but this didn’t mean he was averse to shutting himself away in the study with Chloe or me from time to time. Papa would pound away at us, a bit like Dr. Mars with Maman, only less rushed, leaving more time for our mutual pleasure. We became so partial to his attentions, I remember, that in 1970 and 1971 in particular, even though we were in awe of his anger — he didn’t like to be disturbed — time and again we would go and knock softly on the study door, fretful, hungry for the pleasure that no one else — not Dr. Mars nor Pierre Peloup nor the Vinssé brothers — could give us to quite the same degree. At times we would find ourselves in a quandary, with Maman crying out from the dining room, clamoring for our presence at the shining table, when we had already made up our minds to go and knock on Papa’s door. We would stand without moving in the freezing hallway, barefoot since we were naked, fingers raised ready to knock, while Maman in a voice by turns frenzied, listless and pleading would summon us to join her in the dining room, where she was about to pass out with pleasure. Sometimes Papa would be quicker off the mark, and, after letting us into his study, would throw himself on us like a tiger, while Maman moaned away alone. At other times there was quite a gathering in the house, and what with Dr. Mars pressing Maman down over the shining disc of the dining-room table as he mounted her from behind, Pierre Peloup sliding his member into me in the freezing hallway — the tiles of which, I forgot to mention, were dark green, again like the surface of a lake — and Ingrid taking Papa’s sex inside her between the padded walls of his study, we were all — with Chloe lending a hand here and there — perfectly happy.

  X

  We had our neighbors’ scandalmongering to thank if our happiness was interrupted for a month or two. And, I would also say, their envy. Had we forgotten to draw the curtains one day? Was there a spy in our midst? Had Myriam de Choiseul, never the most disciplined of individuals, found the temptation just too great and unburdened herself at last? Suspicions had been aroused, far worse than those leveled at us during the earlier episode with the psychologist at school. Then someone got it into their head to “notify the authorities,” and one afternoon, a social worker showed up at our front door.

  Papa wasn’t home. Maman was naked and busy in the dining room. It was Ingrid who went to the door when the social worker rang and showed her into Papa’s study, which was beyond reproach in every respect. There was no risk she would find any sort of compromising object or racy literature there. (I’ve neglected to mention it until now, but we did have a certain class.) Maman came out to meet her fully dressed and perfectly composed, since we’d spent the whole morning catering to her needs, and engaged her in the most dazzling conversation.

  “I am told,” the woman began, “that there is possibly something dysfunctional about your family. I would like to discuss the matter with you and your children.”

  “Dysfunctional?” Maman exclaimed. “In what way?”

  “Well,” the social worker went on, ill at ease, “there are some who claim — but they may be mistaken — that in your home there is perhaps too much . . . intimacy between the members of your family.”

  “Intimacy?” Maman’s surprise was genuine. As I’m sure you’ve understood, the idea that anything untoward was going on in the house had simply never occurred to her. She thought that this was what life was like. And who’s to say she was wrong? The body we formed with our parents and their friends was so close-knit, the traffic between us so sublime and orderly, that the social worker’s words seemed to run up against a smooth, softly curved surface. She had no idea how to make a dent in it.

  She would glance down at the bright rug woven with enormous flowers, and she could glimpse through the doorway to the study the dark, polished disc of the lake where our mother would recline, but all she saw was a stark, perfectly dusted, well-kept table. She could hear us chattering innocently upstairs. How could she find a way into this household, where, paradoxically, she had already been admitted?

  She asked for a tour of the house, and Maman coldly acquiesced. Wrapped in the dark folds of her dress, she led the social worker upstairs to our parents’ room, where Chloe, Ingrid, and I had gone to tidy up a few minutes previously. The beautiful curtains fluttered in front of the half-open window, the plum-colored velvet armchairs were reminiscent of the dining-room table in their almost masculine severity, and the bed was perfectly made up and covered with a floral-pattern quilt. The perfume bottles and makeup were neatly arranged on the dresser, the drawers were closed and the carpet was immaculate. The social worker was taken aback.

  “Dysfunctional?” asked Maman.

  The social worker asked to see our bedrooms, and that was where we messed up, playing too much at being angels. Each of us was seated at her little desk, revising a lesson or doing her homework, and when Maman came in with her, the three faces that gazed up at her were so untroubled, so lovable, that it was a bit provocative. For the social worker, it was like a slap in the face. It was at this point that she realized we were all in it together.

  XI

  Because of our neighbors’ suspicions, our lives were turned upside down for almost two months, and I look back on this period as one of the saddest of my childhood, though there were others whic
h I’ll tell you about later. We could no longer live as we had done in the past. Not a moment went by without someone ringing the doorbell, asking to see us or speak with us. Maman was obliged to go around fully dressed. Dr. Mars came to visit less often — we had tipped him off — and when he did come by, it was on the pretext of examining our throats. He was barely permitted to so much as brush against Maman, who was determined to make a good impression on the social workers, though we could tell she was dying inside. We were used to seeing her on fire, rubbing our bodies against hers each day and marveling at her voluptuous breasts, and now here she was hiding it all from us, taking it all away. We began to get moody, which wasn’t like us at all. We would wake up feeling sad, whereas in the past we had always leaped out of bed, excited at the idea of starting another day. Papa pined away in his study, and the disc of the dining-room table was gradually covered with a thin layer of dust where we would trace signs with our fingers.