by Anne Serre
Sometimes we couldn’t take it anymore and would be compelled to make love, albeit on the sly. We would lick Maman’s sex for a few minutes, while she was performing her toilette at night. Papa would come up to Ingrid’s room, and we would wait timidly in line for the stunning view of his erect member, the moment of contact, the introduction of that awe-inspiring device. But everything had been turned upside down. Papa had never come up to see us in our rooms; Maman had never comported herself like that in her bathroom. And what of the huge round table like a black lake? And the rug in the study with its sparkling flowers? And the tiled hall that gave us so much pleasure? All were deserted. I know it probably sounds absurd, but I swear to you: it was as though we had lost our homeland.
XII
It was thanks to the Vinssé brothers that we finally got out of this scrape. They had come to make a psychological assessment of the family, at the behest of who knows what authority, but it wasn’t long before they were driving us out to the countryside, Ingrid, Chloe, and me. Without once mentioning Pierre Peloup by name, or even his existence, we pointed out the canal to them, on the banks of which we would hold our orgies. Yves and Yvon Vinssé were twins. They looked so much alike that we referred to them as “the Vinssé brothers,” since we found them hard to tell apart. Chloe at last had her share of pleasure, after years of baffling neglect. For the Vinssé brothers, it was like discovering a promised land. Their passion and joy were so intense that we often worried they would collapse under the weight of so much happiness. We’d never experienced this with Dr. Mars, or with Pierre Peloup or Myriam de Choiseul or Marjorie, who although wholehearted in their enjoyment of pleasure — they were all extremely passionate — expressed their satisfaction with more reserve. The Vinssé brothers’ howls would ring out along the banks of the clear canal, under the tall poplars, and if they withdrew for a moment, it was to come straight back in, not knowing where to look, or lick, or touch. We had to use threats to calm them down.
Chloe found them particularly to her liking. Perhaps she’d been waiting for them all this time to bring out her gaiety, her appetite for life? Whenever we were a bit worn out after satisfying them over and over again and were balking at the prospect of returning back along the canal, Chloe would offer to go with them alone. At times like this, when she showed herself to be strong-willed and determined, we didn’t know who she most resembled. “Your father,” said Marjorie. “Your mother, of course,” said Dr. Mars, gallantly. Pierre Peloup was furious to learn that his territory by the canal had been colonized. For three days, we scoured the countryside together, looking for a spot equally well suited to our trysts. We needed somewhere with no houses nearby and a clear view to the horizon, so that we could make out the silhouette of a passerby or a car approaching. A number of times we met — in his gray sedan — in an open field in the middle of a huge plain. While we were going about our business, I could glimpse in the distance, whenever I raised my head, the two black spires of a cathedral. And for the first time I felt something stirring in me. Not love, that was still a long way off, young as I was, and in any case in a quite impossible situation; but the seed of love, a glimmer of hope, a first pang of grief for something higher, finer, more mysterious than our familial pleasures, which were neither high nor fine nor mysterious, but weren’t the opposite of that either. Something broad, smooth, glacial, and imposing.
XIII
With the arrival of the Vinssé brothers, order was restored to our family. The rumormongering ceased, or people kept it to themselves at least. On the rue Alban-Berg, we no longer saw the neighbors across the way peeking through the curtains at us. People stopped snubbing us when we passed them in the street, and Papa could go out dressed as a woman again — only now he would walk up to the corner as a man and change clothes elsewhere.
For our mother, on the other hand, the blow inflicted by those two months of abstinence and caution may well have been fatal. She was truly ill from that point on, and when Dr. Mars came over, it wasn’t simply to cheer her up or to celebrate the beauty of the great frozen lake of our dining-room table with her, but to examine her and prescribe her medicine, urge her to shake off her despondency and pull herself together. “Come, Marianne!” he would say, “you used to be so cheerful, so breathless for life, you were so radiant when you welcomed me into your backside, and you always wanted more! What’s going on? Get a grip on yourself! Everything’s back to normal, the children are happy, I can stop by between each house call, no one is preventing you from living your life exactly as you please.” And since he was fond of flowery language, he added, “When, pray, will your dark and creamy behind smile on me once more?” Maman laughed, which wasn’t like her at all.
Papa, who as I’ve already said had always been rather brutal with her, no longer cast so much as a glance in her direction. He would shut himself away with the insurance agent and Ingrid, sometimes having Chloe and me take part as well. We didn’t really like the insurance agent — we thought he had a funny smell. Ingrid thought so, too, but she rather liked it. During the whole time Maman was ill — sad, that’s to say — Papa didn’t once set foot in the dining room. The sight of Maman was so hateful to him apparently that he would sometimes slam the dining-room door shut behind him, something he had never done before. Typically, he would close the door to his study, and once in a great while that of their bedroom; but the dining-room door that opened onto the tiled hall, never. Our “intimate household traffic,” as the social worker would have called it, had been disrupted. To communicate with Maman, we had to sneak through the half-open door, closing it quietly behind us as soon as we were through; or alternatively, reduced to watching her swoon with pleasure — for she still fell into swoons — we would stand outside and eye her through the little window that gave onto the garden.
Marjorie was alarmed, more so than she had reason to be, no doubt. What she feared more than anything, I think, was that she would no longer be able to enjoy our company as often as she had in the past. I could sense this from a certain feverishness in her caresses, an unwonted zeal, the curious jealousy she displayed toward Pierre Peloup and the Vinssé brothers. Until then, our ties with the latter had served only to fan the flames of her love for Maman, of her often as not thwarted desire for Papa, of the intensity of her passion for Ingrid. “I’m unwanted! I can tell I’m a third wheel!” Marjorie would cry, regardless of the situation, even when we were in the midst of forming with her and Maman the most graceful figures, as they say in Sade — the really exciting ones, that is, the ones most conducive to pleasure. “Be nice to Marjorie,” Maman would counsel us. Before adding, as if surprised by the thought: “I think she’s hurting.”
Dr. Mars, who was sensitive to suffering, or well-placed to alleviate it at any rate, withdrew from Maman’s backside for a moment to do the honors of Marjorie’s. But it was obvious that Marjorie Higgins was less to his liking, perhaps because she was a brunette, perhaps because she didn’t burn with the same insane passion as Maman, or perhaps because it was Maman and not Marjorie who was queen of the dining room, with its shining disc in which Dr. Mars would see his own reflection when he bent across it.
XIV
As I lay out the broad strokes of our family life, I wouldn’t want to give a false impression of our mother. I can see only too well that I’m trying to circumscribe her form. Perhaps I’ll be able to take a more nuanced approach as my story advances and the memories return, floating up to the surface of the shining disc of our table. In spite of the years — which haven’t overlaid all these impressions and emotions with “a thin pellicule of dust,” as it says in the song, just shifted them about, so that all I have to do is reassemble them — our father, it seems, has always been a mystery to us. He was a mystery to begin with, and a mystery he has remained. Our mother, on the other hand, whose eyes I peer into wherever I happen to find myself — when watching the faces of actresses in films, or simply observing the faces of women everywhere — and who
se erotic dispositions I scrutinize so as to see her at the center of her being, in that state of intense arousal where all is revealed — our mother was never a mystery to me. Or was so great a mystery, perhaps, that I wander at night in an unknown country whenever I approach her blinding form.
But what else do I have to name her by, if not her sex? She was so idle that it’s impossible to connect her form to any activity outside her own home or family. She never left our sides. Until I was fifteen, the age at which I moved out, she never left us even for a second. We were the ones rushing back and forth, coming and going, bringing news of the outside world, but disclosing nothing of our domestic life except lies. She stayed indoors, in what we now know (it’s one of the things Sade omits to mention) to be the “erotically charged” environment of the family home, going from her bedroom to the dining room, where she would consult the dark disc of the table, then back from the dining room to her bedroom again. Where else could she go? Papa’s study was off-limits to her; when she came into the kitchen her mind was always occupied elsewhere; and she never spent long hours in the bathroom. She sewed, badly. She would invite Marjorie over, or Bénédicte, who took no part in our family life. She would occasionally pop out on an errand, but only once in a blue moon. We were the ones who brought back groceries for meals; Papa or Marjorie who took care of the other items of shopping.
She wasn’t kept under lock and key by our father, who never tried to prevent her from going out. It was of her own free will that she stayed at the window, not even looking out at the garden. Her dresses? She would go out to buy clothes, but not more than two or three times a year. Books? She didn’t read. “I have the demon of love in me,” she would say. For she spoke well, much of the time like an oracle, and I’ve sometimes thought that, were I to place each of her phrases end to end, they’d make a book. To recover the words she spoke to us, however, I need to press her down against the frozen disc of the dining-room table, sometimes round, sometimes square, always mellow and always dark. It’s an extraordinary experience, a quite dreadful one perhaps, and in order to go through with it, you have to make a show of levity, of gentle madness, at times. Netting the fleeting fish of reality is not easy; to catch them, a certain fecklessness — a certain forgetfulness even — is sometimes required.
.
I left home at fifteen. I set out wandering at random and eventually wound up in a hotel in Normandy with a thousand francs in my pocket. I don’t remember how I managed to end up there, in that particular hotel. My life ran along songlines like the ones in dreams. Even the shifts from one situation to the next had the same lack of logic you find in dreams. I was here and then I was there. How did I get from one to the other? I couldn’t tell you.
In spite of that, I never had the feeling I was lost. On the contrary, it seemed to me that I knew very well who I was, where I was going and why, just as you do in dreams. And so I was safe from harm. People could tell I was determined, sure of myself, fearless. Alarming news reached me from home: “Mother frail. Permanently bedridden.” “Mother delirious.” “Mother dead.” I didn’t know what to make of all this in my new life.
For many years, I had no real feelings. Now that I’m nearing forty and, from time to time, by the grace of God, have felt a bit of tenderness here and there, a bit of affection even, I look back with curiosity on that age when I felt nothing besides my own strength.
I lied because I’d always lied. I made up other names for myself, other lives. I can remember telling a man who had picked me up hitchhiking that I was the daughter of a famous painter, because I’d seen a poster announcing an exhibition by that same famous painter. I covered my tracks so that I could be alone.
Yes, I will always deny that my childhood was traumatic. And it’s not out of loyalty to my parents that I insist on the beauty of that period of my life. Our union was so intense and so compact, our sexual complicity so steadfast, like a firm handshake, that I’ve been leaning on it for support ever since, on the dark lake of our dining-room table. At no point has the past fallen from under my feet. And only once in my life have I lost my footing, for about two months, as if in a distant echo, decades later, of those two months of suspicions that kept us so cruelly separated from one another in our house on the rue Alban-Berg.
If I left my family early, it’s because I was ready to lead my own life. But it took me a long time, I confess, to break the spell, to blow open the strongbox of my childhood and learn to feel affection. To walk out of the dream.
What may have helped me perhaps, compared to Ingrid and Chloe who have had more difficult lives than mine, was my taking it into my head to write stories. That was my handrail, a gleaming banister I could always cling to no matter how dark the night. I had a feel for words. They resonated for me; they had a presence, a profound consistency, they were almost creatures in their own right. My appetite for words was so pronounced that I enjoyed almost any book I read. I remember I read some bad ones when I ran off to Normandy for the first time, but I still found something in them to nourish me. It wasn’t until later that my tastes grew more refined.
II
Funnily enough, given how gregarious our childhood had been — but perhaps too much so, and the cup was full — for many years I avoided any kind of sexual relationship. For a long time I was abstinent. At an age when young men and women start to quicken with new force, to shudder and rub themselves up against their peers, I was no more aware of my body than I was of my feelings. Only language tied me to my former life, which is perhaps why I took such pleasure in it.
Those were the years of long hitchhiking trips from Normandy to Provence. Men would pick me up: red-headed men, dark-haired men with singsong accents, strange men, men in fast cars. Everything was an event for me because everything was beginning. I would inscribe the faces and behavior of these men in my mental notebooks: out of them I would build cathedrals like the one with the black spires I’d seen in the distance that day while Pierre Peloup was busying himself inside me and, for the first time, I’d had the idea of something higher and finer.
One man took me to Nevers, another to Nîmes, to another I said: “I’ll go wherever you’re going,” then left him along the way. Another dropped me in a forest where yet another, on a bicycle this time, waved down cars for me, afraid I might lose my way.
I traveled with a family, I traveled with a man who was worried about me, and worried he might have a madwoman on his hands when I told him I was the daughter of a painter who’d been dead for a hundred years or more. I ended up on a beach where I sold some drawings I’d made. Where did I sleep? How did I pay for it all? I no longer remember. I think I was already managing to find rooms in cheap hotels located in respectable parts of town. It’s a gift I’ve always had, at fifteen, at twenty, at twenty-five: finding a decent hotel with nothing to go on but my own intuition, something inexpensive, a godsend, always a godsend.
Meanwhile, more terrible news would reach me from home: “Father critically ill,” “Father very weak.” I was in a hotel when they announced: “Father dead.” I can no longer remember whether it was the bells of the nearby church that I heard at that precise moment or bells that had started to ring furiously inside me. At all events, the news was accompanied by a great pealing of bells, a blue sky like the one Verlaine saw from the window of his cell, the feeling of something being born, a surge, a castle springing up inside me, with its towers, its crenellated walls, and its drawbridge raised.
III
At that point in my life, I was seventeen. My parents’ premature deaths had left me the beneficiary of a small trust I could draw on once a month. It wasn’t much. I think it came to two thousand francs. But it felt like a lot to me, since I never bought anything, stole the bare essentials I needed to live, made a habit of doing moonlight flits, and traveled without a ticket. I never felt poor, and no one would have thought to give me alms.
I wasn’t sad to have lost my parents, since it open
ed up a space that, if anything, was bright and airy, like the sky in spring. I wrote regularly to my grandparents, sending them the kind of letters I knew would make them happy. Otherwise I was alone and free to act for myself.
Sometimes I try to recall what my body was like in those days, since that’s where your impressions are stored, it’s your body that sends its emotions out into the world. But I can’t remember a thing. I don’t think I ever once thought about pleasing people, ever once examined myself in a mirror or dreamed of asking myself if I were beautiful or not. My mind was too busy with other things. With what? And where? I couldn’t say exactly, even if I had the sense that it mainly had to do with language.
A boy named Serge entered my life in the city of Arles, where I was staying. I wasn’t smitten with him, but I did see him a handful of times. He was someone I could exchange a few words with. I continued, of course, to lie about my past, my name, what I liked and what I didn’t like, but at least I had someone to lie to. And I needed that, since I hadn’t spoken in so long that I was becoming a bit strange, and could be very aggressive at times. Serge was no fool; he knew that I was lying. He may even have found it rather attractive. Whenever he tried to fondle me or kiss me, I would shy away. Sometimes I grew weary of his psychologizing, which he insisted on sharing with me for my own enlightenment, perhaps because he wanted to help me, and definitely so that he would end up being able to fondle me. I put up with his theories with a yawn. When I listened to them, they always felt wrongheaded to me. But I owe it to Serge that I didn’t become a complete stranger to myself and entirely alone, since he gave me, like a seed, a taste for meeting people, for conversation. And that was a beginning.
IV
My sisters had moved out of the house on the rue Alban-Berg after my father’s death. I waited until I was twenty before returning there. In the meantime another family had moved in, but they let me look round. Everything, of course, had changed, which was just as well. The hall had been painted white, the dining room had been converted into a living room, the study into a dining room, a huge kitchen had been built on, and the garden was less forbidding: it was blooming now, and shaded.