Waiting for Bojangles

by Olivier Bourdeaut

  Aside from the Creep, who still spent his senatorial vacations with us, playing Russian Droolette with me, working on achieving success by growing his belly, and grilling sausages on the terrace, we had no more company. The first time the Creep came, he drove Mademoiselle Superfluous down with him. He arrived in a state of advanced physical and morale fatigue. Mademoiselle had screeched and squawked the whole way, flapping her wings, tapping her beak against the windows and turning the backseat into one huge crap table. To make matters worse, Customs had given him a hard time at the border. They’d inspected everything: his papers, his car, his luggage . . . and they’d started all over when he’d insisted he was a senator, since they assumed they were dealing with an imposter.

  Getting out of the car, he decreed that he never wanted to see Mademoiselle again, not ever, and if it were up to him, he’d roast her on a spit, and eat her all by himself, washing her down with a good bottle of Bourgueil. As for Mademoiselle, she dashed straight to the lake and spent the rest of the day down there sulking. After the Creep went back to Paris to his job in Luxembourg Palace, it was just the four of us, and that was fine with us.

  Sometimes Dad would call the police to see how the investigation was going. He’d put the loudspeaker on so Mom could hear the cop tell us that they still hadn’t found her. We clapped our hands over our mouths, laughing silently, as Dad raged, overacting defiantly, “This is unbelievably awful! How can you let her abductors get away with anything so unlawful?”

  Then, taking a deep breath to pull himself together, he’d say mournfully, “There’s a little boy here who needs his mother. Are you sure you’ve got no leads at all?” The cop’s answer was always the same: sounding ashamed, he would say he was glad that my father had called, but admit that the investigation had stalled. As soon as Dad hung up, I would quip, “If the investigation is stalled in Paris, they’re not going to catch up with us any time soon! It took us long enough to get here in a vehicle that ran, so if theirs is stalled, they won’t be here for a really, really long time.” That always cracked my parents up.

  Every morning, while Dad and I were still asleep, Mom would go swimming in the lake with Mademoiselle Superfluous to keep her company. She would dive off the rocks, then float on her back, watching the sun rise. Mademoiselle would wade around her, squawking and trying to catch fish in her beak, but she never could. After all that time, she had turned into a lap bird who ate canned tuna fish, enjoyed classical music, wore custom-made jewelry, attended cocktail parties and had lost the knack for birdier things.

  “I love staring up at the wild blue yonder while listening to the marine sounds from deep under. It really carries me away. What better way to start the day?” Mom would comment when she got back. Then she’d make us a delicious breakfast, with homegrown orange juice, the best we’d had in our lives, and honey that came from the neighbor’s hives.

  After breakfast, we’d go to the markets in all the little villages near the house, a different market in a different village every day of the week. I was on a first-name basis with all the vendors, and lots of times they would give me free fruit. Sometimes it was bags of whole almonds that we’d break open with a stone or the heel of a shoe. When we didn’t know how to cook their fish, the fishmongers would tell us what to do. And the butchers would give us Spanish recipes, like pork in a salt crust, mayonnaise with garlic, or really crazy paellas with fish, meat, rice, peppers and everything else all thrown in at once. Then we’d go sit and sip coffee in one of those plazas where everything was painted white and gilded with strong sunlight.

  Dad would snort as he read the newspaper, because it was a crazy world, and Mom would ask me to tell her fabulous stories as she smoked, eyes closed and face turned toward the sun, like a sunflower. When I ran out of ideas, I would describe what we’d done a day or two before, adding a few little falsehoods. Usually those tall tales were every bit as good as my entirely made-up stories.

  After lunch, we’d let Dad think about his novel, lying in the hammock with his eyes closed, while we went down to the lake for a swim if the weather was warm, or to pick big bouquets of wildflowers and skip stones on the water if the air was cool. When we got back to the house, Dad had gotten a lot of work done; you could tell by his puffy face and all the ideas and cowlicks in his hair. We’d put “Bojangles” on at high volume for cocktail hour, before grilling something for dinner. Then she’d switch to some livelier tunes, and Mom taught me to dance: rock ’n’ roll, jazz, flamenco and more. She really knew how to rock the floor. Every night before turning in, I was allowed to smoke one cigarette, to practice making smoke rings. We’d make a bet, and as we watched the rings rise high and evaporate into the starry sky, we’d savor every puff of our new lives as fugitives.

  Unfortunately, after a while, the moving vans started showing up in Mom’s brain now and again. Brief moments of madness that popped up in the blink of an eye. They lasted twenty minutes or an hour, and then, just like that, they were gone again, in nothing flat. For weeks, there’d be no sign of them. While she was on one of her mad tears, the pine tree wasn’t her only obsession—anything could stoke her crazed aggression. One day, she wanted to smash all our plates, because the sun reflecting off of them had dazzled her, and she suspected them of trying to make her go blind. Another day she wanted to burn all of her linen clothing, because it was burning her skin. She swore there were blisters on her arm that we could neither see nor feel, but she scratched them all day until they bled for real.

  Another time she was sure that the lake was poisoned, just because after a hard rain one night, the color of the water had changed. The next day, she would swim in the lake and dine off the porcelain plates, garbed in her linen clothes, filling our ears with her upbeat chatter, as though nothing had ever been the matter. When the tide turned again, she would take us as her witnesses, wanting to prove her hallucinations were true. Dad would try to calm her down and show her that she was mistaken, but there wasn’t a thing he could do. She would get all worked up, screaming and gesticulating, leering at us with a horrifying smile and resenting our lucidity. “Why don’t you understand; how can you not see it when it’s as plain as the nose on your face!”

  She didn’t usually remember what she’d done afterward, so Dad and I never talked to her about it. We acted like nothing had happened, figuring there was no point in rubbing salt in her wounds. Those occasions had been hard enough to get through once; who needed to relive them a second time? Sometimes though, she realized that she had gone too far, had said and done awful things. That was worse, because at those times, we weren’t scared of her, we just felt bad for her, terribly, terribly bad. She would try to wash away her sorrows with tears, and it seemed like she would never be able to stop crying, like when you’ve picked up too much speed to stop running down a hill. Her sorrows fell on her from somewhere very, very high, and there was no way she could stand up to them. Her makeup couldn’t stand up to them either. It scattered from her eyelids and eyebrows, running all over her face, smearing her plump cheeks, trying to flee her terrified eyes, which made her so frighteningly beautiful. When the wave of sorrow ebbed, the depression flowed back in, and she would sit in a corner, hair hanging in front of her face, head slumped, legs jiggling nervously. She’d be panting, trying to catch her breath as though she’d just run a race. I figured she was probably trying to stay ahead of her sadness, that’s all. Dad and I felt totally useless when she was in that state. Try as he might to soothe or reassure her, or I to beguile her into smiling, when she was like that, nothing worked. She was inconsolable. There was no room for us between her and her problems, there wasn’t even any air; they took up all the space that was there.

  To lessen the scope and shorten the duration of those crises, the three of us agreed it was time for an intervention. So we discussed what we could do to lessen her trials and tribulations. Dad suggested that Mom stop drinking cocktails day and night. He loved cocktails too, he said, but perhaps drinking them all the time wasn�
�t good for what ailed her. Though the cocktails weren’t necessarily speeding up the move, they probably weren’t slowing it down, either. Mom agreed, but with a heavy heart, because cocktails were a big part of her life. She did negotiate a glass of wine every night with dinner, to start the evenings feeling like a winner.

  Like a criminal turning herself in, she would ask us to lock her in the attic at the very first signs of an attack. She explained that she didn’t know why, but only in the dark could she look her demons in the eye. With infinite sadness, Dad agreed to sweep out the cobwebs and move some furniture up there, so that she could stay in her aerie as long as necessary. You have to love someone very much to lock them in such a horrible place, to leave them there in the dark. Every time she started to get fanatic, Dad raged inside at having to put her in the attic. But the louder she screamed, the more quiet-spoken he became, and he kept his word, though it broke his heart. I would cover my ears to try not to hear her.

  If it went on too long, I’d go down to the lake to make my head clearer, and to try to forget about all the nasty surprises life seemed to have in store for us. But sometimes, even at the lake, I could hear the terrible chorus. So I would sing until her screams faded to whispers.

  Once she had won the battle against her demons, the combat against herself, she would knock gently at the door and emerge from the ransacked attic, looking victorious, exhausted and somewhat inglorious. Even though those struggles in the attic required all of her might, she still couldn’t sleep at night, so she needed pills. Fortunately, the demons never came when she slept; sleep provided an escape from her woes, offering her some well-earned warrior’s repose.

  Since Mom couldn’t have cocktails in the evening anymore, Dad would go drink his outside with the pine tree. Wearing rubber boots, and standing amongst the roots, his own drink he sipped, while from a watering can, a toxic mix slowly dripped. When I asked him why he had started having cocktails with the tree, he came up with a whimsical story. He told me that he and the tree were drinking to the pine’s upcoming liberty. It would soon be free to sail the seven seas, because one night, when he hadn’t even been drunk, pirates had called to say they wanted that particular trunk for the mast of their ship. Rather than hacking at it with an ax, he was helping it fall more gently . . . and covering his tracks. “You see, my son, this tree has won the right to visit exotic ports, and face down terrible storms. It will sometimes be becalmed, before the winds help it sail on. It will travel the world, all sails unfurled. Flying a skull-and-crossbones flag, it will soon be able to brag of a thousand adventures far more exciting than standing here waiting to be hit by lightning!” Then with an offhand toss, he poured the last toxic drops into the moss.

  I wondered how in the world he could come up with such malarkey. I knew perfectly well that he was having drinks with the tree for Mom’s sake, to help her see the lake. He hoped that with his toxic mixture, the tree would soon be out of the picture, and that with it gone, perhaps Mom’s mind might be less forlorn. But when I started dreaming about the ship sailing from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, and about the pirates on board, cheerfully counting the gold and treasure in their hoard, I could better measure what a worthy story it was. As ever, he told such beautiful lies for love.

  When she wasn’t turning herself in to be locked up, Mom was more and more thoughtful toward us. Every day, on her way back from her morning swim, she’d pick little bouquets that she’d set on the tables by our beds. Sometimes there’d be a little note, too—a line from a book she liked, or one of her own beautifully crafted poems. All day long she’d be wrapped in Dad’s arms, or else she’d wrap me in hers. Every time I’d walk by her she’d grab my hand and pull me toward her chest to listen to her heartbeat, and to whisper compliments in my ear.

  She’d talk about when I was a baby, about the party filled with mirth they’d had in her room at the clinic to celebrate my birth, and how the other patients had been irate about the music and the noise that went on ’til late; about the times she had danced all night long to rock me to sleep; how the first steps I took were to try to grab at the crest atop Mademoiselle’s head, and how the first lie I told was to accuse Mademoiselle of having wet my bed; and also just plain about how happy it made her to spend time with me. She had never talked like that before, and I really liked when she told me stories about things I couldn’t remember, although even I could realize that there was more melancholy than joy in her eyes.

  10.

  To celebrate the feast of San José, the people of the village organized a fiesta that lasted all day. They started in the morning by dressing a huge wooden Virgin Mary in bouquets of flowers; that took several hours. Whole families would show up with armfuls of red and white roses, leaving their offerings at the foot of the statue. Then the organizers would arrange them so cleverly that right before your eyes, they garbed the statue in a red dress with a white pattern and a white cape with a red one. Although I was watching the whole time, I still couldn’t tell how it was done. In the morning, there was nothing but a head on a wooden skeleton, and by evening, there was the Virgin Mary, all decked out for the party in a beautiful, sweetly scented dress, like a real princess.

  All day long, firecrackers had been going off all over the place, rumbling and grumbling up and down the valley. At first it startled me, because it sounded like a war movie, but nobody else seemed bothered, so I decided not to worry. Dad told me that Spaniards partied like soldiers, but I had never seen a battle like that, bursting with flowers, firecrackers and sangria.

  Over the course of the day, the streets began to fill up with families garbed in traditional clothes. People came from all over the valley, and even further afield. From granddads to granddaughters, they all looked like they’d stepped out of a picture book; even the babies had colorful gowns for their big night out on the town.

  Mom had bought us costumes that followed local custom. Unlike the sailor suit Dad had gotten me, I was happy to put on the shiny vest, baggy trousers and white moccasins, because you never feel ridiculous when you can blend in with the crowd. Mom had tamed her crazy hair with a black lace mantilla, and, for a new look, had slipped into a gown with a big puffy skirt, like a queen in a history book. The outfit made her so warm that she had to keep fanning herself with a black fan with butterflies embroidered on it. She fluttered the fan so quickly that it looked like they would fly away any minute.

  During the afternoon, the streets filled with Spaniards parading religiously, because for them, the fiesta was something they took seriously. They looked proud and happy, and I thought that with parties like that, they had every right to be. When night fell, the streets lit up with bonfires and torches to illuminate the dancing and merrymaking. On the square in front of the church, at the foot of the Virgin Mary, the townspeople had cooked a paella in a dish so big that you needed long wooden rakes to reach the rice simmering in the middle. Everybody helped themselves, and sat to eat wherever they pleased, because the fiesta was like a paella—a carefully dosed blend of this, that, and everything else, all mixed together.

  When the meal was over, they celebrated by setting fireworks off all over the place: from the rooftops, the mountains in the distance, the boats on the lake; there was banging and booming and colorful starbursts shooting into space. The walls were splattered with bursts of light, and by the end, the sky was so bright that you could barely tell if it was day or night. In fact, for just a moment, hardly more, the darkness had a total eclipse, and across from me I glimpsed Mom’s face. Tears streamed down from her eyes to her lips, then curved inwards, toward her proud, trembling chin, before leaping to the ground. Through it all, she never made a sound.

  When the fireworks were over, a tall, striking woman in a red-and-black dress climbed to the top of the church steps and began to sing love songs from the heart of a small orchestra. To help her words soar higher, she raised her hands to the sky. Her voice was so beautifully sad that we wondered if she was going to start to cry to give it e
ven more emotion. But instead, she switched to happy songs that started a commotion. Everyone clapped to the rhythm as they danced. The atmosphere was magical: I was totally entranced. Like marionettes, the silhouettes spun and darted; not one single person looked brokenhearted. Skirts billowed out in a haze of bright hues, as dancers leapt and twirled, floating in their own magical world.

  With her dress of lights and lace, big dark eyes and olive-skinned face, one of the girls was like a perfect doll, and I confess that I was in her thrall. I couldn’t wrench my eyes away: her hair, her smile, her pink cheeks, I could have stared at her for weeks. She fanned her face gently, smiling intently, yet there seemed to be an ocean between her and me. Still, I stared at her for so long that by and by, eventually I caught her eye. When she looked at me, I went weak in the knee, losing all track of time as a shiver ran up and down my spine.