Farther up, toward Belleville, the streets don’t do quite so many cartwheels, no cramps or sore muscles, a vague downward spiral, with some cohesion. Séraphine is still on her guard though: the microbourgeoisie is capable of anything in the art of camouflage. I.e., a woman she knows who likes to go on and on about Guerrisold particularly when she’s perched atop her Pradas. Séraphine doesn’t really know Paris very well, only people who’ve moved from other parts of France and a few natives who have visited from top to bottom. People who used to live in the suburbs don’t bother to, they settle for living there. All Séraphine knows about this capital is that she doesn’t like the people and that before long they’ll return the sentiment. All Séraphine knows about the capital is that her address oozes sociological weakness.
Séraphine Derdega, 55 bis rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, special delivery, Triangle of the Hydra.
Christian was barely out the door of the Montparnasse apartment before Séraphine changed the furniture around, emptied two closets, and swiftly pared down the décor in each room, Laurent being a minimalist. She filled the fridge with enjoyable foods, threw away her antediluvian pajamas, and bought herself the appropriate nightwear for a young woman, then waited. With a childhood friend Laurent shared a scrawny two-bedroom place on rue Corentin Cariou, he gave her to understand that it would take a few months for him to announce his abandonment. Faced with the empty closet after scores of trimesters Séraphine began to grow impatient. Laurent invited her on a trip, and at the top of the tower looking down on Chicago he said: see, this is where we’ll get engaged. She stuffed the fridge with luxury foods, threw away all her old jeans, and clothed herself in femme fatale, then waited. Laurent shared with a childhood friend now also a business partner a redecorated two-bedroom place on rue Corentin Cariou, he ordered her to understand that it would take him a few months to announce his desertion. Faced with the empty closet after scores of semesters Séraphine started to get pretty annoyed. Laurent invited her to go away for a weekend, and at sunset on the cliffs of Brittany he said: the weather will be nice when we get engaged. She put nothing in the fridge, this budgetary item being on the verge of elimination in favor of the rent money (1,245 euros) which she’s been paying on her own despite Laurent’s promises, then waited. Laurent shared with a childhood friend now also twice a double business partner a cozy two-bedroom place on rue Corentin Cariou, he announced Séraphine it will take me months maybe even years I’m afraid I don’t understand but I love you you know I’m afraid I dread it but if I can’t with you you see that means with others it won’t happen either, let’s say even less of a chance. Faced with the closet full of capitulations, Séraphine hoped for patience-wrapped consolation prize in her new mold-covered apartment (375 sq. ft., 650 euros), then waited. She hoped for finally reliable committing Laurent, sometimes boys need so much time. She waited six years. And.
The dates, said Abdu, are sweet these are too sweet I think, I’d rather warn you. Séraphine is warned. It happened at the Stalingrad station, the connection between Lines 7 and 2. She didn’t ask for anything and she’d been warned. In her body the autopilot glitched, six years three weeks five days how many hours, Séraphine certainly saw, connection, the elegant old woman stooped over without teeth bags overflowing with Gourmet Croquettes, the old woman with no wedding ring cats and stale bread, no love and no water her heart a salt cellar crackling swamp antechamber, sitting on the bench yet elegant stooped over with no teeth the old woman was sucking on dried fruit.
The number of places in her neighborhood that Séraphine deems pleasant: three. The regular food store; the exotic food store; the Other Café. Opposite sidewalk twenty-two steps to the left; opposite sidewalk fifteen steps straight ahead; opposite sidewalk thirty steps to the right. Exotic food store Abdu gives her credit at least once a month. Séraphine consumes almost exclusively products sold by Abdu, cooked by his wife in most cases. Séraphine often feels like she’s eating at the same table with Abdu and his wife, that she says thank you Mrs. Abdu what delicious taramosalata. So the dates are okay, but try the apricots instead. With her hand, still a wedding band virgin, Séraphine touches the bags. Séraphine already has a cat she named Bonjour because of Françoise Sagan. Séraphine thinks I’m thirty-eight and asks Abdu for a good kilo of each and three pounds of homemade shortbread cookies.
Laurent isn’t looking for pretexts. Not at all. Laurent told Séraphine cast back out into the wind: be happier. Now Séraphine understands though a little late that. Adult responsibility and commitment, never-never land’s necrotic breasts. Laurent isn’t looking didn’t look won’t look for pretexts. He’ll turn away from night-light insomnia, completely crinoline free. There are sacrifices that are impossible for young men and among them are pinches of magic powder concocted by Tinker-bell. Yet it’s more of the happy thought that helps with takeoff than any placebo fairy dust, but for all these lost children it will constitute the ultimate renunciation.
Séraphine doesn’t sleep during the day anymore and each one of the Hydra’s heads waves outside her window. Their yellow eyes weigh her up through the glass, Séraphine doesn’t air the place out anymore, the last time she opened the window two of them suddenly loomed, scaly monstrous, venom pearling thick at the tip of their pointy fangs, she still has a suspicious scar on her wrist. Séraphine doesn’t sleep during the day anymore, all day long she waits for a sign from Laurent, her cell phone and landline side by side on the desk, blisters on her thin fingers from pressing the send/receive button on her answering machine. Her heart often leaps when she sees new messages loading, her aorta cracks once she gets them. Disappointment strikes to the point of cardiac attack, how many have died of spam, the who should investigate.
Séraphine once loathed the daytime, now she endures light, agitation, so much life outside, such working-class life, Séraphine observes the bodies be they misery crushed or gloating proud when microbourgeois, she imagines their names and their apartments, their relationships and knows she’s been banished, the worst of the worst of the worst, now Séraphine inspires more pity than envy really no envy at all. For three solid hours she surrenders and sleep gets hold of her, sale-price sleep, good enough for the worst of the worst of the worst, blank, arid sleep bereft of paradox. When she wakes up Séraphine thinks she’ll pick up her sobbing right where she left it, unaware that her tears don’t stop when she’s sleeping.
Séraphine doesn’t sleep at night, Séraphine’s nights aren’t made for that now Séraphine cries at night too, Séraphine is always crying and she isn’t working. Night is familiar, Séraphine gets a better grip on herself, she still cries, of course, but for different reasons. By about
1:00 a.m. she stops waiting for Laurent. She says I left him because it wasn’t going anywhere, I’m beyond the age of going out with a boy right I’m at the age of living with a man right or even marrying him and having children and a little yard a gravel driveway a little fireplace right but her logorrhea anvil exhausted cat doesn’t even condescend to offer a little meow of agreement.
Once every three days Séraphine takes her chances on the Hydra’s cold skin, braving the state of siege seven minutes thirty seconds.
Right hand on the doorknob, the left loaded with garbage bags, her lungs gorge themselves hesitant. Door slammed, four floors, ground floor garbage room mailbox, release button opened door. Thirty feet to the left tobacconist’s four packs of Marlboros, cross over to Abdu’s pita meze cookies yogurt crackers soda back. Once the bolt is slid uncontrollable ritual. Getting back her breath, bags lifeless on the floor. Methodically put away in the little cupboard, three shelves, divide by kind, subdivide by size, align in the refrigerator, dairy on top, in the middle salty and fatty, on the bottom sweet and fatty, jams in the vegetable drawer. Snuggle up in the pink blanket, turn on the TV. Three cigarettes then prepare the tray. Put the toaster on a stool, choose the food in order and lay it out on the coffee table. Spread on bread chew cut fork chomp swallow swallow swallow. Operation can be repeate
d until the stomach threatens overflow.
Séraphine withdraws, isolation exacerbates the tiniest little environment-linked detail. And everything is hostile toward her. Outside inside neighborhood apartment everything is a frontal assault. The paint peeling from the bathroom walls slaps her every morning with its fragile residue. A cloud of insects, gnats maybe or minuscule creepy-crawlies, abandoning their corpses along the baseboard as soon as springtime comes busting out all over. A humidity halo wound oozes around cracks, even though the heat’s up full blast the sheets in winter are cold, soaking beneath the comforter in the stagnant dew from the wall on the left. The torturous days decline, strangling from eyelids’ opening, the mailbox is holding back or swallowing up the latent checks, the washing machine is giving up the ghost, the windows are chipping, the leaks are multiplying in rancid drops, the circuit breaker is capricious, the stove plucks out its own eye.
With every new attack, sometimes several in a day, Séraphine remembers how normal life was in Montparnasse even if it wasn’t full. And while her wash soaks in the slow bathtub swamp, Séraphine needs to find the guilty party, Séraphine needs the heads of those responsible, nice round heads, full like juicy melons that she can give a quick slice to and then chop up brutally grabbing the knife handle.
The Hydra roars loudly at the bottom of the four flights, those close to Séraphine talk about the traffic but Séraphine knows they’ve already gone through the Hydra, swallowed up by the beast, walking around in its belly without even knowing it, coming out sticky with gastric juices for a few hours in the shabby fourth-floor bastion before diving back into the gaping mouth once they’re on the other side of the building door, from up at her window Séraphine sees them calmly step inside she sees them, warns them, but her sharp cries are only answered with laughter and moving shapes encased in scales, looking like Saint-Exupéry’s elephant-swallowed-by-the-snake hat.
Séraphine needs the heads of those responsible, she often imagines herself decapitating Laurent from up at her window, seeing his juicy melon snatched midair by the Hydra, she very distinctly hears the cracking of the bones, the chewing of the Hydra taking furious delight in the inestimable freshness of the stuffed treat, jackhammer ivory hard onomatopoeias, Séraphine observes the teeth of the Hydra moistened with the blood of the one responsible, sees the cause devoured by its own consequences, guilty Laurent screaming, Laurent torn to pieces, Laurent the primary source of Séraphine’s woes but how many others afterward wonders Séraphine needing more, more heads, more secondary heads, more minor heads, down to the least little silhouette Séraphine wants to exterminate all those responsible and everyone the hat fits.
Séraphine cries a little and throws up more often. Sometimes her solfège sobbing or restitutions (30%–50% of the initial quantity) echo in the tiny, absolutely moldy apartment. She resorts to a delivery service to avoid having to cross at the Hydra. She says smothered will be my love for Laurent under my new flab, crushed will be my regrets for the wasted years between the quintal folds of my heavy hanging flesh. As she eats, every time, she repeats it. Ripping from me this defeated love pestilent corps, ejecting through my mouth this aborted love, I’m vomiting you up Laurent along my tongue you slide it doesn’t hold you back, it flattens out curves it participates active in the final extraction, you taste like sugar and sour tzatziki Laurent, all throughout her sanitation operation Séraphine keeps repeating this.
What comes out of the kneeling body is more and more carb bloated. Crystallized Séraphine’s rage comes out little by little. The head of each of the responsible parties is to be uprooted with a sweep of teeth, the Hydra’s twitching organs are in the big honey pastries, biting them, chewing them passionately, saying I’m dying from their duplicity the sweets are lead poisoning, my life is nauseating waste. Until the age of thirty-one Séraphine daughter of Azzâm seven veils legacy and suddenly nothing after the rift, Séraphine vigorously hates the ostentatious signs she previously believed circulated in her corpuscles, Derdega the last, the last of the least, she so wanted to deny Azzâm’s existence, refute the lie, believe her mother wasn’t that stupid, stupid and devastated what had gotten into her head cutting off the heads of the guilty what had gotten into her head pistachio and peanut brain sauce.
To erase it all Séraphine would need every trace, every last trace, of her so-called father to be eliminated. But everything in the neighborhood reminds her of him, the formula written on her neuron slate, Azzâm is composed of Arabness cubed plus violence squared, to erase Azzâm both elements must be wiped off. Séraphine really wants to soak the sponge in pure bleach, no more Azzâm no more completely crazy mother, no more past and no more mistake, no more Laurent, no more aporia, no more shameless regression, no more 55 bis rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, no more Hydra. Séraphine would like to run away, coming back with arms full from the halal pizzeria she often wonders if through excess she’s using to excess to try to provoke in herself a point of no return.
Séraphine cries a lot, and throws up a great deal. Sometimes the cost of the orgies swipes a good portion of her salary (65%–80% of the initial amount), the foods pile up only to be turned into a memory upon unwrapping in the small and absolutely moldy apartment. Séraphine is a mouth and a mucus bag of muscles forcefully to-ing and fro-ing. Séraphine has a body made of anxiety, anxiety that feeds on everything, including cracks in walls, overflowing trash cans, and everything she knows she’ll never have. Séraphine ignorant of her identity, Séraphine disgusted by baklava lies, Séraphine fertile in bitterness and icy anger. If I’d known sooner not a Derdega I would’ve chosen my men so differently, cursed be the hand that strikes the horn of a gazelle, if my mother’s choice had been another in the past no Azzâm no beatings no fear of cloning him no uterine disgust, no virus-borne obsession, no couple home, no Laurent in my territory, no raging depression, no residence degeneration, no lease on 375 square feet. Séraphine’s stretch-marked skin drained swamp is becoming porous as her heart is deserted. The bitterness of her skull has made it its home, her soul didn’t have the time to feel too vulnerable, promptly stunted by the venom saber. Hatred is in her fossilized honey star bosom.
Séraphine now knows she is also pregnant by the Hydra, she’s the scarlet handmaid of rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, she knows she’s enveloped by the Hydra’s membrane, final phase domino consequences. Stuck inside the Hydra, she feeds on it so each night she can bring it back up, immediately dissolved lumps in Golem, fortified in this alchemy, consolidated by the addition of amino acids, Séraphine knows she’s related, she’s feeding the Matrix too, like others she produces the requested energy, the energy that’s needed to keep the Hydra’s greedy robust body going, she’s one of the Hydra’s cells, a minuscule part, a handful of molecules, crafty whipped deficiency instability malady grudge hypocrite Séraphine is a silver scale on the Hydra. She hates the way it breathes, ramified cruelty pulmonary alveoli, malice mixed with carbon oxide. After observing the Hydra for too long Séraphine crossed its rancid yellow gaze which in men freezes both hope and lifeblood determination. Séraphine belongs to the Hydra and she’s hungry for heads compulsive eating is always the lair of resentment.
Mrs. White in the Lounge
with the Lead Pipe
Séraphine is stationed behind the Hydra’s eyes. The view is better, she likes it better here than at the entrance to one of the gills or at the angle of the nostrils. Séraphine has a hard time tolerating the noise and the smell. Séraphine has a hard time tolerating just about everything now. Behind the Hydra’s eyes, Séraphine breathes the glass so it’s easier to wipe off. An unobstructed view is a requirement if you want to detect the tiniest prey from a great distance. And as for prey, Séraphine is constantly picking them out, she’s constantly fidgeting all over the place behind the Hydra’s iris, her movements cast shadows in its throbbing yellow. Crates of juicy, responsible melons are what’s needed to feed the animal, Séraphine thinks to herself that someday the Hydra will swell up so much that even all of Pari
s won’t be enough, it will be known that the Hydra was born in an ancient cemetery, from her egg to the chalk of her opaque shell watered with dry pestis bacillus Yersinia blood and paupers, Séraphine says to herself that someday since she’s positioned behind the Hydra’s eyes she’ll be able to attend the purifying meal composed of neighbors’ neighbors, cousins’ neighbors, cousins’ cousins, brothers’ cousins, and finally headless brothers. Séraphine inhales deeply every day to increase its volume, she fills it with what she can, words, syllogisms, buttressed thoughts, everything she can think of as quick as possible, urban legends, rumors, votes, belief in an opinion.
Not a Clue Page 19
