Mother's Disgrace

by Robert Dessaix

  I gathered my wits and stood up from the table, almost expecting the other readers to point at me and snigger, whispering ‘Fraud!’ I turned and faced the bookshelf behind me. There, not two inches from my nose, was the Grande encyclopédie biographique in twenty volumes. I took down Volume Six and turned to Dessaix with two s’s. And there, like some instruction from a patrimonial guardian angel, was an entry on another General Dessaix, also a Napoleonic general, veteran of the Russian campaign (how appropriate), wounded near Moscow … I could hardly believe my eyes. It was all so simple. There’d been a mistake. The s’s had confused people. It was a pity about Egypt, but Russia had possibilities, there were certain synchronicities …

  Back I went to the Hôtel Desaix and packed for Paris. What a displeasing little bourg Riom had turned out to be, squatting on its plain of rye with its bogus saints and cabbage-and-lard hotpot and dead-end petite noblesse. General Dessaix with two s’s hailed from Savoy. I rather liked the sound of that. The moment I got to Paris I found a little restaurant called ‘Le Savoyard’ in a backstreet off the boulevard de Sébastopol and settled in there for the evening to think myself into a different storyline altogether, something much more alpine, icier, more severe, hard-edged—loftier, in a word. Now I came to think about it there in ‘Le Savoyard’ (although the patronne didn’t look at all like my mother), I’d always felt a certain … how should I put it? affinity for that part of France, I even rather liked Geneva, which everyone else found so cold and alien. General Joseph-Marie Dessaix was looking very promising indeed.

  So, forgetting Cairo and the Mamelouks and the fatal ball at the battle of Marengo, I began my investigations into my Savoyard with eagerness: Joseph-Marie Dessaix, général de divison, comte de l’Empire—a count, one could do worse—a man possessed, it transpired, of a rude indépendence de caractère which dissuaded Napoleon from making him a Marshal. Preferring honour to ‘enriching himself at the expense of others’ he apparently died poor. My principled uncles would no doubt find that admirable. He was wounded in the battle for Moscow, made governor of Berlin, and had a number of children and nephews who were not at all célibataires or childless. I very much liked the sound of Count Joseph-Marie of the Thonon-les-Bains branch of the family on Lake Geneva. All that military éclat was a little off-putting, but there were compensations: the Russian connection, the sense of good family and honourable service, and even certain literary pretensions. At about the turn of the nineteenth century his father, for instance, Charles Eugène Joseph, wrote the following nobly instructive poem:

  PRIDE IN BIRTH

  For my Grandchildren

  Behold the vainglorious braggart, infatuated with his breeding,

  Boasting at every turn about his ancestors and forebears,

  Feeding his pride on marvellous deeds (not his, but theirs),

  Of calls to follow in their footsteps, though, unheeding!

  Instead of blushing at the emptiness of futile titles,

  He grasps at some importance for himself in trivialities,

  And tries to expiate, through others’ virtues (not his own),

  The error of his birth and blundering fate’s banalities!

  Blind in its choices, whether at Thonon-les-Bains or Rome,

  Making now a palace, now a simple thatched hut home,

  In an instant birth can make of the obscurest embryo a count or earl,

  While greatness in a man can take a patient century to unfurl.

  Leaving as you must your cradles, my dear children,

  Fear the lying bait of valorous titles, shun delusion;

  Aspire to virtue, pity wickedness and all its wiles:

  Good will then be safely yours—all else is vain illusion.

  Well put, although the stench of piety is perhaps a little strong for modern tastes. But Charles Eugène Joseph’s heart was in the right place, surely. (And you have to remember that, blithely unaware of all those robust Germanic roots in English, the French don’t mean to sound as pompous with their Latin abstractions as they do.) Be that as it may, the ‘lying bait of valorous titles’ still has some allure in suburban Sydney, I suspect. To be completely frank, I can’t deny it still has some allure for me. But I can agree it’s ‘vain illusion’. In fact, I think now the Savoyard General and his sons and nephews are just a tale that’s told. I’ve scrabbled around in their twisted family trees—all those Eugènes, Jean-François-Aimés, Jean-Marie-Josephs, Constances and Joséphines, all those capitaines and commandants, sergents and magistrats, all those mortes sans enfants and mortes jeunes—and really, I see no evidence they have anything to do with us whatever. Why do we insist on walking backwards towards our deaths with our eyes fixed stupidly on past chimeras? Because, I suppose, we find our utter ordinariness, our run-of-the-millness, not even to speak of our cosmic insignificance, utterly intolerable. ‘Good stock’! Good grief, it’s brambles and mud as far as the eye can see.

  It’s true that in the valleys of the Haute-Savoie, hardly half an hour’s drive from Geneva’s cold heart, around the villages of Marignier and Faucigny and the forest of St Jeoire, there were families called Dessaix. Tax records from 1464 make mention of the domus nobilis Amedei de Saxo (from the Latin saxum, stone) and the domus nobilis branched and split and spread into Dessaix, Dussaix, de Saix, some doubtless less nobiles than others. And in the middle of the nineteenth century, as I now know, the Haute-Savoie was prey to numerous so-called emigration agencies, shipping Savoyards (few dukes or counts, though, naturally) to North Africa, America and Argentina. According to one account, ‘our valleys rang with the call to emigrate’, they were littered with ‘posters, prospectuses and brochures’ and aswarm with the unscrupulous agents of governments anxious to populate their ‘pampas and desert prairies’ with the scrapings from Savoyard villages. Just a scratch at the bottom of the papers they waved would open the gates of paradise. I think my great-great-grandfather Peter or his father, impoverished carpenters or wheelwrights, probably signed up in the mid-1850s, got stuck in Ireland on the way to the New World and ended up in St Leonards in Sydney, not far from where I lived and went to school—still wheelwrights, still poor, still nobody. I think what I am is a small, tied-off bastard nodule at the end of a twig on a stick-thin branch of the utterly commonplace bush they planted here.

  Not in my head, though. There Amadeus de Saxo and his domus nobilis, the quilted valleys of the Arve and the Giffre (brilliant, paint-box green on my map of Rhône-Alpes), the long, tangled lines of Savoyard families of doctors and poets and heroes of the Russian campaign lie like a homeland I had strangely misplaced—I admit it. My fierce sense of being self-made, ‘as if I’d thought myself up’, as the Russians say, is largely shattered. I’d have liked to think I’d woven myself cunningly out of an assortment of odd threads and yarn, chosen with taste and freely, but from the moment I met Yvonne in that house in Longueville I’ve doubted that’s really what I’ve done.

  Forgetting freedom for a moment, even the fashionable notion of a self as the unique point at which various discourses intersect (discourses about family, God, class, intelligence, taste, sexuality—they’re almost infinite) doesn’t seem adequate to describe what I now see. What I now see is something much more old-fashioned, much closer to common wisdom: looking for the first time across the dining-room table at my grandmother, soft-skinned and haughty, watching the way she spoke and smiled, the way she took control of the room around her, the way my mother mixed diplomacy and self-assertion, charging the air around her with unspoken retorts—sitting looking at all this I had to think of blood. I’m no geneticist and will stick with a simpler concept. Discourses may intersect as they will and the self may kaleidoscope into thousands of unique patterns over the years, but some things are surely given. To live dynamically (as it seems to me now) the important thing is not so much to deny what is given but to confront it constantly, to prick it, mock it and outrage it with what is not.

  I once met an Abkhazian novelist (I mention this in the spi
rit of pricking) called Fazil Iskander, a Gogolian-Marquezian writer from Sukhumi on the Black Sea. He’s been to Australia, but I first met him in his Moscow flat in one of those apartment blocks on Red Army Street reserved, in Soviet times at least, for writers. Over tea the talk veered round to religion. Abkhazia is partly Christian, partly Muslim, although the dominant ideology was in those days atheist. So the topic was bound to come up. I asked Fazil if he was Christian or Muslim. ‘Oh, I’m a non-believer,’ he said, using a much less strident word than ‘atheist’ with its overtones of Soviet dogmatism. ‘But I don’t want to rid the world of believers. There will always be believers and there will always be non-believers. I like it like that. I’d hate to live in a world where there were no believers.’ In saying that, hardly noticing he’d said it, he’d inadvertently prised open some fuggy, boxed-in part of my brain. (It’s funny the way that can happen: people can throw you a word or two over a shoulder on the way to catch a bus and completely alter the way you think about everything.) Sitting right there on his sofa, staring at the blue-and-gold teapot, I thought seriously for the first time of letting the believer inside myself talk to the non-believer, letting the knowing part converse in good humour with the mystified and the credulous with the sceptical. It was a wicked feeling.

  As I’ve told you, in my childhood the bush and brambles with their spiders and snakes and blue-tongued lizards always belonged firmly down the back. In summer the faintest smell of fire sent Jean and Tom out into the back yard to peer through the trees into the gully. The street, on the other hand, was kerbed, the front lawn clipped and there was a proper geometry to the front garden. The backyard and the frontyard met at the trellis at the side of the house: viciously beautiful climbing roses facing the street, the back a warm jungle of honeysuckle, never trimmed and rustling and creaking with small animals and insects dealing death to each other. There was, you see, in that child’s prototype of paradise a clear division. It’s taken years to start to break that down.

  And so, in that new prickly spirit, still circling around the question of who we are at any moment, I’d like to broach a subject which will almost certainly strike you as bizarre. After all, everyone is so knowledgeable nowadays, everyone seems to know everything about everything, about wave particles, synapses, probability theory, black holes, Wittgenstein, there’s no need any more merely to believe in anything. What I want to say is bound up with coincidence. Perhaps there’s a better word (‘irony of circumstance’, ‘random synchronicity’) but ‘coincidence’ will do for now. Life is littered with coincidences, of course. This narrative is littered with coincidences, for that matter, as characters in my tale brush past each other unaware that from the point of view of a storyteller yet to emerge narrative lines are mysteriously knotting, branching and forming patterns.

  Some of the litter is probably just that. I type the almost never met-with word ‘Auvergne’, for example, stop typing, go out to the mail-box and take out a colourful card from Carmel Bird emblazoned with the words ‘Aux Fruits Glacés d’Auvergne’. I’m in a plane reading Mark Henshaw’s novel Out of the Line of Fire, I come to the word ‘Klagenfurt’ and as I say it softly to myself the pilot’s voice comes through my headphones saying: ‘We’re now flying over Klagenfurt.’ You smile at such coincidences, such minor synchronicities, but put them down quite reasonably to random intersections of trajectories, you don’t ask yourself as a rule if God means you to go to Klagenfurt or buy a box of glazed fruit. They might ask themselves that sort of fatuous question in cultures where it’s not understood yet that the universe is just a lot of particles flying apart and then collapsing back again, but not here, not the sort of people we know.

  But (and this is the really awkward part) some coincidences have appeared to me not to be random. Or to have, like wave particles, a patterned randomness. To believe them simply random would, ironically, be to strain credulity. What, then, are they? All I can do is explain how I perceive them, even if you’re inclined to relegate them instantly to the glazed fruit category. If you stand on a hill watching a train wind its way along a railway-track below on your right, the fact that it’s derailed by the stalled car at the crossing further along the track on your left does not appear random to you. That’s not a word that would adequately describe what you see happen. To the car’s doomed driver there might appear to be a randomness to what happens—the car stalls at the random confluence of millions of trajectories: faulty carburettor, his mother’s meeting with his father, the train-driver’s migraine—and the train’s driver and passengers might well agree with him as they career off the rails and capsize. But to me, up on the hill, the coincidence of the train and the car is not so much foreordained, or even predictable (how am I to know? perhaps the car will buck abruptly into life and off the tracks) as in the order of things, from a certain point of view. Once I’m up on the hill.

  Sometimes I’ve had a sense of seeing things simultaneously both from the driver’s point of view and the observer’s at the top of the hill. It doesn’t feel strange or luminous; on the contrary, it feels decidedly ordinary and right. Sometimes the simultaneity occurs in your head before it does in the world, so to speak, which feels a little odder. Sometimes you feel empowered to make an actuality of a possibility common sense tells you has a billion-to-one chance of coming true. I know we’re told by the ultra-sane that perception is a brain function, a matter of electricity, atoms, nerves and so forth, but that doesn’t quite accord with my experience. It’s rather embarrassing to have to say so, but it doesn’t.

  I’m standing in the main street of Rabat in Morocco. It’s quite a large town, almost half a million people live here. I’ve just arrived to visit a friend called Ahmed H. I have his address and I know it’s right because I’ve written to him there and had several replies. But when I show it to taxi-drivers they shake their heads and tell me it makes no sense to them. I go back into the airline office I’ve just emerged from to see if anyone there can decipher it for me. I draw a complete blank. Outside in the glare of the sun I can see the street seething with people. I’ve been flying since yesterday and feel desperate to arrive and sink into a long sleep. I sit down in the anonymous cool of the office and withdraw, upwards. (You’re smirking, I can tell, but don’t smirk too soon.) I can’t actually see anything yet from where I am, but I’m up there. Now comes the tricky part. The seething street does not become unreal to me exactly, it becomes in the blink of an eye more what I’d call relatively real, and what I have to do is to hook it up to a different relative reality, hovering above it. There’s a meshing in the offing, I can feel it in my bones. (I don’t apologise for this, it happened as surely as you picked up this book—I’ve just reread my letter home describing it to Jean and Tom.) And so I walk out into the street and head off … I’d have to say ‘at random’ on the level of the street, but in no direction at all on the other circular, stationary level above. And so I walk in the street and stay stock-still in my mind. Then I cast down my hook. I stop a man and say to him: ‘Do you know this street?’ ‘Yes, of course, I know it,’ he says, ‘and I know that house because Ahmed is my nephew. I’ll take you there now.’ And he does. And as we walk and I let myself down into the street again, it almost scoots away from under me when I hit it.

  And now I’m in Caracas with my wife. Again, we’ve just arrived. We have virtually no money at all, just the odd centivo: no one will change our Austrian schillings into bolivars and there’s no letter for me at the American Express office to tell me where the money I’m expecting has been sent. All we’ve got to eat is crackers and cheese saved from the plane. It’s time for radical action. Out into the street I go, drifting upwards. Venezuelan streets claim a lot of your attention, frankly, but something in me is edging upwards towards stillness. I come to a bus-stop. A bus draws up and I get on it. I’m so stationary and circular inside now I’m only very faintly aware of the need to cast my hook, but I cast it and draw the street up towards me. I get off the bus and walk straight into
the Royal Bank of Canada. I’ve never heard of the Royal Bank of Canada and, on the level of the street (so to speak), have no reason to be there. I approach a teller and and he hands me my cash. Again, I’m not exactly surprised, but deeply satisfied. Before I have time to let the world scoot off with me again, a woman comes up to me, right there inside the bank. ‘Excuse me,’ she says, as matter-of-factly as if she were about to ask me the time, ‘I thought you might like to read this.’ And she hands me an article cut from a newspaper, in English, explaining in detail the precise … what shall we call it? the newspaper called it a spiritual process, but that’s such a messy word … let’s just say the precise metaphysical and indeed religious experience I have just been through, in words and phrases I’d made mine years ago. This does startle and move me. But the woman has gone. You don’t expect this sort of thing in Venezuela.

  Now, I’m not an other-worldly sort of person, nor a particularly irrational one. I actually make a very bad mystic. Indeed, any adept of Jung would pick me immediately, I’m sure, as locked far too firmly into reasoning and analysis at the expense of the psyche’s more elemental and freewheeling possibilities. So why am I sharing thoughts with you which must seem to you as silly as crystals? Why invite your scorn? Because I’d like to make it clear for the record that, as I see it now, ‘random’ is an inadequate description of the course my life has taken—as poor as ‘self-determined’ or ‘genetically determined’. Not that I want to suggest by that that I think any God in any orthodox religious sense has had anything at all to do with anything, or that I think some things are ‘meant to be’ (by whom, exactly?), but by the same token it’s hard for me to reconcile my experience with the idea that all reality is just the aftermath of a mindless big bang. I feel, in other words, a great wheeling-about inside since that first night in Cairo. I feel I can see what a friend of mine, a Russian and a non-believer, means when he says: ‘Why must God be a noun? It’s a verb!’ Perhaps it’s just a case of overactive quantum particles in my synapses—they really do appear to have a mind of their own sometimes, those things.