by Mary Byrne
In autumn, I watch her again. Marguerite sits at the center of the big table in the local hall. It is so wide they have to shout across at us and make sign language. She shrugs. She is concentrating on the occasion, the ceremony, her job as hostess. It is her ninetieth birthday and she has been working on the menu for weeks with the caterer. She eats very little, picking and watching her guests. She supervises each serving, waits for reactions and comments, smiles when they come, sensitive to any praise or slight. When the main course is served, she does a tour of the table, chatting with each one, leaning on her stick.
Not eating, not settled, not at ease, just like her job on the farms, hovering near a table of eaters, wanting everyone to be fed and happy, barely as high standing as they are sitting. I watch her and wonder why she inflicts this on herself now, why she does it, and I tell myself—yet again—that she does it for the giving, of course, as she gave and gives to me and to all the others like Denis, other people’s children, all her life. For the giving she never got herself. Marguerite first gave herself to me in the way she did everything else: it was her decision, not mine, it was her body and she had decided it.
On her first farm, at twelve years of age, they gave her bread and coffee three times a day, standing up in the kitchen with a farm boy. One day she started to vomit. When they finally consulted a doctor, he said she was malnourished. She was bedridden for weeks. After that, someone found her a good farm, where they tried to feed her up, coaxing her to eat.
‘Much as I’d have liked, I couldn’t oblige them.’
From then on she could no longer eat a proper meal, her stomach had shrunk. She enjoyed soup.
‘Like an ailing beast, I didn’t thrive. I stayed small and thin. It was like an insult to their goodness.’
She couldn’t have children or at least none had appeared and no precautions were taken.
‘Better that way,’ she smiled that elfish smile. ‘The bigots would go mad. Maybe the witches organized it.’
When I persuaded her to check with a doctor, he discovered a tumor.
‘Take it all out, so,’ Marguerite told him. ‘That’ll knock the laugh out of us.’
The doctor pretended to be shocked. French women didn’t say that kind of thing, to doctors or anyone else.
Marguerite said the French ideal of a woman was Coco Chanel, and did everything she could to counter it. She also said some Frenchwomen didn’t deserve the vote, even in 1945.
Sometime later it was my turn again, with another shrapnel flare-up.
‘Shrapnel moves in strange ways,’ said the surgeon, a plump man from Morocco. Marguerite refers to him as Le Gros—the Fat One. Fancies himself as a wit.
‘Pity it has no market value,’ he said, ‘we’d have made a fortune out of you.’
There was some kafuffle after Marguerite’s birthday party. It started among the gauntlet of smokers outside the door. Diana wanted to go on someplace, Denis wanted to go home. She was all decked out in some glittery thing more suitable to New Year’s. He was tired and had to get up in a few hours.
‘The c-c-c-c-crisis is b-b-biting,’ he said, ‘this is no time to t-t-t-t-test the b-b-boss.’
He was right. Factories were closing left, right and center. Some of those that stayed open were on up to ninety days forced closure.
Diana finally went off with some of the others, while Denis went home.
Denis’s original nosedive was due to some tart he’d picked up locally. She showed herself around with him then did a bunk with someone else. Denis spent months in bed, unable to get up. The second time he actually tried to kill himself with tablets, but Marguerite found him in time and nursed him back to health on her sofa. She even said we should import an Asian woman who’d be more sensitive to his needs and more appreciative of what she was getting.
‘With his kind of luck,’ I said, ‘he’d get a dud.’
The herbs and spices business started well enough, but by the end of the year it too started to get hit by the economic crisis. The Euro was too high, Americans wouldn’t buy. Sterling had slipped to the value of the Euro, so the Brits weren’t buying either. This whole economic thing was going faster than the weather metaphors they gave it: tsunami, whatever.
The real estate market had already begun to flinch when Diana sold the barn to an English couple. They were either the last of the big spenders or they were oblivious to what was going on. Younger than our usual Brits, they kept coming to Marguerite with flowers and cakes. I kept wondering what they wanted from her.
‘Maybe they want nothing,’ Marguerite said. ‘Some people want nothing, like your good self.’
Turned out they were looking for work.
‘Now the world is really upside down,’ I said.
Worse was to come. Diana had never really moved most of her personal belongings—what she referred to as her stuff—over to Denis’s place.
One day in January I strolled by to find a removals truck outside the barn door. There was no sign of Diana. I stopped and asked the guys what was happening.
‘Stuff is going to the States,’ they said. ‘Sale goes through tomorrow. We’re getting extra pay for being double quick about it.’
Stuff was always a first priority, I thought.
We never saw her again. Diana had skipped with the barn money—her money, since she’d bought it before they married. Denis arrived the next day, pale, tearful and inarticulate. He first thought something had happened to her. He had searched high and low after work, not slept, not worked. Finally he went to the police. It was the police who told him she was leaving the country—they knew because of something to do with paperwork for the removals. He refused to stay and eat.
It snowed the next day, Saturday.
‘Let’s get Denis over for lunch,’ said Marguerite. ‘Cheer him up.’
He didn’t pick up the phone, of course. Of course I went over there. A light dusting of snow had fallen. There were no footprints in his yard. Of course the door wasn’t locked, and of course he was hanging from the rafters in an otherwise impeccably clean house.
I didn’t have to tell Marguerite. She knew it from my step in the yard, then the look on my face. She put her hand to her chest.
She called the police and the funeral parlor and made all the arrangements.
A man came out with a catalogue you’d find funny if it wasn’t sinister. Marguerite took advantage of the situation to make arrangements for us as well.
‘Six feet,’ I said.
Marguerite ignored me. ‘No plastic crosses on the coffins,’ she told him. Then, as if she knew something I didn’t, ‘Any of them.’
Organized religion wasn’t going to have the last word.
She put her hand to her chest again.
A lawyer phoned looking for Denis. When Marguerite questioned him, he said that Diana had left massive debts related to her business. Because they had no marriage contract, Denis was responsible for debts incurred after the marriage.
‘Well there’s one thing he did well to duck out of,’ said Marguerite. Then she bit her lip and wondered if he’d known this before he killed himself.
‘It wouldn’t have been a barrel of laughs for him,’ I agreed.
Then she told me to call the doctor.
I buried them both the same icy day. You can’t fit two coffins in a hearse (not many people know that) so the cortege looked like something from a film, or an accident.
‘Look after that handsome head of yours,’ was the last thing she said to me. This is what I loved her for: pure disinterested caring for others. There was no side to Marguerite.
As the man from the funeral parlor drove me home, freezing fog hung low over the cathedral spire in Rouen. Highest spire in France, reaching after Somebody Up There. Unless He was now Somewhere Else, in a world upside down.
As we slowed in traffic crossi
ng the bridge, I found myself a yard away from an elderly oriental on foot. He was wearing one of those old blue costumes the Chinese used to wear.
He caught my eye. Maybe the funeral car got his attention. His look was kindly. It said: We’ve been through some things, you and me. We should have died several times. Better people than us did.
Righteous Indignation
Mme F—Fernande to her friends—lives just around the corner from the canal bridge where Arletty pronounced the famous question: ‘Atmosphère?’ with all that heavy Parisian irony. The Hotel du Nord, backdrop and title of the film, is still there, the canal and surroundings still one of the cool places to be, in Paris, in the summer.
At eighty-seven, Fernande well remembers the film, having been a bit of a goer herself, once. Although the younger crowd tend to find the Canal very branché, and are willing to pay higher prices to live on or near it, Fernande invariably turns her back on it, preferring to reach back toward the streets where she used to work as a concierge. She eats lunch every day in one of the cheap places along rue St Maur, has shandies with anyone who’ll cooperate, and she’s always willing to pay. She is well known to the new Arab and Berber owners of the rundown cafes with rotting awnings and poster photos of hillsides in Kabylie. Shandies remind her of the good times, when Georges was alive.
Fernande has two minders, although she’d rather have none, and there is some doubt as to whether she really needs any of them or if they actually need her more. One of them is a plump Portuguese with a pathological fear of old women being swindled, who watches over Fernande like a hawk. The Portuguese reports to the other minder, a cousin of Fernande, who is after the inheritance, and has every interest in keeping it intact.
Fernande dresses in vivid colors, flowered dresses with matching cardigans, shoes and jackets. Her former neighbor, Zorica, says she used to be very chic indeed, although now she looks slightly disheveled and has a tendency to slouch, moving in and out of the conversation and giving the minders an excuse to pretend she’s lost the run of herself. She loves food and drink and if there are amuse-gueules on the table she digs into them absentmindedly before anyone else or before the drinks are served, suggesting that she is not quite with it. Another thing that annoys the minders is when she manages to give them the slip, which is as often as possible. It is quite a feat for her to make it all the way down the stairs where she lives, then hobble along the ill-mended streets and make her way up another set of stairs—this is not a neighborhood with many lifts, or even the space to install them, if money were to be found for the purpose—where she almost collapses after the effort and excitement of her escape. She often takes refuge with Zorica, where they chat and watch soaps for hours, talking intermittently, misunderstanding each other frequently. Fernande is on the ball for most things, yet can forget long-time neighbors or acquaintances in the house. Zorica, a foreigner and illiterate to boot, for whom Fernande read letters and interpreted bills over the years, merely shakes her head: Fernande can do no wrong. Zorica perceives her like a mother, and has missed her desperately since she left to look after her sister in a brand new apartment down the street: new building, public housing. Now that the sister has died, Mme F, as well as feeling lonely, is hoping City Hall will give her the rubber stamp to stay, but of course city hall officials are saying, ‘Why don’t you go back to your own apartment?’ Mme F likes it in the new building, where she has a view of the early seventeenth-century Hôpital St Louis, and in the distance Montmartre and the Sacré Cœur. Although it’s a bit lonely, she manipulates the neighbors to do the shopping for her. The only shopping she does herself now is for amuse-gueules, in the Chinese or Arab late-night groceries. The minders are terrified she’ll be mugged.
Yet Mme F can take care of herself. When the ground floor garage owner complains that she watered him as well as her geraniums, she silences him: ‘And we’re supposed to breathe exhaust fumes and say nothing, I suppose?’ She is especially vigilant for car horn abuse, and rushed out recently to shake her fist at two motorbike policemen—who had the temerity to tootle their sirens gently once or twice behind a vehicle momentarily abandoned in the middle of the street. ‘Do you want to deafen us or what?’ she roared. ‘Oh, ça va, ça va,’ the policemen replied patiently.
The Portuguese minder tells stories to anyone who’ll listen, about other old ladies she’s known who were had by crooks before leaving this world. Although she prefaces the stories with a ‘Look at me, I’m hardly a likely candidate to be racist,’ her stories are always just that. One old lady almost signed to purchase land and build a holiday complex on the Moroccan coast, she says, proposed to her by the Moroccan doctor treating her in the hospital. ‘Found it in a drawer after she died,’ says the minder. ‘He’s left now and gone home, so I can talk about it.’ Listening to the Portuguese, one would be forgiven for thinking the whole quarter was full of rich elderly ladies and foreign crooks. Another woman, the Portuguese relates with relish, was pulling six hundred euros a week from a bank account and handing it over to someone who did her weekly shopping. ‘She was black,’ the Portuguese says loudly, glaring balefully down the street.
The Portuguese may be a bit paranoid, but she is an excellent watchdog for Mme F’s cousin. One thing is sure: old Fernande might be losing her marbles, but her absentmindedness exists in direct proportion to the person with whom she is dealing. She has neighbors she likes, and has given them many of her belongings. The Portuguese, however, is convinced that the neighbors, a youngish couple, are robbing Mme F, slowly but surely. She has been to their apartment, she says, and seen the stuff there. The Portuguese and the inheriting cousin have warned Fernande, over and over, NEVER to open the door to ANYONE. Fernande shrugs and says, ‘No pockets in a shroud.’ She hopes to rid herself of most of her belongings before she passes on, and cares not a whit for the inheriting cousin or the Portuguese. ‘They are a pain,’ she says. When she really needs help they are never too pleased to be asked, so the hell with them. Fernande tends to get very annoyed about the non-cooperation of her poor old feet and legs, and often has to be assisted home after one of her shandy escapades. The minders say she should use the walking stick they got her.
One of her excuses for frequent escape is the two apartments in her former building. One of these, on the third floor, she owns, but had to abandon it and rent one on a lower floor when the stairs became too much. When she wants to collect her mail, Fernande makes her way up there on her own, and if Zorica isn’t there and she can’t manage to open her door, she stands on the stairs yelling ‘Anyone home?’ in a pathetic voice that is full of power, until someone shows up. Invariably she has the wrong key, or the overhead light bulb has blown, and the concierge has to be called out. It is often the concierge’s husband who arrives, a cigarette to the side of his mouth, bearing a ladder and a new bulb, giving Fernande a side look across his pencil moustache. He knows Fernande was once the concierge. Perhaps he wonders if he and his wife will finish up like her if they don’t beat a retreat to Portugal before falling apart. Then he wrestles Fernande’s three sets of keys from her, opens the door, deposits her inside, and leaves Zorica or one of the others to decide what to do with her.
Both of Mme F’s apartments are monuments to a kind of kitsch which Susan Sontag never dreamed of. Fernande calls it untidiness, and only apologizes for it vaguely, as for a crime perpetrated by someone else. The rented apartment is the most kitsch of the two, as if Mme F had made up for Georges’ absence, and her descent to the first floor, by a flurry of foreign holidays and purchases. Glass-fronted cupboards overflow with dolls of every shape and size, from every ethnic grouping. Dolls from some demented Carmen dance across chests of drawers and, like Zorica’s flowers, look as if they are about to make a getaway across the ceiling and walls and back to some eternal rave or other. A check has to be done upstairs as well, in the smaller room she and Georges shared for some sixty years, as the door seems loose and everyone is worried about possibl
e squatters.
In the upstairs apartment, squatters would be comfortable if in a sort of time warp. The kitsch here is slightly less frenetic, with reminders and black-and-white photos of her and him all over the place. Lace doilies cover a small early-model TV set and radio. A well-worn carpet occupies the middle space. Old post office calendars block up missing window-panes. A wall-bed clad in Formica looms large on one side of the room. Fernande turns on her heel with an agitated sigh and walks back down, having wiped all memory of this life from her mind. Let the cousin have it when she dies. The room, for her, died with Georges.
She is much more intrigued by the notice of a registered letter she has received from the concierge, and is adamant that she wants to go to the post office and get it, in spite of warnings of standing in a queue and needing an ID. Clasping the notice to her front, she sets off for the post office on Zorica’s arm, with a determined air.
Out on the street it is hot. There is a hum of sewing machines in the air. Bags of offcuts from the morning’s work have already been left out for the bin collection. Mme F tells Zorica that city hall has invited her to the old folks’ annual dinner in a local restaurant. ‘Used to invite us once a month,’ she adds, ‘before the Right got in. Now the Left are back, it doesn’t look like they’ll go back on it.’ It doesn’t occur to her that Zorica, past the age of retirement but a foreigner and therefore a non-voter, is invited nowhere. Mme F makes jokes about voting for the National Front in the European elections, and there is no guarantee she wouldn’t do so. Yet she isn’t racist. Several young men sit on a doorstep and study the two old ladies with interest. One, of North African origin, is looking for a row. When Mme F refuses to mount the high footpath near him—because she avoids high steps of any kind—he asks aggressively, ‘Afraid to walk right by an Arab, are you?’ ‘Didn’t know you were an Arab, did I,’ retorts the bold Mme F, quick as a flash. He doesn’t quite know what to say to that.
