Twenty-One Cardinals
Page 3
I never told him about Geronimo’s fever and horrible migraine. He had never been sick, not even a winter flu, and when I saw him clench his teeth in pain in the principal’s office, I thought he was furious at his powerlessness. He’s tough, our Geronimo. He can hold back more than his weight in tears. Even at age twelve, when that little girl broke his heart, it was clear that he would be an important figure in our family story.
He didn’t unclench his teeth. The principal, despite the authority of her padded chair, her enormous bosom and her principal’s doublespeak, couldn’t get a word out of him. He was gripping his chair, his hands like talons, his arms tensed, his neck sunk into his torso, a young wildcat observing something bigger than him and biding his time.
This was not their first confrontation. Geronimo was the king of the schoolyard, which regularly landed him in the principal’s office, rightly or wrongly. But I’d never had to answer for the things he did. We were both monitors, and he stayed away from my area.
The school bus loading zone wasn’t my responsibility that day. We all knew that, the principal, Geronimo and me. That only made the threat more treacherous when she said, from above her imposing bosom, ‘But you must realize that a monitor can’t allow children to be walking around the schoolyard with sticks of dynamite.’
I thought he was going to throw himself at her and maul her enormous boobs. He jumped from his chair with all the ferocity he could muster and – this is Geronimo’s particular brand of intelligence – without hesitating, he brought his hand gently from the pocket of his windbreaker, removing the offending object, which he pretended to offer to the principal.
Inside, I was jumping for joy. She had probably never seen dynamite in her life. Her enormous boobs quivered in unison, in fear or indignation. She wanted to get up, take charge of the situation, but Geronimo hadn’t budged, hadn’t withdrawn the authority of the stick of dynamite by so much as a millimetre, and the principal sunk into the great expanse of her trembling flesh, the chair yielding under the shock with a soft hiss.
That’s where the story ends. I don’t tell the rest. It’s what I give the Caboose when he brings the conversation around to what has become, in our family, ‘the time Geronimo made the principal’s boobs shake.’ The story is part of our heritage. That story, and many others, made for enjoyable evenings. We have an endless repertoire of stories and, at night, after the battles over the dishes and the battles for the three-seater sofa, the kids would settle in any which way they could in front of the television, and, from the living room doorway, I would listen to them. My workday wasn’t finished yet, but I couldn’t help but be there, in the centre of the house, propped up against the doorframe, one foot in the kitchen and the other in the living room, listening to what they had to say about their exploits at school, about TV, about the world that was opening up to them, about what they would do to all the hicks of the world once they left Norco.
I never managed to finish my day’s work, the house stayed messy and our evenings are some of my happiest memories.
The house would be lit up like a cathedral. There would be someone in every room and someone moving between them, but the epicentre of our chaotic evenings was the living room, specifically the hollow of the sofa, where the victors had managed to take their place after the battle over dishes – generally Geronimo, Tintin and Tommy, although often Tommy couldn’t hold her own against Matma. The others, those who perched on the arms or on the back, were the keepers of the sofa. There were three, four, sometimes five of them – the Weewuns, inevitably, since the old ones were too proud and their legs too long – and once one of the overlords of the sofa got up for a glass of water or milk, or to empty it all into the WC, the keepers battled for the privilege of saving that person’s place. Sometimes – and herein lay the fun of the game – the Weewuns weren’t fast enough or wasted too much time squabbling, and a seat stealer would sneak onto the sofa. The overlord would come back, chew out both the keepers and the thief, and join the seatless, grumbling, stretched out on the ground or crouched in a corner, keeping an eye on the queue-jumper in case he went to get a drink or have a pee, such that the battle for the sofa continued all evening long.
However, there was a magic word, a word that had the force of law and took the harsh edge off the game. Otherwise, there would have been even more fists flying. I don’t remember when it became part of the game. ‘What does it matter?’ Yahoo said when I asked him. ‘It stuck, and it made us laugh.’ The word originally was a sentence, a clearly issued warning: That’s my place or some such thing. With time and repeated use, the sentence had become Smyplace.
Smyplace, and the overlord could go to the kitchen or the WC in peace, the right of ownership established. But there was always someone to steal the place. And depending on the mood that reigned that evening, it was settled by argument or a rip-roaring fight. For fun or for real.
The word was used for a lot of things other than the battle for the sofa. Smyplace for a chair, for a shady corner of the porch, smy for anything we wanted to designate as personal property and that, necessarily, was the object of a power struggle. The same code of honour, the same swindling and the same fights.
It became Smyshirt, Smyboots, Smypen, Smyrifle, SmyCornflakes – a fairly tenuous way of preserving a right of ownership in a house where nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a place to sleep, was personally assigned to us. We slept in whatever bed was free, and we put on whatever we found among the clothes piled in what I called my laundry room, which had been the kitchen/living room of one of the units of this incredible house that had had four of them at the start.
We were most fierce about protecting the clothes. But, often, Smysweater wasn’t enough. You had to sleep in whatever you wanted to wear the next day. The morning fights weren’t as violent among the girls – there were only five of us – but it was like Armageddon if the boys had decided, in an effort to provoke or out of pure maliciousness, that their hearts were set on the same article of clothing.
We lived in the most wonderful anarchy, and I loved that house. The doors slammed, the stairs trembled, the walls shook, life stamped its feet with impatience in that house, and I was its caretaker. I was the one who swept, shovelled, washed and bleached, who every morning dove into endless piles of laundry, who chased dust bunnies and the mess in bedrooms, only ever managing to move them around. I was the one who reigned over the disorder.
The four units made for a magnificently quirky abode, a maze of doors and kitchen/living rooms that suited our disorganized lives to a T. I have loved disorder ever since. My children, and particularly my husbands, didn’t. They all left.
My realm was upstairs, in the west kitchen/living room, in what was the laundry room and what Geronimo called the rag room.
Where’s the Old Maid?
The Old Maid is in the rag room.
Why is the Old Maid in there?
Because the Old Maid is on the rag.
There was no authority figure in the house, and this little verse, which I was constantly serenaded with, served to remind me that doing the wash didn’t make me one.
So we piled our clothes in the laundry room. The dirty and the clean. The dirty were heaped in a mountain around the washing machine. And the clean were stacked in our father’s dynamite boxes, some washed and brushed out, others still grey with dried mud, which served as chests of drawers and were piled along the walls. All of this happily intermingled. I washed the clean and the dirty without distinction, and at noon, whether I was finished or not, I moved on to something else.
In another kitchen/living room there was a table, a few chairs, a rocking chair and an impressive number of books. The table was actually a door set on trestles, a door ripped from an abandoned house that my siblings then diligently and enthusiastically damaged so they would have to go get another one. The books, on the other hand, were carefully put away in a white pine bookshelf.
This was the study, the place where the Cardinals engaged in
book learning, the place where the worlds of science, the arts and power were theirs to conquer, the place where the loftiest of ambitions seemed possible.
That was where I heard Zorro dream of becoming an engineer. I think he just liked the sound of the word, because when Tintin asked him, it turned out he had no idea what an engineer did. It took him several days – and the dictionary, I’m sure – to finally answer, ‘An engineer builds military machines.’
Then he wanted to be an architect, and then a sculptor, a painter, a poet, finally admitting, one fine evening, that he would be nothing less than a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci. The dictionary had served him once again.
‘And what about being a fag, too?’
I don’t know where Matma picked that up, but one thing was sure, he got the fight he was looking for. He wanted to be an inventor too, and having his dream stolen by a war engineer, even Leonardo da Vinci, was more than he could take. He had been nicknamed Matma – for Gandhi, the great apostle of non-violence. It was ironic, of course, because there was little tolerance in the highly charged genes of our Mahatma.
In spite of it all, the study was the calmest place in the house, and that’s where I rocked the babies.
‘That’s where you played dolly.’
Untrue, patently untrue. The swaddled little bundles that landed in my arms just a few days after their birth were like my own children. They smelled of milk, fresh cotton and the gentle things in life. Little, pink, downy balls, tender and warm in the crook of my arm. They were my little ones, and I was their mother. And they all came back to me at some point to hear about their childhood. How old was I when I started walking? Is it true that I couldn’t tolerate milk? You gave me pieces of meat to suckle! They would ask about the others, compare themselves to them, recreate their memories. Did the Caboose really have a pointy head? I walked at ten and a half months? Before Wapiti? Before Geronimo! They were amused by the shortcomings of the others, amused by what they didn’t know about their own childhood, amused by their big sister playing dolly – no, I wasn’t playing dolly – but deep down we are all after the same thing. We all want to go back to Norco, back to the hustle of our lives, to understand what we were, what we have become and, most importantly, we want to solve the riddle of our parents. Our father, a pale version of what he was deep down and never let us see, enslaved by his obsession with rocks. Our mother, there, always in the kitchen, lost in the clatter of pots and steam, and who, because she was always there, was invisible.
I’m the one who gets the questions. They think being the oldest means that I was in on the secrets.
‘All those years of taking care of the babies and the house, and she didn’t tell you anything?’
I wasn’t even six the first time she gave me a baby to rock. It was Angèle, the Twin, Angèle who was so cruelly taken from us and whom I took from my mother’s trembling arms.
‘Take the baby, there’s a big girl. The other one is burning up with fever.’
The other one was Tommy, of course, and they had to be separated because of the fever, because of the terrible illness that it heralded and that could have taken both babies to their grave.
‘I haven’t lost a single one.’
My mother’s triumph, her greatest fear, and the only time she ever confided in me.
I rocked every baby after that. She would bring them to me, still warm and smelling of her bed, and she would go back to the kitchen.
During the few days when she would withdraw to her room, the house held its breath. No more racing up and down the stairs, no more sofa wars, no more punching or arguing. Our mother was having another baby. The house drifted along in a surreal state, and the kitchen, without her, without the worn-down and bewildered presence of our mother, lay dying.
I think that when our mother was alone in her bedroom with the baby, with the door closed, she pined to be with us, in the heart of the house, in the kitchen, simmering her enormous stews. Once a rush of vitality came back to her, she would leave her bedroom, her eyes frantic and her step unsteady, hand the baby over to me, and get back to her pots.
‘I think she missed the kitchen.’
The Caboose started when I told him that. It shocked him, I think. He would rather I keep talking about babies.
‘And did she rock me?’
No, dear Caboose, she didn’t rock you. She was already close to the edge, and she didn’t have time, even though after you there were no more babies kicking in her belly.
She was driven by urgency: the urgency of meals, the urgency of children, the urgency of the days going by, the urgency of thoughts that she chased off with confused mumbling … I don’t know why she was in such a rush. She was always out of breath. She went back and forth in great strides, as if she had kilometres to travel between the sink and the stove. Terrorized by time, sighing, labouring like a madwoman, muttering like a kook. And if one of us had something to ask her, we had to repeat it several times so that, finally plucked from the muddle of her thoughts, she would lift her head, surprised and lost: ‘What?’ We barely had time to explain, and she would already have forgotten, sighing with an absent voice, ‘I don’t know. Go ask Émilienne, she knows.’ I couldn’t stand it. Every time, it took all the humility I had to quell my anger and say, ‘Mother, I’m Émilienne.’
‘So what was she muttering about all the time?’
At the time, I thought I was the only one who wondered about our mother’s compulsive muttering. Everyone in the house was busy dreaming about their lives. I was the only one truly there. That’s what I thought until years later when I was asked about the ritual of meals, our mother’s nightly rounds and the incessant muttering.
‘Recipes, she was reciting recipes. So she wouldn’t forget them.’
Recipes, yes, I heard them too, but there was more than an obsession with meals in the drone of her thoughts. I don’t know how many times I heard her chanting a recipe, and then, all of a sudden, struck by inspiration, she would freeze, her eyes dark with worry, her breath trapped by a painful thought, and finally, after a seemingly endless wait, a long, heavy exhale would escape her and then, in the hoarse hissing of a voice that was not her own, I would hear a name escape her lips, the name of one of her children. One of us had just flapped our wings against the walls of her panicked memory.
How can I explain …
She loved us. You just had to see the tenderness, the gentle looks, the love she swaddled her babies in before entrusting them to me. But her tender passion was nothing against the panic that drove her into the kitchen. She forgot the baby, she forgot all of us, one by one, because of the panicked love she had for all her children, and if one of us popped into her thoughts, alone and singled out in the jumble of faces of children that got tangled up in her mind, it was panic; she just realized she had forgotten that child.
But she had found a way to overcome her confusion. When we were at the table, she counted us. Each person had an assigned place – there was to be no bickering here, and Smyplace didn’t work – and, while we were serving ourselves, her eyes moved to each one of us to make sure we were all there. It was a delicious moment.
‘I wouldn’t have missed that moment for the world. I would stare at the plate and wait for her eyes to land on me. It was like a prayer.’
Tootsie is the second to last, the youngest girl, just before the Caboose, and she has her own way of expressing things.
Our mother counted us, one by one, and when she had gathered everyone who made up her world in her line of sight, she would turn back to the counter where urgent matters still awaited. She never sat down. No time, not hungry, she tasted this and that, feeding herself with the ladle or the spatula. It was only after the evening meal, after making sure everything was set for the next morning’s meal, that she allowed herself to rest and withdraw to her room.
If the Caboose had counted us in our semi-circle around the computer, properly counted us, one by one, like our mother had, he would have realized.
There is something about our mother that asks to be protected. A rip, a deep gash that her mind gets lost in. Sometimes I watch her huffing and puffing in the kitchen of her bungalow as if she still has a brood to feed, and I wonder what makes her want to lose herself like that. She is seventy-eight years old, her joints are eaten away by arthritis, her heart menaced by her arteries, and still she toils away like a forced labourer. The charities gobble up the meals by the potful.
When we get together, in twos, threes or fours, rarely more, our first question, inevitably, is about her: ‘How is the Old Lady?’
We want to protect her, to cup her in the palm of our hand, but she always gets away. She takes off ahead of herself and leaves us with a blurry image we have never stopped wondering about. An elusive creature, who, in our minds, really only existed at night when she appeared at the bed we were sleeping in, her long hair hanging loose, her bony silhouette softened by the filmy contours of her nightgown and the rosy glow of the tiny flashlight that accompanied her on her nightly rounds, which she turned toward the palm of her hand so as not to wake us when she approached.
The fleeting image of our mother has haunted our nights and followed us throughout our lives. I still find myself waiting for her, alone in the bed of the little room at the hotel where I work my fingers to the bone in the kitchen six days a week. The room is as rundown as the one I had in Norco. I imagine that I hear the floor creak gently under her step, I curl up under the covers and she arrives at my door, opens it noiselessly – I wonder if I should hold my breath – then moves toward the chair beside my bed and sits down on the pile of clothes. Then the moment I love so much arrives, the one when she looks at me, me, Émilienne, her eldest girl. I am eight years old, fifteen, twenty-one, fifty-three, and she looks at me, her child.