If there are degrees of suffering, they exist inside the same individual, and for each there’s a sort of impossible horizon, an impassable threshold. The worst thing. I was fifteen when I read 1984, by Orwell, and I remember room 101. In room 101, there is the worst thing. In Winston’s case, it’s rats. Winston is attached to a chair, his head and hands bound. The torturer adjusts a cage full of rats on his face. ‘They will leap on to your face and bore straight into it,’ says the torturer. ‘Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they burrow straight through the cheeks and devour the tongue.’ When you read that at fifteen, you remember it forever.
In my case, I thought the worst thing was to be buried alive. And then I had children, and the worst thing prowled around them. What was the worst thing? The worst thing was them. It was everything, except them. Except that I was imagining, I wasn’t suffering.
I nagged Vince and Stella to get into their pyjamas…and I stood there with my arms dangling. One was missing. In my arms, I had a set of phantom pyjamas. It was an impulse I couldn’t act on, like unbearable pins and needles. I knew how to do everything with three children. I put three cups on the table. I got three cakes out of the packet. I folded the shorts that were too small for Vince, to put away, for Tom. And then I cried. There were still traps and pitfalls everywhere. His toothbrush by the sink. His school things that were returned to me weeks after, a half-finished drawing, a forgotten Space Ranger, and even the sticker he’d chosen for his coat hook.
The detonations of suffering. That Tom’s clothes and toys outlive him. That his toothbrush has remained, it, and not my little boy. That miserable bits of plastic and paper have survived and not his little body, so muscly and healthy. More fragile than a doll.
His clothes for the new school year. The economising voice in me, the practical voice, said to me: but they’ll be fine for Stella. Girls wear trousers too. In such good condition. Still so wearable. Stuart put them straight in a box. One day, I discovered that the box wasn’t there anymore. He’d given everything away, got rid of everything. A dead person’s clothes. Not Vince’s old clothes nor Stella’s future ones: a dead person’s clothes. In the end, that’s how Tom appropriated things. Death gave them to him. Death, his new mother. His adoptive mother.
Everywhere there were hints of him, glimpses of him left over. And Tom was there, held in the fabric of things. Television, words, errands, people, everything was dangerous. The substance of the world was dead. Words and objects were dead. I could no longer touch anything and, very quickly, I couldn’t go out, or turn on the TV, or even, when night finally fell, turn on the light. Vince would turn it on for me, and I’d jump, sometimes I’d scream.
But the boxes from Vancouver were also left over, the unpacked boxes. These boxes frightened me. Winter gear. Knickknacks. Bottomless layer upon layer. I didn’t open them. When I needed something, I made do. Vince was the first one to rummage through them. More and more things came out into the open and stayed there, on the floor or on the furniture. So I understood that nothing belonged to Tom, but that everything was cursed. Vince played with objects that I’d thought were Tom’s, but that Vince had always taken, as did Stella now. And Tom navigated between these bits of flotsam, a shipwreck; all the objects had passed through his hands without staying there, everything had been touched by Tom and put back into circulation in the different houses where we’d lived. Sometimes I said to myself that I’d only given birth to Tom so that he could let death into our home.
It was also Stuart who, after a while, replaced the bunk beds with a single bed, for Vince. That means, now that I think of it, that Vince must have spent weeks, months even, above Tom’s empty bed. The room was transformed. When Stella grew out of her cot, there would be enough space to put a big bed for her beside Vince’s. That’s what Stuart said to me. When Stella grew up. We were living in a material world, with tangible objects that presented practical problems, and in the middle of these objects, we were losing our children.
After the cremation, exhaustion set in all of a sudden. Dying of grief. Letting yourself die. But it didn’t work. It was no good not sleeping, not eating, lying down, I still didn’t die.
The same number of people divorce or commit suicide after grieving as they do in general. Statistically. And people commit suicide whether they have children or not, it has nothing to do with it. I remember how angry I was when Bleu by Kieslowski came out. It was before the children were born, but I was already with Stuart. Julie loses her husband and her son in a car accident. Julie moves house. Julie goes to the pool. Julie cries and has her husband’s posthumous work performed. Julie doesn’t die. She holds it together. She furnishes her nice apartment in the rue Mouffetard. It’s all right about the husband, I said to myself. You can survive the loss of a husband, no matter how in love or dependent you are. But the son. The only son. I found the film and its psychology unbearable. Although now, ten years after Tom’s death, I tell myself that total loss is one kind of solution. Massacre. Leave your whole life behind.
Just after Stella’s birth, I often daydreamed, about escaping. Disappearance, not death. I emptied our bank account, I took the first plane, I rented a room with a view of the sea and I stayed there, empty-handed. Sometimes, I also built a cabin, complete with chickens and rabbits, and became a clairvoyant, for example. The scenario became more elaborate the more tired I was—I dreamed while breastfeeding, peeling vegetables and folding the washing, running around foreign cities looking for houses and schools, queuing in consulates and government offices. It seemed to me that clairvoyance was a good way to make a living far from everything. I could really see myself as a reclusive Madame Soleil, honing my gift and freed of children.
Except that, in reality, I didn’t see the signs. After Tom’s death, I no longer daydreamed. Nor during the night. And, when the dreams did return, it was always the same dream. A woman and a little girl on a pier. The pier looks like the one from my childhood, but the faces are foreign to me. The little girl is dead. They are both wearing mourning clothes, black lace mantillas, and mittens. The little girl is pale, with porcelain cheeks, and then I notice that it’s a doll. The mother, if she is her mother, is old. They both stare obstinately at the open sea, they have their backs to me, and I wake up, I hate them so much.
I never had the feeling of having slept. In the morning, I was more tired than the day before. Sometimes, the switch to turn off my brain worked: the sleeping pills, sleeping pills fit for a horse. But when they didn’t work, when I wasn’t struggling like a mare in a brutish sleep, I had the time to visit the remotest corners of the labyrinth. Nightmare, night, day, what name did this place possess? Tom had burned. With all his worldly goods, as they say, his goods amounting to white underwear, to everything, everything. I was with Tom. I was alone. A stable in flames. A vault. A vault-stable-hold-labyrinth, nowhere, infinite corridors, dead ends, the oblivion of ‘oubliettes’. No, ‘oubliette’ is such a benign and beautiful word. I was in the darkness and the ashes of total recall. Above me, a chasm without light. No more thought. Pain as a fixed point. I was in death’s truth. In the extreme lucidity of insomnia.
He wouldn’t be coming back. I would never see him again. It was my fault he was dead. That was the truth. Of Tom, only memories remained and these memories were unbearable. Memory was an intolerable place, there was no visiting it, but it was the only place where I could be with Tom.
I summoned him in mirrors. Beneath the surface, something moved and changed shape. As if someone, or something, stood between me and my skin, between me and my eyes. I summoned him: Tom? The air became murky. A spot became clearer, a blind spot where all the lines curved and disappeared. As if I were looking at the world through a thick circle of glass.
To touch his living body. To hear him laugh. To notice that he’s grown, to witness a miracle. To teach him words. Carry him on my shoulders. Tickle him. His hand sticky on the way home from school. His own particular smell. And his voice, a little hoarse. His vo
ice will never break.
Memories of Tom. I gripped my skull, my ears, my mouth. I squashed my head between my nails. I didn’t have enough hands to choke myself. The only place to see Tom again. It was called Hell.
Once, only once with Tom, did we take the time to go for a walk around Sydney’s outskirts. On a rock in the middle of a river, a lizard warmed itself in the sun. Its red ruffle was displayed on both sides of its head. It looked like two wings, like a dragon from the Middle Ages, as if our myths had sensed the existence on the planet of such creatures, or as if Australia had given them form, though in a smaller version. The dragon didn’t scare Tom: it would’ve fit into our hands. Tom Thumb. Hansel. Leaning over the rushing water, fascinated.
At times, I found myself wandering off pleasantly… following the thread of a memory…floating with Tom, somewhere else. Limbo is a place of memory, I guess, a park to wander about in, vast and grey. The entrance would open up unexpectedly, when I wasn’t thinking about it—I thought constantly about Tom, but at that particular time I remembered him as rarely as possible. Oh, yes, it would open up. Limbo. Purgatory. There where we wander. But it was Heaven. I was with Tom and he wasn’t dying. A pact with the Devil. Because, upon return, damnation.
Returning to this world: the world where he is dead. Remembering each morning that Tom is dead. Before it finally became habit. Such a long time. Sometimes, I’d get something to eat. I’d eat a meal, a bit of a meal. I’d sit down, or I’d remain standing, and a bit of food would enter my mouth. Enter my body. Fuel for the suffering. Fuel for the flies. The suffering inside me demanded to be fed.
Niobe, the demi-goddess, has lost twelve children and she feels her blood leaving her. Her limbs and her hair become heavy, she turns to stone. She becomes a rock perched above a city. Though, one day, she’s seen to be eating. She eats, her mouth opens for the duration of a meal. Then she becomes stone again, a nourished stone.
Maybe it was my anger that I fed. Sometimes anger became stronger than grief. A different kind of suffering, that wanted, not to tear me apart, but to kill. I didn’t know who to kill. Apart from me. Stella and Vince, to get it over with. And to punish Stuart. I could also dream about running away with Stella. My accomplice. The little vampire, the little ghoul. The ultimate cause of my tiredness. We would’ve been tracked, her tiny footprints cute and blood-soaked beside my huge ones.
If Stella hadn’t been born, I wouldn’t have been exhausted. If Stuart hadn’t been posted to Sydney, we wouldn’t have moved. If Stuart hadn’t insisted, we wouldn’t have had a third child, if I didn’t fall pregnant so easily, if my pregnancies weren’t so easy, if I hadn’t taken that nap…If; in French if means yew tree, a landscape dotted with ifs like the yew trees you find in cemeteries. If Tom had been the eldest. If Vince hadn’t existed. If we’d called Vince Tom, would Tom have been Vince? And if, in the course of the drifting of the continents, the Australian plate hadn’t been separated from Antarctica, maybe Australia would have remained uninhabitable, and cities would never have grown there, and we wouldn’t have lived there, and Tom, my son, my second son…This curved space, the ifs, this siphon, this insane funnel I’m entering, where I perceive the world through a hole.
I would like to undo the cremation. Reverse the chemical process. Capture Tom’s molecules in the air around the planet, sort through the atmosphere, sift the sands, filter the rivers and the seas, melt the snows of the poles and study the new children, retrieve one by one all the bits of Tom, gaseous, ashen, carbonised, atomised, wherever they managed to find a home. Remake him. Give him shape again. Add the seventy-five per cent of water that our bodies are made of, model his matter like clay. Then, I’d summon the family, the father, the brother, the sister, the grandparents or whoever was left, the few acquaintances and friends. And all the others, all those who crossed his path. And I’d accuse them. I’d force them to kiss the remains and to ask his forgiveness. I’d make them vomit with terror. I’d threaten them. They know nothing. Stuart knows, a little. The innocents. The guilty ones. I’d howl my rage. Just give Tom back to me! As I write these lines, my anger and my hate are intact.
It’s been more than a month now, since the day of forgetting on the beach. I got Stuart to read this notebook and he found it morbid. ‘You don’t mean morbid,’ I said to him, ‘morbid is for illness. You mean macabre.’ In English as in French. ‘Either way,’ he said to me, ‘it’s unbearable. Unbearable.’ ‘Because it was not unbearable?’ I ask him. ‘It’s seeing it,’ said Stuart. ‘Seeing it written down.’
I’ve decided to get him to read it regularly. We never talk about Tom, but we’ll be together in this from now on. He won’t have the right to take anything out, to censor anything, but if he has a reaction, a memory or an amendment, I’ll write it down, I’ll write down his hypothesis. The mother and the father, for better or worse.
We got married. Early. In Souillac, at my paternal grandparents’ house, so exotic for Stuart. Was Tom really born of this marriage? What connection is there between Stuart and me, and the Tom that I knew, the one from Vancouver and the forests? There are two couples: Stuart and me; Tom and me. And then Vince and Stella make up the third couple, and, since Tom’s death, they’ve taken on a level of autonomy. Maybe one day, when I’m feeling a little less heavy-hearted, like that day of forgetting at the beach, then I’ll tell the story of Stuart and me. Maybe. In olden day France, waffle-sellers, the sellers of oublies—oublie in French means to forget—these waffle-sellers shouted ‘Here’s pleasure itself’. That’s what I read on the internet, which is where I also found out about Niobe: www.niobe.com; it’s a site where grieving mothers can talk to each other. The logo is in the shape of a statue of Niobe, in stone. There are other sites for fathers, and some for grieving couples. And all the virtual cemeteries you could hope for. With photos of children. Sites for vaults and temples and tombstones. Oublies were cone-shaped waffles—second meaning: oublies was also the name for the Host not yet consecrated. Immediately I think: a child in limbo. The incomplete, the incompletion, I come up against this, over and over again. Did Tom have a life? With a beginning, a middle and an end? Do you call that a life?
A moment of oublie, of forgetfulness. One free hour, on the beach. But I stayed in the vault. The cremation didn’t have the imagined effect. Neither Tom nor I became airborne. My head, my hair is made of stone. My nails and my fingers are heavy. I can’t lift my eyelids anymore, I can’t lift my hands anymore, I can’t raise them to my eyes. Grave, the English word for tombe, is heavy, and graves in French evoke falling because tomber is also the French verb to fall. Jesuis tombée amoureuse de Stuart, I fell in love with Stuart, and I fell pregnant with Tom. And with Vince and with Stella, and with nobody else. But Tom didn’t become airborne, the cremation didn’t work. I didn’t start breathing in his molecules, his scent didn’t lighten the weight of my head, and his gaseous hands don’t comb my hair. No, I can’t pass through his vaporous body. Contrary to everything, the Earth’s atmosphere was not fouled, the air did not become unbreathable. Tom is dead but no modification of time, of climate, of human behaviour, is detectable around us.
Storms, tsunamis and earthquakes, forty days of darkness on Earth, would have appeased my wrath a little. A bit of pageantry to grab the imagination, a bit of furore to make the others stop dead in their tracks. The others, the unscathed ones. Two seconds of terror for them. Niobe, at least, has her little myth. Obviously, it’s not Demeter in the Underworld. Or even Hecuba turned into a dog. But as for me, nothing. I didn’t turn into anything. I didn’t even know how to scream for very long: one injection, and out I went. What should be done for Tom? What devastation? Or what monument? My father, he was howling in a private hospital.
They say that nature can’t stand emptiness. Sometimes I tell myself that the only tangible trace that remains, the only trace of Tom, the sign that I didn’t dream it all, is the caesarean scar just above my pubic bone. Tom was the only one of my children to be born like this, to have exit
ed my belly above my vagina and not through it, but what does that mean?
If the atmosphere that surrounds the Earth is a constant mass, Tom created his own little turbulence there, he inscribed himself into this air that we breathe, his volume existed. It seems to me that his removal beyond the surface of the Earth should leave an anomaly in the arrangement of the world…A distortion, a disturbance…A cloud of ashes between us and the sun…Something, and not this strange as before.
But the Earth seems to be an organism whose scars heal well. A system that re-forms almost the instant an element is removed. Before or without Tom, idem.
So I became mute. It was my lips that turned to stone. Silence descended into my veins and paralysed the muscles of my cheeks. I was seated and mute. My hair drooped. My fingers drooped. My eyelids and my eyelashes, and the skin on my face. I felt only the silence flowing beneath my skin like water beneath a city. I was dead. I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream. I did nothing. What was left of me was there to suffer.
Whoever was prepared to take note of this phenomenon would be testifying for Tom. I became a burden for Stuart and the children. But I was also, it seemed to me, something stable, that you could count on, like a table, or a tombstone, like Tom’s death. I was Tom’s representative on this planet, a heavy presence, an anchored pain.
Tom is Dead Page 7
