I didn’t mind taking on this work, given I didn’t have any choice. Taking on their pain, so that they could move on. Mutely, I urged them to live. At least I thought it. As for me, just dismember me.
Talking served no purpose. Talking didn’t stop the planet from turning. Day and night from following each other, people from getting on with things, machines from functioning. I kept an eye out for the breakdown, the explosion, the delirium. Nothing.
In the beginning, each morning, it was by way of rebellion. Even Stuart continued to breathe, even Vince and Stella continued to be hungry, to ask for things, to defecate. Even me.
I remember one day, the phone rings, it’s my mother, she rings every day. No sound comes out of my mouth. My lips form syllables, my tongue fidgets, but my vocal chords don’t vibrate. The air just goes round them, the air just keeps me breathing. There is an element of decision in this refusal. My will exerts itself upon my vocal chords to paralyse them, but, from this moment on, the paralysis overwhelmed me, I lost control over my own refusal. I believed I was refusing to speak, but already I couldn’t stop myself from being mute.
When Stuart came back that evening with the children (during this period, Stuart left work really early to pick up Vince from school and Stella from day care in Bondi, where, thanks to Tom’s death, we got a place that I’d characterise as compassionate), when the remaining members of this family entered the house, my lips parted around a pathetic ‘hello’ but no sound passed between them. It was better that way. Never again would I utter an optimistic hello or bonjour or good evening. Yes, it was better that way, and that would teach them (what, I don’t know), they would notice, these three scattered members of this destroyed family, they would take notice of me, but already I could no longer speak.
Body reflexes undergo reversal. You become strong, sick with strength. A dam is created, a membrane, you acquire a new organ at the base of the throat. Speech or swallowing. You don’t die from being mute. But the others go crazy.
I had nothing to say, nothing to confess. The torture was never-ending and language was useless. Words formed in my head in layers, they inundated my neurons, spread out, joined up again, streamed to form other layers, and this floodwater didn’t flow out, it dripped frustratingly in my mouth forming a boggy syllable which, before it was even uttered, lost its meaning.
My mother continued to call me, her courage is beyond belief, my mother spoke to me, alone, on the phone. She gave me news about my father, about his scream. Between two doses of medication, the scream was reborn—it rumbled in his chest, rose, then burst out. It seemed to me that I could hear him. I was mute, not deaf, but my mother spoke loudly, articulating each word. My father screamed for me, for us. This scream hollowed out a hole where Tom had been, at that gaping spot, that must be kept gaping.
Not long after, The Scream by Munch was stolen from the National Gallery of Oslo. It was the concentric waves around my father’s scream that had engulfed the painting, swallowed up by his wide-open gob, it disappeared while my father screamed, and, of course, the painting would never be found, given that, in the end, the world didn’t remain intact, given that anyway, based on a few signs, you could see there were faultline cracks in the surface, molecules were being engulfed, and of the material world all that remained were memories.
Undo that which has been created. Stella and Vince had a dead brother and a mute mother, not to mention a crazy grandfather. I saw them. They passed in front of my eyes. And, for a very long time, I believed that I could speak whenever I wanted to. But words, starting with ‘want’, were like watches with broken springs.
When the time came, I’d speak. But this moment didn’t come. My silence took care of everything that I might have had to say.
I had a brief period of activity. I managed to take Stella to day care and Vince to school. I managed to wash them and to dress them. I did some shopping. I even cooked. My silence brought an improvement with it. The TV stayed on, a night light, a fixed point. Certain elements of the world penetrated my brain. Sometimes, I also had outbursts; I’d hug Stella tightly against me till she screamed. Once I cried on Vince, physically, on Vince’s hair and cheeks—I leant over his bed and I poured out like a carafe. And then, like an unforeseeable wave, one of those killer waves in the middle of the sea, I grabbed him and shook him and I dumped everything on him, bucket loads of insults and screams.
After this outbreak, Stuart asked me to check into a hospital. It must have been at the beginning of autumn, around March or April. It was still very hot in Sydney. I was in a white room. I slept. I had a neighbour as mute as me. The room wasn’t air-conditioned, or the air-conditioning had broken down: we were two large bodies laid out on white sheets, mute and motionless, sweating away. A couple of beached whales. My neighbour fanned herself with the security instructions, what to do in the case of a fire; it was her only movement.
What was wrong with her? What had she done? Two infanticides in the same room? My roommate. My girlfriend. In the beginning, I was upset by her presence, but even MALF wasn’t able to secure me the luxury of a private room. Then I began to like her. Mutely, she created havoc. And, at other times, she was nothing but an extra, hired to make me speak. All her play-acting was only meant to be therapeutic; a Sydney hospital drama queen, and not the magician who, from under the sheets, would have made Tom suddenly appear like a rabbit. Near the end, even her eyelids didn’t blink, even her chest didn’t rise. She had a great talent for catatonia.
Even with the best intentions in the world, I wouldn’t have been able to say anything to the shrink. Nothing got past my throat. Or else: give him back to me. Give him back to me and, if I’m sick, you’ll see how I get better. The shrink spoke to two people in the room, me, and Tom beside me. Sitting quietly beside me. The English you, like the vouvoiement in French—I heard the plural form, I heard you two, you two the dead ones. I didn’t speak to Tom either. Not yet, not already, not that I’m aware of. He was constantly with me, he read my thoughts. ‘When do you think you’ll be able to go home?’ the shrink asked me. And I felt the paralysis, its soft, dark fluid, descend to the bottom of my throat and spread out through my entire body. I would never go home. I would stay here, passive, a dead weight. Little by little, I would forget the house, even the desire for a house. And as this fluid spread, curiously, I rediscovered my limits, I touched something that could be an edge: an edge of me, something become me, my skin, my impotence, and, then beyond that, the world.
One night, after I got back, Stuart took my face in his hands. ‘Please,’ he said to me. I tried. I tried in the best of faith. I tried to form a sound in my throat and to bring it to Stuart’s face. I didn’t know how to do it anymore. I opened my mouth, but my throat had become so narrow that only just enough air passed through it to keep me alive. Stuart took his face in his hands. He became two hands that watched me, pierced by two eyes. Tom played peek-a-boo between his fingers. Tom’s laugh shivered between his fingers. Something rose up from Stuart’s stomach all the way to behind his hands. His own scream. We’d been turned into animals and we discovered, each of us, our scream. A zoo of pain.
Most of the time, I had vertigo. I lay on my bed. As soon as I moved, even the slightest movement of the head, the apartment distorted. The walls leaned in towards me and lifted me towards the ceiling. I closed my eyes but I felt myself rising at great speed. As soon as I opened my eyes it started again, the straightened walls leaned in once more towards me. I was unable to move forward down the endless corridor. I held onto the walls, they shied away. The light bulbs on the ceiling fell towards me, blinding, accusing. The doors whispered. Sitting in the kitchen, I turned the radio on and let innumerable cups of coffee go cold. The next minute was impossible to live through. Each minute that came, always the same. I couldn’t breathe. Time stagnated in coffee cups. Inhale, exhale. Impossible. I didn’t know how anymore. I panicked. Time no longer passed into my body, through my body, basic reflexes threw me into a panic. My body
became a barrier, to air, to food, to sleep, to coffee. The next minute, each minute, how to live through it? Panic attacks sent me running to the windows. I’d stop still, lost. Victoria Road continued on beneath the sunroom. The traffic signal for the blind went from red to green and the electronic voice gave its orders, go, stop. I closed the window, the muffled beep was a bell of misfortune, a little death knell, the death knell for Tom.
Tom was by my side. He’d sensed that he could come home, that I wasn’t afraid anymore. He slipped in bedside me and, as long as I didn’t say anything, he stayed there. Bird. The slightest noise made him fly away. I spoke to him in my head. I thought up sentences for him. As long as I spoke to him, as long as I held his attention, he stayed. Hypnotised. Noises made my heart leap. Stuart and Vince learned to walk on tiptoes, and even Stella didn’t scream anymore, or I didn’t hear her. I stayed lying there, and Tom came and sat on the edge of the bed. My eyes didn’t see him, but my mind saw him. I sensed his presence and his features took form. At times, when I was exhausted by this intimacy, I’d get up and I’d sense him at the level of my hip, and I’d smooth my hand over his head caressing him gently. The air was hard and warm. And then I could, more or less, go on with other tasks, the washing or taking care of the kids.
Vince drew pictures of fires in orange, yellow and red, with black houses and firemen. Stella avoided me. Caution is the mother of reason. At eighteen months old, she’d learned, in one go, to feed herself up in her highchair, spoon in hand, a faraway stare. An empress. For the rest, she sought out Stuart. Stella never learned French. Stella, like Vince, still only speaks her father’s language.
Jamais, toujours—never, always—these were Tom’s words; he’d just started trying out these difficult words. Never, always, at four-and-a-half?
Stuart followed my movements as if he were standing on a pier, hoping to see a boat return. Or to see the drowned start swimming? But I was also incapable of reaching out to him. Stuart’s mouth became rounded, opened, he wanted to speak, he kept me company, but I couldn’t. One night he said to me—he grabbed me by the shoulders, I thought he was going to shake me—‘It was not your fault.’ But at the time I didn’t hear it. It was one of those expressions of condolence like people said to me in our neighbourhood, when they really couldn’t avoid me—‘It was not your fault.’
Today, Stuart’s sentence is like a talisman. I bring my hand to my neck and I say it to myself. It’s my hard-earned medal at the tender base of my neck.
A cop rang our doorbell. He asked to speak to me. He showed me his ID, he was dressed in civvies. Me in my dressing gown, hair not brushed, standing at the door to the apartment, this Australian cop saying my name. I shook my head and I leant against the wall, on that infernal landing, with that apartment looming behind me. Hell must be anonymous. Maybe they pronounce the names once, at the entrance, and then, once the threshold is crossed, a nameless magma blasts a black fire.
‘Can I come in?’ asked the cop. I couldn’t move. In this nameless flesh, this most damned of all damned flesh. Take me away—if I’d been able to speak I would’ve asked to have it all over with.
‘Listen,’ said the cop. ‘You haven’t replied to our summons. I’d like nothing better than to close the file. But you must cooperate.’
He was a nice cop. I based my reasoning, when I reasoned, on the binary system, nice people/nasty people.
We sat down opposite each other at the table, the one where we all ate at night, the silence broken only by our chewing. You have to eat, the show must go on. I was suddenly conscious of the mess and the dirtiness. The table was sticky with yoghurt, dried cereal, and crumbs. Under the table, the same. There were clothes on the chairs. I didn’t know anymore which were dirty and which were clean. I need to tidy up, I thought. I was stranded in a dressing gown, like those housewives in American telefilms, the ones who drink in secret, the ones who have committed the worst crimes.
‘Tell me how your son died,’ the cop said to me.
I appreciated that he didn’t name him. That he didn’t say Tom as if he knew him, as if we both knew him. I nodded. An Australian face, red and blond, wide, jaw like a convict, a very white smile. ‘There was no autopsy,’ said the cop. I looked into the middle distance, more or less into nothing. I got up, I took a pad of Post-it notes from out of a pile of junk mail and unopened envelopes. The cop watched me. I wrote on one of the Post-it notes that I couldn’t speak. ‘There was no autopsy,’ repeated the cop as he read, and he looked at me again. His face is the only one that lingers on from that whole time. Two blue lozenges for eyes. Was it before or after the hospital? Or maybe even much earlier?
I remember his white short-sleeved shirt, his long shorts like the whole of Bondi wore, and his Velcro sandals. Onto a chair, amongst the scattered clothes, he’d thrown a jacket that had fallen heavily, making a metallic noise—had he come armed? Or was it the sound of his cop badge, of his sheriff’s star? Bang, bang. Take me away. Mentally, I held out my wrists. Handcuffs and prison. Get it over with. He wanted me to tell him about Tom’s death. This matter of the autopsy. Given how Tom died, of course, an autopsy. Cremation, of course. Remove every last trace. ‘You had him cremated.’ No body, no evidence. As he spoke, an old news story came to mind. A woman had returned from the mountains without her husband; she’d taken one last photo, asking him to move back. He’d fallen a hundred metres. The perfect crime. I’d found it funny at the time. I was twenty, living in France, long before the children. Compassion wasn’t exactly my middle name. ‘You’re French,’ said the cop. I remember bits of sentences. ‘Your father’s in hospital.’ The cremation. Why had we had him cremated. ‘It was your decision,’ said the cop. The hospital had told him it was my decision. It was not your fault, Stuart had said. And that I had waited, made others wait, beyond the legal waiting period. Beyond that, it’s the communal grave. I said, or I wanted to say: after. It was after Tom’s death. I wanted to say it in English, after, in the cop’s Australian language. ‘Yes?’ he encouraged me. With his tense expression, attentive, almost anxious, almost Stuart’s face. ‘What?’ he asked me.
What, after? I didn’t know anymore. I forced myself to say the f, the f of after, to blow into the emptiness between my lips, ffff, but it made no sense. And to make the t audible, make a little air explode between my teeth. And the a, and the e, and the r—I really wanted to open the floodgates, I wanted to establish a timeframe, for the cop, the timing of events, the before and after, the cremation. I wanted momentarily to say an a, an e, and an r, it was important, what I had to say, the timing, to establish the facts, to bend the rules of my system, to utter an a, an e, an r, but it was impossible. For my mouth, my tongue, my throat, impossible. Atrophy. Ankylosis. That old French rhyme—Toto and Lolo are in a boat. Toto falls in the water. What’s left? Cremation. ‘Why?’ asked the cop. He didn’t say ‘Tom’, at least that was something. ‘Write it down, then,’ he said to me, and he pushed the pencil towards me along with the Post-it note on which I had written: I can’t speak, post-traumatic syndrome. I smiled at him. He made an encouraging gesture. I picked up the pencil and drew Toto’s head, like we did at school in France. 0+0 equals Toto’s head, two eyes and a nose. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Very good. It’s a routine investigation.’ I wrote, after. ‘After what?’ After the cremation.
In Australia, at the time, cops were nice; I’m talking about the cops in charge of investigating mothers. A few years before our arrival, they’d had a case, in the desert, near Alice Springs, like the Grégory case in France. A child had disappeared. A baby, a little girl still breastfed. All they found were shredded bits of her nappy. Her name was Azaria, Azaria Chamberlain. Her parents were members of the Seventh Day Adventists. They also had two sons, they were camping at Ayers Rock, that monolith that the Aborigines call Uluru. At first, the Aborigines were accused, then the dingoes and, finally, the mother. I’d read a book about this story, a huge bestseller. The author, John Bryson, had picked up countless faults i
n the proceedings, in particular on the side of the forensic scientists. These guys had spent months throwing nappies stuffed with food at dingoes, crows, and other animals found in the bush, to study the tears—fangs, claws or human hands? I had read this book, innocently, at a book club in Vancouver. What we discussed was, who was guilty.
Stella had just been born and I imagined myself in the mother’s place, flanked by my two sons, grieving for Stella. That lasted for ten days maybe, the time to read that fat volume and to discuss it with the ladies in Vancouver, and then we went on to something else, to what women over there read, Patricia Cornwell or John Grisham. And that forgotten book (what remained of it? The red glow of Uluru, a crying woman in a courtroom, who had the face of, what was her name, little Grégory’s mother?) that forgotten book came back to me, returned to my head from my library in limbo, the moment that cop entered the apartment. That cop rang the doorbell, and something rejoined the flow of time. Mrs. Chamberlain. Little Azaria. Maybe it’s thanks to them that I didn’t go straight from Victoria Road to an Australian prison. Australian cops had made enough of those kinds of mistakes. After the Adventist, the French woman?
Stuart started opening the letters and went to a hearing. He told our story. They had to compare our testimonies, as it were: the one from the Post-it note, the one from Stuart. And that’s how it went. The file of Tom’s death. Case closed. The perfect crime.
Do we know which book accompanies us, which book bequeaths us an image that will recur, a mystery other than its narrative? In the same way, before all our exiles, even before meeting Stuart, I let my eyes wander over world maps without knowing that one day such and such a city would render death familiar to me, without knowing that one day such and such a city would be as familiar to me as death. And I watched children without knowing, other people’s children, without knowing that they were mortal, and, three pregnancies later, my own.
Tom is Dead Page 8
