Other People's Countries: A Journey Into Memory

by Patrick McGuinness

  Driving drunk was not difficult at Robert’s garage, because he ran a café out of the same building. People picked up or dropped off their cars, or came to browse for new ones, and had a few glasses of beer or wine. The café was full of advertisements for those drinks that even then no one really drank, but which somehow define the sophistication of drinking: Mandarine Napoléon, Pisang, Maitrank, Dubonnet, Suze. There was a hypnotic one, for Byrrh, a neon outline from the fifties, which I loved to watch, of a glass filling up and being drained into the mouth of a red-dressed woman. The light would linger a few moments on the surface of the darkness before disappearing, and then the whole design would burst back out again. When it was off, the neon tubes looked dusty and rudimentary, and you could see the twists of wire that pinned the glass tube together; when lit, it was a spectacle.

  Robert and his wife Paulette held their café (‘Au point du jour’) and lived above it with their grimy and feral Alsatians and their four children. Robert and Paulette had one glass eye each, having survived a terrible accident when they crashed their car into a deer on the road to France. She limped for the rest of her life, and he always contrived to wear his glass eye in such a way that it pointed upwards regardless of what the real eye was doing. It gave him the air of one of those saints in martyrdom scenes, his eyes aspiring heavenwards while the flesh accepted its mortification below. Robert looked like a saint in dirty overalls, still torn between higher and lower things and keeping an eye on both. Robert and Paulette kept chickens too, who would infiltrate themselves through the unclosed windows (not quite the same thing as open windows, which are a matter of agency and not forgetfulness) of their cars and lay their eggs. Goats roamed shakily over the carcasses of his decomposing Fiats as if crossing the steppes of some heat-beaten Greek island. We once hired a car from Robert which had several different kinds of animal shit scattered, pelleted or simply smeared around it. The only deposit Robert wanted for the lopsided eighties Fiat Ritmo was a kiss from Angharad, who wore his oily fingermarks on her white cheek for the rest of the day.

  What made Hainaux the typical Bouillonnais, and typical too of a certain kind of life and culture, was that mix of industrial and rural that you get in small factory towns, or in places where heavy industry has been hewn out of nature. They’re factory-glades amid the green. He was part of that movement from the soil to the assembly-line, except that there was no movement because the assembly-line came, then went, and the soil stayed. Like my grandfather and all those who worked in the factories in Bouillon and elsewhere, they had the habits of the country: they trapped animals and ate them, fished, kept chickens and pigs in their yards, and grew vegetables with a skill that was muted and bleak and uninterested in itself. (What would they think of today’s self-conscious MILF, yummie-mummies and Nick Hornby dads tending their allotments in the mockneyfied suburbs of Euroland?)

  They lived according to one set of rhythms – sun and moon, soil and seasons – but also clocked into and out of factories, did night shifts, manned machines and breathed in asbestos, coal dust, fumes. You see it across the world, and I’ve known those people in places as different, or differently the same, as Southern Belgium, Northern France, the South Wales mines or North Wales quarries; in my father’s Northumberland and his father’s Northern Ireland, but also in Greece, Romania, Spain, Italy. It’s a universal specific, and it’s the essence of Bouillon while at the same time being the essence of so many other places too.

  I could feel nostalgic for it, because it’s going, and it’s going in a way that’s wholly in keeping with the way it came: the factories are leaving, and though the soil still exists, no one really remembers it’s there. Or not as soil anyway. The allotments are now wasteland or second homes; the work has moved or evaporated, and the forest is for walking, not trapping or fruit-picking or getting firewood. Actually, it isn’t really for walking either – it’s for watching tourists walk in. Robert’s garage is finished and boarded up. ‘Commerce à reprendre’, says the sign, but none of his sons reprised it; they had neither his financial nous nor the chaotic and charming eccentricity that masked it. They feuded, lost money, then customers, then went to work for his rivals as mechanics: the new, smart Opel garage in Libramont industrial park, where the salesmen wear suits; the Renault garage near Bertrix, etc. My family has transferred its loyalty en bloc to the new Skoda garage in Noirefontaine, where the showroom windows are actually clean enough to see through.

  Robert Hainaux died in 2007, and moved one space to the right: the cemetery. He took his brand loyalty with him to the grave, and was still advertising his cars from beyond it. The ‘annonce’ of his funeral in La Meuse newspaper went like this:

  Le Petit Robert s’en est allé

  pour enfin se reposer.

  Fiat lux!

  AESTHETICS

  I’VE NEVER KNOWN a people so able to shrug off the beauty of where they live as the Bouillonnais. Yet that too is a kind of universal. There are people who come here because it’s beautiful, and those who stay here because they have no reason to go anywhere else. With the true Bouillonnais, a sense of the place’s uniqueness goes so deep they don’t let themselves notice it. But they know it – it’s a certainty that so bypasses awareness that it can be mistaken for unawareness, even by the person inside whom the bypassing happens. This is because of some unconscious superstition that goes along these lines: if you notice it too much you turn it into something endangered. You look at the solidity of it all – the castle laid like a molar on its ridge of granite, the forest with its waves of green, the houses with their slate façades held together by a crumbling rust-coloured mortar I’ve seen nowhere else – and imagine that by thinking about it too much you’re weakening it, sapping its foundations. Besides, it’s also an effort to notice beauty all the time; it’s too much like work, and this is Wallonia after all.

  ‘FAIRE LE TOUR DE BOUILLON’

  THE SEMOIS, A tributary of the Meuse, flows through Bouillon in the shape of an omega: it enters from the south, spreads out to take in streets and hotels, the shells of the two factories, a medieval castle, a handful of bakeries, butchers’ shops, schools, two old people’s homes and dozens of cafés, and then turns back and leaves town two hundred yards from where it came in. This slackness and circularity gives the Semois an especially meandering quality that suits the Bouillon temperament; as if it was not especially keen to reach its destination, and preferred to double back, take another look around, and generally play for time in liquid flânerie. ‘Faire le tour de Bouillon’ is what we say when we’re going for an aimless walk, and this is exactly what the river does. On calm days, as you walk the riverbank, the water laps quaysides with the sound of a baby suckling at a breast. In the autumn, as the rains come after a dry summer, the parched banks of the Semois start to dissolve back into the silt they came from. The mud on the riverbank becomes lustrous and tender, the river rises and there’s a brown translucent froth that trembles like a hem of dirty lace at the edges of the water. It’s like looking through the window of an old house, trying to make out the slow, half-lit stirrings behind the pane.

  TRIAGE

  ANGHARAD TOLD ME once, as I mooned about in the Bouillon house succumbing to a touch of the ubi sunts, to let go of the past. She’s probably right. But really it’s never been that simple, and I sometimes think it’s getting worse, this past business, that it’s rising up in me like damp creeping up a wall.

  My parents travelled. They travelled light – by which I mean that their baggage was all internal – and had that peculiar ability to adjust that you find among maladjusted people. Off to school in England for three months at a time, I’d come back to the house, usually a different house each time (though it would still be called ‘the’ house, which fooled no one), and find my things gone. Usually I came back to a different country from the one I’d left. ‘Why did you throw this out?’, I’d ask about some shoes or a jacket or a few books I remembered and would have liked, if only for the purposes of orie
ntation. ‘You weren’t using it’, they’d reply. ‘I wasn’t using it because I was 3,000 miles away, in England, where you sent me to school’. But this was a mere detail. ‘Mais quand même’, said my mother. ‘Well, still’, repeated my father, before adding a flourish of non sequitur: ‘fair’s fair’. ‘Il faut trier’, my mother used to say, ‘toujours trier’.

  My parents had specific criteria when deciding whether to keep or throw out an object. If it could be drunk, eaten or smoked, it would be consumed or consume itself, and was out of the equation. Other objects needed to be affirmed on an almost daily basis or else they’d be under threat from the black bin bags: they had to be touched or applied or used. Sometimes it was enough to evoke them in conversation; a glancing reference from time to time might be enough to keep them from the articulated jaws of the bin lorry. My things and my sister’s were never safe, because we were not there to vouch for their necessity. This must account for why we developed such detailed memories, such pain-inducingly precise recollections of tastes and smells and textures. And why, when, as a child in Iran, I won a used bicycle at a raffle (my number 13, which was my mother’s lucky number too, came through), I wheeled it upstairs to my bedroom and slept with it leaning against my bed for a fortnight. The reason we liked Bouillon so much, and still do despite all the settling we’ve done (I think that’s all we’ve ever done: settle) is that nothing got thrown away: last year’s toys and the year before’s had their place among Julia’s and Lucie’s and Eugène’s things, and the things from the decades and even the century before. The Bouillon house is my Pharaoh’s tomb, containing all the things I might need for another life, for the life I might have had in case it ever comes around again.

  ‘Quand même’; ‘fair’s fair’, etc. My parents often misused ready-made expressions not only in each other’s languages but, by the end, in their own. By dint of all the travelling they did, and by dint of living with the other, each became gradually unmoored from their native tongues.

  For the children, the commerce between French and English, with the added complication of Walloon-flecked patois, made for an exhilarating world of malapropism and cross-purposes. For example, I was once told, when I asked if I could stay up past 11 to watch a spaghetti western, ‘you’ll be lucky’. I took that to mean that I would in fact be lucky, and would, indeed, be able to watch my film. When I came down just before 11 in my pyjamas to watch it, I was given an explanation of the phrase which showed that if it meant anything it meant its opposite: that I wouldn’t be lucky at all; that I would, in short, be unlucky. There are many things like this that coloured my childhood and made me feel as if I was always rubbing against English from the wrong side, that if translation was a tapestry, I was at the back with the hanging threads and dangling clutter of knots. In fact the tapestry was all back and no front, because I felt the same in French too.

  PISSING IN YOUR CHIPS

  ONE OF THE most evocative confusions occurred with the passage of my father’s favourite expression – ‘to piss in your chips’ – into French. For years I heard ‘pisser dans ses frites’ used about people who had messed something up or rashly harmed their chances of getting a job or earning some money, or snaring a bride or a groom. In short, people who had shot themselves in the foot. Since I had only ever heard it in French, I thought it wasn’t just a French term but a Belgian one; and not just a Belgian one but a Bouillonnais one, part of the heritage patois everyone trafficked in, and dovetailing very neatly with the town’s culinary landscape. If anyone, anywhere, was going to be pissing in their chips, it would be us, here. I heard my grandparents, aunts and uncles and even our neighbours use the expression, until ‘Pisser dans ses frites’ belonged in my mind to Bouillonnais and to Bouillonnais only. Only much later, testing it out on some young Arlonnaises in my early teens, did I realise that the phrase was in fact my father’s exotic Geordie import that had grafted itself onto the Bouillonnais branch and briefly flourished there among people who took chips seriously and for whom the expression seemed so well designed that it was impossible to imagine it being anything other than theirs. In truth, I had simply caught it for the length of its brief life in our language, and though I try sporadically to revive it in Bouillon or plant it further afield in the French-speaking world, all the dictionaries assure me it never existed. And yet . . . it seems an oversight here, in this country whose great symbols are the Manneken Pis, the only world tourist attraction that is smaller than most of the souvenirs that replicate it, and the ‘baraque à frites’, the chip stall. A combination of the two would surely become, in turn, the very symbol of national disaster. ‘T’as b’en pissé dans tes frites là, vieux!’: ‘You’ve well and truly pissed in your chips there, mate!’

  BOXES

  THE ITALIAN DISSIDENT, Silvio Pellico, wrote a book called My Prisons; Verlaine wrote a memoir called My Hospitals; mine would be My House Moves; or maybe My House Clearances.

  An old photograph of the four of us – Kevin, Monique, Sarah and Patrick – kneeling in front of another packing crate, heads bowed: are we packing or unpacking? Hard to tell, but either way we are at worship. The God of movement has his altars everywhere, and his altars are always portable.

  CORRIDOR, 8 RUE DU BRUTZ

  COMING HERE AFTER a few months’ absence, I find the air has thickened. It’s like going underwater, and the water is always blood-temperature regardless of the weather outside. In this house the past is particulate; it’s made up, as they call it in science, of ‘respirable suspended particles’, and you can feel them in your lungs and on your teeth as you enter the house.

  However excited I am to come back – one phrase in French for returning to a place is regagner, to win back, and I enjoy the irony of that, because returning is always more about losing than winning – however excited I am to win back the place, I slow down as soon as I’ve opened the front door. It’s out of respect for all that’s settled, but also so as to miss nothing: the dust, the mould, the swell of wallpaper dampening in blisters, its tight little snarl as it lifts and curls where it meets the skirting board. It’s like moving along the seabed, like being a diver: slow-footed, thick-limbed. I am diving, I know, but what am I finding? My anchor or my wreck?

  CORRIDOR, 8 RUE DU BRUTZ II: THE CATWALK

  MME C— THE factory owner’s wife, proper in every way and with a patrician kindness my grandmother loved but my grandfather found insulting. ‘Très correcte’, Lucie would say admiringly, as Mme C— walked (‘at least she does her own walking’, Eugène used to say) back up to her eight-bedroomed house in its tight little acre of rose garden, overlooking river and forest, and facing away from the factory she owned. Looking at those bosses’ houses, ‘chez les patrons’, I always thought they looked like averted faces, sitting on their hillsides with their biggest windows and doors facing beauty – nature, the greenery, the trout-torn, kayak-tormented Semois (as Yeats might have called it and Verlaine pretty much did) – and their backs giving onto the factory and shops and workers’ houses. By the time I was a child, the factory had closed, but its shell was still there, and quite beautiful with its myriad windows catching the various gradations of sun. As the windows got broken, what started as a fanfare of red and gold squares became a few patternless clusters, then a handful of isolated pangs of light, then nothing. Now there is no factory either, just a grass-and-gravel landscaped garden with coach parking and bandstand, whose lack of character may have been easy enough to create but takes a lot to maintain: there isn’t a day when the place isn’t being weeded, pruned, mown or watered into municipal featurelessness.

  I also remember, and more often, the clipped short steps of long legs tightly pencil-skirted in. Here I could digress erotically for quite some time, because this was Mlle L—, who closed her eyes and imagined she was Catherine Deneuve, sashaying down the corridor in a catwalk daydream. I kept my eyes open. I didn’t read Madame Bovary until I was eighteen, but Mlle L— exuded what I now know was Emma Bovarysm. She seemed to spend her
self against her own dissatisfaction, but at the same time to define herself by it too, to need it. She sighed a lot and looked out of the window, its blocked infinities of lace. She’d put her hands on her taut hips, and imagine herself and her outfit, made by a small-town dressmaker for less than it would cost in a shop, in a place like Brussels or Paris, or, as we knew them then, ‘even Brussels’ and ‘maybe even Paris’ (see later: ‘Even Brussels’ and ‘Maybe even Paris’).

  People from around the province came to Lucie with pictures of dresses and coats they’d cut out of fashion magazines, and Lucie would make them. I was amazed at the disproportion between work and worth: how could a person be cheaper to pay than a factory? And there was the irony that the very people who made their money and laid people off because machines could do the job were the same people who, when it came to their own things, wanted them made by people and not machines. Did I think that then? Certainly not, but now that I do think it, I realise I knew it long before I thought it.

  Amid all this, there’d be the smell of food from the kitchen on the other side of the door, the smell of sleep from my grandfather, the steam from something boiling catching the windows and misting them up. It’s all still happening, and somewhere more real and tangible than just my memory. Do my children know this as they walk and play in the house, smelling the same smell, running the fingers of their minds along the inside of the house’s doublure? And that smell, incidentally – it was always the product of what made it: the life, fast or slow, that animated it; the food they cooked, the things they brought in, the clothes they wore, the bodies washed and unwashed, old age, and that tamped-down off-sweet hesitant odour of someone you’ve never thought of as old but who now, suddenly, seems to have caught age itself on their skin. I remember that moment with each of them: Eugène already smelled old despite being only in his fifties, Julia was far into it; as for Lucie, I remember first smelling old age on her, and being made unsteady by it and perturbed, in about 1987, after Collette’s death. I never smelled it on Collette or on my mother – there was no time. All those things have gone, and the people, but the smells are still there. It’s all still going on, in the secret lining of time.