by Anne H
Neighbouring gardens, matching hydrangeas, identical houses arranged along a single line, tiny reference points for the great trains that travel across Saint-Pierre-des-Corps day and night. I am haunted by the trains of Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, their broad, fierce music that rends the air like long knives, their absolute energy, hurled from end to end of the living earth, which is furrowed as a field is furrowed by the plough. Under such a din I will see, no longer just hear, what is going on beneath the frozen memory, as if there were no past or present, not even a possible future, once it has been given over to forgotten words and gestures, while lost odours come along in fresh bunches. And I shall never again be free to exist on the surface of myself, like someone standing on a narrow balcony outside his house, with all the doors behind him closed like prison gates.
And if my mother’s warmth were to waken, the gentle warmth of her tender, sweet, warm breast where I rest my cheek in dreams, my entire life would be returned to me at a stroke.
But now a series of small and unimportant facts swirls before my eyes like a swarm of gnats.
The odour of pale wood-shavings, eaten away by emanations of glue and varnish, envelops me from head to toe. My father bends over me. Examines me attentively.
“This child certainly doesn’t look like the Other. Too dark. Too small.”
My mother repeats, echoing him:
“Dear God, how dark he is! Dear God, how small he is! What a shame!”
Between her breasts, the medal worn smooth by the gentle rubbing of my mother’s flesh. The Other, the First-born, lately dead, rests there in his unchanging innocence for an eternity of adoration and grief.
His blue eyes. His blond hair. First in his class. First at home. His unchanging qualities of an absolute First. The dead little child I replace. The Other. The daunting example. I may as well resign myself to not existing.
The sea has frozen over all that. God’s pity sleeps at the very bottom, in a cold shadow.
I shave at the sink in my kitchen on Rue Bonaparte. A drop of blood stands out on my cheek. No one can know about the poor quality of my blood. First of all, it’s perfectly normal blood. Rh positive. Like most inhabitants of the planet. Who can possibly know that one day when I was a child my vermilion blood was changed? Not all at once, but through a series of small bloodlettings. Not that it became blue or green or violet or any other surprising colour; it simply changed into other blood, natural-looking, unobjectionable, irreproachable at first sight, but in reality its very essence is corrupt. My own mediocrity slips through test tubes like some elusive virus. No bitter drama or thundering tragedy when this strange transfusion began. Trivialities at the origin of the world. Infantile behaviour. All traces gone, no sign of the frozen tears of my childhood. And if Delphine disturbs me, it is certainly because of those very tears, buried beneath the sea.
Death from natural causes, Dr. Jacquet will say. She will be repatriated to Canada. Don’t worry about the baggage. The embassy will take care of everything.
A SUIT OF LIGHT
I
ROSE-ALBA ALMEVIDA
It’s me that you see through the wide-open window of my lodge. On the street side. Me, leaning out the window for a breath of air. My head, my hair, my beloved face, my round shoulders, my heavy bosom, my pink satin dressing gown — all the most beautiful things that I possess, I show off through the window. I display the top part of myself, fully clothed, for the people walking by. Starting at noon, when I get up, and if the day is fine. As for the bottom part, it’s still me, body and soul in satin, my well-rounded rump, my short legs, and my narrow feet. O the little mules that dangle from the tips of my toes, swaying like two flying birds. All of it carefully sheltered, hidden in the shadow of the kitchen behind me. I seem to be looking outside but, in reality, I am caring for my own person, in secret. I think about myself all the time. And about money. The money I need to become more and more myself, without blemish from top to bottom, bottom to top, all of me exposed to the bright sun of fame. My only son, Miguel, is with me, in the same unbearable dazzle of light. A real little torero in his suit of light. Whether he’s naked or dressed my son shines and I, his mother, shine along with him. Olé! Olé! I hear the cries of the frenzied crowd. It’s my son they acclaim. I inhale the blazing dust of the bullring. The furious gallop of the dying beast goes past my face. The smell of blood and death pursues me all the way to the foreign city where I am a concierge, at 102 rue Cochin in the fifth arrondissement of Paris, France.
MADAME GUILLOU
Her name is Rose-Alba Almevida and she is taking the air at her window. Now, lightly, she moves her elbows on the window ledge. Tiny grains of dry black dust cling to her skin. She spits on her fingers and carefully cleans her elbows. She looks abstractedly onto the street. She sees her son who is drawing on the sidewalk with coloured chalk. This reassures her and allows her to return immediately to the very depths of herself, to the place where everything is dream and splendour. She’s well aware that everything is happening in her head, but nothing in the world can stop her from daydreaming as she pleases, until a gnawing hatred for the life given to her sweeps over her like an equinoctial tide.
ROSE-ALBA ALMEVIDA
Rosa, Rosie, Rosita, Spanish rose, fiery and pungent, Rose-Alba Almevida, impulsive and supreme: I rhyme off the forms of your name, a superb litany. Let not a hair on your head move, nor your breath under your satin robe, let nothing reveal the soul you hide.
I plunge into silent furious longings for four-star hotels, for expensive cars with liveried chauffeurs, for luminous makeup, for unctuous creams, for indelible mascara, for vintage wines, for furs, especially for furs, red or silver fox, spotted panther, soft sable, so that I will be forever changed into a wild beast, fierce and splendid, made for love and consecration. These dreams come when I am mad on the inside and appear distracted on the outside.
MADAME GUILLOU
Miguel Almevida. Seven years old. Huge eyes. White transparent skin that, when his clothing allows, reveals a tangle of blue veins. White shirt. Patent-leather shoes. Thin as a matchstick. Too delicate no doubt for the affronts of life.
MIGUEL ALMEVIDA
The sidewalk, grey as boredom. My coloured chalks go back and forth across the grey of boredom. Red, green, blue, yellow, white, violet. I place colour on the stagnant boredom of the sidewalk. The chalk screeches in my fingers, it crumbles and is crushed. I lay down straight lines. I draw the plans for my future house. Sick and tired of the crowded little lodge, of the toilet in the yard, of the faucet on the landing. French people, third-rate like all of them, go back and forth along my sidewalk. Shamelessly, their hurried steps erase my lines and colours. My mother would say that I ought to bite their toes very hard to punish them. That would teach them to respect other people’s work. It’s what she thinks when she has to scrub the staircase buried under layers of wax and dirty, muddy footprints that come from who knows where and sabotage her work step by step.
I have to pass the chalk over every half-obliterated line, brighten every colour that’s been blurred, and then my drawing will be clear and precise and visible from one end of the street to the other. Here is my house, I dream it up as I go. A good twenty rooms, lined up along a corridor that’s broad and deep as an avenue at the Place de l’Étoile. Small salon, medium salon, grand salon, small kitchen, medium kitchen, big kitchen, small dining room, medium dining room, big dining room, huge W.C., a second huge W.C., a third huge W.C., an immense bathroom, a very immense bathroom, an endless games room, and a very deep, wide, high, magnificent bedroom. Me, standing in the very middle of that wide, high, deep, magnificent bedroom. I am waiting for my husband and I proclaim it very loudly. Arms crossed, standing in the middle of the matrimonial chamber, I wait for him to arrive. My mother, who looks like an ancient mummy, sticks her head out of her wrappings and very angrily orders me to repeat that remark.
&nb
sp; “I’m waiting for my husband!”
She yells so loudly the whole street can surely hear her: “You’re sick in the head!” And she pulls the window shut.
My father is back and there are things going on between my mother and him behind the closed window, its drawn curtain. It’s always that way as soon as the window or the door closes on them. I’ve been driven away, excluded, kicked out, and the two of them are inside whispering, arguing, laughing very loudly, and then moaning as if they were sick, my mother in particular, as if she’s about to give birth. The silence that follows is like the end of the world. I feel like crying right there, all by myself, all dirty, covered from head to toe with the different colours of chalk, standing on the sidewalk, my feet planted in the middle of an imaginary bedroom. I must wash myself. To erase the sidewalk dust from my clothes and the traces of chalk from all over me. O my beautiful patent-leather shoes, what a disaster! They resemble my mother, they are ruined like her behind her window, and the water that she’ll have to fetch in a bucket from the landing, her manner casual, her head high, and her dressing gown all wrinkled. In the middle of the day. A beautiful Sunday when my father looks dashing and has nothing to do. I know very well what they talk about before they collapse into moaning and the great deathly silence that follows. “Money! Money!” demands my mother. My father grunts and claims that she spends faster than he earns. Insults on both sides. Sometimes a few loud slaps on my mother’s lovely behind. The cascade of her laughter.
I wait. I pace the sidewalk. I cool my heels. I wear out my wonderful shoes. I wait for the window to open again. One day I’ll go away for good.
Three p.m. The window clatters open. The outside air rushes inside again. I follow the air into the house and I say, “I’m hungry.” My father shuts the window. I have to sit at the table, my hands daubed with dust and chalk. There’s not a drop of water in the house.
My mother doesn’t yell at me to wash my hands. She’s miles away, farther than ever, and all languid as a result. She has put on a blue dress and bracelets that clink on both arms. My father is puffing away on a Gauloise. His pride in smoking so powerfully and so deeply is equalled only by his dazzling smile between two puffs.
I eat surrounded by his smoke, I drink surrounded by his smoke, I breathe the smoke from after love. My dirty hands are in the shadow of the smoke. The silence around me is so great I can hear the smoke breathing its little mouse breath onto my face. I want to cry.
All at once the half-cold meal, the absence of conversation around the table, their stunned looks, and my own urge to cry — all were finished. Through the window barely open again, people could see that my father wasn’t wearing a shirt. All the smoke went outside, swept away the personal stories of us, the Almevidas, evaporated in blue curls, this Sunday, September 25th.
My father’s shirt is draped over the back of a chair, white as the Immaculate Conception in the churches, starched as the priest’s surplice on Corpus Christi. A ray of sunlight has slipped under the chair. My father’s pointed shiny shoes become illuminated beacons.
PEDRO ALMEVIDA
In the time it takes Rosa to get ready, to put on all her frills and makeup, I’ll have walked around the block two or three times. My son’s hand in mine, my shiny shoes in front of me. The whiteness of my shirt matches that of my son’s. Washed and changed at my insistence, now he is trotting along at my side. He insisted on wearing a mauve T-shirt with a green Mickey Mouse, but I was adamant and wouldn’t yield. A man has to do what’s right. Whiteness and polish on Sunday: that’s as it should be. And memories of the corrida pop into my mind and armfuls of jasmine follow after.
If only I knew why my son’s hand slips so quickly from my rough construction-worker’s grip. The hand is too coarse and virile no doubt for a child who still wavers between girl and boy, whose mother dotes on him five days out of seven. In this foreign city the honour of Spain is assured by me, Pedro Almevida. My son Miguel shares that honour with me, he is bound to me, hand in hand, white shirt against white shirt, pointed shiny shoes — a double pair — walking at a good clip down boulevard Saint-Germain between four and five p.m. on this fine Sunday in September. Anticipation and impatience growing as I watch for the gorgeous embodiment of the fiesta herself, loosed upon the grey city, to appear at the corner of the street.
MIGUEL ALMEVIDA
Here she is! Here she is! She’s wearing a miniskirt. You can see her big knees and, higher up, her fat thighs. The skirt stops there. A kind of little shirt cut from the same gold as her dress. I don’t believe my father can love. He’s too amazed to say a word. As for me, I get used to the idea of a tiny dress made of gold, an abbreviated sun that makes way for my mother’s knees and thighs, gleaming and shining in their own way the length of the street.
My father says tonelessly: “We’re going back to the house.”
We followed my father home. But it was obvious that my mother thought the walk was too short when she’d taken so much trouble to get all dolled up. Her suppressed anger as great as my father’s. Both pretended to walk along the sidewalk normally, their heads in the air as if they were trying to grab and harness the wrath of the storm clouds overhead, should the need arise.
They’ve quarrelled. Traded insults. Fought. Roaring like bulls in the ring. Rolling on the floor from one end of the tiny kitchen to the other. Breathing their dying breath. On the verge of a blackout or a fatal cramp.
After they had barely recovered, they took me out of the broom closet where they’d put me. They took stock of the battle’s final toll. For my mother, a ruined dress, twisted bracelets, bruised arms and legs, a black eye. For my father, claw marks and tooth marks all over, and a broken rib. My mother weeps for her dress and her eye. My father promises to buy her another dress and a slice of steak for her eye. It’s easy to see that he suffers a thousand deaths with every breath. My mother covers his chest with kisses, to glue the rib back together, she says. It’s obvious that she is sincere and remorseful.
ROSE-ALBA ALMEVIDA
I’ll buy the dress myself from a chic boutique on rue de Sèvres. The most beautiful and most expensive. The longest, too. He’ll have nothing to object to as far as the length is concerned. As for the rest, he’ll be dazzled. Except for the price, maybe. I’ll think of something. That will teach him. I’ll be as elegant as Diana was with Dodi Fayed, cruising on a yacht. My husband’s head is sure to turn in the presence of such grace and beauty. To make love with him right then — as usual, when it strikes his fancy — I’ll take off my new dress and carefully hang it up, safe from the tumults of love.
MIGUEL ALMEVIDA
Home from school earlier than usual and, silent as the air we breathe, saw everything without her seeing me. My mother took the vacation money. She closed the blue box and put it back with the dust bunnies under her bed. She left to pursue her own schemes and I stayed all alone in the deserted house with mine.
I dress and apply makeup carefully, as my mother always does before she steps outside. I take the dress that was ruined in the brawl and tossed in a heap behind a chair and slip it over my head as if it were a golden chasuble. Tubes and jars, brushes of all kinds, stiletto heels, and black tights make me look like some strange and slovenly girl. I have just enough time to rejoice at my weird image in the pitted mirror that hangs on the bedroom door when suddenly my mother is back, carrying a big box marked “Marie-Christine.”
You can only be crazy about my mother’s new dress. No queen, no movie star has anything like it. Velvet and sequins. No night riddled with stars is as black and glittering. Donkeyskin had better behave. My mother turns and spins at the mirror. I wait for her to see me in all my finery and marvel at me as I marvel at her. The two of us ecstatic at ourselves and at our doubles. Accomplices and sweethearts.
At last! She’s seen me!
“Christ almighty! Am I dreaming? What if your father saw you!�
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With no consideration for the golden dress or the black tights I put on my head to suggest a woman’s long braids, she smacked my rear, and my high-heeled shoes fell off. She didn’t hit too hard and I didn’t cry. What’s most important is that I still have hope in my heart that one day my mother will accept me as I am, outrageously made up, with purple nails, and long hair hanging down.
By sheer coincidence, my father decides that very night that I have to take karate lessons at the local school. One thing is certain, both my mother and I have secrets that must be kept from my father at all costs.
ROSE-ALBA ALMEVIDA
I hemstitch. All day long I hemstitch. The lady on the first floor complains about the heat. I hemstitch. The gentleman on the sixth floor is shivering. I hemstitch. Heat and shivers. They have their problems. I have mine. I won’t touch the heat. I have hemstitching to do. I have no time to attend to the heating. The lady on the first floor is menopausal, the gentleman on the sixth is a nudist. What do they expect from me? I have hemstitching to do for Madame Guillou on the fourth floor. Piles of sheets and pillowcases, thread pulled tight and knotted. Madame Guillou, who’s very old-fashioned, is preparing a traditional wedding for her daughter. She’ll have her trousseau, that overripe girl who is finally being married off. I hemstitch from morning till night. I stop dead and stow it all under the bed when my husband comes home in the evening. It’s important that he not catch me sewing. I fear his questions. If he knew why I need money so badly he’d kill me. The blue box for our vacations under the bed — empty. He couldn’t bear that and I would be dead in no time. Be brave, poor little me, this is just a difficult moment to get through. Day after day till the whole trousseau is ready. Afterwards I’ll rest and I’ll dye my hair Venetian blonde. My mind is made up.
MIGUEL ALMEVIDA
