by Anne H
My mother is sewing furiously. I wonder what she’s going to do with all those sheets. Maybe she’ll open a four-star hotel. I’d love to roll around in sheets like those. It would be a change from the rags they make us wear for karate, for the exalted brutality of a deadly virile game. I fall to the floor so often I’m covered with bruises.
Yesterday my father took me to my karate lesson by force, dragging me by the arm the whole way.
There’s been a leak in the cellar. My mother still pulls thread. People have been knocking at the door to her lodge for a good half-hour. My mother still does her hemstitching.
“Madame Almevida! Madame Almevida! The place is full of water! The cellar is flooded!”
“I’m coming! I’m coming!” my mother shouts, and she snaps a thread with her teeth before calling the plumber.
My God, this house is exhausting! People going in and out all the time. I don’t know where I can go to live the life of a well-behaved child: learning my lessons, doing my homework, examining the bruises all over my body, and cursing my father in peace.
ROSE-ALBA ALMEVIDA
I pleaded, wept, threatened, simpered, and fondled endlessly. To go dancing at a club. To wear my dress from Marie-Christine for the first time. My husband grumbled, yelled, mentioned once again how hard it is to earn money and how easy it is to spend. But when he saw me in my black velvet dress riddled with glittering stars, standing erect in the middle of the kitchen, at the very heart of this rat’s nest where the three of us live with no toilet or running water, he said, “Yes.” He could only say “Yes” because he didn’t suspect the price of the dress or its consequences for our vacation in Spain.
In exchange for all that hemstitching so skilfully pulled and knotted and already dearly paid for, Madame Guillou will look after Miguel until morning. I have the whole night ahead of me for dancing with my husband.
I love dancing, my whole body thrashing about rhythmically, my husband facing me, agitated and glorious. The two of us in the same wild and joyous whirl. Now and then an urge comes over me to try and dance close with someone else, to see if it would have the same effect as with Pedro Almevida, my husband.
As the night draws to an end, as the glimmers of light become ever softer and the cigarette smoke thicker, the slow number rocks the barely standing but warmly locked dancers like a population of the drowned swayed by a rising tide.
I’m drunk, more than from any drink, ready to bed any man who would hold me tightly against him while swords of fire pierced my body through and through. I close my eyes and I melt. My husband gives a hollow laugh and whispers in my ear to wait till we’re home to pass out completely. I open one eye a bit and, over Pedro Almevida’s shoulder, spy a broad grin without a face, nothing but the smile of an unknown man addressing me quite openly. My husband drags me outside as I cling to his arm and try to erase from my mind the unknown and beautiful strong white teeth that secretly devour me.
MIGUEL ALMEVIDA
It may be a rat hole but it’s mine. I’m attached to it. I’ve been here since my mother left the clinic with a little bundle, me, in her arms. Three days after my birth. That was ages ago. And now they’re chasing me out of my home so they can go to a club and live it up like teenagers. It’s not the first time, either. Yet whenever they do it I’m scandalized in the same way. My own parents. To ship me off to Madame Guillou’s on the pretext of inaugurating my mother’s new dress. Under the coloured spotlights and strobe lights. At their age it’s absolutely uncalled for.
Madame Guillou’s black horsehair sofa dominates her living room. It’s like an enormous sea creature glistening with water. Madame Guillou puts a hemstitched sheet on the sofa and gives me a red-and-white striped blanket that smells of mothballs. Horsehair is spiteful. It’s hard and prickly. Slippery. I fall, I land on the floor. Twice. Hard enough to make new bruises. It’s like everything else: I have to get used to it.
Morning. Foamy chocolate and hot croissants delight me more than I can say. I’m still overcome with happiness, the chocolate and croissants barely downed, in a state of deep contentment, when I realize that Madame Guillou’s wrinkled face is really very kind. I kiss her flabby cheek.
Before leaving I spend a long time gazing at an adorable doll in a pretty dress that’s sitting on a shelf. Behind my back Madame Guillou looks at me looking at the doll, her attention equal to mine, intense and indiscreet.
“That doll belonged to my daughter when she was a child. My daughter never liked dolls.”
As I make my way home, slowly, dragging my feet down each step, I have all the time in the world to think that if life were arranged better, it wouldn’t be wrong for Madame Guillou’s daughter not to like dolls or for me to love them.
PEDRO ALMEVIDA
I am the father, the husband, the paterfamilias. I have a thick black moustache that’s carefully waxed and tapered at both ends, a carnivore’s teeth, and a quick temper. Construction worker. Créteil, Nanterre, Villetanneuse, sometimes in the provinces too. My wife, Rose-Alba Almevida, is a concierge on rue Cochin in the fifth arrondissement. When I’ve made my fortune I’ll go back to my native land. Ten or fifteen years of exile, if I have to. I’ll exhaust my legal status as a foreigner in this foreign city. And go back home. I’ll have a spacious house made of whitewashed adobe. Inside, every modern convenience. A small field beside it, planted with vines, as straight as a die. The ideal would be to spend nothing here. Except for what’s necessary. Put everything aside. And go back to Spain. But now Rose-Alba Almevida, my wife, my spendthrift, my glory and my torment, lets my money slip away, fleet as mercury. It’s true that I attain seventh heaven with her, both day and night. That’s worth a little present now and then. As if I could afford it.
Miguel, Miguel, my son, look me in the eye once, only once, look me in the eye and I’ll give you the earth.
I bought him a soccer ball in exchange for the doll I broke. He wouldn’t take the ball and he hasn’t stopped crying.
Maybe I was wrong to have wanted a boy so badly when Rosita was pregnant. It didn’t bring me much luck. Before the ultrasound, I even told her quite seriously as she looked at me with outrage: “If it’s a girl I’ll throw her to the pigs.”
Her grave and quivering voice: “If you ever do such a thing, Pedro my husband, I’ll kill you.”
ROSE-ALBA ALMEVIDA
“Madame Almevida! Madame Almevida! The garbage stinks in the courtyard! It’s been three days now! Get rid of it, woman, and fast!”
Rosa, Rosie, Rosita, little feet, fleshy lips, round shoulders, the most beautiful woman to dance with, people are calling to you from the depths of hell, they want to see you on a dung heap, on a pile of rotting things, with your cool hands, your perfumed breath, your light heart. Use your dainty fingers to sew fine fabrics. Clandestine work, clandestine machinery, in aid of the vultures of the Sentier. Money! Money! I need money! I’m being robbed! Exploited like a blind negress. Money. Fast, before my husband checks the cash in the blue box under the bed. It could happen though that I’ll hang myself first, like a charm at the head of the bed, swaying and sticking out its tongue.
“Madame Almevida!”
They say “Madame” to my face. But under their breath they call me “Marquise.” I know they do. I know everything. Oh, if I could I’d empty their garbage onto their heads, but that’s not in my contract, and I must fulfill its every clause to the letter. Under threat of being fired. So I’ll dump the trash into those big containers, with orange or green lids, that you see on city sidewalks in the morning. But I’ll put them out around midnight so I can sleep peacefully during the fine hours of dawn, as I like to do, with the grey shadows holding the chirping of birds as they answer one another from tree to tree.
After Operation Trash I’ll take my son to bathe at the Bains des Patriarches, at Censier-Daubenton, where the towels are so big, the water so
hot, and the tubs so deep.
My husband is in Saint-Nazaire nailing boards and putting up house frames. I’ll be sleeping alone. I’ll take the boy into my bed. The two of us in the sweetness that follows a bath. Poor little angel, he cried so hard when his father broke the doll Madame Guillou had given him.
MIGUEL ALMEVIDA
He did it on purpose. He picked her up by the feet and threw her onto the kitchen floor. My poor doll broken into a hundred pieces. Shattered. An old-fashioned doll, very brittle and gorgeous. He was all red, like the flag you wave before a bull to excite him. He’s a bull himself, my father, breathing hard in his rage. He said again and again, as if he were cracked in the head: “No you don’t, little boy! No you don’t! Never!” And went out, slamming the door.
I cried so hard I could have drowned in my tears. A lake at my feet with pieces of doll floating in it, like crumbs on a plate for the birds. And now I’ve taken his place in the big bed, next to my mother. Too much happiness. Too much. Both of us, my mother and I, smelling good, warm and smooth in the same way after our bath at the Patriarches, close to one another now in the clean sheets. Twins in a single white shell. Yet I’m crying as if I were all alone in my folding bed on the floor of the kitchen, between the table and the buffet.
I finally fall asleep with my mother’s feet against mine, “To warm me with your little furnaces,” she said.
He came home sooner than expected and carried me, fast asleep, out of the big bed, like a sack of potatoes transported cautiously.
It wasn’t till the next morning, as I was getting ready to leave for school, that I started gathering up my things.
Once I was there I told my plan to my friend Karine, who always listens to me and sometimes lends me her Barbie doll. “I’m leaving. My mind’s made up. I’m not staying in the house with that stranger.”
Karine asked me what stranger I was talking about. I told her it was my father.
ROSE-ALBA ALMEVIDA
That child is going to drive me crazy. My most expensive blush! My finest tweezers! My thickest eyebrow pencil! He took it all away with him in the red suitcase. He did it, he did it, my son Miguel who ran away this morning. It’s now five p.m. And I, his mother, am going stark raving mad. My knees are quivering. My hands are freezing. Me, crazy, all by myself in the house. My husband in Saint-Nazaire. My son miles away. What bad luck! I’m suffering like a martyr in the olden days, in the convents of Spain. The police! Should I call the police? To hunt for my son like a criminal. My hair is too black, not yet dyed Venetian blond, I’ll pull it out, one hair at a time, as a sign of despair.
For a good fifteen minutes now someone has been pounding on the door of the lodge. Madame Guillou is calling to me as if she were mad.
I’m coming, I’m coming, Guillou, Guillou, you asked for it. I’m foaming with rage and if I open the door to you, you’ll see what it means to be a Spanish woman in la furia of living.
MIGUEL ALMEVIDA
I roamed the streets. All day long. Dragging the red suitcase. Changing arms. Setting it down on the sidewalk here and there, to rest. I was hungry. I was thirsty. I was afraid. I was cold. I cried a little. Night comes early in November. I felt the dampness of the night on my back. The city was at its worst. Malevolent and foul. The breath of the city on my neck. Hooligans breathing very close to me, their rotten eyes staring at me as I walked by. I decided to take refuge with Madame Guillou. Right away she took my hand and delivered me back to my mother. I didn’t put up a fight, I was limp and contrite. Crying my eyes out. My mother held me in her arms, tightly enough to break my bones. I wailed in a voice so piercing that Madame Guillou stood there petrified, stabbed by my howls as if by a hundred Andalusian daggers plunged into her widow’s heart.
Another night without my father. An entire night in my mother’s bed. Myself all icy up against her, she blazing hot and musky after all the emotions I’d subjected her to while I was a runaway.
At dawn, my mother, who usually doesn’t get up till noon, started shaking me the way she shakes her bedside rug from the kitchen window once a month, in a cloud of dust, fine grey incense swirling all the way up to the sixth floor. I thought I’d die from that shaking.
She said again: “No, no, I won’t tell your father, I promised, but you do it again and I’ll make mincemeat out of you.”
I left for school without breakfast, my whole body trembling.
PEDRO ALMEVIDA
I am the husband, the father, the master of the house. I put food on the table for my family. With my pay in my pocket, I go home. Here I am in the train. Ten days in Saint-Nazaire, hammering and nailing in the November wind and rain. I could take my wife right on the doorstep, the minute I arrive, I want her so badly. But first I want to make myself handsome, blazingly handsome, from head to toe. I’ll put up with the filthy toilets at the train station for the time that it takes to shave and shower. I’ll put on a clean shirt and the shiny shoes that go with it. I’ll show up at the door of my house like a knight home from battle.
With every trace of sweat and toil erased, I go home. I close my eyes and already my arms are filled with her, my beauty, Rosa, Rosie, Rosita Almevida, my wife.
ROSE-ALBA ALMEVIDA
I’ll have a surprise for him. I’ll dye my hair. After a ten-day absence he’ll have a surprise. Myself, transformed. Into a Venetian blonde. Claudia Schiffer, but better. More flesh on the bones. A golden splendour emerging from the shadows like a blinding sun too long held captive.
The hairdresser studies me, looks me up and down. For him I don’t exist. I’m just a head. No body or soul, just a head at the tip of a lance for him to take and transform to his liking.
He talks as if he were dreaming out loud. He appears to see what he’s saying, clearly before him. It’s obvious that I inspire him. “I’ll dye your hair. I’ll cut your hair. I’ll transform you drastically. Let me do it, you’re too dark, you have the beginnings of a moustache. I’ll release you from the darkness. Leave, leave your decapitated head in my hands. I’ll make it into a resplendent idol.”
What he says, he does. I am delivered into his hands like a dead animal that’s turned over and over, washed and embalmed. Once the operation is over, there appears in the mirror before me a golden sparkling creature who claims to be me. I behave myself and dare not contradict her. Absorbed in my infinite contemplation.
“That’s 600 francs,” says the hairdresser.
I haggle with him. By way of payment I offer him the long hair he’s cut off. He studies the heavy sheaf of black hair that has fallen to the floor. Gathers it up, holds it in his hands, hefts it, sniffs it. He maintains that it’s Asian hair, straight and coarse, and that it’s worthless next to a fine and silky Scandinavian mane. I offer to leave a deposit and come back tomorrow with the rest. The hairdresser smiles, shakes his head, says again softly, tenderly almost, like a cooing pigeon: “Cash, cash, cash, my lovely.”
I offer him my gold wedding ring and take back the mass of my hair and cram it into my shopping bag. He accepts my ring after he’s felt its weight and clinked it on the counter.
I go home, a tiny white line like an old scar on the fourth finger of my left hand.
MIGUEL ALMEVIDA
What I saw, what I heard between my father and my mother was so frightening, I’ll never be able to speak it without dying a second time. The first time, I was hiding under the kitchen table, my jacket over my face, my fists over my ears. Waiting for catastrophe. There won’t be a second time, I swear. I couldn’t bear it. Yet images, words swirl around me still while I sleep.
“Get out, you aren’t my wife any more. I don’t recognize you.”
A small blond head rises and bristles. “I’m someone else, blond and desirable, a genuine star. Take me and you’ll see how beautiful I am.”
“What have you done with the long black hair that I lo
ved?”
“Here, take it. It’s yours.”
She opens her shopping bag and pitches a black mop at his head; he flings it to the floor and stomps on it.
My heart is beating hard enough to crack my ribs. I implore the angels of the night. To come and pull a crimson curtain over the high drama of family scenes. So I can curl up between the sheets.
A little tune, light and persistent, slowly moves away with the dream that’s nearly over.
“The ring, the ring you gave me, Pedro my husband, I’ve lost it, I lost it on my way to the market.”
Their voices, unrecognizable, singsongy, die somewhere inside me.
PEDRO ALMEVIDA
She’s lying. I’m sure that she’s lying. I’ll rub her nose in her lie. Oh, she’ll admit the truth in the end. There is female deception beneath it. Sly dishonour to a man. It’s not clean. It’s diabolical like the Trinity, the Incarnation, and everything else we don’t understand. One day it will be crystal clear. Everyone crowded into the Valley of Jehoshaphat. The Last Judgment. The mysteries revealed. It’s then that I’ll know for certain what my wife did with the gold ring given to her by me and blessed by a priest in a church in Seville on May 28th, 1977.
I take her to the market at the hour when they hose down the square. She and I bend over, looking down at the ground. Among the puddles, the gleaming asphalt, lettuce cores, gutted oranges, apple peels, overripe pears, all rotten things, swept away by the gushing water. Gold ring, little wedding ring, are you here? We might as well be trying to find a needle in a haystack. Rose-Alba Almevida cries and says that it’s pointless to look. She asks me to forgive her. For nothing, she says. To do as I want, she maintains. I’ll kill her one day.
She is wearing tight black satin trousers and a bright orange shirt with puffed sleeves. With her makeup on, something like shiny little beads drop onto her cheeks from her eyelids. A marvel. I won’t tell her that her legs are too short. I feel like being kind to her again.
She takes me to Madame Guillou’s. Madame Guillou’s bathroom. Tile on the walls and floor. Gleaming, blue and white. I’m here to fix the leaking radiator. Rose-Alba Almevida, my wife and my torment, feasts her eyes on the splendour of Madame Guillou’s bathroom. I touch her arm to wrench her from her daze. Tears fill her eyes and her lips quiver like a child trying not to cry. When she’s back in the lodge she says again and again: “It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair.”
