by Anne H
No echo lingers in the deserted auditorium. It’s all over. Backstage, calm is gradually restored.
He is quiet, rested, after the shower water has gushed over his exhausted body. It seems to me that he’s thinner. What had to happen is happening right now. Jean-Ephrem de la Tour invites me to his place. With my father at home and my mother keeping him company, I’m as free as the dark air of the nights, where I so love being just now.
ROSE-ALBA ALMEVIDA
After the festivities at the Paradis Perdu there is the conjugal vigil in the lodge on rue Cochin. Bare-chested, Pedro Almevida, my husband, is lifting weights. He won’t fight with me until his biceps are just right.
He puts his shirt back on and sits astride a chair, facing me. He lists his grievances in a monotonous voice. He leaves nothing out and I get bored listening to him, I’m like an accused person waiting to hear the expected sentence. What’s different now is that I don’t love him any more and he doesn’t love me. The Paradis Perdu has come between us, like a continent of perverse wonders where I am happy and where he will never set foot.
“My wife is a thief!”
And he mentions the vacation money that I took to buy myself a dress from Marie-Christine a thousand years ago.
“My wife is a bad mother!”
And he talks about Miguel who is turning out badly and who sells roses at the music hall.
“My wife is a slut!”
And he keeps harping on about my mane of hair that was sacrificed to offend him.
“My wife is a whore!”
And he says that he knows all about it, about the promenade gallery and the Paradis Perdu.
“You aren’t my wife any more and I’m not your husband.”
And he takes me so forcibly that I bleed like I did the first time.
JEAN-EPHREM DE LA TOUR
It’s engraved in Gothic letters on my performer’s card. It’s written in capital letters on the program of the Paradis Perdu. Jean-Ephrem de la Tour, star dancer. It would be unwise for anyone to try to trace all the names and surnames that have been lost along the way, as far back as the early records of the children’s aid department.
Miguel Almevida. Little brother, oh, little brother of the poor. Not yet born. Not puny. Slim in the extreme. With great empty eyes and curls falling onto his forehead.
He’s at my place. Advancing cautiously, leaving trails behind him on the thick carpet, like someone strolling along the soft sand of a beach.
Little by little he sees everything. His eyes veined with yellow and green fill with the strangeness of the place. Small gilt chairs, walls hung with crimson velvet, shelves of leather-bound books, concert grand piano, deep sofas, Chinese screen, huge mirrors waiting only for the slightest smile, the most secret tear in the shadow of eyelashes.
He thinks it surpasses the Paradis Perdu itself in magnificence. He is no longer moving at all. He’s like an acrobat stopped short on his wire, in great danger of death. He looks at the brass barre on the wall, the pouffes on the floor, the subdued lamplight, the low tables covered with strange objects of gold and silver.
I extend the tour a little farther. I take him to see the first bedroom, the whirlpool bath that fills it completely, the second bedroom with the huge bed sitting on a platform, the white muslin canopy that falls like a bridal veil.
He listens and looks. He sits on the floor as if he’d fallen there. Frozen in place, knees pulled up to his chin, arms hugging his knees. The look in his eyes is that of a freshly killed hare.
Knowing perfectly well that he’s had more than enough, I continue nonetheless to show him around my loft.
“Take a good look, Little Beast, look very closely at this wonderful loft that is mine, learn to call it by that strange name you’ve never heard before. Repeat it after me: loft, loft, loft. It’s awesome, as you might say. You can see Paris by night through the big windows streaming with rain. Here, come closer. Take a good look. Lean out a little. It’s no small matter, the seventh floor. Careful, don’t get dizzy. It’s shiny and shimmery down there on the pavement, from the rain. All those cars are heading somewhere, that’s certain, each person with an idea in his head, an appointment, verifiable or fictitious, wipers beating against the windshield like a heart through tears. Watch out, you’re liable to skid behind the Sacré-Coeur that stands there like a huge white cake. Twisted cars. Ambulances, police and firemen, screaming sirens. Soon we’ll have to take stock of the night that is ending and decide between the dead and the living, while dawn falls over the city like the silver drizzle of rain.”
I offer him champagne. In a barely audible voice, he asks for a Coke.
I tell him that his mother is very beautiful but that it won’t last. “Once she’s old, you’ll have to throw her away and stop clinging to her like a sickly child.” I laugh so hard I can barely hear what he says.
He protests with all his might, though he’s already doubting the truth of his own words. “My mother will always be beautiful, she’ll never be old, she’ll always be beautiful. And as for me, I don’t cling to anything or anybody.” He’s on his feet and looks like a lost child in a train station. He says that he wants to go.
“All right, Little Beast, go. It’s raining and you’ll get soaked. It’s your choice if you want a scolding from your mother before daybreak.”
His quick steps in the direction of the door. A little farther and he’ll be outside.
I hold him back. Show him the full-length portrait painted by a perverse artist. “Take a good look at that portrait. It’s me, with my feathers unfolded, nailed to the wall by my wings, like an owl on the door of a barn. Take a good look at my face at the moment of my ruin. It’s the face I show sometimes to anyone who can bear it. Take advantage of it. My moment of truth won’t return for a long time.”
Suddenly he throws himself at me like a furious cat. He pounds my chest with punches that reverberate in my ribs. I smell his scent, the odour of a frightened and furious beast. I free myself and breathe deeply. My fatigue is immeasurable. I tell him to leave. He gets his breath back and delivers a sentence that doesn’t seem to belong to him.
“I don’t want you to be alive, or dead either. I would like you to not exist.”
Miguel Almevida walks away down the deserted street, in the rain. No doubt he’s afraid of the darkness and the emptiness around him, above all afraid of me. But until the end of the world he won’t be able to stop himself from doing what he has to do in order to be afraid.
MIGUEL ALMEVIDA
I run in the rain. My shoes are full of water. My hair drips onto my neck. Loft, loft, loft — a strange word in my mouth, like a soft caramel that’s been chewed and chewed again. Just one word, one small word that I’ve learned tonight and that means everything: the gilt chairs, the velvet walls. Jean-Ephrem de la Tour in his loft, like a Negro king in his castle all red and black. His noxious heart rendered visible on his entire ravaged body. The painter who did that is cursed, that’s certain.
I run away. I go home, all alone in the exhausting night. I live in a rat hole, according to my mother. I sleep on a folding bed, right on the floor. I know the linoleum by heart, seeing it from so close, with its green leaves, its pink flowers, its worn spots, and its slightest cracks. But before I sleep I must appear before my parents.
Now the day is coming from every part of the city at once, grey and hazy. It pierces me more than the night itself, it wraps me in anguish from head to toe.
ROSE-ALBA ALMEVIDA
The garbage fire in the cellar. The firemen who arrive as I throw the first bucket of water onto the flames of the foul-smelling mound. A rat, two rats break away from it. I wish I could die. To die from having let the garbage accumulate, to die from not being allowed to let it pile up without being immediately punished by fire like a witch at the stake. To die of disgust, quite simp
ly. It’s as good as cancer or a heart that gives out. Killing me. My white hands, my scented body. I couldn’t care less about the filth that this building secretes every day, like stinking crap.
In chorus, tenants and owners squawk at my door. “Madame Almevida! Madame Almevida! There’s a fire! Do something!”
I’d like to throw the lot of them into a common grave to rot in silence, in the darkness of the earth, until their bones are stripped clean.
All day I have time only to sew, hunched over my machine which fills the house with its deafening racket. Driving me crazy. I work for thieves who exploit seamstresses working from home. It might last and then again it might not. One day I’ll denounce them. For the time being, I need the money. I want a fur coat and I’ll have it. I’ll wear it to the Paradis Perdu. That’s where I’m happiest, among creatures from a dream, adorned to the hilt, flung into the furnace alive, to the sound of thunderous music.
The promenade delights me more than anything else in the world. Its friendly darkness, its animal warmth against my hip, its delightful crowd of mature and knowledgeable men lying in wait in the shadows.
“Madame Almevida! Madame Almevida! You’re dreaming! For heaven’s sake wake up! The place is full of smoke. I’m suffocating. My eyes are burning. Do something!”
“Fire’s under control. The firemen are sure. Go home.”
Pedro Almevida, my husband, gently shoos them out of the lodge, shoves them almost tenderly, leads them to the stairs in the dark, flicks the switch. Five a.m. in November. They aren’t a pretty sight in the bright light, the tenants and owners together. You old pile of brightly coloured bathrobes, I don’t like you, I never have and I never will. I’ll go to the Paradis Perdu and take a break from all of you and from life in general.
At last we’re alone. I take off my pink satin dressing gown. Before I get into bed, I accuse my husband of throwing his cigarette onto the garbage in the cellar. He shrugs, says I’m crazy. I think he’s laughing in my face. I look for my son. I find him asleep, as usual, on his little camp bed between the buffet and the table. I’ll never know when he came home. Too much bedlam tonight to know what’s really going on in my house.
MIGUEL ALMEVIDA
Quiet nights in the fifth arrondissement. My father left the house right after he tried to strangle my mother. She was probably screaming too loudly before she blacked out, and he was afraid of annoying the owners and tenants, who would agree to call the police.
He lit a cigarette and left, smoking — for Spain, he said. Taking none of the necessary things, no jacket, no pants, no razor, no shirt, no clean underwear, no baggage, nothing, hands in his pockets, cigarette stuck in his mouth, red-faced though, like someone who’s not in his normal state. His heart was beating so hard you could hear it in the kitchen until he left through the front door.
Sitting on the floor, half-choked, my mother came back to life, with the marks of my father’s fingers around her neck.
“All he had to do was not look under the bed where I hide my things. All he had to do was not see my fur coat in its golden cardboard box. But who could have told him about Monsieur Athanase?” my mother finally managed to say, between two fits of choking.
The coat lies on the floor, sprawled like a great dead animal.
Rose-Alba Almevida, half-undressed and torn apart and trembling, drags herself over to the coat, strokes it gently as if she were petting a cat. “This coat cost me a lot.” Then come some incoherent words interrupted by sobs, about the promenade gallery and the encounters that take place. “He told me I was as lovely as a picture and he took me to the furrier right after we left the four-star hôtel de passe on the quay.”
Something terrible went on inside my father’s head, as if the red cape that’s waved before a bull had been waved right in front of my father’s narrow brain, as if thin banderillas had been planted in his heart, and my father came very close to murdering my mother, the short breath of murder up against my father’s furious face. He couldn’t tolerate that, the thought of murder. He went away, taking nothing. Maybe he’s hoping to find what he wants back in Spain — their old life, intact and pure, my mother with her long black hair, smiling at him. Me, still unborn. Her, innocent of me and of him. Content to wear her bridal crown perfectly straight on her raven hair arranged in an extravagant chignon. Her long veil falling to the floor in cascades of transparent white. If only the blond prostitute who’s taken my mother’s place on rue Cochin in Paris would disappear forever. What my father couldn’t do I’ll do myself one day. The murder of Rose-Alba Almevida will take place. I, the son, cover my face with my hands and weep. Dishonour is upon our house, posted at the entrance like a quarantine notice. Already contaminated by dishonour here in my rat’s hole, I love my mother more than anything in the world. I forgive her for everything.
ROSE-ALBA ALMEVIDA
The marks on my throat are changing colour, from red to violet, from violet to blue, from blue to a dirty yellowish green. I wrap a silk scarf around my neck. I hide my wound and my fury behind the silk that was given to me by the man from the promenade gallery. I’m hibernating in my lodge. I’ll stay there as long as that cruel necklace, a gift from Pedro Almevida, my husband, stays around my neck.
My son looks at me with eyes filled with alarm. He puts ice cubes in a transparent plastic bag around my neck. He speaks softly so as not to rouse the last scene, still alive, lurking in the four corners of the darkened kitchen. I can’t tolerate any light. Or the lodge, open to everyone. I’ve pulled the curtain over the glass door that opens onto the landing. A few calls for help come to me, I’m lethargic, they fall around my bed like blunt darts.
“Stairs not done for days, polish, polish, I’m expecting a delivery, stairs caked with dirt, Lafayette, Lafayette, delivery, delivery, urgent, urgent . . .”
I hear distinctly the voice of the blond student with the rough moustache who shouts: “Marquise, come out! We want you on the stairs lively and affable, as usual!” He repeats: “On the stairs! The stairs, Marquise!” His loud laugh rings out from the bottom of the stairwell to the top.
I plug my ears, I close my eyes, I imagine diamonds and gold, fine pearls and blue sapphires to hide my wound, heavy necklaces that sparkle around my neck like a hundred flaming suns when I open my lynx coat partway. And I fall asleep. Sleep and dreams intermingled. My son takes advantage of my sleep to fly away to the Paradis Perdu. I shall join him there when I’m healed.
Money has no odour, they say. But I can smell it as soon as it’s inside the house, in the blue box under the bed, its odour as pungent as strong Spanish tobacco, reassuring and comforting. And now I can sense the absence of money, it’s like breathing emptiness, a trough in the air that I fall into. Vertigo. My husband’s pay has disappeared along with him. Alone with my son. My sewing machine takes off like a galloping horse. “It will kill you, my girl,” my mother would say. “The entire marriage bed is yours, my darling,” my father would say, “stretch out there full length, full width, like a cat in the sun.” Thus encouraged by my father, I fall asleep so calmly that the entire earth, with its gnashing, its trials and tribulations and its terrors, turns against my ear and I can’t hear it breathing its warm oppressive breath. The crazy planet that I live on. The blessed promenade where I collapse.
JEAN-EPHREM DE LA TOUR
“Your mother’s a whore, Little Beast, your mother’s a whore. It was to be expected. I know everything. Monsieur Athanase told me everything. There’s no reason to lose your head and drop me like an old sock. You son of a whore, you’re never here when I need you. But here you are at last with your arms full of roses, your idiotic eyes showing just enough fear to please me. Where were you yesterday? And the day before? Do you mean to tell me you were taking care of Rose-Alba Almevida, as if she were a martyr under the absent gaze of God? She’ll get over the conjugal marks on her magnificent neck, the neck of a Roman
matron. And did I have to be on my own twice, without you, facing a ferocious audience on gala evenings? I didn’t lift my leg high enough, got a cramp in my right thigh, lost the beat. Tremendous panic all through my body. Beak open, wings folded. Flap, flap, flap. Without you in the front row I break down. I go to pieces. I melt under the lights like a candle on an altar. Little Beast, I like to see you, to be seen by you, when I dance. I want you there, paying attention, holding on to your seat, marvelling at me, endlessly. Nothing else exists, including your mother. I like you to torment yourself over me.”
MIGUEL ALMEVIDA
He insulted my mother. He called her the most terrible name that you can possibly call a woman.
I shouted: “And what about you? What about you? Did you never have a mother?”
“Never!” he replied, his great laugh revealing his white teeth, stretching his cheeks to his ears. “Never! Never!” he said again forcefully.
It calmed me a little to know that he’s never known a mother and it helped me understand the insult that’s always on the tip of his tongue, all ready to say, as soon as a conversation turns to mothers in general. And then, very quickly, my indignation slipped through my fingers like sand and I knew that he had good reason to complain about me.
He speaks more and more softly, at the very edge of dream and waking. About shortened breath, about gleaming black skin gone dull all at once, about shame and disaster, about my unforgivable absence.
I think that in his unhappiness, he luxuriates in sad words in order to dazzle me with sadness and to make me a prisoner of my bedazzlement like a blind owl flung into the light.
Is it possible that one day I’ll be totally blind and a prisoner of Jean-Ephrem de la Tour? For the time being, I just have to promise that I’ll always be there when he does his act.
I draped his big towel over his shoulders and led him, dripping sweat and still elated from his own lamentations, to the shower. Before he disappeared under the rushing water, he said in a powerful voice:
