Poum and Alexandre Read online

  My father Alexandre says: ‘The event forecasts its shadow.’ When Telemachus sees his mother’s suitors eating them out of house and home, at first all he does is make grand speeches. He looks faintly ridiculous. The suitors scoff, yet, unbeknown to all, including himself, his speeches are inspired by the goddess Minerva. As she makes hope soar in his heart (and ours), a boat soon becomes available and he is suddenly ready to set sail in search of his lost father.

  Just like Minerva, my parents exhort each other at breakfast. They carry on about how épouvantable or merveilleuse a person or a situation is. They constantly defer to the ashes of their ancestors or dead parents and laugh at anecdotes of their fearlessness and spunk. Of course, they don’t scan the sky for eagles, but in their own way they read signs and mutter spells as they exclaim over telephone calls, letters, unexpected meetings or news (and of course over my mother’s quotes from The Odyssey). A smile, a compliment or a thankyou from their families is a ‘good omen’ for the goal at hand. What undoes them is their relatives’ disapproval. (And they get plenty of that.) To be accepted by the clan when they have broken all the clan rules is their constant worry. They want to belong but, like Odysseus, they have to wander the seas in search of home.

  Stories and myths, history and culture, are more important to my parents than truth. They are always asking each other: ‘What shall we say to the nuns? What shall we say to your sister, to your mother, to your other children, to your aunt?’ They even have stories about my birth ready for me. ‘We had to go to London.’ ‘We wanted you to speak English.’ When I ask an uncomfortable question, they look at each other guiltily. No answer is clear and simple. There are official answers and unofficial answers. Once Alexandre tells me: ‘Listen, if anybody asks you about your father, just say: “My father is a knight surfing on the crest of a wave.”’ I stare in blind faith at his big tummy and nod. He could convince me that Karl Marx was a practising Catholic. He could convince a bird that the sky is full of water and the sea not at all.

  Another time, he grabs my arm when we’re walking in the Tuileries Gardens. ‘If anyone asks you questions about me, tell them what Telemachus said: “My mother always told me I was the son of Odysseus and I believe her.”’ I nod gravely to reassure him. I can’t understand why anyone would ask me that. He has always been my father, ever since I can remember. I suddenly feel doubtful; do people stop being your father at a certain point? I don’t even remind him that, unlike Telemachus, I am a little girl. Such details seem petty. According to Alexandre, the Magna Carta was the first recognition of every individual’s right to freedom and respect. If I start asking questions again, he says: ‘You were born in England because of the Magna Carta, Catherine.’ And he will often exclaim to me: ‘Think of the Magna Carta.’ Books are thrust in my hands, books full of answers.

  My parents sometimes stare at me as if to convince themselves I have the makings of a Telemachus. Maybe they have been robbed of something only he can return. I would love to hand over the pearl they are seeking, but I have nothing to give except my own chubby person.

  My mother’s appearances are always staged and unexpected – a bit like the goddess Minerva’s. She sweeps into Sylvia’s and my bedroom, throws a sharp questioning glance at me, then talks to Sylvia over my head until the telephone rings, after which she rushes out with a cry like a bird that has flown in through the window by mistake. Maybe she can’t bear it for long and that is why she has to run away every time. After her departure, Sylvia switches the radio back on and the announcer’s clipped tones, coming all the way from London into our bedroom in Paris, sew up the void left by Minerva’s tempestuous presence.

  Poum obviously needs to peep at me, to check I am still the small girl she has made in three days of absolute pain. The nurses advised her to yell. It helps, they said. But she didn’t. Not once. I nearly killed her. ‘This baby doesn’t want to come into this big nasty world,’ the English doctor said. She decked our room in red at my birth, just like the hull of Nelson’s ship The Victory. ‘It’s painted that way so you don’t notice the sailors’ blood as they saw off their legs,’ Poum explains gleefully. My parents visit The Victory a dozen times with me in tow. They love gory historical events, especially my mother. The crusaders kneedeep in blood in Antioch, the Revolutionaries’ guillotine shiny from overuse, the Spanish Civil War – her tales of bloodshed are endless. On the red toile de Jouy wallpaper covering the room Sylvia and I share, the adventures of Paul et Virginie by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre repeat themselves ad nauseam. The bedspreads and cushions are also blood red. But while Sylvia is there, even if our room is red, it’s ours – a place to return to, where people have to knock before entering. The rest of the apartment is another world.

  People are always coming and going, but they have nothing to do with us. They are the grown-up noises on the distant shore beyond our bedroom – the corridor, the sitting room and dining room that we have to cross to reach the front door. We leave our refuge with our coats buttoned up, ready for the street. My mother’s family is sitting around her drinking coffee or still eating lunch as we tread by. My uncle throws a compliment at Sylvia, which makes her blush painfully. My uncle’s compliments are sarcastic and always have a bite, as if Sylvia, who is very large and fair, offends his slim, short, dark maleness. I know this with a certainty that is as physical as a smell, as if a cloud of knowing has descended on my body. I can’t share the cloud with anyone because it isn’t made of words, but it explains the world to me just as well as smell explains it to dogs. I often look into dogs’ eyes and feel that company of knowing without words or explanations. Sylvia and I make it to the hallway, then we both glance at each other and catch our breath.

  Sometimes my mother leaves her family and runs after us to put a light hand on Sylvia’s arm near the front door. She gazes deeply, warmly, frankly into her eyes. She doesn’t say anything, but I know she wants to make her feel better. I know she has felt the same cloud as me. And my love for her in that moment is as strong and as tight as if she were folding me in her arms. The strange thing is that Sylvia never comments on Poum’s sudden understanding sweetness. She doesn’t like her and is always finding fault.

  ‘Your mother doesn’t love you. Your mother doesn’t care. You’re my little girl.’ I clutch her feverishly. Her body is the ship to which I am tethered. We are always together. We’re even together in my first passport photograph because I wouldn’t let go of her. But deep, in the dark, somewhere inside me, I know that a strange thread links me to Poum. She went all the way to London to have me, even though she rushed back to Paris afterwards. She is the one who found Sylvia. She is the ruler of Ithaca. These thoughts make me a traitor to Sylvia, but listening to Sylvia makes me feel a traitor to the strange lady to whom, one day, Odysseus will return.

  My father is often absent. He just disappears. One minute he’s there in the room, filling it with his buoyant presence, the next he has vanished. He goes to the country every Saturday afternoon and comes back late Sunday night. When I am about six, my father starts taking me places on Saturday mornings. It is the crowning moment of my week. We go to the Parc de Saint-Cloud or the Sainte-Chapelle or Chartres or Notre Dame or l’Orangerie or the Louvre. He talks the whole time about Alexander the Great, Constantine, Caesar, Julian the Apostate. He tells me of palaces and forests, galloping horses and raped women. His voice gathers momentum and his hands seize javelins and slave girls. He canters us up hills where we stare at burning cities. Then he leaves me in the red bedroom. He whisks himself away and he will be gone till the next evening.

  He goes to that mysterious place he calls ‘the country’. I put no other name to it. It’s just as if he has vanished into a cloud. Poum handles similes fearlessly: ‘Your father will not die, he will leave for heaven in a chariot of fire.’ For me he has loped off to Olympus for a while. His regular disappearance every Saturday afternoon till late Sunday evening doesn’t faze me. Maybe he is with Hera or Demeter or Ares waging some war agai
nst the Titans.

  Poum, however, does not handle these absences so well. At that time I think that all fathers disappear like jack-in-the-boxes. All fathers vanish to the country on the weekend. But I know for sure that all mothers do not retreat to their bedroom up the stairs to be seen only at meals. Other children’s mothers take them to school or to the park or even play with them. There is no question of that with mine.

  One Easter morning on the outskirts of Chichester, Sussex, where my parents have bought a summer house, my mother suddenly decides to hide some Easter eggs in the garden for my cousins who are staying for the holidays. My father hovers like a bear and observes her flitting here and there in the bushes. A few hours later, still nothing has happened.

  ‘Poum, call the children. Isn’t it time for the egg hunting?’

  Her face is vague and noncommittal.

  ‘Well, I will call them myself,’ Alexandre says.

  ‘They are gone,’ she says.

  ‘Who is gone?’

  ‘The eggs …’

  My father runs to the garden but they have indeed vanished.

  ‘I couldn’t resist,’ she admits. ‘I only started with one, but then I had to eat all the others.’

  He frowns. ‘You’ve probably made yourself sick.’

  ‘I have a stomach of bronze,’ she shrugs in response before burying herself back in her book and crossing her slim legs with a happy sigh.

  On Sundays, my mother’s family will invade the apartment in Paris just like the suitors aspiring for Penelope’s hand. At the sound of their loud, exclaiming voices she will emerge from her bedroom up the stairs. Poum’s brother and sister will sit there and eat and drink my parents out of house and home. They seem to pity her, to envy her and to hate her all at the same time. Their barbed remarks make me flinch even though I don’t understand them. I sometimes imagine my mother as a child of my size, alone with them. They, of course, stay the size they are now. It makes me shiver. Why my mother is in such thrall to her family, who clearly have no affection for her, is one of my big questions. My father sometimes hums, ‘A dish of mushrooms left me alone in the world,’ quoting from Sacha Guitry’s Mémoires d’un Tricheur, in which the narrator’s whole family was wiped out by a poisonous dish of mushrooms. The glee in his voice brings a secret, reluctant smile to my mother’s lips.

  Sylvia thoroughly disapproves of my parents and of their families. We live apart on our own island, but when she is away I am left in Ithaca and to the goings-on of the apartment.

  When I misunderstand her, Marie-Antoinette snorts and she flashes out: ‘You are only a quarteron after all.’ This sounds to me like I’m an escaped slave, but what she means is that I’m only a quarter Spanish. Or she pauses a moment, frowning: ‘It must be the Russian blood.’ She never explains much anyway. Her incursions in my life remain magical and sudden. One dark night, when I am already in bed, she tells me to get dressed again and waits tapping her foot in the hallway. Still sleepy, I follow her onto pavements alive with the watery lights of the old réverbères.

  It’s 10pm; she is taking me to the Les Halles market in the dark belly of Paris. Soon the quarter will be gutted to create the present soulless mall it has become. We take a bus and another bus and step down into darkness. The streets are narrow and the cobblestones slippery. Criminals, butchers, florists, greengrocers and prostitutes hobnob happily. But my mother trips unconcernedly through the dark alleys, smiling at skimpily clad women and at black-coated men who sell her armloads of flowers for a few francs. Then she casts me a glance. ‘We have to have a Viandox.’ My mother hates meat. But here, because it’s obviously a tradition for her, she walks into one of the tiny bistrots and settles her two elbows on the zinc, that soft, dull, silvery metal all real French cafés have on their bars, and asks for two Viandox. The dense café’s egg-yolk-yellow light gleams off sweaty cheeks and sharp eyes – it even seems to ricochet off belly laughs and catcalls.

  An enormous woman with a moustache stands near us and gives us a big wink. ‘Hello, Poum, is this your child?’ She smiles.

  In my belly, I know these people accept Poum because she’s not afraid. I wish she were like this in her own home. She is looking at me over the steam. ‘You have to drink a Viandox at the Halles, it will never taste like this anywhere else, little bird.’ I sip the French Bovril as I breathe in the thick-shouldered labourers, the shifty tight-waistcoated pimps, the bombastic or sleepy prostitutes, the big-breasted fishmongers. The smell of death, sweat, wine, vanilla, spices and tons of flowers sings out Les Halles, Paris’s own belly.

  When Poum’s brother and sister catch me reading, they say: ‘Ha, your mother also spent her childhood with her nose in a book.’ They often mimic her two hands held up, clasping an invisible volume ridiculously close to their jeering faces. They are right. Books are a genius loci which attract Marie-Antoinette’s attention, and allow me to connect to her in an instinctive, animal way. She owes her entire culture to them. I have never known anyone to read as much as my mother. She clings to books as to a raft. Is that why my aunt doesn’t like her? Poum is whimsical, unmotherly and reads voraciously. Her sister smothers her progeny and is in love with her ironing board. Yet her hold over my mother has a fairytale quality. Whatever her sister says, whatever her sister does, is sacred. To stay in her sister’s company, Poum accepts any compromise. The only person who tames her addiction to her siblings is my father.

  My mother was cross-eyed until the age of eighteen, when she was operated on. All her life she complains about her eyes, fending off reality with her palms as if it’s attacking her. She sees the distant close and the close far away. She’ll walk quite near you and jump out of her skin if you touch her, then she’ll smile intimately at some distant thing no one else can see. In books, reality is precisely described and doesn’t move or change. If you are lost you can go back to the page before and live it again.

  I ask her once why we never go to her brother or sister’s house and why they always come to rue du Cirque instead. And why do we not meet all the other aunts and cousins they are always talking about? If these aunts and cousins are theirs, surely they must be hers too. Is she not their sister? This creates a lull. My mother starts talking about a ‘situation’ and stares out at my father with her shipwrecked eyes. My father talks about William the Conqueror, quoting Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. ‘From this irregular but romantic union a son was born: William. Later famous.’ He beams at my mother as if he has solved all their problems. But every Sunday the suitors are back with new comments. They speak at the top of their voices, all calling my mother and each other ma chérie or mon chéri. They speak about me as if I’m sick or in some kind of trouble. I have no idea what they mean.

  In her siblings’ presence, my mother changes. She even talks differently, drinks more, and delivers herself to them body and soul. I retreat to the empty red bedroom to read or go to the kitchen to do the washing up, which erases their relentless company. When they leave, I hear my mother trip up the stairs to her bedroom and all sounds of her vanish again behind the click of her door. Yet I know what she’s doing: reading on her bed. It stands at the end of her bedroom, with its lace sheets and gigantic square pillows, like a large comfortable ship. Or maybe she’s sewing. My mother, being half Spanish, makes lace tablecloths by the yard. But unlike Penelope, she doesn’t undo her day’s work during the night.

  Marie-Antoinette loves her family wildly, unreasonably. It is like a sickness. Just like Snow White, she happily munches the poisoned apple her brother and sisters hand to her. It’s no use crying ‘No! No!’ My mother bites deep into its shining white flesh. She will fall asleep without noticing anything around her anymore – until she lies in the glass cage of those plants and flowers she dreams about. Yet some part of my mother, the part that glances at me out of the blue with utter understanding, knows. I see the flicker of it in her eyes. Maybe her life at rue du Cirque is only possible surrounded by Penelope’s suitors. Could i
t be they are required for Odysseus’s return, so he may save her from them?

  But if my mother’s family are still there on my father’s return, both my parents are transformed into guilty children. They clear their throats too often, pour wine placatingly and listen without interrupting instead of capping each other’s stories. Yet his roving power never quite leaves Alexandre and the ‘suitors’ are slightly scared of him. He can spring from his chair and suddenly leave the room. It is obvious: he has gone off to make a decision about a raid or a siege, with his army waiting for him just behind the door. His swift transitions bewilder the suitors, who live in a sea of chatter. Poum doesn’t flicker an eyelid and continues talking to keep her family busy.

  Sometimes on a late Sunday evening my father tiptoes into my bedroom. ‘Are they gone?’ We both know what he means. If they are, he hugs me and bounds up the stairs calling ‘Poum! Poum!,’ flinging his briefcase and coat on the floor. I hear her euphoric cries of welcome and the bedroom door closes on their joy. She hasn’t quoted The Odyssey all day because they mock her when she does. But in the euphoria of his homecoming, references to Homer return en force.

  Odysseus has returned to Ithaca.

  3

  VERSAILLES

  My mother isn’t called Marie-Antoinette after Louis XVI’s wife, but after an aunt who died at eight years of age. She’s named after a dead child. But, as if it had chosen her, her name seems to follow her around doggedly.

  When I am about five or six, for once alone with my mother, I witness one of her sudden, irrevocable decisions. She jumps out of bed and gets dressed in an unusual hurry. Scented, her nose powdered and her pearls on her ears, she skips out of the house and leaps on a bus with me in tow. ‘You have to see the Conciergerie, Catherine. You are my daughter after all.’ We go straight to the gloomy Conciergerie Palace along the Seine River. ‘This is where the queen Marie-Antoinette was imprisoned before she was taken to the scaffold in a horse-drawn cart, her arms tied behind her back,’ Poum explains hurriedly on the way. There are no other visitors that sunny winter morning as she sweeps between the two towers. She buys our tickets from a blousy, grey-haired tricoteuse who has just come back from knitting under the scaffold, then plunges into a dark place where everything echoes and clangs. She walks ahead, chatting to the guide as I follow. Their voices seem lost to me, however much I try to keep up with them. Lifting her index finger from time to time in mute recognition, she nods with sudden intensity. Then, holding her chin, she mumbles in awe over the fresh details provided directly from beyond. Guides love my mother. There’s no one else but us, yet the place is full of other footsteps. Something keeps getting in my way, if only a fat column, the sweat on the grey stone walls, a metal spit, a barred window where light trickles in its sad parody of the free sunlight outside. Here, deep in the Conciergerie’s belly, you would never guess the sunny day we have just left is still out there in the street.