Poum and Alexandre Read online

  Poum knows the most horrible details about Marie-Antoinette. Back on the bus, she tells me how she had to undress with her jailors in the same room sniggering at her. How her hair had become completely white within a few days. How she stuffed her soiled linen between two stones because she had her period. Though I don’t know what periods are, my mother’s slim, pointed fingers stuff an imaginary blood-sodden cloth between two imaginary blocks of stone so I can feel how the poor woman attempted to keep clean before her death. After her death, they placed her head between her legs so it wouldn’t roll about. This was common practice after guillotine executions, my mother explains.

  Marie-Antoinette’s marriage to Louis XVI is on Poum’s mind. She was brought from Vienna all the way to Fontainebleau by her Austrian retinue and handed over to the French. She was fourteen years old and had her small dog on her knees. She was taken to a tent and disrobed of every stitch of Austrian clothing and dressed up again with only French garments. Even the small dog was snatched from her arms. Nothing Austrian was to remain. She then entered the French retinue and was brought to Versailles. ‘The queens of France had to give birth to their children in front of many witnesses to be sure there was no substitution. Le coucher, le lever, la toilette du roi – going to bed, getting up, dressing, were semi-public too.’ It reminds me of school: everybody knows what you do. In spite of this, the French called her l’Autrichienne, the Austrian, for the rest of her life.

  ‘But why didn’t they let her keep her dog?’ I ask.

  ‘Because,’ says Poum, ‘even her soul had to become French.’ I try to barter but my mother is final. ‘Some things have to be given up forever,’ she says.

  She doesn’t look at me but out of the bus window, as the Paris of the sixties streams by. When she drags her eyes back to my person, Marie-Antoinette has arrived at Versailles and there is nothing more one can do. The bus thunders to a halt, nearly knocking over a young man who jumps aboard unscathed and pays for his ticket while the driver showers him in a stream of French oaths. As he grins back at the driver unashamedly, my mother says, in an absent sort of way: ‘I nearly married Pange, before meeting your father.’ Buses are perfect places for my mother to speak. She turns her lost, wide gaze on me and drops her ad lib bombshells. There are no witnesses. Careful, I wait. I know how her utterances can disappear in the mist.

  By the time the young man, out of breath and unrepentant, lands with a thump two seats ahead of us, I understand that the comte de Pange was not quite normal. ‘A bit like a village innocent,’ Poum casually adds.

  I ask the obvious question. ‘Why did you want to marry a village innocent?’

  ‘I?’ she says. Her eyelids flutter a second as she stares into the mid-distance. I gather it was her duty. Her mother made that clear to her: she had to marry him to restore the family’s fortunes. Poum’s information lands in my mind between the thuds and jolts of the bus. This was during the war, after Poum’s parents ‘lost’ their home, the Mas Blanc, where she had lived all her childhood. Her father had just died, and according to her mother the village idiot was the perfect match. It went as far as an entrevue, a small party thrown by Pange’s parents, made up of family members and a few appointed friends. In this entrevue, my mother was to get a look at her future husband. The marriage was already a fait accompli for everyone except Poum. By the second meeting with the same party of guests, a ring was handed over. Her husband-to-be asked her with a child’s tone of voice, ‘Will you come and kiss me goodnight when we are married?’ as he pushed a green emerald onto her shrinking finger with his large, hairy hands.

  I don’t know what to say. Her offhand tone jars even more than the events themselves. I wasn’t able to save the dog in the other story. I am ready this time. Surely something can be done? My mother turns dreamy and lapses into silence. She has a castaway look. I have no foothold in the land she goes to. For us, there is no common shore. Soon we are walking to her apartment and I am back in my bedroom. It is over.

  It takes me a while to get the story straight. My mother has only told me about the entrevue, the ring and the dreamlike strangeness of it all. Pange, however, stays with me, on sufferance, like one of my wobbly teeth, neither in nor out. Then I have a brilliant idea. I ask my father. Has he heard of Pange?

  My father smiles expansively and supplies the rest of the puzzle. ‘Pange? Why!’ he answers, ‘you could have been called Catherine de Pange. How would you have liked that?’ I don’t reply; it feels funny like a wet sweater at the beach in a sudden cold wind. My parents often tell me I could have been someone else entirely. I know that what you are inside can’t change. Like raspberry jam or bicycles or dogs – what you are just is. Everything else can change but not what you are inside. Even they can’t change that. I remember the first time Sylvia writes my name down for me. There are four words in it. I can’t make the link with myself at the start. I stare at her. My name comes from the outside, like a train destination: Waterloo or Victoria. I feel my ‘insideness’ more like the hidden house I paint in the overgrown garden. It’s where I go to think about things. But Sylvia points to the name she has written down for me. She is quite firm, a bit like the United Kingdom is firm about Gibraltar or the Magna Carta. She has a name too: it’s Sylvia Ann Lee. I understand now how it makes her presence something I can talk about, almost somewhere I can go. Names, I decide, are for others to use; a bit like handles, they open the door to someone else. But Catherine de Pange isn’t right. I don’t want that name. I want the one Sylvia spells out for me when I don’t even know how to read. ‘That is your name,’ she says, and hands it to me on a piece of paper.

  My mother starts the Pange story in a dreamy way as if she is still lost in it. My father finishes it fast and matter-of-fact. Horrified by her fiancé, my mother confided her dilemma to one of her Spanish aunts. This aunt got in contact with Pange’s doctor. His answer was clear. ‘From time to time,’ the doctor explained, ‘this man has to be locked up in a padded room of his hôtel particulier because the fits that regularly overcome him make him physically violent. To be married to him would, on occasion, resemble being locked in a cage with a bear.’ Poum’s depression about her future as comtesse de Pange turned into a nervous breakdown. She was sent off to Spain in disgrace, to the French embassy in Madrid, and worked there for a friend of the family. Her salary was forwarded directly back to her mother. The ring was returned. My father’s pale blue eyes look straight at me. They always seem to cut through words and say some invisible truth that I strive to hear. ‘I met your mother very soon after that,’ he says. ‘In a way, because of Pange, she escaped them, I think,’ he adds under his breath – nearly in a whisper. My parents will not easily break the spell of perfection surrounding each other’s relatives.

  Sylvia has given me some English common sense. I use its harsh light now to gather the hard facts behind the Pange story. Poum’s mother was prepared to sell her to the highest bidder, yet Poum speaks of this very same mother in terms of extreme respect and adulation. Her brother and sister who come every Sunday earnestly encouraged her to sacrifice herself on the family altar. How can she possibly think these people love her? Why does she feel she needs them so much? ‘We don’t like them, do we?’ I ask my father. He mumbles and shifts uncomfortably on his feet. Soon, he switches the conversation back to the Carthaginians and the Romans.

  Poum knows the eight volumes of Saint-Simon’s Memoirs backwards. He who took notes on everything that happened in Louis XIV’s Versailles court: the good, the bad and the hilarious. She is always quoting him and chuckling. Saint-Simon has a phrase to deal with every rue du Cirque problem. It becomes quite clear to me that when my parents are alone, they bond over their fears in a party of two, but the rest of the time their courtesans rule them. The rest of the time, they seem to be carrying Versailles on their shoulders.

  When I try to steer my mother back to the topic of Pange the next time I see her, she slides back to Marie-Antoinette in one of her sleights of hand. ‘
Louis XVI was not attractive,’ she explains, as if that explained other things too. ‘He looked middle-aged in his youth – one of those men who seem staid before their time. He was gentle and kind and adored the queen. But his kindness got him into trouble,’ my mother adds sadly.

  ‘Did you think Pange would be like Louis XVI?’ I ask.

  She frowns. Louis XVI is her way to deal with Pange without incriminating her family. It was a good try but it didn’t really work. The bear is still in his cage, locked in the past, and I have not helped with my stupid questions.

  My mother’s mother is still a beautiful relic from her own past. She lived with my grandfather in a halcyon state of mutual admiration; the light shone under their door late into the night. A roll of soft grey hair weighs on her brow. Her big, round, blue eyes look dreamy and bored. Her clothes drip from her tall, willowy body as if they don’t matter. She loves my aunt, uncle and cousins, but for several years she lives with us. When my mother’s brother and sisters come over, she rushes out like a lover and hugs her grandchildren to her breast. Then, as if they were visiting her on a desert island, she whisks them away to her room, a room I’ve only ever been in once or twice. She calls me ‘the child of the devil’ and never speaks to me if she can help it. Poum’s eyes glaze over. She goes through the motions of welcome but is soon overpowered by a stronger force. She stands outside the magic circle of belonging, a magic stronger than her own. It doesn’t even feel like her home anymore. I long for Odysseus. I wish we could go and live with him and Calypso so she could transform her family into the pigs their muffled cries remind me of. Yet I can’t fight Poum’s relentless desire to be part of them. I wish she were more like Penelope.

  On Saturday morning I try to talk to my father. ‘We don’t have to love them, do we?’ I ask.

  He seems very cautious. He doesn’t speak of the knight on the crest of the wave, or of the Magna Carta. ‘Your mother is tired,’ he explains. ‘We must make things easy for her.’ I know that is not the reason. I know he is lying about something vague and mysterious.

  Then he is gone and my mother will be alone with them all Sunday. I plot to save her. I imagine stories. I read about Robin Hood, the Knights of the Round Table and Ivanhoe. I plan to carry her away from them. But slowly, Sunday after Sunday, I give up and dream of other things. I dream of getting away, of living so far away from these people that they won’t even know my address. I play games in the street, pretending to be a spy. I run from wall to wall, secretly trying to prise Poum away so she can bloom on ruins and recite The Odyssey to her heart’s delight.

  Poum goes and sits in her mother’s bedroom every day. Her hands in her lap, on the edge of her chair; I know she is not comfortable. I never see her relax as other people do. The only place where she seems off-guard is in her bed. There, surrounded by her lace pillows and her books, she reads the day away. I know my parents have done something all these people don’t approve of. It gives me a sneaking sympathy for bandits and strangers. Any stranger is safer than one of my parents’ relatives.

  My mother thinks like that too. ‘If a criminal comes knocking in the middle of the night, with police sirens screaming after him,’ she says, ‘I couldn’t help but open the door, I’d feel duty-bound to hide him.’

  My father adds his bit. ‘In the Middle Ages, an extra plate was always laid at the table for the travelling knight.’ And in The Odyssey, the Greeks always welcome the Stranger. He is the bearer of news, the messenger of the gods, the voice of destiny, the lost child returned. Maybe if I become a Stranger my mother will hug me to her breast. When I see other mothers grab their children and squeeze them ferociously, I don’t turn away in embarrassment like my schoolmates; I stare my fill.

  In Versailles, anyone could be banished without the slightest warning. The magic circle was Versailles, and if you were not part of it you were lost in outer space. No job, no honour, no love, no beauty.

  The real Marie-Antoinette had fun – so much fun, it got her into trouble. My Marie-Antoinette has no fun at all. Even when she is with my father, some deep-seated anguish never leaves her face. According to Alexandre, Louis XVI didn’t ‘move an ear’, which is his way of saying the King was faithful. My father usually says that about women, never about men. Men, he explains, can’t be faithful; it’s physiological.

  The queen Marie-Antoinette’s closest friends ended up with their heads on a pike. They were then paraded under her windows at the Conciergerie. My mother has the ‘religion of friendship’. Each one of her friends is a world unto himself or herself. There is a Spanish Flamenco dancer of Russian descent called Lutice, an Irish seer who can read signatures called Collins, a gay film director called Jacques Sigur, an old White Russian guitar teacher called Mr Shadinov, a Jewish woman with a tiny husband called Roberte Singer, a couple of cultured Jewish heroes of the French Resistance called Renée and Roland Pré, and a Spanish woman called Pilar Viñaca, who married the wrong man. She is my absolute favourite. Friends, my mother says, are to be honoured in every way. She pushes this so far that my father often complains. He has no friends; he is too busy. Unlike Louis XVI, he has no time to meditate while repairing clocks. Nevertheless both my parents have an obsession with clocks and keep at least fifteen of them chiming in sweet cacophony.

  They have found a school of American nuns for me. There is a big problem with the French ones, who don’t seem to approve of my parents. At this American school a girl invites me to a fancy-dress birthday party. I am about six and it means nothing to me, but my parents are suffused with smiles. They pat me on the back as if this were my doing, as if I were Pheidippides dying on arrival after running all the way to Athens to announce the victory against the Persians. My mother jumps to her feet and walks out with me without even telling Sylvia. We take the bus and end up in a tiny street. It’s a part of the old, old Paris that Haussman hasn’t cut up into big boulevards. You can almost hear tumbrils rattling over the wobbly cobblestones. We end up in front of a warehouse. My mother knocks on the glass door and a small, weasel-like man opens it. Her Flamenco dancing friend has recommended her to him, so reluctantly he lets us in. Hanging upside down in their linings like great bats or the strange fruit of Billie Holiday’s song are hundreds of disguises. While I stare, my mother consults the man like a doctor. He measures me all over and prescribes one of the bats to me. Without unpacking it, my mother moves to the exit with it. He doesn’t like handing it over, as if she were robbing him, but her friend has some sway over him, it seems. He follows us to his door and closes it with a snap. We are alone in the street again. Marie-Antoinette marches over the cobblestones triumphantly. She smiles at me. ‘My bird,’ she says, ‘friends are as precious in joy as in disaster.’ She usually calls my father ‘bluebird’. Bird is her highest badge of honour. She even has bird songs on a loop chirping all day in her bedroom.

  When we are back, the dress is put on me. It has a funny crinoline smell. The sticky stiffness of it makes me feel sick. Sylvia and I go to the party. My parents lean over the banisters and wave and wave as if we are never coming back. The party is dreadful. All the children are disguised. I am scared. A man wants to take my photograph, but I have to be rushed out to vomit between two cars. I am brought home in disgrace. The children cry ‘Goodbye, Marie-Antoinette! Don’t forget your head!’ I vomit all the way back.

  One day, my father takes me to Versailles. He gets permission to visit special parts of it. I see the bathrooms, the blue theatre and wander through the Galerie des Glaces holding my father’s hand. We are quite alone in the place. He takes me to the gardens and climbs on empty pedestals and poses as a Roman emperor. He lies on stone benches and pretends to be a corpse. He loves that game and keeps deadly still while I shake and shake him and beg and beg him to wake up.

  Then I find something out. The queen Marie-Antoinette was beheaded on the sixteenth of October 1793. My mother’s birthday is the sixteenth of October. To my amazement, when I tell her of this strange, symmetrical thing, Poum d
oesn’t react with quotes and exclamations, she just stares at me sharply and jerks her head. She will never talk about Marie-Antoinette again. When my father cooks up another Versailles expedition and begs her to come, she refuses point blank.

  Perhaps she thinks the sad and frightening things in that woman’s life could somehow fall to her at any moment.

  4

  SPARTA

  My father’s library has enormous grey velvet armchairs that loom over me like Hades and Persephone’s thrones in the underworld. In them sit Jacques and Clothilde, whose voices merge, high up over my head. They are the first siblings I meet, but I don’t understand they are my half-brother and half-sister. No one tells me. One thing is quite clear to me though: they are Spartans. They step straight out of my father’s stories, with their strange, vital energy. From the sown dragon teeth sacred to Ares, they spring from the earth, to stand fully grown in front of me. There’s fear in my parents’ eyes when they come to their apartment. My father barracks for Athens – not for Sparta. He presents a jovial front but you can feel he’s wary. Poum swallows often and her courtesy is nearly too considerate, as if she has suddenly become Japanese. She’s always ready to escape the room and leave them with my father, but he cries ‘Poum’ as soon as he feels her ratting out on him. When I am called to the library in my nightdress, they ruffle my hair and I look up at the tall soldiers with their flashing eyes and sword-like jokes. They walk with no hesitation and look around them with roving gazes as if some captive were kept hidden from them.