The Godmother Read online

  As a child I was always swallowing bits of paint from walls as well as monochrome plastic toys. On several occasions I narrowly escaped death, until one doctor, more imaginative than the rest, went beyond the banal diagnosis of autism to discover I had bimodal synaesthesia. This condition finally explained why, when served a dish of mixed-up colours, I would spend the meal sorting the contents, my face ravaged by nervous tics.

  The doctor recommended to my parents that they should let me eat what I wanted, provided I found the food on offer aesthetically pleasing and it wasn’t going to poison me – pastel-coloured candy, Sicilian cassata, profiteroles filled with pink and white cream, ice cream stuffed with little pieces of rainbow-coloured candied fruit. It was he, too, who came up with the ruse of giving me paint colour charts to leaf through and rings set with big, colourful stones that I could gaze at for hours, chewing my cheek, my mind a total blank.

  Which brings me to fireworks… When those sprays of incandescent chrysanthemums appear in the sky, I experience a coloured emotion so profoundly vivid that I’m simultaneously saturated with joy and replete. Like an orgasm.

  Collecting fireworks… It would feel like being at the centre of a gigantic gang bang with the entire universe.

  As for Portefeux… well, that’s my husband’s name. The man who protected me for a while from the cruelty of the world and who granted me a life of delights and satisfied desires. For those marvellous years we were married, he loved me as I was, with my chromatic sexuality, my passion for Rothko, my lolly-pink dresses and my complete lack of practicality rivalled only by my mother’s.

  We began our conjugal life in magnificent apartments, rented with the fruit of his labour. I say rented deliberately – as in creditor-protected – because like my father, my husband did business of an unspecified nature that nobody knew anything about except insofar as it afforded us a significant degree of material comfort. It never occurred to people to interrogate him on the subject, such was his generosity, his breeding, the seriousness of his manner.

  He, too, made his money thanks to the so-called shit-hole countries of the world, offering consulting services for the development of national lottery systems. In short, he sold his expertise in the French system, the Pari Mutuel Urbain, to the leaders of African nations or Central Asian countries like Azerbaijan or Uzbekistan. You can picture the scene. I personally became very familiar with that end-of-the-road ambiance, over numerous stays in improbable international hotels, both with him and with my own family. They were the only places where the air-conditioning worked and the alcohol was decent, where mercenaries rubbed shoulders with journalists, businessmen and criminals on the run, and the peaceful ennui in the bar lent itself to lazy chitchat. Not so different, for those in the know, to the cottonwool atmosphere of the common areas in psychiatric hospitals or in the spy novels of Gérard de Villiers.

  We met in Muscat, in the sultanate of Oman; the same place he died as we celebrated our seven-year wedding anniversary.

  At breakfast, the morning after our first night together, without even realising what he was doing, he buttered my toast to look like my favourite painting. A rectangle of toast, half covered with strawberry jam, plain butter on a quarter of the remaining surface, and, finally, orange marmalade spread to the very edge. White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) by Rothko.

  Unbelievable, right?

  When I married him, I thought I would lead a carefree life of love forever. I hadn’t the slightest inkling that anything as dreadful as an aneurism in mid-belly laugh could lie in store. But that’s how he died, opposite me, at the age of 34, at the Grand Hyatt in Muscat.

  When I saw him collapse head-first into his plate of salad I felt an indescribable pain. As if an apple-corer had plunged into the centre of my body and extracted my spirit in one piece. I wanted nothing more than to run away or else sink into a merciful faint, yet there I remained, stuck to my chair, fork mid-air, surrounded by people continuing quietly with their meal.

  At that very moment – at precisely that moment, not a second earlier – my life truly turned to shit.

  Things got off to a flying start with hours spent waiting in an incongruous police station, surrounded by suitcases and with two little girls going crazy in the heat, under the insolent stares of the Sultanate’s police officers. I still have nightmares about it: clutching my passport, doing my best to soothe my two girls who are dying of thirst, smiling feebly at humiliating comments that I’m supposed not to understand. Me – the one who speaks Arabic.

  Apparently it was too complicated to repatriate my husband’s body. In the end a sneering functionary gave me a permit to bury him at Petroleum Cemetery – the only place that would accept kafirs – while simultaneously debiting an exorbitant amount from my credit card.

  So that’s how you find yourself aged 27, alone with a newborn and a two-year-old, with no income and no roof over your head. Because it took less than a month for us to be thrown out of our beautiful apartment on Rue Raynouard with its view over the Seine. Our handsome furniture was sold, and as for our leather-upholstered Mercedes, one day the hunchbacked old erotomaniac with a string of convictions who had been my husband’s driver just took off with it, leaving me and my girls stranded outside the lawyer’s office.

  Naturally it wasn’t long before I came crashing down. I already had a tendency to talk to myself and eat flowers, but one afternoon I walked out of the Céline boutique on Rue François Ier as if in a trance, dressed head to toe in new clothes and muttering to nobody in particular, Good bye, I’ll pay later! When two poor security dudes, all in black and with ear-pieces, accosted me before I reached the door, I lashed out and bit them, drawing blood. I was taken straight to the madhouse.

  I spent eight months with the lunatics, contemplating my previous life. Like a shipwreck survivor with her gaze stubbornly fixed on the empty sea, I waited for somebody to come to the rescue. People told me to get over my grief, as if it were a kind of illness I had to be cured of at any cost, but I just couldn’t do it.

  My two girls, too young to have the slightest memory of their fabulous father, forced me to face up to my new life. Did I have a choice? First I counted the days, then the months that had passed since my husband’s death; then one day, without even noticing, I stopped counting.

  I was a new woman, mature, sad, and ready for combat. An anomaly, an odd sock. I was the widow Portefeux!

  I separated myself from what remained of my past: from my enormous Paraiba tourmaline cabochon, my pink Padparadscha sapphire, my Fancy Blue and Pink diamond toi et moi ring, and my fire opal. All the colours that had accompanied me from childhood. I sold everything so I could buy myself a dreary little three-room apartment in Paris-Belleville with a view onto a courtyard that gave onto another courtyard. It was a dump where night ruled the day and colours didn’t exist. The building was in keeping; an old red-brick community housing block from the 1920s with cheap finishes, overrun by Chinese who shouted at each other all day long.

  Then I got down to work. Ah, yes, work… Before being written out of the happily ever after script by some malevolent entity, I’d had no idea what it involved. And since I had nothing else to offer the world besides an intimate acquaintance with every kind of chicanery and a doctorate in Arabic, I became a court interpreter.

  After such a precipitous collapse in my financial circumstances, I was always going to raise my daughters in hysterical fear of a drop in social status. I paid too much for their schools, screamed at them when they got bad marks, had a hole in their jeans or had greasy hair. I’m not ashamed to admit I was a difficult mother, not at all the nurturing type.

  With their stellar academic records, my two genius daughters are now working in the services sector. I’ve never understood quite what their work entails; they’ve tried to explain a hundred times, but I tune out before I get it. Let’s just say we’re talking about those dumb-ass jobs where you fade away in front of some computer screen making things that don’t r
eally exist and adding nothing of value to the world. Their careers are like the words in that song by Orelsan: No one’s gonna find fixed work / even with straight As and eight years’ study, you’re gonna have to fight / my pizza delivery guy knows how to fix a satellite!

  But I’m proud of them, and if they were ever hungry I‘d cut off my arms to feed them. That said, the truth is we don’t have much to say to each other. So I’ll leave it there, except to declare, loud and proud, that I love them, those girls of mine. They’re magnificent, honest, and they’ve always accepted their fate without batting an eyelid. All of which is more than can be said for me. It seems that I am the last in the family line of adventurers.

  The auctioneer charged with getting rid of all my rings after I emerged from the madhouse – Sale of the Contents of Madame P.’s Jewellery Case, a Discerning Collector – continued to send me his catalogues filled with jewels and other magnificent objects, no doubt believing that I was some high-net-worth individual.

  At night, when everybody was asleep and the house was finally silent, I would sit at my desk with a glass of Guignolet Kirsch and religiously leaf through the luxury brochures. Reading each description, examining every photograph, I would play imagine the house burns down and you rip off the insurance company. I adore old things: they’ve witnessed the lives of so many people and you never get tired of looking at them, the way you do with new things.

  It’s remembering details like this which makes me realise that even in the depths of my grief, I’ve always been open to positive ideas. I’ve never felt desperate enough to contemplate suicide; for that you need a spiritual strength I’ve just never had.

  To get to the point: more than twenty years after scattering all I held dear to the winds, I stumbled across the photo of The Little Fireworks Collector, valued between 10,000 and 15,000 euros.

  Obviously I had to buy it back.

  On the appointed day I turned up at Artcurial auctioneers at the end of the Champs-Elysées. I was scared to death. Scared I’d miss out on the print, that the price would soar out of my reach. Scared of all those well-dressed people having fun with their money. Scared of being outed as an impostor in my pathetic chalk-coloured suit, with my expression to match.

  I hung back until it came to my lot. It was an original colour print, showing the Belvedere terrace, 50cm x 40cm. The decor was typical of the 1970s: stone, glass and blonde wood furniture. In the background, a firework was about to explode into the deep-blue sky. Audrey Hepburn was wearing a magnolia-pink Givenchy dress. Her face was right next to mine, and in the foreground, in pride of place, sat my strawberry Melba ice-cream. Everything was exactly as it should be; the absolute perfection of a moment fixed in time forever.

  — Lot 240, an unpublished and unique shot by Julius Shulmann in a departure from his usual Californian villas… The Little Fireworks Collector, 1972. This is an original print given to the actress and not catalogued in the Paul Getty collection. Everybody will have recognised Audrey Hepburn next to that pretty little blonde girl with the blue eyes in front of her beautiful ice cream. I have 10,000 euros… 11,000, 11,500, 12,000, 13,000…

  I panicked. I felt like screaming: Stop! That little girl with the golden skin – that’s me! Look at me, look what I’ve become! Can I not at least be allowed this?

  At 14,500, the bidding stalled… once, twice… 15,000, I cried… 15,000 at the back of the room… and my rival, a guy who looked young enough to be my son, gestured that he was done.

  With the fees I got it for 19,000 euros. Me, the little court translator, who prided herself on never using credit – I’d cracked for a photo.

  I went home with my treasure and hung it opposite my desk. My daughters simply couldn’t understand why on earth I’d suddenly bought this portrait of a cheerful little blonde girl to decorate the living room, when the rest of our apartment – apart from the pink carpet with orange flowers – had always been so grim. Had I told them I’d indebted myself for the next five years, they would have thought I’d lost my mind. Not for one second did they make the connection with their mother.

  How sad is that?

  I started my career as an interpreter in the summary courts.

  You should have seen me in those days. I put such heart into my work. I thought I was indispensable, bending over backwards to translate each nuance and register, everything the defendants wanted to express to those who sat in judgement over them.

  I felt infinitely sorry for many of the Arabs whose words I reproduced in those trials. Men who were extraordinarily poor, with little education; impoverished migrants looking for an El Dorado that didn’t exist, forced into a life of small-time skulduggery and petty theft so as not to die of hunger.

  It didn’t take me long to realise that nobody was interested in my nuance or my register. The interpreter was simply a tool to accelerate the act of repression. You only have to listen to how the magistrates speak during these hearings, not varying their delivery one iota regardless of whether or not the interpreter is keeping up, regardless of whether or not the guy in the box is following.

  I was an evil rendered necessary by the principles of human rights, nothing more. My presence was given barely a grudging acknowledgment – is the interpreter here? Yes? Good, then we can start… – before the process got underway. You’re charged with having committed in Paris and, in any event, within the relevant statutory limitation period… blah… blah… blah… And so on, without drawing breath, for the next ten minutes.

  It was particularly moving to watch my colleagues who worked in sign language, as they gestured furiously like short-circuited robots in an effort to translate a tiny fraction of whatever they had managed to grasp. Yet if one of us were impertinent enough to ask for a pause to make ourselves understood by the poor wretch for whom we were responsible (and who wasn’t picking up a damned thing), the magistrate would adopt a pained look and close his eyes as if to say I’m just going to hum a little tune in my head while I wait for this moment to pass. Naturally the bothersome person in question would be marked down as a nit-picker and never asked back.

  I very quickly stopped trying.

  When I felt sorry for my guy, I sometimes managed to slip in a few things in Arabic amidst the torrent of words pouring from the judge. Things like: Just tell these ass-holes what they want to hear so we can get this over with – you were in such a hurry to leave France and go back home, you only stole so you could afford a return ticket.

  For the more complicated cases involving several charges, when I had phone taps to translate, I sometimes invented things to help those defendants I thought were most deserving of pity. But I could also do the opposite and decide to sink them, especially when it was a matter of protecting their poor wives, naïve girls who were totally under their thumbs. As the prostitutes or mistresses stacked up, those bastard husbands, whose filthy intimacy I shared through my headphones, treated them like dogs. The cynicism of these men knew no bounds, as they registered their business phone lines, the cars they used for their trafficking, and the property they acquired with laundered cash in their wives’ names. I made sure to tell these women what I had heard over the telephone intercepts, to show them what idiots they were being so at least they would stop showing up twice a week in the visitors’ room laden with sacks of their husband’s laundry, like mules.

  Another thing: I was paid under the table by the government department employing me, which meant I had no taxable income.

  True karma, indeed.

  It’s quite frightening when you think about it, that the translators and interpreters upon whom the security of the nation rests – those very people engaged in simultaneously interpreting the plots cooked up by Islamists in their cellars and garages – are working illegally, with no social security, no pension… Frankly, you could devise a better system, couldn’t you, in terms of incorruptibility.

  Well, I find it pretty disturbing. And I have been corrupted.

  At first I thought it was funny, th
en one day I wasn’t laughing any more.

  I was helping a poor Algerian in a compensation claim for wrongful detention. These cases are heard in civil courts, with lawyers arguing about the damages the State should pay an innocent person for having ruined his life. On this particular day, the parade of legal errors was being played out before an especially loathsome magistrate who eyed each claimant with a mocking sneer, as if to say You, innocent? What else am I supposed to believe?

  The Arab in question, a labourer who had been cleaning the façade of a building where some crazy woman was living, had done two and a half years of a custodial sentence for a rape he hadn’t committed, before being acquitted by the Assize Court when the lunatic retracted her accusation.

  He bent my ear for a whole hour before the hearing, trying to explain how much the occasion meant to him, thinking that here, at last, was a chance to pour out everything he had held pent up inside: the promiscuity rife in the prison, the treatment reserved for sex offenders like him by his fellow inmates, the two showers a week, his wife who had returned home with his children to the bled, the village in Algeria, his family who didn’t speak to him anymore, the flat he’d lost… He had so much to say. The court could have taken five minutes to listen to him, if only by way of apologising for the fact that some investigating magistrate had totally fucked up his life by remanding him in custody for 30 months without any evidence. But no, the Chief Justice cut him off contemptuously: Monsieur, at the time you were working without any papers. You have no grounds upon which to make any claim whatsoever. As far as we are concerned, you don’t even exist!

  I was so utterly ashamed I could no longer find the words in Arabic. I couldn’t even look him in the eye. I started babbling something and then it just came out, all on its own: Your Honour, I, too, am working without any documentation, and for the Department of Justice no less. So, since I don’t exist, see how you manage without me! And I walked out, leaving them all to it.