Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

“If you’re quiet you can stay, but be quiet, mouth shut,” she hisses. She knows the fat would be in the fire if my mother finds me there in the kitchen too often.

I sit down on the chair where in the mornings a supplier usually waits for a dram and maybe a little more, a grab under her skirts and the accompanying slap or unexpected French kiss, and watch her bring the dish from the pantry, pull off the cloth over it, lay the piece of meat on the chopping block, fetch the knife from the hook under the shelf by the wall, and wait.

I think I have come to hear the blade first slice through the soft muscle tissue, the white and red, the limp pink stone. And she also knows that I am waiting for her to divide the pieces with the heavy cleaver.

She raises the weapon slowly and holds it in the air for a while, until she can tell that in my imagination my head is on the block, closer to her apron.

When she finally brings the cleaver down so that the bone cracks under the iron as if it is my own neck vertebrae, I have long since squeezed my eyes tight shut.

IN A CERTAIN SENSE the milieu in which I grew up adopted the sense of duty of the highest classes, the sense of honour from the nobility, but without the hypocrisy that made it viable. And we had transformed the enforced grubbing and hard labour of the workers “beneath us”, out of whose midst we had nevertheless once climbed, into an idea of application and industry, but without the explosions that temporarily destroyed all morality and duty.

Women constituted the coat of arms of all that, the becalmed figurehead, and I cursed it. Working-class women like Emilie enjoyed more freedom of movement, the freedom of the insignificant, than we, precious young ladies of the bourgeoisie, doomed to an existence as a human artistic bouquet: colourful, elegant and dust-free under a glass cover so as not to spoil our maidenly tint.

My way of escaping the vacuum consisted of reading and writing. Others lost themselves in their children or married an older rich man, in the hope of a premature widowhood and accompanying independence.

Some, those who had no other safety valve, competed for a starring role in the varied theatrical programme of hysteria, with its paralyses and limbs full of cramp, its monumental fainting fits and the deliriums which you can find in old psychological manuals, and which you can equally well see as a concise introduction to the dramaturgy of the muzzled femininity of my young days — a Sistine Chapel of bourgeois pathos. The slightly more acceptable variant consisted of chronic stomach ailments, migraine-related twilight situations and other maladies that required periods of isolation in partly or wholly darkened rooms, punctuated by cleansing rites with alternating hot and cold baths and compresses, powders, infusions and tinctures.

Even my mother could periodically abandon herself to these with a pleasure she herself did not recognize as such. Her periods assumed the character of litanies, full of self-pity and vengefulness. The calamity usually announced itself with hypersensitivity to children’s voices and the tap of cutlery on plates. When she snapped at me or my brother that well-brought-up children never touch the porcelain of the dinner service with their knife or fork, everyone in the house knew what was what. In the kitchen Emilie shrugged her shoulders even higher than before, fearful of the fury that might descend on her. My father let out a resigned sigh. Edgard hit his head with his hand as if he had forgotten an important appointment and I tried to breathe as little as possible.

For the next few days it was as if my mother’s body was sprouting countless fine tentacles. A network of ethereal threads stretched out around her and linked every nook and cranny in the house with her nervous system. The slightest movement was transmitted over that invisible system. Vibrations produced vibrations. Even turning a page in one of my picture books, though they were cut from reasonably stiff cardboard, penetrated to the boudoir next to the dining room, where my mother, supported by a geological formation of pillows, lay on the chaise longue, vibrating with anger.

“Child, use the carpet when you go upstairs. The car-pet! Has no one any respect for my eardrums here? Please, Edgard, do your mother a favour and don’t trot through the house like a pack of dragoons. Put an old tea towel in the bottom of the washing-up basin, Emilie, I’ve asked you a hundred times…” And so on.

Gradually her tirades faded into muted, unarticulated lamentations. Her words seemed to crumble, throwing off their crust of consonants and as it were revealing their melted insides. Her hypersensitivity to sound had usually gone by then. The tentacles disengaged from things, slapping back onto her body like extended elastic and recreating it in an imploding universe of pain.

Emilie lugged up even more blankets and pillows, and with the slow body language of a tortoise shoved side tables over to the chaise longue, set out bottles, tubes, flacons, a basin of water, soap and white linen cloths. Meanwhile she had closed the blinds on the whole floor, banked up the fire in the antechamber below and had plonked us down like exiles in the armchairs.

“If the patron agrees, I can serve him and the little ones food down here for the time being,” she whispered, and without waiting for an answer slunk off upstairs, into the twilight world.

Now and then muted sounds penetrated through to us, a vague groaning followed by the tripping of Emilie’s padded slippers, “my cat’s paws” she called them, over the parquet floor.

This situation did not usually last long. When I was small my father was in the habit of sending me out on reconnaissance after a day or two. He pushed me in through a chink when the door was ajar. In the dark I could only make out my mother with difficulty, but I could hear her breath. Only when I moved closer could I distinguish her head, largely buried in soft pillows at the foot of a mountain range of blankets that swelled and shrank to the rhythm of her breath. If she turned to me and sleepily stretched out an arm towards me, and didn’t turn away abruptly, submerging completely in the pillowslip, my father would know she was on the mend.

Twenty-four hours later she would arise from her linen cocoon. Emilie would pull up the blinds and wind up the clocks, my mother would smother me with kisses at breakfast, run her fingers teasingly through Edgard’s blond locks and kiss my father on the forehead, the picture of good humour.

I am sure that her suffering was real. My God, if there is anything I have despised about the fact of being a woman, it’s the monthly madhouse of my glands. But I wonder whether she did not partly transform her discomfort into a gentle but nonetheless throttling holding-hostage of my father, my brother, me and Emilie, who as the goblin-like servant of a malevolent queen interceded between the upper and lower world in our house, which closed round us like an oyster.

As soon as everything had calmed down our rooms breathed out audibly, and I did too, behind glass, on the veranda, in the completely walled-in back garden, where otherwise I roamed impatiently along the path, back and forth, back and forth, in the hope that I could hypnotically anaesthetize my yearning for room to breathe, for horizon.

And when I heard the schoolchildren passing behind the fence, exuberant at their few hours of freedom after lessons before they were expected back home, when I heard them swimming in the mild warmth of late spring days, I almost burst with anger. The slamming of the front door, after my brother had thrown off his satchel, had drunk milk in the kitchen and joined his pals outside, sounded to me like an affront. The fun they had, under the window of the room where in the evenings, when the light had lost its force, I was able to take some sun under my mother’s watchful eye, aroused pure resentment in me.