Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

I disliked the way he enjoyed telling me about his escapades. I could see that from the light-footed tread with which he left my house afterwards, and the way, as he walked through the front garden to the street, that he cheerfully laid his walking stick on his shoulder like a sword or a rifle.

No, he didn’t need to draw a picture. I did that for myself, with an uncomfortable feeling of guilt because I dared imagine it, a hand still clutches my throat when I recall the scene. I don’t know if it’s jealousy, and, if it is, at which of the two of them it is directed: Emilie, naked on her bed, her hair undoubtedly in thick cascades of lava flows on her pillow, a fleshy, maternal image, a drunk, steaming, woman-shaped stain; or my brother, fifteen or sixteen years old, half man, half child, squeezing his way between her thighs, letting his arse be grasped by her fists and fastening on her nipples.

I try to suppress the image. I can’t bear its incestuous reticence, the more or less obscene idyll that my imagination makes of it: she putting him to her breast like a son and he shooting his come into her like a lover, and then arising from her tissues unmanned: a worm, an emptied father, melted Icarus, who had penetrated too close to the primordial formlessness of the female.

He liked showing off his body, to me too, in his room, after swimming or rowing, while he apparently casually admired himself in the mirror but equally relished my own, not even hidden adoration.

Women don’t have a body, Rachida child. We are walking yolk sacs that, as if by a miracle, push male bodies out of our tissues, imbued with an almost mathematical clarity, a Euclidean perfection, satiated in every fibre with directness and sharp concentration — while I, I am the sea, and you too and all women. Sandbanks on which sons and lovers are shipwrecked. Strips of mud of the kind that a man can only release himself from by leaving one of his boots behind.

My brother on the other hand was my demigod, fortuitously produced by, I felt to their own consternation, an accidentally passionate copulation of a rich French farmer’s daughter and a quite wealthy Flemish dealer in copperware, basic kitchen utensils, matches and handmade nails.

He had straw-blond hair when he was young, in thick, almost chiselled curls. He had eyes of a blue you would have thought impossible, and blond lashes, and from about the age of fifteen the endearing beginnings of a moustache, a milk-white nimbus on his upper lip.

I saw how my mother silently idolized him. She could look at him as he ate, played a bored tune on the piano or sat reading, with a satisfaction not entirely devoid of sensuality. I saw how she concluded with satisfaction that he had a good character, that a balanced young man seemed to be slowly emerging from his puppy fat, of more than average intelligence, and socially with enough suppleness to ensure him an interesting bride sooner or later — an expectation she never relinquished and which over the years went stale in her breast and became a resigned disappointment.

When he was a young man, the plus fours and sweaters with their deep V-necks, the sporting style that came across from England after the war, seemed to have been waiting for his limbs. We were no longer swathed in the dark clothes of those who had brought us up, suiting their sombre and cluttered interiors, with their rigid timetables and clockwork habits. We wore white, childish white. We were mad about light-footed patterns in pastel shades on light materials, the christening clothes of a new age. Their loose cut seemed perfectly suited to trips in the car, which freed us from the rectilinear railway and allowed us to follow meandering routes through a land that was licking its wounds.

“It sounds dreadful,” I said to him one day. “But actually the war is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

We were sitting upstairs in this room by the window. Our chairs were more or less opposite each other, in the bay window. My daughter, whose godfather he was, was playing at our feet with her blocks, and as usual it annoyed me that she never built towers with them, but, as an omen of the cobalt-blue hatred she would later arouse in me, arranged them with the same coloured side upward in boring squares on the parquet floor.

He leant over slightly and brought his lips close to my ear. “Do you know what, my little gazelle?” he whispered. “Me too.”

WHEN HE HAD to take me out for a walk, he was generally a lot less fastidious in his choice of routes than my father. Our walks took us through more neighbourhoods and districts than usual: areas where in street after street one parade of introverted gables followed another. Our town was a spongy tissue of alleys and passages, little squares, shady steps under footbridges over which monks must have once glided from one quadrangle to another, or bridges under which dawdled the water of the two rivers, which did not so much converge as fall asleep in each other’s arms in our town. You could easily wander its passageways for half a day, crossing the world every square kilometre, and lose all sense of direction. Most of those quarters were linked by a few streets to the rest of the town, which seemed to have been washed in loose fragments on the islets between the countless branches of the river.

We liked to leave our route to chance. I think my brother also liked imagining himself detached from all context as we walked through the streets, over the cobbles, gleaming with precipitation, under roof lines that were lost in the clouds, while we listened to the cadence of our heels on the stones, turned into an alley at random here, retraced our steps there to take a different route. Often we were the only living souls who seemed to venture outside.

Sometimes a gothic gateway detached itself from the fog, an arch crowned by cornucopias in clay or flamboyant stones. Elsewhere, squeezed in between two houses, the remains of a buttress suggested the existence, once, of a chapel or a church, the house of worship of an ancient guild or monastic order, swept away by the Iconoclastic Fury or the Revolution, or simply by a fallen candelabra. Although we never pointed out to each other what struck us, I knew that my brother looked at those fragments as I did; and I also think, looking back, that not only for me but also for him they were much more than purely arbitrary wanderings, but were definitions of space — our own space.

In the shadow of the huge chimneys that towered above the factory buildings round the new harbour, we could imagine ourselves travellers through a forest of prehistoric trees, or, according to our whim, suddenly surrounded by a Forum Romanum that had set down its rows of columns amid our northern step gables and saddle roofs. In the courtyards at the foot of those high, cavernous structures there was always more life to be detected, summer or winter, wet or dry, than in the better districts near the heart of town. The closer you came to the squares and parks of the centre, the more reserved and aware of their façades the buildings became — while on the threshold of those hovels on the outskirts of town, resting more against each other than on their foundations, there were always children under the nodding rooflines and gouty walls playing with a top or bobbin, or crouched together whispering like guinea pigs in an open doorway, from where the smell of boiling potatoes or buttermilk floated into the street.

Through those areas, where my father would never have ventured with me, even when they were quiet and deserted, a restlessness also roamed that I can only describe as tentacular: the rustle of antennae, jaw segments or legs that you could listen to on calm days around large anthills in pine woods.

Here a kind of humanity survived that “our kind” regarded as a more or less amorphous mass, useful as a worker-ant colony, feared as a potential cause of pandemonium: the army of insects that had far too many children and fortunately buried most of them almost immediately afterwards. In the mornings swallowed up by the factory gates at the crack of dawn, and there, behind those walls, beneath the chimneys and their crowns of smoke, they knotted thread to thread, crept between the equally insect-like rattling spinning machines and looms, and in the evenings got drunk, fought out disputes and settled feuds. But in the dark it still provided our fathers and brothers and sons with their share of tarts, and in daylight it supplied our households with linen maids, kitchen maids and laundry maids, and maids of all work — at least if they could be extricated early from the those alleyways, preferably as children, before the dirt had penetrated their soul, or before socialists and other rabble had filled them with too much knowledge and hunger, especially hunger.