Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

I had put one hand on his back in astonishment, while he kept the other wedged against the wall, with his palm over mine. The only other man to whom I had been so physically close until then was my father, when I was a child, during the afternoons at the seaside, when he wanted to protect me from the waves or a biting wind, but my father had cherished me. His body had never hungered or sought for anything,

There was something childlike about him. I moved my hand from his back to the nape of his neck and stroked the back of his head.

He was trying not to kiss.

Just standing there.

Stroking my cheek with his.

I smelt his smell, which condensed on the wall behind us and in the hair on my neck.

Then he let go of me and went downstairs. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and it sounded as if he had a frog in his throat.

I heard him stop on the landing. The rest of the party must have reached the ground floor by now as the stumbling faded away.

“ I’m sorry ,” he stammered again when I had caught up with him. “So sorry. I didn’t mean to, Miss, I mean madame… mademoiselle.”

I sought his hand in the dark. “It’s all right,” I said.

WE HAD LEFT the summer before on 28 June, early in the morning, in splendid weather, the beginning of a Sunday like a generous almsgiving. In accordance with the annual custom my mother, together with Emilie, had filled all kinds of cabin trunks and suitcases weeks in advance. A stream of luggage had gone on ahead and the day after our arrival a second stream would follow us, besides what we took with us on the day itself. My mother was not someone who went on trips, she moved as it were with atmosphere and all. Once the first stream of cases was delivered, the maids in my uncle’s house, who after the death of the matriarch were in charge of business matters, would unpack our clothes, put our sheets on the beds and store our table linen in the chests of drawers in the guest quarters, so that as soon as we ourselves arrived she could move into a world governed by her familiar natural laws.

She had looked breathtaking that morning. She had been in a good humour for weeks. In the months before our departure her menstruation pains had subsided from rancorous symphonies to string quartets full of rainy melancholy. It was no longer unknown territory to me. Just over a year previously I myself had started bleeding, very late according to her, but nevertheless in synch with budding nature and the mid-Lent fair. I still attribute it to the roundabouts. Their centrifugal forces unleashed my chemistry, opened the polonaise of the molecules. My mother had reacted with a strange tenderness. She immediately put me to bed for three days. Perhaps she secretly hoped that I would join her monthly revolt, but did not turn into a monument of irritability, until later after the birth of my daughter.

I myself had thought the business at times stupid and at other times a melancholy premonition of death. I leaked periodically like a draughty sow. I felt mushy, overripe, a sack of rust-coloured blood which was torn somewhere. My body was no longer a body, it had become a carcass. I cried easily. I was suddenly a sentimental booby, and I was annoyed with myself.

Emilie came to my room every morning to fill the water jug. “From now on, mamzel,” she said the first time, “you’ll have to put up with that misery every four weeks.” She called it “ministrations”. I think it was a bastardized form of “menstruation”. She had spoken the word in a tone that betrayed complicity. We were now clearly sisters.

My mother too had come and sat two or three times a day on the edge of my bed, taken my book out of my hands to be able to stroke my cheeks unimpeded and look me in the eye with a beatific pity that I had never suspected in her and distrusted, since in my view it contained an implicit form of triumph, as if she were rubbing it in: “You see. You too. Look at you there, with all your castles in the air. Look at woman, shackled to her treacherous body.” But of course she had said something completely different: “The fresh air will do you good, my child.”

She had called the approaching holiday “our last summer”. My brother had left school at Easter. After the hot months he would start work in my father’s warehouses, to gain experience and, my parents hoped, to acquire a taste for bourgeois life before he had to do his military service. As far as I was concerned, she felt that I had spent long enough under the skirts of the nuns to be able to behave like a well-brought-up young lady, knew sufficient foreign languages to say my piece everywhere, and though my French conjugations and sewing left something to be desired, my periods had made it clear that I had entered irreversibly the phase of life in which, as she put it with some aplomb, “a woman becomes a woman”.

She was crazy about circular reasoning, trains of thought that by way of conclusion wound up at their starting point. The tension there has always been between us was based on a fundamental difference in the way our souls were constructed. Ideas for my mother were a kind of lid, her medium was tautology, while the engine of my own mind is driven by the hydraulics of paradox, in which thought, how shall I say, can release its excess pressure — more or less as a steam machine is equipped with valves with which it can discharge to prevent it being destroyed by its own power. And when I think back to our departure, it would be nonsense to try to convince you or myself that, hidden behind the easy-going bustle of that glorious morning, I suspected the crash of the whole machinery that kept our world in existence, the fatal forces that were piling up, so that the whole system of communicating balances was imperceptibly at the point of exploding. I would be doing violence to the truth and above all be seeing the outbreak of the misery that was to hold us hostage for four years as a natural given: some physiological phenomenon or other, like a sneezing fit or a fart, unique to the organism of time or history, and it was not. It was a stupidity such as only our species can commit.

*

The town lay under a dome of azure, and in my memory smells of soap and caustic soda. The evening before our joyeuse sortie , Emilie had quickly washed the hall, so that when the front door opened the sunlight seemed to slip on the gleaming floor tiles. We had had breakfast and I had waited downstairs until my mother descended the staircase in full regalia, followed by Emilie lugging a set of bags, and bringing up the rear my brother, with a pile of hurriedly grabbed books in his arms, because just before we left he invariably had an attack of hunger for print and felt he should make use of the summer months to brush up his reading.

The coach was brought round to the front of the house. Tatante, my father’s sister, had walked through the front garden, the tails of her long, wide summer coat waving behind her, and in the hall had said hello to my mother, who had meanwhile crowned her own proliferation of ribbons and gloves with a formidable sunhat, even more imposing than her sister-in-law’s. The kisses with which they had welcomed each other hung in limbo somewhere under the broad brims of their hats. It reminded me of the greeting of the Holy Virgin by her cousin Elizabeth, as you can see in late-medieval or early-Renaissance paintings: two tall female figures bending towards each other, but at the same time keeping their heads some distance apart — so as not to crease their haloes.

My father had stood looking on, with that eternal half smile on his lips, and my brother had provided a little apotheosis by dropping all his books at the bottom of the stairs and unexpectedly letting loose a violent oath, which under other circumstances would have made my mother sway like a standing lamp that had been nudged by a brush handle, but she had turned round, looked at the books on the floor, and then at my brother and giggled sarcastically: “A good start, mon ami . It’s sealed with God’s name!”