Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

We had scarcely come to a halt in the inner courtyard when screaming children surged round the coach, and laughed or peered at us with shy grins, while the oldest, slightly more reserved, looked on in the background and nodded to us. They were the children of the many servants and maids who lived in smaller farmhouses all over the estate of my mother’s family and also worked in the stables and barns around the house where we were to stay for the next few weeks. My relations had long since stopped working the land themselves, except sporadically, during the harvest when they were always short of labour; but basically my uncle, who had watched our arrival from a distance, was mainly a businessman.

After he had made his way through the pack of children and first helped my mother alight, I saw, as they greeted each other with two kisses, that her eye lingered for an instant on the luxuriant hairdo on his head, his beautiful grey and white mane, always a little dishevelled, which invariably seemed to remind her that there was something untamed, something wild in him.

“Marianne…” he said between the first and second kiss, and she responded with “Théo…”, with an intimacy that needed no further syllables and, certainly from her side, the resignation with which we can love members of our family deeply without liking everything about them.

I myself was very fond of him, and precisely because of his indifference to all kinds of conventions, which my mother attributed to a touch of bad blood on her father’s side, a few drops of which, she feared, had found their way into my veins.

“I see my little fortifying something for the journey was well received, Petit ,” he laughed, when he saw my brother getting off the coach in a fairly unstable manner.

“Splendid wine…” hiccupped Edgard. “Really!”

They shook hands, my uncle squeezed my brother’s shoulder and took his chin paternally between his thumb and forefinger. “I’m very pleased. Someone who takes the trouble to do my cellar the honour which is its due…”

They let go of each other, and I knew he would say my name now and for the umpteenth year in a row would exclaim that I just went on growing and that this summer he would definitely have to top me like a poplar, “because you know, dear niece, poplars start wobbling when young”.

One by one the servants came to greet us, hat in hand, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, slightly bent over the respectful distance maintained by their handshake, as if we were a delegation of diplomats, finally arrived at a foreign court — and it looked like that, too, within the enclave that protected the high walls of the stables and barns, the vegetable garden, the chicken enclosure, the orchard and the berry garden from the rest of the world: a microcosm with its own customs, most clearly embodied in the figures of my uncle’s wife and her older, unmarried sister, whom my brother, with my father’s irony, always, except when she was around, called “the inseparable shadow”. Now too, now they come out of the house, and look in turn at their lined slippers so as not to slip on the bluestone steps leading up to the front door; they both seem, in their light kimonos, with hair worn up and cheeks powdered all too extravagantly, to radiate a dim light. I hear the soft tinkle of the gold dangling from their ears, and as always it astonishes me, now we greet each other, how soft their skin, which has already lost much of its youthful springiness, feels beneath my lips — almost like the filling of a chocolate marshmallow, despite the thick layer of make-up which from afar gives their faces a cool, almost jade-like glow.

As a child I was intrigued by the isolated existence they lead within the walls of the house where my mother was born. The part of the residence occupied by them and my uncle is a suite of spacious rooms, divided from each other by wide double doors. The parquet on the floors nips in the bud with a dastardly creaking any attempt to sneak around in secret, so that I can never spy on them as if I’m not there while, in their intimate boudoir between the dining room and the drawing room, they let the large pages of the fashion magazines rustle through their fingers while exchanging little cries of glee. Everything is as subdued and padded as they are. In their ponderous dressing gowns, vaguely inspired by what they see in the fashion magazines, but apart from that largely modelled according to their eccentric tastes, they are very like giant silkworms, enclosed in a cocoon of extravagant textiles, without ever bothering to grow into butterflies.

Their boredom is of the superior kind. They spend the greater part of the day fixing each other’s clothing and coiffure, followed by a whole disrobing ritual when they prepare to retire in the evening, so that besides silkworms, they are also reminiscent of some tropical plant which spends all its energy on a flowering which is not only as rich as it is short-lived, but is also particularly punctual — on a certain day and a certain number of full moons after the equinox, and only during the brief period when the sun is directly above the earth, or some such thing, since my aunt and her sister were actually not occupied with changing their clothes and fixing their hair in the afternoons.

The kimonos they were wearing that evening as they tripped towards us in their slippers had the kind of frills that my mother rather disapprovingly called “undressed dress”, and to make matters worse the two sisters hailed from Tourcoing — the very way my mother pronounced that place name betrayed the fact that it would have been better if fate had had you born elsewhere. “Tourcoing!” she could sometimes conclude, as if the word itself were sufficient condemnation.

After the sisters had joined us at table under the beech tree, where my uncle had prepared a small evening meal, they pressed cloths smelling of lemon verbena oil to their delicate ankles, to keep off the mosquitoes that buzzed high above our heads in the last warmth.

My uncle was meanwhile discussing “that incident” and whether it would have consequences.

“A lot of fuss is what we’re going to have,” exclaimed my brother, who had not denied himself the umpteenth glass of wine.

“Doubtless,” replied my uncle. “But where? As long as they’re at each other’s throats in the east, to be honest, I’m not going to lose any sleep.”

“If you have any fuss, comrade, it’ll be with me,” interrupted my mother. “That’s your last glass. Understood?”

“ Oui, mon capitaine! ” cried Edgard, making a clumsy salute.

“Leave him be,” soothed my uncle, and to my mother: “If you’d like to go to bed, dear, your room is ready. I’ll keep an eye on them…”

“That’s very reassuring…” she replied, and no one could fail to hear the sarcasm in her voice, but nevertheless she got up, tugged my brother’s blond quiff by way of a good night kiss, whispered, “Brigand…”, gave me and my uncle a pat on the shoulder and withdrew into the house.

A little later the light of a paraffin lamp flickered at one of the upstairs windows. Only downstairs was there electricity, but not even there in every room, only in those where the sisters and my uncle spent a lot of time.

“Cigar, Edgard?…” he asked conspiratorially.

“Oh, why not?” replied my brother nonchalantly, stretching in his chair.

My uncle retrieved a small cigar-holder from his inside pocket, snapped it open and offered it gallantly first to my brother then to me.

I declined. I always found his fixed intention, carried out each year with varying success, to teach us a few of the vices that add spice to life, as he put it, sufficient unto itself. The sins one doesn’t taste keep their aroma longest.