Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

Madeleine came closer and held the candlestick above Amélie’s body while my mother undid the shawl further, pulling it slowly free of the locks of hair and the congealed blood. Madame Bonnard spread her daughter’s clothes out on the table, the Communion dress, the white stockings, the white mules, the mother-of-pearl rosary and the shiny gloves, and more clearly than before used her back as a shield between her and my mother — I could see from her whole attitude that she was doing her best to think of something else. Of anything, but not of her child behind her back, of the bloody shawl that was lying openly on the slab, or the water in the basin that was going redder and redder whenever she dipped the cotton cloth with which she was washing the head in it and wrung it out. We were silent, the candle flame hissed, the water sloshed in the basin.

“Help me a moment, Hélène.” I went over to her. My mother gripped my hand, with her other hand lifted up Amélie’s head and slid my hand underneath. The head was cold, cold as the stone on which it had been resting. On my fingers I could feel the loose piece of Amélie’s skull give way under the pressure of my palm, and it was as if the lifelessness, the deadness, death itself, its chilly nothingness, its festival of freezing, its greedy congealing, transferred itself to my fingers from that head, which was obviously no longer the head of Amélie Bonnard who two or three hours before had been hopping through the grass, but the head of a dead person, which lay in my hand like the curve of a cracked jug.

I shivered. My mother said later: “That was fear, my child. You’re as frightened of death as anyone else. Don’t fool yourself.” But at the moment itself she had said nothing. She had simply stopped her work. With the roll of bandage in her hands that she had wound around Amélie’s head from her neck, she had looked up at me. A few strands had come loose from her hair, which she wore up in a bun; they were hanging in front of her eyes, which fixed me for a couple of seconds — a look that could always do more than a thousand slaps or reproaches and needed no syllables to make itself understood: “Don’t dream of having a fainting fit or even being sick.” I looked away. She pulled the bandage further round Amélie’s head. “We’ve got to hurry,” she said quietly. She meant that the body was starting to go stiff. Amélie’s head seemed to be screwed to her neck, her lips pressed together more firmly than before, narrowed to a red-blue strip on that under-the-breath body. All the dead mumble.

There was a knock. Madeleine put down the candle and went to the door, which she opened a fraction. “Véclin,” she growled. She had a vocabulary of basalt, and language that resounded from her weathered wooden body like the rattle of stones in a tin. “Tell him to wait,” said my mother. “We’re not finished yet. Send him upstairs. My brother can give him something to drink.” Madeleine mumbled something and pushed the door shut again. My mother turned round, put her hands on Madame Bonnard’s shoulders. “We’ve finished, Marie. We can dress her. Come on, turn round. You can stay here tonight, I’ll have them get a room ready.”

Obscene is the word that I repeat. Obscene the sight of Amélie Bonnard, at noon still a child who probably put her hair behind her ears in front of the mirror before smearing her mother’s rouge on her face, by evening a dead child-woman in a wedding dress. Her shoes seemed not to fit, to be too loose around her heels, the gloves too precious, the rosary too pathetic, the veil that we had drawn over her head and the bandage too ethereal in the light of the candle. We stood at her feet. My mother took off the apron that she had worn the whole time, straightened her shoulders and gave a sigh that was like a suppressed sob. There was another knock at the door. Véclin. My mother indicated with her eyes that it would be best for us to go now. Monsieur Véclin came in, cap in hand, servilely nodding greetings; next to my mother he suddenly seemed to shrink. We left him with Madame Bonnard.

I walked ahead of my mother and the maid Madeleine, towards the steps at the end of the cellar passageway. I heard my mother say: “Keep an eye on things, Madeleine. If he dares charge for so much as one plank of ours, I’ll knock his brains out with his own hammer.”

THE EVENING FELL, the day dawned. Madame Bonnard kept vigil in the cellar with her dead daughter. Sometimes people came to pay their respects, but as the morning wore on it became quiet. My mother bent over the tub with the maid, Madeleine, and washed the blood out of little Amélie’s clothes, the child had wet herself as she died.

“Do go and sit in the shade,” she called to me. “It’s far too hot, Hélène. You’ll be getting heatstroke next.”

Noon was approaching. The sun heated the inner courtyard and forged it into the sacrificial dish for the cult of its stasis at the zenith.

Only animals could look the afternoon straight in the eye, blind to what it had melted, deaf to the deathly quiet tumult of things that the middle of the day unleashed and that in my ears sounded louder than the roar of cannon on the horizon, that increasingly was only heard when it subsided. The afternoon exposed the world’s nakedness; it showed its arse, the obscene — the word continues to haunt me — grimace of its blunt indifference. It tapped in the joins in the stones, it rustled on lizards’ feet over the vines of the ivy against the side of the house behind my back.

Doves cooed, claimed silence for themselves, the din seemed to fall silent. In the cellar Amélie Bonnard, who hour after hour merged more with her own dead self, drew the darkness towards her and dissolved in the amniotic fluid of the great nothingness, however white she was in her robe, however palely she might lie there under her veil of lace blossoms.

“When death comes,” I say to Rachida, “I’ll stretch out my arms to him and he will find me as you left me, with hair brushed and a necklace on.”

“He’ll want to dance with you, Mrs Helena,” she laughs.

It is she who takes me from the chair to the bed, lifts me up for a second with her arms under my armpits to let me rest on the mattress, and takes my legs by the ankles and lays them on the sheet, and then plumps up the pillows and arranges them behind my hips and back — and finally closes the curtains. I don’t like the afternoons any more, not like I used to.

“Have a good nap,” she whispers, and goes downstairs into the kitchen. Perhaps she rests on a chair in the back garden, and lowers the long, wide trousers to show the sun her knees and lights up a cigarette — the small sins she allows herself in silence, beneath the leaden grin of the devil of the afternoon.

In hidden spots, on the side of the house, somewhat camouflaged, I tried to absorb the heat and stay so quiet that the lizards, which always shot away into the wide gaps between the bluestone paving slabs, would overcome their fear and crawl out of their crevices, first sticking their emerald heads above the shadow of their accommodation and then, in the twinkling of an eye, re-emerging in a flash from their hiding places and coming to a halt before my eyes on the boiling stone.

The indifference of those tiny reptiles could make me jealous. Their divine inertia was like an elixir whose occult formulas I just couldn’t crack in my own fibre. I was only a postulant, there was too much rodent left in me, too much mouse-grey industriousness for me to be able to embrace the strict doctrine of motionlessness — and if I lower myself in my former shape, there on the bluestone in that afternoon, then I find in the motionlessness I was trying to achieve the core around which, in the years since, has grown the bittersweet flesh of the being that I was to become despite myself: a creature with a soul without warmth that wants to sleep without budging on a hot stone in the long afternoon of history, unaffected by horrors or glories. I wanted to shake off tissue that had worn out, slough off layers of dead skin, shed my skin in sentences so as never to have to resign myself to a definitive form — hungry for the ability of those lizards, which could leave their tail behind in the mouth of a predator. So don’t think that this thrashing lump of language on your tongue betrays anything at all of the true beast.