Erwin Mortier: While the Gods Were Sleeping

She fell silent, looked down and drank a mouthful of tea.

I had no answer, at the time.

She was a born poetess.

IT STRIKES ME that Rachida likes scouring or mopping downstairs while I am working upstairs, and a definite sisterly relationship is created between us as she clenches the brush in her fists. I should like to be able to send the pen in my fingers as easily across the paper as she sends her mop across the tiles — the gentle dragging calms me and smoothes my senses.

Except that she washes dirt away and wipes out traces. While I stain the paper with the staggering gait of a drunkard, my ecstasy of ink, she leaves things in their nakedness. She brings the blissful mongoloid smile of the world to the surface, the grinning, gleaming-wet Zen of dumb objects, the names of which she blows off like chaff. And I think: I shall never be able to reduce everything there is to such unrestrained silence in the word, the great night is better than 10,000 months.

“Did you say something, Mrs Helena? Did you call, do you need anything?”

She doesn’t whistle in the hall, like the other one, that standing stone, after she has plumped me down on the toilet like a bag of bones in the hope that it will make my bladder empty faster.

Rachida makes tea and fills the thermos. She checks whether my pens need ink and whether the side tables are close enough to the chair. She will soon leave me there until she returns in the afternoon to heat the food.

“We have angels too,” she says as she combs my hair and seems to be looking more at my hair than at me. She brushes my sparse locks up without her eye catching the mug with its mummy’s grin that laughs at me every morning in the bathroom mirror with my own yellowed teeth. That carcass that, ridiculously, still houses the lust of a girl and, at the sight of the window-cleaners in their cradle at the windows, still sneaks a look at their crotches like a teenager looks at a lolly.

“The same angels as you. Gabriel,” she says. “He’s your angel too, isn’t he?”

She does my nails, looks in the drawer of the dressing table to see what earrings match my blouse. She doesn’t find it too much to ask to hang a few carats of innocent dignity around my scraggy neck every day — unlike “her colleague”. That bloated cow would probably most like to smother me between her tits.

“Christine,” she laughs. “Her name is Christine.”

“She’s not an angel,” I say. “You are. But without wings.”

“The boss won’t let me. Too many feathers. I hang them up in my cupboard when I have to work, Mrs Helena.”

I’m glad that she’s laughing, that she takes me from my bed to my chair as if she is leading me onto the dance floor, that I can place my fingers in hers and put my feet in the spot where she has put hers.

She lowers me carefully into my chair.

She asks whether it is close enough to the window.

She lays my feet on the pouf.

She wraps my feet in an extra blanket.

Am I sitting comfortably?

Don’t I need an extra cushion behind my hips?

“I’ve poured the tea in the thermos, Mrs Helena. Would you like the paper first?”

When I shake my head she lays the board on my lap and says that there is enough ink in the pens.

Although she asks whether I’m feeling cold, as she asks she has already knelt down beside me. She rubs my fingers warm until they tingle. I’m glad she understands, understands so much, that she doesn’t overwhelm me with favours for which I first have to beg and that her gestures and grimaces do not spell out to me the thousands of connotations of the word parasite. As you get older you automatically calculate in nanograms and micrometres. You weigh friendship like gold dust on tiny scales and the merest grain of sand embodies the grossest humiliation.

She gets up. Looks down at me with satisfaction.

“They and the Spirit ascend to Him, on a Day whose length is 50,000 years.’

“What was that, Mrs Helena?”

“Nothing, child. Something about your angels…”

She always makes sure there is an extra notebook to hand, so that I have to get up as little as possible from my chair before noon. She never sighs when I ask: “Can you fetch me the red exercise book, and put the green one back on the shelf, if you would?” She will never chuckle sarcastically like the other one, that half gorilla, who in the evening grabs the exercise book out of my numb hands with a vicious grimace, flicks the pages through her fingers and shakes her head with a snigger. Then I brace myself for the umpteenth question, the umpteenth sneer — do I really have so many secrets that I have to write them all down before I kick the bucket, and can’t she put the ones on the top shelf into boxes? They’re gathering dust and you never reread them anyway.

I say to Rachida alone: “When I’m dead, take them with you and distribute them. Make sure the other one doesn’t get her hands on them, she’ll only take them to the dump, the rodent. When you distribute them: read them or don’t read them, and if you don’t read them, pass them on. Don’t say who I was, that isn’t of the slightest importance. I swear by my pen and what the angels dictate to me.”

She always seems pleased, childishly pleased, whenever I manage to fill one of the notebooks and she can put it in the cupboard. When I ask her to fetch a few of the old exercise books for me—“Take some from the top shelf, at the back, with the split bindings,” I say — she first goes over them with a dry cloth, places them in two measured piles on my board and opens the top one for me.

Then, standing by my chair for a moment, she can sometimes look down at the board and the old exercise book, the yellowed pages, and my very young handwriting, with her hands on the waist of her apron and the duster in her hand, as if glancing into a cradle or a sarcophagus, with the same compassion and tenderness that we reserve for the dead and newborn infants.

“Do you still remember writing all that down, Mrs Helena?” she asks cheerfully, always cheerful. Sometimes it is as if, through my fragile, almost transparent bones, she is addressing the child with the broad-brimmed straw hat and the long ribbons in her collar, skipping over the gaps in the paving stones holding her father’s hand — a game I invented myself to dispel the monotony of our walks.

I shake my head.

I never reread myself. Never ever. Never.

I open those exercise books to establish whether I have vanished sufficiently from the lines, faded with the walnut ink bleached by the years, and whether I have gradually become alien enough to find myself unreadable, reduced to score marks that I survey rather than read, as you study a painter’s brush strokes.

I follow the cadence of my handwriting and search for the silly lust, congealed in letters, of the girl I must have once been, the child who on the threshold of her adolescence pulled her writing as tight as the thin leather laces with which she tied her bootees — how she forced the flesh of the words into the whalebone of syntax, until her own flesh was full of wheals and she longed to break out! The lust of the flagellant and the libertine is equally insatiable. Lashes and love bites wound and soothe in equal measure. And no one, I say, Rachida, no one can ever escape from the almighty god of grammar.

She goes without shaking her head in disapproval, the angel. She knows when I am addressing her for her own sake and when I am focusing on her impersonal presence, which for me is another word for our soul. I’m glad that she senses when she must leave me alone, and that she lets me sleep when she brings me soup or fresh tea and finds me dozing off. She leaves the pen in my hand but puts the top on loosely to stop the nib drying out. Or she gives the glasses that have slipped out of my hands a polish and lays them on the board with their arms open.