Erwin Mortier: While the Gods Were Sleeping

Perhaps she takes the time to have a longer look at my strokes and my scrawl, the calligraphy of my intoxication or my irritation, set down at the time when my daughter was still a babe in arms and demanded all my waking hours, sucked my life dry, my existence — and the haste and the furious pleasure with which in a nocturnal half-hour I could let the ink splash raw from my pen for a moment like fountains of milk that welled up from my nipples the moment the little mite so much as stirred.

“Massage my feet, Rachida,” I ask, “Would you? Knead my soles with your thumbs to get my lazy blood flowing again. You have soft hands, soft and adept. You know that I don’t want to ask the other one, she always leaves me crippled, in worse agony than I’m already in.”

I’m glad at the natural pride she exudes. When she kneels down by the pouf on which my legs are resting, she gives off no air of servility, no subcutaneous arrogance which is usually the sour face of humility. A sovereign intentness flows from her fingers over my shins, my instep and my toes. Sometimes, with my ankles in her hands, she can look up and run her eyes over my calves and thighs, over my pelvis, my belly and breast. She can look me in the eyes with an almost amorous concentration and seems to peel the years away from me. Her look is the look of a woman. We understand each other. Under the eye of the woman every man becomes a little boy with a pop gun. Their love is so childlike.

Sometimes I see her looking at the exercise book resting in my lap, the fig leaf with writing on. For a second an embarrassed smile crosses her face, perhaps because my scribbles remind her involuntarily of pubic hair, the pubic hair that a child would draw, if we were to ask children something like that, just as we ask them:

draw a sun for me,

a house,

a tree,

a soldier, a horse.

From the moment she lays the board on my lap and opens the notebook, the delight of a child who sees the tin of chalks or watercolours being taken out of the cupboard wells up in me. The euphoria and expectation, the same earnest pleasure with which a child, the tip of its tongue between its half-opened lips, draws lines, recreates things, repeats the millennia-old ritual of the hunter summoning up the spirit of his prey on the wall of a cave. The world seems to be paying court to me: write me out, duplicate me. Trace my air strata, my earth strata, my cloaks and my sick memory, and all the gradations between being and non-being that only a human, the most excessive creature that crawled up from my slime, can bring to life.

If she were to wonder why I have never added a volume to the library room next door, when there were still books in there, I should probably reply: one must wait until one is dead before letting go of one’s writings. But that would be a lie, or at least an excuse. People who write are sneaky. You claim a space alongside time. A place where you can sit chuckling to yourself, that is what those who write want to hollow out for themselves, a room at the back. So be consistent, I think then, and wait until you’re dead.

I have finally got rid of all my books. I realized my childhood dream and gave away the whole library, boxes at a time. I don’t know where all those volumes are now. All I’ve kept are the exercise books. Shakespeare was allowed to stay too, out of a sense of duty. Like St Augustine, because of his nailed-shut doubt, very amusing. And Yoga for Your Dog and a few similar titles: titles that my husband brought back from his travels, or that friends have given me as presents because like him they knew that I’m crazy about absurd literature. I love the inexhaustible energy with which someone documents themselves for decades before leaving as a testament a Concise History of the Corset . I don’t make fun of them. To each his own monsters.

I have also kept the dictionaries. Not to find there, as in a herbarium, the arid pleasure I could experience in dictionaries as a girl, when their columns stretched out before my eyes as if they were gunpowder magazines. From their racks I stole the ammunition for the bursts of buckshot that I let loose on the world. Now I read dictionaries because they’ve gradually become the only novels I still like.

Daily I absorb a few pages, my way of reading a breviary. I mumble what I read aloud, the rows of words ordered from A to Z that are not able to gloss over their stupid coincidental nature. Word upon word, an eye for a tooth.

I run my finger over the page down the entries. Each word resounds like a cry for help, clawing up from the page like a drowning man’s hand; and see how the words, the other words, the ant words, the soldier words, rush to help that dying word, to support it with their lances, throwing rescue ropes towards it, hauling it ashore and forming behind it like a praetorian guard.

Morning roll-call for definition.

Salute the Flag.

Azalea and Azimuth.

The tumult of meaning bursts out from under my fingers.

For years I haven’t been able to listen to what people said. I heard them speaking, but I couldn’t listen. Everything sounded equally insignificant, charming and light-footed as the notes of songbirds in March on the first warm days. I couldn’t bring myself to speak, to chat, not in the restaurants and the cafés where we gathered, my brother, my husband, myself, the others. I submerged myself in the bustle. I let the surf of the hubbub wash over me. I looked around, took in the chandeliers, the fug of tobacco, the velour draught curtains, the palms in brass pots, the nodding ladies’ hats, the waiters with their aprons and the routine way they arranged cutlery on the table or cleared plates, carved roast meat, uncorked bottles, the choreography of the habitual cycles. And I thought: they’re like migrating birds. Landing after the great crossing, the survivors shake the dust out of their feathers and twitter melodies of relief.

When I read Proust for the first time after the war, it made me almost sick to my stomach. I didn’t hear time, great dead time roaring through his sentences — his Loire sentences, his Mississippi sentences, his grammatical River Congos and syntactic Nile deltas, pregnant with sediment.

I heard ambulances wailing,

the wheels of hospital beds scooting over uneven floor tiles,

the hurried steps of stretcher-bearers,

and tinkling scalpels and surgical clamps,

and the bunches of keys on the sisters’ belts,

and the hiss of sterilizers,

the calling and long-drawn-out groaning in the largest field hospital in literature,

where the great healer covers bones with periosteal membrane,

injects cavities with pulsing blood-red marrow,

and forces cartilage between joints, and attaches muscles to tendons,

and covers them with arteries and main arteries,

and folds up intestines in the hole in an abdomen,

and places the liver on top,

and moulds fat on it,

and connecting tissue, layers of skin;

dermis,

epidermis,

epithelium

— just put the lashes in the eyelid, sister,

with the tweezers.

For a long time I couldn’t put a sensible word on paper, furious as I was, a great sulking child that pressed its lips together and with a flushed face full of reproach gaped at the world in the hope of making an idiotic impression. Until I realized that writing is the only way of answering the world back with silence. Does each act of speaking then imply deep contempt?

Don’t look so worried, Rachida. I really do still have all my marbles. Speak French to me again. I like your French, it acquires ochre tints when you talk, whereas my mother’s sounded ceramic, not dull and not full.

I can deal better and better with sometimes hearing her voice unexpectedly and suddenly, in a flash, seeing an image of her, as she was, at about thirty-five. The moment of stasis on Sundays when she was completely made up to go strolling in the park and before she left the house, with her regal quantities of fur; the feathers in her hat and her parasol paused for a second in the hall and looked at my father to check that everything was in order.