Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

I’ve long since forgotten their names, if I ever retained them. They seemed to me completely interchangeable. After the death of my husband I could never watch their flirting without feeling my stomach turning. The very thought that my brother could put their bodies to his lips, in passing steal something of them the way he casually plucked a grape from one of the fruit bowls in the house — while the sense of loss seethed in my bones, an ice-cold knife carved runes of mourning into the flesh of my belly, and there was so little in my growing daughter that recalled her father that I made her atone for it all her life.

With the years I have grown more tolerant. I think that he sought that youth and those bodies because their vocabulary could bring him consolation, a better translation as it were of his silences — and even if he was driven by an extremely childish desire, not so much to possess the other as to be the other, so what? Perhaps in each of those bodies he mastered a language I have never learnt, each time he sought a handful of synonyms, a metaphor of flesh and blood in which, however fleetingly, he felt his own being expressed, if not embodied.

I wish that he were still alive, that I could sit with him on the balcony, surrounded by those boys like playful cats on the cushions of his sofa. Then I would observe how he listens to me, with bored pleasure, with or without gleams of sarcasm in his eyes. I would keep an eye on the moustache on his top lip, to see whether the corners of his mouth remain stationary, whether the moustache moves left or right with his pouting lips in a grimace that expresses scepticism. I wonder whether he did not time and time again seek that moment of fear, the gulf of angst, excitement or icy fever that opens up in the first embrace with a stranger — the strangeness and the familiarity of a body that is animated in every fibre by a totally different spirit, houses different stories, different dreams. I try to imagine the twists and turns and intertwinings of the bodies of those rascals round his, the bony frame of that farmer’s son in one of those photos, for example. The grip of those arms, the mouth that at first resists, then opens: who gives, who takes, who drinks and allows himself to be drunk — and with each caress, bite, sigh, cry what bewilderment must have tingled through his own limbs? The rapture, the hunger, the thirst that flowed through so many embraces in those years, on both sides of the lines. All those intertwinings, forbidden or not, lewd or not, for payment or not, that makes no difference. The invisible battlefield, I mean, where a reverse war took place — the mixing, the consecration: take, eat; this is my body.

I see him giggling; I’m sinning against my mother’s ban on making the dead speak. He sighs: “You’ve always liked dressing up your concerns in other people’s clothes, my little gazelle. For you the world is a blank sheet that you scribble full to your heart’s content. But when the wind of history gets up a person can set their sail in the hope of being spared or perhaps taking advantage of chance. He can try walking into the storm or look for a hiding place. Who will eventually be left standing and who will be crushed under the wheels of the Moloch, no one knows, not even our dear Lord. We are mice running in the treadmill of fate and we can either take the pace or not. No sonnet ever changed the course of history. The world is the world.”

They were childish, the excursions we undertook after the war, he and I, and my husband, and anyone who wanted to accompany us, during the annual return to my uncle’s house, the final destination of our ostensibly carefree trip. We took our time, chose a meandering route and picnicked on the way. When we sat on the blanket and looked out over the hills, with the hamper in the grass, the cutlery, the fine plates, the ice bucket and the pâté, we regarded ourselves as freebooters, but we were aglow with a youth that could be little more than an anachronism. We looked like a medical team enjoying itself on its day off. We were wearing shrouds or doctors’ coats, textiles on which the slightest impurity was immediately apparent. We seemed to want to show the spotless aura of our bathrooms, which in those days were less and less sumptuous annexes of the bedroom with its coital connotations, and more whitewashed private chapels intended for the rites of purification, the anointment with soap and lotion, to which we devoted ourselves with the doggedness of those who suffer from fear of infection, who scrub themselves until they bleed.

Anyone who had seen us driving around the border, and deep inland, would have taken us to be town-dwellers who regarded the world of the countryside, centripetal, cyclical, as little more than a rustic decor with which our self-importance contrasted favourably. No one could know that all that inflated light-heartedness was designed to hide the deathly quiet final destination of our journeys from ourselves.

Invariably the car would finally draw up at the familiar, dull-green painted gate, by the high wall in which the small, arch-shaped windows just below the tiles stared sceptically at the outside world, the way farmers half close their eyes when they have little confidence in the nonsense you’re talking. The gate would open. Beyond it they would be waiting for us, my uncle and his family, another year older, more bent or greyer, or still more gangling, with still more offspring in their arms, more than enough of them anyway to give us the familiar Sicilian welcome. Embraces and loud greetings. Pats on the shoulder and teasing.

They would conduct my brother and me and all those accompanying us to the table under the silver poplars, or to the big dining room. From the pantry the maid would not so much walk as stride to the table, with an air as if the soup tureen in her hands was a sacrificial lamb. Over the steaming plates they would question us about news from the north, how my father and mother were doing, and what had happened in the past year in the bends and side alleys of our extensive family network, which had its own maps, tougher than the official ones. They called us swallows because just like swallows we only fell out of the sky after the winter, town-dwellers who avoided the dark months in the countryside. The autumn and winter months that my mother and I had spent there obviously did not count as proof of the opposite. We remained northerners.

What we drank was not soup but relief. On the cutlery chest tarts with chokers of whipped cream and sugar glaze waited. When they were cut everyone knew that my brother and his companions, and often my husband too, would get up from table. With every course of dinner their impatience showed more openly on their faces, so that my uncle eventually had their portion of cake served in the smoking room, where they would withdraw after the meal.

“If the gentlemen wish to devote themselves to the really important things,” he said, “they may feel free to help themselves to my cigars. There is also port. And stronger stuff.” We wouldn’t see them again before it was time for bed. They stayed in that room deep into the night, sometimes till first light. When I went to wish them good night, and cautiously opened the door of the room, just wide enough to let myself in, there was seldom more to be heard than the crackling of the fire that they had lit to drive away the chill of the night.

Sometimes one of them would be sitting in the armchair, elbows on knees and hands folded, leaning forward towards my brother, my husband or one of their friends in the chair opposite them. Between them hung the silence created when two people break off a confidential conversation so as not to involve an outsider. They looked at the toes of their shoes on the carpet and waited. Someone else stood at the window, glass of port in hand, staring out, even though there was little to be seen but one’s own reflection against a background of nocturnal black, distorted by the curves in the window glass and the play of the flames in the hearth. Usually I gave my husband a quick kiss, wished my brother and the others good night and closed the door behind me again. My presence seemed to make them aware of an intimacy that had them more in its grip than linked them together.