Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

She gets up. Pulls me upright. Arranges the pillow behind my back. “I’ll tell a story. While you eat, I’ll tell you a story for a change.” She pulls the sheet over my legs and smoothes it out. “Is that OK? The story of Said with the Lovely Eyes.”

“Who’s that? A desert prince who turns old women into salamanders?”

She giggles. “I shall tell his story the way my mother always told it to me. But if you stop eating…” She takes her hands off the sheet and holds them at shoulder height with fingers spread wide… “Then I’ll stop talking at once. You’ll have to decide for yourself how it ends.”

She adjusts my nightdress, straightens the collar with a few strokes of her index finger, then goes over to my chair, folds the blanket up and shakes out the cushions.

The ending. Why always that last dessert? Why that elaborate laying of the table, that juggling with cutlery, that measuring of the distance between the glass and the plate, that elegant folding of napkins, setting out bouquets and polishing candlesticks? I like table tops covered in crumbs and smeared with jam, and the casually folded newspaper which equally casually counts its fatalities and crimes — a chance form for the formless chance of every day.

The words and the voice of my mother, and the silence of the body, and the war, which never let itself be embraced by its name. When I was young I wanted to be able to capture it in one light, call down the consolation of completion upon things and my thoughts. But I couldn’t. I thought I was still too green, too impatient, and now I don’t want it any more. No more consolation, no rest. Just sleep without sleep.

There comes an age, Rachida child, at which I won’t say you hunger for death, but you are ready to await it. To be able to become old enough, so that you can await death with the same casualness with which you wait for the bus at the corner of the street, without excitement or hope — it would be my idea of bliss, if I still worried my head about such things. I’m already in seventh heaven if I can keep all my teeth in my mouth while you watch how I eat.

My finiteness, or what is left of it, can still, albeit seldom, fill me with fear and dismay, but at the same time in the certainty of death there is a dim vision of an impersonal consolation which is not necessarily at right angles to life and may be a close continuation. The certainty of one day no longer having to eat or drink or sleep, or, despite all hormonal dryness and fragile bones, fanning the fire of desire — no longer having to go round in circles or send best wishes to people whose birthday I always forgot anyway, but freed from time to return to the great scheme of things.

“If I were young now, I would go out of town, Rachida my girl. Cycle out of town and swim in one of the old river branches. I would go into the water in my bare feet through the reeds on the bank, to be able to feel the mud like a soft cushion under my soles. And then I would say: it’s just dead earth, dead, soulless earth. An old mountain range, a tombstone that has worn away.”

I take her hands in mine. Stroke, as my mother’s ancient grandmother once did, with my thumb over the backs of her beautiful olive-coloured fingers, so soft and smooth in my calloused claws.

“I can dab them with iodine,” she says. “That will make those spots paler.”

I thought for far too long that words have nothing more to say, but it is so good that they do not completely fit with things and lead a life of their own. Did I say it aloud? She’s smiling, but I can see that she’s not really listening. Perhaps she thinks I’m starting to wander. She frees herself from my hands, retrieves the hairbrush from the drawer of the bedside table and runs it through my hair — or what’s left of it.

“It’s almost music, the cadence of your brush in my hair. I should stick words on it. Listen, pull it slightly slower through my hair and listen: ‘The lamp had to burn far too long in the vacuum…’ When I used to go walking with my father I always made up sentences that fitted into the rhythm of our footsteps.”

She draws the brush with long strokes across my crown, keeps her eyes fixed on me, snorts a laugh. I can see her thinking: she’ll come round. But she says: “You’re dreaming aloud again, Mrs Helena. That’s what happens when you get so little sleep.”

“No, child, I’m wide awake. We’re apes, we preen each other with words. Listen to what your brush sings: ‘Time… to break bread… on the table again.’”

“That’s what I like to hear,” she smiles. “I’ll put plenty of butter on.”

When I was young I regarded words as compact, stable units, intriguing stones that I collected so as not to be empty-handed in the face of the world. I made breakwaters from them against the spring tide of light and colour, of smell and sound that could sometimes descend overwhelmingly on me — the world in its brutal splendour, its breathtaking selfhood, which would overpower me and annex me in the tumult of its constant becoming. In other words I was afraid I would die of pleasure.

As time went on I came to see them increasingly as mirrors or lenses, or prisms which dissect the white, undifferentiated glow of the world — as my father was wont to reflect when, at home after a storm, I stood next to him at the window, looking at the rainbow over the wet roofs: “And to think that such splendour consists solely of refracted light…” Carnival in hell was what Emilie called such weather, when the sun shone and it rained at the same time.

I regard them as mini solar systems, words, atomic nuclei around which the electrons of meaning charge, like little planets with weak gravitational fields, the ethereal atmospheric layers, and deep down in their geology a messy memory, although unlike this planet they have no core, not even a figurative one. All I try is to order them in such a way that their constellations evoke figures that otherwise would remain unseen and unknown. I have never filled all those exercise books with their signs for any other reason than in the act of writing to squeeze my foot in the door of the definitive, like a pushy door-to-door salesman of magic cleaning products.

“The time is finally ripe, child, to clear the last shelves. Put everything in boxes and take them away. Distribute them, all those written sheets. Do what you want with them, but make sure their fate is uncertain.”

“First I’m going to boil your egg, Mrs Helena. We still have time.”

“I’d like to be buried in those bookshelves. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to pull them off the wall and make a nice coffin of them?”

“For that you’d need to shrink a lot. At least forty centimetres. Now I know why you eat so little.”

The books, the dead, my mother’s voice in my sleep and the garden without limits; in my head they open more and more grandly that space without location, where a time prevails outside time, and which since childhood I never have stepped out of with more than one leg. The greater part of our mind is an Indian god stretched out in the alert sleep of a cat, dumbstruck, but far from deaf, and if necessary all-seeing. As we get older, Rachida my child, I’m not ranting, as we get older everything we do or don’t do, and say or keep silent about, is drowned out ever more loudly by the breath of that alert sleep in us, which we try in vain to tuck in with words, but which also drives our words. We all speak from horror vacui .

“Do you want me to take the photo of your mother too, Mrs Helena?” she asks casually, treacherously casually. I know that she’s testing me, that she thinks: she won’t go through with it. How many times have I resolved finally to clear the decks, and how many times has she hoisted me up on the tough thread of her joie de vivre ?