Erwin Mortier: While the Gods Were Sleeping

In the kitchen there was sugar in hard cones on the surface of the long work table, held in a contraption with a wheel attached that you had to turn, whereupon a tool scraped sugar loose and it was caught in a dish. And there were mortars for coarse salt or peppercorns, and scores, hundreds, thousands of scoops and scrapers and hooks and clamps and forks and tongs and studs and screws… With an extensive range of instrumentation, from explosives to tweezers as fine as women’s hair, the world could be mined, melted, distilled, reforged, and with each way in which it was attacked, it revealed different facets of itself. Today you have to consult the physicists, or the astronomers with their arcane instruments, in order still to be able to experience the world as elemental; today’s world — a favourite saying of my mother’s — comes to us completely streamlined, while in my youth there were not yet any peaches grown which were able to travel round the world unscathed, even without padded boxes, because they never really ripen.

The house was like a termites’ nest, managed by workers whose queen had long since wasted away in her bridal chamber, but around whose absence a daily life still developed. A stubborn, possibly millennia-old matriarchy ruled over the seasons. In my early childhood this coincided with the stony contours of Moumou, my mother’s mother’s mother, over 100 when she finally died when I was about eight. I thought she was old enough, almost prehistoric, to bear the whole of humanity. The vast stretch of her existence took my breath away.

During the long autumn of her life the home in which she had borne her offspring contained her like a reliquary shrine. Deep in the heart of the house she lay for most of the day on a thick, eternally rustling mattress in an alcove right next to a chimney breast. When the shutters of her sleeping compartment were closed and she lay behind them snorting in her eternal slumber, I imagined that the alcove hid a basin in which a mysterious marine mammal was being kept alive. I imagined that every so often Moumou had expelled a hunk of slime and blood from her gigantic body which her older daughters had caught and rubbed clean with linen cloths, and in that way, as they rubbed, modelled into the more or less recognizable shape of a human being. At least that was what I saw happen in the stall, when a cow had given birth, and with her tongue piled the lump of membranes and blood into a calf.

On Sunday two of Moumou’s granddaughters put her into a dark-blue or black dress of a cut that had once, long before the Franco-Prussian War, been fashionable, manoeuvred her with some difficulty into a wheelchair with a woven seat and pushed the whole huge contraption into the large drawing room, where every so often I, the youngest, had to greet the matriarch, the oldest of all.

She was virtually deaf. Over one eye, no more than a chink in the geometrical pattern of wrinkles round her eye sockets, lay an alarming blue-grey membrane. The other eye was more like a point of light somewhere far off in the darkness of her skull. She carried the smell of wet cellar stones with her, the clamminess of crumbling walls.

Because she could hear almost nothing and could see less and less out of that single smouldering eye, I had to put my hands in her lap, after which she grasped my wrists with her hands, felt my palms at length, turned my hands over and rubbed my knuckles repeatedly with her scabby thumbs. Meanwhile the heavy heels of her shoes pressed harder and harder onto the wood of the wheelchair’s footrest, which began to creak ominously.

It was as if she was enjoying my youth. Cracks and splits appeared in her ancient Ice Age body. Fault lines seemed to grate against each other. Masses of earth shifted and threw up constantly changing mountain ridges in the heavy cotton of her dress. A copper necklace with a medallion showing Napoleon III en profil meandered from somewhere under her chin down though those newly formed valleys and came to rest on her navy-blue cummerbund. She bent her head forward and with her one eye seemed to be more grazing the light from my surface than examining me.

Finally, in the ravines of flesh on her cheeks, a mouth slowly opened, pink and completely toothless. Membranes of slime sprang open. From her throat something bubbled up that was midway between a laugh and a death rattle. One of her hands let go of me, tapped the fingers of one of her daughters, who was leaning listlessly with her arm on the back of the chair, waiting for the audience to end. From her sleeve, as if by magic, she produced some paper money and pushed it into Moumou’s hand.

Moumou lowered her hand again, with the other turned over my right hand, pressed the note, folded four or five times, into my palm and closed my fingers over it, as if she were entrusting me with her whole fortune.

In her one deep-brown iris I now read the same sadness, that apparently all-comprehending melancholy, which one day struck me to the core when my father sat me on his arm at a cage in the zoo. From a cliff of grey skin, grooved like a relief map, that glides past us apparently endlessly, an eye suddenly looks at me, for minutes on end, it seems, until it closes in a half-moon of lashes.

I hear my father say: “That is an elephant.”

But it wasn’t.

It was the Countenance of God.

“HELENA, CHILD,” my mother would moan if she could hear me. “Where is this leading to? You’re shooting off in all directions. There’s no line in what you’re saying. I can’t make head or tail of it, I’ve lost the thread.” Some things she couldn’t understand. Even if she’d lived to be 150, she didn’t want to, and there’s not much point in having her nod in agreement or making her angry here.

She constantly wanted to know why I said something in one way and not in another, why I didn’t use normal words or sentences, or didn’t simply get straight to the point. It was a habit she presumed to adopt when she not only was my mother but for a while wanted to play tutor, a role which gradually dissolved in that of her motherhood. I was never able to explain to her that you sometimes achieve much more by deliberately talking beside the point than by speaking with a precision that in any case will never be anything but illusory.

She was in the habit of giving me extra lessons during the holidays using the books in the house where she was born, but I had read them all, even the ones she thought unsuitable for me. For a change, to maintain my grammar, she would make me write letters, never to be sent, to relations deeper in France. I thought the whole business was unnatural, but not the imaginative side of things, I liked that. My mother was too sober to give me subjects for essays; she never liked novels or poetry, so she opted for the letter form, which I in turn found dreary. Eventually I started making up relations and I enjoyed it so much that I also wrote to real relations about incidents that had never taken place.

Writing for me has always been something paternal. At home it was my father who had me write letters, who commented on the legibility of my handwriting and laughed and chuckled at the jokes I made. He had a fine sense of the gradations of irony and for the moments when humour can tip over into something else, into sarcasm or devastating sadness, for example. That is why I cannot possibly imagine that a woman ever invented writing. Up to now no one has been able to talk me out of that stubborn prejudice.

Women talk, ceaselessly, and they always talk to themselves, including my mother, despite her pride in her unshakeable common sense. Day in, day out, like a music box whose cogs are worn out, she rattled off short commands, strictures or questions, which invariably carried an undertone of reproach or accusation. She went on pursuing me until her death, a shadow that kept tugging my sleeve or tapping me on the shoulder, and I only stopped getting annoyed when I realized that it was herself first and foremost whom she kept under her thumb — a remnant, not to say an enduring trauma, from the war years, when she was left to her own devices for almost all decisions — but by then she was no longer alive. It is terrible that I can only turn to welcome her ghost into the realm of the fallible, and with that same gesture grant myself absolution for the fact that I am a human being, now that she has been in her grave for years.