Читать книгу Ricochet - Robyn Neilson - Страница 11

“To sew is to pray” Louise Erdrich, ‘Four Souls.’ The river of remembering beckons, not to extinguish the bad memory, rather total immersion. A risk that it might well drown me. After all, there is little else to do today. The cauldron crackles… electricity shreds the sky, ropes of rain lash. Poked and jabbed, after three days, là terre caves in. Each of our I-gadgets, (a small but significant condolence), is out of battery. But I cannot start the generator and leave it in this torrent. Leaden dark at 4pm in early summer.

Crazy. Dingue.

Our tiny Ikea solar lamps struggle to give off sufficient light. I look for humour in how futile this weather renders my endeavours. The French country folk simply stay resolute in their gumboots, shrug and say: ‘Il pleut comme vaches qui pisses…. It’s raining like pissing cows.’

Our bedroom window smashes open with a wallop, and all my side of the bed is soaked. I begin to pen the memories, and the irony occurs to me that after six years, the first two sentences of my story remain exactly the same….

Feeling a bit flat today…Loup won’t be home until late…

I put my faith in the writing to re-make the story. But I want to check my memory against fact, so I search back to a 2009 calendar on my flailing phone, and see that indeed, it was a Tuesday….

….So that gives me time to get all this goddamn washing dry and iron all his shirts… and tee-shirts, and even his jeans…Jesus, who irons jeans and tee-shirts these days? Apparently the French do! And now I’m a wife of a Frenchman… after my first two cups of orange pekoe tea… a small triumph in a country of Nespresso converts… I’ve finally found good quality loose leaf tea and bought a little porcelain sieve which sits neatly inside my mug… I then scoff too many dark chocolate Petit écolier biscuits,but will compensate later by running up the hills to the chapel and beyond. Thank Christ for those hills and the forest and the chapel, otherwise I wouldn’t fit up the stairs…I must stop going to the boulangerie… the Auriol bakery is deservedly reputed as the best for miles around.

My mundane routine gives me structure; I turn on the radio, which I barely understand, but the music they play compensates. I hear the hometown twang of Angus and Julia Stone…apparently the darlings on the French scene at the moment. I bought A Book Like This with me, and Loup loves it too. We don’t have a CD player, so we listen to it whenever we’re out in the car. It’s not such a leap to imagine that Loup is Just a Boy, and that we are both Wasted, on the potion of our love. Impatient however to learn French songs, I shimmy around the table when I hear Christophe Mae, and coerce my mouth to mimic the unfamiliar sounds of Renaud’s ‘Mistrales Gagnant’.

The ironing takes over an hour. The constant rearranging of the table to accommodate the pop-up ironing board, which slips so that I have to start again, feels like an heroic feat. Fucking stupid useless board, we need a real one. Anyway, who does iron jeans these days? Nevertheless, I crease Loup’s shirts with precision, just the way he likes them. I then iron my collection of vintage silks and cottons, determined to make some progress with my sewing today. Waiting for my new husband to return home, the hours of each day have an insatiable need to be filled, like my appetite for French pastries. Sewing I decide, will fill those hours, become a ‘worthy’ occupation. So, I begin to re-create; hand-sew and embroider elaborate scarves and wraps out of vintage fabric.

Loup is incensed when he realizes that I spend more of my time and money sourcing old lace, retro prints, silk threads and bizarre buttons, than I do in selling my scarves. But it’s my money, I insist, and my time. This disagreement becomes a recurring theme…Loup cannot see the value in investing hours of effort and expense without an equivalent financial return. I can see his point, but flinch away from the familiar line of my father’s… yet another reminder of their powerful resemblance. Stunned each time I run into their wall of pragmatism, I finally see that their frustrating likeness is a thing to cherish. They were and are both, hard headed visionaries.

Having carefully hung Loup’s shirts from the centre of each spiral stair, I stand back and admire the cascade of grey, blue, and white. I am satisfied with my work, but relieved that I can retire the hot iron because the morning sun, although it cannot shine directly through our windows, makes a glaring presence. The underground kitchen is suddenly claustrophobic, but smells fresh-laundry-clean. Jeanine our neighbour said of the clean cotton scent one morning when she came with a gift of pot plants, ‘Ça sent bonne’.

As her words rolled together in my ear, I thought she was referring to Là Sainte Baume, the nearby old-growth forest where the nuns live below, and the priests live above. High up on a precarious perch built by the Catalans in the fifth century; where they guard a bone of Mary Magdalene’s in a gold cage, saying that she took refuge there in the concealed deep cave. Today, believers climb the massif to light candles and say a prayer for their lost loved ones. Or the ones they are about to lose. Water drips down the interior of the grotto, and it is always cold, no matter how hot the day is. I go there because it is a natural wonder. And because I feel less alone in the presence or the possibility of, a spiritual wonder.

My second Sunday in France, when Loup was occupied, I stepped straight out from our blue door, and map in hand, walked the least direct way, through rambling villages and groups playing là pétanque on the shaded roadsides, all the way up to Mary Magdalene’s bone. Thirty-four kilometres in thirty-four degrees. Arriving exhausted, épuisée, and elated; it felt like a true endeavour. In part, a true pilgrimage. A good-looking young monk sat perched on the stone precipice, 30 metres above the highest trees in the forest canopy. He swung his sandaled legs out into the air, in what seemed a brazen dare. Or else a confident certitude: his God cared for him. This monk was no ingénu; he spoke with experience in and of the world. He recounted his own pilgrimage, of leaving behind attachment, including his wallet. His face cracked up like any young man’s would, as he told the story of discovering a monastery water fountain that gushed wine into his water bottle instead of water.

I didn’t even think to look at Mary’s bone; distracted by this man’s path, his renunciation. I left distraught by the letters of grieving parents pleading to God to spare their children. I had no notion then that I might return soon to light my own candles.

Nearing midday now, cramped inside our Auriol kitchen, I am hot after the ironing. I cannot be bothered getting dressed, as I’m not going anywhere, and know no one who might come calling. So I stay in my airy silk slip, which verges on sexy, although I steer my mind away from that thought. Too much solitude contrives to make me anxious about Loup’s and my newfound lust. And to question the smorgasbord of sex that quickly satisfies Loup, but leaves me un-sated and abandoned. One day, I find something in his toolbox that serves to satisfy me. At last! Worried by this new indulgence, I later confide in Loup, and he confiscates the very thing that had gratified me. He then became more attentive and we dared to become more candid. And together, we feared less the uninhibited trysts of coupledom. For Loup, this new intimacy is a revelation, a rush. For myself, it is a long-awaited restoration.

Here now, in the stifle of this small plain room in Provençe, looking back on a former small plain room in Auriol, casting farther to a distant winter sunroom in Gippsland, I feel nothing but gratitude. For the leaving, the desolation, the growing-up, the loss, the coup de foudre. Grateful for the mystery of why Loup feared fathering our child, for the rain, the lightning, the hot sun and the ironing of his shirts.

I retrieve my pinned-fabrics and recommence the task of hand sewing. Conscious that this is a labour of love: perhaps unconscious that I am stitching love into each hour of solitude. Despite what Loup says, I stay loyal to my bespoke designs. Each is unique. Each has a character of colour, of stitch or weight. Some are reversible, with a wintry weft, of velvet and wool. Others are wispy, almost transparent delicacies of silk and old lace. My embroidery is far from traditional cross-stitch, and probably doesn’t deserve the title. But it has a power to absorb… I immerse myself in a distant memory of Isabelle Huppert in ‘La Dentellière’. Enthralled. Thirty years later, those threads still hold, and I stitch along with the embroiderers, knowing that I will never attain their perfection, but that is not why I stitch.

Today I am working on a reversible silk and cotton throw. I have reconstructed it out of cut out sections of vintage scarves and dresses; some that I paid dearly for in a local antique brocante, where each piece of French lace smells of opulence and pleasure. The others, which I discovered in a country opportunity shop at home in Victoria, smell of Presbyterian practicality; the faded prints disguising their foreign fetish. I select some motifs from the op-shop cotton dress with a cinched-in waist and a billowing skirt: on a background of olive green, black and white drawings of Paris swirl as I imagine the svelte wearer caught in an updraft over a street vent on Boulevard Saint-Germain. More likely, she is hanging out the washing on her unrefined country’s only claim to fame, a Hills Hoist. On yet another windy day on the Cape. I rummage for a Hermes silk scarf, and with satisfaction I dismantle it’s haute couture with the scissors.

Cutting into and sewing fabrics back together is an important ritual: an accidental metaphor for patching my old life together with my new foreign life; a search for the sensual within the mundane. Or of pairing two contrary cultures. Chain stitch fascinates me; it flows better than cross-stitch, which of course is implied in its name. Each barren loop poises in the air, waiting to receive the pierce of the needle as it brings home the thread and secures the next link in the chain. Blanket stitch is my bane, but I have come to rely on it, and edge fastidiously each motif of fraying silk, spending hours just on one small piece. At the moment I am edging a heart, with two lovers in a Montmartre café scene and the Sacre Coeur in the background. That’s somewhere Loup and I will never go together… I’m not too disappointed, enjoying as I do to take a map of Paris and then ignore it… getting lost, avoiding the landmarks. For Loup, Paris holds no allure and he does not share my delight in deconstructing the clichés. It is enough for him to be a passenger passing through Charles de Gaulle Aéroport.

I am concentrating on the blanket-stitching around my heart, cursing as the needle slips over the shimmery silk, when there is a banging on the door. We have a white blind over the glass, so that some light can enter without the street seeing in.

I don’t want to answer.

But I am stuck, because to get to the spiral staircase and escape upstairs, I have to shimmy past the door. I can see the outline of two people, men. I am afraid, because I think it might be the pair of irate builders who came here last week whilst I was alone, loudly gesticulating, threatening Loup with vengeance. For what, I could not tell.

I hastily pull the half-sewn wrap around my bare shoulders. The knocking continues, accompanied this time by a loud voice, insisting,

‘Madame, c’est urgente!’

Pins stick into my shoulders. I fear for my daughters. Of the nightmare I had last month…. something grotesque. I fear for Loup. I am frozen.

Bang, bang, bang.

I worry that the glass of the door will break. I worry that the kitchen looks untidy. I pull the wrap more tightly over my chest, and wish that I had gotten dressed. Sharpness pricks at my left breast.

I open the door.

‘Bonjour Madame,’ says the older of the gendarmes with a disarming gentility,

‘May we come in please?’

‘Ahh…yes, oui, excusez-moi Officers, viens, entrez…’

‘Excusez-moi’, I say again, as it seems to be the only thing I can say…I mix up all my French pronouns, tu and vous. I push my fabrics and sewing box aside and offer the uniformed men our only two seats. They remain standing, as if sitting would seem too relaxed. We form an odd trio around my neatly cut out hearts and needles and threads.

‘You are the wife of Monsieur Zorn, is that correct Madame?’

Seeing me slump, the Gendarme quickly adds,

‘Non, non, Madame, you need not worry, it is not your husband’,

‘Alors, then it’s Pascal?’ I ask too quickly, ashamed.

‘Madame, you should sit down’ says the younger one, himself sitting down, so that I mimic him, shivering despite the cramped kitchen, the steamed cotton competing with the pipe smells, the three of us, and the slanting sword of the midday sun down the courtyard wall.

‘Oui,yes, it’s concerning your brother-in-law Pascal.’

‘Non, non, non!’

Alarmed by my shivering, the young officer asks if I have anyone who can come and sit with me.

‘No they’re all at work,’ my feeble reply.

Please God don’t let it be true over and over again, before the Gendarme had had a chance to tell me what had happened.

‘What has happened to Pascal?’ I cannot find the right French words.

‘He kill himself this morning, ce matin.’

At first I think they mean he tried to kill himself. Again. But then the officer keeps talking. Perhaps as a way to pardon my refusal to comprehend.

‘He was a very unhappy man. You know he unhappy Madame?’

‘Oui, yes…Jean-Loup knew…oui, we tried to help…. mais Pascal …je ne sais pas…

Please God don’t let it be True…what should I do, should I call Loup, his sister…? They’re all at work….’

Teeth chattering. So cold in this hot room.

‘Non Madame, better not to tell them at work…nous vous conseillez pas de précipiter …you should not ring them… it is too dangerous… they might have a car accident on way home…. your husband, he works far from here, non?’

‘Yes, he sometimes works far away… has a long drive home.’

‘Si, and the sister of Pascal, Odette, she also will have too much shock to drive après. You need be brave, you tell family tonight when all are home. You cannot tell this tragedie on telephone. You must all be together.’

‘What about Pauline, Pascal’s other sister in Strasbourg, does she know?’

‘Non Madame, it is better she hear from Odette. Odette is oldest, n’est ce pas?’

My mind cannot conceive why Pauline would not know. Her apartment overlooks the family house in Strasbourg. Where Pascal lives.

‘You are Australienne, Madame Zorn? Peut-être it is a good idea to call and speak with your maman, that might help?’

Both officers are visibly troubled, and the older shakes my hand with tenderness when they leave. I cannot remember how I spent the rest of that long afternoon. I know that I did ring and woke my mother. And my brother, who had spent a lot of time with Pascal, rang me and we spoke at length. We had all formed a sudden and deep affection for Pascal. The shock was greater, because he was not ours to love and to understand. Our grieving was secondary.

I had no idea how I was going to tell Loup.

I remember staying in my slip until the sun left the courtyard wall, and the kitchen and everything in it was gloom. I fixed my mind upon my sewing in slow motion; repeating my mantra, begging God to reverse everything, please don’t let this be true.

And then I dressed robotically, walked in a trance to the grocers, and bought the minimum.

Somewhere along the way I must have decided to proceed as if everything was normal, so when Loup arrived home, worn out from driving in the heat, I kissed him and offered him the ritual iced coffee and bowl of nuts. He saw that I had been sewing, but sensed that all was not right.

‘Chéri, we are going to have to drive over to your sister’s soon. You have something to tell her…’

I break, and Loup knew straight away.

‘Pascal?’ he quavered,

‘What has happened to Pascal?’’