Читать книгу Speechless - Tom Lanoye - Страница 18

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HE NEVER READ a word of what you are reading at this moment. He died and what I had written up to then I threw away, shortly after his cremation, shortly after his ashes were shaken out of the urn onto the same meadow, on more or less the same square metre, as her ashes, only a few years before.

United at last.

I erased what I had written radically and ritually, deleted it charitably, during a night that brought insight and austere melancholy, after I had stared for hours at the screen of my laptop as if into a mirror and could scarcely stand the sight any longer. Delete. Delete. Consign to the Lethe.

That same day I started again, on this, this novel that must not become a novel, not belles-lettres but not rubbish either, an improved Bible and an anti-book in one and the same cover. Starting again, in anger, looking straight into the digital mirror in which these words obediently appear as my fingers type them, and these too and these too. I type them manfully but am ashamed at so many lost hours, so much faint-heartedness. Embarrassed by my flight into other projects, to other places, into words other than the necessary ones. And look, even now, even after beginning again, I still had to go on for pages and pages—and hence still in flight—about so much other than the essence. So be it. It’s as plain as the nose on your face. Even in the case of this renewed writing I first need flanking manoeuvres, epic feints to the square millimetre, encircling processions of monsters and trolls, from Gilt Mary to Napoleon, from hot-air balloons to Cape firefighting helicopters. A caravan of swaying anecdotes and barking woes. A parade of old acquaintances, veiled in couleur locale and perfumed with sweet memories. A force of manly facts and consoling market-stall holders rushing to my aid—Mie Wust, a pious nun, Justine Henin—in the hope that they will provide me, who have recently become a full orphan, with surrogate support, inspiration and help, I who never thought I would have to deal with inspiration and help, certainly not from outside, and certainly not here, at this loving liquidation, this intimate settling of accounts, a book which in my arrogance I had thought in anticipation would scarcely need a writer. It would compose itself, through the energy of its core.

It didn’t. The cocoon did not allow itself to be cracked just like that. Diffidence is still there, in full force. And I am not going to apologize for that. Diffidence is part of the whole, perhaps even the central theme. Anyone who knows the answer can shout it out. I can only hope that the serried ranks of my demons and dwarves, my memories and my wounds, move in a centripetal vortex, and that that whole pathetic procession—why not here, within about three lines?—may finally be reduced to silence, at its own axis. In the frighteningly calm eye of the inwardly circulating whirlwind which it has itself produced.

And, well I never. The dust descends. Here it lies. The key, the quintessence, the spell. Staggering, simple and hard. This book is unavoidably also the story of this book, which refused to let itself be written while my father was still alive.

It has nothing to do with fear of failure with regard to him, the fear of not succeeding in his commission to raise her from the dead with my words. He of all people would never have disavowed my literary labour of Lazarus. He would have welcomed every attempt, however inadequate or mediocre, as a complete miracle, would have acclaimed it as a wonder of the world. Even more so than with my other titles, he would have stocked up on copies from the local bookseller, a few dozen in total (‘I can’t begrudge the man the money, can I, we’re all shopkeepers together?’), gift-wrapped and all, in order to distribute them shamelessly and, despite my spluttering protests, to the whole staff, against all the house rules, in exchange for a kiss from the ladies and a shared drink with the men.

Fear of failure? The real reason is crueller. I type it with resentment, disgust even. Watch, as these cool words appear, just like that, on my screen and your page: his death was necessary, in reality and on paper, before I could really begin. Her life cannot be described without his, and vice-versa. That’s what you get with those bloody eternal loves, those inseparable lives from an earlier period—they were proud of the fact that they had never exchanged a French kiss with anyone but each other, and I have never met anyone who contradicted that or even cast doubt on it.

For the book that he awaited so passionately to appear he had first to follow her. His end was one of the links in what he would have liked to read and distribute himself, with a kiss as thanks and drinks as his reward. ‘Your health, my girl.’

There is a persistent and widespread misconception, among connoisseurs and laymen alike, that writing means ‘preserving’. Establishing what existed, as it existed. Of course it is the other way round. Writing is destroying, in the absence of anything better. Only then and as a result does what you are writing about pass away. Literature is letting go. Writing is dispelling.

So come on then. Say farewell—you too. Draw a thick, bold cross over it, however gently. Over her, over him. Their neighbourhood, their period, their lives. The great scenes of a small neighbourhood and a family with lots of children, in a corner house without a garden, and a shop with a constantly jingling doorbell—I slept in the room right above it, and during many a morning nightmare I tried out our slicing machine on the fingers of our earliest customers, those unsuspecting anonymous sadists, those instigators of a daily terror, who harried and controlled from morning till night with their hellish jingling.

A cross over all customers, all meat hooks and that one slicing machine. Put the cleaver into this: the whole human zoology of my youth, in which the oddest beast bears my name, my glasses and my defects, my scars and my lisp. Only in that way will she, Josée, become what she always wanted to be. Bigger than herself, larger than life. Because just as one cannot talk about her without expanding on him, so I cannot write about the two of them without digressing on the whole damned world which I got to know, and over which she ruled, for years. And standing face to face with that realm of woman, I am bound one last time to incline toward sloth and doubt.

Why me?

Because, end of story. That’s enough, now. Hack and pierce, fillet, expose every bone—begin. It doesn’t matter where. But begin.

Describe for example with a grin your horror at this moment, your panic as a recognized customer-friendly purveyor of literature. Stick a skewer in the craftsman you so often maintain you are, and listen with pleasure to the sigh that escapes from the wound like a dirty, despairing fart: ‘Dear me, dear God! I’ve started with the end! His death should have been at the end! For greater symmetry and melancholy pleasure!’

Laugh your head off at the palette and brushes of the professional painter of the senses you imagine you are, the cat’s tail with which the literary whore whips himself into streamlined production: your bundle of themes. The key-word outline of a possible, hoped-for, future—who knows?—masterpiece. That must be the aim, always. We can’t do it for less. [she, echoing] ‘You’ve got more in you than you think.’

I have a printout next to me, of my themes. According to calculations from long ago I should by now, on page xx, have long since described our former landlady. Fat Liza was her name, miserliness and unpredictability her fame.

I should also have long ago depicted our Hardworking Hunchback. He lived round the corner from us. A tough, emaciated man who looked timidly around him, high on his back a shoebox of flesh and spinal cord. At the same time he was the proud father of a dozen offspring, which with the cruelty native to children we called ‘the Humps’. Humps 1, Hump 2, Hump 3 …

I should also long since have sketched Willy the Shoemaker in detail. He plied his trade half a street further on and was also endowed with a hump, which strengthened me from an early age in the suspicion that overground nuclear tests were once conducted in Waasland. The more so since he was the possessor of a hefty club foot, which he dragged behind him—he could patch up his shoe, which quickly wore out, himself, thus making a saving. Willy had the bushy eyebrows of a devil, the mouth of a monk, the brown eyes of a wounded deer and an echoing house without children which constantly smelt of glue and leather.

Tear them up. All of them. Joyfully. Your schedules, your memoranda, your reference stuff. Delete, delete. Consign to the Lethe. What matters is spinning around in your head ready to be remembered. From now on go only for the mercurial moment. The random clatter inside your skull. Reap the moment and pick the impromptu. We’ll see where we get to, together.

For example, begin with what should have been the only true beginning. The starting gun of what is at once a domestic and a universal saga. The intervention of fate.

The scene takes place in the previously mentioned flat above our former butcher’s shop. Where Fat Liza used to live, into which my parents moved on their retirement, and where later I would have to reach a verdict on each of their possessions. Because of that unity of place the decor actually looks rather familiar. Pieces of jigsaws from different periods that suddenly fit together unexpectedly and unpredictably. Playing jazz must be like this. Suddenly from the mess comes that one crashing chord, unrepeatable, and yet perfectly timed. Sent by favourable chance.

Gratefully received by the patient musician.

Or not. What if we no longer need to pay attention to planning or directness? After all, this is the end of the first section. An organ figure would not be out of place. A small tableau vivant, characteristic of the protagonist, while she is still hale and hearty and suspects nothing of the catastrophe that is about to engulf her.

We shall look for her where we left her. We shall zoom in on the plot among the pollard and the Canada willows, the streams and the earth paths. The balloon flotilla in the sky has gone, floated off to pastures new. The sky has been left empty, an immaculate blue. The canopy of a merciful summer.

She sits on the ground, in a bathing costume and with that simple band in her hair, rooting about in her vegetable garden on her knees, right next to her famous bungalow, which was built under her supervision and to her design from concrete foundations to corrugated roof by family and friends with too much free time and not enough resistance to her moral and friendly blackmail. (‘You’re coming to help, aren’t you?’ ‘All the others are coming, you know.’ ‘Afterwards there’s a barbecue with satay and scampi.’ ‘Oh no! The foundations have got to be deeper! Much deeper!’ ‘I should know, shouldn’t I? Are you a builder’s daughter, or am I?’)

She is gardening intently as always, without looking right or left. Her Roger is taking a nap in the middle of the lawn in a deckchair under a large red plastic parasol. From the transistor on the table next to him pours bel canto song, alternating with match reports and weather forecasts for pigeon fanciers and canal shipping. He sleeps through everything.

It is a radiant Sunday in September, sometime in the second half of the twentieth century. She must be about sixty. It may be five years more or five years less. Doesn’t matter. This is her. Made entirely of language and yet exactly as she was. She is digging up her harvest with her bare hands, from small earth banks, consisting of the sandy soil that makes our native region so suitable for growing asparagus and for not much else, unless it be floury potatoes.

She cuts the asparagus, thin and pale as the hands of a dead piano player, according to a fixed ritual, mercilessly tender, never rushing it. First she gropes around in the soil wrist-deep, where a crack or a small nipple that has already turned purple in the earth wall has betrayed the upward thrust of an asparagus shoot, sitting waiting milk-white in our dark earth. Her hand stirs about cautiously in the opening, while she herself closes her eyes, increasing the sensitivity of touch in her hand by excluding visual stimuli. At first she appears not to find what she is looking for. She stirs ever deeper. For a moment you are afraid that her arm will gradually disappear into the hole, up to her armpits, as if the earth is a pregnant cow and she a gentle-natured vet who has to arrange a number of organs, for order and neatness are important everywhere, definitely in the innards of a globe. But now she strikes with her kitchen knife—an heirloom with a bone handle and a blade that that has become wafer-thin with all the sharpening, the cutting edge has even worn into a half-moon shape. ([she, speaking with certainty] ‘One fine day that knife will break in half, on a shoot no thicker than a child’s little finger.’)

By the time she is finished the sweat is running down from under her hairband. Standing up, she wipes it away with her wrist, dirtying her face as well with a shadow of poor earth and the sickly, slightly bitter smell of her harvest. It is displayed next to her on a piece of old newspaper. [she, just as certain] ‘You’re right, these are the first, still a bit skinny and stringy. It will be years before they can compete with the ones from Mechelen, which are the best in the world—don’t let those Spaniards or Dutch fool you, they can have as much sandy soil as they like over there. But this here, look? Still enough for a pan of soup. With some chicken bouillon added, some fresh parsley, a dash of cream. There are restaurants where they can’t put that on the menu. Unless from packets. [she, contemptuously] Nonsense, that may come out of packets. My soup? Never.’

Her eyes glitter combatively at the prospect of, by way of proof, preparing her fresh soup, this very night, for tomorrow afternoon. But each time she has stood up she groans, with one hand half on her hip, half on her back: ‘Goodness me, I almost couldn’t stand up. That back, that back, that back. I should have been in a wheelchair for twenty years. If it goes on like this it won’t be much longer.’ Unaware of the gross irony of that prediction.

This ailment is not in her imagination. Since her birth her spine, from coccyx to neck vertebrae, has exhibited an S-shape that is growing worse as the years go by. She is shrinking faster than other elderly people, and she is already so small. There are X-ray photos in which one loop of the S curls over one of her kidneys, while the other curls menacingly toward the opposite shoulder blade. ‘If I ever fall off a step ladder, the whole lot will go splat.’ [she, with strange pride]

In order to spare her constitution she should not lift anything and never work leaning forward. ‘If I had listened to that, I should have lain in bed for years, paralysed from head to toe. Work and still more work, I say. [she, cantankerous, rebellious] Only then will the muscles stay strong enough to support a ruin, however much they may creak.’ Whereupon she sits down and pulls up weeds. Then, kneeling again, she trims all the rhododendrons, as intently as if praying.

Even on the lawn she kneels a little later, with a spoon and a jar of blue powder. The remedy given to her by the hunchbacked shoemaker—‘push a bottle with the bottom knocked out into the molehills, neck upwards, so that the wind fills the underground passages with a terrifying whistling’—hasn’t worked. The bloody creatures are once again ruining her lawn. She has to put an end to it.

Once and for all.

She scratches a molehill open and carefully spoons in her blue powder. A few metres away her Roger turns in his sleep again, smacking his lips with content, snoring in the shade of a plastic parasol. Sunday afternoon, his only moment of rest. The canopy remains unfathomably blue and bel canto and reports babble from the radio. Will Beveren be champions this year? Nothing and everything at the same time. Wap-wáp, wap-wáp, wap-wáp. In Saint Quentin thick fog expected, visibility less than twenty metres. I know I mustn’t ask, but how is your book going? The minders wait before releasing the pigeons. No more running away. Buggered, hu-hu-hu. Delete, delete, the Leie. Sint-Baafs-Vijve: thirteen beam shots lowered. On the banks of the Scheldt. Well hidden in the reeds. Once more, come on. The canopy is blue. The world is vast. / Life too. / We’re not.

That’s enough.

Begin.