Читать книгу Speechless - Tom Lanoye - Страница 20

-

ON THE DAY that fate strikes they are eating pizza and watching the end of the evening news. She and he, Josée and Roger, side by side. Glass of red wine to go with it, and also a green salad with freshly chopped onion, slices of tomato and grated cucumber, all sprinkled with a simple vinaigrette and a garnish of ground parsley, ‘since [she of course] just because you’re eating a pizza, you mustn’t lose sight of your vitamins, certainly not at our age, and especially not in the depths of autumn, and … Roger! Can you turn that TV down a bit? A person can barely hear themselves speak. And anyway it’s those football results again. Very soon you’ll know them off by heart.’

Words to that effect.

The napkins are simple but indestructible damask, and from frequent washing have become as soft as a child’s pyjamas. The cutlery, as old as their marriage, is silver-plated and has recently been given another polish. The handles, with their curlicued decoration, shine like they used to, ‘because [she, militant] just because you’re both in your eighties, there’s no need to get sloppy. Style is a matter of will, and of continued will. People have only themselves to blame or to thank.’

True to that motto, every morning they complete the crossword puzzle of their regular paper, Het Laatste Nieuws, together, to sharpen the memory and hone the mind. In case of disagreement a three-volume dictionary is consulted. With English supplements and French films she regularly consults her dictionaries, still in the old spelling. She has repaired the front and back covers, which had become detached, with black insulating tape, cadged from a theatre technician.

To strengthen the body too against wear and tear, after doing the crossword puzzle, on her initiative and against his wishes, they lie down together next to their table, on the Persian rug, for a series of cautious sit-ups.

‘How many more to go?’ [he, on the rare occasions when he grumbles]

[she, imperturbable] ‘Be quiet and carry on.’

That’s what their morning is like.

It’s evening now and they are eating pizza. The crystal wine glasses have been produced, as they are every evening, from the china cabinet, in which the finest components of their finest service are displayed alongside their most precious ornaments, on glass shelves three or four storeys high. A school of motionless decorative fish in an aquarium brim-full of purple water, since the cabinet, narrow and high, has two doors and two sides with mauve leaded lights.

The pattern that the lead-lines follow is diamond-shaped. The glass is the same kind—with optical undulations and here and there a colourless pane—as that of the terrace door which, right opposite the cabinet, opens onto a balcony overlooking the street. Well, ‘balcony’. A zinc base, two plant tubs, a wrought-iron balustrade in a black circle, that’s it. The terrace door has exactly the same lead diamond shapes, in exactly the same dimensions, as the doors of the crockery cabinet. A mystery or a stupid coincidence, since it must have been put there before Fat Liza moved in, hence long before the cabinet was acquired to serve one floor below, where she and he lived for as long as they ran the butcher’s shop. It’s now twenty-five years since they packed it in. ‘You can’t believe [she, she, she] how fast the years fly by, though you’ve nothing to look after but yourself. How did we ever manage it back then? With the shop too? And five children? It was lucky that in those days I had no time to think about it. And that I had my theatre. And that bungalow. Otherwise I might have been tempted to give it all up and go and live as a tramp under a bridge in Paris, released from everything, from shitty nappies to customers. Believe me, I wouldn’t have made a bad job of it as a tramp. If you do something, you must do it well. Even begging and roaming about.’

She isn’t very interested in France as a whole, but Paris and its symbol, Édith Piaf, are in her top drawer. ‘What a life that poor woman had to lead! But that voice, that voice! [she, between horror and rapture] She sang until she dropped. That’s what I call great art.’ There is one other French emblem that wins her favour. In the passage to their bedroom hangs a plaster replica of the death mask of the Happy Drowned Woman. An anonymous woman, fished out of the Seine fifty years ago, dead as a doornail but with a blissful smile like that of a teenager after her first orgasm. It is a popular image with her whole generation. Most of her sisters and cousins have one hanging on the wall too. A woman who died in complete intimacy, who defies death 10,000 times on many Flemish walls. Endlessly smiling, despite the colour of the wallpaper, let alone the flower pattern.

Back to the living room, where she and he are just putting a second piece of pizza onto their plates. Only the stained glass, in the cabinet and the terrace door, gives the decor of the room a certain coherence. This cannot be said of the rest of the effects, the furniture first of all. Eclecticism sets the tone, as everywhere in Belgium, from architecture to the constitution, from bourgeois interior to morality. One person calls it anarchy, another liberalism. A third bric-a-brac.

In the terrace door the mauve glass tempers the brightest sunlight. In the cabinet it quite simply tempers all light. Rumour has it that exposure to too much brightness is disastrous for ornaments in French biscuit—refined white earthenware very suitable for depicting longing faces, and hands with fingernails covered in jewels, down to the minutest folds in crinoline. But it is excessively brittle since it has only been fired once. ‘Does that surprise you? [she, contemptuously] You know what the French are like? Great panache, but little aptitude for hard work and thoroughness. Even dusting they do half-heartedly over there. It’s no accident that when we say “in the French way” we mean “carelessly”.’

Anyone looking around doesn’t get the impression that skimping jobs or dust will ever have a chance in this room. Although obviously not every biscuit ornament has a right to equal protection. On every cupboard corner, every windowsill and every table there is one simply gleaming in full light, usually surrounded by knick-knacks in terracotta, or dishes with or without fruit in them, or vases with or without flowers in them, or travel souvenirs in plastic and papier-mâché, or photos in frames of all sizes, or ashtrays in all shapes and colours, or plants and miniature cactuses in a wide variety of pot holders, from modern Delft blue to authentic Cologne pots—one even in plasticized papyrus, a present from a thoughtful visitor to Egypt.

On the mantelpiece stands a three-part set with exuberant embellishments and gilt work, imitation-eighteenth-century, the centrepiece of which (a petrified whipped-cream cake) supports a round clock, a Cyclops eye wearing a monocle, which you can swing open to wind up the clock with a toy key. You can turn as hard as you like, the elegant hands won’t budge: the internal spring snapped off decades ago. The outer elements of the trio—a female (left) and a male courtier (right), who each step forward out of a summer house—are actually two vases, which no one dares use because with flowers they would tip over off the mantelpiece, straight onto the gas radiator, which looks like a filled-in open hearth with a copper cover.

If you wanted to see Josée Verbeke politely irritated—although she knew well enough that you were just teasing her—you had to go into her living room, looking around with a sigh at the knick-knacks which she had accumulated over the years, and inquire: ‘Where’s the blunderbuss? This is just like a shooting gallery at the fair. And I don’t think two hundred pellets will be enough.’

You could have said the same thing in her bedroom, if she let you in at least, which she was reluctant to do, because there must be etiquette, and etiquette likes privacy. [she, displeased] ‘Not everything from before the occupation needs to be thrown overboard. The Germans destroyed much more than Zelzate and Zeebrugge, and later the Cinema Rex in Antwerp, with a flying bomb, the cowards. Manners were never the same again. And the royal family even more so.’

All her curios are on ornamental napkins or lace doilies, most of which are round and not much bigger than a beer mat. However, some jewels are assembled on a single oval napkin, itself ringed with a halo of fringes. The figurines are arranged on it as if for an extravagant group portrait. In it a porcelain ballerina from before the First World War can happily keep her crossed hands under her chin and raise her pointed foot up and to the side next to the obituary card of a former supplier of smoked ham and brawn, who a month ago had been run over on his bike by a municipal bus. ‘The man had only just retired. [she, melancholy] Even his bike was brand new. The things that happen.’

Beside the deceased supplier of charcuterie there stands, cool as a cucumber, the wooden, slightly Cubist fisherman that she herself brought back from Japan—the furthest journey ever granted her by the theatrical bug and theatrical societies, thanks to an exchange project between the Flemish Association for Catholic Amateur Theatre and its naturally Shintoist counterpart in the Land of the Rising Sun.

The pièce de résistance of the collection is placed on her big cupboard, which is an angular and sparsely decorated affair, almost three metres long, with six square doors and whose main stylistic feature is robustness.

Her eldest brother, an architect, designed it himself and had it made just before their marriage, during the penultimate year of the war, when oak was prohibitively expensive and scarcely available. One of those six doors locks, and during my childhood was always locked. Behind the tough oak were the most expensive strong drinks and many of their little secrets.

(I knew where the key was, and on the few occasions when they went out in style—to the Mayor’s Ball, or the Annual Celebration of Christian Shopkeepers, and were suddenly out all night, ‘because [she, worldly-wise, pig-headed] what if someone occasionally goes out? Then it’s better if he does so properly. There’s nothing better, after a night of dancing and pleasure, than a hearty breakfast: a pan of eggs and bacon, fresh brioches from the baker across the road and two pots of really strong coffee; then opening the butcher’s shop with fresh heart and trying to keep your eyes open until the evening, when you can shut up shop again’—those few times, then, that they went out were sufficient for me, also staying up all night, and sometimes at intervals of six months, to read Jan Wolkers’ Turkish Delight and Jef Geeraerts’ first Gangrene novels, books I had heard so much about, although not from my parents, who nevertheless simply had them in their mysterious cupboard.) (All other papers, including their marriage certificate, their passport and a handwritten accounts book with lots of deletions and addition sums, I left untouched. One should not try to know everything about one’s parents.)

I still haven’t said what that pièce de résistance is, on top of her long cupboard, in the centre in all its splendour. A sculpture, again in biscuit, but this time as big as a squatting cat. The Holy Family, painted in pastel shades. Mary, Joseph and the baby, with on its right shoulder a dove peeping round guiltily.

‘Make sure [she, deadly serious] that no one tries to deny you that sculpture if anything happens to us. It’s an heirloom from your grandmother. It survived the flight from West Flanders to here, during the last big gas offensive when your grandfather and her had to flee as fast as they could with the horse and cart, with the maid, a son and a daughter, and just a fraction of their belongings, including this sculpture. It’s a miracle that it didn’t get broken on the way in that wild torrent of refugees in which people and animals were trampled underfoot. It’s older than your father, who was born here in the Vermorgenstraat. If you don’t like it, you can get rid of it, I’m not crazy about it myself. But don’t ever let anyone take it away from you. It’s yours.’

The sculpture is on an oval wooden base and under a glass bell jar, to stop it getting dusty. Under that wooden base is also a napkin, of antique Bruges lace. When their house contents are sold off, in just over a year’s time—he leaving alone for the oversized room in his old people’s home, she for the institution for human jetsam—the lace napkin and the glass bell jar will fetch more than the Holy Family.

They have now almost finished their pizza and their salad, and are listening, chewing attentively, to the weather forecast, which this evening is being broadcast to them by their favourite weatherman, the one with the moustache. That gives us the chance, before the fatal moment arrives, to cast a quick glance over the rest of the setting. The decor is half the story.

The candelabra has three arms, each of which is gilded and elegantly curled and ends in a matt-glass rose, at the heart of which is a bulb. The arms are all attached to the outside of a ring, also gilded. On the inside hangs a graceful chalice of cut matt glass, hollow side upward. Underneath, at the centre of the chalice, a gilt protuberance hangs down, like the point of an inverted First World War German helmet, pointing to the round living-room table just below, the one with the glass top that rests on a wickerwork base. One of the few possessions that will survive the move to his oversized room in the old people’s home.

Apart from a wall clock and a pair of bone-dry holy water fonts—a crumbling palm branch has been pushed behind each of them—only monumental items are displayed on the walls. Above the mantelpiece: a mirror with bevelled edges and a luxuriant frame, again gilt, almost as high and as wide as the chimney breast itself. On the wall opposite: a machine-woven tapestry, in which two late-medieval characters are riding through a wood on horseback with falcons on their fists, without noticing the many hinds and hares behind their backs, watching them go past in surprise. The tapestry is partly hidden by a two-person couch—an elegant, stylish piece of furniture with white wooden feet, curled arms and decorations in gold paint, covered in moss-green velvet, fastened with an endless row of brass drawing pins. The cushions are the same moss-green velvet and at the top, halfway along the back, where friends, family members and total strangers have to lay their heads, there is again a battery of napkins. ‘To protect my cushions. [she, disgusted] You can’t believe what people put on their hair nowadays. That’s if they wash it at all.’

Above the cupboard designed by her brother stands a painting by her elder sister, Maria the Artistic, who for years lived a few streets away. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone, [she, slightly embarrassed] but I always thought your Aunt Maria was better than your uncle. Our Maria had a golden touch, everything she painted came to life, while he had to sweat and strain to achieve half what she achieved. He used to stand and curse over still lifes of hers, which were so striking, so natural. He had to become a house painter, and the rest didn’t amount to much any more. But he saw to it that she stopped too. If only that woman had been able to go on painting! She didn’t have an ounce of support, and in those days it wasn’t usual, a woman making a career in art. Our Maria could have conquered the world. Now the poor thing is in an institution, she no longer knows what she said or ate yesterday, she has difficulty recognizing her children and can’t remember her paintings at all. If I ever get like that, you must shoot me straight away. It’s not compassion keeping someone like that alive. It’s cowardice.’

The work by Maria the Artistic, above the long cupboard, is a copy of the Negro Heads by Rubens. Four times the same African with a fringe of beard, ‘painted from life from different points of view’, as art catalogues describe it. A black model, a lost soul from sixteen hundred and something, who can be found in many other paintings of the Flemish master as a Wise Man from the East or as a slave, and who thanks to Aunt Maria looked at me all through my childhood, indeed from different points of view. While I was reaching my verdicts, alone in the abandoned flat, I felt four pairs of eyes boring into my back. Each time a condemnation from the very same occasional judge from sixteen hundred and something.

(The junk dealer whistled in admiration. ‘Not bad, for an amateur.’ But he was buying it for the frame, he said. Sober, good craftsmanship, with a nice patina.)

Finally, just above the china cabinet there hangs, quite daringly in view of the colossal weight of the carved frame alone, the crown jewel of her pictures. An engraving of the old school, easily a metre square, probably printed at the beginning of the twentieth century, depicting Rubens’ studio while he is painting and commenting, standing at his easel facing a white female model in a feathered hat. They are surrounded by visitors and walls covered in well-known masterpieces. ‘They’re going to be fighting over this! [she, proudly] It was almost included in an exhibition, here in the Municipal Museum, during the Rubens Year. But they didn’t quite have enough space for it.’

(The Rubens House in Antwerp, when emailed with a photo of the etching attached, was to decline our generous offer with thanks. The junk dealer who took the Negro heads offered a ridiculously low price. The item remained in the family.)

Supper is over, and the plates are in a pile with the cutlery on top, ready to be taken into the open kitchen. Shielding her mouth with one hand, she digs at her dentures with a toothpick, mechanically, more from habit than necessity. ‘Like a toothpick should be. [she, dogmatic down to the smallest details] Hollow with two sharp ends, in white paper packaging, and made of material resembling the shaft of chicken wings or hedgehog spines, which people once used to make their own toothpicks from.’ On the TV an announcer lists the evening’s programmes.

He has got up and opens the terrace door, giving in to one of his few vices. His curiosity. In the shop he had the nerve to interrogate everyone in a friendly manner, without distinction, from children to old bags, widows to the unemployed. He did not avoid any subject. Divorces, illnesses, rows, gossip. Until his Josée called him to order with a hiss, and also—invisibly, thanks to the counter—gave him a kick in the shins. ‘What are you up to, Roger? [she, in a whisper, but meanwhile looking very affably at the same customer] You’re giving that poor old dear the third degree. You’re just like Sherlock Holmes, you are.’

He puts his head outside, full of curiosity. There’s a wind blowing, it’s drizzling, dusk is falling, not very inviting for a walk. The evening rush hour is almost over, except at and around this junction of which their property forms one of the corners and where, in spite of all the department stores in the town centre and all the shopping malls for miles around, a number of small shops still do good business, because together they form a mini shopping centre. A baker’s next to a greengrocer’s next to a newsagent’s, a little further on a chemist’s and a florist’s, diagonally opposite a shop selling bird seed and bird cages and chewing rings for dogs, round the corner a supplier of cement and bricks, and over there a butcher’s—it’s true: no longer under their flat. Their previous tenant, without warning and just before his lease expired, opened a brand-new butcher’s shop on the other side of the street, quite simply in a terraced house.

At first they were furious and desperate; now they are grateful to him. Their former business has become an added attraction, from which the whole neighbourhood benefits. Anyway it’s a perfect location for a shop like that, on a corner and, mark you, on the oldest road to Antwerp. Actually it’s something that was always lacking here. A chip shop.

‘Roger, love? [she, annoyed] Do shut the door. There’s a terrible draught.’ That’s the last thing she says in the language he is familiar with from her.

‘They’re queuing out in the street again,’ he says, contentedly closing the terrace door and pushing the roll-shaped draught excluder firmly back against it. ‘It’s the same every evening at this time. One car after another parked or stopped in the middle of the road with all four indicators on. And to judge by the plastic bags, it’s not only chips they’re buying. One person takes away half a chicken, or curried sausages or hot dogs, or what do they call them nowadays? A chip shop like that sells everything, from cans of lager to soft drinks and cigarettes.’ He turns round to her and has the fright of his life.

Her eyes are unrecognizable. Empty, deathly, icy. She seems to be staring at something behind him. Her lips purse, relax again, purse, relax. As if they were preparing to spew out something large. Saliva is leaking from her mouth. A first drop is already falling from her chin into her lap. Her napkin remains unused. Her hands are trembling on the tabletop.

‘Josée?’ he asks, at a loss what to do, then taking a step closer after all. ‘Is something wrong?’

Finally she looks at him.

Her expression has not changed.

For a few seconds they gaze into each other’s eyes. Then she flies at him. With a voice that is scarcely hers any more. And with a scream full of wordless revulsion and rage.