Chez Moi Read online

  I like writing at night. If I were a writer I would always write at night. That’s what Balzac did. Was it Balzac? I can sort of picture a satin dressing-gown with soup stains on it. Was that his? It’s what Proust did even during the day because he lived with the shutters closed. I can sort of picture a bed, but - blank! My memory’s gone blank! - it’s getting confused with the one in Van Gogh’s bedroom. That’s the kind of jumble my thoughts are usually in; I mustn’t let the jumble take over. I must concentrate on writing my lists. With the list of brilliant ideas I think the way they are formulated is very important. I mustn’t say too much or be too vague. If it’s too detailed it won’t really be a list and it could hold me up when it comes to doing the things. If it’s too vague - is it really worth my going into that?

  Don’t let’s waste any more time. Brilliant Ideas: 1) A restaurant for children. 2) Restaurant and catering/prepared meals. There, it’s already finished, I’ve only got two ideas. I was prompted to them, both of them, by my muse Vincent-the-florist. The first when he talked about customers being like family: family means children, children means won’t eat anything and don’t behave well in restaurants. Family means hell, and yet here I am with my revolutionary idea just round the corner from you, with a place where children are welcome, like in a school canteen but better, no more expensive (I know, it doesn’t seem possible, but I’ll find a way of solving the impossible in list number two), a restaurant where some things have to be eaten with fingers, a place where everything will make them want to eat.

  The second idea is, at first glance, less original. A restaurant that prepares dishes for people to eat at home, a sort of posh take-away, yes, but not like other ones. My muse gave me the idea by giving me his rotten flowers. This isn’t about serving rotten food at buffets and garden parties. No. This is to do with not wasting anything any more. I won’t have dishes for people to take home every day, only when I’ve got too much food. I won’t cater for parties of 500, I’ll do micro-cooking for people who don’t have time, can’t do it themselves, or can’t be bothered. It will be very cheap because it will be leftovers and the worst bit is I’ll tell people and no one will mind. It will work by word of mouth and people will soon realize that it’s a sort of lottery. Sometimes bingo! You get the steak en croute for four with wild mushroom sauce, and other evenings no, sorry, we’re fully booked and we haven’t got anything, but if you’ve got five minutes I can give you a recipe that’s so easy you’ll be able to do it with your eyes shut. When people are really nice and have proved how much they like the place by eating here often and recommending Chez moi to their friends, I’ll give them a surprise, a gala dinner for a birthday, something extravagant, over the top and unexpected. They like me, the people round here. It’s incredible how much they like me. Great streams of love gushing at me. They say, ‘But how would we cope without you?’. Housewives say it, and impoverished young couples. It makes me glow, I finally feel I’m me. I give complete satisfaction, I exude goodness, I’m changing the world - changing it into somewhere liveable, at last!

  I open a bottle of Bordeaux. I’ve only had… let’s see, how many glasses did I drink with Charles? How many bottles did we… I can’t remember, but I’m thirsty. I need a little something to get me started on list number two, which is much longer and more difficult to draw up because that’s where all the problems raised in the first list are supposed to be sorted out.

  At the top of the blank page I write ‘What Needs Doing’. I decide not to put my thoughts in any order, just to let them come. In a heap. I do some brainstorming and write down: Go to the council to find out about the price of school meals. Get in touch with local nannies (I cross that out straight away, sensing that nannies are my natural enemies because they might think of me as underhand competition). Establish a list of things children like. Calculate the cost of a meal. Decide on a lowest-possible selling price. Invest in unbreakable plates. Don’t decorate. Don’t put toys all over the place - toys can make a place look awful because they’re either too bright or too drab: toys are direct opponents of good taste, even wooden ones which, apart from anything else, bore children to tears and depress them. Find a way to make adults understand that they’re welcome here too. Have two different menus? No, appeal to regressive impulses: serious cuisine will be for the evenings and the catering department. Take on staff: a waiter and a girl to help in the kitchen, or the other way round, a waitress and a boy to help in the kitchen. But I’m sure I want a girl and a boy. Why? Because I feel I’d be able to settle disagreements more easily then. Buy cushions so children can reach the tables. Waffle-iron. Pancake griddle. Deep fryer? Deep fryer. And what about an open fire? So I can grill meat on a wood fire: lamb chops, spare ribs, chicken breasts. I look closely at the walls and ceiling, trying to find a flue. With my eyes glued to the mouldings, I don’t see the chair in my way, catch my foot in it and fall right over it onto the tiled floor, the fingers of my right hand doing little to deaden the impact between my nose and upper lip and the cast iron pedestal of a table.

  I stay there sprawled on the floor for a moment, the way footballers do, with my hands on my face, the way footballers do, and grimacing, like them, with my knees up to my chest, which they do so well. I don’t know whose attention I’m trying to attract, there’s no ref here. As for whose fault it is, it could only possibly be mine. I’m surprised to find myself regretting married life, a time when any suffering could be traced back to the other half, the evil husband, the wicked man who was so unfair to me. It was so good being able to think Fuck him! and feel the pus run out of the abscess. I suppose I could be annoyed with Charles for making me drink so much because I now realize - now that I’m having so much trouble getting to my feet while the walls seem to be dancing round me at hectic angles like a house of cards on the point of collapse, the tables are scuttling about on their feet like giant cockroaches and the chairs, which have turned into dung-beetles, are peering down at me and scowling with their menacing horned foreheads - I now realize that I’m drunk, so drunk I didn’t even know I was.

  I heave myself onto the banquette and gaze at the crumpled pieces of paper covered in my forger’s handwriting: the l’s closed to form perfect loops, the dots directly above the i’s, the fluid downstrokes, the letters all exceptionally even in size, leaning slightly toward the top right-hand corner, expressing a reasonable degree of optimism, and giving each line a classiness, an elegance as it sweeps smoothly in the direction of the text. I have had many successes thanks to my deceptive writing. Experts have pronounced that I have the natural authority, reliability and enterprise required of a leader, and predicted a dazzling future for me in psychology and psychiatry, guaranteed success in teaching, and tremendous facility for research and engineering. Even when I myself read what I’ve written, I’m lulled into the illusion of my own abilities. I believe in what’s written there and, as blood drips very slowly from my nose and lip (the drips from my nose forming splashy flowers the size of a daisy and the smaller ones from my lip only managing little chickweed buds), I decide to follow my own advice and comply with the instructions given by the excess alcohol.

  Before lying down to sleep, I add to the end of list number two: ‘Find Mr Slimane’.

  I am woken by a rustling, slithering sound and sit bolt upright. The mail is being pushed under the metal shutters. One by one the envelopes peep in, first with just a corner, then the rest follows and, as if suddenly sucked in by the floor tiles, they skid towards me. They’re all white, with a window. Envelopes are the exact opposite of bathrooms, I think to myself: having a window is a drawback. I’m amazed how many letters I receive since opening the restaurant. Not that ‘letter’ is the right word. These aren’t people writing to me. It’s not sentences that they’re sending. I know I should no longer be surprised, I should stop thinking letters are always an opportunity for someone - however close we are - to open themselves up to me. How are you? letters say. I’m feeling much better, the children are very well, my h
usband’s found a new job, I’ve started reading again, I’ve enrolled in a wonderful sewing course… Or: I can’t really cope any more, I’m in such a mess, every day I think I’m going to walk out, I’m suffocating… News, given and received. I think about Madame de Staël’s letters, or was it Madame de Sévigné? I think of Rosa Luxemburg’s letters (and here there’s no hesitation because her correspondence with Leon Jogiches is part of my nomadic library, the refuge of thirty-three authors salvaged from the chaos of my memory). I get up and pick up the dismal harvest of the day’s mail. On offer today: two reminders for unpaid bills with charges for late payment, a request for my compulsory contribution to a dodgy-sounding pension fund, an offer of one month’s free subscription to a trade magazine, and a bank statement for my business account. I put them down next to each other, the requests for payments and the pages from the bank screaming ‘overdraft!’. Talk to each other, I feel like saying to the two piles of paper. Sort it out among yourselves. One gaping hole to another. I hope this geographical proximity can resolve the conflict. My creditors will give up. The bank will advance some funds. There’s nothing I can do, anyway, apart from regret there aren’t any other letters, that I only get things with figures on them. In a spirit of revolt, I go over to my book shelf and pick up Rosa Luxemburg. I’ll send myself a letter from her. It’ll make up for it. I open it at random on page 277, and read:

  What really made me happy was the bit where you said we’re still young and we’ll find a way to sort out our personal lives. Oh, my golden love, I so long for you to keep that promise!… A little place of our own, our furniture, our books; calm steady work, going for walks together, occasionally to the opera, a little circle of friends who sometimes come over for supper, a month in the country without work every summer!… (And maybe also a baby, a little tiny baby?? Could we ever? Ever?…)

  I close the book, thinking about that little tiny baby isolated inside brackets, already protected by its future mother - who would never be its future mother because she was childless when she was assassinated in 1919 - in the volatile embrace of two tiny arms of ink. I think a while about a mother’s tenderness, about the madness and ferocity of a mother’s tenderness. It’s nine o’clock. I really must go and do the shopping, at least to get the bread and fruit I need, but I stay there motionless, paralysed by the scene in my mind’s eye. My heart beats slowly, my chest constricts. I relive it - yes, I relive my own offhand behaviour when I was in no hurry to erect those vital brackets, and the initial exuberance which cost me so dearly.

  My son was the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen. People made fun of me when I said so. Even my husband laughed at me. ‘But look,’ I told him, ‘Look!’ I told my family and friends. ‘He’s exceptional. His head’s perfect, his nose, his skin, his body. And his eyes are so kind. Look at him compared to other babies if you can’t see it straight away. They’re wrinkled with big pointy noses, scratchy little hands and a cowardly look in their eye. Other babies have skinny arms and pigeon toes and bendy, ingrowing nails. They shriek the whole time. My son’s the exact opposite, a real pleasure to behold.’

  The nurse is worried. According to her, I’m too euphoric. But the fact that she thinks I’m over the top only rallies my fighting spirit. ‘Maybe you haven’t looked at him properly,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not surprised, you’ve got too much to do. If you spent an hour looking at each baby, you’d waste precious time. But this one’s different. Look at him, I promise you. I can’t take any of the credit, but he’s a work of art.’ My husband slaps me. With the flat of his hand right across my cheek and nose. The woman in the next bed buries her face in her hands. I wonder whether she’s laughing. My nose starts bleeding and the nurse takes my husband by the hand and leads him out of the room. I think none of them have any sense of humour and feel very much alone.

  From his see-through crib Hugo gratifies me with his wonderful smile, which I’ve forgotten to mention. I lie there admiring him but suddenly, unbearably, as if something’s broken: I don’t love him any more. I look away. Concentrate on the blank wall. I must be wrong. It was just a mental block. I’ll get some rest and when I look back in his eyes it will start again, that huge jubilant wave of love. It will swallow me up and pin me down, I’ll be ga-ga and triumphant. I wait a while, watching the woman in the next bed suckling her poor little girl, such an ugly scrawny thing with three black hairs on a ridiculous sugar-loaf shaped head but with hair all over her body, on her back and arms. The mother’s eyelids are lowered, she sighs with pleasure or disappointment and tries to forget the incomprehensible scene she has just witnessed. But perhaps she’s also savouring a sense of victory: I’ve been punished, me, the mother of the most beautiful baby in the world, right next to her who produced a skinny, hairy frog. I was slapped. I had such a come-down. Was put back in my place. Yes, she’d probably had enough of it too, of me gazing at my son the whole time. But it’s not over, they won’t get me that easily.

  Stealthily as a desert lizard imperceptibly skewing its scaly sand-covered face towards its prey, which mistakes it for a stone until the very moment of capture, I turn my face towards my child, expecting to feel the constantly rising tide of passion. Nothing. Nothing happens. I launch into a detailed examination: dimpled wrist, a tiny soft fold attaching it to the apricot-coloured hand; exquisite padded mouth, flower-like and pulpy, pulpy and feathery, a generous half-open mouth beneath a little round nose, a friendly humorous nose; blue eyelids already edged with lashes; a forehead of unruffled solemnity without even a dip at the temples, solemn then and tranquil, anchored by indistinct eyebrows raised in an expression of indulgent astonishment. An even covering of downy hair whirling round a perfect vortex. His ears as flat, iridescent, restful and calm as clam shells on the shore. A vigorous elastic body in a baby-grow that is neither wrinkled nor gaping in every direction, but instead emphasizes the perfect contours of his limbs attached to his long, powerful and mysteriously convex torso. It’s all there, his soothing regular breathing, his eyes which suddenly open, soft grey, looking at me without actually seeing me, the nurses say - because I’m too far away and there’s a layer of Perspex between us. He does actually see me, I think. My son’s looking at me and he can see me, and he can see in my eyes that it’s already over. I can’t do it any more. I don’t know where it’s gone. But indisputably, brutally and terrifyingly it’s gone: all my love has vanished; all that’s left is a powerful urge to care for him and an appalling pity, but I’m struggling to understand who that’s for.

  The next few weeks are blank. I can do everything properly. The paediatric nurses congratulate me, I’m discharged, I go home and I wait. I wait for the love to come back. I nip into his bedroom by surprise, catching myself out, and stare into the cradle. Hugo’s there, sleeping, gorgeous. And as he grows, a spherical lump swells inside my chest. I never thought heartache would be that shape, or that violent or originate in that way. I start spying on other mothers, the ones with prams like me, the ones who’ve already got to the buggy stage, the ones walking next to tricycles, the ones carrying sports bags and trotting along behind great bean poles. I’m fascinated by them. They all have the treasure that’s been stolen from me. All of them. The strict ones, lax ones, sour ones, annoying ones. I can see it on their faces, in their every gesture, hear it in the intonation of their voices: countless signs of maternal love. And it tears me apart. I don’t talk about it to anyone. And no one talks about it to me. Because my infirmity goes unsuspected.

  Hugo grows. He plays with his hands, sits up on his own, crawls, stands…. He’s never ill, he laughs, laughs from morning till night and starts talking very young, putting together huge senatorial sentences. He grows more beautiful too, his eyelashes getting even longer, his eyes bigger. His hair is a beacon, his body agile. The other mothers at the park envy me. He never cries, even when he falls over. He makes friends easily, and treats them with exquisite courtesy, sharing his biscuits and lending his bucket. He smiles and plays the fool to entertain babies
when he’s only four years old himself. The other mothers resent me. They think I’m too perfect. We go for boat trips, he goes riding, knows how to steer a hot-air balloon, I pay for a diving course, we read books, we cook, we do silk paintings, he becomes the Capoeira champion. He doesn’t do anything with his father. He sits at his feet when he’s reading the paper, then curls up against him with his head on his chest and his eyes closed. I’ve got out of the habit of waiting for my heart to leap again. I’ve given up on it. Sometimes - like a story-teller who knows ancestral epics by heart - I tell myself the story of my three days of glory. The three days that came between the birth and the slap. I retrace my steps and remember. The wonderment is still intact. I can no longer feel it, but my imagination can synthesize it. It’s like looking at photographs of the past, seeing yourself biting into a piece of fruit on a summer’s afternoon. It’s winter and you haven’t got anything in your mouth but if you concentrate you can still find a trace of the sensation, you can identify it without feeling it. It’s like working with a stencil. And it’s torture, because you keep wanting to thrust your hand into the picture and grab the piece of fruit, take the sunlight, turn back time.

  My aunt, who was diabetic, had half a leg amputated towards the end of her life.

  ‘I can move my foot,’ she told me after she’d had the operation.

  I naturally thought she meant her remaining foot.

  ‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘It hasn’t been affected and gone numb.’