†
Nez Noir University Press, 343
EC.
‡
Macmillan, London, 1923.
*
Artcraft Press, Chemin Rouge 299
EC.
2
My maman was one of you. She was born in Voorstand. She was able to trace her family back to the ‘Settlers Free’ of the Great Song. Had things been different I might have been a Voorstander, like you, and then there would have been no trouble. But when my maman was eighteen she came to Chemin Rouge to be a model in a fashion advertisement.
She became famous, within Efica, for her role in a local soap opera, and then she was notorious as a founder of the Feu Follett† Collective, a small radical theatre group which was always in trouble with our local authorities for its opposition to the country of her birth.
Let us say it straight — Felicity Smith was very critical of her own people. It was because of this, she changed her name from Smutts to Smith: she did not want to be a Voorstander. She was outraged at the way Voorstand manipulated our elections, meddled with our currency, threaded all that shining cable we never understood, miles of it, great loops of it, through the dry granite caves which honeycombed our southern provinces. She did not like the way your country used us. If this is offensive, I am sorry, but it was her belief. It was honestly held. Indeed, it was passionately held. She was not reasonable or balanced or fair. Yet for all the passion she expanded, for all the ceaseless paranoia, for all the very real Efican government agents who came snooping round the theatre, their electronic pencils dancing like fireflies in the dark, it is hard to see how the Feu Follet Collective was a threat to anyone — it was a small, dirty, uncomfortable theatre at the back of that warren of bachelor flats, stables and dressage rings which had once housed the Ducrow Circus School.‡
When, at the end of her life, my maman found a way to really threaten the status quo it was not through the theatre but in the dirty old fairground of baby-kissing politics. In comparison the notorious Feu Follet was toothless. It had no money, no advertising, too much boring Brecht. My maman sometimes said that if it had not been for the spies, who after all paid full price for their tickets, they would have long ago gone out of business. That, of course, was a joke. The unfunny truth was that the Feu Follet would never have survived if it had not been for its circus matinées and Shakespeare productions, the latter chosen to coincide with the selection of that year’s high-school syllabuses.
I was born in the Scottish Play, at the end of a full rehearsal.
There was no great rush of fluids, but there was no mistaking what was happening when her waters broke and my maman quietly excused herself and walked out of the Feu Follet without telling anyone where she was going.
When she came down the brick ramp in Gazette Street, things started happening faster than she had expected. Oxytocin entered her bloodstream like a ten-ton truck and all the pretty soft striped muscles of her womb turned hostile, contracting on me like they planned to crush my bones. I was caught in a rip. I was dumped. I was shoved into the birth canal, head first, my arm still pinned behind my back. My ear got folded like an envelope. My head was held so hard it felt, I swear it, like the end of life and not its glorious beginning.
My maman had never had a child before. She did not understand the urgency. She walked straight past the line of empty red and silver cabs whose Sikh taxi-men, unaware of the emergency taking place underneath their noses, continued to talk to each other from behind their steering wheels, via the radio. As she crossed the Boulevard des Indiennes to the river she already felt distinctly uncomfortable, as if she were holding back a pumpkin, and yet she would not abandon her plan, i.e. to walk quietly, by herself, along the river to the Mater Hospital. She had long ago decided on this and she was a woman who always carried out her plans.
It was a Sunday morning in January and the syrupy air smelled of dried fish, sulphur and diesel fuel.
The year was 371 by our calendar. My maman was thirty-two years old, tall, finely boned. No one watching her walk along the grey sandy path beside the river bed would have guessed at what her body was experiencing. She was an actress of the most physical type, and for the first half of her journey her walk was a triumph of will. She wore a long bright blue skirt, black tights. On her back she carried a black tote bag containing an extra shirt, another pair of tights, four pairs of pants, a pack of menstrual pads and a life of Stanislavsky she had always imagined she would read between contractions. This last thing — the book — is a good example of the sort of thing that irritated people, even members of her own company who loved her. They sensed in her this expectation of herself, that she could, for Christ’s sake, read Stanislavsky while she had a baby.
She had a rude shock coming to her. They did not say that, hardly had the courage to think it in the quiet, secret part of their minds, but it was there, in their eyes, fighting with their sympathy. She had obsessed so long about this birth, not publicly, or noisily, but she had done the things that sometimes annoy the un-pregnant — eaten yeast and wheat germ, chanted in the mornings.
No one from the Feu Follet saw her walk across the Boulevard des Indiennes. Had they done so, they might have been tempted to see it as evidence of her will, even her pride, her belief that she could walk while a lesser woman would be in an ambulance calling for the anaesthetic, but Felicity was someone who liked to celebrate the milestones of her life — birthdays particularly — and she had imagined this moment, this walk beside the river, for too long to abandon it.
My maman was a foreigner, but she loved Chemin Rouge with a passion barely imaginable to the native born. She believed it was this provincial city in this unimportant country that had saved her life, and if she had believed in God it was here she would have kneeled — on the grey shell-grit path beside the river. If she had had parents it was here she would have brought them to show them what she had become. She had no God, no parents, but still she celebrated — she brought me here instead.
She had been a resident for fourteen years. She had been a citizen for ten. She had her own theatre company. She was going to give birth. It was so far from where she had been born. All these sights — this ultramarine sky, these white knobbly river rocks, the six-foot-tall feathered grasses which brushed her shoulders — were unimaginable to anyone in the great foreign metropolis of Saarlim, and they were, for her, at once exotic but also as familiar as her own milky Hollandse Maagd skin.
This small, slightly rancid port city was her home. And her feelings for the Eficans, those laconic, belligerent, self-doubting inhabitants of the abandoned French and English colonies, descendants of convicts (and dyers who, being conscripted by Louis Quatorze, were as good as convicts), grandchildren of displaced crofters and potato-blight Irish, were protective and critical, admiring and impatient. It was no small thing to her that I should be an Efican, and she betrayed her foreign birth in the way in which her ambitions for each of us, the country and the child, were not humble.
Although the theatre was appreciated for its rough colloquial Shakespeare, she and the actors also devised a sort of agitprop, part circus, part soapbox, in which they attacked our country’s craven relationship with yours. There were people who valued the Shakespeare but found the agitprop unrewarding, and others who never set foot inside the Feu Follet who imagined the famous actor-manager to be both strident and humourless. It was half true — she was capable of being both of these things occasionally, but she was also a softly spoken woman with warm eyes. No son was ever so cherished by a mother as I was by her.