And when I heard the schoolchildren passing behind the fence, exuberant at their few hours of freedom after lessons before they were expected back home, when I heard them swimming in the mild warmth of late spring days, I almost burst with anger. The slamming of the front door, after my brother had thrown off his satchel, had drunk milk in the kitchen and joined his pals outside, sounded to me like an affront. The fun they had, under the window of the room where in the evenings, when the light had lost its force, I was able to take some sun under my mother’s watchful eye, aroused pure resentment in me.
I heard them egging each other on, exchanged playful blows. I eavesdropped on the galloping of their heels on the pavement when they set off to one of the pubs on the edge of town, on the banks of the river: establishments where I could only go when accompanied by my father, an uncle, sometimes my brother, and preferably on a Sunday, when the bourgeois aired their bridal bouquets, ordered beer and brawn with mustard and secretly eyed the waitresses.
I was sick with jealousy when Edgard came back from those outings with a Bacchanalian grin on his lips, the grin that forged a conspiratorial link between him and Emilie, and melted my mother’s heart to such an extent that she cooed at his wettest jokes like any schoolgirl. If anything could make me even more furious, it was the slavishness of my own sex, the passivity with which they nestled in their shackles and let the reins be tightened and then from their wasp waists poured venom over any woman who did want to break out.
My mother excelled at this. She became the sullen idol I spat upon. The congealed version of a goddess with two forms, of which Emilie embodied the boiling dimension, the fury and ecstasy of womanhood which, when it comes down to it, respects no morality, negates all principles and casts us back into the glow of the melting pot.
These were the years under the sign of the Magna Mater, because the time called adolescence remains the most female season in a human life. Our qualities haven’t yet caked solidly around us, and always, I am certain, a core in us remains white-hot and boiling. Its impulses influence the fluctuations of the magnetic field that I call our being, or our soul, or whatever — since words are only words, congealed screams.
In my schooldays, at the venerable institute of the Cistercian Sisters of the Holy Word, my sympathy, although I should rather say fascination, invariably focused on the largely invisible nuns in their godly termites’ mound, which was divided by a high wall from the classrooms and covered playground. The young ladies who gave us instruction, young bourgeoises for whom marriage heralded the end of their career, seemed to me much more sterile than those black Fates, who in self-elected virginity glided over the immaculately polished tiles of their corridors with the rustle of canvas around their calves — the wing beats of the Holy Ghost, whom they worshipped in their chapel at dead of night, until in the first light of morning they prostrated themselves before the altar like scorched moths.
My mother thought it important to send me to a religious school. The belief in a supreme being was for her at best a form of edifying poetry, very useful in bringing up children, while for me the true God was the God behind the tabernacles, the totally silent scream between the lines of the Living Word, which made galaxies collide and drove chicks from their egg.
“Stop talking nonsense, child,” she would snap at me if she were here with us. “There’s nothing on high.”
She regularly took little offerings to the nuns; sums of money, food, in May flowers from our garden, for the statue of the Virgin. Then she would converse for a while out of politeness with the sister in charge of guests in the parlour of the convent, sitting on one of the chairs that exuded the smell of furniture wax and were reflected a hundredfold by the copper of the flowerpot-holder and the old kitchen utensils on display. She treated the nuns with the respectful incomprehension she also reserved for doctors, whose knowledge she appreciated, but without the will to share in it. She seemed to find the finesses of the sacred as unappetizing as a view of the opened wall of an abdomen with an inflamed appendix throbbing in it.
If I look at the nuns through her eyes, at the portion of the cloister that I could see from my desk in the class, and the ghosts that shuffled past the pointed-arch windows every day at the same times, on their way to the chapel, I don’t see a convent but a machine, a generator whose imponderable mechanism converted hymns, litanies and acclamations into a psychic gravity designed to keep morals and habits in their place.
I have always disliked the fearfulness attaching to every rite, although I know: a ritual without useless exactitude precisely loses its purpose. Behind this lurked the fear of the Egyptians, whose priests begged the sun god all night long to rise again from the kingdom of the dead, or the frightened cunning of the Incas and their attempts to anchor the heavenly disc to the sun stone, like a sheep on a chain, or like a child tries to prevent his mother leaving him by clinging to her skirts.
I don’t know exactly how old I was when I suddenly began to suspect that the rituals were meant to keep in check a huge fear of the Word itself, God’s Own Name, which there in that chapel had to coincide reassuringly with itself. The circular days of perpetual adoration, the perpetuum mobile of songs and invocations, yes, even the style of the holy in itself, suddenly seemed to be incantations meant to avoid the godhead disintegrating, or, as the sun will one day do, exploding and unleashing a storm of meanings gone adrift.
Wouldn’t that be a spectacle? And how would it feel to dissolve in that explosion, and never, never again be able to be completely expressed?
II
WHEN I CAN’T get to sleep, I like looking outside. I ask Rachida before she goes not to close the curtain over the window next to my bed. I want to see the teams of cleaners who work in the middle of the night in the offices on the other side of the water: the olive-coloured worker bees — veiled girls, young men with raven-black hair in light-blue smocks. I like following those kids as they go from floor to floor and make draughtsboard patterns of light and dark slide across the front of the building. In honeycombs of light they dust, scrub floors, empty waste-paper baskets, soap window glass and rub it dry, and I receive the impersonal blessing of their work as a sacrament. At such moments I have the feeling that I am calm enough to be able to survey the splendour of the earth as it is: not beautiful or ugly, but living and dying, pulsating in all its plants and animals.
I like the few hours of desolation at the crack of dawn, the emptiness and the first birds, which for a moment don’t have to share the silence with anyone, before the cars drive under the crowns of the trees into the multi-storey car park with glowing brake lights. I like listening to the rumble of the first trains, which at this early hour penetrates far into the centre of town, until the hubbub of life getting under way drowns it out: the buses, trams, cyclists, the footsteps of clusters of schoolchildren, in whose satchels pens or pencils are rattling to the cadence of their tread on the pavement — the glorious everydayness of the world and its banal, but oh-so-vital peace.
*
Then I wait till the bell goes downstairs, the signal Rachida gives me to let me know she’s in the house. It may be the other one. I can tell from the ring what awaits me. The other one doesn’t so much ring as send a shrill reproach upstairs. Then I pretend to be asleep, squeeze a half-hour’s freedom from the night, pull the blankets in a cocoon round my bones and sulk, and realize I’m like my mother, when she was young, when every month her tissues rang the hormonal alarm bell. I grant her those little resurrections now more than I used to.