“I’m like the donkeys, child. Their legs wear out first too, it seems.”
He had poured a dash of cream in his coffee. As he stirred it, he said: “It’s about time there was an end to it, if you ask me.”
Only when I felt Rachida taking my glasses off my nose to dry the lenses and I, after she had put my glasses back on, saw my brother looking into his cup in embarrassment, did it dawn on me that I must have called out and cried.
My hands were trembling. I saw Rachida’s helplessness, she was looking furiously for a single light-hearted sentence to break the embarrassed silence, and it went right through my heart.
Finally she went away.
My brother waited till she had left the room, got up and came over to me. As usual he tried to put his fingers under my chin so that I would look up, but I turned away and stared outside while he cursed my stubbornness.
“I don’t know, Hélène,” he sighed, “what matière you’re made of inside…”
Matière, I thought, how frivolous. But I said: “Concrete.”
A few weeks later came the news that he had broken a hip and was in the hospital with a prosthesis. Later, that he was to move into a boarding house. I wondered who had arranged that for him.
A courier delivered a package. Inside were a set of keys and a note with the pre-printed heading house of evening pleasures—how deep can you fall, I thought.
“I’m sorry, my little gazelle, but I don’t think I’ll be returning to my house,” he wrote. “Keep the spare keys, you never know whether you’ll need them one day…”
I saw the question burning on Rachida’s tongue, whether I shouldn’t visit him. I sensed her disappointment, but I very much appreciated the fact that she remained silent.
My brother always cultivated a form of impermanence, a quality that made all contexts slide off him. He shrouded himself in a sniggering secrecy that reminded me just too much of a cult, and his death did not really put an end to his impermanence. It simply became absolute. I mourn for him by polishing up his mysteries.
I never knew which of the young men who regularly hung about in his house, even when he was well into old age, slept with him. Who were lovers and who were not, as far as that distinction could be made. As time went on they looked younger and younger, though they remained constantly between their mid-twenties and about thirty-five, but he himself naturally got older. They were more like symbols than people of flesh and blood. Radiant emblems of youthfulness, snooty young eels in their smart clothes, their collars starched so razor-sharp that they constituted a danger to their carotid artery, which I could see beating under their tender skin when they were introduced to me.
Nervous and polite to the point of hysteria, meticulously coiffured and manicured, at family gatherings or dinners they put their feet under the table and were silent, longing all too visibly for invisibility, having been first announced “as a friend of Edgard’s”—pronounced with all too audible quotation marks.
I wondered which of them he could stand to have with him at night, whom he admitted to his sleep and whether during their slumber they let their fingers wander to the scar on the sleeping trunk half under, half next to theirs, instinctively in search of the vein, the fracture, the line of morbid growth which ran from his hip, via his abdomen and his ribcage, to below his right shoulder, thank God the right side of his body. It looked like a careless line of welding or an aerial photo of a mountain chain. I thought it would feel scabby, dry and crumbly, but when he once allowed me to touch it, it gave way, warm and rubbery under my fingertips. I was frightened of hurting him, but he said: “Doesn’t matter, can’t feel a thing there.”
Except on stormy days, the sultry days, the days when summer seemed about to tip over into autumn. Then he had the bath filled with cold water and stretched out in it because the cold numbed the phantom pain that shot through that long vein. I wonder if his “friends” kept him company, dried his back, helped him into his dressing gown afterwards. They seemed more like tasty morsels, titbits that his tongue longed for when he was satiated with coarser fare.
There must have been others, of whom I caught no more than a glimpse. A more or less regular supply of men who were just too far “beneath” us on the ladder to let them loose at parties without turning the aura of secrecy that always surrounded him into a public scandal. Men who didn’t wear hats, but caps, and suits that more or less screamed that they were reserved for Sundays or special occasions, intended to last for years without wearing out.
I think he liked the difference, the distance, the interval, that never quite bridgeable gap between their world and his, that he sought them out for the scarce moments of complete brotherliness, more raw and pure than his more presentable boyfriends.
Whatever the case, he never wanted to move house and never suggested that I come and live with him.
“My little gazelle,” he laughed. “You have your books, I have my bad boys.”
He must have immersed himself in their lives and bodies, just as I could become completely absorbed by what my mother called “my reading matter”, a term I found derogatory enough, and even more when she used it. He had her mouth too, that wonderful, voluptuous mouth, with which she did not so much pronounce words as bid them a melancholy farewell. Her majestic French clothed itself with her lips like a boa. Whenever I think of my brother I hear her talking again, and vice versa, when I call my mother’s speech to mind, I am reminded of my brother — of his own berry mouth, the mouth of a catamite.
She found him less difficult to deal with because of course she recognized less of herself in him. But he was also a man. From a young age he enjoyed freedoms I could only dream about, but my mother always loved him more than me. I was never jealous about it. I got to know only too well the latent resentment that can exist between mothers and daughters. You have to be a woman to see through another woman. And if that other woman happens to be your own daughter the contempt proves chilliest of all, since you are looking into yourself. For my mother even innocence was a trick, and I’m not a jot better. I myself hated my daughter because she existed and was who she was, and now she is dead I hate her because she’s dead. So I accuse even chance of being an accomplice, because I call children who die before their parents greedy. I was furious when my daughter died, with hatred and misery.
I always thought that I was the only woman in Edgard’s life, at least the only woman with whom he shared an intimacy which perhaps went further than that between a wife and her husband, because she respected secrets and had little need for mutual confessions, and because the body did not stand between us as a gigantic kink in the cable. We did not immerse our demons in the holy-water fonts of language; we understood each other without words. That was the fantasy where I housed our understanding.
When one day he confided to me that he had known women, at least one, I felt almost deceived and I still don’t know why he suddenly told me.
“And did I know her?”
He nodded.
I started running through my friends, reeled off the names of cousins, second cousins and aunts, and even great-aunts, whom I didn’t think I could possibly suspect of such frivolities.
“You’re too much among the roses and carnations, my little gazelle. You’re forgetting in a manner of speaking the bunch of wild flowers…”
I must have stared at him uncomprehendingly, because he continued. “Do I have to draw you a picture, Hélène?”
When it dawned on me, I went deep red. “Bastard,” I stammered.
“She was the boss. She gave the sign, Sis. If she came home and didn’t pull my bedroom door shut as she passed, on her way to her cubby hole upstairs, I knew she was”—he took my hand in his—“pour parler diplomatiquement, she was ‘disponible’.”