The first time I dared to return with her, a few years after the death of my husband, it was a fiasco. I felt her eyes boring into my back after I had left her by the car; she maintained a stupid silence. I had first, with my legs half out of the door, exchanged my footwear for a pair of boots and then taken the path to the back gate. When my husband was still alive, the last owner welcomed me like a princess for a while. “Eh bien voici,” he would cry. “Not’ châtelaine.” He showed us the silos and the milking plant, and the new barn or the potato cellar, but his pride hid a man frightened to death who knew he was deep in debt and liked a glass too many to anaesthetize him against the fear. He had my uncle’s beard, in which the smoke from around the hearth eternally lingered. As the years went by, at the long table in the back kitchen of the annexe where my mother had heated so many kettles, he poured us increasingly generous shots of liqueur, while behind his back his mistress of the moment, as angrily as the previous or following one, scoured pans and counted the glasses with resignation. We drank and indulged ourselves in stories which I have repeated far too often to do it again here. Around us you could almost hear the ivy and the grapevine anchoring the shutters to the window frames and the moss covering the slate roof with wet cushions.
The last time I went there with my husband, the gate was closed. We went to the only surviving café in the village to ask what had happened. A few village elders recognized me, the daughter of the lovely Marianne, the Fleming, comme nous, nous sommes aussi des Flamands, au fond, écoute—and spoke to me in the language I remembered from my childhood. A language like crude ore, like flint. A Flemish that rose from the chalky soil and became flesh before my eyes.
A factory-owner from Calais had bought the property for a song after the bailiffs had seized everything. He had rented out the surrounding land, and had the house locked up and the contents auctioned off.
“There’s nothing there, madame,” he informed me when I rang him to ask him if anyone in the village had a key to look after things. “The place is a ruin. Much too dangerous.”
When the following year my husband died, going back would have affected me too deeply. My life was one great map strewn with places to avoid, a flight from the curse of memory.
Four or five years went by. The day when I finally put the boots on and set off, I felt my daughter’s eyes in my back. I could almost hear her thinking: she’s still not over it, poor old dear, still looking for her forgotten paradises.
I had to return without accomplishing my mission. The back gate was overgrown with brambles, elder had woven its branches between the railings, there was no way through. You should have seen the pity, the haughty pity on my child’s face when I came back to the car with twigs and thorns in my clothes, a gash in my calf and dead leaves in my hair. She said nothing, she was always like that. Too cowardly to say what she thought, always letting other people do the dirty work, intriguing, and letting other people play through her fingers like bobbins, threading the lacework of her cosy little intrigues and always washing her hands in cups of rancid innocence — how did something like that come from inside me, I wondered. I gave birth not to a child, but to a rusty nail.
A few weeks later I forced her to take me there again; I sent her off to the seaside and she left me behind with great pleasure. In the pockets of my overcoat was a big pair of secateurs. I cut loose the branches around the gate until I could use the handle again, and made my way through the brambles and nettles around the first row of stalls, past the chicken runs and reached the inner courtyard, stumbling over the tufts of grass shooting up between the gaps in the paving stones. They were largely buried under sand and rotted leaves, the subsoil seemed to be sucking them up, as if an invisible titanic effort, an army of worms, were burying the house by gradually pulling it into the ground.
At first I couldn’t open the side door, the door on the south front. A lead weight was leaning against the wood on the other side, and only after I had pushed for ages, with my full weight, did it give way and fall with a dull thud on the floor. A shiver of rustling went through the climbing plants across the stones of the house front.
Someone must have put one of the old mattresses, those ponderous pre-war mattresses, against the door, perhaps to discourage intruders or vandals. The monster lay heavily at my feet, leaving just enough room to push the door open thirty centimetres or so, so that I could get in.
Now I look back on it, it is as if old Moumou, the primeval mother, was pushing against the inside of the door to keep me out with the full force of her primordial size, her femininity without frills — as if wanting to say: “Stay away, child. That’s enough, we’ll manage by ourselves. Decay takes little effort, we can do it alone.”
And when I went through into the kitchen and saw the gap in the floor tiles, the wound of sand where the old stove had stood which the rag-and-bone man had obviously ripped out, of course to sell the steel, the desolation almost assumed the bitterness of a reproach. I saw the dust rings in the wall that marked the silhouette of the saucepans as they had once hung from large to small like a scale of copper above the chopping blocks.
And the farther I went, the heavier the atmosphere became, the more hands seemed to press against my trunk and exhort me to retrace my steps — but I wasn’t there to gape. I had come to mourn, that house was my burial chapel, the storehouse of all my dead, for whom I could weep only there. I wanted, up in my uncle’s library room, to surrender myself to the handful of memories that could transform the sound of zinc inside me into a requiem, take possession again of the longing that seized me in the days when my husband was recovering on the other side of the Channel and my mother guarded me with a restlessness in which I now increasingly detect the signs of the flu that was to confine her to her bed for weeks and release me from her clutches. I wanted to be able to pull that longing over me like a mourning cloak.
Only up there could I escape from her restlessness, flopping on the chair by the table, next to my uncle, who was doing paperwork with mittens on. It was winter, and one of my mother’s attempts to keep a grip on things was to skimp on firewood and coal. My uncle blew on his fingers; I meanwhile pretended to be writing letters.
“The irony, child,” he whispered into his beard, meanwhile listening to check whether she wasn’t coming upstairs again, my mother, for the umpteenth time, supposedly looking for something in the room next to ours, eavesdropping as she rummaged about to the drumming of her heavy heels. She must have been the only spy who hoped that by being conspicuous her presence would not be noticed. “The irony is”, said my uncle, “that we’re not doing at all badly at present. In the past I had to fatten two pigs to get the price they’re now offering for a single ham. We don’t really want for anything.”