I can still picture the sarcastic frown when she asked for my “homework” and started reading. And my own scandalized reaction, not only because she was nosing in my “letters”, however imaginary, and obviously didn’t think much of them, but mainly because she was entering a domain that in my eyes was not hers. I couldn’t stand the fact that with her well-intentioned attempts at education she was essentially appropriating my father, to whom I had to write letters during the war, even though they would never reach him. She wormed her way into the shell of his absence. She who impressed on me that the dead must be silent, gave her own husband the character of someone deceased when she savoured my “little trifles”, as she called them.
For her letters were collecting basins for communications, objective reports. Feelings were noted briefly in passing, like the state of the weather, births and deaths. Her expressions of condolence sounded formal, her congratulations on engagements and christenings artificial.
For me letters, including this one, have always been a playing field where anything could happen and where I did not simply reveal myself to another person; writing forces me to delay and shows me myself as more or less a stranger. My father understood that, but my mother had little patience for subtleties like double meanings, winks or a bon mot.
Nor did she understand that a story as it develops strives for its own specific gravity. It unwinds and allows the person speaking it or writing it down to determine its fate only to a very small extent. Words, images, sentences congeal, and around that glowing core a gravitational field is created that attracts other fragments of images and sentences from mental space, sucks them in and absorbs them into the whirlpools of the imagination. Brainwaves and associations are constantly bombarding the swelling word planet. Some stories brush past the still-liquid surface, drawing at most a light trail in the sky, but most things come and go unseen, and are pulverized silently. There is so much that will never be forgotten, because no one will ever have known that it existed.
“Then it’s of no importance, child. If we don’t know what we don’t know, it doesn’t exist!”
She almost snaps it. Where on earth does her voice still keep coming from? The voice, unexpectedly clear and articulated, unmistakably hers, that dry alto, that light vibrato, that I so often hear just before I go to sleep and that seldom says anything but my name: “Helena…” Now questioning, occasionally plaintive, but mostly brisk: “Helena!”
In the past I would have tried furiously to release myself from such twilight situations, I would have shaken my head, to and fro on the pillow, to wrench myself free from the paralysis of the waking dream. Now I keep quiet, and she also calms down.
“The scissors,” she whispers. “Give me the ribbon.”
And sometimes she is silent, but I can hear her shuffling round in search of a strip of felt, a nail, a length of rope, a length of barbed wire. Wherever she is, things must be as untraceable or imperfect as they are here, on the waking side of dreams.
I think that it wasn’t just because of their evasive tone that she could be so scornful of my letters. I think she felt excluded and became jealous without fully realizing it. Perhaps she began at long last to suspect that my words were addressed to someone else, someone who could understand everything, got every quip, was able to place every ambiguity: an invisible third party, apart from her and the cousins, uncle or aunt, imaginary or otherwise — the true addressee. If she suspected something of the kind, she was right.
I write to a man. Whatever I write, to whomever it is addressed, I write to him. I don’t want it ever to stop, to have to write “Goodbye”, “Adieu”, “All the best”, “See you soon”. His body stretches out in the writing itself. He lowers his limbs into the stream of my thoughts. That unceasing, maddening conversation of myself with myself, the almost endless splitting of voices into voices into voices into voices, comes to rest only when he seals my lips and stills the flood in me.
I could seethe with fury when my mother read those letters, and I was only able to make it clear to her by myself committing the unforgivable. One day she asked me to write a letter to an aunt by marriage in Brussels. In French, as almost all my efforts were for that matter. My mother felt there were all kinds of things wrong with my conjugations.
I wrote a letter. But I wrote it to her. I crawled into my father’s skin. They had written each other love letters when they first went out, I knew that. Every child reads its parents’ love letters if it gets the chance, it’s a law of nature. Neither of them excelled at amorous outpourings. He regularly mentioned “la plus Grande Joie”, capital letters included, which she could give him and he her. She informed him by return of post that the “Joie” could wait a little longer. Honour was a matter of life and death for a woman.
I wrote her a letter as my father. I evoked his voice and tried to make it resonate in the sentences, his jokes when he was in a good mood, the teasing and wet talk with which he was able to disarm her. I let the “Grande Joie” passages appear dimly between the lines in a less abstract form than they themselves had used when they were going out.
When she collected the work that evening, she did exactly the same as I had done while writing it: she blushed. The house was blacked out. In the room a paraffin lamp was burning on its lowest flame, but there was light enough to see that she went bright red and did not dare raise her eyes from the paper, because then she would have had to look at me.
I leant forward a little across the table, towards her, with the lamp between us. A second later I received a slap on my cheek. It sounded like the crack of a whip; outside the dog started barking.
She only ever hit me once in her life, and it was then. The lamp wobbled, but didn’t fall.
My mother looked me straight in the eyes. She was trembling. The print of her palm was still glowing on my cheek. She crumpled the letter in her fist. She did not take her eyes off me and stuck her fist into the pocket of her apron.
I could see she was fighting back her tears. I knew she would send me upstairs, that she wanted to cry undisturbed, and it wouldn’t be over me.
SOMETIMES I WONDER whether all my memories deserve their name, whether their clarity and directness do not make them rather phantom pains of the soul — just as an amputee can have cramp in the toes of his foot that has long since been removed or someone who has gone deaf is visited by flawless melodies from his childhood rather than actually summoning them up. The world is shrinking, inevitably. On the other hand the echo chambers of memory seem to expand and divide like living cells. The mind remains restless.
Be that as it may, when you see her come in now, when you see her sit on a sofa with her hands in her lap and her knees tucked modestly together, then you too are entering a memory, which I am definitely bringing to life and have perhaps meanwhile endlessly reforged and reworked.
I have taken my place next to her, standing, on the other side of the armrest of the sofa. I am still young and am wearing a dress with a sailor collar. When I put my hand round the armrest it is quite possible that she and I are posing. If the scene is intended for us and close family, my mother can easily also put a hand on mine, a touch of intimacy that you will look for in vain in the more official portraits in our reception room at home.