5

IN THE LAND OF HELPLESS LAUGHTER

My parents are Catholics but neither can take communion. It’s because of the situation. The word has become a permanent fixture in their communications with me. The situation floats in, explains, erases and smoothes out any of my questions. The situation keeps me in pagan limbo.

Because of the situation, catechism is not an option. Because of the situation, Alexandre finds a school with American nuns. They don’t seem to mind as much as French nuns about the magic and mysterious things that worry my parents. Christianity is nothing more than a whiff of incense or my mother’s nervous sign of the Cross. I am on the outskirts of Christianity. Instead of God or the Virgin Mary, Julian the Apostate is my hero. Maybe that’s why my mother’s laughter seems more sacred to me than the priests’ shenanigans.

Some Sundays, when he doesn’t disappear to the country, my father takes me to St Joseph’s American church on the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt. We walk there together. This is my piece of heaven even before the priest promises it to us if we are very, very good. I know my father is not good. He tells me all the time. I don’t care. Achilles, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Constantine and especially Julian the Apostate were not good either. The church is a blur of light, people and incense, but all I can think of is my hand engulfed in my father’s pocket.

More of a Voltairian, my mother likes to chuckle about priests and tends to find excuses to skip Mass: she is tired, she has one of her mad headaches, ‘like a great bell ringing in my head’, ‘like a flock of birds pecking at my brain’. My father never contradicts Poum. He rushes at her and I see her hands fluttering behind his head. He also can suddenly scoop her up as she ineffectually fends him off. Everything he does is sudden. There’s no escape. Her laughter and her cries are smothered. His soldiers have burnt her palace, her past and her future. She can call him her bluebird or her fat bluebird; there is no way back to what she was, to that strange freedom that floats in her eyes when she sits on ruins or engages in her own small, mysterious acts of plunder. Alexandre hates those tiny moments that are utterly hers. But I breathe them in. They are what she truly is, what no one can conquer.

Poum becomes very Spanish when she does go to Mass. She whips out a black mantilla, a special pair of black leather gloves from a drawer, and sets off dutifully. She even takes me with her once or twice. I walk next to her in the street. The way she fits her gloves more securely feels like she is tightening her horse’s girth before battle. She usually wears gloves, but never black ones, they are only for Mass. Her many rules are bewildering, but she breaks them coolly. Once she tells me, ‘You have to know all the rules, to break them well and be free, little one.’ Her hands are slim and beautiful. They could be in a Velásquez painting. My mother does not value her beautiful eyes or anything about her body, but she is inordinately proud of her hands. She loves them like two friends at the end of her arms. Every week they are religiously manicured and the nails painted with bright red varnish, with the lunulas untouched so that a tiny moon sits at the base of each nail. She moves them like conductors’ batons. They have an independent life of their own. But I don’t like them. They are the only things about her body I fear. There is something of the Spanish Inquisition about those hard red nails.

Her sister meets her. The Spanish church is a sea of mantillas. Thanks to the American nuns I have just had my first communion, and so after consecration I go to the altar. As soon as I return, I open my mouth to show my mother the round, slim, white wafer before it melts on my tongue. I whisper: ‘I am not munching into it. They told me not to. Maybe they think his bones are still in it.’ I know she can’t have her own wafer because of the situation. I’d love to give her half of mine. But, before I can whisper anything else, in a swift movement, her hands are over her face and she crumples over her prie-dieu as if in an agony of prayer – or as if she has become a sudden cripple. The priest is mumbling in the background and the people are swaying to his words, kneeling, standing up and down. I am worried about my mother. Her fervour is disquieting. I put a tentative hand on her shoulder, as I know she doesn’t like being touched by me. But this time she shudders and shakes but doesn’t shrink away. As she crumples even further over her prie-dieu, I bump into her sister’s disapproving glare on the other side of her. Is this the situation again? Then, suddenly, inexplicably, I realise my mother is succumbing to paroxysms of laughter. She is in stitches; her whole body is convulsed. She’s still kneeling; her face buried in her hands even though everyone else is standing up now. My aunt pokes me from the other side but I stick beside her. I even slip my hand under her shuddering arm.

I realise this is happening because I showed her the wafer on my tongue. She was perfectly normal a second before. Her laughter is worth enduring the long Spanish mass. At the end, I help her out of the church as if she were very sick. When the sun hits her face, she recovers slightly and gazes at me with near fondness, a bit like a mother in the playground. ‘You little devil,’ she moans, ‘you nearly killed me. Oh, the pain, I thought I was going to faint with laughter. Oh, oh … Munching the bones of Christ …’ And, right there on the square, in the throng of people, Christ’s bones set her off again. My aunt has moved away from us and is talking to a lady who is also my aunt but will not speak to my mother. Usually, my mother nods gently and moves away. Now, as I lead her towards the bus stop she is collapsing again, out of the reach of any aunts. ‘Oh, oh, I can’t bear it anymore. You dreadful child.’ She clutches at me and I breathe in the wild lilies of her smell.

Laughter is my mother’s dark sun. She can’t control it. It takes over like a tide and she has to dissolve, slide, reach out frantically to withstand its onslaught. I follow her in the streets of Paris like a private detective hired by a lovesick husband. There are many clues to collect. She springs on booksellers unawares, often with an urgent question. I hide outside the window and I can decipher the owner’s answers by his stupefied expression. She loves ancient, musty bookshops and can stay hours poring over an old volume with a bewhiskered, gnarled hunchback who breathes her in just like I do. Sometimes, I stop following her and lose her trace to walk back to the hunchback’s shop and check out the book she was looking at. It’s often some obscure medieval text about Gnosticism or alchemy. The old man still has a dreamy look on his face in the wake of her visitation, and he talks to me kindly. Drops of her recent presence fall on me like dew.

She rarely moons at shop windows but sails inside like a small ship. She always knows exactly what she wants – some unreasonable piece of information or some object that has not been sold on the premises since the Crusades. She hops out again, younger, more carefree than I ever see her in her home. I stare at the fascinating stranger, who is truly herself at last. But that is not the mother I live with.

The mother I live with is afraid. She holes up in her bedroom and reads. Apart from rare, precious friends, the only people she sees are the family she is addicted to. They hardly wait for her to leave the room before ripping her to shreds in the mistaken belief that children are deaf. Nevertheless, she begs for more – and invites them every Sunday. However uncomfortable she is with the world, she is on excellent terms with herself. I often catch her nodding companionably to herself in an empty room.

One day I’m on the other side of the street, hiding behind trees and around corners like an international spy. I needn’t. She never notices anything and has to bump into you to recognise you, because her eyesight and her fear of the situation keep her in a twilight zone. I am cautious nevertheless. I know I am trespassing on these expeditions. The Iliad has taught me about sacrilege. I could be shot at dawn by the Spanish Guardia Civiles in patent-leather hats. I peer round my tree trunk but she has gone, vanished. I scan the large, nearly empty avenue Gabriel. Nothing. There is only an old tramp woman, obviously drunk, slumped against a wall. You can even see a bit of her knickers. Then I recognise something: the coat, the red nails. This is not a tramp. This is my mother. She is now clutching a réverbère, one of those ornate rococo Parisian streetlights, and her body is swaying, wracked with spasms of agonised laughter. I can see nothing visible that could have started her off. Some memory, some thought must have triggered this fit of helpless laughter. A man appears at the end of the street. Like all survivors, Poum can sense his presence. She looks straight back at him with her wide, wide eyes, as if saying: Have you never seen a real woman laugh before? As I watch her from a safe distance, little by little, the flow subsides and she brushes her clothes with a dignified, nearly jaunty flick, and walks on, abruptly grownup, as if nothing had happened. She doesn’t even turn around to check if he’s still there, but whisks herself round the corner and disappears. The man is left staring. I go home after that. My cup is full.

But helpless laughter can get her into trouble. One Saturday morning my father invites me upstairs. There is an awful silence in the room. Alexandre kisses me briefly. My mother is squirming uncomfortably. To my surprise she extends her arms and gathers me in one swift hug. Before I can cling to her, she has pushed me away. I sit in a daze near my father, who is now reading his newspaper in silence. For the first time Poum throws me that sisterly look I know so well from when she throws it to others. I know what to do. I shake his arm and ask questions. She nods and smiles at me encouragingly. My father then loosens and flings down his paper. ‘How could you, Poum? Didn’t I specifically warn you, beg you?’

My mother clasps her hands: ‘You did, you did, Alexandre.’ No bluebird this morning. My father stares at her awfully.

‘And what did I tell you?’

She sighs and admits to it freely: ‘You said that we were going to dine with a very important client of yours. You warned me about his speech defect, his stutt …’ She starts stuttering herself but suddenly, without warning, her face is drenched in tears and she has crashed against her lace pillows. ‘But how could I help it! It was inhuman!’ she wails. ‘Alexandre, have pity. When he started saying my Cur-cur-nel, my Cur-cur-nel, my Cur-ne-nel to the Colonel. It was more than flesh and blood could stand!’

My father’s mouth is twitching slightly. He lifts his arms to the ceiling. ‘Did you have to pretend to be sick and literally crawl to the bathroom? And then stay there an eternity until I had to get up from the table and carry you bodily out of there back home – in disgrace?’ He frowns again like Jupiter in his cloud. ‘Can’t you control yourself, Poum?’

She has flung herself on her pillows again, her hands over her face. ‘No, no, it’s impossible – it was impossible. I could still hear his stutters through the bathroom door. Oh Alexandre, forgive me.’ But lost to waves of laughter, she can speak no more. My father turns away in disgust and addresses himself to me.

‘They thought she had a miscarriage or terrible diarrhoea!’ He brandishes his hand. ‘And I had warned you about him!’ My mother is helpless against the pillows. My father presses on. ‘And what did you say?’ A muffled moan comes from behind her hands. He supplies me with the information. ‘Your mother had promised, she said: “Why, Alexandre! The poor man, who do you take me for? How could I laugh at someone in such a situation?”’

My mother peels her fingers from her face and their eyes meet. There is a sudden silence. Then, just as the sunshine bursts into the room, something happens, something is torn away. I look up.

Jupiter has forgotten his wrath.