9

SPAIN

Marie-Antoinette takes vicarious pleasure in her father’s land. She even professes to love bullfights. According to her, when a bull fights bravely, he can expect to be sent back to pasture. For the Spanish, she says, bullfights are like Mass in the sun. As enthusiastic about Spain as she is about the suitors, she behaves like an eager guest with both and speaks Spanish as fluently as she speaks her siblings’ gushing idiom of mon chéris and ma chéries in every weather. These catchphrases of endearment, so light and deadly, sizzle through the air like bullets.

Languages are my mother’s thing. She has learnt Spanish, French, English and even Braille. She shows me how her slim fingers can read a piece of white studded paper. They feel their way as they do when handling her boxes. Now I understand why I thought her fingers had eyes. And so, Braille seems appropriate when there are so many things she doesn’t seem to see.

Marie-Antoinette’s father came to Paris along with his brothers in Queen Isabella of Spain’s retinue. They were from a very old but ruined family from Ávila in Castilla. The only time my mother takes me there is when I am about nine. I have a memory of sombre fortress walls, lonely towers in cobblestoned streets, gigantic wrought-iron gates and a feeling of abandonment, loneliness and despair. Even her family coat of arms is a broken tower with its door kicked in. The whole family emigrated to France. My grandfather’s sisters also lived in France, as resolutely eccentric old maids keeping all the habits of the court of Spain, dressed in black from head to foot. Spanish old maids screech like parrots, have faces chalked with make-up, and an unforgettable smell. Poum was given to a wet nurse before being shuttled off to them. The sisters’ main influence was to teach her to embroider, and how to curtsey to a queen.

She spent half her childhood in their company, while her younger siblings stayed with her parents. She tells me that when she was with the aunts she missed her parents and when she was with her parents she missed the aunts. The aunts obviously took on a parental importance, and long before she could speak or reason could set in, her heart and allegiances were torn. The Spanish side of my mother’s family is prone to disaster. One of her great aunts lost several children to cholera, and her last son died in her arms as they travelled away from the epidemic by horse-drawn carriage. She called out his name night and day and died insane. Another great aunt insisted on bringing cut flowers back to the place they were picked when they had wilted. She also put her jewels out on the windowsill at night because she believed the light of the moon was good for them. She never understood why they were no longer there next morning. She also liked to sit on the floor and her maid was tortured by the idea that people would think they didn’t have any chairs.

My mother drops these clues about her sacred land without letting me enter it. She guards Spain from me or guards me from Spain; I am not quite sure which. The time she takes me there I meet one of her uncle’s widows. After her husband’s death, to everyone’s surprise, Tía Carmen worked at the Spanish embassy in Paris before retiring to Spain. She is bright and cultured, which is rare in Spanish women of that generation, and clever enough to consult with Pange’s doctor and stop Poum from marrying the village idiot. The story has spread in my mind like a Rorschach blot. She saved my mother’s life. Because everything is mysterious and elliptical, I do not ask why I am suddenly travelling to Spain to meet her only now, instead of seeing her while she still lived in Paris. After the plane, at some point, we are brought to a room full of Spanish voices. They speak very loudly, and even though I am used to my parents’ excited tones, this is like entering a birdcage. As soon as my mother points out ‘the Tía Carmen’ to me in awed syllables, I put up my arms to hug her, because I’ve heard so much about her. But my arms fall to my side; Tía Carmen does not hug me to her breast but pats me vaguely on the shoulder before turning to my mother. Yet I see her hug her other nieces. Poum rushes forward, kisses her fingers, embraces her, surrounding her in a crescendo of love and respect. I move aside and look at them. The aunt listens and nods her head. She is quieter than the rest of her family and exudes authority. From time to time, she extends a hand and caresses a granddaughter and the girl transforms herself into a young faun to submit to her touch. I am too fascinated to feel snubbed.

Little by little I understand that I am here on sufferance. My mother sometimes throws me a glance, as if to say: ‘You are mine. I can’t help doing this, being like this.’ She seems to be chanting a mantra with them. The next day, she rushes me to the Escurial to visit the vaults. Because of her family, she can get in. As usual the guide falls instantly in love with her and they chat together as I follow them deeper and deeper into the belly of the palace. Their voices waft ahead as darkness closes in on us. The coldness and bloodlessness of the place is even worse than the Conciergerie in Paris – a different kind of cruelty. Black onyx coffins, dark sculptures, frigid corridors and barred windows preclude any thought of redemption in this country of religion. After an hour of earnest conversation and stalking of the dead, even my mother starts failing and, with one of her sudden decisions, leaves the place. The sunlight outside is hardly warmer. It’s winter. Poum is bubbling with information about tortured, beheaded, garrotted ancestors. She quotes the guide with ghoulish delight. ‘“As for that one,” he said, “he cannot have died a natural death, because when we opened the marble coffin, we found him with his head between his legs.”’ Poum finds this comment ‘sooo Spanish’. ‘They are sooo bloodthirsty,’ she giggles. ‘If he was in a Grandee of Spain’s way to a title, or to a place at court, a child, the last of a line, would not have much chance of surviving.’ I look at her. Sometimes I feel she is that child, her head down between her legs like an ostrich, refusing to see.

I start hating this place. I feel unsafe. I want to get Poum out of here. One afternoon we go out with all her cousins and their children to a pastry shop wedged between obese columns, to which it seems to have found its sugary way. They all start eating cakes, their wrists jingling with bracelets. I notice suddenly that my mother wears none and often rubs her own wrists as if trying to erase the pressure of invisible handcuffs. Neither does she wear the ring my father has given her. Her freedom finds subtle ways to express itself. The atmosphere is nearly the same as in Tía Carmen’s drawing room. Empty when they walk in, the shop becomes crowded and noisy. The birdcage is transported wherever they go. They send me off to buy a bottle of wine. ‘And don’t break it,’ they cry. I walk away and I eventually bump into the cellar they have painstakingly explained how to find. I return with the bottle. As I lift it for all to see and say, ‘See I haven’t broken it!’, it crashes to the ground.

In the midst of their cries and jeers, which freeze me deeper than Tía Carmen’s rebuff, I catch my mother’s glance. Her eyes are smiling at me as if to share some hidden ancestral joke. ‘Pour the wine in the sand of Spain,’ her eyes seem to say, ‘pour the wine on their heartless cobblestones.’ Her eyes always seem to know a deeper, balder truth that no other part of her is allowed to express.

Once I am shown a photograph of World War I soldiers with no faces, no limbs, stuck in their beds. Their eyes are like windows of sadness and fear. They remind me of my mother’s eyes. Is there a collective pain, a bit like a collective unconscious, gathering on some forsaken beach of suffering? Maybe that is why I can feel my mother’s anguish under my skin. Sometimes I recognise its intensity in other people – exiled, banished gazes, looking out of desolate or even jolly expressions. One day, much later, Poum tells me that she has not lived a day of her life without experiencing utter terror.

I wish we could just leave – but I know we can’t. It’s like those god-awful merry-go-rounds my father puts me on. Up and down they go and each child has to hook up the rings hanging from a stick as they ride by. Alexandre always waits in the shadows, punching his fist in his palm like a bookie, but I never hook any rings, not once. It’s the same here, no rings, no sticks, just a merry-go-round of Spanish spinning round my mother and me as we sit, up and down, on these manic horses.

Finally we are leaving and it’s a Spanish custom for the whole family to come to the airport when one of its members catches a plane. My mother’s Spanish relations are left with their waves and receding cries of farewell. In the no-man’s-land beyond Customs, Poum and I drink a glass of wine as we wait. She looks at the airport around her and murmurs: ‘Sometimes one has to lend oneself, Catherine, not give oneself.’ We are just the two of us in a way that never happens. That makes everything worth it. She sits on the high stool with her knees sideways, her elbow on the bar, and her lovely fingers floating backwards as she talks, or visiting her brow to touch or quell some feeling in her mind. In that small time, we both belong – no traveller is an outcast. But in the plane back to Paris, Poum is very silent. I read at her side, wishing I was older than nine.

Even in spirit, my father is strangely absent from this venture. He doesn’t ask about our trip and makes no comments. Yet when he speaks of the Spanish world, he is always carefully polite. He often whispers to me that he is so relieved that I have blue eyes. I feel that this has something to do with the Magna Carta. You couldn’t in your wildest imagination think of the Spanish dreaming up a Magna Carta. Freedom is the least of their concerns. Little by little, I fathom that it is my parents’ main concern. Even though they are scared, even though their families’ disapproval casts them into gloom, it is their freedom I feel all through my childhood, as if nothing and no one can control their footsteps, their gestures, their decisions, their youthful exclamations – not even them.

Even though Marie-Antoinette has chosen my father unreservedly, some part of her will always loosen and be lost when she sees the aunt who saved her from Pange and looked after her when she had her breakdown. It makes me think of the door in the tower, kicked open by a booted foot. As soon as anyone comes near that door, Marie-Antoinette loses all her power of discernment. Tía Carmen is the polar opposite of my father in my mother’s life. Yet, a bit like Thanatos and Eros, both of them have elements of death and life.

I had met Carmen once before in my life, but I have no memory of it. On our return, my mother’s sister makes it her business to tell me about it. ‘Why,’ she says, ‘Carmen only met you once in the street in your pram to avoid coming up to the apartment in the rue du Cirque. I don’t understand what reasons your mother finds to fawn on her.’ It suddenly occurs to me that Carmen broke up a marriage that was supposed to restore the family’s fortunes.

Just as she reads Saint-Simon about the French, my mother reads Galdós about the Spanish. One thing all the Spanish have in common is the Catholic Church. When Communist soldiers are to be executed at dawn, they still have to be confessed. When there are neither enough confessors nor enough time, their solution is to have only the officers confessed. ‘Sooo Spanish,’ my mother comments delightedly. ‘The officers will take them to heaven, like they took them to battle.’

She pinches my cheek. She breathes in wild Spanish air that no Spaniard today seems to remember. ‘And did I tell you about the two guardias civiles with their patent-leather hats taking a man to be shot at dawn in a closed horse-drawn carriage? The condemned man is sitting in the middle and comments: “The morning is as cold as the Great Whore.” One of the guardias civiles answers him: “Yes, but think of us who have to return afterwards.”’ I hear the clip-clop of the hooves in the crisp, freezing air. I wonder if the man has a chance of getting away, but I know from my mother’s face it’s no use asking. Poum never seems to notice the atmosphere created by her stories. It’s as if some Spanish knife inside her cuts through whole clouds of it unconcernedly. She looks down at my face and I see the two planets of her eyes, where everything is unknown to me. She is laughing away, so happily. The description of that dawn has soothed some indescribable pain inside her that can find no other way of expressing itself.

I know this, as certainly as I know that red is the colour of blood.