11

KLEPTOMANIA

Something is missing. Poum is always searching for that lost part of herself. I know it every time I look into her eyes. That’s why she has to leave every afternoon and wander Paris. Her missions are complex. Sometimes she goes to buy some herbs in a tough quarter and stays for hours in a tiny shop sitting on a bag of coffee beans or manioc speaking to an African shopkeeper in his biblical robes. Or she disappears with her Russian Flamenco dancer friend, or just travels in the Metro to the other end of the city and I can’t keep track. She also spends hours with her painter friend, an alchemist who will die of a burst pancreas, a common death for alchemists. (You only have to read Nicolas Flamel, Fulcanelli or the divine Paracelsus to see that this is true). She regularly needs to be in rue Daru, the Russian Church, and comes home laden with stories. There are so many expeditions. Just like the magic carpet of her bed, these places take her away from the rue du Cirque, for my mother can’t bear to stay there for too long a time – she has to vanish. I know that.

Marie-Antoinette flirts with the esoteric while her deeply Catholic Spanish upbringing bursts in on her unawares, urging her to make the sign of the Cross at the most unexpected moments. At Mass itself she is too busy having unclerical fits of helpless laughter. If her tendency is to follow arcane traditions to the letter, her overriding urge is to break the rules. You can see this urge well up in the sudden surety of her movements, the sudden unnatural glee in her eyes, the sudden quiver at the corner of her lip, and the sudden eerie grace of her movements. It’s a tidal wave of wisdom and folly, so tightly knit you can’t distinguish one from the other. It’s the needle of my childhood compass.

Rules are not for either of my parents. They have never been to school. Poum had tutors and Alexandre was tutored by his father. When childhood was over, the war was thrown at them. What’s left are memories of grandparents and eccentric uncles, of long corridors of gloomy ancestors, of gruelling interviews about imaginary sins, of endless lessons at home, Latin Masses and wild siblings. What’s left is a medieval hodgepodge that can fit nowhere in this explicit world. I will never fathom their childhoods. There are only lightning reminiscences, suddenly stencilling in the lost worlds for which they yearn. Something from that time has been irretrievably lost. It floats in their eyes and in the fumbling emptiness of their hands. They look at me in surprised wonder as if I have a key and can give that time back to them. They suddenly swoop or disappear on me, to surprise or jerk their lost infancy out of my being. They stare at my childhood as it unfolds before their eyes. I am robbing it from them, but they do not recognise their lost treasure.

When mysterious objects appear in the house, my father is always suspicious: ‘Poum, where does that come from?’ Alexandre is a soul of honesty and my mother’s kleptomania makes him quite ill. Every strange object brings on a mini row that my mother pooh-poohs. ‘I beg of you, my bluebird, don’t worry. As if I could do anything to displease you.’ Her reassurances do not pacify him and he keeps a weather eye on her.

The first object is a cannon ball. My parents and I visit a fortress in Switzerland with an enormous drawbridge. On each side of its no less enormous doorway is a pyramid of hand-hewn stone cannon balls. As my mother trots by, she coolly picks up the one on the very top and slides it into her handbag. My father, haunting her footsteps, mutters into her neck: ‘Poum, put that back … Poum … you can’t do that … Poum, it’s not yours.’ As they tramp through the castle, as she chats with the guide and thoroughly investigates every turret and every dungeon, Alexandre follows in a cold sweat, a sombre wake. Poum emerges from the visit refreshed and, as soon as we are out of earshot, receives the scolding waiting for her with a clear brow. As he berates her, she blinks up at him, her face full of peace, her smile motherly. He can shake her and try to make her take her booty back till he is blue in the face. No dice. He has reached the outer reaches of his authority, the frontiers of his dominion. A quiet happiness covers her like a coat of mail. She waits, eyes brimming with serene power. He gives up, and very soon he is chatting to her again, telling her to breathe the air because ‘it’s like Champagne’, digging his hand into the crook of her arm and piloting her where he wants to go. He has to be indignant, just as my mother has to read all day on lace pillows and sometimes has to steal – because both reading and pilfering things relieves her of invisible harrowing pain.

Books can conjure exactly the expression kleptomania brings to her face. On the Road is one of them – the last book my father expects her to understand or like. When he reads passages of On the Road to her, she laughs till she cries in a despair of mirth. Hugging her chair like a teddy bear, she gasps. When she sees me laughing too, she cries: ‘Oh, oh, Catherine, you are my daughter.’ It is something she always tentatively seems to doubt, for I do not look like anyone she is familiar with, anyone alive, only a long-dead Russian great-grandmother. Soothed and understood, hearing her rituals enacted, she begs my father for her favourite character, Remi Boncoeur, over and over, again and again. ‘Please, go and get Kerouac and Remi Boncoeur for me.’ Remi Boncoeur steals to soothe his heart, to appease the angry gods of his childhood. What did her angry gods do to her? I can only piece together her pain in Kerouac, in cannon balls, in sacrilege, in blasphemy, in stolen roses, in her suffering laughter.

As a drunkard despises an empty bottle, she is utterly indifferent to the material proofs of her kleptomania. The cannon ball stays orphaned on the bookcase. That’s when my father starts circling round it like a shark. First, a glance from afar, then a look, then a closer stare, day by day, step by step, in concentric ripples, he zeroes in closer. Until one evening, I see him touch it lightly, nearly absent-mindedly. Next comes a small caress, a pat, until finally he grabs it and weighs it delightedly in his palm before hurriedly putting it back. However, the pull is too strong and he returns to the scene of crime to hold it and fondle it boldly. He clears his throat: ‘Catherine, this cannon ball has been hewn by hand. It was thrust into a cannon and then it ripped through the air bursting through regiments of soldiers, shattering limbs and lungs. Afterwards, they had to go onto the battlefield to get all the balls back. They would wipe off the human remains from it. Look, there’s still a little bit of blood left.’ He points with a careful finger. We both peer at the cannon ball. All the soldiers are scattered in the furrows, limbs blown apart, lost smiles on their faces, surprised by death, clean of terror as birds circle overhead to clean their bones of flesh. My father is in full swing. Suddenly, my mother steps into the room. He swiftly puts the cannon ball back on the bookshelf. She notices nothing – ever. But eventually his hand will irresistibly reach for it, even in her company. I am there that first time. He needs me there. Never does he allude again to the fact that it’s stolen. She sits placidly as he spins stories of drawn-out sieges and of how cannon balls slowly made fortresses redundant. The strangest of all is her total lack of interest in the object of her theft. I look at her closely. She will never even acknowledge its presence – in a magical sleight of hand it has become my father’s – a gift from her to him. They both love bloodshed. She could not have found a more tender offering.

My mother is a wolf, an eagle, a blind bird, a cat; her gifts come from the wild, not from money or shops. Now there’s an ivory umbrella leaning against my father’s bookshelf. I see her take it. When I am about nine, she brings me to an old and gaunt great-aunt. As if Dickens had turned Spanish, I look for cobwebs in her cavernous house, but there are none. By some strange mystery, her name is also Carmen. She and my mother speak in the forbidden tongue. Poum kisses her hand. I sit and wait. My father never goes there, his name is never mentioned, erased from the race of the living. The old marquesa pats my hair with a distant hand but never looks at me directly. I sit and sit – a sin on two legs. The aura of sinfulness around me keeps me in a trance, as if I were floating in formaldehyde. My mother throws me her shipwrecked glances filled to the brim with a strange foggy sadness, as if she were partly drunk in this woman’s presence. When she gets up to leave, she stands in front of the gaunt face like Iphigenia before Agamemnon and kisses the old hand one last time. She must accept the deal; there is no going back, no explaining, no bargaining. Only Artemis can save her now. She must turn away without looking back, robbed of redemption. A woman in a black dress called Marie escorts us to the door. In the large hallway, Poum thanks the female Chiron but, as we leave, before the door can close firmly on our backs, my mother’s hand slides out and snatches an ivory umbrella forsaken against the wall and takes it away with her. As soon as we reach the street, the umbrella flies open and we walk back to the rue du Cirque under it. My mother clutches the ivory handle with a dazzling smile. Oh, to steal, oh to come away with one’s plunder, says her exultant gaze.

We return to see this aunt several times. We are even there when she is dying. Poum has me sit near her rasping, gasping breaths. She stands there looking down at the wrecked body, the shuddering lungs and the hawk-like nose holding the whole skin that houses Aunt Carmen like the ridge of a tent. Marie is praying quietly. I look round at her but she is staring straight ahead. So I turn back to my great-aunt and watch her life draining from her. I wonder where her soul will go. She is supposed to have loved her unfaithful husband to death. Will he welcome her into the underworld or will she wander, gasping for air evermore? I breathe as deeply as I can, as if I could make the river of air between us widen. I don’t feel sorry for her. I feel no dread. I just want her to breathe painlessly and go to sleep. My mother stands there for hours and we wait. There is nothing else to do. But she still doesn’t die. Marie takes us to the door. The only thing my mother steals this time is the air in her lungs.

She is pensive on the way back. I walk at her side, hoping she will say something. Suddenly, her hand flashes out and grabs my wrist: ‘Come, my bird.’ She walks boldly into a café and cries out to the owner behind the bar: ‘Two glasses of spicy warm wine!’ The man straps his apron tighter over his middle and scurries. I recognise the lilt in her voice even before the alcohol touches her lips. She hasn’t stolen anything, but she has stepped into her magic mood. With a wide, tender smile on his face, the unknown man seems to sense this too. He lays a hand on my mother’s shoulder. ‘Life,’ he murmurs. She smiles up to him: ‘Merci,’ she says, thanking him for much more than the wine. He disappears behind his bar and pulls out his white dish towel to shine his zinc-covered bar for new elbows to lean on. Poum lifts her glass to him and takes a wild gulp. She leans towards me. ‘This stranger is a real patron, little one, a healer of souls, a French shaman. He knows how to shoulder pain, like the man who bent down to share the load of an old horse, like the man in the New Testament who helped Jesus to carry his cross – a priest among men.’ She takes a breath and stares through me. ‘We will not go and see your great-aunt again. No, we will not.’ I stare and stare at my mother and know she is in her element: death and wine. She grins and clinks her glass against mine, holding my eyes safe in secret communion with her own.

The next thing she steals is in England. My father is driving and I am there too. It’s raining; the hills are awash. My mother and father are talking at the top of their voices about the Crusades or Big Feet Bertha, Charlemagne’s mother, or maybe Alexander the Great. Javelins are flying, cities are burning, blood is flowing, while the English rain steadies my father’s erratic driving. People beep their horns. Alexandre snorts: ‘Another one in a hurry to get to his fiancée.’

Suddenly Poum sits up. ‘Look at that little church lost in the hills! Let’s visit it!’

My father comes to a halt with a screech of tyres. ‘Let’s!’ He dives out of the car, takes the umbrella from the back and rushes round to open my mother’s door before conveying her carefully across the lopsided tombs towards the church. I run after them. When I go in, they are both exclaiming in loud whispers about the beauty of the architecture. Hugged around the altar, a small, devout Mass is going on. My father makes the sign of the Cross. My mother lifts her hands in mock horror. ‘Protestants,’ she whispers. My father shrugs and pulls her down to sit beside him. He even goes to communion and pulls me along. I happily swallow the Protestant host. I’d dance with the devil if my father told me to. The old priest looks at us in disbelief as we crunch the bones of Christ. My mother is waiting in glee. Sacrilege, smile her lips, blasphemy, shine her eyes. My father’s proud arm surrounds her shoulders and drags her against him. She flutters in protest, but is irresistibly squashed against his wide girth. He holds my hand on his other side. For a second we are all together – a real family, in a forbidden church, disobeying the rules. My mother rests her cheek an instant against his sleeve in total surrender. ‘My Alexandre,’ I hear her murmur.

Before we walk out of the church my mother ducks and I notice her fingers move out laterally. Then an old prayer book on the table in front of the door is no longer there. My father, sailing ahead to pounce on the priest and shake his hand with gusto, sees nothing. The rain has stopped. Marie-Antoinette is herded back into her seat. The car plunges back into the rain. The object of her pilfering lies in her lap. It’s in leather and has strange drawings. Alexandre’s wandering eyes fall on it and his flat foot lands on the brake with a thud.

‘What is that, Poum?’

She looks at him dreamily: ‘What, my bluebird?’

He lays his hand on the book: ‘That.’

She stares at him with a wide, happy smile: ‘I stole it.’ The bald effrontery of it hangs in the car like one of my great-aunt’s gasps. There is nothing more to be done. Nothing.

He looks at her long and full. ‘Poum,’ he says, ‘Poum.’ For an awful minute the weight of silence crushes the road under the car. Then Alexandre’s head is chucked back against the headrest – tears are falling down his face. ‘A Protestant prayer book! Oh, Poum.’ The car rocks with his laughter. My mother has her serene look.

I have taken some in Catholic churches too, say her eyes, her peaceful smile. One has to be fair.

The first theft I remember I am so small I am being carried. Everything is enormous. My mother is walking ahead. We are in the Jardins de Bagatelle, a prissy, perfect garden of roses where humans hardly dare to tread. Roses are Poum’s favourite flower – one of the things, along with Guerlain, she is totally serious about. Roses seemed to be lined up in defence of her. To my mother, every rose has a face and something to say. Every rose is a woman in disguise, the face of a drunkard or a forgotten old whore, or maybe just the very fat lady who lives down the street. I know this as surely as I know Poum will die one day and I will be left with all her scented traces, floating away just beyond my understanding. A guard is on duty with a blue uniform and a disapproving stare. My mother wanders in the sunlight, just out of reach. Floating, it seems to me, between clouds, sunlight and roses. She steps into a flowerbed and plucks a rose in full bloom, just before its peak, right under the guard’s nose. The cut is swift and sure and she holds it in her hand, sniffing it as she walks away, as my father stares in horror. The guard moves not an inch. He seems not to see her. It is downright magic.

Only magic brings some missing things back.