13

THE UNDERGROUND ORGANISATION

It’s easier for Poum to speak of death than to speak of sex. Her easy syntax, her precise eighteenth-century French will suddenly become medieval and sibylline or turn to cloudy vagueness when sex is broached. For Marie-Antoinette, the world below the belt is an overshadowed, floating territory, a Hades of the flesh. Yet I am unembarrassed about asking her anything. While the nuns slide technical information in my direction without looking me in the face, Poum always stares me straight in the eye and gives me an obscure answer on the spot. Once, I hear a teacher or a pupil speak about ‘tampons’ and I ask Poum what they are. Her wide gaze alights on me, then beyond me, an unfocused laser beam, an eagle sighting its prey. A metaphysical rabbit from school is daring to enter her home. She is getting ready to dive down and dig her talons deep into it – a quick, painless, efficient death for stupidity.

‘Catherine! Tell me! If you had a cold, would you stuff Kleenexes in your nose? Well, tell me!’ I shake my head carefully. ‘So!’ She smiles, taking a deep breath and jerking her head towards her bedroom stairs. And then, with a short sniff and another wide smile in no one’s direction, she stalks off, dusting off her hands like Pontius Pilate.

After this I still don’t know what tampons are; even when I find out, I stay clear of them all my life. She has slain the stupid rabbit. My doubts, my questions are beheaded in one clear swish of her sword. Her vague urbi et orbi, ex cathedra symbols, grow to create living constellations. Her images are more powerful than any nun’s rational grids that pack thoughts into neat compartments where thinking can neither flow nor grow. Somehow her message is that deep in this mysterious land below the belt is something sacred, something incomprehensible. Something feminine that requires no explanations. It must be lived and discovered in its secret, unfathomable way; a way no one can teach me. Not even her.

You can get mired in information. I know that from the atoms. We are studying them in science class. Atoms are whirling worlds with their nuclei and their protons. They are like tiny galaxies hidden in matter. I ask the teacher if they are a mirror image of the ones in the sky, but he gives me a bad grade for that. I learn very early to shut up in school. I can’t wait for the years to leak out of that punishing place. Yet scientists peer so close at the atom that they manage to separate it from itself and that’s when the atomic bomb happens. I know my mother’s whirlpool thinking will never break atoms in two and end up with an atomic bomb. She leaves them alone to do their atom thing, swirling and swirling in their secret galaxies in that world below the belt.

When I read 1984, I recognise the fear everyone lives in at 6 rue du Cirque. I know from observing Big Sister – the concierge, Madame Carmel – that the underground organisation is dangerous. It reels everybody in, even closet proles like my parents. Somehow they are under scrutiny. Death seems to be implied if you get caught. A word, a glance, a comment, the dedicated pursuit of relentless humiliation, is Big Sister’s business and she slays you in the end – your face locked up with the rat in the rat cage.

Any great city, any cave, is still a village: slander is what gets my mother – it’s a mined ground that leaves her nowhere to tread. Soundless, invisible shrapnel bursts under, over, around her. There’s no escape for Poum, except in her bed with a book or outside in a maze of spurned, hazy, faraway streets unknown to the rest of Paris, yet full of African and Arab seers with long coats and bare heels, prostitutes in short coats and high heels, eyes full of wisdom and desolation. That is her secret home ground, far from residential quarters, far from her sister’s parish and bloodthirsty respectability.

I marvel at her bravery. In spite of them, she descends into the underground organisation with Alexandre. But when she comes to the surface again, she is on her own. Somehow it doesn’t seem to affect my father so much. You can see it in the way he breezes past Madame Carmel. And so I feel my mother is the brave, faltering one, crossing the Styx into the unknown world where the dead talk to you in whispers, where excitement is knife-deep and pain a caress. Alexandre jumps back and forth over the Rubicon with ease and glamour. His bravery is of a different order. In the light of his sudden decisions it flashes, in that moment where all could be lost. ‘Dogs bark but the caravan passes’ is one of his favourite sayings. He always quotes it on the eve of battle, his countenance darkened, meditative, nearly withdrawn. The next day or hour he will stroll in, relaxed, his hands in his pockets, a glint in his eye. He hugs Poum. ‘My baraka is still strong.’ He rarely uses forms of endearment, just her name – ‘My Poum,’ he says as his hands hold her in a sudden epiphany and they smile at each other. Bandits on the run, they have come clear, they have emerged unscathed from the underground organisation – safe yet again, in the teeth of suitors, neighbours, families and foes alike.

‘Women,’ I announce to my mother, ‘have to go to special doctors called gynaecologists.’

She jumps out of her skin. ‘Gynaecologists!’ she spits. ‘I have never seen a doctor of that kind in my life, except to have you and I never went near one again. Gynaecologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, Catherine, are all insane. Did Eve see a gynaecologist?’ She sighs. ‘Poor Eve, that story with the snake is so ridiculous. She gave an apple to that idiot Adam. So what? It was nice of her. He didn’t have to eat it, did he? She didn’t shove it down his throat. Such a fuss about nothing.’ Poum reads the Bible back and forth. While my father sticks to the New Testament, she keeps to the Old. She strides through it, writing on the pages in red. It’s the only book she submits to such treatment. I find a heavily underscored line in Deuteronomy: ‘For I am a jealous God punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.’ In Ecclesiastes, she underlines ‘to me yesterday, to you today’ and also ‘I haven’t delivered you to the hands of David and yet today you charge me with a guilt concerning a woman!’ And in the Psalms: ‘How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your children against the rocks!’ The translator, Chanoine Osty, says in his introduction: ‘Nowhere is there substantial affirmation of the resurrection of bodies.’ This is boxed in shaky red ink. Her terror shines through. No forgiveness, no loophole for Poum. She must lie on her bed of nails.

Like all law-breakers, my parents need luck, but, strangely, they can both be without mercy. My father grabs me: ‘What? You think they shouldn’t execute a criminal who has raped and killed three little girls?’ I nod my head. I won’t budge. It just feels wrong to me. What’s the use of killing one more person when three are already dead? Poum is highly offended. She’ll try to make me change my mind many times. To her, criminals enter a pact with death. My parents suddenly seem as grid-like as the nuns. Something in me leaves them then. Yet my father once confides that he never had to kill anyone, either in the Resistance or in the war. To them, death is the necessary companion of life, the solver of the mysteries, the conjuror that will get them out of their worries. Death explains and unravels. Ravaillac, Charles I, Mary Stuart, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, all walked to their deaths. It’s obvious: death and the underground organisation stride hand in hand. They both accept that they deserve to die on the spot, yet they’re still alive, stealing roses and umbrellas, gambling with taboos.