I Am the Brother of XX Page 5

  The room was her chapel, the nurses vestal virgins bringing her the gift of a promise fulfilled. She promised chastity. It didn’t cost her any regrets. She had never wanted it, her husband’s body. She had wanted it only so as to procreate. And yet she loved that man, as she loved her house, a memento of her parents.

  After having promised the Lord chastity she felt calm and satisfied. Sexually satisfied.

  At the age of nine Stefan became sad. She had knelt at his feet, beseeching him. “I beg you, what is the matter?” Had she, Hanne, done something wrong? She searched the face of her son who chased her away. She scrutinized that belated child. Pregnant on Lake Lucerne, in a house not far from where Wagner had lived, she was forty-seven years old and with her husband never missed a concert.

  And now Stefan tries to control himself, while his wife touches all the objects belonging to his mother as if she were at a rummage sale. Not about the dead, Stefan was thinking, but about his mother. The wife continues to rifle through the crates.

  “My mother didn’t love you,” says Stefan.

  “Now she’s no longer here, it doesn’t matter,” the odious babyish little voice instantly pipes up, “I’ve already forgotten.” The imperturbable, melodious little voice continues: “She hurt us so. Now you belong to me and I to you.”

  Stefan heard the full horror of that sentence. Stefan knows that his mother couldn’t stand her.

  “Madam,” says Stefan in a falsetto voice, imitating his wife’s, “when I love someone I don’t sleep with anyone else.”

  “Stefan, why are you making fun of me, your mother had asked me whether I was in love with you.”

  Stefan, still falsetto, “I don’t sleep with anyone else.”

  The girl bows her head. The blonde hair clamped to the head and rolled up like a tiara, and the rest of the hair hung down her back. Which he grabbed hold of, dragging her to the ground.

  His wife takes his hand.

  Stefan, still falsetto, “Pardon me, Madam, my hands are sweaty. My hands are always sweaty.”

  “Darling, please, you know that I am ashamed of my hands.”

  Stefan: “Even now they’re wet — dry them.”

  The wife takes a handkerchief and dries her hands. She is about to cry.

  “You didn’t tell my mother that you slept with yours. Why didn’t you tell her the truth?”

  “You’ve changed, Stefan. You’re acting like this because your mother died.”

  “My mother and I want to see how you did it.” Stefan is still gripping the long hair.

  “My mother and I sit here on the sofa.” On that sofa Stefan rests a suit that was his mother’s, which he took out of a plastic slipcase. On the floor the shoes and the handbag.

  The young wife lies down on the floor: “I am doing it for you, Stefan.”

  “You are doing it for the two of us. Every day you’ll do something for the two of us. And you’ll have to cook snails . . . ”

  On the floor, after having undressed, the young German woman follows orders. She writhes about timidly. She pauses.

  “Kiss Mother’s feet.” She twists over and rests her lips on the shoes.

  “And remember never to touch Mother, she hates sweaty hands.”

  For a long time now, the little doll hasn’t dared to touch Madam Hanne’s things. The room smells of spices, of incense, of the reek of what remains — and can’t be seen. The objects are deployed in a military parade. They look like idols, loot, knickknacks. Rubbish and spirit. The black plastic bags are tearing, a sinister sound, of membranes. A veil of face powder covers the paintings. It seemed as if a hand wanted to erase the images. And the frames were flaking as if they had leprosy. Stefan is sitting in the dark. He doesn’t want his mother’s things to be left by themselves.

  As a child he had played in that very room, and he played with the future, something very abstract, that had the simple name of tomorrow. And even then that room had been dark — he boarded up the windows. Now he doesn’t need many words to express himself. He could say without words that he is playing with what happened once, with the past. It is totemic, nothing is real, and yet a presence blinds him. It is the bottomless gloom, without a surface, nothing but darkness. Flat.

  For a long time now, the little doll has been unable to touch Madam Hanne’s objects. She can look down at them, from above. The aviary hangs from a hook. She is quite comfortable. It is spacious, the bars are distant from one another. Stefan has hoisted it with a hook to the ceiling. Before there was a crystal chandelier. He shut the little door. She could look at all his mother’s things, as if she were at the theater. Sometimes he calls her, sometimes he feeds her, sometimes he opens the little door.

  The sound of her voice is so sweet, honeyed, faint.

  More and more faint.

  What a pretty little bird his wife is.

  The Visitor

  On a day without a date Angela da Foligno appeared in the halls of the Archeological Museum in Naples. She walks slowly, lost in thought. The face the color of sand. The brow stern. They had heard about her fasts, but her appearance showed no signs of wasting. They had also heard that she had dark hair and eyes. The eyes were a washed-out blue, hostile. The hair concealed by a linen gauze, gathered and as though sewn together. She smiled sweetly. It is not clear to whom. But from one window insects flew. At the hem of her habit, gray and lined with austerity, dabs of red velvet — two graceful tattered pumps. Perhaps she wore them when she was visited by the abbesses. Or by divine darkness. They swung in the void, when she hung in midair and couldn’t breathe. In perfect dereliction. She is scented. Like a small plant of orange flowers.

  She was born in 1248. A landowner and loaded with possessions. She marries at the age of twenty. Feels solace at the death of her husband and children. As she tore her clothes off, she pledged herself to chastity before the crucifix. She chose the way of mendicancy. Deprived of earthly loves, of goods, and of her very self, she embarked on her mystical contest with God, “Unknown Love,” and nothingness. A humble and frightened monk transcribes her words, her theological investigations, the visions. On Holy Saturday, she, the faithful Christian, tells him, led to it by an excess of the mind, that she had been in the sepulchre with Christ. She said that she had kissed the torso of Christ. She saw him stretched out, his eyes closed. Then she had kissed his mouth. Christ drew her to him. She spoke of a certain taste of the host that spread in her mouth. And when it descends into her body it gives her a greatly pleasant sensation. She trembles violently. Years later the bigot Agnes Blannbekin, on the 1st of January, again and again turns in her mouth, tender as egg-skin and very sweet, Christ’s foreskin.

  It happened that on that day without a date the shell was the first to become aware of the presence of Angela. It oscillated gently on the ocean floor of slanting waves. And Venus, from her elegant white post, slipped to shore. The fresco is tinged with the void. The curious gaze of the goddess visits the museum’s other guests. Before her, in the corridor, and deferent, the marble statues move aside to let her go by. They all seem alive, she thinks. Where’s the difference? Has she herself ever existed? The ascetic and the goddess touch lightly. Angela doesn’t seem entirely alive either, though she has an appearance of her own. The goddess saw herself repeated, reflected in many museums. She cannot tell herself from the copies. She had been to London, to Berlin, to Paris. She knows how to travel. She knows how it feels to be wrapped, packed, transported and battered. She feels the blows of the hammer to the nails on the crate. And her name on a label. Destination: no man’s land. Someone shouts: “Lift the crate!” Venus breathes all the same. She has the breath of the lifeless. That is her secret. Now she has settled in Naples. She feels the breeze that comes from the sea. Submerged voices, seaweed and portents.

  The Nymphs step out of their representations, step down from the painted garden decorating the wall. The wall closes in
on itself like a sepulchre. They are nearly all minute, damp, rapacious. They are still cloaked — Angela knows this — in a somber voluptuousness and a wild inebriation with which she identifies. The Nymphs give the impression that they listen to dreams. Not entirely awake, like those returning from an apparent death, they blindly contemplated the halls of the museum, without daring to move. The light wounded them. A pallid terror flutters across their eyelids. There is silence. Only the sound of shards falling was heard, colored shards, as they left their mooring. A silence of dust.

  Now they remain outside, outcasts, forgotten by everyone. They thrash about in search of their ghosts. Maybe they are already clawing and scratching at the walls. They beg to return to their posts. They lust after their lost places, and themselves as images. Outside, they are no longer even images. In the mirror they don’t recognize themselves, they have no proof of themselves.

  Melancholic and hypochondriacal as they are, resurrection is not for them. To return to the niches like perpetual flames, in the mise-en-scène of representation. That alone is a semblance of what is called living or existing. Having descended to earth, they realized they were ill-disposed to living. Nor could they repeat what they were doing in paintings, their place of origin. They abhor all manner of effusion. They say no. They don’t act, they don’t think. Their existence is placated only in painted terra-cotta. In muted hues, in ochre and raging red, swept away by a radiant glow. An azure trail remains.

  Some, like fierce bees, buzz around to reenter their representations. Others have burrowed their way in. The colors, in their absence, had formed a shapeless tangle. A shovel rests against the wall. It was used to move pieces of mosaic that no longer fit. And there are two Fauns at each corner of the hall. They held candles, but the fire wasn’t burning. At a signal, a martial sound of crystals, the curtains went up and a shaft of light, of real light, greeted the Nymphs and all the images. They knocked three times before going in. Without saying their names. The ceremony of nonexistence had been completed. They wished for nothing more than renunciation. Now they are happy, darkly happy. They shared the words of the ascetic: staying in one’s prison, in the painted prison, and observing one’s own void.

  Adelaide

  Adelaide sits in the kitchen. A mug of beer, a dirty plate. She hasn’t turned on the light, it’s almost dark and the faucet drips. “Enough.” For a moment the drip stops. It’s strange, thinks Adelaide, how things sometimes pay attention to you. There was also a gust of wind that caused the shutters to bang and she said enough. And they stopped. But in the kitchen there was a great bustle. Voices, yes, voices she recognized very well, they were hers. But they didn’t come out of her mouth. She was thinking of her baby. In the crib. Grown too big to stay in the crib, but he started to cry as soon as she put him in the cot with bars. In the crib the baby wound his legs around as though they were elastic, then he joined his hands as though he were praying. Was he praying? That was what she’d asked the priest. Who refused to baptize him. Why do you deny my son baptism? I, said the priest looking odious and cautious, am not denying the little one baptism, but I deny the mother her wish to baptize her son. The mother swallowed more beer. She was remembering her parents, her sister who had just died, her sister’s shouts Get him out of here, the priest who had slunk into her room to give her extreme unction. Well, in her family they had always dealt with priests. One way or the other. They, the priests, always preceded deaths. As though they lay in wait. It’s not easy to go peacefully. To not be molested. But now she remembers well how the man in the cassock had said no. No, I cannot baptize your son. And you dip your filthy fingers into the holy water, thought the mother. You’ll kneel before me so that I might punish you with a whip. That is what the mother thought about day and night. Punishing him. And in the meantime she imagined various punishments. Poison. A car crash. Fire. Arson. And the simple and sound pistol shot. But then maybe one day they would indict her. And she could already see herself in a cell, in prison, in a corner, tied like a dog to a leash, a rope around her neck. And she was asking for water. She was terribly thirsty. The food in the bowl, she vomited it. Scarce light through the window with bars. There was nothing to see. Even the sky seemed dimmed. And then she could see less and less. She had said that she had problems with her sight. And they, the jailers, the doctors, the chaplains had laughed. They were all laughing in the prison. She could hear them laughing even when they were serious. Her breasts had lengthened and she no longer understood anything about her body. Which appealed to Herbert, had appealed. To Janis, and very few others, since she was a rather chaste and temperamental woman. She whimpers now. She would like her whimpers to rise up to heaven.

  Rather than for men she has had, since she was a little girl, an inclination toward heaven. To climb up to heaven. When a child died, in the village everyone went to the funeral of anyone that died — she would wait for her moment. To get into the narrow box of wood. And she rehearsed. What are you doing, they asked her at home. She’d say, I’m rehearsing. Once she’d slipped a plastic bag over her head and fastened it around her neck with a string. She turned red, her heart beat fast, she tore open the bag immediately. That won’t do, she said. But at least she had tried. And now she knew that it wasn’t the end she wished for. And besides she didn’t wish for her end. She wished for an end to the priest. She had identified with it to the point of confusing her own end with that of the priest. She had to think only of how to get rid of the priest. Who’d dared say no to the baptism of her son. He will forever be damned, that’s what he told everyone in the village. And everyone started being afraid of her. And that was why they acted so polite. And when they saw the priest, they no longer greeted him. They feared the mother of the child. And later they feared the child. Who was growing fast. The doctor was astounded. He hasn’t been baptized, the mother had told him. That’s why he grows so fast. Baptism makes for a delay, the purity it promises and all promises delay natural development. Sometimes. Her child was growing in leaps and bounds. Even the nails.

  One day Herbert, who had fled from her, asked to meet his son. He came in through the kitchen, the door was always open. The smell was the same as usual. Detergent mixed with food and lye. The light bulb was swinging. The table was set for two. Who could the other one be, Herbert wondered to himself. He saw a woman come in whose step was proud and elegant, the long robe left a breast uncovered. She offered her arm to a very beautiful boy with long hair, extremely fair skin and lips that seemed painted. It was impossible to hide anything from that woman. Who sniffed the air and said, “Come out, you scoundrel, I know you’re here. This is your son. But you’ll never have him.” The father approached the son shyly, tried to hug him but the latter jerked back as though stung by a venomous insect. I am your father, he said. And the boy with a leap took a knife and drove it straight into his father’s heart. With his mother he filled mugs of beer, chatted into the night, and then finally took the body, carried it down somewhere, spirited it away. It was never found. The police never thought, or couldn’t be bothered to look for it. They reported it missing and left it at that. But now it was the priest’s turn. They had waited too long already.

  These actions, killings and burials, are not premeditated. It is pure instinct and instinct says one must hide corpses. That is what God wants, said the son. To hide, said the mother, and together they got to work.

  Tropics

  Already as a boy I had taken pleasure in identifying with my sister, a few years older and with a different father, but when I was seven I left with my father, a diplomat, first for Brazil and then for Central America. I didn’t see my sister for long spells. But when I went back to Europe, I would go visit her with my mother, who was also her mother, at the house of our grandmother, where she lived. And I saw a well-behaved young girl who greeted me holding out her hand and bowing her head — I caught her glance which seemed slightly meaner than the last time I’d seen her, when she was ten years old and I was six.

/>   Our encounters were always brief, and we never really had time to become acquainted. She greeted me when I went back the second time as if she didn’t know me. Such a formal greeting. It was in the hall of the villa, at the end of it the French doors were open and one could see the palm trees, the magnolia, and the lake. I greeted her formally, too, I was intimidated by her, and when she held out her hand I couldn’t help shaking it, even though, with a little effort, I might have hugged her. We took two or three walks along the lakeshore and we were photographed beside a flower bed and the magnolia. She much taller than I. And always that slanted, slightly mean glance. She was blond, with long plaits, light eyes but not blue like mine, hers were gray, musk, green. She was ill at ease with me and she watched me, maybe she was weighing me up. I was ill at ease with her, the daughter of my mother. I believe that my life, my style of life, was better than hers; we had many servants, I was better dressed, and she had to spend her years in boarding school. I don’t know why I am saying that she had to spend her years in boarding school, but I heard my mother saying that my sister couldn’t come with us, because she was sickly. My sister was not sickly at all, she was a strong girl, violent, free of illnesses, even of melancholy. Which I tended to suffer from, unfortunately. I don’t know if I wished that she’d come with us; we were rivals from birth. Her father was very kind to me, I saw him twice; and it seemed to me that my sister and her father were almost strangers, they had the same eyes, but I daresay not the same heart. He greeted me the first time as if he had always known me, obviously he liked me, he asked me a lot of questions about America and about what I wanted to do when I grew up. We had an exquisite conversation, two strangers, I am not in any way related to the father of my sister, and yet that gentleman could have been a relative of mine. I received letters in Brazil from him, with Pro juventute stamps on the envelope. With my sister I never chatted for very long, I don’t know who she is. We spent one summer together, at the seaside. Both she and I felt ill in the sun. This may have brought us together. Each year she would spend three weeks with her father in grand hotels. She spent every year in boarding school. From when she was eight to when she was seventeen and three months, she was a boarder at various schools. And when I was in Brazil, then in Central America, I tried to imagine my sister in those boarding schools and I would reach the conclusion that she liked being there, and that she wasn’t afflicted with melancholy. She didn’t need us. She never wrote to me, and to my mother hardly at all, formal letters, brisk and not very affectionate. I saw her again when I was fifteen, she had left the Bausler Institut, a boarding school in the Appenzell (where I have never been and have no intention of going). She had become a good-looking young woman, without the plaits, a ponytail. We invited her to stay with us, in Rome, before she entered another boarding school, and we’d go to the Foreign Office swimming pool together. She was beginning to flirt with everyone.