lives. The great scenes of a small neighbourhood and a family with lots of children, in a corner house without a garden, and a shop with a constantly jingling doorbell—I slept in the room right above it, and during many a morning nightmare I tried out our slicing machine on the fingers of our earliest customers, those unsuspecting anonymous sadists, those instigators of a daily terror, who harried and controlled from morning till night with their hellish jingling.
A cross over all customers, all meat hooks and that one slicing machine. Put the cleaver into this: the whole human zoology of my youth, in which the oddest beast bears my name, my glasses and my defects, my scars and my lisp. Only in that way will she, Josée, become what she always wanted to be. Bigger than herself, larger than life. Because just as one cannot talk about her without expanding on him, so I cannot write about the two of them without digressing on the whole damned world which I got to know, and over which she ruled, for years. And standing face to face with that realm of woman, I am bound one last time to incline toward sloth and doubt.
Why me?
Because, end of story. That’s enough, now. Hack and pierce, fillet, expose every bone—begin. It doesn’t matter where. But begin.
Describe for example with a grin your horror at this moment, your panic as a recognized customer-friendly purveyor of literature. Stick a skewer in the craftsman you so often maintain you are, and listen with pleasure to the sigh that escapes from the wound like a dirty, despairing fart: ‘Dear me, dear God! I’ve started with the end! His death should have been at the end! For greater symmetry and melancholy pleasure!’
Laugh your head off at the palette and brushes of the professional painter of the senses you imagine you are, the cat’s tail with which the literary whore whips himself into streamlined production: your bundle of themes. The key-word outline of a possible, hoped-for, future—who knows?—masterpiece. That must be the aim, always. We can’t do it for less. [she, echoing] ‘You’ve got more in you than you think.’
I have a printout next to me, of my themes. According to calculations from long ago I should by now, on page xx, have long since described our former landlady. Fat Liza was her name, miserliness and unpredictability her fame.
I should also have long ago depicted our Hardworking Hunchback. He lived round the corner from us. A tough, emaciated man who looked timidly around him, high on his back a shoebox of flesh and spinal cord. At the same time he was the proud father of a dozen offspring, which with the cruelty native to children we called ‘the Humps’. Humps 1, Hump 2, Hump 3 …
I should also long since have sketched Willy the Shoemaker in detail. He plied his trade half a street further on and was also endowed with a hump, which strengthened me from an early age in the suspicion that overground nuclear tests were once conducted in Waasland. The more so since he was the possessor of a hefty club foot, which he dragged behind him—he could patch up his shoe, which quickly wore out, himself, thus making a saving. Willy had the bushy eyebrows of a devil, the mouth of a monk, the brown eyes of a wounded deer and an echoing house without children which constantly smelt of glue and leather.
Tear them up. All of them. Joyfully. Your schedules, your memoranda, your reference stuff. Delete, delete. Consign to the Lethe. What matters is spinning around in your head ready to be remembered. From now on go only for the mercurial moment. The random clatter inside your skull. Reap the moment and pick the impromptu. We’ll see where we get to, together.
For example, begin with what should have been the only true beginning. The starting gun of what is at once a domestic and a universal saga. The intervention of fate.
The scene takes place in the previously mentioned flat above our former butcher’s shop. Where Fat Liza used to live, into which my parents moved on their retirement, and where later I would have to reach a verdict on each of their possessions. Because of that unity of place the decor actually looks rather familiar. Pieces of jigsaws from different periods that suddenly fit together unexpectedly and unpredictably. Playing jazz must be like this. Suddenly from the mess comes that one crashing chord, unrepeatable, and yet perfectly timed. Sent by favourable chance.
Gratefully received by the patient musician.
Or not. What if we no longer need to pay attention to planning or directness? After all, this is the end of the first section. An organ figure would not be out of place. A small tableau vivant, characteristic of the protagonist, while she is still hale and hearty and suspects nothing of the catastrophe that is about to engulf her.
We shall look for her where we left her. We shall zoom in on the plot among the pollard and the Canada willows, the streams and the earth paths. The balloon flotilla in the sky has gone, floated off to pastures new. The sky has been left empty, an immaculate blue. The canopy of a merciful summer.
She sits on the ground, in a bathing costume and with that simple band in her hair, rooting about in her vegetable garden on her knees, right next to her famous bungalow, which was built under her supervision and to her design from concrete foundations to corrugated roof by family and friends with too much free time and not enough resistance to her moral and friendly blackmail. (‘You’re coming to help, aren’t you?’ ‘All the others are coming, you know.’ ‘Afterwards there’s a barbecue with satay and scampi.’ ‘Oh no! The foundations have got to be deeper! Much deeper!’ ‘I should know, shouldn’t I? Are you a builder’s daughter, or am I?’)
She is gardening intently as always, without looking right or left. Her Roger is taking a nap in the middle of the lawn in a deckchair under a large red plastic parasol. From the transistor on the table next to him pours bel canto song, alternating with match reports and weather forecasts for pigeon fanciers and canal shipping. He sleeps through everything.
It is a radiant Sunday in September, sometime in the second half of the twentieth century. She must be about sixty. It may be five years more or five years less. Doesn’t matter. This is her. Made entirely of language and yet exactly as she was. She is digging up her harvest with her bare hands, from small earth banks, consisting of the sandy soil that makes our native region so suitable for growing asparagus and for not much else, unless it be floury potatoes.
She cuts the asparagus, thin and pale as the hands of a dead piano player, according to a fixed ritual, mercilessly tender, never rushing it. First she gropes around in the soil wrist-deep, where a crack or a small nipple that has already turned purple in the earth wall has betrayed the upward thrust of an asparagus shoot, sitting waiting milk-white in our dark earth. Her hand stirs about cautiously in the opening, while she herself closes her eyes, increasing the sensitivity of touch in her hand by excluding visual stimuli. At first she appears not to find what she is looking for. She stirs ever deeper. For a moment you are afraid that her arm will gradually disappear into the hole, up to her armpits, as if the earth is a pregnant cow and she a gentle-natured vet who has to arrange a number of organs, for order and neatness are important everywhere, definitely in the innards of a globe. But now she strikes with her kitchen knife—an heirloom with a bone handle and a blade that that has become wafer-thin with all the sharpening, the cutting edge has even worn into a half-moon shape. ([she, speaking with certainty] ‘One fine day that knife will break in half, on a shoot no thicker than a child’s little finger.’)
By the time she is finished the sweat is running down from under her hairband. Standing up, she wipes it away with her wrist, dirtying her face as well with a shadow of poor earth and the sickly, slightly bitter smell of her harvest. It is displayed next to her on a piece of old newspaper. [she, just as certain] ‘You’re right, these are the first, still a bit skinny and stringy. It will be years before they can compete with the ones from Mechelen, which are the best in the world—don’t let those Spaniards or Dutch fool you, they can have as much sandy soil as they like over there. But this here, look? Still enough for a pan of soup. With some chicken bouillon added, some fresh parsley, a dash of
