Nonsense, that may come out of packets. My soup? Never.’
Her eyes glitter combatively at the prospect of, by way of proof, preparing her fresh soup, this very night, for tomorrow afternoon. But each time she has stood up she groans, with one hand half on her hip, half on her back: ‘Goodness me, I almost couldn’t stand up. That back, that back, that back. I should have been in a wheelchair for twenty years. If it goes on like this it won’t be much longer.’ Unaware of the gross irony of that prediction.
This ailment is not in her imagination. Since her birth her spine, from coccyx to neck vertebrae, has exhibited an S-shape that is growing worse as the years go by. She is shrinking faster than other elderly people, and she is already so small. There are X-ray photos in which one loop of the S curls over one of her kidneys, while the other curls menacingly toward the opposite shoulder blade. ‘If I ever fall off a step ladder, the whole lot will go splat.’ [she, with strange pride]
In order to spare her constitution she should not lift anything and never work leaning forward. ‘If I had listened to that, I should have lain in bed for years, paralysed from head to toe. Work and still more work, I say. [she, cantankerous, rebellious] Only then will the muscles stay strong enough to support a ruin, however much they may creak.’ Whereupon she sits down and pulls up weeds. Then, kneeling again, she trims all the rhododendrons, as intently as if praying.
Even on the lawn she kneels a little later, with a spoon and a jar of blue powder. The remedy given to her by the hunchbacked shoemaker—‘push a bottle with the bottom knocked out into the molehills, neck upwards, so that the wind fills the underground passages with a terrifying whistling’—hasn’t worked. The bloody creatures are once again ruining her lawn. She has to put an end to it.
Once and for all.
She scratches a molehill open and carefully spoons in her blue powder. A few metres away her Roger turns in his sleep again, smacking his lips with content, snoring in the shade of a plastic parasol. Sunday afternoon, his only moment of rest. The canopy remains unfathomably blue and bel canto and reports babble from the radio. Will Beveren be champions this year? Nothing and everything at the same time. Wap-wáp, wap-wáp, wap-wáp. In Saint Quentin thick fog expected, visibility less than twenty metres. I know I mustn’t ask, but how is your book going? The minders wait before releasing the pigeons. No more running away. Buggered, hu-hu-hu. Delete, delete, the Leie. Sint-Baafs-Vijve: thirteen beam shots lowered. On the banks of the Scheldt. Well hidden in the reeds. Once more, come on. The canopy is blue. The world is vast. / Life too. / We’re not.
That’s enough.
Begin.
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she
(OR: DUMBSTRUCK)
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ON THE DAY that fate strikes they are eating pizza and watching the end of the evening news. She and he, Josée and Roger, side by side. Glass of red wine to go with it, and also a green salad with freshly chopped onion, slices of tomato and grated cucumber, all sprinkled with a simple vinaigrette and a garnish of ground parsley, ‘since [she of course] just because you’re eating a pizza, you mustn’t lose sight of your vitamins, certainly not at our age, and especially not in the depths of autumn, and … Roger! Can you turn that TV down a bit? A person can barely hear themselves speak. And anyway it’s those football results again. Very soon you’ll know them off by heart.’
Words to that effect.
The napkins are simple but indestructible damask, and from frequent washing have become as soft as a child’s pyjamas. The cutlery, as old as their marriage, is silver-plated and has recently been given another polish. The handles, with their curlicued decoration, shine like they used to, ‘because [she, militant] just because you’re both in your eighties, there’s no need to get sloppy. Style is a matter of will, and of continued will. People have only themselves to blame or to thank.’
True to that motto, every morning they complete the crossword puzzle of their regular paper, Het Laatste Nieuws, together, to sharpen the memory and hone the mind. In case of disagreement a three-volume dictionary is consulted. With English supplements and French films she regularly consults her dictionaries, still in the old spelling. She has repaired the front and back covers, which had become detached, with black insulating tape, cadged from a theatre technician.
To strengthen the body too against wear and tear, after doing the crossword puzzle, on her initiative and against his wishes, they lie down together next to their table, on the Persian rug, for a series of cautious sit-ups.
‘How many more to go?’ [he, on the rare occasions when he grumbles]
[she, imperturbable] ‘Be quiet and carry on.’
That’s what their morning is like.
It’s evening now and they are eating pizza. The crystal wine glasses have been produced, as they are every evening, from the china cabinet, in which the finest components of their finest service are displayed alongside their most precious ornaments, on glass shelves three or four storeys high. A school of motionless decorative fish in an aquarium brim-full of purple water, since the cabinet, narrow and high, has two doors and two sides with mauve leaded lights.
The pattern that the lead-lines follow is diamond-shaped. The glass is the same kind—with optical undulations and here and there a colourless pane—as that of the terrace door which, right opposite the cabinet, opens onto a balcony overlooking the street. Well, ‘balcony’. A zinc base, two plant tubs, a wrought-iron balustrade in a black circle, that’s it. The terrace door has exactly the same lead diamond shapes, in exactly the same dimensions, as the doors of the crockery cabinet. A mystery or a stupid coincidence, since it must have been put there before Fat Liza moved in, hence long before the cabinet was acquired to serve one floor below, where she and he lived for as long as they ran the butcher’s shop. It’s now twenty-five years since they packed it in. ‘You can’t believe [she, she, she] how fast the years fly by, though you’ve nothing to look after but yourself. How did we ever manage it back then? With the shop too? And five children? It was lucky that in those days I had no time to think about it. And that I had my theatre. And that bungalow. Otherwise I might have been tempted to give it all up and go and live as a tramp under a bridge in Paris, released from everything, from shitty nappies to customers. Believe me, I wouldn’t have made a bad job of it as a tramp. If you do something, you must do it well. Even begging and roaming about.’
She isn’t very interested in France as a whole, but Paris and its symbol, Édith Piaf, are in her top drawer. ‘What a life that poor woman had to lead! But that voice, that voice! [she, between horror and rapture] She sang until she dropped. That’s what I call great art.’ There is one other French emblem that wins her favour. In the passage to their bedroom hangs a plaster replica of the death mask of the Happy Drowned Woman. An anonymous woman, fished out of the Seine fifty years ago, dead as a doornail but with a blissful smile like that of a teenager after her first orgasm. It is a popular image with her whole generation. Most of her sisters and cousins have one hanging on the wall too. A woman who died in complete intimacy, who defies death 10,000 times on many Flemish walls. Endlessly smiling, despite the colour of the wallpaper, let alone the flower pattern.
Back to the living room, where she and he are just putting a second piece of pizza onto their plates. Only the stained glass, in the cabinet and the terrace door, gives the decor of the room a certain coherence. This cannot be said of the rest of the effects, the furniture first of all. Eclecticism sets the tone, as everywhere in Belgium, from architecture to the constitution, from bourgeois interior to morality. One person calls it anarchy, another liberalism. A third bric-a-brac.
In
