ashamed of my creative indecision, resulting in still more indecision. King Midas? Jonah, biting his nails in the innards of his whale. Job, idly fretting on his glorious rubbish dump. The urge to act paralysed by a thousand questions. I have to restrain myself, with the catalogue of Western art history in my hand, not also to resort to Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. That would be, apart from ridiculous, another flight, yet another postponement. Whoever hunts for comparisons is detaching themselves from reality, from the awareness of how overwhelmingly ordinary it is, but also how unknowable and devastatingly unique. No greater swindle than the knowledge of art. Job and Jonah have no place here, let alone Hamlet and the rest of the sluttish international crew of the good ship Culture, that international floating escort bureau which provides a value-adding strumpet for every aspiration and every swoon. Stop the make-up and hair-curling, stop posing, as King Oedipus or the Good Soldier Schweik, Sancho Panza or his boss. It’s about you and you alone. I mean: about me. That is precisely the point. Why should I suddenly have to write this book? There are enough people with deceased mothers, most of whom have had more spectacular careers than that of a butcher’s wife from Waasland. No shortage of heavyweight women, with brilliant children and a life set in Mumbai or New York, Rome or Rio, instead of a Flemish hellhole. Let such fortunate orphans get to work. Let them grieve and honour and fête memories, in a geographical and historical framework that the reader does not first have to look up in the tiniest corner of his encyclopedia.
Let them glory. Not me.
The greatest pressure did not even come bubbling up from myself. From beyond the grave I could feel her pressure. Mothers never become human beings again, mothers remain mothers.
I saw the corner of her mouth and her eyebrow once more curling in disdain, her burning filter cigarette was again balancing between two fingers, and she herself was looking away—silent for a change, absolutely silent, ear-shatteringly silent, speechless with feigned indignation, as a grand tragédienne scarcely one metre sixty tall, acting her fathomless disappointment, displaying her displeasure at her youngest child every day that he did not write her story.
‘If I feel contempt for any kind of person, it’s those who speak ill of their parents.’ How many times she said that to me! True, after she had come to terms with the fact that I was becoming a writer, counter to her express wish and preference. [she, the first time she heard of my plans] ‘Writing is something for lazy people, drunkards and paupers.’ A few years later she sat in the pitch darkness, glowing with pride that I turned out to be able to live from my pen, won a literary prize, and after all had no drink problem. ‘I always knew. About those prizes. He’s got more in him than he thinks.’ She said that in my presence as if I were not there. Making no secret of the fact that she must have had a decisive part to play. ‘Like mother, like son.’ That is the essence of all text, certainly when spoken aloud: the most important thing is the subtext.
Sometimes, though, the text and the subtext simply merge. How often she longed quite openly, certainly after the appearance of my first collection of stories, with a photo of my father on the cover, for me to write more about her? But at the same time delicately warning me that it would be better if I produced a grand and positive story, a tome of fitting length, not a malicious memo. Noblesse oblige, after her double life motto, ‘You must not spit in the spring from which you have drunk’ and ‘You’ve got more in you than you think.’
The latter should be taken literally. There is more in you. Yes, in you too. In all of us. Lots more. More and more. ‘Of course you passed your exams with distinction! [she, rolling her eyes] That’s only normal, isn’t it? You could also have done it with the highest distinction. Oh God, a person can’t have everything. See it from the positive side. Now you’ve got something else to look forward to. When are your next tests?’ Does a human being ever become any more than that? The repetition of the same test, in ever-different forms, if need be that of a book. If need be this book. A classic biography which at the same time must have nothing classic about it, which on the contrary must produce something extraordinary. ‘Oh yes! [she, with one hand held triumphantly above her head] Something original! Something spiritual! You have a completely free choice. As long as it’s something that makes everyone say: it surprised us cruelly, but affected us deeply. We’d never thought Lanoye had it in him.’
While not writing I became aware of her ever-growing expectation that was not an expectation but a demand, a claim, a constitutional right, fed by her pretensions as an amateur actress, her lifelong dormant disillusion at being a butcher’s wife against her will and her equally lifelong arsenal of the feminine tyrant, not used to not getting her way.
For oh my God in whom I don’t believe—how perfectly she mastered the palette of domestic extortion! It usually won her respect, sometimes horror, and always obedience, regardless of her choice of weapon, always adapted to the terrain and the position of the family battle. Her armoury was full and the weapons adequately oiled. Little white lie alongside punitive threat. Offended silence alongside a furious torrent of words. Working in a whisper on private sentiment alongside pointing sarcastically at the approaching mockery of the whole neighbourhood and the whole school and the whole country. No role was beneath her, no retort too refined. ‘There’s only one kind of people who are more abominable than those who write bad things about their parents. They are the people who don’t write about their parents. Though they can write.’
Admittedly she never made that last comment. But she could have. She would say it, without compunction, if she were reading over my shoulder now. Correction, she is reading over my shoulder. Has been the whole time. She is even losing patience because there’s been more about balloons and myself than about her.
And, reading over my shoulder, she says in a throwaway tone but loud enough for me to hear—subtle acting it’s called, her forte, both on the boards and in everyday life—although it must not go unrecorded that she excelled equally in ‘giving people a piece of her mind’—so she says, reading over my shoulder, here and now: ‘And meanwhile it’s still all about you, you know. Anyway, lucky that you’re not reading it aloud. Because dear, oh dear … Where on earth do you still get that ugly “a” of yours from? In a small circle of friends I can understand it, people from Sint-Niklaas together. Or in the shop, when you’re chatting with your customers. Good people, most of whom have never read a serious book, and have trouble with a paper. You have to talk to them in patois, or they’ll think you’re putting on airs, and they’ll go to someone else for their meat. But someone like you? On the radio, on TV, on the platform … Have you ever heard yourself? You didn’t get it from me. Okay, if I have to play the maid in a country farce, then I sometimes use dialect. I like it. I can do it. Or for the old mother in The Van Paemel Family, poor dear. There dialect is moving and appropriate. But surely not with you? A writer, who is supposed to set a good example. How on earth did you ever stagger your way to your degree in Germanic philology? No one can understand. Sometimes I can’t myself.’
Let her read over my shoulder as much as she likes, let her make comments into the bargain, even she will have to put up with my first writing a few pages about myself, because I haven’t finished with that—on we go—paralysed nail-biting in my whale, that indecisive fretting on top of my mountain of compelling material. Its weight does not rest under my backside. It weighs on my chest, while I type this and this and this.
Why is it only my stories that will have to replace her, now she herself has gone? Why not those countless other stories of those who knew her? Daughter, sons, grandchildren, all those remaining relatives—an expanding list, an upside-down bread tree of bloodlines? Plus all her friends and protégés, because she had them, by the score—what would a diva of life be without an ample and loyal public in the only true arena, that of reality? What is a matriarch worth without some additional children outside her own family—orphans, rejected scions? Old friends, schoolmates even, for ever loyal, until death do you part?
Whatever I serve up here, in whatever order, or in whatever key, it will remain a noble lie, a splinter of the prism that was her life. Why
