My Chocolate Redeemer (4 page)

And so I went with him to his room. Den might have been a better word. Or lair. There among his books and journals on stars and quasars and mu-mesons, he prodded me with his figures.

‘If nine men with ten wheelbarrows excavate an area of eleven cubic metres in twelve days, how long does it take three men to excavate the same area?'

The warm sweet taste of the chocolate was still on my tongue, guiltily cloying, as I forced my mind to go down this path. I got no further than the first two figures. Never. After that my understanding darkened, sweat broke out on my upper lip. I was lost.

At about this time I began growing my nails. Grand-mère objected: ‘At your young age, you cannot do that. What do you want with long nails?'

‘I'm frightened by some men.'

‘Which men?'

‘Claudistes.'

My uncle gave me that grim and yet strangely happy, tight smile. ‘Come Bella, let me hear you. At least let me
feel
your thinking.'

I grew to resist this assault. To fight back tooth and nail. I learnt, bit by bit, how to reprove his heated probing and teasing. I
thought
, yes – I thought of the nine men. Were they fat or thin? Short or tall? I saw their hands calloused from the heavy barrows, their boots thick with the dust of the soil they excavated. Were they married? And did their wives love them? Did they not object to being sent to work by Uncle Claude? Set in motion to satisfy a mathematical whim?

‘What are they called?'

‘That's besides the point.'

‘What's their nationality? Are they Turks?'

‘There are no men, Bella. They have no names. They are just words I used to explain the problem to you.'

‘Then shall we say they're Turks? Or Arabs?'

There it was. They were created by him just to illustrate the workings of numbers. These men could expect no help from Uncle Claude. Just as the poor figment clinging by his nails to the precipice could expect no mercy as the stubborn boots crunched closer and closer, and I awoke crying in the dead of night.

There was also the damn grapefruit. The conceptions of the universe, as I remember them from my earliest years, changed, according to Uncle Claude's teaching, in the light of new discoveries. When I was very young I remember his saying to me that the universe probably began in its very earliest stages as a lump of matter about the size of a grapefruit, fourteen or fifteen billion years ago. Everything that now is was compressed into this ball. Of course even then, and I couldn't have been more than five or six, I learnt not to ask what size the grapefruit was, and whether it was the small African variety or the fat pink fleshy fruit from Florida. For I knew the answer to that – ‘Bella, there
is
no grapefruit!'

Then there was the problem of how life came to be. We came, Uncle Claude taught, out of the primeval soup which existed on the cooling planet aeons ago. In this soup were, among other things, proteins and nucleic acids. Necessity and chance mated in the watery Eden and life grew out of this chemical brew, evolved into microbes and gave rise to us. We are the result of collaborations of the first primitive cell creatures. We are their cathedrals. Cells are machines for translating messages. Molecules associate and life emerges. And what is the meaning of the message contained in the elementary proteins from which we are formed? Why –
we
are the meaning of the message.

Can you truly say that you're surprised that I talk, and sometimes walk, in my sleep! ‘Amino acids!' I cry, to the alarm of my grandmother who speaks no English but rises hurriedly from her bed seizing her black walking-stick with its silver duck's head handle, knocking over the photograph of Marshal Pétain, and calling on my Uncle Claude to save me from the ‘ameenos!' whom she believes are in the pay of the hated English. Chains of DNA, pulsing like jellyfish, swim through my dreams!

There you have Uncle Claude's two lessons. In the beginning, the universe grew from a grapefruit; and man is descended from soup. There is the difference between us. Uncle Claude believes in equations, I believe in God. My problem, too, is that it is a lot easier to believe in God than it is to believe in Uncle Claude. And a lot more interesting. I fought back. I read his books. Reading is revenge! I found out about something called the Planck Wall. It seemed you could go back only so far into the very first moments of the Big Bang; at 10
-43
seconds after ignition you hit the wall. Everything broke down. Nothing could get past the wall. Next time he picked on me I said:

‘So what about the Planck Wall?'

He got really shirty then. ‘Who told you about that?'

‘Nothing can get past the Planck Wall. We'll never know what's on the other side.'

‘You're too young to talk about such things!'

One day Gloria disappeared. I think I know what happened. Just as Uncle Claude had smashed my favourite cup, he had kidnapped Gloria, stolen into my room one night while she slept beside me and carried her away. I was so convinced of it I expected a ransom note:

‘Stop lying about the world. Do your sums or Gloria gets it!'

I searched Uncle Claude's observatory at the top of the house where he scans the heavens for comets – he is determined to have a comet named after him – and where he does his experiments into the origins of life on earth, a smelly mixture of chemicals in a glass tank he calls ‘the soup of life'.

In my dreams Gloria appeared to me in grainy videos, looking thin and pale, with a sign around her neck:
prisoner of the claudistes
. I'm sure he tried to get her to learn the names of all the subatomic particles, to confess that soon all the world would recognise the historical necessity of the rule of quantum-mechanics.

But I knew my Gloria. She was brave. She had her nursing experience to fall back on. And if she had kept her fiddle she would cheer herself by playing defiant snatches of the Beethoven Violin Concerto.

Still, I knew she was gone. And I could not even send her notes, or money, the way Mama did. One day she would turn up in a shoe box, or a drawer, or at the back of a cupboard, or in a car boot … with her neck broken, or a bullet in the back of her head.

It's mid-morning and the sun is blazing in a perfect sky. Over the rocky mountain that forms the curving right arm of the little bay, the hawks are hunting. At first they are so high above the mountain that they appear like specks, floating scraps of blackened paper after a fire. It's only when they swoop lazily lower that you realise that these are serious killers. They spread their wings and glide lower still, like planes waiting to land. I know they will hunt all day, rising and falling on the thermal air currents, suddenly plunging for the kill. An unobservant creature might imagine them to be wind-blown specks, distant, unimportant and harmless. Such creatures, no doubt, make perfect prey.

Beneath the slats of the wooden jetty the lake water curls and slides like dark green silk. In the sunlight it has a thick folded quality, while in the shadowy corners it ripples like black cream. Ria and Beatrice, the young blonde daughters of the Dutch couple, have removed their tops and are taking it in turns to oil each other's breasts. The mother, Magda, is tall and auburn-haired with a fussy, aggressive manner; she bullies her blonde daughters on whose perfect faces there appear no traces of emotion. They are as smooth as soap. Magda resents their shining perfection; she sends them back to the hotel time and again for her wrap, her book, for drinks, for more suntan cream. She is one of those curiously shaped women with very long legs, though the upper half of her body is packed into a black swimsuit and has a dense, oblong look. Her bottom is spreading and there are wrinkles around her neck. She wears white mules with thick heels which emphasise the distance between her shaggy footwear, which gives her the look of standing somewhat bizarrely up to her ankles in snow, and the tops of her thighs where rolls of brown and rather leathery flesh mar the line of what are otherwise very good legs. Her husband, Wim, reclines beside her in his deckchair; he wears short white socks and sandals and he studies
De Telegraaf
through large, gold-rimmed glasses. A handsome man who seems younger than his wife, he is clearly the source from which the daughters derive their blonde good looks. Doubtless this is a constant source of frustration to the mother who gazes down the long length of her legs to where her daughters sit on their towels rubbing oil into their breasts. They have the most perfect breasts. Beatrice must be about seventeen and her breasts have the dense, chubby compactness of peachflesh. Ria would be about twenty or so and is very fully developed. Her breasts have a lovely lolling quality to them, firm yet elastic with delightful natural bounce. Now that they are oiled and gleaming they lie back and close their eyes and offer their breasts to the sun. The mother was beautiful once and that is surely the real source of her dissatisfaction. That is why she bridles at the unruffled surface her daughters present. That is why she harries them for drinks, books, attention. The daughters speak seldom and seem joined in some secret which faintly amuses them. When she can't stand it any more, the mother pulls the costume to her waist and her pendulous dugs tumble alarmingly into view.

Raoul, the escapee from the Foreign Legion, is watching the girls. He cannot keep his eyes off their breasts. He pretends to be watching the water-skiers, the windsurfers, the hawks overhead, but I can see what he is really watching and what he is thinking. He wears a pair of rather wide, full, very old-fashioned swimming trunks. The impact of those breasts on Raoul's imagination is being registered in the centre of the swimming trunks which appear to be made from some material resembling old and grubby parachute silk. There I see the pointer or indicator or dial of Raoul's emotions rising noticeably, deep within his deeply unfashionable swimming trunks. In this manner I imagine Red Indians once raised their tepees. Poor Raoul! Does he not understand that those breasts are not the objects of desire he imagines? They are exposed solely and simply for browning beneath the solar grill. Their aim is not to seduce, they rebuff glances as they would a caress. They are not here for that. His swelling prologue lacks a theme. Uncle Claude would explain what is happening in basic, biological terms. He would recognise that erectile tissues are responding to the stimulus inspired by well-oiled mammary glands. What could be more natural or inevitable? The boy's organ is responding to signals, a nervous reaction takes place, his penis rises. Simple, natural – and what is natural gives Uncle Claude fierce joy. Doubtless, he would say, the boy's brain tells him that he likes the look of the Dutch girls, or that their breasts are beautiful, but these are pretty strategems by which we humans trick out brute reality. The girls are just bait, flowers for the bee.

Uncle Claude worships the understanding. He believes it is omnipotent, he believes his own eyes, though of course he is willing to change his mind in the light of the evidence. Evidence means a lot to Uncle Claude, the facts of the case. There were, for instance, the facts of the case of the postboy Clovis and me in the bar of the Priory Hotel a few nights ago. The bar was rather cold and so we were sitting close together in the corner booth with its pink plush benches and marble tables. The ceiling is low and groined, short squat pillars support the roof. Were it not for the bar in the corner you might think you were in a crypt. You'd not be very far wrong because the bar of the Priory was in fact the infirmary of the old monastery where the sick and dying lay under the eye of the infirmarian, according to the very strict rules of the order. For everything in the house of the Carthusians was ordered, written down. Indeed, a visit to the infirmary was likely to be the only time the monk ever left his cell, except for his visits to the chapel for lauds, matins and vespers. For the rest they were always alone in their hairshirts and their silence. Dying, however, was a communal affair, particularly if illness attended one's departure. Dying was a time of bells. If one was very weak, a time of soup and perhaps a little fish, even a taste of meat, forbidden on all other occasions. When a brother lay dying he entered what they called ‘the agony'; the monks came to pray by him and the Paschal candle smoked in the corner. Now it was Clovis and I who sat in the old infirmary and Clovis had something almost like the agony on him. But there was no priest, no candle, and only Emile the barman fiddling with his drinks up at the other end. As Clovis leaned his head on my shoulder, I held his hand. It wasn't much but I felt for Clovis and that's not surprising. The idiot had this enormous black boot he was forced to wear because of the polio he had contracted when a child. His right leg was not more than a stick of bone and he dragged it behind him with a great heavy hoof attached to it which made him walk as if he were continually beginning to climb a flight of stairs and missing his step. The bar was cold, clammy, damp and dull – but we drank beakers of Emile's
coupe maison
as if we hadn't noticed. Clovis had dyed his hair bright green and wore it in a stiff wedge, like an axe-head of grass.

‘The Party is anticipating a wonderful rally in the Square,' Clovis told me excitedly. ‘The biggest ever. Speakers will come from many large cities. Lyons, of course, and even Paris. You and your family have honoured places on the platform. I am to act as an aide as well as to help direct the cars to their places. The Chief of Police is designating the entire village a parking area. I am to have a new uniform' – he pressed his mouth to my ear – ‘even a new boot! Of crystal!'

‘People park everywhere as it is.'

‘Yes, but this time no one will be permitted to complain.'

‘The Angel has arranged this?'

‘Naturally, together with the Mayor.'

‘The Angel is a shit.'

‘Bella, I implore you – speak softly.'

Clovis buried his head in my shoulder as if this would hide him from anyone listening.