The Woman With the Bouquet (8 page)

“Did my aunt tell you her life story, yesterday?”

“She did.”

“And it took all evening?” Gerda guffawed.

I understood that it was curiosity that was making her behave in such a friendly way toward me.

“I’m sorry, Gerda. I swore I wouldn’t repeat anything.”

“What a pity.”

“In any case, you would be wrong to imagine that your aunt is an old maid who has known nothing in her life.”

“Oh, really? My poor aunt, and here’s me who’s always believed she’d never met the wolf, and that she’d die a virgin!”

“Well, that’s not the case.”

“Well, I’ll be! How about that . . .”

“Why were you so sure of it?”

“Well, she’s an invalid . . .”

“Wait a minute! The stroke that confined her to her wheelchair, that only happened about five years ago . . .”

“No, I was referring to her disability. Aunt Emma was not immobilized before her attack but she couldn’t get around any easier. Poor woman! She had tuberculosis of the bones, back in the days when they didn’t have the medication they have today. It affected her hips. How old was she then? Twenty. That is why she left Africa: she came to the hospital here . . . To treat her, they laid her out on a wooden plank for a year and a half, in the sanatorium. When she moved into the Villa, in Ostend, at the age of twenty-three, she could no longer walk except with crutches. The children called her ‘the cripple.’ Children are so mean, so stupid and heartless! Because she was pretty, my aunt, very pretty in fact. And yet, who’d want a girl who hobbled around? She swayed from one hip to the other with the shortest step; it was frightening, mind. In the end, everyday life became easier after her attack, when she finally accepted the wheelchair. I ask you, try to get a twenty-three-year-old girl to sit in a wheelchair . . . You have to say things as they are: what a pity! Well, so much the better if there was a fine lad who, someday, made the sacrifice to . . .”

Disgusted by the very idea, she shrugged her shoulders and went out.

Thoughtful, I tucked into my solid Flemish breakfast, then had a quick shower and went down to join Emma Van A., who sat facing the day, a book on her lap, her gaze clinging to the clouds.

She blushed when she saw me. The reaction of a woman who has given of herself. I felt that I needed to reassure her.

“I spent a wonderful night, thinking back over your story.”

“So much the better. I was sorry, after the fact, to have bored you with it.”

“Why did you omit your disability?”

She grew tense. Her neck stiffened, and gained an inch in length.

“Because I don’t live the life of an invalid, and I never have.”

Suddenly she inspected me from under her lashes, wary, almost hostile.

“I see that my oaf of a niece has been filling you in . . .”

“She mentioned it by chance and it certainly wasn’t to make fun of you; on the contrary, she spoke of your troubles with compassion.”

“Compassion? I hate it when people look at me that way. Fortunately, the man of my life did not inflict his pity on me.”

“He didn’t talk to you about your handicap?”

“Yes, at one point when he was in a mood to get married, when he hoped to make our affair official . . . I was disoriented! I answered him that although the people might accept a commoner, they would reject an invalid. And so he told me the story of a French queen, Joanna the Lame. He even called me that for a few weeks. I had to make a huge effort to keep my sense of humor.”

“Is that why you wanted your relationship to remain clandestine? Basically, he accepted your disability much better than you did . . .”

She shoved her neck against the back of her chair. Her eyes clouded over.

“It’s possible.”

Her voice broke. Her mouth quivered. I understood that another secret was waiting for me behind her lips.

“What’s the matter?” I said gently.

“The tuberculosis was the actual cause of my sterility. Because of the infection in my bones and the treatment I received I could no longer use the side of my body. Otherwise, perhaps I would have had the courage to marry Guillaume.”

She stared at me intensely and corrected herself: “How idiotic, sentences like that, ‘otherwise,’ or, ‘if I hadn’t been sick!’—tricks of the mind to suffer even more! My fate could not unfold ‘otherwise.’ One should never fall into these hypotheses, they are a deep source of pain where you splash about hopelessly. I have known one disgrace and one grace, I have no cause for complaint! The disgrace: my illness. The grace: that Guillaume loved me.”

I smiled. She grew calmer.

“Madame, there is a question I hardly dare ask you.”

“Go ahead. Dare to ask.”

“Is Guillaume still alive?”

She took a deep breath and then stopped herself from answering. Swiveling on her chair, she went over to a low table, picked up a flat silver box, saw that there were no more cigarettes, and pushed it away, annoyed. In disgust, she grabbed an antique tortoiseshell cigarette holder and with a proud gesture, raised it to her mouth.

“Forgive me. I shall not answer your question, sir, because I do not want to give you too many clues that might identify the man I have talked about. Suffice to say that Guillaume was not called Guillaume, it is just a pseudonym that I gave him in my story. You will also notice that I did not mention his rank in the order of succession. And finally, you will remember that I gave you no indication whatsoever of which royal family is concerned.”

“Excuse me? You did not mean the Belgian dynasty?”

“I didn’t say that. It could just as easily be the royal house of Holland, Sweden, Denmark, or Great Britain.”

“Or Spain,” I shouted, exasperated.

“Or Spain!” she confirmed. “I told you my secret, not his.”

My head was spinning. Naïve, I had swallowed down to the last detail everything she had told me the night before. This discovery that, despite her emotion, she had controlled her story, cast a different light upon her—calculating, crafty.

I wished her a good day and set off on my walk.

As I strolled, a strange thought wriggled between my temples, a thought that escaped me. In a fleeting way, a memory was working its way into my brain, like a word on the tip of the tongue. I had been baffled by what Gerda had told me, and then Emma herself, and I now went about with a sense of uneasiness I could not define. I stopped several times on the long deserted piers. I contemplated the waves: I felt land sick, and I had to sit down.

It was Tuesday, and the tourists had vanished, restoring my Ostend to me, intact and empty. However, I was suffocating.

Ordinarily, whenever I stayed by the ocean, I had the impression that the horizon receded as far as the eye could see; but here in the north the horizon rose up like a wall. I was not looking out at a sea on which one could escape, but a sea where one can go no further. This sea was not a call to departure—it raised up its ramparts. Is that why Emma Van A. had spent her life here, to remain prisoner in the exile of her memories?

I clung to the iron guardrail that ran along the pier. When I had left the villa, for a brief split second I had been stung by something—a sensation, a memory that had left a bitter taste in my mouth. What was it?

As I headed toward a café in order to get something to drink, the answer came to me, because the
brasserie
chairs suddenly conjured a sharp image: the madwoman of Saint-Germain!

Twenty years earlier, when I had just moved to Paris to begin my studies, I had met this strange creature one evening when my friends and I were waiting to go into the cinema.

“Mesdames, Messieurs, I’m going to perform a dance for you.”

A tramp of a woman with flat hair of an indefinite color—some of it was yellow, some of it ash gray—stopped in front of the group of people getting ready to go into the theater, left her bundles under a doorway, then stood among us, keeping an eye on her bundles all the while.

“The music is Chopin!”

Humming in a reedy little voice, she jiggled on her ballet slippers, that must have been white once upon a time, her gestures hindered by the pink shawl sliding against her flowered dress, while her timid beret threatened to fall off. What was fascinating about her was the negligent way she performed her number: as if she wanted to have nothing to do with rhythm or tempo; she hummed the melody when she happened to think of it, provided she had enough breath left; as for her movements, she barely took more than a step at a time. She was like a little moppet of the age of four pretending to be a ballerina in front of a mirror. I got the impression that she knew this, and that she thought she was the only one who could do what she was doing. I could see a faint smile on her lips, reproaching us for being such ignorant connoisseurs. “I can perform anything, they don’t even notice, they don’t deserve any better.”

“There! I’ve finished!”

She saluted us with a slow, noble curtsy, gathering around her a vast imaginary skirt that ended in an invisible train.

Those who regularly came across her gave a smattering of applause. Either out of pity, or cruelty, we began to give her an ovation, whistling, bawling, getting onlookers to join in the acclaim until the moment when, bathed in sweat, exhausted by the curtsies she had added to her choreography, she exclaimed shrilly, “Now don’t go getting ideas, there won’t be any encores!”

She then walked along in front of us, her red beret outstretched.

“For the dance, ladies and gentlemen. For the artiste, please. Thank you, in the name of art.”

I often ran into her after that. One day she came close to the queue, teetering, her nose crimson, her gaze blurred: clearly she’d had too much to drink. She put down all her stuff and mumbled a few notes, wiggled her legs, just enough to realize she was incapable of finishing her haphazard ballet.

It made her furious. She gave us a dark look, up and down.

“Are you making fun of a poor old woman? But I wasn’t always like this, I used to be very beautiful, yes, very beautiful, over there in my bags I have photographs. And then, I was supposed to marry King Baudouin, the King of the Belgians, because the Belgians they don’t just have miserable little presidents like we do, they have real kings! Yessir, I was nearly the queen of the Belgians, you heard me! Queen of the Belgians, just because King Baudouin, when he was a young man, he was crazy about me. And I was crazy about him. Hear that? We were very happy. Very. And then there was that scheming woman, that . . . that . . .”

She spat several times on the ground, disgusted, in a rage, trembling with hatred.

“And then there was that Fabiola!”

Victorious, she had managed to say her rival’s name. Pupils dilated with spite, eyebrows raised, she harangued us violently: “Fabiola, she stole him from me! Yes! Stole! When he was crazy about me. She didn’t care, that Spanish hussy, no respect, she wanted to marry him, she bewitched him. He turned away from me. Poof, just like that, in the blink of an eye.” She leaned against a wall, and tried to get her breath.

“Fabiola! It’s not hard to speak several languages when you’re born with your ass in butter, and you’ve got maids from England, Germany, France, and America! Pshaw . . . I too could’ve spoken several languages if I hadn’t been born in the gutter. Thief! Thief! She stole my Baudouin!”

At the end of her tether, the tramp took hold of herself, and looked at us as if she had suddenly discovered we were there. In a flash she made sure that her bags were still where she had left them, not far away, and then, limiting her performance to movements of her upper body, she hummed a vague tune, waved her arms and hands for twenty seconds, and then bowed abruptly.

“There we are!”

Then she began mumbling two speeches together between her teeth.

“For the dancer . . . scheming bitch . . . adventurer . . . thief . . . thank you, for the dance . . . that bitch Fabiola!”

So that was who my dreamer from Ostend was taking me back to, none other than the beggar woman who used to cart around her dozen or so plastic bags and whom the students at the Sorbonne used to call the madwoman of Saint-Germain, since every quartier in Paris has its own eccentric.

Was my landlady any better? In a flash, the improbability of her story struck me. An affair between an invalid and a prince! To have power over a rich, free man, going so far as to choose his mistresses for him! The beginning and the end on the beach, between the dunes, so impossibly romantic . . . It was all too surprising, far too artistic! It was no wonder there were no longer any material traces of their story: it had never happened.

I went back over her story in the light of my doubts. Her peach leather notebook containing the lovers’ menu: did it not correspond to the best erotic texts, those written by women? Masterpieces of sensual audacity in literature: aren’t they often the work of marginal eccentrics, spinsters who know they are not destined for motherhood, and who find fulfillment elsewhere?

When I went back to Emma’s, there was a detail that acted like a key opening every door: above the glass canopy there was a silver and gold mosaic spelling the name of the place: Villa Circé! You could tell that the panel must have been added after the building was completed.

It was all becoming clear: Homer was her womb! Emma Van A. had been inspired by her favorite author to conceive her episodes. Her meeting with Guillaume, foretold by a premonitory dream, transposed the meeting between Ulysses and Nausicaa, the young woman discovering a naked man by the water’s edge. She had called her villa “Circé” the better to identify herself with the enchantress in the Odyssey who worked her magic artifices on men. She hated knitting, weaving women, those Penelopes to whom Ulysses takes so long to return. As for the menu of erotic recipes, that too was inspired by ancient Greece. In short, she had made up her so-called memories with literary memories.

Either Emma had had a laugh at my expense, or she was an inveterate liar. In either case, it seemed obvious to me, given her disability—that she had tried to hide—that she had embroidered the truth.

I went through the door, determined to prove to her that I was no longer fooled. But when I saw her slim silhouette sitting in her wheelchair looking out at the bay, my irritation subsided.