The Woman With the Bouquet (9 page)

A tender pity came over me. Gerda had been right when she said, “the poor woman,” when speaking about her aunt. The unfortunate woman had not had to work for a living, but what must her life have been, with her body—surely a sweet one—so humiliated by disability? How could anyone hold it against her for using what was left—her imagination—to escape from her existence, to enrich it?

And what right had I, a novelist, to reproach her for her poetic improvisation?

I went up to her. She was startled, smiled, pointed to a chair.

I sat down across from her and questioned her.

“Why don’t you write all of this down? It is so captivating. Write a book, use fake names, and call it a novel.”

She looked at me as if she were talking with an infant.

“I am not a woman of letters.”

“Who knows? You should try.”

“I already know because I spend my time reading. There are enough impostors as it is . . .”

I grimaced, reacting to the word impostor, because it seemed revealing to me that she was using the word, when she had lied to me the day before: an admission of guilt, in a way.

She noticed my grimace and took me by the hand, kindly.

“No no, don’t take it badly, I wasn’t referring to you.

I was amused by her misunderstanding. She inferred that I had forgiven her.

“I am sure that you are an artist.”

“You haven’t read me.”

“That’s true!” she retorted, bursting out laughing, “but you are such a good listener.”

“I listen the way a child does, I accept what people tell me. So, if you had made up those stories yesterday, I wouldn’t realize.”

She nodded, as if I were telling her a nursery rhyme. I ventured even further: “Every time we invent something, it’s a confession, with every lie we are sharing a secret. If you were making fun of me yesterday, I would not hold it against you, I would thank you, because you chose me to tell your tale to, and you considered me worthy of your story, you opened your heart and your fantasies. What could be more singular than creativity? Can one give anything more precious? I would have been very privileged. The chosen one.”

There was a shiver on her features that showed me she was beginning to understand. I hurriedly continued: “Yes, you’ve recognized me, I’m a sort of brother, a brother in falsehood, a brother who has chosen, like you, to open up by making up stories. Nowadays, great value is placed on sincerity in literature. What a joke! Sincerity can only be a quality in a report or some sort of legal testimony—and even then, it is more a matter of duty than quality. Constructing a story, the art of attracting a reader’s interest, the gift of storytelling, the ability to see close up something that is far away, or to evoke without describing, the ability to give an illusion of reality—all of that has nothing to do with sincerity, and owes nothing to it. Moreover, stories that are driven not by reality but by fantasy—scenes one would like to experience, stifled desires, repeated urges—all mean more to me than any minor news story in the paper.”

She opened her eyes wide, twisting her lips.

“You . . . you don’t believe me?”

“Not for a moment, but it doesn’t matter.”

“What!”

“Thank you all the same.”

Where did she find the strength to punch me so hard? She struck my chest and I fell backward.

“Imbecile!”

She was furious.

“Get out of here! Leave this room immediately! Get out! I don’t want to see you anymore.”

Alarmed by the shouting, Gerda rushed into the library.

“What’s going on?”

Emma saw her niece and thought for a moment before she answered. In the meantime, the sturdy woman had located me, on the rug, and was hurrying over to help me to my feet.

“Well I never, Monsieur! You fell over! How’d you manage to do that? Did you trip on the rug?”

“Precisely, Gerda, he tripped on the rug. That’s why I called you. Now I’d like to be left alone, I need to rest. Alone!”

Faced with such authority from a timid old lady, Gerda and I hardly knew what to say, so we beat a hasty retreat.

Once I had found refuge upstairs, I was filled with remorse for having precipitated this crisis. I thought Emma was a liar, not that she was disturbed. Her reaction showed me that she believed in all her fabulations. Now, through my fault, she was suffering even more. What should I do?

Gerda came to join me on the pretext of serving me some tea, but in fact she wanted to get more information out of me regarding the scene she had just witnessed.

“What did you say to her? She was hopping mad!”

“I told her that I might not believe everything she had told me yesterday . . .”

“Oh, yes . . . I get it, and now . . .”

“I added politely that I adored her story, and that it didn’t matter at all if she was making it up. And then she hit me!”

“Ouch!”

“I didn’t know she had gone so far in her ravings. Totally unbalanced. I figured she must be a liar, or fond of making things up all the time, but I didn’t think she would turn out to be . . .”

“Crazy?”

“Oh, that word is . . .”

“I am sorry, Monsieur, but you have to admit that aunt Emma is deranged. Do you think that the novels you write are true? No. So, that’s what I’m telling you: my aunt is out to lunch. Hey, it’s not the first time we’ve talked about it . . . Uncle Jan said the same thing already. And Aunt Éliette did, too!”

I fell silent. I found it unpleasant to acknowledge that this crude woman might be right; when common sense looks like a wild boar with an obtuse forehead, wearing yellow rubber gloves and a dress with giant flowers, and her vocabulary is poor, her syntax deficient, I am not attracted to common sense. Nevertheless, I had to share her diagnosis: Emma Van A. had left the real world behind, to go into a world of make believe, completely unaware of the journey undertaken.

Gerda went off to prepare dinner.

As for me, I was prevaricating. Should I leave things as they stood, or go to calm Emma down? I could not stand making her unhappy. It would be better to lie than to distress her.

At seven o’clock, once Gerda had left for the day, I went down to the living room.

In the fading daylight, in the middle of the library gradually overtaken by gloom, she sat in her usual place, her eyelids red. I slowly went up to her.

“Madame Van A . . .”

My words were lost in the silence of the room.

“May I sit down?”

The total absence of reaction gave me the impression that I had become voiceless, transparent. However, although she neither spoke nor looked at me, through the excessive contraction of her muscles and the fact that she had reduced her field of vision, I felt that she could perceive my presence and found it unpleasant.

I improvised a solution to get out of the crisis.

“Madame Van A., I am very sorry about what happened earlier, and I feel completely responsible. I cannot understand what came over me. It must be jealousy. Yes, without doubt. Your past is so fascinating that I needed to believe it was untrue, that you had invented it. You understand, it’s difficult for ordinary people like myself to learn that such . . . extraordinary things can happen. Please accept my apologies. I have been furious with myself. I wanted to trample on your happiness by shouting out that it wasn’t real. Do you hear me?”

She turned to me as, gradually, a victorious smile appeared on her face.

“Jealous? Really, jealous?”

“Yes. I defy anyone who listens to you not to die of a fit of pique, of envy . . .”

“I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

She studied me, sympathetically. I insisted, in order to regain her trust.

“No doubt that is why you never spoke about yourself: to avoid arousing any violent envy.”

“No. What held me back was my promise. And then the idea that I might be taken for a madwoman.”

“A madwoman . . . why would that be?”

“There are so many miserable people who lead such a boring lives that they will tell incredible tall tales and end up believing them. I understand them in a way.”

The mystery of words . . . Like birds, they land on a branch, and the tree does not even realize. And so Emma Van A. had just described her own case without recognizing herself, as if it were an illness affecting only other people.

I felt she was calmer. As a result, I felt the same sense of peace.

And so I left Emma Van A., in silence.

The next morning, at half past eight, I was woken by Gerda’s screams: she had just found her aunt dead in her bed.

Paramedics, doctors, sirens, policemen, doorbells, doors banging, movement, and noise—all came to confirm throughout the day what we had found when we went into her room: Emma Van A. had succumbed to a new heart attack.

Gerda behaved impeccably. Full of sorrow yet efficient, she took care of everything, including me: she asked if I wanted to curtail my stay—two weeks had been paid for in advance—or not. As I decided to stay, she thanked me, both for herself and for her aunt’s sake, as if I were doing them a personal favor, when in fact I did not know where to go.

Emma Van A. was groomed, made up, and laid out on her bed, while we waited for her to be placed in her coffin.

I continued my strolls, which brought me a strange comfort. Today there was a sad dignity about the sea, veiled in tones of gray. I had come to Ostend to recover from a broken heart, and I had imagined a vague, gentle, nostalgic sort of place, a fog I might be able to curl up in. I had been mistaken. There was nothing vague about Ostend—no more than poetry is vague—and yet I had recovered. Emma Van A. had restored intense emotion to me, and in her odd way she had put me back on my feet.

I savored these final moments as a privilege where she still kept us, Gerda and myself, at the Villa Circé.

At five o’clock, her niece brought me my tea, grumbling.

“The notary called to say there is a specific clause regarding her funeral: there has to be an obituary in two Belgian daily newspapers, two Dutch ones, two Danish ones, and two English ones. Mad as a hatter!”

“Have you already taken care of it?”

“The notary has taken care of it.”

“Who is going to inherit?”

“Me, as she promised me, that I already knew. And she requested a wake of three days, which is normal, and then the strangest thing: she wants to be buried with a glove.”

I shuddered. She went on, rolling her eyes skyward, “Some glove that is in a mahogany box at the very back of her wardrobe.”

As I knew what this was referring to, I didn’t want to sully her aunt’s memory by telling Gerda the wild story.

Gerda came back holding an open box in her outstretched hands, looking suspiciously at its contents.

“Is it a man’s glove, is that it, yes?”

“Yes.”

Her niece sat down and thought, a troublesome effort for her.

“So she might have known a man?”

“A man’s glove indeed,” I asserted gently.

She smiled at me, understanding my reasoning.

“Yes, I see.”

“A chaste encounter during a ball. The rest, pure fantasy. The perfect stranger from whom she confiscated this glove and who never realized . . . That is what I believe, Gerda.”

“That’s what I believe, too.”

I looked up and took down a book that was in full view on the shelf.

“It’s easy to see what sort of reading suggested her fairytale to her.”

I opened an exquisite edition of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, then pointed to a chapter, “Cinderella. She leaves her slipper behind on leaving the ball. The Prince picks up the slipper and goes to look for his partner.”

I picked up the glove.

“This is the prince’s glove that represents Cinderella’s slipper.”

“My poor aunt. Not surprising that her love stories are no more than fairy tales. Reality was too hard for her, huh, too violent. Aunt Emma wasn’t just an invalid, she was a misfit. She was never anything but a dreamer.”

I nodded.

“That’s enough making fun of her,” she concluded, “so I’ll respect her last wishes. Doesn’t matter where it came from, this glove, I’ll put it there with her.”

“I’ll come with you.”

We went into the death chamber, with its impressive silence, and I must confess that because of this glove, because it was the prop of a dream, I was moved when I went to slip it between the old woman’s fingers, against her heart, her heart that had only ever beaten in a dream.

On the third day of mourning, Gerda, her husband, her children, and I went to say farewell to Emma Van A., and then as we were waiting for the employees from the funeral parlor, we played a game of tarot.

When the doorbell rang, I shouted to Gerda, who had gone off into the kitchen, “Don’t bother, I’ll get it.”

I was surprised when I found only one man on the doorstep.

“Good morning, are you alone?”

“Excuse me, Monsieur, is this indeed the home of Madame Emma Van A.?”

This question alerted me to the fact that I was mistaken as to the visitor’s identity, all the more so as I could see the hearse moving with majestic slowness at the very end of the street.

“Forgive me, I thought you were one of the employees from the funeral parlor. No doubt you must know that Madame Emma Van A. has passed away?”

“Yes, Monsieur, that is why I have come.”

Turning around, he saw that the undertakers were climbing out of their vehicle.

“I’m glad I made it in time. May I speak to you in private?”

He was an elegant man, wearing a tie and an impeccably cut dark suit, and he spoke with the tranquil authority of those who are used to brushing aside the obstacles before them. With no cause for mistrust, I led him into the living room.

“Look, Monsieur,” he said in French, with almost no accent, “I won’t beat around the bush. I have come here with a very unusual mission that I myself do not understand. Allow me to introduce myself: Edmond Willis.”

He handed me a card with a crest that I did not have time to look at because he immediately continued in a hushed voice, “For five years, I have been Secretary General in post at the Royal Palace of *. When I took over my duties from my predecessor—who in turn had taken over from his predecessor, and so on all the way back through time—I received a most preposterous order. Perhaps with each new transmission of the order something has been eroded? Or was there a deliberate effort to muddle the information? Whatever the case may be, at present we no longer have any idea who, in the royal house, is behind this request . . . In any event, the instructions are perfectly clear: should the Secretary General of the Royal Palace learn of the demise of Madame Emma Van A., Villa Circé, 2 Rhododendron Street, Ostend, his mission is to take this glove and deposit it next to the body before the lady’s coffin is closed.”