My mother’s tears
When I was born, my mother burst into tears. On the photograph taken of the two of us a few minutes after my birth, you can clearly see — despite the lipstick freshly applied to her lips, despite the foundation spread over her cheeks — you can clearly see her moist eyes. My mother in tears. After a crying fit. My mother’s tears. A tearful birth. I don’t remember who said terrible flood while looking at the photograph. My mother had slipped a few things into the pocket of her silk nightgown and as soon as the child arrived, in other words, as soon as I was there, even before she looked at me, not yet knowing if she had brought a beautiful baby into the world, a healthy baby, with no defects, with no infirmities, my mother had apparently plunged her hand into the pocket of her nightgown and pulled out a makeup bag. She put on fresh lipstick. She dabbed foundation on her cheeks with no concern for what had just left her womb, relieved to have less weight to carry around along the street, up the staircase, when getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, those three and a half kilos of male child flesh from which she would never completely free herself despite the nurseries and nannies, despite her traveling and her weeks abroad, despite my father and my father’s patience. The crying fit, I’m told, occurred just then, immediately after my mother had applied her makeup the first time, made herself up for nothing because it all ran, staining her honor, giving her for a moment a mad woman’s face, a body with stiffening limbs, exhausting themselves in spasms as if ropes were pulling them in all directions, drawing them apart, assailing her furious flesh. In another era, a century earlier, there would have been a gleeful rush to photograph my mother, who would have then adorned the plates used to illustrate the woolly theories shrinks invented at the time, images that inevitably evoke a sense of disquiet through the inmates’ troubling beauty, their groans and frantic breathing, their shuddering limbs. When her makeup ran, it would have revealed the pallor of my mother’s cheeks, the cheeks of a strong, shrewd woman who in these circumstances was obtuse, unable to free herself from an obsession she’d already tried to wash away with a flood of tears, an obsession that, to be sure, should have a heavier, more cunning weight than the child in her womb, defeated by mere contractions. In maternity wards where mothers endure extreme violence before collapsing with joy, just as you might hear their screams, my mother’s crying fit was no doubt punctuated with invective launched in caustic tones like impossible, impermissible detonations. It couldn’t have lasted much more than two minutes. No one dared comment when my mother put on her makeup for a second time, especially not the doctor who had known this woman since he assisted her first two deliveries, this woman next to whom other women’s beauty was laughable, this woman whose eyes could blaze with funereal ferocity and dissuade all attempts at reverence or conciliation.
Just as my mother had ordered, my father was waiting in a room devoid of flowers because she hated seeing those death throes in vases and found their odor as viscerally repulsive as the smell of carrion. He was to wait until she joined him there. The male head nurse, who spouted mundane wisdom like clockwork, imagined it would be a good idea to tell my mother that my father’s presence would be a solace to her and he offered to go get him. This nice boy suddenly discovered how the cunning, malice, spite, and extraordinary superiority of beings—of whose existence he was previously unaware—can set fire to phrases, transform them into burning lashes that smite the skin and inscribe it with incurable wounds that will keep him from ever opening his mouth again without first considering who it is he’s dealing with, who it is he’s talking to, or from thinking that any woman is the same as the one who preceded her or the one who follows.
The photograph was not put in the family album.
There were photographs of all kinds in our albums, just not this one.
I was seven years old. The photograph slipped out of an envelope where it had been put with old postcards. Someone picked it up and said terrible flood. I can’t say if it was a man’s or a woman’s voice. The voice was of neither sex, neither high nor low, neither slow nor rushed, a voice escaped from a phantom body that said only terrible flood without putting any feeling into those two words, confident they contained an incontestable truth, an objective voice with a tone someone might have when giving testimony about an accident observed from his balcony, answering with complete confidence the interrogation the police subjected him to. This terrible flood terrified with the force of its truth. The speaker offered no objection or, more likely, didn’t dare object when my mother snatched the photograph away and, with a smile striking for its calm violence, said: No need for silliness. And the conversation continued as if nothing—not the sexless voice, my mother’s ‘No need for silliness’, or the legitimate questions about the photograph, dropped from who knows where—had happened, as if my mother’s voice, her cleverness, her charm always managed to prevent a pall of silence falling after those moments of unpleasantness that waken multiple curiosities or hone existing ones and so stifle those moments as quickly as possible. Words blanket other words, scatter them, erase them. My mother’s words had the power to charm, to placate, that is, to banish unwelcome opinions, to confine them to a cage, a prison. I had ears only for the sound of her steps retreating from the room. I separated out the impurities, the laughter, the arguments, the pleasantries, the true stories; all I heard was the cupboard door open, the lid of the garbage can rise then fall, the cupboard door close, and my mother’s steps going in the opposite direction, my mother heading back towards us after having gotten rid of the image that might encourage someone—not anyone close to us or anyone reasonable—but might inadvertently encourage some naïf, some idiot to ask questions, to wonder why, to want to clear up the mystery behind this terrible flood.
She will return, her hands empty. When I open my eyes and look at her, her hands will be empty and there won’t be the slightest evidence of what she has just done. For a second time she will condemn me, cast me out, she will condemn the instigator of the terrible flood, the wisp of a son, disposable, the little man-child unworthy of attention, to whom this condemnation will never be explained. My mother has rejoined her guests. She banters, she buzzes from one person to the next, my mother who harvests smiles from the adults as well as the children, my mother who, for others, wears a glowing mask radiant with sunlight, whose dazzling lips pearl her words with sublime sensuality, imbuing them with flesh and life. She illumines and is crowned for it. None can match her beauty.
I waited for her eyes to fall on me, I waited for her to utter words for me, for me alone, an intimate, reassuring phrase to soften the tragedy, to assuage my fear, but my mother — queen bee reigning over her subjects — didn’t spare me a glance, she dismissed me, banished me from her hive, as she had the photograph, non-existent, discarded, in the darkness of the garbage can with the cigarette butts and paper towels, with the coffee grounds and empty cartons, with the crumbs and vegetable peels.
*
The square room
She would not let us come in. It was her room. Her chamber. A square room filled with books, a single red leather armchair, and a very long low table on which stood a Chinese bowl and a black vase with a bouquet of artificial orchids that my mother perfumed several times a week with an atomizer. My father only ever entered the square room if my mother was in it and after he had asked permission. For the most part, he didn’t go in at all. As for us, my mother would have killed us if we’d dared set foot in the room. My two brothers never mentioned the square room, they ignored it, they’d forgotten about it, and did not spare it a glance or word. I couldn’t tell if their behavior was due to indifference or some kind of wisdom. As for me, when I passed the square room, I couldn’t help but slow down. Even if I had decided to speed up or to break into a run as soon as I got near the door, I slowed my steps, at the mercy of some gravitational force or some hand placed on my chest holding me back, obstructing my path, even forcing me to make a detour around the other side of our apartment to reach my bedroom.
Out of carelessness or malice, my mother sometimes left the door to her temple ajar and I often saw her sitting in the armchair, legs stretched out in front of her or tucked beneath her, reading, always reading, as if what she held in her hands had the power to tear her away from the world, as if a book could seize my mother and carry her off to a world created just for her, a world closed to me, one I admired and envied, a world that had the advantage, for my mother, of erasing time, the city, the telephone, the praise or insults of mere mortals. Through the crack in the door I could watch her for twenty or twenty-five minutes without her noticing my presence, which both delighted me (I saw my mother without her seeing me) and distressed me (it gave me the measure of my inability to arouse her interest, to compete with the higher presences in whose honor my mother had built a sanctuary, inaccessible to inferior beings and the uninitiated, a place for her alone that only my glances caressing her flesh could darken). I was fascinated by the movement of her eyes over the pages, their brisk back and forth, their nervous motion that came close to hypnotizing me, and the words, moved by some mysterious power, came alive, took shape, abandoned the lines of print, left the book and entered my mother’s eyes, crossed them, filled them, flowed in her blood, the words kept her alive like sap, nourished her, sustained her furious beauty and the smiles I tried to decipher, the words reinforced her intelligence or at least one aspect of it, the most visible, the least tender, the one that confounded, chastised, that demeaned with ease. I became certain of only one thing: without words, my mother would pine away, would be dead to the world. I thought of the two canisters of gasoline on the garage shelves, I thought of the many matchboxes my father bought from the street vendor, printed with pictures of our country’s regional folk costumes. Would I dare let my soul swell with savagery and set a book on fire and toss it into the library? … Would I dare lash out, launch an assault against the ecstatic melodies that followed one after the other inside the square room? …
As soon as my mother noticed me through the crack in the door, her gaze would fix on me intently, but suddenly, as when a rapidly spinning top bumps into an obstacle that kills its dance, the intensity evaporated and her gaze signaled the vaguely parasitical element I embodied for her. I would flee as fast as I could.
*
The darts
He would wrap the darts in a small bag and slip them into his pocket. We didn’t have a dartboard at home. We only had these two darts: the red one and the green one. Every two or three weeks for almost two years, my father and I would take off without my brothers or my mother. We would leave the city and head north for one of the many forests in the region. My father’s announcements of these sylvan escapes would fill me with joy even though, as we closed the door to the apartment, a weight settled onto my shoulders like the specter of a guilty conscience trying to soften my resolve but I was able to shake it by racing down the stairs to reach the lobby, breathless, seconds before the elevator. This allowed me to play the bellboy and open the door for my father, deferentially holding out my hand into which he never failed to place a coin. From the moment he sat behind the wheel, my father would smile for the entire drive as if this road to the forest, whatever the weather or season, had the virtue (despite the orders of various medical specialists he grudgingly consulted now and again) of consoling him, of easing all weariness and woe, of scattering all tedium, banality, and adversity. We always drove to the same spot and parked the car under a somewhat solitary beech tree that hung over the road. My father led the way and I delighted in his unreasonable behavior and wisdom in banishing the political crises and stock indexes in which he had once or twice tried, without much conviction, to interest me.
As soon as we entered the forest, sheltered from suffocating principles and precepts that stun, we behaved like two mad men, two monkeys, two rebels against decency. We kicked at the trees’ bark, we tore up the moss and stacked it into piles, we tossed leaves over our heads, we ran, sang, blew into hollow branches, opened our mouths to devour everything around us, and drew loops on the ground with our feet. We invented dangers, enemies, battles, various monsters to be vanquished and others to be saved (even without knowing much about them, I could tell the difference between harpies, unicorns, phoenixes, griffons, sphinxes, and other worrisome hybrids). We invoked the spirits of the forest, we offered them our joy, we roared until the veins in our temples bulged and forced us to stop and calm down a bit, to recover some serenity. Sitting on a log, we listened to the sounds of the place. We let them approach us and bewitch us, but not completely and not for long. Before any mysteries could upset us, before any anxiety set in, my father took the two darts out of the bag, waved them before my eyes, let me choose between the red and the green and, with a word or a glance, designated the first target to hit. We had the agility of freebooters, the luck of high rollers. Our darts were implanted in pinecones, in tree trunks, stumps, in a root, a knot, a fork. Most often they hit the mark we’d assigned them.
And so we advanced, from one target to the next, from sighs over lost points to exploits with points won, until we arrived at a small farmstead on a plot bordered with a larch tree at each corner, a house covered with shingles on three sides that must have once served as an inn because a sign from an earlier era showed a schematically drawn bed with blankets. We rarely encountered other guests and if we did — which happened no more than three times total — they soon disappeared, at least for the duration of our visit. As a rule, the two women who lived there (Floriane and Régine) were alone. They welcomed us with open arms, hugging us like family, like intimate friends they’d been longing to see. They brought us drinks and fruits in season: plums, red currants, bilberries, apricots, cherries, apples, pears, and occasionally even a few wild strawberries, which I crushed between my lips one by one, delaying the moment of swallowing them, happy to hold on my palate what I would not have hesitated to declare—seduced by hyperbole as children that age often are — the very best flavor in the world.
I loved these two women with their soft pallor, their broad hips, their fine, fitted blouses. I liked to listen to their voices, free of pretention, when they told me stories about animals or spoke colorfully of the flowers and plants they grew. If the two women looked very much alike (the same slender hands, the same generous mouth, the same gait, the same brief fluttering of their eyelids), for me it was in their breasts that they were most sisters and once I’d quenched my thirst, I was impatient for only one thing, for my father to disappear with one or the other of these two women, so that I could stretch out on the bench, my head resting in Floriane or Régine’s lap, my eyes half-closed, lingering at the gates of sleep, her breasts hovering over me, breasts I contemplated like sublime flesh I didn’t have to share with anyone else. And what can I say about those many exalted moments when, reaching for some object or other on the table, Floriane or Régine bent forward, her bosom brushing my cheek, her breasts spreading an exquisite asphyxiation over my face? All this (the intermediate moment, the sight of the breasts above me, the touch of them, the stories they told) instilled in me a beatific calm that held only the pleasure of being alive and the desire for the moment to last. The sound of my father’s voice as he descended the stairs brought me back to reality. A reality become more tender, more desirable. Floriane and Régine would kiss us before we left. We played no games and spoke no words on our walk back to the car. I did not look my father nor he at me. We merely held each other’s hand, our warm, our panting, our knowing hands.
*
The cast-iron pan
If my brothers came into the kitchen while my mother was cooking a meal, she would send them about their business in a voice that brooked no opposition. For them, the kitchen was off-limits, but I was often invited to stay and watch her follow the recipes, from the first step to the last. I was eight years old and unsure if my status merited envy or contempt, but as soon as I realized I enjoyed it, I no longer cared if my brothers envied or mocked me. The realm of the kitchen had been conferred on me — such was fate!
Before setting to work, I had to protect my clothes with an apron purchased from a boutique in a chic part of town, a red apron on the front of which a hen strutted with her four chicks. My mother had let me choose between it and two others, one decorated with daisies, the other with a big heart. In the first kitchen sessions, my role was limited that of observer, still I soon proved useful, not just as a kitchen hand who could peel and chop the vegetables, but one also able to master more complicated techniques. For example, when I was nine, I could take over the preparation on my own of a mushroom risotto, an émincé de veau, or a cherry clafoutis, and I no longer confused the words marmiton, mirliton, maquignon, martagon, mirepoix or mero. My mother marveled at my prodigious skills and would rail against the majority of modern girls who were incapable of doing anything, who could neither cook nor even speak proper French, which made them inferior in her eyes to the very condition they wanted to escape. My mother smiled, joyfully offered advice and clear explanations, sometimes she lifted me onto a chair so I could see things from above. She wanted me to taste the sauces before she did, to be able to recognize herbs and spices. She ran her hand through my hair, hugged me for a few seconds with a laugh that was free of guile. Our time in the kitchen, in this retreat where nothing weighed on us and where we lacked for nothing, was one of kindness and affection. However, on rare occasion, my mother, forgetting everything, would fix her eyes on me like a strict governess and, in a voice filled with menace and magic, she would announce, ‘A girl who is ashamed of liking to cook is a halfwit, a Maritornes fit for a beating. That won’t happen to you.’ I did not answer. I learned new words (like Maritornes) and hid my unease with questions that started to flow the moment I needed them: Why is it more complicated to make vanilla cream than chocolate cream? Why do purple runner beans turn green when cooked, why does dough rise when it’s resting, why does lemon juice cure foods? … Why, why, why? … Afraid of difficult situations, I had collected a stock of questions I wrote down in a yellow notebook so I wouldn’t forget them. Except for these precarious moments that left me dreading the panicked state of an imposter exposed, our times in the kitchen were filled with an atmosphere of confidence, encouragement, and love. In those moments, my mother loved me. Being loved was possible. I savored these moments that banished any somber shadows or oppressive worries. Just her and me. Like two accomplices …
One Sunday morning when we were preparing a large dinner, the older of my two brothers came into the kitchen for a glass of lemonade, shattering the intimacy in which my mother wanted to envelop the two of us. The innocent zeal of a guilty incursion. I saw my mother drop a teaspoon and, in a voice of equal parts sweetness and authority, she asked my brother to pick it up. Just as he bent down, my mother took the cast-iron pan, the one I could barely lift with two hands, and held this pan a foot and a half above my brother’s head. When he stood up, he hit his head so hard that he gave a yelp of pain and immediately started to cry, he who was so disgusted by tears, he who had always been spared them. My mother dabbed his head with a damp cloth, telling him it wasn’t serious, and took him back to his room so he could rest. I was stunned. I didn’t have the slightest doubt my mother had held the heavy pan there on purpose, betraying my brother’s trust — her favorite son. No! It couldn’t be! Had she gotten lost in a daydream, one of those fictions she loved so deeply, forgetting the danger the pan presented? … Had she not been able to turn fast enough … Mere conjectures. I wore myself out going over what I’d witnessed in the most minute detail. My mother’s return would disperse my speculations.
She lifted me up and sat me on the counter so our eyes were at the same level. She held my waist — and I could feel her nails against my sides — she brought her face close to mine — I could feel her breath in my mouth — and she delivered, in a voice that shreds all will, that puts an end to any struggle, she delivered the sentence I’m not about to forget, delivered it like a verdict, a curse intended to isolate each person from what he sees in another, to turn friend, lover, brother into a rival or a tormentor, she delivered this sentence that, true or false, desolates, rots the soul: You must always, at every moment, distrust everyone around you … Even your father … And even your mother …
*
My mother’s tears
My father had surely put the bag with the photograph out on the curb. Three flights of stairs to go down. Three landings wavering under the neon lights. I clung to the handrail in the staircase, I fought against each step, each step was an enemy to fend off, to stab, and in the excessively white light, in the malignant coolness, days passed like a great void that swallows one’s existence. How old would I be when I reached the street? … How would my face have changed? … Three floors would be enough to make me an old man, to fill me with a dying soul. I pressed the tips of my fingers against my temples until the commotion inside weakened. The sorcerers have no power. There’s no such thing as people who cast spells. Their conjuring tricks dispel each other, blow each other away, expire between two claps of the hands. A child can, without a guide or protective hand, ward off the steps of staircase that haunt him. I descended, my fingers soon confidently holding the iron railing, filled with a boldness they’d finally recovered.
Outside, the light from the lamppost reassured me with its pink hue. I was no longer in such a rush. I wished the light could fall into my pocket so I could take it back to my room and keep it under my pillow, near at hand, ready whenever I needed it.
Garbage bags were piled high on the sidewalk, but I recognized mine, ours, with its green string dangling, perhaps out of coquetry, against the black. I untied the knot and took hold of the slightly wrinkled photograph, whitewashed with several drops of milk. Thank goodness! It was intact. My mother hadn’t ripped it up and the drops of milk left no trace. I looked at the picture in the soothing light and felt my flesh warm. From the end of the street, a voice with accents of eternity reached me. It spread out, suffused my heart, and disappeared down the other end of the street, simple words that had turned into a melody. Isn’t this how men—without wanting confidence and in the gaps between words they scatter haphazardly — offer the best part of themselves? … My return to bed was easily accomplished. All night long, I held the photograph tight against my stomach. Why did that voice of neither sex say terrible flood? What contagion did it presume to find me guilty of? I repeated the accursed expression to myself. As if my mother’s tears represented a danger, as if my mother were about to be lost, about to drown in a terrible tide that floods, that washes away, far out to sea, that engulfs distant lands forbidden to small boys who are afraid of losing their mothers, little boys who have to brave the night and their fears to overcome the affliction, to face down the cataclysms that weigh on their mothers’ hearts. I crushed the seeds of worry, I reduced them to dust I could hold in the palm of my hand and blow out of the open window.
* * * * * *
The pieces excerpted above are selected from Michel Layaz, My Mother’s Tears (London: Seagull Books, forthcoming in July 2019). Published here with permission from Seagull Books.
about Michel Layaz and My Mother’s Tears
The acclaimed Swiss writer Michel Layaz has written eleven works of fiction. With subtle, bemused humor and an unerring eye for human frailty and the lengths to which people will go to hide their flaws, Layaz has written movingly about the hidden tensions within families, the awkwardness of adolescence, and the drama of intimacy between friends and lovers. His fifth novel, Les Larmes de ma mère (My Mother’s Tears), is his most poignant.
The adult narrator of My Mother’s Tears has returned to clean out his childhood home after his mother’s death. In thirty short chapters, each focused on a talismanic object or resonant episode from his childhood, the narrator tries to solve the mystery behind the flood of tears with which his strikingly beautiful, intelligent, and inscrutable mother greeted his birth. Like insects preserved in amber, these objects — an artificial orchid, a statue, a pair of green pumps, a steak knife, a fishing rod and reel, or a photograph of his mother taken minutes after his birth, among others — are surrounded by an aura that permeates the narrator’s life. Interspersed with these chapters are fragments from the narrator’s conversation with his present lover, a woman who “demands words” from him in a verbal exorcism of his past. This conversation charts his gradual liberation from the psychological wounds he suffered growing up.
My Mother’s Tears is not only an account of an adult son’s attempt to understand the mother he both loved and feared, it is also a novel about language and memory, about the ambivalent power of words to hurt and to heal, to revive the past and to put childhood demons to rest. In one chapter, the narrator recalls being lost in a forest with his father during a storm. To build up his courage, he begins inventing adventure stories for his father and with these stories comes his first realization that the imagination can help brave difficult situations. This seed of the writer he will become blossoms with his awareness that the imagination “not only enables us to face hateful or distressing moments, but also makes existence possible, makes life bearable and allows us to laugh about serious things and to take the ridiculous seriously.” It is precisely this balance between tragedy and comedy that makes My Mother’s Tears much richer and more nuanced than a straightforward account of a difficult childhood. — Tess Lewis