Undressing Emmanuelle: A memoir

I’m intrigued by the colour of my eyes, by the family resemblance. I don’t know the name of this colour. Grey, pale green …?

My grandmother doesn’t like my narcissistic ways, my poses. This lengthy contemplation of my face, its discovery from every angle, distracts me from my prayer and is really too much. So one day Granny stands up, tacks some newspaper over the mirror and looks at me with kindly authority, not saying a word. Deprived of the sight of myself, for a few days of the holidays I surrender to my grandmother’s good, serene orderliness.

9

Aunt Mary is manic-depressive, like her father.

‘She’s not very well in the head,’ my mother whispers.

Before she came to the hotel we used to visit this bizarre aunt in hospital. She seemed normal, all smiley and sweet. Aunt Mary enjoyed our visits and always made sure to put on a good show, to prove her sanity and that she shouldn’t be locked up. Depending on her state she was either drowned in lithium or subject to electroshock therapy to achieve an artificial stability. I was little, and struck by the size of the nurses.

‘They’re animals!’ she would say, quietly so they wouldn’t hear. In a bid for survival she set her bed on fire and was asked to leave. My father went to get her. He signed a document, paid for the burnt bed and brought Aunt Mary back to the hotel.

She was shouting ‘Tell me I’m not crazy, tell me!’ as she left the hospital, furious at having been pharmaceutically gagged, reduced to a state of continual and hazy smiling. She jabbed a vengeful finger at the huge, impassive white figures.

‘No, you’re not crazy,’ my father replied, squeezing her hand. ‘Come on, let’s go!’

‘Manic-depressive’ is an odd, complex word, with an intellectual sound to it. It is always said clearly but quietly, accompanied by sorrowful discomfort on my mother’s face. It must be a failing that needs to be hidden, a rare defect that has affected our family, of which my aunt is the vivid proof.

Aunt Mary spends half her life in the air and the rest on the floor. She lives mostly at night, when the contrasts show less. She sometimes laughs and sings for days at a time, buying extravagant presents on credit and exclaiming at how wonderful life is, and how short. Aunt Mary gives her love in huge bouquets, or else goes to ground, at her slowest moments, like the victim of a broken dream or departed lover. Then one day she comes back to life, believing in it again, more fervently than ever. Giving us her sense of humour, her regained appetite and her temporary zest for life.

When I grow up I’m going to be manic-depressive. It’s so much fun, so entertaining.

I adore my aunts. So opposite to each other, but always there for little love-starved me. They are the warm, lively figures of my daily life, weaving a palpable web of love around me every day.

Aunt Mary runs the hotel bar, that pivotal space she often doesn’t close until morning, that hub of routine, ritual debauchery. She doesn’t sleep much, or drink at all. Aunt Mary is always sober as she witnesses the spectacle of the daily drinking sessions. The customers feel relaxed around this kindly, changeable woman – to the extent that some of them think her as drunk as them.

My mother is a regular, discreet, efficient customer at the bar. She drinks constantly, serving herself wine or sherry. She can hold her alcohol – I take after her. She never seems drunk. When she is, she hides away or tells me to go to my room. That’s all my mother seems able to say whenever she is vulnerable, moved or surprised.

My mother is incapable of expressing emotion. She sup-presses it as a weakness, a threat. Life is hard and dangerous, you have to be on guard. My mother fears feelings, as a never-ending wave sure to sweep her away. She prefers control, and uses drink to make this inhuman state bearable.

My father frequents the bar for the same reasons as my mother, but he also hosts the space. He plays the piano and the synthesiser, a sort of modern music box that reproduces the sounds of other instruments as well as bespoke rhythms. It is magical, mysterious, cheerful. My father occasionally and impatiently teaches me a little.

The customers like the hotel bar, where everyone drinks until they are laughing uncontrollably at nothing; deep, throaty laughs that resonate through the whole building. Some fall over, and weep, then get up again and sing, badly. They shout unknown names – faraway lands they will visit, women they will love.

10

Alcohol has been part of my life since the day when, before I was weaned, my mother got me to sleep by putting a cognac-soaked cloth wrapped around a lump of sugar to my lips.

Alcohol made my father loud and cheerful. He played, sang, acted the fool; he was my clown.

Alcohol broke through my mother’s Protestant restraint, brought her out of her silence, freed up unknown, vicious words, the words of a different person. Emotions burst forth, and then my mother would disappear.

Alcohol gave life. It was the song, the blood, the bond of the hotel. My father would drink up to forty beers a day. I practised my maths by counting them. To arrive at different totals I would then add each whole glass of cognac and each Underberg to the beers.

When he was sober, my father didn’t speak.

I preferred alcohol to silence.

11

Kristel is my real name, from the word ‘crystal’. It suited my father’s fragile luminosity.

There’s not always a reason for fragility, it can just be a part of someone’s nature. My father was fragile but he hid it, drowning and destroying himself in alcohol and noise. My father adored clay-pigeon shooting and hunting, and his carpentry machines – the screaming metal beasts that lived in his refuge, the attic. He would listen to the intolerable mechanical roar of these carving tools without ear protection.

When out hunting he would fire his gun often, right next to his ears, shooting rebelliously in the air out of a taste for loud noises. By middle age he was almost deaf, which suited him. The voices of the women, the cries and screaming of the children, these signs of life slowly disappeared, growing fainter like an echo, vanishing into his silence and leaving him in his chosen solitude.

My father had not been a child. He was sent to boarding school at four years old. I imagine him as a brave little chap, clever, forced to act grown up, to make his bed without creases, not to cry at an age when that’s all you can do. He grew up alone, with no protection, never carefree. He discovered desire before love, and alcohol first of all.

My father drank, hunted, loved the sea, sport, flesh and chess. In Dutch chess is called schaken, which also refers to the abduction of a sweet young girl by a nasty man.

Perhaps my father thought he was nasty, but he wasn’t. Just broken and mostly absent.

In his attic he makes chess figurines. There are hundreds of them, arranged according to size and by category: queens, castles, pawns, bishops. The best ones in front, the flawed hidden behind. There’s no end to this manic creativity, or to my father’s obsession with this game, this strategic battle, this checkmate.

Sometimes when I’m bored I go up there to see him, daring to enter. He stops his machine and sits motionless, looking at me. I smile at him, feeling like his prettiest figurine. He points out his new creations then quickly starts work again, and I clear off to escape the racket.

My father was Catholic, the son of a hotel-owner and a musician. My grandfather ran an orchestra, and once brought back with him from a trip to Switzerland a strange, unique instrument that made the sound of a fairy tale: a xylophone. It drew people from all around.

My mother came from a humble peasant background, she was a Calvinist and very beautiful. She was brought up strictly by her widowed mother, to an extremely harsh religious code. Fear of divine punishment replaced a father’s discipline.

I remember my mother when she was young; she was fluid as a bohemian dancer, charming and stylish as a movie star. My parents met at a ball. They danced together for a long time, floating, dazzled. My father loved women, and beauty; he loved my mother from that first dance.

Mum loved dancing, it was her element. Her other loves were dressmaking, work and my father. She wasn’t very religious. Marriage gave her an escape from religious excess and the fear of God. She preferred profane to divine love, and converted to Catholicism out of faith in my father. My mother didn’t go to Mass, but made us keep that weekly ritual in her place.

I loved this Sunday outing. At the end of the ceremony I would smile angelically and sidle up to the collection plates to pinch the money I sometimes found there. I would shake the collection boxes and force open their ridiculous little lids, then take my sister to the movies to watch Laurel and Hardy. Much more fun.

12

Once she was a wife and mother – just a few years after that first ball – my mother stopped dancing. She worked. My mother no longer did the thing she loved. She became obsessed by the beneficial effects of hard toil, austere as a matter of duty, irritable, often sad as she witnessed my father’s slow flight.

She concentrated on her daily tasks, on the hotel and her children. She concerned herself with our homework, our health, our cleanliness and the perfect ironing of our clothes, which she often made – with some skill – herself. My mother was unable to express her affection other than through faultless material care. We were scattered around so as not to disturb hotel business. I was often in my bedroom, Marianne with our neighbours – kind, cigar-selling shopkeepers – and my brother wherever he pleased. He was the family’s little man; he called the shots.

People say they miss the deceased. I missed my father and my mother when they were still fully alive. They travelled through my childhood in the same way they moved around the hotel: my mother industrious, hurried, hidden; my father drunk, flamboyant, alone.

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