My devotion, p.2
My Devotion, page 2
“Do you hate your family, too?”
Oh, Frank. I remember those words as if they were the first sensible thing I’d ever heard in my entire life.
When you asked me that extraordinary question—Do you hate your family, too?—in an instant I felt closer to you than to anyone I had ever known. It was, perhaps, the dominant feeling I experienced at that time: a hatred of my family, equal only to my love of books. Do you remember what people used to say at embassy receptions, all those years we lived together in Rome? As we huddled beneath the table, we could hear how they lavished pity on my poor mother for having me as a daughter. Maaike is perfectly gorgeous, such a shame her daughter can’t hold a candle to her, though she is charming, of course. To my face they always said I was charming, but never that I was pretty—and when I think back to all those absurd lies we used to hear at the villa, I am hurt by the very thought that no one, ever, thought of lying to me, simply to make me feel more at home in my own skin. There is a scene in Tess of the d’Urbervilles where Tess has just moved into the d’Urberville home with her young husband, Angel, and together they come upon ancestral portraits hanging on the wall of two women who resemble Tess—but hideously: her fine features were unquestionably traceable in these exaggerated forms, writes Hardy, mercilessly. I believe this must be more or less what my mother saw when she looked at me, because my face was an ordinary version of her own—like in the novel, where the portraits are built into the masonry, so that the lovely Tess, despite her humiliation, cannot remove them. And yet I wasn’t that ugly—I had simply failed to meet the goal that had been set before my birth, to serve as heir to my mother’s beauty, to carry her reputation as a beautiful woman far and wide. My name, Helen, that of a woman so ravishing she started the very first war in Western literature: I wore it like a tiara that was far too heavy for me. However, while I could not help being hurt, I was not vain enough to indulge the fantasies of the adults who were raising me, and I quickly accepted my fate and my full, sturdy, small body—I never grew taller than the height I had reached by the age of thirteen, five foot one; my features were mundane, with no delicacy: greenish-gray eyes, black hair, and a tiny, pointed face, with tight lips and a sharp nose. I wore my hair short, just below my ears, to emphasize my eyes, which were of no use to me except for reading. I could read in four different languages, and I read everything. My mother silently held this against me, as if she thought that I hadn’t made an effort when I was still in her womb, and that her beauty had passed me by, like some ball I’d been too clumsy to catch. Poor Maaike, went the refrain, not three feet away from me, the tone quite pleased. As I hid under the table with you I wept buckets onto your shoulder. We did not know, Frank, that much later you would paint me to console me for that insult. You would paint me surrounded by my attributes, just as I was, with my books and pens, my worried gaze, my simple clothes, in my study, my bath, my bed, in taxis, shaded parks, wherever I went. My very ordinary figure would be displayed on your huge canvases, and I believe that, in oil, no one could find fault with me. I would become eternal, in my way. And no one, no one at all would ever remember my mother.
My father, undoubtedly, will be remembered by the men he offended, and they are legion. Your father would become the most famous—famous in the little world in which we lived—so badly did my father treat him during the six years that followed. The cohabitation between Merton and Appledore must have been one of the most poignant in history, I read recently, in the memoirs of the former office secretary. (And I had to read those words several times over, I confess, before I understood that he was not referring to you and me.) Throughout their time in Rome my father employed every form of humiliation he’d learned over his long career against yours, and in the end your father humiliated him in return, using the only method my father knew nothing about. But I digress. To get back to that first dinner: gathered around the table were our fathers—determined to tear each other apart, loving our mothers badly, and totally absent in our upbringing—and then our mothers—disillusioned and selfish, their mutual hatred already like a lamp casting a harsh light over the table. There was Adrian, your very serious older brother, who would become a minister at about the age of thirty, after he had married a young woman from the same village as your father. Later, he obtained the high rank of ecclesiastical inspector, which he occupied with perfect integrity for seven years. When I went to see him in 1978, taking advantage of a trip I made to England not long after his appointment, he greeted my customary congratulations with an apologetic smile. I’m a cleric in my father’s village, and Frank is traveling all around the world with his painting. Why ever should you congratulate me, Helen? I was the eldest. I was respectful, the way the eldest nearly always is. I didn’t know it was possible. Do you understand? I didn’t know it was possible to say no. There was a passion in his voice I had never heard before. He died two months later, surrounded by his wife and five children. The last thing he said to me that day, after walking me to the little gate at the edge of his garden, still echoes in my mind. The truth shouldn’t be able to hurt us, Helen. And I still see the magnificent room where the dinner was held, that first evening, in Rome. Filled with emotion, I thought, Gogol was in this room, and Sir Walter Scott, and Stendhal. I looked all around me, but my gaze avoided my brothers’ faces, across from me. Back then I had no words to describe what my brothers did to me. Later, once I knew the words, I almost felt sorry. Later that evening, at the dinner table, during dessert, you leaned towards me slightly on your chair and in a hushed voice you said:
“But what are we going to do? How are we going to get out of this?”
And so, I believe, from that very first evening, there was one thing I knew for certain, Frank: it would be my fate to watch over you.
It all went so quickly, in the beginning—as if the celluloid of my memory had been overexposed in those early years, and it was impossible for me to recall the precise order of words and gestures, offerings, contributions, rewards, arms around shoulders, mutual gratitude, and shared language, which brought us closer, you and I, and created a bond, forever. Whatever happens, writes Rainer Maria Rilke in one of his Requiems, has had such a head start on our suppositions that we can never catch up with it, never experience what it really looked like. In the autumn of 1950 I started going to school with you every morning, the Marymount International School. The chauffeur who came for us would stop outside the door, and you were always a bit late, you would climb in next to me on the rear seat, and we would talk and talk. We were united in our sidereal hatred of our parents and their witty remarks, their despicable activities, and their heartlessness. In the spring of 1953, your father and my mother became lovers. After three years of putting up with my father’s affronts, Horatio got his revenge by seducing the ambassador’s stunning wife. Oh, but my mother wasn’t innocent, either. I think she had been waiting for nothing else, ever since that first dinner party—to take revenge on my father for his lack of interest in her and to hurt your mother. And yet for the two of us this disturbance held nothing but advantages: out of their depth, our parents paid us no attention, and we could spend our nights wandering through the sleeping city and talking, talking endlessly. A year later, once everyone knew about this most poorly hidden secret of international diplomacy, your mother upped and left your father and moved into a château somewhere outside Paimpol. Imperturbable and secretive, she had acquired it unbeknownst to her husband or sons as she meticulously planned the destination of her imminent flight. She would live there until her death, in that magnificent dwelling surrounded by an estate that was literally brimming with horses, alone with her servants and her animals. You never forgave her. As for me, with every passing day I have come to understand her better and better.
The year Kate left, I was sixteen. My brothers, too, were growing up. I would run into them in the corridors of the house with their trousers down, touching their privates, they would shoot burning gazes at me, and hide handkerchiefs soiled with semen under my pillow or even between the pages of my books. It was disgusting, humiliating, abnormal; my underpants disappeared inexplicably one after the other, my mother turned a blind eye. The only time I’d tried to broach the subject with her—deeply shocked at the time, at the age of ten, to have this major danger looming over me—she swatted away my fear with the back of her hand, the way she would swat at a cloud of smoke from her cigarette. She seemed almost proud, to be honest, of her sons’ virility, she was like some medieval chatelaine puffed up about the rapes and massacres committed by her offspring, their ability to ravage the surrounding countryside. To flatter her pride, they had both signed up for a class on Greco-Roman wrestling, and I would see them come home still gleaming with oil and lasciviously unwinding the protective straps from their hands, never taking their eyes off me. They terrorized me. You were the only one I could talk to. When I think about Rome, that’s what I remember—being small, anxious, misunderstood, spending a colossal amount of energy protecting myself from my brothers, liking only books and you. In fact, I loved you then, Frank, more than anything. You were my reason for living. And one evening in 1954 I would not leave your room. I didn’t say, let’s do it, I didn’t say, take me, but you knew why I was there, and I recall your elated expression as you came inside me. Later, as we lay side by side in the silence of the sleeping villa, you whispered:
“Shouldn’t we have put a towel down, or something?”
“What for?” I asked.
“For the blood. Girls bleed the first time, don’t they?”
“Yes,” I whispered, not moving.
“You see. So there must be blood on the sheets. We’ll have to find a way to hide them. Wait, let me look.”
You switched on the little lamp above your bed, and very gently pulled away the sheets around me to take a careful look. You didn’t know much about girls in those days, but you knew you had to withdraw before it was too late, and that, the first time, they would bleed. This was the 1950s, after all. In Italy, the Fascist laws against contraception were still in effect. When La Dolce Vita came out, marking the beginning of a new era, we had already left the city behind four years earlier. Fellini’s Rome, the Rome of American movie stars on the via Veneto, of plunging necklines and propitious fountains: we missed all that. Our Rome was the Rome of Pope Pius XII and his god-awful speeches, of censure, of post-war poverty.
“There’s no blood,” you said eventually, puzzled.
I didn’t move. I held my breath. You were trying to figure it out.
“Do you think perhaps I didn’t do it properly?”
“No, you did it very well, Frank.”
“But then there should be blood, shouldn’t there? The first time . . .”
That was when you understood. You stopped suddenly and looked at me, and I burst into tears.
“Helen, Helen, Helen,” you muttered, rocking me in your arms. “Helen, Helen, Helen.”
That night, as if to erase what my brothers had done to me, we made love again in the pitch black Roman night, silently, clenching our teeth to keep from waking anyone, and we did it once again in the early morning, as if we were needlessly retracing our steps to make sure we’d locked the door properly behind us.
Something else happened that year. While trying to figure out how to get away from my family, one day, I suddenly remembered the apartment my mother owned in Amsterdam. When she was still an adolescent both her parents died of an illness a few months apart, and since her eldest brother at the time was twenty-four years old and was already working for the family firm, he had immediately taken charge of the business. Thus, nothing changed for my mother; she went on living in the family home, without her parents, with her five brothers and sisters. When she received her inheritance at the age of twenty-one, she bought herself the three-story apartment on the Prinsenstraat where she lived until she married my father, two years later, in June 1930. I had never set foot in the place, I’d only heard her mention it. I knew it existed, in other words, that somewhere far away there was a place that belonged to the family inheritance, a place my brothers would never dream of living in, and which I could therefore lay claim to for our sole benefit: for you and me. The first time I spoke to my mother about my idea, she looked at me warily:
“What exactly do you want to go and do in Amsterdam?”
“Study.”
“Study what?”
“Literature.”
“Dutch literature?” she asked, raising an eyebrow ironically.
“All literature, Mother,” I replied, unable to hold back a shiver of pleasure as I did so. Leave this house. Read books. Read in peace. Never come back. It was as if I could hear the words pounding in my temples.
“And what makes you think you can do that in Amsterdam?”
“There’s a university there, and I will read books.”
“Boeken,” sighed my mother in Dutch, turning her splendid profile towards the window. “Boeken. Books. Always books, Helen. I left Amsterdam, I left my country for your father, I wanted to see the world, and so I took you with me, you, my children, all over Europe, and now you, my daughter, Helen, you want to go back to Amsterdam to read books. You live in Rome, in eternal sunshine, and you want rainy Holland. Why?”
She seemed sincerely curious, but I was thinking that the easiest answer to her question would be:
Because if I stay here, my brothers will go on raping me.
There was no point in saying it, in giving this answer, because my mother would not hear it. So I said, “I simply thought that maybe I could go and live in your old apartment.”
“My apartment?”
“Yes. With Frank.”
She seemed to be considering my request, clearly surprised that her lackluster youngest child could come up with such an idea. And yet—something I have known now for a long time—if I hadn’t ventured into the breach back then, without knowing exactly where I was headed, if I hadn’t stood up to my parents to get them to let me move to Amsterdam in the autumn of 1956, not only would I not have had this life, but surely, rather, I would not have had any life at all. Paradoxically, I was extremely lucky, precisely because they underestimated me. It was because I was of no interest to my parents that they let me go, that they really did not care where I went to get away from them. This indifference, and our milieu full of diplomats, and the fact that you were supposed to be my chaperon—against all expectation, it was enough to sway them. When I spoke to you about my project, I assumed you would think it over before you committed—because that’s what I would have done, naturally—but you simply wanted me to describe the city to you before we went there. And so, time after time during our nocturnal rambles, I told you about Amsterdam’s misty streets, which I had never seen, but I’d read descriptions in books—the placid canals, the tall houses with their narrow staircases, the flower market. I had no plans for you, but at least I had found us a place, a destination. All you had to do—all we had to do—was pass our final exams.
The day of the exam results, after we’d found my name on the list of those who’d passed, we searched for your name in vain. You had failed. With me you have always insisted that, paradoxically, it was a good sign, as if missing that step was not a humiliation but indeed an honor, a mark of intelligence and of an exceptional nature, but the fact that you never spoke about it to anyone, that you never even tried, later on, to include this event in your artist’s legend—which would have been easy enough, and it would surely have worked to your advantage—this convinced me all the more firmly that deep down you were disappointed. In fact, it is possible to see this defeat as the beginning of the difficult decade that lay ahead of you, and which would only really come to an end when you began to paint. Nowadays your name might instantly evoke success, but the first ten years of your adult life were nothing but a painful series of failures. The day we got the results, however, we did not know that, so we walked ever so slowly back to the Villa Wolkonsky, trying to work out how we would break the news to our parents, and how to convince them to let us leave together for Amsterdam just as we’d been planning for months now. We both thought the prospect of you repeating your year was unacceptable, because it meant we would be apart. I would remain at the mercy of my brothers, while you would be moping around the consulate in Milan, where your father was about to be transferred. You claimed to be hopping mad, but I knew that deep down you were desperate at the thought that you’d disappointed me, that you’d failed to protect me the way you had sworn you would, and you kicked at the tree trunks as we walked along. You simply couldn’t imagine that you might be able to convince your parents to let you leave after all.
“They’ll never agree,” you said over and over, sadly.
“No, they won’t agree,” I said eventually. “But they’ll accept it. That’s different.”
I was preoccupied by thoughts of the coming altercation, but also embarrassed to be walking beside you with my diploma virtually an accomplished fact while you had nothing. We had not envisioned this possibility, even when I was scrupulously reviewing my notes while you pretended to be reading, lying on a sofa next to me, as if simply combining our efforts in everything meant it would suffice for only one of us to study in order to pass our exams. I had always been the conscientious one, timid and respectful of the established order, and although my marks may have been higher than yours all through secondary school, I had respectfully seen you as someone who viewed studying as inconsequential, since thus far you’d managed to make it through each consecutive school year without difficulty. Why your method had not worked this time, I don’t know. But there was something rather terrifying about this fiasco, because for the first time I could see the limits of your system, and I think you could, too. When you suggested we run away, it initially indicated a desire to stay hidden, the way certain animals do when they know they are about to die. You were wounded in your self-esteem, to have been brought low by school, an institution for which you had so little respect. It is always nobler to scorn only that which you are able to sail through gracefully; to belittle the authority that has deemed you unworthy shows a failure of magnanimity. So we walked along, gloomy and worried on that luminous day in May, and my unease grew ever greater until eventually it became a solid thing. I could feel determination rising in me, the likes of which I had never known, and I believe that it was from the force of my anger and astonishment that I drew the strength, that very evening, to confront our principal adversary, your father—as if I was seeking, by obtaining the right for you to come with me to Amsterdam after all, to erase your failure, to deny it and restore the balance between us. In a way that was how I won the battle, which for us was decisive—because the best way to subdue an enemy is to speak his own language. I was the daughter of the ambassador, you were the son of the Deputy Head of Mission—our academic imbalance cruelly rekindled the imbalance that had divided our fathers over the last six years—and this would work to our advantage. The fact you’d failed to obtain your diploma might at first have seemed a private, family matter—but in the little world of the embassy it was no such thing, a fortiori when the child of a rival passed with flying colors. I realized this the moment I started talking to Horatio—in fact, he was my greatest ally in the matter, because he was the only person who desired as greatly as I did to forget—or rather, in his case, to make others forget—your failure at school. When I told him the results he murmured:
