My Chocolate Redeemer (6 page)

I was relieved when Mama decided we had seen enough. We left these astronomers of their inner selves, searching their secret places. I was pleased when we came away. Frankly I had had more fun when I was seven and the grocer's son Henri bribed me with toffee and nougat to take my clothes off in the old stables of the Priory Hotel, which are now the garages above which the staff live in cramped rooms. The offer was irresistible and the look on Henri's face as I slid the cotton drawers over my hips was more fun than anything I saw before, or since. The minutes in front of the mirror with the sisters of Narcissus at their internal inspections did not appeal to me. Besides, I thought the speculum would do me damage. I could hardly tell the other women that I was a virgin. I knew just by looking at them how embarrassed they would be. I'm sure they would have blamed my mother.

I want to say, and I know that this is going to sound terrible, really
terrible
, but I haven't done it, not can't, but haven't, yet, don't rule it out but won't, not for a while. It came as a terrible shock to Mama to find out.

‘What? Not even once? But darling!'

‘It's OK. Really. I mean there are people around who – haven't.'

‘But darling – oh you poor thing!'

My mother had been liberated, you see. Well, of course you see. She took the pill early and got a lot of experience. It kept her busy and feeling good. And at the time she was beautiful. This was before she woke up one morning and found herself little, dark and plump and her beauty vanished like a dream. And it was that sort of time, the sixties and seventies, whenever that was, anyway centuries ago when time blurred and everyone did it in the road, if you believe the lyrics. So I didn't expect her to understand and I couldn't bear her sympathy.

‘Actually, I intend staying this way until I find a man I love and then I plan to give myself to him.'

My mother clutched her heart, shocked speechless.

It was shortly after this that she set off on her quest to discover the meaning of beauty and went to the States and I never saw her again. I used to enjoy the first handwritten pages from distant hotels as Mama rode her lens deep into the heart of America. Then the letters stopped and the money began. A little to begin with but then the flow of banknotes increased enormously, envelopes full of dollar bills with
‘Love Mama'
scrawled beneath the portrait of George Washington and, occasionally, a line like
‘I hope you got my note?'
, a kind of long-distance joke, I suppose, to indicate that things were going well, or maybe just because she was in a hurry. With Mama wit and haste were always difficult to tell apart.

Maybe beauty is a memory of the way we were? We see something that reminds us of how we were when we were holy and we say: ‘How beautiful!'

Maybe that's why there are no ugly saints.

In terms of particle physics, according to the gospel of Claude, my mother can be compared with the neutral pion, neutral and invisible, born from the decay of a negative kaon.

Mama rediscovered the camera and set off in search of beauty, and I was saved. She was determined to discover the source of her missing looks, her departed glamour, and no Livingstone in search of the Nile was ever more fiercely determined. She had time for nothing else. Her shiny camera case packed with expensive machines, her nervous cigarette smoking, my short, dark Mama became the investigator, the very private eye whose mission in life was to track down that elusive genius that she had once possessed, which we called ‘loveliness'. Where did it go, Mama's beauty? And where is the terror André once was when he kept an office in Lyons?

Chapter 3

About twelve, when the hawks float above us like spots before the eyes, so close to the sun do they fly, Monsieur Brown descends and joins us on the private beach. He has been with us now for three weeks and always appears in a white towelling robe, fluffy and soft, with a great gold B emblazoned on the breast pocket. The gown is tied with a scarlet cord. He wears most elegant dark glasses, a smoked windscreen for the eyes. The jetty moves beneath him when he arrives and he sinks into a deckchair without removing his gown or glasses. The jetty moves under every new arrival, I know, but somehow it moves more graciously beneath the carefully dignified tread of Monsieur Brown. He gets his name from the B on his pocket, from his colour and from the wide variety he offered me on our first meeting. André refers to him only as ‘my guest', with a peculiar little grimace when he says it, as if he had just swallowed some unpleasant medicine. He has taken over the entire upper floor of the hotel, that is to say some twenty rooms are now at his disposal, rooms once the cells of the monks who lived on either side of the long oak gallery. For one man to take over half an hotel struck me as needlessly expensive but one would not have expected André to complain. Surely it's money for jam? The position of the other guests is more complicated. I can see they're pleased to have among them a man who can afford half an hotel, but rather uneasy about such alarming profligacy. You can see it in the way they look at Monsieur Brown – ‘Who is this guy?', they ask themselves, ‘that he should be spending money like there is no tomorrow?' Some say he's an eccentric millionaire, others whisper that he is an African potentate who chooses to live in seclusion. I say nothing, I am not even a guest here, I merely visit the Priory to sunbathe on the private beach by kind permission of the owner who is very fond of my grandmother.

He sits for a few minutes while the sweat gathers in his eyebrows and the little white hairs which salt his dark curls, stand out crisply. Then he rises and slowly removes his robe. He is so black that his skin has purple shadows in places. True, he is a little wrinkled around the neck and near the armpits, his body sags here and there and his waist is several rolls of flesh too wide, but then he must be in his late sixties at least, and all things considered he's in pretty good shape. He wears a pair of white trunks which set off the smooth, dark, satiny texture of his skin. He lies back in the sun. Is this wise, I ask myself? Every cook knows that chocolate should never be exposed to a naked flame. Even if you're using nothing more than cooking chocolate –
Nestlé's Chocolat Noir
, or
Baker's German Sweet
– it is still a shadow of the sacred substance, gift of the feathered snake god, Quetzalcoatl, royal beverage
xocoatl
the Aztecs drank in the courts of Montezuma in a highly spiced bitter froth of holiness.

And there he sits as if he is on a throne, or something. You can tell that the others do not like it. Not one little bit. It is a plump, solid way he has of sitting, as if he expects crowds to roll up and begin bowing and scraping, it is there in the cock of his chin, in the blind way he squints out across the lake. He hasn't come to sunbathe, to laze away a few hours, he has come to be adored! He looks strange, haughty and lost all at once. His manner makes the regulars on the wooden beach nervous. The Dutch father lifts his paper to his eyes and squints. The little German girls cluster around their mother and stare at the black man. I go on reading, we all go on reading, or pretending to, even Wolf, the German, turns the pages of
Hannibal; A Life
with an especially solid regular flapping rhythm which tells me that like everyone else he is watching the man. I am reading an article in a fashion magazine which guarantees to tell me what type of guy I attract: the high-flier, the whizzkid or the wimp. I tick my responses with eyebrow pencil and find when it comes to checking my score that I can't read the results because my eyes are full of tears.

It comes on me, this crying sickness, at odd times and it has been like this ever since Papa died or, at least, went away forever. Why it should have started again some weeks ago when I looked up and saw an elderly sunbather, plum purple and glistening, sitting on our private beach, I do not know. Maybe he reminds me of Africa, maybe Africa reminds me of Papa. As I cry, pushing my head into my arms and letting the tears drop through the wooden slats to mix with the water and be swallowed by the little silver fish, I also feel something else: I feel hungry. In all the questions in the quiz that promise to tell me what kind of man I attract, not one asks what sort of man makes me feel hungry. Perhaps we all need to eat someone, from time to time …

Papa usually came home at Christmas – or was it that his visits just made it seem like Christmas? He breezed into the apartment as if he had never been away. I would get home from school to find him walking about the place with his hands behind his back, humming under his breath and touching new things my mother had brought home, articles of photographic equipment, expensive lenses in gleaming black leather pouches, an assortment of the latest light meters which she would leave scattered about, a cluster of tripods, or he might be parading around the room beneath one of those white umbrellas photographers use to reflect light. He had a playful nature. Or he'd be standing beside the new compact-disc player, one of the discs in his hand, seeing if he could make the multicoloured surface reflect light on the ceiling. He'd be wearing a big blue coat and a red scarf and his face was always so incredibly brown for the middle of winter. When I first caught sight of him I thought he must be ill. He looked so odd, suddenly reappearing in European winter clothes, looking like a cross between a time traveller, a detective and an intruder. When Mama installed the new video phone I found him gazing into the blank screen as if it were a mirror, or a holy picture.

‘When your Uncle Claude and I were children they showed picture phones like this in the American comics we bought. They were so small they strapped to the wrist. I remember Claude got very excited. “That's what we'll all have one day, just you wait!” It sounded like a threat.' He kissed me. ‘Will they reduce this phone machine in size, Bella? So we can wear them on our wrists?'

‘We will probably all be ordered to wear them. Won't Uncle Claude be pleased? Welcome home, Papa!'

He wrapped me in his warm arms. ‘Dear girl, you're well? Has anyone told you that you have the teeth of a contented cannibal?'

I must have been about nine or ten at the time. I cannot believe that he has been gone so long – already. Is it four years, or five? I don't care to remember. I do not wish to count.

He would have brought a suitcase full of African gifts: masks, wood carvings, pelts, musical instruments, and would unpack happily in his bedroom which was a kind of museum of his travels. He would stay with us over the holiday and my mother would accept him as a rather interesting foreign relative, consult his tastes in food and wine very anxiously, as if he were quite unused to our ways. She would see to his material comforts and then retreat into her darkroom for longer and longer periods, and Papa and I were left alone.

At Christmas there were presents and walks about the city. Mama always received jewels to add to her beautiful collection. For reasons we do not understand, today these are all under government lock and key. No explanation has been given. With father's death we experienced a kind of big bang. Before it there was nothing very exceptional, but after it there was chaos. When I turned nine he gave me a diamond pendant. A big perfect blue diamond cut in the shape of a heart which I wear on a silver chain around my neck. The government snoopers never saw my pendant and I certainly don't intend to tell them a single word about it. Not bloody likely. They took all the rest, though.

I guess Papa must have reported to his superiors in the government department during these brief visits home, but he never mentioned it to us. Never said he was going to the office, or spoke about what he'd been doing in Africa. Soon after New Year he vanished, from one day to the next. We took this to be quite normal. Some people went to the office, Papa went to Africa. From the walls of our flat his latest trophies looked down on us: a royal chair from Cameroun carved as a seated man, his legs spread wide, his arms resting on the heads of two female attendants, the seat supported by elaborately carved wings of trolls, tigers, and slaves – a handsome seat for a chief; there was a hollow wooden figure from the Fang tribe, a curious mannikin which mixed the foetal look of a tiny baby with a curious suggestion of age, a repository probably made to hold the bones of the dead; and an ivory bracelet of snakes and toads from the Congo. These new trophies were signs that my father had been and gone. During these brief reappearances he would not visit my grandmother with whom the break was complete when he married my mother, ‘the English woman'. This was a fairly polite way of referring to Mama.

I always missed Papa when he disappeared though there was a curious kind of relief in knowing that however odd it all seemed, these visits were regular and could be counted upon. There seemed no reason why the arrangement should not continue indefinitely. Papa might have been absent for much of the year but he left behind so much to remind us of him. When I was very small the Bapuna mask which hung upon my bedroom wall frightened me. Particularly in the dark when its white face gleamed. It had a chalky complexion with curious slit eyes which gave it a faintly oriental appearance, and two parallel eyebrows above each eye, and a strange set of bumps on the forehead. The face was round and flat like a shallow soup dish, with jug-handle ears. Sightless, sleepy, slit-eyed, bumpy, the Bapuna mask on my bedroom wall haunted me. But it was, after all, Papa's gift, so I could hardly throw it away and after a while, very gradually, I became less frightened of it and eventually I grew fond of it. Over the years it hung on my wall I began to see that the nose was long and sensitive, that the lips were full and generous and that the mask had an expression of dreamy tension that was very appealing. I began to feel sorry for the poor pale creature. I took to calling him Rolo and even tucked him beside me in bed until Mama found us together one night and I woke to the sound of her screams. ‘Bella! How can you put that horrible thing in your bed? Who knows where it's been!'

I remember that at the time my mother was working on her project called ‘Collectors' Wives' in which she was investigating whether rich old men who collected objects of great beauty collected women in the same way. I remember her temper during that period was not good.

I was far too young, and in any event it was far too difficult for me to try to explain my change in feeling towards the Bapuna mask and, in fact, this surging sympathy I felt for its blind, pale dignity was more difficult to deal with than the horror I had once felt for it. But there it was. For as long as I can remember I've had the feeling of being what Mama calls ‘otherwise'. I would have much preferred not to have been this way. I remember Mama had told me once of a friend who had, she said, ‘resigned' from the Foreign Ministry; ‘he put in his letter and, Bella, that was that'. It seemed a very good idea to me and I, too, wrote a letter:
‘I, Bella, resign from being otherwise.'
I carried it around with me for months but I never found anyone I could post it to, and I knew then that I was going to have trouble with these feelings.

Among the first of the picture books I'd been given as a baby was the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, and my sympathies were all with the Giant. Ugly, pop-eyed and oafish, he sprawled across his table, knocking over his soup which spattered his green doublet as he made a despairing grab at Jack who sped nimbly away clutching the Giant's speaking harp. The Ogre's thick red hair was all in a tangle, his eyes were moist and his face dark with rage and pain. Jack was fresh-faced and beaming. He had already stolen the bag of gold, he was proud of his speed and his spoils. Now he had the speaking harp, and he would be back, I knew, for the goose that laid the golden eggs. And when that happened, with the lumbering, snivelling Giant in hot pursuit, he would lure him to the tip of the swaying, miles-high beanstalk and then, quite deliberately, murder him. Jack was the sort of boy who ought to be locked up.

‘What you love becomes beautiful,' Papa told me. This used to infuriate Mama who would reply with a saying of her own: ‘Charity begins at home.' Papa would fall silent, and a few days later he would disappear back into Africa.

Since my Papa no longer spoke to his family I became the go-between. Each summer I went to stay by the lake with my French family. My Uncle Claude would come to Paris to fetch me and before we left to drive back to my grandmother's house he would look gloomily around our apartment at the new display of my father's trophies, the exotic accumulation of another year in Africa. And he would shake his head and click his tongue disapprovingly as if he were a teacher who had discovered one of his dimmer pupils has been writing on the walls.

In my father's bedroom, which was a kind of African shrine, there were photographs of men just like him who had spent their lives in Africa. These pictures were taken in the last century and showed traders and their houses. Some of them lived on houseboats moored on brown, broad rivers, clearly settled there for good because the boats had been roofed over and become permanent trading posts. There were pictures of the surprisingly comfortable and immensely cluttered interiors. The fashion was for many rugs and coloured glass in the windows, tables with twirly legs, a variety of lamps hanging from the ceiling, vases galore, leopard skins on the floor. Everyone in these pictures wore hats, it didn't matter whether you were a master or a servant, the head went covered if it was to be decent: hats of straw, hats with ruffles, cockades, plumes, bowlers, toppers, hats made of hair, or rope, or rags. But hats. Every head was roofed. Without doubt the head was then regarded as the seat of wisdom and if you went out with it not properly protected and respected, who knew what might fall on it.