Canicule by Armand Louis

Author:Armand, Louis [Armand, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2013-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

17. ramapithecus

Each human generation carries within itself all the previous generations, and appears like a foreshortening of universal history.

– José Ortega y Gasset

Amber, emerald, sapphire, ruby. Auntie Freude, born in the East and raised in refugee camps, hung coloured glass beads in the kitchen window. They caught the sun, cast prismed light across ceiling and walls. She’s still there, how I remember her, watering the rosemary in red ceramic Devo pots on the windowsill, flames of light shimmering and darting. Every summer, how she’d sew rosemary into the pillow cases, perfuming the linen. The same perfume on beige stockings left to dry in the laundry. The scent of rosemary has always aroused in me the imagined pleasures of an older woman.

*

My auntie’s house was a narrow two-story affair, blue awnings over windows and cluttered back garden. I lived there ever since I can remember. There was a birdbath hidden among backyard shrubbery, like a chamber pot on a wrought iron stand thick with cobwebs. The water, algal-green. In the summer, mosquitoes, frogs and dragonflies. A red tricycle with rusted wheels, upside down, lay tangled into the undergrowth.

My auntie had a workroom behind the stairs, where she tailored clothes for the women in the neighbourhood. A cardboard dressmaker’s dummy stood in the middle of the small room, surrounded by mirrors in which it multiplied in ways strange and sinister. Eye glued to the keyhole, I’d watch while she fitted the lady from next door. Frau Schöneborg. Who wore a girdle to keep her flesh in place. Or else the young store owner’s wife from the bungalow at the end of our street. Unlike Frau Schöneborg, this one had long thin legs and didn’t wear a girdle, but she had no breasts either.

Auntie Freude liked to tell stories about people I didn’t know and who seemed invented just to entertain me. I found the stories hard to follow and preferred staying up to watch old films on the portable black-and-white that sat atop a locked cabinet in her bedroom. Only later I learned the cabinet held the bottles of gin which for years she drank in secret, hidden among the petticoats and underwear, perfume and talc.

We’d soak up UFA-era Ernst Lubitsch and Gerhard Lamprecht flicks, Pola Negri almost always in the lead. Or Hollywood standards like Sunset Boulevard and The Maltese Falcon . Falling asleep side-by-side long after midnight. I remember once, head against her arm, gazing at a swirling pattern on her negligee. Realising later it wasn’t a pattern at all, but a ring of dark hairs snaking about her nipple, visible through the fabric.

Afterwards I dreamt recurrently of my auntie’s breast. To smell the rosemary mingled with the salt of perspiration on her skin and taste it. I longed to be nearer to the feminine mystery. These dreams were complicated by images from stories she told about the Amazons. I wondered if it was true they cut off their right breast. My mother, I knew, had suffered from cancer. A double mastectomy.

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