The Transparent Boy
Lausanne, Switzerland
March, 1973
This is how bad it was: His parents could not even agree on which language they would use for their arguments.
Matti rolled to his side and gnawed at the cuticle of his left thumb.
One floor below, Claudine screamed in her artsy, la-de-da, annoyingly poetic-reference-laden Parisian French. Her stiletto heels clicked on the carpet, on the parquetry directly under the boys’ bedroom, and on the stone floor. She shut herself up in her sitting room and slammed the door. His father followed her in his thick-soled shoes and flung open the door. He shouted at her in his Midwestern American, with its monosyllabic curses and brutally drawn-out R sounds; its aggressive, snarling vowels. Then Big Cy’s shoes reversed the direction, across stone, parquetry, and carpet. He shut himself up in the music room and slammed the door.
Matti punched at his pillow quietly, hoping not to rouse his elder brother. Matti was not quite eight and still a day student. Juni had just turned eleven — was home this weekend, in fact, to celebrate his birthday — and in his second year of boarding school. Matti hated for his brother to hear the fighting. He suspected that a good brother, a competent brother, would have kept the household calm for Juni’s occasional visits.
After a moment, the sitting room door opened, and once again his mother made her way toward the music room for one last word, one last tap-tap-tap-slam.
Recently, this drama was playing out almost every evening that his father arrived home from the lab before his mother retired for the night.
Juni was already awake, however, and sitting upright with his arms folded across his chest. “They’re arguing about you, Goose-boy,” he whispered. “Can you hear that? They’re arguing about you and Uncle Armand.”
Matti had not known, but he would not be surprised, either. In his parents’ angry, poisonous world, he made as likely a target as anything – likelier than most, in fact. Did they not, after all, when they thought the boys could not hear, refer to Juni as The Perfect One and to Matti as The Impossible One?
For the moment, he said nothing. He adjusted the covers over his shoulder and returned to what he had been doing to block out his parents’ argument. He had been imagining that he was holding his violin, pretending to play one of the songs his father played on his big black stereo in the music room -- a cheerful tune that featured someone whistling the melody line. Even now Matti smiled as his fingers danced over imaginary strings.
Juni seemed to be listening as hard as he could. “Hey, Goose-boy, what are they saying? Are you still going away for trips with Uncle Armand?”
“Yes.”
“An old circus clown?” Juni’s voice barely concealed his scorn. “God, you are such a goose! What does he do? Does he perform tricks for you? Does he juggle rings and ride about on a unicycle? Does he let you honk his big red nose?”
That was a tough one to answer, and Matti considered it carefully. Uncle Armand said that often the best answers weren’t really answers at all. “Uncle Armand did a lot of different things with the circus,” he said finally. “He wasn’t just a clown.”
“Maybe when you grow up, you’ll—“
They both heard it then, the sound of footsteps on the stairs. The tread was that of Mlle Dorothee, who covered a lot of ground for the family as both a governess and nanny when needed, and a sort of auxiliary housekeeper when the boys were away.
She padded down the hall and tapped on the boys’ door. “Mathieu,” she called in a soft voice. “Mathieu, your father wishes to speak with you.”
Matti swallowed hard. “I’m coming, Mlle Dorothee,” he called back.
He climbed out of bed and reached for his robe and slippers.
“Remember that it’s a bathrobe,” Juni hissed at him. “I called it a dressing gown last time I was here and he—well, you can imagine.”
“I know.” Speaking English to their father could be a tricky business, because at school they were taught British English. Big Cy, however, called British pronunciations and vocabulary posh talk and faggot-speak. He expected Midwestern Standard from his boys when they were at home.
The differences were not as dramatic as, for instance, the difference between the High German spoken in Germany and the dialectic variants that one heard in German-speaking cantons of Switzerland. Navigating the differences in English was a subtle task, certainly harder than pleasing their mother, whose French was only a handful of words and a tiny tweak of a vowel or two from what was taught in their schools.
As Matti knotted the sash on his gown—sorry, robe—and reached for the door, his brother whispered, “Good luck, man,” in English.
“Thanks,” he replied in the same language. “I’ll need it.”
* * *
Cyrus Witherspoon sat with his wife on the sofa in the sitting room. “Good evening, Matti,” his father said in English.
This was not a good sign.
Usually when they were together everyone spoke French. Big Cy was fluent in French—had been excellent in it even before he first came to Switzerland in 1961, according to what people said. Claudine considered herself fluent in English. She was not, but she tended to grow enraged when anyone tried to point that out—or when she lost track of a conversation, which happened rather often.
How American are we going to get here? Are you “papa,” or “Dad”?
Matti decided to avoid the question altogether. “Good evening,” he said, nodding to both of his parents in turn.
“Your mother tells me that you’re still taking treks with your great-uncle.”
Matti kept his face as blank as he could manage. “Yes, sir.”
“Would you mind telling me what Armand does when you’re out there, just the two of you?”
“Mostly, he checks on his properties and his investments, sir. Sometimes he looks at buildings and things he might buy.”
“I told you,” Claudine interrupted, “This is all business.”
Mr. Witherspoon ignored her. “Your mother says that whether you make it to class or not, you always know your dancing routines.”
“I practice every day.”
“And Madame Charvat says that your violin lessons have not suffered. You take your instrument with you?”
Matti nodded.
“I didn’t hear you.”
“I take it with me, sir. I practice every day.”
Big Cy scowled. “Your assessment letter from the school arrived yesterday. It’s in the mail basket in the foyer. Go and get it for me.”
Mathieu’s heart sank. He did his best, but he knew that there were some things he simply could not grasp. He nodded and turned to obey.
When he arrived in the hall, he noticed that the envelope had not yet been opened. He was not completely surprised that his mother had been afraid to look at his grades; on the whole, Claudine preferred to leave things academic to Big Cy. However, he had presumed that his father was upset at his going off on adventures with Uncle Armand because it was making his school work suffer. A sealed envelope meant that this whole inquisition was not contingent on his grades. There was something else going on.
He handed the envelope to his father without a word. Big Cy slit it open with a ballpoint pen from his pocket. He shook the folded paper out and narrowed his eyes.
“I see that reading is still something of a problem. And nothing is happening with your spelling or your penmanship.” He glared at Matti. “Apparently you still don’t find it worth your time and trouble to improve.”
Matti bowed his head and said nothing. He knew that there had been very little improvement. He had put forth an effort, of course, but some things were appallingly difficult, and there were so very many other things that were both more interesting and less frustrating—there just wasn’t enough time to do everything.
“It's the letters,” Matti said. He pressed his thumb and first two fingers together and moved them as though picking up and putting down a chess piece repeatedly. “They keep boinging around on the paper and changing direction.”
“You need to try harder,” his father said. “You're a smart boy. I know you can do better.”
“Yes, sir.”
Yeah, right, he added to himself.
“You know,” Big Cy said in a conversational tone, “back home when I was your age, everything was expressed as a letter grade. Just little rectangles of cardboard with some letters on it — that was all. And you had best believe that my father would have tanned my hide if I had brought home anything less than an A.”
Matti tried to picture Dr. Witherspoon, a slightly-built retired anthropologist in Kansas, a man with the thickest glasses Matti had ever seen on a real person, trying to tan the hide of Big Cy, a man well over six feet tall, with a thick torso and an American-style football player’s shoulders. “Yes, sir,” he said as neutrally as he could.
“Top marks in physical development—that’s just your genes coming through there—ahead of the class in geography, significantly advanced in history. History?”
“Um, Uncle Armand tells me about the places we visit—about the famous people who lived there and the famous things that happened there. And I read the maps for him.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, sir.”
“See, I told you, Cyrus,” Matti’s mother said. “Armand has only the child’s very best interests at heart.”
“Hmm, this is interesting.” Matti’s father stared at the report for a long minute, and then studied his son with renewed interest. “It says here that you are significantly ahead of your class in mathematics. It says you multiply to three places, you’re working with percentages, and you’ve mastered long division.”
Matti hesitated: This was an area where British versus American English could trip him up disastrously. “When we travel,” he began, watching his father’s face for any sign that he was using the wrong word. “Uncle Armand has me cal—“ He saw no warning twitch on his father’s face.
“Cal—“
Still nothing.
“—Calculate how many kil—miles. How many miles from city to city, and how much—gasoline we expend in our travels. And when he—calculates—things about his investments or his taxes, he asks me to do some of the work. He says my eyes are better.”
To his relief, Cyrus Witherspoon nodded his head. “This is good,” he said. “This is very good. You’re not completely wasting our time and money out there.”
He leaned forward, his arms on his knees. “But I must know: Does Armand touch you?”
Matti whipsawed instantly from relief to confusion. “I beg your pardon, sir?”
“I said, does he touch you?”
“Um, he—he cuts my hair sometimes. And when he was teaching me to walk the wire, he held my hand—“
“That’s not what I mean, Mathieu. Does he touch you inappropriately?”
“Cyrus, such a question to ask the chi—“
“Claudine, this is between men, you understand?”
Matti opened his arms. “I’m sorry, Papa, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Big Cy seemed to have lost interest. “Yes, well, go back to bed,” he growled. “I have to talk to your mother.”
A minute later, Matti stood between the beds removing his robe. “It was very strange,” he told Juni, both of them still speaking English although they considered French their native language. “He wanted to know whether Uncle Armand touches me.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Does Armand touch you?”
Matti threw his slippers at the chair. “I don’t know what Papa means. Does he touch me? He cut my hair. He held my hand when he taught me to walk the wire—“
His reward was a cascade of giggles. “Matti, you are the stupidest little goose-boy in the world! Papa wants to know whether Armand touches you inappropriately.”
“Yes, that’s the very word he used: inappropriately. What does he mean?”
“I don’t believe that you don’t get it.”
Matti was losing patience. “Believe it.”
The giggles continued unabated.
“Hey! Hey, you! Hey, Cyrus Montgomery Witherspoon, Junior. Believe. It.”
Ah. Blessed quiet.
Matti rarely hauled out the big gun of Juni’s given name, but he felt that he had already had more than enough stress for the evening.
Juni rolled to his side and looked his brother straight in the eye. “He wants to know—Elmer Mathieu, Elmer Fudd—whether Uncle Armand ever touches your, you know, your pee-pee.”
Matti thought that he had fairly good control of his facial muscles, but he was unable to suppress a look of disgust. “Oh, yuck!”
Juni fell back against the headboard, chortling again. “Oh, God, look at the goose-boy’s face!”
“But you didn’t have to say pee-pee. I’m not a little boy any more. I know penis. And phallus. And dick. And that’s just in English. I know a lot of languages.”
I know more languages than you could ever imagine, Little Cyrus.
Feeling that he had perhaps regained a bit of his dignity, Matti blew his nose and drank some water, then climbed into bed, waiting for his brother’s glee to wind down. When it did, Matti asked, in as careful and as grown-up a tone as he could manage, “Why would he want to do that anyway? He already has a penis; I see it whenever he has to make water out in the country—“
Whatever he had said (and he thought that he had sounded very reasonable and mature), his brother was lost again in paroxysms of laughter.
* * *
The following afternoon, Uncle Armand and his restored Bentley arrived just as Madame Witherspoon and Mlle Dorothee got Juni, his books, and his laundry out into the drive to wait for his ride back to school.
Armand Brecht knew how to make an entrance. He was actually their mother’s uncle, the flamboyant black-sheep elder brother to her father. Armand had played at dozens of professions, from the family-scandal circus gig (and that was as an acrobat, in spite of what the family claimed—Matti had seen the old posters) to only slightly less scandalous turns as an actor, a nightclub singer, and an artist working in pastels, before settling down in his twilight years to the kind of stodgy capitalism that the Brecht family understood. He might have won a measure of respectability, had he been able to find one woman and stick to her. Unfortunately, Yvette was the sixth Mrs. Armand Brecht, and that relationship was starting to look shaky.
To Matti’s dismay, before Uncle Armand came to him, he bent over and studied Juni. “You have grown,” Armand said in a serious voice. “I don’t see you enough. I hope that you will come to my house for a few days this summer.”
Juni tried to look cool, but there was no doubt that he was totally blown away by the invitation. He absolutely strutted out to the van. Once he and his bags were inside, Mathieu could see him happily pointing out both his great-uncle and the Bentley to his classmates.
Matti said good-bye to his parents and picked up his violin case and his own small suitcase. Armand beamed at him, but this time he did not return the pleasantry. His face as still as stone, he climbed into the Bentley, fastened his seat belt, and braced his shoes on the metal box in the well before his seat, the box that he knew was full of candy and games and toys.
“Ah, we are a little sphinx today,” Armand murmured as he pulled out of the drive, waving gaily. As always, the gravity of his voice and the joy on his face seemed unrelated. “But know this, young man: That house is poisonous enough without the two of you boys playing jealousy games. I’m an old man. In a few years, I will be gone, and that boy will be your best source of sanity.
“Now Little Cy—“
Armand broke off while Matti snickered at the name his brother hated above all other names. “Yes, go ahead, laugh, but don’t do that to his face. He can’t help what your parents decided to name him any more than you can help your own name. Little Cy deserves a little break, too. So he will come to the chateau this summer. He’ll play in the pool, we’ll go sailing on the lake, and perhaps I will even see if it’s too late to teach him the wire.
“And that is all, my little friend. He will never be a part of our secrets. Not ever. Our journeys and our games belong to us, and to nobody else, Mathieu—my promise will be good until the day I die. He will visit the chateau, and that will be the end of it.”
A massive weight lifted from Matti’s shoulders and heart as his uncle spoke.
“Better now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Armand spun the wheel and slid into the heavy traffic headed toward Geneva. “Now, young man: Blow it away. Blow away everything that you are, everything that you think, everything that defines you.” Matti began taking deep, deep breaths and releasing them lustily at the dash as his uncle spoke. “Visualize the little gnome. Do you see him?”
Matti nodded, picturing the heavy glass gnome-shaped candy container his uncle kept on the hall table adjacent to the room where Matti slept when he visited.
Armand’s voice became lower, slower, and more seductive. “You must blow away everything, little Matti—your family and your history, your likes, your dislikes, your dreams, your beliefs, and your name. Be empty, Matti. Be empty and utterly transparent.”
There was nothing but the vibration of the Bentley, and the wind whistling in through a partially opened window, and his uncle’s low, magical voice.
“Now,” he said, but he spoke in a coarse country dialect of Flemish, a language that nobody else in Mathieu’s family would recognize. He spoke slowly, with lengthy pauses between sentences. “My name is Andre Liebling. I am an old man now, a farmer, and in poor health. I had a wonderful wife and six children. I raised root vegetables in a rural district much like the one that you and I visited near Marseilles around the New Year, but now I must find my youngest son. I hear that he is in terrible trouble and I am afraid. I must look everywhere for him. I promised his wife that I would do so.
“My daughter-in-law Nikki has sent with me their son. His name is Bruno. He was born on the fifteenth of April in the year nineteen-sixty-seven. He is almost six, and although he is not very clever, he has a good heart. I will try to find a good school for him while I am in the city.”
Uncle Armand waited three minutes and then repeated everything he had said.
Then another pause. Then one last repetition.
Matti kept his eyes squeezed shut tight and let his imagination run wild.
Thinking. Planning. Becoming.
Armand’s tone changed, although the language did not. “What is your name?”
“Bruno Andre Liebling,” Matti answered in the same dialect. His eyes were still tightly closed. “I’ll be six soon!”
“Oho, Bruno Andre, eh!” Armand said with a chuckle.
“Yes, sir,” Matti said with dreamy confidence. “I was named after my grandfather, and his father before him.”
“Very good. And when is your birthday?”
“I will be six — this many — in April. I have a kitty,” he added, his tone gaining an edge of excitement. “Her name is Bijou and she is going to have baby kitties!”
“And what color is she?”
“Gray, sir, with one white paw and a little white flag on the tip of her tail.”
“Oh, very good, Bruno. I love kitties, too. Now, tell me about your mother.”
“My mama? Her name is Niccolina. My father is away; my sister says that he is in jail, but mama says only that he is looking for work.”
“I do believe that you are the best and cleverest boy in the world. Tell me what your mama does.”
He saw the small farm, all browns and grays, too much rain, too much mud, not enough money. Saw his mama biting her lip in the kitchen, looking at bills. A lonely woman, counting on her little boy. Proud of him. Blue walls and a white enameled metal table.
Matti opened his eyes and drank in the warmth and the light. “My mama grows hops and cares for the neighbors’ geese.”
“Geese? Is that the truth?”
“I am sure, sir. They are old (the neighbors, not the geese) and mama helps them, and I help her.” Matti gifted his uncle with a smile of utter delight. “She calls me her little goose-boy — Grandpapa, look at the sports car!”
“Don’t get distracted, my little Bruno. It’s a pity, you know, that you’re clumsy and not very well coordinated.”
The boy in the passenger seat felt his muscles go just a little looser, felt his reflexes slow ever so slightly. “Yes, sir.”
“It is a pity that you are not gifted with agility, for you will be required to climb the back of a three-story building for me. Do you think that you will succeed in being my little monkey?”
“Of course, grandpapa, if it will make you happy.”
“It will indeed, because I will need someone to get my tools to me.”
“Your tools.” Matti drank in the sunlit landscape. “Then this is an assassination.”
“Yes, but we must not speak of it that way.”
“Of course, grandpapa.”
Utility poles swished as they passed them. The waters of Lac Leman glittered in the mid-afternoon sun. From the radio in the dash of the Bentley came the voice of Edith Piaf, raw and powerful and weirdly exciting.
No comments:
Post a Comment