Free Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker Page A

stairs, father, me. I remember the smell of that rough, unscented soap, when my father opened his arms, scoured until the skin was red and the hairs still damp, and called—alors vien, petit mec. And I remember how I flinched when he kissed me.
    My father was alien territory, to be traversed with caution, but I knew every scent and curve of my mother’s body. During the hot days if we were still staying in the city, she slept in the afternoons and I slept beside her, curled against the shiny texture and white lace bodice of her slip. She smelled of lavender and nail polish. I used to gaze, fascinated, at the strange convex curves of her painted toenails as if they were the single sign of a pair of invisible shoes. Sometimes she slept on her back with her arms folded, like a dead crusader. I crouched against her, feeling like an aborted fetus, not daring to indicate that I still lived. When I did my homework she would be cooking, leaning over my books, correcting my verbs, my maps, my dates, my maths while she pulverized vegetables, plaited pastry or watched the sauce rise with terrible concentration. She bargained in markets, dressed up to visit neighbors, posed as a glamorous and daring woman when she smoked cigarettes. She adored the cinema. My father earned good money, so they often went out. I was deposited with Anne-Marie, who would give me striped boiled sweets and tell me terrifying stories.
    My mother came from the vineyards of Gaillac. Her father owned his vines. They lived simply, but they were not poor people. When the war in Algeria was over her father was among the first to accept the pieds-noirs who went to live there and who brought their knowledge from the lost vineyards in Africa. Gaillac was known for white wines. It was the arrival of these incomers that transformed the wine production in the area. We went out to stay on the hot soft slopes during the summer months. I remember the house with its narrow brickwork and perfect row of lozenge windows under the receding dogtooth of the corniche, beneath the gutterless eaves which dripped onto the gravel in regular fluted torrents during the thunderstorms.
    My grandmother talked all the time in a soft undertone, to her ducks, her cats, her chickens, her indifferent dogs, her husband and her grandson. She seemed to be whispering secret instructions which no one understood. The villagers called her “la pauvre vieille” and said that she had always been that way, since the early years of her marriage. And they said that she had been beautiful, proud, and had liked her own way, but that when she had married Jean-Baptiste Michel she had made her bargain and slammed the door shut on her own happiness. He was a man who did not know the meaning of compromise or forgiveness.
    There was a night when she ran all the way back to her parents’ house, blood covering the front of her blouse, without her coat, terrified and screaming. Jean-Baptiste Michel came to fetch her in the morning, and she went back without protest, abject and defeated. Afterthat she began murmuring to her animals. No one provoked Jean-Baptiste Michel without suffering the consequences.
    The only person who was capable of stopping him was my mother. She was his only child. In her own way I suppose that she loved him. She stood between him and my whispering grandmother. I see her head raised from her vegetables in warning at the sound of his step. I see her wringing his shirts into coils, plucked from the aluminum tub, with concentrated care. I see her watching him at mealtimes, anticipating his demands. I see her reaching for her purse to give him money as he leaves the house. She always fed me before he came home so that I did not irritate him or dribble and jabber at the table. And sometimes he watches her carefully and she meets his glance as if there is an understanding between them. I hear her voice, low and rhythmic as a drum, reading aloud in the evenings. His broad back bends to hear her, his