Free While the Gods Were Sleeping by Erwin Mortier

we had nevertheless once climbed, into an idea of application and industry, but without the explosions that temporarily destroyed all morality and duty.
    Women constituted the coat of arms of all that, the becalmed figurehead, and I cursed it. Working-class women like Emilie enjoyed more freedom of movement, the freedom of the insignificant, than we, precious young ladies of the bourgeoisie, doomed to an existence as a human artistic bouquet: colourful, elegant and dust-free under a glass cover so as not to spoil our maidenly tint.
    My way of escaping the vacuum consisted of reading and writing. Others lost themselves in their children or married an older rich man, in the hope of a premature widowhood and accompanying independence.
    Some, those who had no other safety valve, competed for a starring role in the varied theatrical programme of hysteria, with its paralyses and limbs full of cramp, its monumental fainting fits and the deliriums which you can find in old psychological manuals, and which you can equally well see as a concise introduction to the dramaturgy of the muzzled femininity of my young days—a Sistine Chapel of bourgeoispathos. The slightly more acceptable variant consisted of chronic stomach ailments, migraine-related twilight situations and other maladies that required periods of isolation in partly or wholly darkened rooms, punctuated by cleansing rites with alternating hot and cold baths and compresses, powders, infusions and tinctures.
    Even my mother could periodically abandon herself to these with a pleasure she herself did not recognize as such. Her periods assumed the character of litanies, full of self-pity and vengefulness. The calamity usually announced itself with hypersensitivity to children’s voices and the tap of cutlery on plates. When she snapped at me or my brother that well-brought-up children never touch the porcelain of the dinner service with their knife or fork, everyone in the house knew what was what. In the kitchen Emilie shrugged her shoulders even higher than before, fearful of the fury that might descend on her. My father let out a resigned sigh. Edgard hit his head with his hand as if he had forgotten an important appointment and I tried to breathe as little as possible.
     
    For the next few days it was as if my mother’s body was sprouting countless fine tentacles. A network of ethereal threads stretched out around her and linked every nook and cranny in the house with her nervous system. The slightest movement was transmitted over that invisible system. Vibrations produced vibrations. Even turning a page in one of my picture books, though they were cut from reasonably stiff cardboard, penetrated to the boudoir next to the dining room, where my mother, supported by a geological formation of pillows, lay on the chaise longue, vibrating with anger.
    “Child, use the carpet when you go upstairs. The car-pet! Has no one any respect for my eardrums here? Please, Edgard, do your mother a favour and don’t trot through the house like a pack of dragoons. Put an old tea towel in the bottom of the washing-up basin, Emilie, I’ve asked you a hundred times…” And so on.
    Gradually her tirades faded into muted, unarticulated lamentations. Her words seemed to crumble, throwing off their crust of consonants and as it were revealing their melted insides. Her hypersensitivity to sound had usually gone by then. The tentacles disengaged from things, slapping back onto her body like extended elastic and recreating it in an imploding universe of pain.
    Emilie lugged up even more blankets and pillows, and with the slow body language of a tortoise shoved side tables over to the chaise longue, set out bottles, tubes, flacons, a basin of water, soap and white linen cloths. Meanwhile she had closed the blinds on the whole floor, banked up the fire in the antechamber below and had plonked us down like exiles in the armchairs.
    “If the
patron
agrees, I can serve him and the little ones food