To live is to complete a dream.
Philippe Herbet, Museum of fine arts,
Charleroi, summer 2011.
21 July. Rain.
It’s raining in Brussels. The tanks are getting wet, the soldiers are parading, and the spectators wave their little flags.
Tomorrow: Charleroi. A writer’s residence at the Museum of Photography in Mont-sur-Marchienne, the starting point for an exploration about which, at this stage, I know nothing.
My first idea is to bury myself away in that elite cocoon and talk only about photographs, those in the museum and those of my parents when they were newlyweds, which I’ve brought with me.
Before I was born, my parents lived in Jamioulx. My father worked at the ACEC, a manufacturer of electrical products based in Charleroi, and my mother, when she was not at home in the village, spent a lot of time in the city’s hospitals, having three miscarriages before she had me.
From that period, the family album contains a number of photographs of military parades, including some showing a statue of the Virgin Mary led in procession and soldiers in Napoleonic costume. They are captioned Jumet, 1953.
22 July. Rain.
Gilberte Agon (1951-2010), matron of the flag of the Marshals of Empire and the Fifth Regiment of English Sepoys, died at the age of fifty-nine. Her photograph is among those displayed on a board at the back of the church in Heigne-sous-Jumet. All the photographs are of people who died in 2010, and not just any people: they all belonged to one or another of the twenty-seven so-called royal societies who parade once a year on the outskirts of Charleroi to celebrate the feast day of Mary Magdalene.
According to El Mad’lèneû, the magazine I bought from a lady sitting at a small table in the choir, these festivities are part of the ‘intangible heritage’ of Wallonia. Some two thousand marchers, divided into more than fifty companies: the Jockeys of Roux, the Marshals of Empire, the Valiant Blues, the Zouaves of Spinoy, the Lanciers of La Querelle, the Turcos of Heigne, and so on. And this is the schedule: mass at four in the morning, departure at five, twenty-two kilometres through Roux, Courcelles, Viesville, Thiméon, Gosselies, returning to Jumet by 12.30.
On Magdalene’s day it often rains, according to a popular saying. The raindrops are the tears with which the saint bathed Christ’s feet before wiping them with her beautiful hair. It’s raining today, and it will probably rain tomorrow, the day of the march, whose existence I have only just discovered after losing my way while searching for something else.
I’ve been trying to track down somebody from my past, somebody very much alive, and here I am in this little medieval church contemplating the faces of the dead.
I ended up in Heigne by chance because the traffic has been diverted, for an unknown reason which I now know: it’s the route of the march, which will pass through Roux, the village where, unaware that these festivities were imminent, I was hoping to find Eric’s house. Or rather his father’s house. His father who went climbing with him when he was a teenager, then supplied him with five books a week while he was in prison, helped him to escape at least once, visited him regularly, and welcomed him home when he was released on parole.
Follow the son and you’ll find the father, and vice versa. At least at that time. What has become of them? On arriving in Mont-sur-Marchienne, in that familiar state of indecision I always feel at the start of a solitary exploration, I realised that they were the only people I knew in the area. I tried the telephone numbers they had left me, but to no avail.
When I went to Roux a few years ago to see Eric’s father, not long after Eric was released, I was fascinated. By the bond between them. By their laughter. By their pleasure at seeing me there, in the flesh, and welcoming me to their table. And by what happened when they wanted to complete the menu they had planned. They rushed out into the street, crying, ‘Does anyone have a melon?’ And from these working-class houses, with their doors always open, people came out either to say, ‘No, sorry, no melons,’ or, holding a melon, ‘Here you go, no need to give me one back.’ In the meantime they had introduced me to everyone, saying I was a friend.
This wasn’t Provence: the melon, the laughter, the open street. Just the south of Belgium. Not a tourist in sight and yet the most welcoming inhabitants in Western Europe. Perhaps because of their hard lives or the rain that falls in the summer, especially on public holidays: it rained on National Day, so far the 22nd hasn’t departed from the rule, and rain is forecast for tomorrow and for Sunday 24th, the day of the march.
That visit to Eric and his father had been my first contact with the Charleroi region. It was all very different from the affluent Brabant where I felt like a drowned rat. I don’t know the origin of the expression ‘like a drowned rat’ but I remember that Eric, in one of his letters from prison, talked about a ‘deadly rat.’ He said that his way of life in the past had been to do a few robberies then lay low ‘like a fat deadly rat’ and live on the loot, then to start again when there was nothing left in the kitty. Eric wasn’t fat, in fact he was quite slim, although strong and sturdy, and he had the knack of coming out with quirky expressions that lit sparks in my somewhat over-refined brain.
My father had been a prison visitor at Lantin, near Liège, and I had briefly followed in his footsteps. That was how I had come to meet this man under a death sentence (as it was called in those days), from a distance (in other words through letters) I had followed his progress on one of the sagas he wrote while in prison, and in return he had regularly sent me news of that strange world. That had lasted three years, until he was released on parole, after which I had gone to see him in his family home. And that visit, preceded by my wanderings on the outskirts of Charleroi – I had lost my way completely – had left an indelible mark on me.
That must have been seven or eight years ago. I think people still called it the Black Country in those days, even though the mines had closed and some had even started being converted into museums. I remember I had just published a novel on the theme of suicide and that it was summer. I’m sure it was summer, because of the melon, and the nearby slag heap, which was verdant. In fact, when Eric and I went out for a walk after the meal and we came within sight of the slag heap, he cried out, ‘Look, when they put me in prison, it was still black, now it’s green.’
Today, all the slag heaps in the Charleroi area are covered in trees. The expression Black Country has been completely banished, you’re supposed to say the Green Country or, for the tourist brochures, the Charleroi Region. Apparently, that’s to avoid stirring bad memories and look to the future. But you only have to lose your way on the outskirts of Charleroi to see the ghosts of factories everywhere, railway tracks that lead nowhere, heaps of scrap. In fact, that’s what fascinates me here, this apocalyptic landscape strewn with tracks, gangways, bridges and funnels that makes you feel as if you are in a vast, decaying amusement park.
23 July. Rain.
Every time I write about a city that isn’t mine (do I have one that is mine, I wonder?) I buy something to wear. I like to adorn myself in mementoes of the cities of the world, like so many commemorative plaques thanking the god of travellers. The belt from Mons. The skirt from Berlin. The raincoat from Montluçon. The ring from Oaxaca. The underwear from Oporto. The scarf from Berlin. The belt from Maribor, and so on.
At the end of July, there are sales in Charleroi, like everywhere else. A pair of jeans for half-price, and as a bonus two exhibitions at the Palace of Fine Arts: Philippe Herbet and Jacques Lennep, who are very much in tune with the kind of things you find here without even looking for them: eccentricity, discretion, simplicity, poetry, a fascination with trivia, the offbeat raised to the level of art.
In Charleroi someone has had the idea of painting some of the walls of the city, ‘to make it more beautiful, of course, but also, and above all, to bear witness to the vitality and happiness of its inhabitants’, according to the sponsors, who include a large paint company. If beauty is something that grabs you and won’t let go of you, if it is that mysterious formula that reduces you to a state of addiction, then I already find the region beautiful and its rust-coloured hues are enough for me. As for the happiness mentioned, I confess I didn’t come across any of those painted walls. But all I have to do is look at the people in the street to convince myself that their reality is not very rosy. And these ‘further reductions’, this plethora of on-sale goods manufactured in relocated factories, dull and shapeless as they are, certainly won’t raise anyone’s morale. I prefer to go back to the black and green suburbs and gaze at the commemorative photos at the back of the church in Heigne, all those faces with their solemn, open expressions beneath three-cornered hats or plumed helmets.
24 July. Rain.
These people are marching. How they march! With what passion, what energy, what indomitable music: brass, fifes and drums. Their uniforms are protected by big transparent plastic raincoats, and their red-dyed plumes by what look like freezer bags. Because, obviously, it’s raining. And it’s cold: eleven degrees this 24 July 2011, the 631st anniversary of the march. 631 years since the saint in question halted the Black Death in Jumet! 631 years of processions, barely interrupted by wars. 631 years of guilds, of rehearsals, of traditions passed down from generation to generation, of changes to adapt to a manifestly Francophile taste. Which explains why the current procession includes the Escort of Napoleon, the Senegalese Infantry, the Algerian Cavalry and the French Indo-China Brigade, as well as the Mexicans, a souvenir of the time when glassware from Jumet was exported as far as the New World, and – an inheritance from two World Wars – the Belgian Infantry from 1914-18, the British Navy and the Canadian Mounties.
I set my alarm for four in the morning, and got to Heigne-sous-Jumet just as they were setting off. Not many people yet – I was told yesterday that there would be many more about midday, at the arrival point – so I’ve been able to park my car just five hundred metres away. I go and stand next to an upright tarpaulin concealing a fairground attraction, still closed at this hour, a tarpaulin that offers no protection from the rain but which does have the advantage that a bundle of thick electrical wires sheathed in rubber runs alongside it. I climb onto the wires so that I’m just a bit higher than the other spectators and their umbrellas. At the same height, in fact, as a tall policeman surrounded by a group of teenage girls plying him with silly questions to which they know the answers, just to tease him. He says nothing in reply, just smiles stoically. I have an umbrella too, I’d gladly shelter him, this handsome policeman who’s here to keep order, not that there is anything likely to disturb that order, if truth be told. The crowd wave at the marchers in a friendly manner, and the marchers wave back. This early in the morning, everyone knows everyone else, and I feel good here, not alone at all. Rain draws people together. One of the girls slips under my umbrella, complains when I make a slight movement, causing a few drops of rain to drip onto her neck, smiles at me all the same, then goes back to her friends and the policeman they are still harassing.
An hour later, by which time it’s fully light, the rain stops. The children in the procession brandish their little swords more earnestly and passionately, the horses steam, the plastic raincoats disappear. Now that there’s no danger of getting it wet, I finally open the magazine I bought from the brochure lady at the church of Notre-Dame in Heigne. On the page devoted to the schedule of festivities, I read that tomorrow, Monday, medals will be awarded to those who have been taking part in the march for fifty years and sixty years. People here start marching as soon as they learn to walk and keep marching until they can’t walk any more. Or drink anymore, because there are plenty of stops along the way. When I asked the brochure lady yesterday if there were any women among the marchers, she told me that Gilberte Agon, matron of the flag of the Marshals of Empire and the Fifth Regiment of English Sepoys, had run one of the cafés the marchers like to drop into. Hence her honorary position.
There are a few women in the procession. Dressed as canteen keepers, each with a little barrel and two stemmed glasses invariably held between the forefinger and middle finger, or as horsewomen of the Empire in frogged dolmans, they too will put in their kilometres. Twenty-two kilometres, on foot, is a distance I’m familiar with in the forests of Wallonia, but I’ve never walked twenty-two kilometres while blowing into a wind instrument or twirling drumsticks. It’s as I tell myself this that I suddenly feel a little alone. When you’re only on the edge of a parade, it’s less of a celebration and more of a show.
I go back to my car and set off in the opposite direction, towards Roux. I resume my search, and again lose my way. One street after another, at random, in the calm and quite of early morning. I remember Eric showing me a water tower. At least, I think it was a water tower. A kind of huge cube on legs, which was quite impressive. He told me he was going to make it a refuge where he would write the bestsellers that would make him rich. I had liked that fantasy. I’d been afraid I’d find Eric demoralised, champing at the bit in a world that had become increasingly banal, but to my relief, I found the same Eric as in those lively letters of his, when he wrote five hours a day, seven days a week, in prison.
25 July. Rain.
Seventeen years in prison – a ‘death sentence’, as it was called then – commuted to a ‘life sentence’. Calling life a death sentence, and less than twenty years a life sentence, isn’t linguistic hypocrisy, just proof that the world of the law is more antiquated than everything else, that it hasn’t kept up with the times in terms of vocabulary. After all, these days, people call tramps ‘homeless people’, blind people ‘partially sighted’, and the Black country ‘the Charleroi region’. The fashion is to tone things down by common consent, in order to spare the feelings of the weaker members of our community. Apart from ‘prisoners’. And ‘victims’. As far as I know, these old words have not been replaced by new ones.
I’ve finally tracked down the water tower. At least I think I have. Because I remember it as being more or less isolated. And now I see buildings nearby. Obviously, they had been there before, but all I remembered was the water tower, which had become a symbol of artistic solitude. I wander in concentric circles, moving as if in a vague nightmare, searching stubbornly for the house, without finding it: all these sloping streets, all these identical slagheaps. Gradually I let myself be won over by the insidious charm of this landscape in which everything is jumbled together. Houses, factories, thickets, paved and unpaved streets, puddles, wild flowers: everything reflects the do-it-yourself nature of existence.
That’s all our lives are. That and writing.
26 July. Rain.
Discovering a region is like falling in love: you always hope it’s going to be as beautiful as a painted wall. But I don’t care for pink, violet or green. I like black. Or rather, the energy of black. Deep down, we all have black in us.
The Black Country is a place apart. Intense, harsh, vibrant. A kind of life drug: I was there, I lived through that, I haven’t lived since, or I live only by virtue of that. I’m sure it was because of that blackness that I first met Eric. I was writing about suicide, he was writing about being a criminal: the same lack of sensitivity when the time comes. The same hatred. Of yourself. Of other people. The same exit from the world through an act of violence.
Where else but in Jumet would a cleaning company advertise itself on its website as ‘specialising in cleaning up after suicides’? And where else but in Charleroi would someone have the idea of a City Safari, the itinerary of which included a visit to the place where Magritte’s mother committed suicide?
After a supposedly dissolute life and her encounter with Christ (‘Go and sin no more’), Mary Magdalene withdrew to a cave and spent the rest of her days with her hand resting on a skull, weeping tears of repentance. For what? The Gospels don’t tell us. But in leafing through El Mad’lèneû, I find this: in a popular song from the Hainaut, Mary Magdalene is a radiant young girl who rejects her father’s order to marry. She doesn’t want prince or king, she wants to travel, dressed in short skirts and flat shoes. At a time when women were imprisoned in long skirts, high heels, marriage and childbearing, this song says exactly what a girl has always wanted to hear.
There was no lovelier child than Mary Magdalene at the age of fifteen, women used to sing as they worked. Sculptors working in country churches have always known that. From Wallonia to Slovenia, despite the skull, Mary Magdalene is shown as graceful and sensual, a symbol of love settling down after much travelling, but without giving up on passion. Red cheeks, bright eyes, full lips, slender figure – as you would expect of a great traveller – and with the experienced, joyful air of a woman who wasn’t born yesterday.
The Mary Magdalene in the church in Heigne, which I visit again during the day, is one of the prettiest I’ve ever come across. She stands in the darkness of a side altar, discreet and smiling. She wasn’t in the parade on Sunday. That was a statue of the Virgin Mary, looking more serious and less charming, the same one as in the photographs taken by my parents in 1953. There is a notch on her cheek, covered in glass, containing relics. I’d like to know more about these relics: what part of the body, exactly? Christian relics have never included anything but decent bones, tibias, fibulas, phalanxes or bits of skull. The Church has always lacked something. The pubis is a bone, too.
Clearly, the festivities continue all week. On my way back, I pass a few scattered groups of marchers in costume. Although they are still tramping the streets to music, they are now limiting themselves to the short distance between one café and another. A swaying motion spreads through the ranks. Some of the men are glassy-eyed. The little waves of friendship become vaguer, more abrupt. As a precaution, the women and children have been left at home. The street is steaming after the rain. The spectators have drifted away.
27 July. Rain.
‘I don’t write to be recognised,’ Eric wrote to me when he was in prison. ‘I’m driven by something deeper. It comes when I imagine that for the first time I might be something other than a criminal. It would be a good idea to encourage me. But not out of pity or curiosity. Because of my talent.’
In prison he wrote every day, five novels simultaneously. And now that he’s out? Now that he has to make an effort, with all the time that takes, to lead a normal existence? How has his life panned out? What will his future be?
As far as the future of the Charleroi Region is concerned, starting with the city itself which is celebrating the centenary of the universal exposition of 1911 by announcing major public works and painting the walls, I’m no soothsayer. But I saw people marching in Jumet, Roux and Courcelles. I felt their solidarity, their pride, their desire to hand things on. What other region possesses, within such a small area, so many groups of friends, volunteers, marchers, musicians, experts on popular culture, people knowledgeable about history even in those households most damaged by the crisis? What other population spends all year raising funds – through dances, sales of pledges, appeals to shopkeepers – to make the costumes, to pay the band, to provide sustenance for the troops? What other cultural project brings all classes and generations together like this, without need for slogans?
It would be a good idea to encourage them. But not out of pity or curiosity. Because of their talent.
28 July. Rain.
Morning. I reread my notes, cosily shut away in my museum refuge. I wouldn’t mind staying here for a few decades, just to see what becomes of this region. In the meantime, I wonder if my text will do it justice. Because, even though I hope I’ll live longer than Gilberte Agon, Matron of the Flag of the Marshals of Empire and the Fifth Regiment of English Sepoys, life, like a page, is short, and you have to choose.
I’ve seen, searched, wandered up and down, filled my notebook with observations, skimmed the books lent by the museum, tried to imagine my parents’ life in the Black country… A thousand ideas for stories to tell have jostled in my heard.
In the end, the marchers have prevailed. And the house I never managed to find.
Afternoon. A brisk walk through Mont-sur-Marchienne, to do a bit of thinking. As I search in vain for the site of the ACEC where my father worked, I pass huge industrial buildings with half-erased lettering on the walls. An old ironworks. It’s all here: a country as grey as iron, a solid, sturdy population still haunted by their dreams. My little factory of words can get down to work.
29 July. No more rain.
This afternoon the sun comes out, white clouds on a black background, broad patches of blue. The green slagheaps glitter exhilaratingly, the Sambre sparkles, the anglers are having a ball: all for my last day. Sitting on a café terrace near the abbey of Aulne, I reread my notes. Not many people about. A blond biker is drinking a blond beer. His helmet, which he’s put down on a chair, is blue, his leather jacket is blue, his bike is blue. The waitress is very young and has probably been on the lookout for this customer all week. She’s as pretty as a picture and extremely attentive, which certainly helps. The blue biker and I are emissaries of the sun: everything will be better tomorrow.
Translated from French by Howard Curtis.
Howard Curtis (London, 1949) has translated some seventy books from French, Italian and Spanish, including works by Flaubert, Balzac, Simenon, Pirandello, Leonardo Sciascia, Luis Sepúlveda, Francisco Coloane, Jean-Claude Izzo, Beppe Fenoglio, Pietro Grossi, Gianrico Carofiglio and Franz Hellens, among many others. He has received the John Florio Prize and the Premio Campiello Europa.
