Woes of the True Policeman

True, her mother also read her the poems of Éluard, Bernard Nöel (whom she liked very much and who often made her laugh), Saint-John Perse, even Patrice de la Tour du Pin, but it was the maudits d’aujourd’hui whom she remembered or thought she remembered with the most disquiet, names that were mostly unknown in Brazil or Argentina or Mexico and that made Edith Lieberman cry, reminding her perhaps of another life, of her break with that other life, when she was a student at the Collège Français and she dated boys from the Jewish neighborhood, when she listened to Brahms and didn’t miss a single Audrey Hepburn movie. Perhaps her mother, from that Rio apartment, saw herself as another French maudit poet, and liked-as only the maudits like-to contemplate scenes of a happiness spurned but in the end sadly lost. And Rosa thought: lost at the moment when the man who would be my father appeared with his proletarian vanguard and his wildly ambitious plans. And if he hadn’t appeared, would she and her mother be in Chile now, living in Santiago without a care in the world, happy as can be, sharing their little news each night, always together? But the louse of the proletarian vanguard had suddenly appeared, as if teleported in by fate. That was a fact, and now nothing could be changed. Probably they wouldn’t be in Chile, anyway, and besides, the little she knew about the country horrified her. Even the Chilean accent, which so many years later her father still hadn’t lost, was jarring, unpleasant, affected. She, of course, didn’t talk like that. Once she wondered what accent she had, and she came to the conclusion that she had none: she spoke a United Nations Spanish. Of the maudits, Gilberte Dallas was her favorite. Her mother liked Gérald Neveu or Ilarie Voronca, but Gilberte Dallas, La Gilberte, was the best. She imagined her tall and bony, her face like Greta Garbo’s but with two scars on each cheek like the women of some African tribes. Sometimes she didn’t smile and seemed sad, but as a rule she was cheerful, her gestures abrupt and her tongue swift. Very elegant: what suited her best were gauzy dresses, silk tunics, feathered hats, and sporting attire. When, years later, she read Anne Clancier’s introduction to the poems of Gilberte H. Dallas, 1918-1960, she realized that she had been fated to love her. Anne Clancier: “Une fillette de dix ans, allongée dans une barque, flotte sur la mer, à midi. Elle essaie de fixer le soleil, attendant de ses rayons la mort et la délivrance. Elle se croit mal aimée, abandonnée de tous, elle éspère retrouver au-delà de la mort la mère à jamais perdue. Lorsqu’on découvre l’enfant, après des heures de recherches, elle est inconsciente, frappée par l’insolation; on réussit à la sauver et il lui faut poursuivre sa route. Ce souvenir d’enfance nous livre la clef de la vie et de l’œuvre de Gilberte Dallas. Perpétuellement à la recherche d’une mère disparue précocement, désespérant de trouver un contact sécurisant avec un père malade…”

Poets whom children should be forbidden to read. At the age of fifteen she found her own maudits. First Sophie Podolski and Le pays où tout est permis, then Tristán Cabral, then Michel Bulteau and Matthieu Messagier. At sixteen she grew tired of them and returned to Gilberte Dallas. The sound of the words reminded her of her mother. She read her aloud, alone, when her father had gone out or was in class, and the strains of Gilberte brought back the green armchair in Rio and her mother gazing out the window at the three rival silhouettes and the treetops of the Paseo Marítimo and the sea a few yards beyond. And then her mother told her stories about what she was like as a baby and what she would be like when she was grown-up and beautiful. And she no longer needed to read Gilberte because the kisses they exchanged and her eyes closing were more powerful and soothing than words.

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