From L’Atelier Chantorel
Gaston hadn’t known his father and had only a confused recollection of his mother: a pretty young woman with blue eyes, golden hair, soft skin, and kind hands that smelled good. Through the obscurity of the past, he perceived a luxurious interior, a grand piano, shiny parquet floors in which the furniture could be seen reflected, windows with stone balusters, a crystal chandelier that tinkled imperceptibly, a gray sky, rain, fog, animated streets, piers, water, and ships, Oh! many ships crammed together side by side, enormous ships, immobile, so large and dark that they appeared amusing and terrifying at the same time. Nothing precise. The silhouettes whose indelible imprint his too young memory had been unable to retain were confused with dreams.
Yet, a few scraps of days gone by had remained solidly anchored in the child’s mind, memories luminous and sharp, like objects that are vivified by the slender ray of light filtering through a basement grate. It wasn’t the important events of his life that had dug the deepest furrows, small details had dominated him entirely. In his eyes, his mother’s death didn’t appear as a clearly defined image. He recalled the patient lying down, asleep, then no longer present. As a result, he experienced no real suffering; for, at that moment, incapable of assigning a true meaning to the eternal separation whose horror he was unable to comprehend, he had thought that “his maman” had left and would return. This resulted in a fugitive grief that Gaston had vainly tried later to resuscitate. He had cried abundantly but had been torn by a much more pronounced suffering, one evening when his toe had gone through a worn slipper; in spite of his cries and pleas, he had been forced to keep the slipper on his foot and the barbarous tenacity of the servant had made him, for more than a quarter of an hour, the most miserable of creatures.
Gaston recalled, without hesitation, a table placed between two windows, beneath which he would huddle to play, delighted by the solitude of that intimate corner. He distinctly heard, down to the slightest nuance, melodies once played on the piano by his mother or aunt. He clung to insignificant details: the pattern on a wall hanging, the taste of a cough syrup, the color of a curtain, the shape of a charm representing a tiny ivory puppet worn by a doctor who had listened to his heart, the cry of a traveling peddler passing beneath his windows, and a thousand other nothings lodged like nails in his brain, without understanding why. The reasoning that had thus affected his sensations had disappeared; little by little, age had regulated his judgments, like the mechanism of a new watch, and the cause of certain tenacious and puerile memories escaped him. The effect lingered on, illogically, without any connection to the past.
Gaston’s father married late. He had wed an Englishwoman, a teacher twenty-two years his junior, whose beauty and intelligence had shaken his apathetic and cold nature, which, until then, had been resistant to any form of excitement. Monsieur Dorsner’s passion for his wife, who had no fortune, swept aside his nonchalance. Determined to change into luxury the well-being he had been satisfied with as a boy, when the days ran quietly by in his small house in Amsterdam, he withdrew his capital from the Van Beer Brothers, shipowners in Rotterdam, and resolved to acquire large plots of land in Sumatra, where he would attempt to cultivate coffee. Laura failed to view, other than with repugnance, a project that would oblige her husband to live for months at a time far from her. Powerless to alter a resolution that had been made final, she suggested that she might at least accompany the colonist. Dorsner refused with that particular stubbornness characteristic of the gentlehearted. He had intended to actively promote the plantation and train an intelligent steward capable of running it when the time came. He would then return to Holland and busy himself with the sale of his colonial production. The separation would, therefore, not be interminable. He departed alone, leaving Laura behind with her sister Ameline.
Robert Bononno 