A cappella

Chapter 10: Tightrope walking

Max, setting aside the books given to him by Marion, began to read the article written by his mother. It wasn't very often that he read in French, which is why the format of the article attracted him, short, personal, intimate even, since it was his mother who spoke. Mix marriage was the title, a catchy one, he thought.

We married, me and him, and in doing so, we both left behind a lot of our traditions and customs. It is like a coat that one would have taken off when entering to find each other face-to-face, naked, after getting rid of all the social conventions. Otherwise, the marriage might not have held, lots of irreconcilable differences under one roof...he came from the east, I came from the west, and each one, therefore, reducing to the minimum our cultural baggage to be able to understand one another. We have remained with the essentials. In time we also had to reconsider certain things that we kept on believing were important and that we ended up throwing overboard too.

So I left behind a lot of what came from my country, my childhood friends, my work as a teacher, and then Christmas, Easter, the galette of kings, even lunch was no longer at midday! Little by little, contacts with my family were also less frequent.

Similarly, he had to sacrifice a lot of things that I do not even know about, but which, I can see, when he sits down to chat with any Syrian migrant who crosses his path. I only know his loss for his brother, just like that, with time, by dint of distance. His black hair too, and his smile...

The apartment around us was not always the same, since we traveled a lot, but it still bore a slight similarity, with only a few paintings on big white walls, basic sofas, with an impersonal and modern style. Nothing that comes from his family or mine, nothing that has a history, a past. This world having begun the moment we crossed the threshold with our bare hands.

Each of us bore his mother tongue as the only real wealth, and offered it to the other as a wedding gift, and it was just like a game for us to go from language to the other and compare them, gradually weaving a solid relationship of which we were proud. Everything else was secondary and we could do without.

With time, however, and children, and travel, the little we carried with us started to weigh and we also began to consider the two languages that tied us at the beginning, no longer like the rich tapestry, nor as a necessary protective net, but as a worn and superfluous spider web, an unnecessary weight. After all these years together, and all the talking between us, our children could certainly walk back and forth from our home to the outside world using one language or the other, whichever it is, it was just a thread to communicate with others.

Balanced in spirit, linguists by force of things, they would walk on this thread barefoot, bare hands, as we had taught them, going with the essentials without any protective net. Sometimes, however, doubt came to us, and the dreadful fear that one of them would lose the balance would crush our hearts...

Indeed, without the warmth of the initial fabric, the relative emptiness of our walls that made up our living space grew ever more crudely, and the children speaking, during our travels, each a language that the others did not know well, were now more often locked in the silence of their individual bedrooms. Outside, it was cold, and the cold insidiously creeped in without a word, through the walls, into our hearts...

Furious, Max placed the paper on the bed sheets and stood up to take a few steps inside the room. So they were tightrope walkers without the rope??! Strange people who could not find their place anywhere, and who, because of all the languages they spoke, uttered no words and found refuge in silence and solitude??!

What a cruel image of his family this article sent him! It was almost a vision of a nightmare, and at the same time...he recognised himself terribly in this narrative.

For years they were oscillating between a country where everyone kisses and another where they greet by putting their hands on their hearts while lowering their eyes! It was a perilous exercise to move from one country to the other, to be both at the same time...

"No, No," said Max looking through the window of his hospital room. The pedestrians' quiet agitation in the center of Bayonne, and the dead leaves of a large plane tree whirling in the wind. I don't want to be this traveler with no luggage, this man with bare hands. I'll stop moving, stay there in the southwest, I'll call it home. I will not move, I'll cultivate my garden, yes, my family, and my roots... I will learn better French and restore myself... a social fabric, a cocoon.

But then his rebellious spirit came rushing back to him: what had prompted her to write this bitter text? He said to himself. Did she herself lose her balance? He was suddenly back in their living room in Vienna, the large apartment in the city center where they now lived: a large vestibule with bright parquet flooring, a large living room with a high ceiling and light leather sofas... and the walls of the kitchen covered with drawing of children... it was an apartment where not everything was perfectly arranged but where a spirit of freedom and love reigned, which he missed as soon as he was away for a while... not really what his mother had described!

He was going to talk to her. Or better, reply to her article, to the reader's mail, it would be more amusing!

......

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