We cross the lane and approach the villa. The hallways in the house must be streets in their own right, the rooms all ballrooms. We plant our finger on the round doorbell. Somewhere deep in the house, metal strikes a gong and we hear the loud reverberation.
It takes a long time. A very long time. This, too, we expected. We know this milieu; we’re aware of the time of day. In a neighbourhood like this one it’s not unusual for postmen or firemen making the rounds for their annual collection to think they’ve encountered an empty house. But they’re being watched from behind closed curtains and from indoor landings by kneeling cleaning women who are dusting the tubular limbs of the radiators, or by the lady of the house, clad in bathrobe and slippers, as she shuffles her way from the bathroom to the dressing room and looks down through the little window on the landing. The callers know it will be a long time before the locks of the fortified citadels are opened, one by one, and they stand face to face with a human being.
But now it’s been a very long time. We ring the doorbell once again. The sound is loud indeed. We’ve come all this way to congratulate Stefaan. The Vandersandens propagating themselves: that is a happy event that we, too, want to celebrate. Apparently we’re too late, or too early. After a third ring and a long wait, when there’s still no sign of life, we take a step back and search the front of the house for any movement behind one of the many windows. Nothing.
As unannounced visitors we now commit a double violation. We step away from the path to the front door and walk across the grass, past the windows. You see, there is someone home, isn’t there? Sitting in a dark red chesterfield armchair is a squat figure in a flowered robe. It’s unusual for someone in the housing estate to sit at the window in an armchair. The street is so far away that you can hardly see anything from the window. And gazing out at the street is the sort of thing old working-class women do. Those kinds of women don’t live on the mountain.
You would expect her to be startled by the loud tap on the glass, but the woman in the chair doesn’t stir. It’s difficult to tell whether her eyes are closed or just sunken into her fleshy, wrinkle-ridden face. Her short legs don’t reach the floor but hang in the air, motionless. Is the old woman unconscious, sitting there in the chair? Or is she dead? No, she cannot be dead. To get the old woman’s attention in some other way (she may be deaf), we wave at her.
The elderly woman does not wave back. Not even a nod of the head. It’s possible that her eyelids moved, like butterfly wings, but that may have been in response to a slight draught. The old woman is slouched in the chair at an angle. Just when we’re about to pronounce her dead, her bosom heaves up and down. A sigh escapes from the bellows of her sturdy body. The old woman’s heavy head falls forward and is hoisted back up. The head is all we need. Everything is under control. She is alive, her son is alive, and he has been given an heir. We’ll come back later.
Melanie Vandersanden-Plottier pushes herself out of the armchair. With great difficulty and loud groaning she slides to the edge of the chair until her orthopedically encased feet touch the floor. The heavy body rights itself. There stands Melanie at full length, far more pitiful than impressive. Stefaan’s mother is no taller than one of the rose bushes in the front garden under the bluestone window ledge that is luring the first rays of spring to shine on its buds. The rough-edged little woman is as prickly as the bush and just as uncommunicative. She no longer finds it necessary to reach out to the world around her. Melanie only speaks when she is of a mind to.
Sometimes there are outbursts or brief phases in which she says a great deal. She can give her son a good tongue-lashing when the occasion calls for it, for which her aged body can still work up the energy. Otherwise there’s little that disturbs her enough to waste words on. She has a goodly number of obscenities at the ready, though. When she grabbed an open bag of frozen peas from the wrong end recently, strewing peas all over the kitchen floor, her uncouth words tore through the kitchen like a tornado. Down on her swollen knees, she picked up the peas from the marble floor one by one. After the last pea had been swept into the dust pan she disappeared into the cellar, only to re-emerge one hour later, thoroughly subdued, the angry words shaken out and released into the chill of the apple bin.
Her poor vision, bordering on blindness, doesn’t keep her from tootling around in her Fiat. Accelerating on the curves and driving down the middle of the road rather than on the right (just to be on the safe side), Melanie cuts her trail through Flanders. Police officers can chase her all they like, but she just keeps on driving—even stepping on the gas if necessary.
She’s known far and wide as a first-class grumbling curmudgeon. In all fairness, the gossips do report that there are mitigating circumstances to excuse her dreadful personality: the many tragedies she has endured. She never talks about the tragedies. She saves her peevishness for things no one can do anything about. If the sky is overcast, Melanie has the right to look so disagreeable and accusatory that an outsider will find himself apologizing spontaneously without having any idea why. If Melanie is deeply displeased by something (bird droppings on the window or margarine instead of real butter), she closes up like a clam and pretends to be as deaf as a post for a couple of hours.
And now the woman raises herself from the expensive chesterfield armchair belonging to her son Stefaan and his wife Mieke. Her eagle eye pans the relatively empty, oversized living room. Persian rugs cover the parquet floor, pieces of antique furniture try to out-age each other, and an original Permeke farmer’s wife, dressed in her Sunday best, gazes at the interior. What’s missing are little figurines for cosiness, a display case for gaudiness, calendars for memory, and a few crucifixes for piety. Her son and his wife prefer to spend lots of money on superannuated antiques, because they’re the kinds of overpriced furnishings that belong in a villa of this calibre. The beams over her head come from a demolished mill, the property of Mieke’s father of blessed memory. The house is bigger than the parish church, and it also has a gigantic cellar and a crawl space. Even the bedrooms are heated, and all the windows are double-glazed. As if a person actually needed all that.
Anyway, Melanie knows her place. The mother who scarcely speaks two words in succession is waiting in the lovely home of her still living son. He’s come a long way: made it to the mountain, with a wife of wealthy parentage at his side. Only now, at age forty, is he having his first child. God, it certainly did take them long enough.
In the meantime the sun has made its way to the other side of the house. Melanie has already been down to the cellar to calm herself and has now clambered back into her pricey but not particularly comfortable armchair. In the chill of the kitchen behind her, the thermostat kicks in. All this time Melanie has been doing what was asked of her: she is keeping watch. She is the house’s security guard.
Finally the taxi turns into the driveway. Her son Stefaan jumps out of the car, leans on the doorbell, lets himself in, tears into the living room, congratulates Melanie for her grandmotherhood, and even makes an attempt to plant a kiss on her cheek. She remains seated. She doesn’t move a muscle, doesn’t even greet him. She doesn’t ask Stefaan how it went, or whether it’s a boy or a girl, or how Mieke is doing. Nor does she say a single thing about what or who rudely interrupted her sleep this afternoon. Melanie’s eyes wander through the living room, making their way toward her son. Then an index finger shoots out of her solid torso. She points ominously at Stefaan’s shoes on the living room rug. She has the right to blow the whistle on her son, regardless of the circumstances. It is her intention to keep raising her one living child for as long as she lives.
There are still a number of people in West Flanders who can tell the story of how Melanie brought her oldest son into the world at four o’clock in the morning. She had just enough time to wrap the little one in a sausage of linen and bind him to her bosom before relieving the lowing cows of their straining udders and spending the rest of the day working in the field. Stronger than a workhorse, that was Melanie.
During his first hours of life her oldest son filled his lungs with the moist stench of manure and the sour smell of barley gruel. Eighteen