Speechless - Tom Lanoye

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is gardening intently as always, without looking right or left. Her Roger is taking a nap in the middle of the lawn in a deckchair under a large red plastic parasol. From the transistor on the table next to him pours bel canto song, alternating with match reports and weather forecasts for pigeon fanciers and canal shipping. He sleeps through everything.

      It is a radiant Sunday in September, sometime in the second half of the twentieth century. She must be about sixty. It may be five years more or five years less. Doesn’t matter. This is her. Made entirely of language and yet exactly as she was. She is digging up her harvest with her bare hands, from small earth banks, consisting of the sandy soil that makes our native region so suitable for growing asparagus and for not much else, unless it be floury potatoes.

      She cuts the asparagus, thin and pale as the hands of a dead piano player, according to a fixed ritual, mercilessly tender, never rushing it. First she gropes around in the soil wrist-deep, where a crack or a small nipple that has already turned purple in the earth wall has betrayed the upward thrust of an asparagus shoot, sitting waiting milk-white in our dark earth. Her hand stirs about cautiously in the opening, while she herself closes her eyes, increasing the sensitivity of touch in her hand by excluding visual stimuli. At first she appears not to find what she is looking for. She stirs ever deeper. For a moment you are afraid that her arm will gradually disappear into the hole, up to her armpits, as if the earth is a pregnant cow and she a gentle-natured vet who has to arrange a number of organs, for order and neatness are important everywhere, definitely in the innards of a globe. But now she strikes with her kitchen knife—an heirloom with a bone handle and a blade that that has become wafer-thin with all the sharpening, the cutting edge has even worn into a half-moon shape. ([she, speaking with certainty] ‘One fine day that knife will break in half, on a shoot no thicker than a child’s little finger.’)

      By the time she is finished the sweat is running down from under her hairband. Standing up, she wipes it away with her wrist, dirtying her face as well with a shadow of poor earth and the sickly, slightly bitter smell of her harvest. It is displayed next to her on a piece of old newspaper. [she, just as certain] ‘You’re right, these are the first, still a bit skinny and stringy. It will be years before they can compete with the ones from Mechelen, which are the best in the world—don’t let those Spaniards or Dutch fool you, they can have as much sandy soil as they like over there. But this here, look? Still enough for a pan of soup. With some chicken bouillon added, some fresh parsley, a dash of cream. There are restaurants where they can’t put that on the menu. Unless from packets. [she, contemptuously] Nonsense, that may come out of packets. My soup? Never.’

      Her eyes glitter combatively at the prospect of, by way of proof, preparing her fresh soup, this very night, for tomorrow afternoon. But each time she has stood up she groans, with one hand half on her hip, half on her back: ‘Goodness me, I almost couldn’t stand up. That back, that back, that back. I should have been in a wheelchair for twenty years. If it goes on like this it won’t be much longer.’ Unaware of the gross irony of that prediction.

      This ailment is not in her imagination. Since her birth her spine, from coccyx to neck vertebrae, has exhibited an S-shape that is growing worse as the years go by. She is shrinking faster than other elderly people, and she is already so small. There are X-ray photos in which one loop of the S curls over one of her kidneys, while the other curls menacingly toward the opposite shoulder blade. ‘If I ever fall off a step ladder, the whole lot will go splat.’ [she, with strange pride]

      In order to spare her constitution she should not lift anything and never work leaning forward. ‘If I had listened to that, I should have lain in bed for years, paralysed from head to toe. Work and still more work, I say. [she, cantankerous, rebellious] Only then will the muscles stay strong enough to support a ruin, however much they may creak.’ Whereupon she sits down and pulls up weeds. Then, kneeling again, she trims all the rhododendrons, as intently as if praying.

      Even on the lawn she kneels a little later, with a spoon and a jar of blue powder. The remedy given to her by the hunchbacked shoemaker—‘push a bottle with the bottom knocked out into the molehills, neck upwards, so that the wind fills the underground passages with a terrifying whistling’—hasn’t worked. The bloody creatures are once again ruining her lawn. She has to put an end to it.

      Once and for all.

      She scratches a molehill open and carefully spoons in her blue powder. A few metres away her Roger turns in his sleep again, smacking his lips with content, snoring in the shade of a plastic parasol. Sunday afternoon, his only moment of rest. The canopy remains unfathomably blue and bel canto and reports babble from the radio. Will Beveren be champions this year? Nothing and everything at the same time. Wap-wáp, wap-wáp, wap-wáp. In Saint Quentin thick fog expected, visibility less than twenty metres. I know I mustn’t ask, but how is your book going? The minders wait before releasing the pigeons. No more running away. Buggered, hu-hu-hu. Delete, delete, the Leie. Sint-Baafs-Vijve: thirteen beam shots lowered. On the banks of the Scheldt. Well hidden in the reeds. Once more, come on. The canopy is blue. The world is vast. / Life too. / We’re not.

      That’s enough.

      Begin.

      -

      she

      (OR: DUMBSTRUCK)

      -

      ON THE DAY that fate strikes they are eating pizza and watching the end of the evening news. She and he, Josée and Roger, side by side. Glass of red wine to go with it, and also a green salad with freshly chopped onion, slices of tomato and grated cucumber, all sprinkled with a simple vinaigrette and a garnish of ground parsley, ‘since [she of course] just because you’re eating a pizza, you mustn’t lose sight of your vitamins, certainly not at our age, and especially not in the depths of autumn, and … Roger! Can you turn that TV down a bit? A person can barely hear themselves speak. And anyway it’s those football results again. Very soon you’ll know them off by heart.’

      Words to that effect.

      The napkins are simple but indestructible damask, and from frequent washing have become as soft as a child’s pyjamas. The cutlery, as old as their marriage, is silver-plated and has recently been given another polish. The handles, with their curlicued decoration, shine like they used to, ‘because [she, militant] just because you’re both in your eighties, there’s no need to get sloppy. Style is a matter of will, and of continued will. People have only themselves to blame or to thank.’

      True to that motto, every morning they complete the crossword puzzle of their regular paper, Het Laatste Nieuws, together, to sharpen the memory and hone the mind. In case of disagreement a three-volume dictionary is consulted. With English supplements and French films she regularly consults her dictionaries, still in the old spelling. She has repaired the front and back covers, which had become detached, with black insulating tape, cadged from a theatre technician.

      To strengthen the body too against wear and tear, after doing the crossword puzzle, on her initiative and against his wishes, they lie down together next to their table, on the Persian rug, for a series of cautious sit-ups.

      ‘How many more to go?’ [he, on the rare occasions when he grumbles]

      [she, imperturbable] ‘Be quiet and carry on.’

      That’s what their morning is like.

      It’s evening now and they are eating pizza. The crystal wine glasses have been produced, as they are every evening, from the china cabinet, in which the finest components of their finest service are displayed alongside their most precious ornaments, on glass shelves three or four storeys high. A school of motionless decorative fish in an aquarium brim-full of purple water, since the cabinet, narrow and high, has two doors and two sides with mauve leaded lights.

      The pattern that the lead-lines follow is diamond-shaped. The glass is the same kind—with optical undulations and here and there a colourless pane—as that of the terrace door which, right opposite the cabinet, opens onto a balcony overlooking the street. Well, ‘balcony’. A zinc base, two plant tubs, a wrought-iron balustrade in a black circle, that’s it. The terrace door has exactly the same lead diamond shapes, in

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