Speechless - Tom Lanoye

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forthright. Yes, just look around, from one to the other: here they sit, the assembled Verbekes, glued to a festive table like bees to a honeycomb. Most are accompanied by their offspring. In their hands they hold a cigar or a glass of Elixir d’Anvers, one is sucking a Leonidas chocolate and the other is nibbling an almond biscuit from Jules Destrooper. But they all have faces that speak volumes, as only the faces of older relations can speak volumes the moment the conversation turns to one of the youngest and most turbulent fledglings of the collective nest.

      ‘If our Josée gets something into her head?

      Best keep out of the way.’

      -

      BUT DON’T BE fooled. I’m now talking again, jumping from one thing to another, sorry, about that photo on the front cover. It’s not because that hat suits my mother—[she] ‘All my life it’s been like that, give me a hat and I look good in it, whether it’s a flower pot or a flying saucer’—that in daily life she was often discovered wearing headgear. Certainly not such a striking specimen.

      She preferred a simple hairband when she was sweaty and, well into old age, was unashamedly at work in a swimming costume in the vegetable garden of her allotment. Our summer house, which we had built ourselves, called ‘the bungalow’, or else ‘our bungalow’, was located a stone’s throw from the centre of her and my birthplace, which was once promoted from an insignificant commune to a proper town by none other than Napoleon. He was already emperor at the time.

      Since then Sint-Niklaas has acquired the greatest number of secondary schools in the whole area, the highest suicide rate in the country, and the largest market square—if you like, the largest empty space—in the whole of Europe.

      In order to make up for everything, the emptiness as well as the suicidal thoughts, there rises once a year on that huge, empty market square, in commemoration of the Liberation—a term that awakens in the inhabitants increasingly new meanings and desires—a squadron of gaudy balloons, filled with helium or freshly baked hot air.

      The latter, the modern hot-air balloons, are first rolled out on the ground by three or four balloonists at a time. An unrecognizable jumble that looks like a granny knot tied by giants is expertly disentangled and unfolded into a plastic puddle, capricious and crinkled, in which nevertheless the contours are discernible of the weird balloon shape that is about to astonish us. Or will it be another of those humdrum ones? One of those pears hanging upside down, as multicoloured as a beach ball with delusions of grandeur?

      With lots of hissing and roaring a jet of flame shoots out of a burner which, together with a large fan, is incorporated in a frame that in turn is mounted on top of the balloon basket. For now that basket is lying pathetically on its side. The fan, sideways and rather lazily, directs the jet plus a first stream of hot air into the opening of the balloon. It has to be held open by the balloonist and his helpers. They stand on tiptoe, arms high above their heads, grabbing hold of the slippery edge of the opening with both hands and making sure that that they themselves don’t get caught in the stream of hot air, on pain of having at least their eyelashes and eyebrows singed off, and usually also every hair on their head. One has to make sacrifices for one’s hobby.

      Behind their backs a colossus gradually takes shape, then stands up jerkily, as if after a barbaric open-air childbirth. It raises first its head, then its back, then its upper body. Slowly and majestically it seems to sprout from the ground itself, yes, it springs from our market square in slow motion, surrounded solely by brothers, as if it were one of the countless earth-born warriors which rose from the field that Jason had sown with dragon’s teeth and which he would have to defeat in order to capture the Golden Fleece. In exactly the same way, overpowering and threatening, the modern supermen swell into view, ever fuller, ever higher, until they have clambered completely upright, pulling the basket straight beneath them, their first triumph. Their jets of flame sing louder and more love-struck the more powerful and mightier they become, and look, there they stand finally fully grown, waving the plumes of their helmets, in a neat row: our gentle mastodons, swaying in our inevitable autumn breeze, trembling with expectation as is appropriate after a birth, for the time being still restrained by cables like Gulliver by the Lilliputians, but ready to make an irresistible leap up to the heavens. A contemporary army consisting mainly of figs hanging upside down—they don’t always have to be pears—in all the gaudiest colours of the rainbow. There are also some in the shape of a gingerbread house or a Smurf. There is even a crate of beer of a well-known brand which is also the sponsor of the feather-light monster, since someone has to pay the bills, even those for hot air.

      A little later they climb into the sky magnificently and to loud applause. The scarce helium balloons, caught in fishnets with too large a mesh, just as a female buttock can be squeezed into a saucy stocking, quickly jettison some ballast—bags of river sand, bags of loam. That is: the contents of the bags are scattered to the four winds with exaggerated gestures, in a ritual reminiscent of the ancient sower who still adorns the cover of our school exercise books, although paradoxically no grain is sown, just sand. Sand on stone, sand on emptiness, sand on people, sand on sand.

      It dissipates immediately, to the relief of the upward-looking spectators, since in extreme emergencies, for example to avoid a pylon, it is permitted to offload the sand with bag and all, at the risk of hitting a back-up car or an unsuspecting bovine or occasionally an unfortunate walker, and one disastrous year even, in order to avoid the sharp rake of a television aerial, a pram, thank God empty—the little passenger had just been taken out to peer, holding Daddy’s hand, at the Smurf floating above them, and the next instant, right next to them: splat! A sandbag, slap in the middle of the pram, whose wheels flew off at the impact.

      The hot-air balloons on the other hand, fizzing angrily, suck in an extra long burner flame through their clearly visible arseholes. A reverse fart that, even more in reverse, gives them an upward jerk, toward the wide firmament. In this way our helium globes and our hot-air giants rise in brotherly fashion above our two central church towers, one of which bears a gigantic gilded statue of the Virgin Mary instead of—as would be fitting, in accordance with our legendary Flemish national character, which bursts with modesty—a discreet weathervane or a sluggish dragon, one of those scaly monsters that enjoys being routed by the archangel Michael.

      However, the people of Sint-Niklaas are not known for their discretion or modesty. As a result their Mary does not look as if she will ever permit herself to be routed, and certainly not with enjoyment, not even by an archangel. She is as high as two houses, our Mary, wears a crown on her head and carries a child on her arm. Our Holy Mary as a fertile empress armoured from head to toe in shiny gold leaf. Consequently she is popularly known as Gilt Mary. When there is sufficient mist, despite all the gold leaf, to remove her from sight, the popular sneer is that Gilt Mary is on her travels again, and that she can well afford it, with all that precious metal and all her spare time, because only one child? You can hardly call that a time-consuming task, hardly even a family. One is none.

      Today there is no mist, far from it, there is a slight rain of fine sand, but apart from that it is a brilliant Sunday in September, and the colours are as unruly and shiny as in a Breughel painting, the ordinary people cheer and drink and eat hamburgers with fried onion rings and fresh tomato sauce, while—above the festive stalls and the chewing chops—a squadron of airships takes to the sky. They rise above our chimneys and slates, above our fashionable roof terraces and densely populated balconies packed with waving local celebrities. They brush past many gables belonging to cafés with names like De Graanmaat and Hemelrijck, or shops with names like Weduwe Goethals & Dochters, where they sell crystal glasses and cutlery boxes lined with blue silk, and of a chip shop called Putifar, after the circus donkey in a children’s book.

      They shoot upward, past the front of our relatively recent town hall, upward past the façade of our ancient jail—a former prison which in your childhood served as, what symbolism, a library, and which they shortly plan, what a sign of the times, to convert into lofts, just as they want to convert everything into lofts nowadays, even former libraries where you were once able to wreck your eyesight reading books, without a moment’s regret, and where at a certain moment there wasn’t one book left, according to your age category, for you to read, and where the librarian—may his memory be honoured, his name praised,

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