Undressing Emmanuelle: A memoir

Kristel is my real name, from the word ‘crystal’. It suited my father’s fragile luminosity.

There’s not always a reason for fragility, it can just be a part of someone’s nature. My father was fragile but he hid it, drowning and destroying himself in alcohol and noise. My father adored clay-pigeon shooting and hunting, and his carpentry machines – the screaming metal beasts that lived in his refuge, the attic. He would listen to the intolerable mechanical roar of these carving tools without ear protection.

When out hunting he would fire his gun often, right next to his ears, shooting rebelliously in the air out of a taste for loud noises. By middle age he was almost deaf, which suited him. The voices of the women, the cries and screaming of the children, these signs of life slowly disappeared, growing fainter like an echo, vanishing into his silence and leaving him in his chosen solitude.

My father had not been a child. He was sent to boarding school at four years old. I imagine him as a brave little chap, clever, forced to act grown up, to make his bed without creases, not to cry at an age when that’s all you can do. He grew up alone, with no protection, never carefree. He discovered desire before love, and alcohol first of all.

My father drank, hunted, loved the sea, sport, flesh and chess. In Dutch chess is called schaken, which also refers to the abduction of a sweet young girl by a nasty man.

Perhaps my father thought he was nasty, but he wasn’t. Just broken and mostly absent.

In his attic he makes chess figurines. There are hundreds of them, arranged according to size and by category: queens, castles, pawns, bishops. The best ones in front, the flawed hidden behind. There’s no end to this manic creativity, or to my father’s obsession with this game, this strategic battle, this checkmate.

Sometimes when I’m bored I go up there to see him, daring to enter. He stops his machine and sits motionless, looking at me. I smile at him, feeling like his prettiest figurine. He points out his new creations then quickly starts work again, and I clear off to escape the racket.

My father was Catholic, the son of a hotel-owner and a musician. My grandfather ran an orchestra, and once brought back with him from a trip to Switzerland a strange, unique instrument that made the sound of a fairy tale: a xylophone. It drew people from all around.

My mother came from a humble peasant background, she was a Calvinist and very beautiful. She was brought up strictly by her widowed mother, to an extremely harsh religious code. Fear of divine punishment replaced a father’s discipline.

I remember my mother when she was young; she was fluid as a bohemian dancer, charming and stylish as a movie star. My parents met at a ball. They danced together for a long time, floating, dazzled. My father loved women, and beauty; he loved my mother from that first dance.

Mum loved dancing, it was her element. Her other loves were dressmaking, work and my father. She wasn’t very religious. Marriage gave her an escape from religious excess and the fear of God. She preferred profane to divine love, and converted to Catholicism out of faith in my father. My mother didn’t go to Mass, but made us keep that weekly ritual in her place.

I loved this Sunday outing. At the end of the ceremony I would smile angelically and sidle up to the collection plates to pinch the money I sometimes found there. I would shake the collection boxes and force open their ridiculous little lids, then take my sister to the movies to watch Laurel and Hardy. Much more fun.

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Once she was a wife and mother – just a few years after that first ball – my mother stopped dancing. She worked. My mother no longer did the thing she loved. She became obsessed by the beneficial effects of hard toil, austere as a matter of duty, irritable, often sad as she witnessed my father’s slow flight.

She concentrated on her daily tasks, on the hotel and her children. She concerned herself with our homework, our health, our cleanliness and the perfect ironing of our clothes, which she often made – with some skill – herself. My mother was unable to express her affection other than through faultless material care. We were scattered around so as not to disturb hotel business. I was often in my bedroom, Marianne with our neighbours – kind, cigar-selling shopkeepers – and my brother wherever he pleased. He was the family’s little man; he called the shots.

People say they miss the deceased. I missed my father and my mother when they were still fully alive. They travelled through my childhood in the same way they moved around the hotel: my mother industrious, hurried, hidden; my father drunk, flamboyant, alone.

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‘Mrs Kristel?! Mrs Kristel?!’

The man in the hotel lobby is getting upset. It’s Mr Janssen, who runs the newspaper shop across the street from the hotel. Aunt Mary hurries off to find my mother, who comes down looking surprised, a chrome thimble on her finger.

‘Yes, Mr Janssen, what can I do for you?’ she asks nervously.

‘Keep your girls under control, Mrs Kristel! Keep them under control!’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘How old are they, now?’

‘Sylvia will be ten this autumn and Marianne is eight, why?’

‘Ten and eight … well, it doesn’t augur …’

‘What doesn’t it augur?’ My mother is getting impatient.

‘It just doesn’t augur well, that’s all!’

My mother turns towards me and starts interrogating me.

‘What have you done?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?!’

Mr Janssen interrupts me.

‘Mrs Kristel, since the beginning of the summer your daughter and her little sister have been cavorting on the tables of your restaurant. At around 3 p.m., when the room is empty. Laughing, singing, gesticulating –’

‘But they are children, Mr Janssen!’ my mother cuts in. ‘Children do play and dance!’

‘Yes, but not naked! Totally naked! They undress and parade around, stroking themselves and wiggling about so outrageously that passers-by stare, and then bash into the telephone box! Look, the glass panel has broken! Your daughters find it amusing, especially the older one. If the collision is violent, they leap off the table like fleas and scarper. I’m the only one who’s seen what they’re up to. Don’t you hear them?! They sing their heads off, which is to say they screech. I can hear them through an open window on the other side of the road! I haven’t said anything until now, but I’m warning you –’

My mother interrupts Mr Janssen again.

‘OK, Mr Janssen, OK. Please forgive us, I’m very sorry. Sylvia sometimes likes to draw attention to herself, you know how they can be at her age, and her sister is still young and easily influenced … but it won’t happen again.’

The neighbour goes off, shaking his head and still muttering: ‘Ten and eight …’

My mother is bright red. Her time has been wasted and her local reputation trashed. She runs around the hotel screaming and foaming at the mouth. She is tracking me down, full of threats.

‘Sylvia! Sylvia! If you don’t come here right now …’

But I’ve been out of there for a while. It had been obvious that Mr Janssen wasn’t coming over to discuss the day’s gossip. I am crouched down in my new hiding place, the cupboard on the half-landing of the stairs. Aunt Alice knows but she doesn’t let on. She has seen me and has stationed herself just in front, with her back to the cupboard.

‘Where is Sylvia?! Do you know where she is, or what?!’

My mother’s rage isn’t passing. She has armed herself with the big willow carpet-beater she uses on the mattresses, and of course her long pointy nails that pierce the skin like staples. She threatens Aunt Alice, throwing her hands up in the air and yelling that she ‘didn’t deserve this’!

I stay in that cupboard for two hours, not making a sound. My mother is bound to calm down eventually. It is a matter of time. Soon she will get out the little steel goblet she hides in her sewing box like an oversized thimble, and drink dozens of small sips of sherry or white wine, sometimes even the whole bottle – but by thimbleful, persuading herself that these sips added up to less than the whole. She will fall asleep, shattered, beaten and drunk. She will forget. I will escape the willow whip.

So Mr Nosy’s nose exploded like a ripe fruit? Tough luck. I am up for anything to avoid boredom and get some attention.

My brother has found another, effective way of getting attention. He shapes his faeces into little geometric sculptures that he attempts to stick to the walls, laughing and running off with dirty hands and stripes on his face like an Indian. My mother swears and rages, apologises to the customers, pleads her helplessness with a sponge in her hand. Marianne spends more and more time at the neighbours’ house with her friend Anneke. They are as thick as thieves. When I bump into her in the hotel she smiles at me. She gives off a mysterious smell of tobacco these days. She seems happy with her life next door.

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‘I hate penetration! Do you understand?’

My mother is drunk. She has taken me by the shoulders and is staring at me fixedly, repeating: ‘I hate penetration. I can’t stand your father coming back from hunting or wherever, reeking of alcohol, sweat and blood, slipping into my bed while I sleep and wanting to penetrate me. I’m sleeping, tired, and he is all dirty and excited and wants to penetrate me. I don’t want it, I can’t do it. I’m too tight, do you understand?!’