Epilogue : The voiceless karaoke, a personal experience (not an Episode)
Wow… What a story! I had thought this was going to be funny until the end, but it was not...
But I just wanted to share this ultimate experience I had with Lola, which I had barely met in person during the whole time her writings were published here.
One day, when we were approaching the end of the story, my phone rang again. It was Lola.
“I want to thank you”, she said.
“You don’t have to!”, I answered politely, the pleasure was all mine.
In reality, I was slightly in awe of meeting this lady that seemed to have a sacré caractère.
“It’s an order!”, she yelled at me through the phone in a voice that left no doubt as for my 0 choices.
Better let the lady finish what she started, I thought, than be found dead or cut in pieces in some sewage pipe…
“Ok, tell me when and where…”
“Tomorrow, at my place, 20.30, is it OK with you?”
“Actually, I can’t tomorrow, I have to…”
She had already hung up…
I admit I am not a very brave parson. When I see I don’t have a choice I like, I almost too easily choose the beta option, an “easy going” person as people say, which is not exactly what I am either, but anyhow…
Next day at 20.30 I found myself in front of her building, somewhere in St. Josse, the equivalent of downtown Beirut in Belgium for those among you not acquainted with Brussels. It was one of those suicidal tenements built in the 70s, which must have surely been the worst architectural decade ever. It was dark, and there was no light at the entrance. I put on my glasses to try and read her name. As I had come a bit too close to the parlophone trying to decipher all those obsolete tags, a voice came out ordering me:
“6th floor, first door on the right!”
It scared the hell out of me…
There was no lift, and no light inside either. The staircase was claustrophobic and narrow, made from mosaic, as all similar buildings in Belgium. The air was bad, I could smell foulness and food. I heard children crying, the sound of TV in Arabic, a bed making the sound a bed makes when two people make the second best thing we do on a bed (the first is by far reading, and sleeping comes only third), and a man screaming to his wife.
Finally, I reached to the 6th floor…
The door was half open. I knocked
“Are you handicapped? Push and get inside!”, I was ordered again.
I did so timidly. The narrow apartment was as smoky as it could get. A cold light from a plain neon bulb and steamy windows were the things I observed first. The air was thick and foul. Strange, I thought, for a cleaning lady to live in such a mess.
Lola sat at the table smoking her cigar, with her back turned. She did not turn when I came in. She must have seen this in Godfather, when they all come at the office of Marlon Brando and he sits there with his back turned. Under certain circumstances, showing your back gives virtual weight and importance to the person.
Still, in this apartment, it looked more like a parody. But wasn’t Lola a parody of a person?
I did not tell her that of course…
“Sit!”, she said, but there was hardly nowhere to sit. I had to sit with her at her kitchen table, that must have also been her living room table. Given the dimensions of the place and the small table, I found myself facing Lola tête-à-tête in just a few centimetres distance. “Is this too close?” I asked myself… To which she puffed all her cigar smoke in my face, and I started coughing like crazy.
“HA!”, she laughed. “Men are not what they used to be!”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“See what I mean? Women have to explain even the smallest of things!”.
I had no comment to this new provocation and started asking myself what the hell I was doing there...
“Don’t be afraid, kid”, she read my thoughts, “I just wanted to thank you.”
“Yeah, you already said that”, I said.
I must admit Lola had the air of someone that, having lost years before all inner spontaneity, compensated with a complete reassurance of her acts. I had the impression that what was going to happen would happen whatever I did or said, and I was going to be just a mere witness, nothing more.
She stood up, walked towards the door and locked it.
“Oh my God!”, I thought, this was DEFINITELY a big mistake. I must honestly admit I was convinced she was going to harm me , either physically (toilet brush) or emotionally (kiss me or worse).
But after locking the door, she directed herself to a narrow, vertical cupboard that I imagined would contain either an ironing board or a gun. Both seemed potentially dangerous, but the door was locked...
Then Lola opened the cupboard and took out, what else? An electric guitar!
She was not ready to stop surprising me, this lady… What the hell was she doing with an electric guitar? She’s more than 90 years old! She can’t even hold it, I thought!
“Look at you, kid”, she finally said. “Soon you’ll shit in your pants!”
And without really noticing me or even looking at me in the eyes, she kept on doing what she had already planed to do to thank me. Which involved for the moment connecting wires to two cheap loudspeakers and an old cassette player. Finally, she connected the guitar as well, and said:
“Are you European?”
“What?”
“”I asked you, are you European?”
“Well, yes, I am European. But of course it all depends what you mean by European”, I said intellectually, in fact trying to win time and figure out where was this all leading…
“Well, fuck you!”, she said.
“What? What’s your problem, lady? Did I insult you, offend you in any way?”
“I said, fuck you, kid!”, she repeated without hesitating. “What exactly did you do to be European?”
“Nothing”, I said. “You don’t have to DO something to be European, you’re born European!”
“You’re right”, she said, and looked me menacingly in the eyes. “You did what you best can do to be European, as you have just said: Nothing. So, fuck you again!”
I was trying to find an answer, more because her manners irritated me than because I had an argument. The lady was actually right. I had done nothing to be a European, apart from being the child of European parents...
And then she said:
“I swam with my daughter a frozen river to be European. What did you do?”
“But wait…”
“Now shut up and listen!”, she ordered me again, “this one’s for you kid!”
And she took the electric guitar and, with her cigar hanging at the edge of her toothless mouth played this song, without pause.
The music was at diapason, the windows were closed, the air was foul and Lola kept head-banging and playing with her eyes closed Beethoven’s ninth symphony, voiceless karaoke, hard-rock version, the Hymn of the European Union, while the smoke of her cigar was falling on me, she was that close!
I have never, ever being in a more weird situation in my whole life… But Lola kept on, and all I had to do was listen to her, a toothless cleaning lady of almost 100 years old playing the metal version of the European anthem in a small kitchen with a white neon light and a locked door. I mean, I have always managed to be there when strange things happen, but this time I had really exceeded myself!
Finally, the song was over, and Lola gave a sigh. Then she sat again at the table, and said:
“That’s it kid. Now you may go…”
“But, I can’t understand…”
“It’s an order!”, she yelled, and turned her back to me, went to the door and unlocked it.
“But…”, I tried to say something, but this time I did not.
I stood up, got out of the apartment, the building and Lola’s life and into fresh, thinner air.
I took a deep breath of the cold winter and looked up from the road at Lola’s apartment. She was there, looking at me from inside her steamy window. I could hear her laughing loudly...
I continued walking without turning back…
__________________
I walk every day below the statue of Claus to go to my office.
After reading Lola’s story, I strictly avoid looking straight at the eyes of the statue anymore.
Once I did, and I would swear I saw his eyes looking at me, like behind a carnival mask, as if asking me
“What did you do to be a European?”