Originally from France and Switzerland, Nadia is an award-winning playwright as well as filmmaker and actor who trained at Drama Centre London. Her second stage play, Subject Mater, received rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2019, and won a Scotsman’s Fringe First Award for innovation and outstanding new writing. Her debut short film, Lascivious Grace, was selected at various BAFTA- and Oscar-qualifying – festivals. She is currently developing a range of short and feature films, one of which is a commission, with Academy member Ilene Starger on board to exec produce and cast.
Before training as an actor, Nadia studied English, French and Comparative Literature at the University of Zurich, and worked in both the entertainment and publishing industries in the UK and Switzerland.
She is interested in auto-fiction and memoir, hybrid identity and placelessness, female relationships and desire.
Email: nadia.cavelle@gmail.com
@NadiaCavelle
The Crocodile and Other Memories
‘You can’t write this like this.’
I can only see Helen’s chin and lower lip. She is never seated when she logs onto Zoom, always in the process of getting seated. She invariably settles down anywhere but her desk: a too narrow window sill so she can spy on her polyamorous neighbours, her bathtub rim so she can cut her toe nails, the floor so she can meditate while rattling through the many stresses of her life. Today it’s the stool in her garage so she can sort through dozens of lightbulb boxes, tell the old from the new. Lit only by her screen, she is a greenish colour that exacerbates my malaise.
‘You want this to work as a piece, don’t you?’
‘I think so, yes,’ I say, politely at my desk.
‘OK, two things then: one, you need a framing device to make it more than just a random, disjointed list.’
Her face lights up with a working bulb, ruthless and ghostly, and then is green again.
‘Two, that framing device can be the means by which you comment on the child’s perspective.’
‘That sounds complicated. My tutor is getting me to write from the child’s perspective to teach me simplicity.’
‘I get that, but it won’t work for our childhood.’
‘Why not?’
‘Our type of upbringing needs mediation.’
‘Why, because we had staff?’
‘Yes, because we had staff! You can’t write unmediated white privilege, Lisa. Not in this day and age.’
Her face lights up again, whiter than white.
*
Helen is a literary critic and Professor of Comparative Literature specialising in the postcolonial novel. She’s a very impressive twin to have. Her passport name is Hélène, our French mother’s middle name, but she anglified it for work. I was named after our Russian great-grandmother who fell from a horse in childhood, breaking a limb, and then from nobility in 1917. Six months ago, I quit my career as an investment banker and the investment banker husband that came with it. I burned out and my love for him burned with me.
I stayed with Helen in Amsterdam at first, didn’t leave the chaise longue in her study for about twelve weeks. My feet stuck out from one end, so she gave me thick woolly socks she’d bought from a gift shop in Norway. The kitchen table became her desk and she fed me basic sandwiches. I was grateful and surrounded by so many books I felt it would be rude not to read. So I did. Non-stop.
With the chaise longue running alongside shelves stocking works from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western canon, my convalescence turned into a very partial education but an education nonetheless. Mostly, though, it was an inspiration, so much so that one early spring morning, I wrote a few lines, a poem I suppose, about the bird in the blossoming tree at my window. I was asleep when Helen read it without permission. She said it moved her and that I had an unsuspected way with words. This planted a seed somewhere within and, in the weeks I had left, I began to feel more than just admiration when I read; I felt an ‘itch’ and it made me restless.
‘I’m going to be a writer,’ I said, suitcases at my feet. Helen and I had just embraced at the threshold of her front door, her lips salty with my tears, my hands gripping her shoulders as if I were about to lift her up in a Eureka moment. She almost took off from laughter. I watched her until she calmed down and then, with eyes serious like mine, she said, ‘OK, you go do that, Lisa.’
A few days later, back in London, I got an email from her:
Subject: Writing
I won’t read anything you write till it’s published, Lisa. I don’t want you writing for my approval. And I don’t want to influence you. You need to figure out what kind of writer you want to be on your own.
Love,
Hx
P.S. Take a short course.
I took her advice and signed up to a course. I’ve also sent her everything I’ve written on that course so far: three short stories, two poems and, just yesterday, a piece of life writing – the first thing to get a reaction out of her. Her reply popped up as I was writing at my desk, and I was still for so long. When I finally clicked it open, it felt like someone else doing it.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/8235019847
I couldn’t believe that she had a) read it and b) wanted to talk about it. As the fifteen hours between the email and the Zoom meeting fell away, I envisioned all possible reactions – from ‘I’m going to send it my publisher friend’ to ‘get your job back’. I was ready for anything – anything but this.
*
‘But I’m trying to recapture something of my innocence. They keep going on about how our responsibility as writers is to the truth.’
‘You’ve registered your childhood experience in its innocence through your use of language. That has little to do with truth. I mean, just think about the crocodile for a second, Lisa, really think about it.’
THE CROCODILE
In 1985, Papa gets a job out in Jakarta, working as a local manager for a Swiss energy company. He is tasked with developing the sewage system there and all sorts of other electrical installations. He heads out six months ahead of us and is so anxious he needs pills to help him sleep at night. The office is made up of him, his secretary Yanti, his driver Yanto and a ‘teaboy’ named Nono. Not many things work at first, but with time and their daily efforts, they begin to.
Papa et Maman continue to love each other through the crackle of long-distance calls. They are very expensive, so they can only afford one a week. Perhaps they write each other letters too.
Papa saw the ad for the job in the newspaper. ‘Can you imagine?’ he said to Maman, throwing it away with a laugh. She rescued it, told him to be brave and apply. How different life might have been if Maman hadn’t fished out Papa’s destiny.
When we finally join him, Maman follows in Papa’s footsteps and learns Indonesian too. Hélène and I pick it up like shells on a beach.
We start attending a French Montessori close by. One afternoon, on our way home, Maman picks up a puppy from a wild pack up on a little hill. We call it Swatch, like the Swiss watch.
A few weeks or months later, somewhere between the ages of two and five, Hélène and I are asleep in our bedroom. It is night-time. The right side of my bed runs alongside the wall while the head of hers touches the parallel one, so that they form the two lines of an L shape that don’t join up.
A crocodile wakes us up by its mere presence. There it is in the moonlight that lights up our floor, almost as big as our beds, with a tail that curves to the left for me, to the right for her. We scream, together and for dear life. Maman, or Papa, bursts into our room, turning the light on instantly. With that flick, the crocodile disappears, a void in its place. It never comes back and it is years before we speak of it.
‘First of all, it wasn’t the moonlight that lit up our floor, it was the light from the hallway.’
‘Oh yeah, you’re right! It was the light from the hallway!’
‘And it wasn’t big at all. It was small, the size of Swatch.’
‘Really? You remember it that small?’
‘Yes, and thinking about it again after all this time, I’ve realised that it must have been Swatch, Lisa. It’s the only rational explanation. Swatch walked into our room, one of us woke up and saw a crocodile instead, started screaming about there being a crocodile, and so what was just a dog lives on as a crocodile in both our memories.’
‘I think it was a shared night terror. A manifestation of some kind of underlying fear we shared, a feeling of helplessness in the face of our displacement.’
‘Maybe, but the thing is, whichever it was – whether we exoticised the dog or the crocodile manifested out of thin air–’
‘Hold on, exoticised the dog?’ I say, my forehead crinkling with confusion.
‘Yes, Lisa! What we conceived of as monstruous is deeply problematic.’
‘I don’t understand. Who wouldn’t scream if they woke up to a crocodile crawling about their room?’
‘I think the question is more – who would hallucinate a crocodile crawling about their room?’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘In countries where the crocodile is present, the symbolism associated with it tends to be far more positive, or nuanced at least. I can’t say for certain, but I firmly believe that an Indonesian child would have hallucinated a very different monster.’
‘So, essentially, you’re saying that the way fear manifests is cultural –’
‘To an extent, yes.’
‘And that we, two little European girls under the age of five, misappropriated the image of the crocodile.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But that’s what we experienced, Helen!’
‘I know! But if you only relay it with the innocence of the child, you’ll be perpetuating exoticised notions of the East.’
‘But if the perception is innocent, how can it also be biased?’
‘That’s exactly the kind of question you want this piece to raise, Lisa!’
Another lightbulb goes on.
*
The course I’m taking is called An Introduction to Creative Writing. In our fifth session, an untitled piece of mine was workshopped. Après moi, le déluge. People liked what I hated about it, hated what I liked about it, told me to change the beginning, the middle, the end, or make the end the beginning, the middle the end, the beginning the middle. As I packed up my things, my classmates chit-chatting about their own monstrous creations, the teacher, a woman in her forties with a penchant for intricately laced blouses but simplicity in writing, approached me tentatively.
‘Why don’t you try writing about your earliest memories?’ she suggested. ‘Do it in the child’s voice and don’t try to lyricise anything. You’ll find your writing will read all the more lyrical for it.’
A classic apparently, the Early Memories exercise, one given to those who are trying a little too hard, straining. Diligent, I sat down to it the very next day and made a list of twelve, which I thought might be too many.
‘It is too many.’
Helen is in the kitchen now, stir-frying oyster mushrooms. She speaks over the sizzle, which lends her voice the authority it must have in the lecture hall.
‘I would whittle it down to four or five and, as I said, find some sort of framing device for them. Like say a woman asks her sister to help her clear out her attic, they come across a few objects from childhood that spark memories which they discuss. This is just an example – come up with your own thing.’
‘But won’t something like that make the whole thing feel really contrived?’
‘It won’t feel contrived if you do it well. Life writing only becomes relevant when you fictionalise aspects of it anyway. Otherwise it just reads like life feels most of the time – messy, random, completely pointless. Nobody wants to buy that.’
She steps out of view to grab soya sauce from the fridge. Her absence makes something clear to me.
‘This is about you not wanting me to write about you, isn’t it? I can change your name if you feel uncomfortable.’
Her voice, disembodied, is even louder.
‘I don’t care if you write about me as a child, Lisa. My brain wasn’t fully formed back then, so I feel no ownership over any of my actions.’
‘But you’ve always been the more dominant one, look at the Else bit.’
‘Trust me, appearing dominant is not what worries me about the Else bit.’
ELSE CATCHING US
We go from a small flat in the suburbs of Zurich to a whole house with a garden and staff. Else is our live-in nanny, Apun our house boy, but perhaps there are more.
In the house, everything is dark wood and rattan. The floors are light and cold. Hélène and I spend a lot of time in the garden, finger painting, playing with our dolls and their bamboo cots, looking for Easter eggs when the time comes. Maman plays with us sometimes, but mostly it is Else in her white uniform, so starched it feels like cardboard paper.
One afternoon, Hélène and I are in pigtails and the same dress – hers pink, mine blue, daisies on both. We take turns throwing ourselves into Else’s arms from a huge rock in the middle of the garden. As I put a hand on the rock to climb back up, Hélène steps onto my fingers. I scream, paralysed by the pain, so Else pulls them out from under Hélène’s shoe. As I lay my other hand on the rock for support, whimpering to Else in Indonesian, Hélène steps onto that one too and my tears redouble. This time, Else picks me up and places me on the rock, shoving Hélène out of the way. She’s the one crying now, realising she’s been punished out of her turn to jump. She recovers quickly, without words of comfort.
‘Remember how obsessed I was with combing her hair, like she was some kind of doll,’ Helen says.
She takes a mouthful. Oyster mushrooms are her favourite, but right now she looks like she’s not really enjoying them, not because she hasn’t cooked them well, but because self-loathing mixed with melancholia tastes complicated.
‘It was so different to ours, thicker, smoother, the colour of liquorice. When I close my eyes, I can still feel my fingers running through it, following the partings made by the comb.’
‘There’s that clip of you using the comb like a harmonica, sliding its teeth back and forth across your own. Dad pans over to you just after Else’s stood up and walked off, fed up with you playing with her hair.’
‘She looks so young in that video… How old do you think she was?’
‘No idea but probably younger than Apun.’
‘I don’t remember him at all. The bit about him and the birds read like fiction for me.’
APUN AND THE BIRDS
Apun has many tasks and some of them involve birds. He is really good with them, good at keeping them alive, even better at killing them.
We have a collection of parrots in a row of cages. We buy them at the market like we buy flowers. When Apun holds one in his hand, it looks like he is strangling it, its little neck between his thumb and curved fingers. Something about his grip makes it open its beak and then, like a chemist, he pipettes a few vital drops into the cavity.
Papa et Maman say that buying chicken from the supermarket is dangerous, so we breed our own. Apun is responsible for killing them and sometimes Papa helps him. I can imagine it is a welcome change from the keyboard and meetings. One time, they let me watch. The blade is enormous, a sword to me. Apun holds the hen over the sewer, stretching out her neck, as Papa lifts up the knife.
Plouf.
The hen’s head falls into the water. She keeps clucking as her headless body runs about, directionless, on her way to our plates.
*
I met my ex-husband Jack at afterwork drinks in Canary Wharf. We were both in our early twenties, working every hour we didn’t party, sleep a thin piece of paper we filed away when things got too messy. Our love was instant like the coffee and cocaine that kept us going. I moved in with him almost immediately because he lived closer to work and we didn’t want to waste time on dates, commuting to them, back and forth from each other’s. Our bedroom was no different to the office – in it, we were quick, efficient and never satisfied.
Jack was Devon born, Devon bred, the generations before him too. His father was a runner and so was he, their muscles like the visible roots of the old oak tree in their backyard, where they’d had countless picnics and buried six pets.
His family always referred to me as ‘something else’. ‘You’re something else’, they’d say to me, ‘She’s something else’ to each other. In front of them, I spoke French and German on the phone, sometimes mixing the two, English words sprouting here and there like weeds. My accent is American but not quite, picked up from off the expansive, expensive floors of international schools. I have French mannerisms, Russian cheekbones, a past that spreads through 1990s South East Asia as the colonisers had in earlier history.
Jack desperately wanted to be an expat like my father had been. Opportunities arose, but somehow they never went his way. He was inconsolable and I was secretly relieved and couldn’t understand why. From when I was old enough to apprehend my childhood as years that had happened to me, I showed it off, made it sound even more enviable than it already did without embellishment. When Helen began reading English at Cambridge, she became increasingly critical of it, I increasingly distant from her, the odd phone call every few months, an overpriced gift on our birthday that meant very little. Yet the more Jack wanted what we had had, the more I found myself wanting it less, wanting it gone even. Still, I assured him that ‘Yes, I’d follow you, of course I’d follow you’.
He lived vicariously through the stories I told him – like how in Manila, Papa would ring a bell when he was done with his breakfast and Rosita would clear it up promptly, and how in Kobe, he travelled so much Maman would fill his absence with Ikebana lessons, and how when we moved from one country to the next, he would pay for people to pack up our things and set them up in our new house, so that when we arrived, home looked almost the same, only slightly reconfigured on completely different soil. All of it was music to Jack’s ears, but to me the notes began to sound more and more jarring.
To compensate for what refused to come his way, Jack booked us holidays in faraway resorts. Though they were very familiar places to me, he was the one who felt like a fish in water, I the one to get rashes from the chlorine. My skin had had enough and said no more. It took me much longer to say it too.
‘When I read the Croque-mitaine bit, I finally looked it up.’
Helen is washing up now, with big rubber gloves. She’s never gotten into the habit of using hand cream since she lives where winter lives too, so her hands keep cracking from the cold.
‘What do you mean you looked it up?’
‘The Croque-mitaine, I looked it up. Her, I should say. I looked her up.’
LE CROQUE-MITAINE
Bali is our favourite destination for when the holidays are short. We stay at hotels where most of the guests look like us and the staff look like ours. They are vast places with polished floors and an infinity of orchids. Some ambient music always plays and when we arrive, fresh fruit juice is served by hotel employees dressed in their folk costume. A simpler version of it, Maman always points out.
The entertainment is traditional. Live music played to Balinese dancers whose long, delicate fingers curve back into a near crescent shape, separating into pairs and joining back up, quick movements dictated by complicated patterns. They are masked with make-up, with crowns made of gold, gemstones and flowers on their heads, their bodies wrapped up in tight, colourful fabric that form a skirt or a dress. Sometimes they hold a fan in one hand and their eyes are always wide open, dancing with them.
Hélène and I, fascinated, stand by the stage and copy them, our small fingers bending back as far as they can but never far enough. Papa et Maman beam with pride as the other guests swoon over us.
Around us stand many statues of deities and demons. One of them has these very long, imposing canines, about half the size of its face. It is terrifying. Papa et Maman call it le Croque-mitaine, the French word for bogeyman, and thanks to it, Hélène and I are, mostly, well-behaved little girls.
‘Her name is Rangda, which means ‘widow’ in old Javanese and Balinese language. She’s a child-eating demon queen who leads an army of witches against the leader of the forces of good, Barong, the King of the spirits, who’s this panther-like creature.’
‘Child-eating demon, Jesus… Well, at least they got that right.’
‘Yes and no. As much as she’s seen as the personification of evil, she’s also considered a protective force in certain parts of Bali. Kind of like Kali who’s the benevolent mother of fertility and destruction in North-eastern India. In fact, Bali being a Hindu island, the two are actually linked.’
‘Maybe they told us about this, but we just don’t remember.’
Helen stops cleaning the pan for a second. Some things never change and the look she gives me when I’m being naïve is one of them.
*
Since that first poem I wrote so spontaneously, everything has felt its very opposite – laboured, like running up a sand dune rather than sliding down it. Everything until this exercise. Perhaps because writing from life is easier, almost cheating really, the equivalent of putting transparent paper over an existing image and tracing its lines.
Tracing the lines of my early childhood not only felt easy, it felt affirming too. I found agency where I had had none, I resuscitated what was given and then taken back for no apparent reason, for nothing I did or didn’t do, home a thing disposable rather than a place with its people.
‘Why are you crying, Lisa?’
Helen is in her bathroom, squeezing the remains of her makeup remover onto a cotton wool pad.
‘I don’t know… I just… I feel embarrassed.’
‘Don’t feel embarrassed… That’s the last thing I want you to feel.’
‘I’ve been so wrapped up in our displacement, our pain that I…’
‘I know, but pain is pain.’
For a moment there is silence as I wipe my tears away, she her day.
‘You know I can’t read the Swiss Alps bit out loud without my voice breaking. How pathetic is that.’
‘It’s not pathetic at all, I get it. Those hikes were exhausting but so blissful. Do you know what it really drove home for me though?’
‘What?’
‘That every space we occupied as children we experienced through some sort of warped, travel commercial lens that turned everything into a utopia, even Switzerland.’
‘I guess, in that sense, though we lived in so many places, we were never truly anywhere.’
SNOWFLAKE-SHAPED CANDY
With Papa, Hélène and I wander the Alps in the summer, hand in hand, a chain made of three with him in the middle, pulling us uphill, guiding us downhill, envigored by the sound of our own voices singing French scout songs, we feel unbreakable. We are learning discipline in mountain shoes and our Switzerland tastes of snowflake-shaped candy given as recompense. How happy we are, tourists in our own land.