The Miracles of Art

My name is Renee. I am 54 years old and for the past 27 years I have been the caretaker of No. 7 Grenelle Road. It’s a lovely exclusive apartment complex with an inner court and gardens, divided now into eight apartments but each of them is still grand and luxurious.

I’m a widow – short, ugly, plump, with corns on my feet and on some mornings, bad breath that would knock out an elephant. I haven’t had much by way of a formal education and have always been poor, quiet and insignificant. I live alone with my cat –a huge lazy tom, notable mostly for the way he can scratch a person when he is irritated. He, like me, makes scant effort to integrate with larger society. I’m not what one would call nice, even if I am always polite. I am tolerated because I fit so perfectly into the social conception of what the caretaker of an apartment block should be like, because I am one of the cogs in the wheel, my presence and conformity to every prejudice my employers have gives them a sense of rightess – I make sense in a world gone mad. And that preconception says that caretakers are old, ugly and harsh. It also says that said caretaker will possess a cat that will sleep through the day on cushions covered with crochet slips.

The selfsame chapter on the ‘rules for caretakers’ also says that they must watch television interminably while the fat cat snoozes and the corridors must smell of casserole, cabbage soup and other such olfactory malfeasances. I have had the unheard of good luck to be a caretaker in a house of grand standing. It was humiliating for me to have to cook these infamous dishes. But I still do it to keep up appearances.

For the past 27 years, each day, I go to the butchers and buy a tranche of ham or foie de veau, which I then wedge into my kitchen cabinet between the packets of noodles and the box of carrots. I exhibit happily these victuals of the poor before I give them over to Leon, my cat, so that he stays fat and helps me keep up that illusion and at the same time I avoid having to stuff myself silly with pig meat and can satiate all the cravings I have for macaroni with butter without anyone suspecting where my real culinary inclinations lie.

It was more difficult to resolve the problem of the television. When my late husband was still alive I was able to completely avoid it thanks to the dedication with which he watched it. I was spared me of any duties in that direction. His TV could be heard in the corridor and that was enough to keep up our score in the class hierarchy game. After his death though, I had to rack my brains for a solution

And it was thanks to a non-button that I found it.

A chime linked to an infrared mechanism was installed so I would know if anyone entered the building even if I wasn’t in the sitting room making the old calling bell redundant. I continued with my routine of staying in the basement where I was protected from all the sounds and smells that my condition would otherwise have imposed on me and I still got to know what I wanted to – who entered, who left, with whom and when.

The folks that traversed the hallways still here the muffled sounds of the TV and even those of the most limited imagination I’m sure, form the image of the caretaker shut up in front of the idiot box. But I’m cozy in my den and when I hear someone passing by, I go to the next room which faces the stairs, and hidden behind my muslin curtains I look out through the dormer window to see who it is.

The introduction of video cassettes and later, of the the godly DVD, made me even happier in my felicity. Although not too many of my kind would have a soul roused by Death in Venice or who enjoy Mahler, I did and I dipped into the marital savings, bought myself the equipment and while the television continued to blare out into the corridor I would sit there, with tears in my eyes sometime, before the miracles of art.