Garçon and Miss Oracle

Part One

When one enters the grandiose castle of Miss Oracle, one is taken aback by the overwhelming scent of vinegar. Every hour of the day – yes, even the night – that typical sour smell hangs in the chateau and it can even be perceived outside the thick, mossy stone walls of the fortress.

The cleaning man is called Garçon and Miss Oracle her first name is Michèle, but people sometimes call her Miss or Madame. The two get along well, but there is a clear line that the flirtatious cleaning man must not cross.

Yes, the cleaning man has something of a waiter, but also of a boy because he looks quite young for his thirty-seven. You wouldn't give it to him, and yet he has already received this high number.

Why do both characters get along so well? Madame's husband died last year; she has a lot of money, few friends, but she is in possession of a normal heart. Garçon has 'nothing better to do'.

Michèle has already spent forty-eight years in her castle, and she still feels great, but I suspect that she is convinced that her best years are behind her. ‘The mirror does not lie’ is her daily motto.

Spraying white vinegar around is Garçon’s favourite activity. As it were, he purifies his soul, mind, body, or whatever you want to call that whole mechanism. Her mechanism needs the purest oil to function.

Every morning, accompanied by the local brass band, a real mechanic comes by with penetrating oil. The man always wears his best suit and squirts a little oil under Madame’s armpits.

Garçon sees this frequently happening and shakes his head. If he were allowed to touch Madame with one finger, she would certainly understand the beneficial effect of interaction and soon enough taste it.

The pleasure that an exotic train of thought gives us should not be underestimated, especially if this train may never actually be boarded by the body.

The other person’s body may be touched in a dream, for example during the day, when the dreamer’s body is straining. Is he obediently cleaning the toilet? If so, he deserves a mental break.

The lady sees the storm coming: she looks outside, sees the village in the distance with the dark gray clouds above as predicted by Astuce. A downpour will come and this will force the workers in the fields inside.

‘A farmer accompanied by Astuce will certainly come knocking,’ she thinks as she pinches her arm. She then scratches herself until she bleeds; this is how she feels alive. Astuce or ‘God’ wants her to do this.

Her husband absolutely did not want Madame to indulge in the pleasures of life after his death: for this reason, she appeals to a roadblock barrier that was installed by a craftsman from the village in front of the door of her sleeping quarters.

Consisting of four basic rooms and a small corridor, the sleeping quarters are impressive and modest at the same time. After her husband's death, a craftsman from the village installed the roadblock. According to Madame, it is an exact copy of the one used alongside a nearby train road.

Only Garçon is allowed into the sleeping quarters if he whispers a password near the barrier using the military alphabet: ‘Echo, Romeo, Oscar, Sierra’.

Part Two

‘You did it again,’ sighs Garçon, who is cleaning the southernmost toilet of the castle. Who is ‘you’? Does the trail lead us to Madame Oracle or to one of those missing farmers?

A farmer is in the sleeping quarters as we write and read. Is this information whispered to Garçon by the wind, or by Astuce, the personal God of Madame? Who knows? We will one day find out what happens to the farmers.

Astuce caused the downpour, the farmer knocked on the door and Madame let him in. They are gone, but the man’s screams are clearly audible. A young man?

‘Take off your shoes because the floor has just been mopped by hand.’ Garçon had said to the farmer, when the latter had looked at Garçon with anxious, questioning, doubting, wonderfully beautiful blue eyes.

‘People disappear quickly here’, Garçon once remarked as he sat at the table dining with Madame, who for once had lowered herself to the logistics quarter. ‘Yes …’, she sighed then, affected, ‘it’s a maze here. People go looking for the toilet and never come back.’

Part Three

Often, when a job needs to be done in the illustrious castle of Madame Oracle, the villagers come to ring the doorbell, and they all speak only Spanish. Madame does not understand Spanish, only Dutch.

A two-cubic-meter computer is used for the translation, which is driven by Garçon on wheels. The translation is done quickly; that is to say, the machine is fed a short sentence, and it takes about ten seconds for its work to be done.

‘A machine translation is much better than a human translation,’ Madame Oracle regularly claims, because ‘the machine often gets the context wrong, which produces a surprising result.’

Garçon fell in love with Madame Oracle when he heard her say this once. Most people either have no opinion about something like this, or they think that a human can translate much more accurately. Only special people will prefer a machine precisely because the result is unusual and therefore has prosaic potential.

In the farming village, this particular preference is often discussed in the highest grade of primary school. Discussions are lively and although opinions are divided, it can be said that the most ardent among the pupils side with Madame Oracle.

Indeed, it is not at all rebellious to rebel against the normal course of events and to avoid clichés. For example, Madame Oracle is absolutely not a fan of proverbs because ‘these clichéd expressions hinder the creativity of the individual.’

Nevertheless, you could clear the table, push these ideas aside or open your eyes and see what is happening in the physical space of the castle: very little indeed, or the good stuff is hidden from sight. This is precisely why Madame Oracle's fixations and preferences often surface in Garçon's daydreams.