“Where we going, Daddy?”
He’s recognized me. We can get on with the conversation.
“How are you, Thomas?”
“Where we going, Daddy?”
“Have you done some nice pictures for Daddy and Mommy and your sister Marie?”
Silence. Just the labored breathing.
“Are we going home?”
“Have you done some nice pictures?”
“Martine.”
“How’s Martine?”
“Fench fies Fench fies Fench fies!”
“Did you have French fries? Were they good? … Do you want some French fries?”
Silence …
“Can you give Daddy a kiss? Can you say good-bye to Daddy? Can you give me a kiss?”
Silence.
I can hear the receiver dangling on its own, voices in the background. The teacher’s on the phone again, telling me Thomas has dropped the receiver, he’s gone.
I hang up.
We’d said all the important stuff.
Thomas isn’t very well. He’s jumpy in spite of the tranquilizers. He sometimes has outbursts where he’s very violent. Every now and then he has to be confined to a psychiatric hospital …
We’re going to see him next week, for lunch. It’s nearly Christmas so I told his instructor I would bring him a present, but asked her what I should get.
She told me they listen to music all day long. All sorts of music, even classical. One of the residents whose parents are musicians listens to Mozart and Berlioz. I thought of the Goldberg Variations, a score J. S. Bach wrote to soothe the neurotic Count Keyserling. There were bound to be plenty of Count Keyserlings needing soothing at the institute, J. S. Bach could only help.
I’ve bought the album for them. The instructor’s going to try the experiment.
If Bach could replace Prozac one day …
Thirty years later I’ve come across the birth announcements for Thomas and Mathieu in the bottom of a drawer. They were classic announcements; we liked things simple, no flowers or storks.
The paper has yellowed, but I have no trouble reading the beautiful typeface saying we were very happy to announce the birth of Mathieu and, later, Thomas.
Of course we were happy, it was a rare moment, a unique experience, an intense emotion, a joy you couldn’t put into words …
The disappointment measured up to it.
We are sad to inform you that Mathieu and Thomas are handicapped, their heads are full of straw, they’ll never study anything, they’ll get things wrong all their lives, Mathieu will be very unhappy and will soon leave us. Thomas, though fragile, will stay longer, growing more hunched by the day … He talks to his hand the whole time, has difficulty walking, has stopped drawing, isn’t as cheerful as he used to be, he’s stopped asking where we going, Daddy.
Maybe he’s happy where he is.
Or perhaps he no longer feels like going anywhere …
When I receive birth announcements I never feel like replying or congratulating the happy winners.
Of course I’m jealous. But later I’m mainly irritated, when the parents with their beatific smiles and smug admiration show me photos of their adorable child. They quote his latest amusing remarks and talk about how well he’s doing. I find them arrogant and vulgar. Like someone boasting about how his Porsche performs to the owner of a 2CV.
“He’s only four and he can already read and count …”
I’m not spared anything, they show me birthday photographs of the little darling blowing out his four candles—having counted them—with the father filming it all in the background. I have horrible thoughts then, I picture the candles setting fire to the tablecloth, the curtains, the whole house.
I’m sure your children are the most beautiful in the world and the most intelligent. And mine the ugliest and the stupidest. It’s my fault, I got them wrong.
At fifteen Thomas and Mathieu couldn’t read or write, and could barely talk.
It’s a long time since I’ve been to see Thomas. I went to see him yesterday. He spends more and more time in a wheelchair now. He finds it difficult getting around. After a while he recognized me and asked, “Where we going, Daddy?”
He’s increasingly hunched. He wanted to go for a walk outside. Our conversations are cursory and repetitive. He speaks less than he used to, but still talks to his hand.
He took us to his bedroom. It’s light and painted yellow, with Snoopy still on the bed. On the wall is an abstract painting from his early days, a sort of spider caught up in its web.
He’s moved to a different building, a small unit of a dozen residents, adults who look more like overaged children. They’re ageless, unchanging. They must have been born on a sort of February 30th …
The oldest of them smokes a pipe and sticks his tongue out at the caregivers. One of them is blind and wanders down corridors feeling his way along the walls. Some say hello to us, most ignore us. Occasionally you hear a cry, then silence, just the sound of the blind man’s slippers.
You have to step over a few residents lying on the floor in the middle of the room, gazing at the ceiling; they’re dreaming, sometimes they laugh ecstatically.
It’s not a sad place; it’s strange, sometimes beautiful. Some of them waft their limbs slowly through the air creating a sort of choreography, movements from modern dance or Kabuki theater. One twists and spins his arms around in front of his face, reminding me of Egon Schiele’s self-portraits.
At one of the tables there are a couple of partially sighted people sitting stroking each other’s hands. At another sits a resident who is almost bald with a few wisps of gray hair; it’s easy imagining him in a gray suit, he looks like an accountant, except he’s wearing a bib and keeps saying, “Poop, poop, poop …”
Everything is allowed, every eccentricity, every whim, no one is judged.
If you’re sensible and behave normally you feel almost embarrassed, you get the feeling you’re not like the others and, therefore, slightly ridiculous.
When I go there I feel like being silly just like the rest of them.
At the institute everything’s difficult, or even impossible. Getting dressed, tying shoelaces, doing up a belt, opening a zipper, holding a fork.
I watch an old child of twenty as his caregiver tries to get him to eat peas on his own. I suddenly grasp the accomplishment required to carry out the tiniest tasks in everyday life.
Occasionally there are minor victories worthy of Olympic gold medals. He has just scooped several peas onto the fork, and brought them up to his mouth without dropping them all. He’s very proud and looks up at us, beaming. I could happily play the national anthem to honor him and his coach.
The following week there is a big sporting competition at the institute, the thirteenth Interschools games, intended for the least handicapped residents. There are several disciplines: bowling, tricycle circuits, basketball, accurate throwing, motorized circuits, and target shooting. I can’t help thinking of Reiser’s drawing of the Paralympics. The stadium bristles with large banners with the words “No laughing” on them.
Obviously Thomas is not taking part. He’ll be a spectator. They’ll take him outside and position his wheelchair by the sports ground to watch the proceedings. I’d be surprised if he was interested, he’s more and more locked away in his own world. What does he think about?
Does he know what he meant to me, more than thirty years ago, the luminous little blond cherub who laughed all the time? Now he looks like a gargoyle, he dribbles and doesn’t laugh anymore.
At the end of the competition they announce the results and hand out medals and cups.
I’d have loved to have children I could be proud of. To be able to show my friends your diplomas and prizes and all the cups you would have won for sports. We would have displayed them in a cabinet in the living room with pictures of us together.
In the pictures I would have the smug, satisfied smile of an angler photographed with the huge fish he�
�s just caught.
When I was young I wanted to have swarms of children when I grew up. I could see myself climbing mountains and singing, crossing oceans with mini sailors who looked like me, traveling the world at the head of a jubilant gaggle of bright-eyed inquisitive children whom I could teach all sorts of things, the names of trees and birds and stars.
Children I could teach to play basketball and volleyball, I could have matches with and not always win.
Children I could show pictures to and play music for.
Children I could secretly teach to swear.
Children I could edify with every possible rendition of the word fart.
Children I could tell how a combustion engine works.
Children I could invent funny stories for.
I didn’t get lucky. I played genetic lottery, and lost.
“How old are your children now?”
What the hell do you care.
My children can’t be dated. Mathieu is beyond all that and Thomas must be around a hundred years old.
They’re two stooped little old men. They’re not all there in the head but they’re still kind and affectionate.
My children have never known how old they were. Thomas still chews an ancient teddy bear, he doesn’t know he’s old, no one’s told him.
When they were little we had to change their shoes and buy the next size up every year. Only their feet grew, their IQs didn’t follow suit. Over the years they seem to have gone down instead. They’ve made progress in reverse.
When you’ve had children who play with building blocks and have teddy bears their whole life, you stay young. You don’t really know where you stand anymore.
I’m not sure who I am now, I’m not sure where I’ve gotten to, I don’t know how old I am. I still think I’m thirty years old and don’t care about anything. I feel as if I’ve been launched into some huge practical joke, I’m not sensible, I don’t take anything seriously. Here I am still talking nonsense, and writing it. My road comes to a dead end, my life ends in deadlock.
NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Jean-Louis Fournier is a writer, humorist, and television producer. He is the author of a number of successful essays and novels in which the humor and humanity of his style always shine, among others Il a jamais tué personne mon papa (My Daddy Never Killed Anyone) (Stock, 1999) and Mon dernier cheveu noir (My Last Black Hair) (Éditions Anne Carrière, 2006).
NOTE ON THE CONTRIBUTORS
ADRIANA HUNTER studied French & Drama at the University of London. She has translated nearly forty books including works by Agnès Desarthe, Amélie Nothomb, Frédéric Beigbeder, Véronique Ovaldé, and Catherine Millet, and has been short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize twice. She lives in Norfolk, England, with her husband and their three children.
FERN KUPFER is a novelist who has written for popular magazines including Redbook, Family Circle, and Women’s Day. For more than a decade she wrote a column for the Long Island newspaper Newsday, and is the author of Before and After Zachariah, a memoir about family life with a severely disabled child. She is currently an associate professor of English at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, where she lives with her husband, writer Joseph Geha.
Copyright © 2008 Éditions Stock
Originally published in French as Où on va, papa?
Translation copyright © 2010 Adriana Hunter
Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de Culturesfrance/Ministère français des affaires étrangères et européennes.
This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from CulturesFrance and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Fournier, Jean-Louis.
[Où on va, papa? English]
Where we going, Daddy? : life with two sons unlike any others / by Jean-Louis Fournier; translated by Adriana Hunter.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-59051-384-2 1. Fournier, Jean-Louis.
2. Authors, French—20th century—Biography. 3. Authors, French—21st century—Biography. 4. Parents of children with disabilities—France—Biography. 5. Fathers and sons—France—Biography. I. Title.
PQ2666.O853895Z46 2010
848′.9203—dc22 [B] 2009041139
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Note on the Author
Note on the Contributors
Copyright
Where We Going, Daddy?: Life With Two Sons Unlike Any Other Page 6
