A Good Death

by Gil Courtemanche

  CRITICAL PRAISE FOR A Good Death:

  “It is a wonderfully simple story told by a writer who shows great acuity in stripping feelings bare… A Good Death bears the signature of a truly free voice, the voice of a real writer. Say it. And read it.” —LE DEVOIR, Montreal

  CRITICAL PRAISE FOR A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali:

  “A fresco with humanist accents which could easily find a place next to the works of Albert Camus and Graham Greene.” —LA PRESSE

  “Elegantly written… A moving depiction of love and humanity struggling amid the violence, hatred and ignorance of the Rwandan massacre of 1994, it also serves as a critique of global apathy towards Africa.” —GUARDIAN

  “When your first novel is compared to the works of Albert Camus, André Malraux and Graham Greene, it’s a pretty good start. The book is set in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, just before the genocide of the Tutsis at the hands of the Hutu-led government. There is a sense of disaster foretold as these men and women, white and black, play out their last days around a hotel swimming pool in a city that will soon become a graveyard. Courtemanche’s novel is guided by a strong moral presence: that of the author. He has an astringent personality, and he puts it to good use in this book.” —THE GAZETTE

  “Courtemanche has written a novel that contains the kind of social criticism that still, almost ten years after the terrible events, is sharp and pertinent… The journalist in him has, thankfully, emptied himself, heart and all, into a love story full of real people that demand to be remembered.” —QUILL & QUIRE

  “Brilliant, anguished and righteous… There are many unsettling qualities to Courtemanche’s extraordinary novel. But above all, it is his insistence on love, and the right to live one’s life passionately and well, even in the face of AIDS and the genocide, this double helix of devastating African tragedies, that make this book great.” —NATIONAL POST

  “A few pages are enough for you to be swept away into the terrifying madness of a country… Exceptional.” —JEAN-PAUL DUBOIS, Le Nouvel Observateur

  “Those who read this novel—and I hope they will be numerous—are in for some astonishing pages on the subject of love and death.” —DAVID HOMEL, Books in Canada

  “A captivating first novel… Courtemanche’s fine writing and refined style… weave together a love story full of beauty and tenderness.” —VOIR

  “A first novel whose story hits hard, very hard.” —LE DROIT

  “A tremendous novel.” —RENÉ HOMIER-ROY, Radio Canada

  “A strong, assured voice… speaking of present day and tragic realities: AIDS and the Rwandan genocide—sicknesses of body and spirit with which men and women live, love, die and triumph… A novel stuck on reality that nevertheless transcends it. You will recognize places and characters. You will recognize the mugginess of the climate. But Courtemanche’s fiction transmits the depth of the real better than any objective documentation.” —RELATIONS

  “A voice that evokes humanity in all its depth and breadth, where executioner and victim are brother and sister, where death is a daily occurrence. A voice I implore you to listen to… Through a felicitous mix of reportage and fiction, Courtemanche has powerfully portrayed a lucid character deeply engaged in a humanist quest… The many facets of Bernard Valcourt’s eye constitute the richest prism of the book since he so ably expresses the complex malaise that can be the fate of a western white man faced with Rwandan culture in full decline.” —LE JOURNAL DE MONTRÉAL

  “A blunt, vividly visual account of a human cataclysm that has left a scar on the psyche of us all. At the same time it is a testament to love, its durability and frailty in the face of annihilation. Do not expect it to leave you untouched.” —JONATHAN KAPLAN, author of The Dressing Station

  a good death

  a good death

  GIL COURTEMANCHE

  translated by wayne grady

  DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE

  Vancouver/Toronto

  Copyright © 2006 by Les Éditions du Boréal, Montréal, Canada

  Translation copyright © 2006 by Wayne Grady

  Originally published in 2005 as Une Belle Mort

  by Éditions du Boréal

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

  2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  Canada V5T 4S7

  www.douglas-mcintyre.com

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  ISBN 978-1-55365-215-1 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-926706-87-0 (ebook)

  Editing by Mary Schendlinger

  Cover design by Jessica Sullivan

  Cover photograph © Jane Yeomans/Getty Images

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for this translation.

  To France-Isabelle

  TO WRITE A NOVEL IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN ACT OF IMPUDENCE. TO COMB ONE’S HAIR IS ALSO AN ACT OF IMPUDENCE, especially when it’s done to try to cover a scar running across the top of one’s forehead. But combing one’s hair is an act of minor impudence, whereas writing is a more serious affair. We mask reality, we hide our fears, we reinvent things that have been said and, above all, the people who said them. Writing a novel implies a certain perversity. It’s not something one can do with a tortoiseshell comb. It is perhaps for that reason that they take away my pen at night. Not, as they pretend, to prevent me from accidentally stabbing myself in the throat with it—but to prevent me from killing anyone else.

  Paco Ignatio Taibo II, We Come Back as Shadows

  MY MOTHER IS SHRINKING. MY FATHER IS GETTING BIGGER. MOTHER PECKS AT HER FOOD AND SPENDS MORE TIME TALKING THAN eating. My father pretends to be listening to her deluge of chatter, but he isn’t really following the conversation. He’s stuffing his face, shovelling down his food like an ogre, not uttering a word. It occurs to me that my mother began shrinking when she had to do all the talking, whereas my father began swelling up when Parkinson’s stopped his tongue with his words still resonating in his head. I don’t find the thought amusing.

  The doctor explained it to me. “It’s called rigid Parkinson’s, plus there’s his recent stroke. I’ll spare you the scientific details; let’s just say there’s been a communication breakdown among his neurons. The brain gives the order to walk, but the neurons don’t receive the command in time and so the patient falls down. The patient wants to talk, but his vocal cords and mouth react too late. They don’t receive the electric impulses soon enough. He knows how to walk and talk, he’s conscious, he understands everything. But he falls down, or he babbles like a baby, and you get the feeling he isn’t there and doesn’t hear you. It’s not that complicated… I forgot to mention, it’s a degenerative disease. You do understand what that means?”

  Yes. Thank you, doctor. And does it go on for a long time? Years. Can anything be done, I mean in terms of medication? No. We try to control it. Thank you, doctor.

  So my father is busily conceiving words, sentences, whole paragraphs, in his head. He has always spoken in complete paragraphs. He hears and understands everything we say, wants to discuss, explain, demolish his children’s arguments, is delighted with the withering riposte he has thought of, the demonstration he is about to make, but then he doesn’t hear his mouth deliver them. He hears all those lovely words in his head, but they remain there, clogge
d like sewage in a blocked sink. And so he rages, or curses, or sometimes lowers his head and weeps, or, to pass the time while the white noise of my mother’s words stretches off into faraway lands, he eats. Sometimes he comes out with a swear word that strikes the assembled children dumb and halts my mother’s aimless chirping in its tracks, as the shadow of a hawk frightens a bird. Then back he goes to his plate, using his knife, which he can still handle well enough, to make little piles of food and push them onto his fork, and then shoving the whole thing into his mouth. Bits of food ooze from the corners of his lips. As he well knows. He can feel the grease dripping down his chin and onto my mother’s spotless tablecloth. Of course it embarrasses him. He doesn’t enjoy behaving like a boor. He’s always been proud and haughty, like Caesar in the Astérix books. But in the moment between realizing he’s drooling and reaching for his napkin, my mother has already taken hers and wiped the gravy from his glistening chin.

  Nothing makes sense to him anymore. He has words, he has thoughts, but no one hears them. He knows how to move his feet and hands, but he falls down or drops his glass. And so I sit to his left at every family meal, trying to anticipate his rages and his defeats. I prefer the rages. They tell me that the man I once knew, the man I do not love, still exists.

  All his life, with blows from his hands as well as his mouth, my father drilled good manners into us, taught us to say please and thank you, how to hold a knife and fork, keep our backs straight, our elbows off the table. To this day his children obey the basic rules of civility and pass them on to their own children, though I hope with a little more human kindness. We were never a wealthy family, but we were proud, not to say arrogant. Proud of what, I don’t know. As for arrogance, it’s a virtue and a fault shared by most men of his generation. He wanted us to be better than everyone else, better even than himself, which is saying a lot. This obsession of his with polite behaviour and proper table manners always intrigued me. It couldn’t have come from his reading, nor from his own background or my mother’s; in her family, as in the neighbourhood in general, elbows were planted firmly on the table, cutlery clattered noisily and meat was held in the mouth like a soother. Now we wipe his lips for him with little delicate, respectful attempts to make him laugh.

  I imagine being my father as he is now, with someone wiping my mouth and laughing and explaining that I’m drooling and that I should go to bed and sleep even though I’m not in the least tired, that I can’t have dessert because it’s too rich and therefore bad for my health. I am my father. I know I’m sick, very sick. I want to kill someone. I’m humiliated. I am not a child. And in any case, even when I was a child I hated it, felt diminished and insulted whenever anyone fluttered a cloth in my face and wiped my chin, cheerily telling me what a filthy little mess I was. What’s an old man supposed to think when being old means being treated like a child?

  The breadbasket on the table is empty, has been for several seconds. I took the last slice myself. I look to my right and see my father glowering at the absence of bread as though he were the victim of an intolerable injustice. A family without bread on the table. A father without bread. The entire history of human misery in that one accusation: no bread. I sense that he is about to erupt. My mother, however, still worried about his health, mentally tallies the number of slices of bread he’s already eaten. She shrinks. She looks to her right and gets an approving nod from one of my sisters, the calorie counter. Would you like some more bread, Dad? He looks at me and makes a noise that could be yes but sounds more like the blissful sigh of a baby who has just felt his mother’s nipple moisten with milk. My mother looks down at the table. My sister shoots daggers at me with her eyes. When he sees the refilled breadbasket he coos. I’m not kidding. He takes a thick slice, slathers it with butter and pâté, to which he has pointed with his knife and which I have passed to him, and he swallows the whole thing in three mouthfuls, almost without chewing. Rigid Parkinson’s, it seems, hasn’t affected his taste for bread—the neurons still respond to a whiff of pâté. My sister mutters something inaudible. Grumbling at me, in other words. My mother eyes his gluttonous contentment, shrugs her shoulders and lets them drop closer to the table, so that her nose is almost touching her empty plate, as though she were trying to shrink even further.

  My father chews more bread, this time a slice he has soaked in salad dressing, having finished off the pâté. He cuts himself a wedge of Camembert and stuffs it into his mouth with the bread. He doesn’t look up. He stares down at the table, his eyelids half-closed like the shutters of an old, dilapidated house. Good God, he’s feeling guilty! At least that is what it looks like. Unless he’s merely resting, gathering forces for a fresh assault on the food. But since his stroke and the Parkinson’s, since his legs stopped taking orders from his brain, since whatever it is that issues from his mouth is no longer speech, since he has had to be taken care of, a man who has never cared for anyone in his life, since he stopped being a man, a real man, a man who stomps around and orders people about, he has been making little guilty-child faces every time he sneaks a slice of bread, and his eyes gleam like those of a thief when he finishes off more cheese in two mouthfuls than everyone else at the table combined. My mother shrinks a little more whenever she sees him ignoring his doctor’s warnings. By eating so much, my sick father is killing my healthy mother.

  I find myself thinking, and it’s not an appropriate thought, this being Christmas Eve, but as I watch my mother transform into a fragile butterfly and my father into a wild, gurgitating boar, I cannot stop myself from thinking about their deaths. The way they comport themselves at the table, their attitude to food, forces the thought of their deaths upon me. There’s my mother, who takes little nibbles from the end of her fork and chews them methodically, taking no pleasure from them. And then there’s my father, shovelling the food down in gargantuan mouthfuls and then, on the off chance that his mouth will feel neglected for even a second, cramming in huge chunks of bread as soon as the first half-chewed mass begins its descent into his stomach. Of course I have to accept his death, since it is so obviously imminent; I’m not being morbid thinking about it. But when I see how my mother frowns as she talks while my father, majestically silent, picks up his plate in his trembling hands, causing such anxiety among the children that they all look down at the table so as not to have to witness the impending crash, I imagine both their deaths.

  My mother will slip away with such a self-effacing expiration of breath not even her sheets will be disturbed. She hates to be a bother to anyone and would be surprised to see so many tearful faces beside her coffin. My father will go with a roar, a kind of explosion, in a burst of anger and terror. My mother will die quietly, decently, like a lady, having always known that her voyage was written in her file long ago and that the only uncertainty has been the date of departure. My father will rage against life, which he will have failed to conquer only because it betrayed him. With his dying breath he’ll say he’s hungry, if only to put death off for a few more seconds. And in those final seconds he’ll mentally go through every book he’s ever read and every conversation he’s ever had having to do with eternal life. He’ll hedge every bet, beginning with that of Pascal. He’ll beg God and Allah to forgive him, look around for any other gods to whom he can appeal, and just before seeing that famous diffuse light supposed by many to illuminate the end of death’s tunnel, he’ll suddenly remember Julie, his youngest daughter, who at the moment is talking about her mortgage but who, twenty years ago, at a Christmas Eve dinner much like this one, tried to convince him of the reality of reincarnation. In the last split second before dying, he’ll decide to believe in reincarnation. With luck Julie won’t be there to tell him that those who have lived sinful lives are likely to come back as lizards, or beggars. My mother will die of exhaustion, happy to have finished her work, to have raised her children, in all probability to be meeting with her God, in whom she still seems sincerely to believe. Death for my father will be a humiliating defeat. Men do no
t die. Which is why he’ll cling so desperately to what he called Julie’s “idiocies,” although Julie herself hasn’t believed in reincarnation since she stopped being eighteen and had two children.

  My parents have lived in this house for forty-five years. We fled from the cloying intimacy and clamour of our downtown neighbourhood to this new suburb, which at that time was practically in the country. I remember the silence of that first morning, the sight of a ploughed field thirty metres from the back of our house, a cow doing its business on our property. All too soon, however, the bucolic fields to the south of us became a boulevard, then a strip mall, and finally a hideous excrescence of the city. The three streets to the north were inhabited by the English, who ignored us, which suited us just fine. And beyond them, towards the city we had abandoned, were the Italians, many, many Italians, who went to the same church as we did and baked such wonderful bread.

  Since then the suburb has gone the way of the world at large. Haitians now live where the Italians were; Arabs took over the English streets; and Tamils moved in as the Québécois moved out. To my father’s great relief, our street was spared these revolutions, except for a Chinese family that speaks to no one, a Haitian who dresses better than the whites, and an Italian Jehovah’s Witness who makes terrible wine but has a good heart and a dog that barks too much. My mother enjoys her daily visits to the good-natured halal butchers, and my father despairs on behalf of the entire city to see tall Blacks walking down the street as if they owned the place.

  It was a good enough house for its time. Two storeys, red brick, set back from the street on a nice lot, plenty of windows and a sloped roof that gave it a certain noble profile.

  To a child of seven, which is what I was when we moved, it was like a small castle. To get to the front door we had to walk three metres along a concrete sidewalk, climb three steps, walk another three metres and then up two more steps.