Now he puts his other hand on my mother’s hand holding the napkin, which she removes from time to time to see if the blood is still flowing. Press, press, he says, and I don’t know quite how but he manages to get up and stand behind her and press her forehead with both his hands.
“Band… aid… band… aid… Christ…”
A murmur spreads through the room, a murmur of shame keeping its voice down. We call to one another, our eyes darting everywhere. Band-aids, where are they, do you know? We thought of everything except band-aids. I can feel humiliation rising like vapour from the Banker, the Homeopath and the Geographer. Even though they have no feelings in common, they know that when it comes to their mother’s and father’s health they are part of the clan. They’re the ones responsible. They look tentatively at one another, discussing what to do, but no one moves. Including me. I look at my father, still pressing my mother’s forehead with his two hands, staunching the flow of blood.
I THINK IT WAS my Uncle Bertrand who used to own a cottage in Bois-des-Filion. An old tumbledown shack on a dirt road that led to a small patch of beach. On summer weekends, families would install themselves along the sand in the same way they lived in the city. Shoved up against one another like the houses they inhabited. My father couldn’t stand the closeness of it. If he had to leave the city he wanted room, he wanted to be able to contemplate the river without being disturbed. He would leave early in the morning, when all the other shacks along the road were still reeking of bacon and eggs, the children still getting cleaned up and the parents yawning or belching up their beer from the night before, and he would secure our position at the far end of the beach, beside a thin, dead pine, all that remained of nature, but enough to symbolically separate his few square metres of sand from the Ideal Beach Dance Hall, which is what this particular stretch of beach area was called. He would mark off his territory, our territory, by tracing a large border in the sand with his heel, placing the cooler and two folding lounge chairs in the centre of it under a large beach umbrella, spreading out a few towels and then, satisfied with his arrangement, wait for the rest of us to arrive, led by our mother. He would wait standing up, scornfully eyeing the other families bunching up on top of one another, not daring to come near this scowling figure with the face of a cop or a bandit. Once Mother arrived and the children were gathered, he would take his book, sit in a chair and forget about us. If one of us seemed in danger of drowning, it was our mother who ran into the water to save us. If we fought with the kids next to us on the beach who had no notion of territoriality, it was my mother who settled the dispute. My father would indicate his displeasure, multiply his decrees, grunt a few times, but he would take no part in the life of the beach except to keep watch over our own square of sand.
One Sunday we were returning from Ideal Beach with Uncle Marcel, who sold used cars. There were five of us in the back seat of his blue Chevrolet with the Monarch fenders and the Chrysler steering wheel and the window cranks serving as door handles. Uncle Marcel made his living doing a little bit of this and that. When my father told me to open the window wider because it was too hot in the car, I obeyed like the good little soldier I was, without thinking or looking at what I was doing. I turned the window crank and the door opened; out I tumbled, onto the shoulder of the road and into the ditch. It was my mother who leapt out of the car and ran to save me. Blood was pouring out of my head like water from a hydrant. My father never lost control. He waited calmly in the car until my mother brought me back, then got into the back seat, held my head on his lap, pressed some sort of cloth to my wound and held it there with his two large hands for the thirty minutes it took us to get to the hospital. I was moaning, my brothers and sisters were crying, my mother was trembling. He never said a word the whole way, just sat there pressing on my head, squeezing it tight, blocking the flow of blood. He was in control of the situation. My mother said I was lucky. A fractured skull. Still my father said nothing, not even when I came home from hospital, my head wrapped in bandages but otherwise saved at last.
SAM, WHOM I no longer wish to call William, reappears, his eyebrows knitted and his forehead creased with the responsibility he has taken on. On the table he sets down the cotton batting and gauze and an assortment of bandages. He has brought in the entire contents of the bathroom cabinet. Two girls follow him in, each issuing advice that sounds more like orders. My father grunts. They freeze. My father points a finger at one of the band-aids, a thick, square one. Sam takes it and holds it up to my mother’s eyebrow, which is still being pressed by her own and my father’s hands. He says yes and leans over. They take their hands away. The cut bleeds a tiny bit, Sam puts the band-aid on it, and then nothing happens. My father, breathing heavily, bestows an incensed look on each of the rest of us in turn. Sam presses on the bandage until the bleeding stops. Like an impotent idiot I watch my father’s anger becoming more and more visible. Isabelle quietly picks up a roll of adhesive tape and puts it in my hand. My father nods. For several seconds I am a child again, guilty, not understanding what it is I’m supposed to do. Sam beats me to it.
“Not… quick… e… nough.”
And he says ha-ha, which is the only expression of mirth remaining to him, the written form of laughter that he reproduces verbally, since his malfunctioning neurons no longer allow him the joyful delirium of a disorderly outburst of sound that is not well relayed by this symbolic and simplistic onomatopoeia. It is a triumphant, proud ha-ha. The father expressing his condescending yet at the same time fond contempt for his children. Essentially it says: Without me they are nothing.
My mother’s right eye has disappeared under a swath of gauze bandaging. She looks like a First World War victim, hastily treated in the Verdun trenches by a clumsy but well-intentioned medical recruit. My father is now beside himself with his ha-ha’s. He points a finger at his curiously enwrapped wife and shouts, “Pho… to… pho… to…” The Geographer is not laughing. He doesn’t say that the wound hasn’t been disinfected, or that the bandage doesn’t have to go over Mother’s eye, and in any case this is not something about which we should be laughing, but that’s what he’s thinking. Instead, he acts like a Japanese tourist. His top-of-the-line digital Canon explodes with flashes of light a dozen times. He circles about, covering all the angles, even peremptorily asking the victim to turn her head a little to the right, where the light is better. My father relaxes, satisfied and perhaps even happy. The Homeopath is back talking about her Turkish delight. Most of the adults get up and tackle the pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen. Emma is asleep in the arms of my daughter, who is yawning herself. Her boyfriend is discussing GICs with the Banker. The other children are taking turns playing Donkey Kong, their bodies and brains totally involved in a furious tournament that has all the appearances of a desperate struggle for survival. If it weren’t for my father’s semi-naked body—which everyone seems to have forgotten about except my mother, who looks at him from time to time with her good eye and blinks at the incongruity of it—anyone looking in on the scene from the outside would think this was a boring, predictable gathering of a middle-class family.
“GRANDPA,” William says, “I have a present for you. It’s from me. You were asleep earlier, and I didn’t have time to give it to you.”
He smiles like a child who is proud of himself. He is holding one of those boxes made to contain a bottle of wine or alcohol. “He’s not going to open it tonight,” someone says, “he’s had enough to drink as it is.” Sam doesn’t move. My father and I are also halted by this Medical injunction, which comes like a police order to cease and desist. It’s a Minervois, Château Villerambert-Julien 2000, says Sam, recommended by all the Quebec guides and even by the Nicolas Web site, the biggest wine merchant in France.
My father looks at the bottle as though it were a Grecian amphora. His eyes glisten with happiness.
“Thank… you… my…”—a long pause—“… friends.”
He called us “friends”!
ALTHOUGH MY FATHER WAS CATHOLIC, HE WOULD HAVE SKIPPED MASS TO GO TO A SALE. HE OBSERVED ALL THE RIDICULOUS RULES of Catholicism—fish on Fridays, three hours’ fast before taking communion, crossing himself at the same time as the priest. But whenever he had to sit through a religious ceremony or a sermon, he went to sleep. With the first snowfall in December, however, his life was transformed. As Christmas approached the house filled with carols and my father was home more often than not, took more liberties with his work schedule, spent hours shopping for a Christmas tree, left the phone for my mother to answer and rarely returned calls, even to clients. He visited the curate to hand in his tithe and went to confession, another once-a-year ritual. He spent a great deal of time in the basement, getting out the boxes in which he’d stored the crèche and the Christmas ornaments, checking the lights, ringing the little bells to make sure they weren’t cracked. He combed the stores and boutiques looking for the perfect gift, the clever surprise, the game that was all the rage, the present he would like to have received as a child. He invited all the family members he didn’t like to dinner, and informed them coldly that he didn’t need anything.
And then on Christmas Eve he imposed the purest torture on us. Not only were we forbidden to touch or, God forbid, shake the presents that were piled under the tree in the family room while Mother was downstairs wrapping the rest, we weren’t even allowed into the room. We had to look in from the kitchen. We’d been used to this since the first time our bottoms were smacked, which invariably happened at the age of three, as though that were the point at which children’s backsides became tough enough to withstand his assaults. The older children had to help put up the tree, silently, then arrange the lights, an exercise he seemed to have thought a lot about. Once a string of lights was in place he’d step back, study the tree, grunt, rearrange the bulbs according to colour, break off a small twig that worked against the desired effect. He moved methodically, with the air of a man obsessed with a mission. He would tolerate no interruptions, no comments or suggestions. We had to admire the great creator of the Christmas scene. On the other hand he would regularly turn to us, like an actor seeking the approval and applause of his audience. We would remain quiet, our silence guaranteeing our immunity. Once the lights were installed he would place the icicles on the tree, then the ornaments, the candy canes, the cloth Santa Clauses, a few tinkling bells that he’d saved for just before the final, crowning achievement, the star on the summit.
“You moved the red ball,” he said, looking at me.
There were twenty-five red balls on the tree.
There was no point in my denying having moved it, even though any one of the three brothers looking down at the floor could have been the culprit. He knew it was me. I was the delinquent, the one who had tried to tell him that there were too many red balls on one side, that they were ruining the balance he was trying to achieve. When he’d gone to the bathroom, I’d corrected the flagrant error in his arrangement of red balls. Just because I was only eight years old didn’t mean I had no flair for aesthetic composition. But I paid dearly for my love of beauty, with a rubber hose across my backside that left my buttocks so sore I couldn’t sit down for midnight Mass or the rest of Christmas Eve. After he finished turning me into a temporary invalid, he sat down at the Hammond organ and played “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night.” My mother ru±ed my hair and gave me a handkerchief to wipe the tears and snot off my face and to put an end to my weak protestations, saying, “That’s your father,” as though to say, “It’s God’s will,” or “That’s Stalin for you.” God was good in 1951, remember, the Cold War was on and the Korean War not far off. I was eight and at school we were being taught that Communists had big moustaches, dressed badly and were going to wipe us off the face of the Earth with bombs that made mushroom clouds. The little father of the Soviet people was the most dangerous man in the world. The most dangerous man in my world, however, was my father.
HE’S SITTING on the floor, his shoulders covered with an old bathrobe that is so stained and full of holes my mother has been trying to get him to throw it out for the past twenty-five years. He’s laughing and waving his hands. It’s one o’clock in the morning, but the children are still pulsing with energy. Amandine, my granddaughter, is shouting, and the louder she shouts the louder my father laughs and the more disconcerted my daughter becomes. She doesn’t know how to tell her grandfather that her daughter doesn’t like him playing with her toys. He’s placing, or trying to place, flat wooden crocodiles, lions and sheep into a puzzle from which the same shapes have been cut out with a band-saw. He fails to do it most of the time, but still seems to be enjoying the challenge. The Banker tells me he’s losing his mind, to which I reply that he’s having fun. My father takes Amandine’s hand and gives her a donkey. She screams even louder. “Please, Grandpa,” my daughter pleads. Tears are welling up in her eyes. Sam takes the donkey, whispers something in Amandine’s ear, and like all children she switches from fury to delight in a fraction of a second, and falls silent. She sits down, gives the donkey to her great-grandfather and guides his hand to the right cut-out. Then she gives him the lion. He looks at the spaces, tries one, she says no. He tries another and she claps her hands. Bravo, Grandpa. Now her mother is crying and laughing at the same time. “How do you explain to a little girl that he’s her great-grandfather, not her Grandpa?”
“Easy, great-cousin, you tell her to call him Grandpapa.”
Sam is proud of his reply. My daughter bursts out laughing. The Tragedienne looks at her son as though seeing him for the first time.
THE SIDEWALK is bare and the weather mild, barely cold. It has been a crazy winter, to the great annoyance of the tourists from France who seem to think Canada was made specifically to provide them with deep snow year-round. The sidewalk is as grey as a tombstone, without even a vague memory of snow. The only suggestions of a White Christmas are a few patches of ice on the cropped lawns of the identical houses, and even they are more black than white. Thirsting for fresh air, I have left the warm bosom of my family. In every house, behind drawn but transparent curtains, shines the same Christmas tree or its double. The same turkey on the same plate of every one of these neighbours who have known each other for years. In France, it’s oysters and foie gras. In Cairo, at least in the Westernized houses, it’s probably pigeon. Wine, beer and presents everywhere, and people who have no words for the affection they feel for one another but who fiercely and deliberately convince themselves that they are a family, a group, a gang, at least for this one night. Christmas Eve, a harmless invention, the product of a legend the origin of which is a complete mystery. Who knows who started it? Some rebel or fool or visionary calling himself Jesus, the son of God, who scandalized Pharisees, provoked the resentment of many would-be well-wishers whose names we don’t know, consorted with a prostitute, had no real father and was therefore the child of a single mother, and a dozen friends. It took twenty centuries for his anonymous birth to become the symbol of family unity. Atheists, Muslims, Taoists, all of us products of churches and consumerism, celebrate Christmas. Humans need to represent themselves, to put on some kind of production, to make theatre. On which side of the stage do I exit least noticeably, backyard or front? I have only a walk-on part, but I want to be believable.
I don’t know why I still try to love my father, but I hope these obligatory festivities at least have the appearance of being freely chosen. Maybe I, too, need all this artifice, religious though it be. Maybe I need something that seems permanent, unchanging. And maybe in these times in which we find ourselves the family represents the idea of permanence and continuity, even for the most skeptical among us.
I think of Sam. Yes, he’s the one who asked this question, and yes, he has shown by his behaviour that he is a sensitive and intelligent man—no, human being—but how can he possibly understand that at sixty I still want to know why my father stole my walleye? A walleye, a not particularly bright fish that not
even fishermen like to catch, in other words a fish that unlike salmon or bass presents no real challenge to the angler and is not even remotely beautiful. A stupid, ordinary fish, except for its delicate flesh, through which the fork slips as through large snowflakes, and which melts on the tongue. My lust for vengeance, which sometimes masqueraded as a passion for justice, has long since evaporated, along with a thousand other childhood sadnesses, leaf by leaf, scattered by the winds of time, which scatters most things. All that remains now is a kind of curiosity about this man who has shaped my life. Why do we want so much to understand Stalin? Perhaps because knowing him will tell us something about our children. And maybe—and I’m beginning to think this might be the case—because if, on the eve of his death, he is suddenly seized by a fit of compassion, perhaps it’s because he senses he might have been wrong all his life, that he has failed to understand the mystery of his creator. With a walk-on part, you have to rely on yourself a bit, not just on the principal actor. And there are worse explanations. In Paris last August, more than four hundred elderly people died without their children knowing about it. Killed by the heat in their un-air-conditioned homes, or in rented rooms where no one visited them anymore, or even on the streets, struck down by the stifling sun. I overheard two astonished gendarmes talking to a young daughter and son whose parent had just died, and who were telling the policemen to go fuck themselves. Every night I wondered if my father was dead, and how I would explain to him that in the decay of one human being we see the image of our own future deterioration and that therefore it is always our own suffering we see, never that of the other. No, I came back with Isabelle. It’s Christmas and important that we play the Christmas game, even if I no longer have the stomach for it. There are some theatrical productions that we need to see if we are to go on living.
A Good Death Page 9
